Scott Spiegel

It’s no coincidence that the Tea Party movement is springing up now, 235 years after the Boston Tea Party.  Barack Obama is the closest thing this country has had to royalty since King George III.

Yesterday Queen Elizabeth II visited New York City for the third time in her life and the first time in 34 years.  New Yorkers were aflutter over the prospect of royalty tramping around on gritty Manhattan soil.  QE2 addressed the United Nations and then, to cleanse herself of that demoralizing experience, did something pro-American and visited Ground Zero, where she dedicated a new park to 67 Britons who died on September 11.

Americans get keyed up over this kind of thing because it’s so alien to our way of life.  To us, a visit from the Queen is a novelty act, like Lindsay Lohan showing contrition for her actions.

While New Yorkers dutifully read up on how they should behave if they met the Queen—don’t bow or curtsy, we are not her subjects; use the title Your Majesty, then switch to Ma’am—too many Americans still haven’t learned how to stop treating Obama like royalty.

His supporters don’t exactly bow in his presence; they get rowdier than that.  They whoop and holler and sing hosannas, when they’re not crying, fainting, and melting into a pile of mush.

Royalty is the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration: symbolic figureheads who shake hands, soak taxpayers who fund their lavish lifestyles, and don’t do much besides look elegant (except when Barack is swatting flies off his face or Michelle is wearing a Mark Rothko painting).  Whereas Brits are reassured that their royal family is just for show and that there’s an actual political administration getting the work done, in the U.S. we have no such consolation in the Age of The One.  Even when Obama is touring a natural disaster area like the Gulf oil spill zone he behaves like royalty, prancing through the dunes in his silk shirt, daintily noshing lobster salad, and privately contemplating his forehand.  When Obama stepped off the plane in Huntsville, Ontario for the G8 summit, the first thing he asked his hosts was whether there were a lot of golf courses in the area.

Royalty strut around on the taxpayer’s dime, bestowing awards upon the little people who volunteer to help littler people via charity boondoggles and fundraising spectacles.  Similarly, Barack jets around the country on Air Force One speaking at union events and elementary schools, trying to convince the country to get excited because some two-bit smelting plant in Ohio was given a million-dollar grant to go green and is managing to break even instead of going bankrupt.

Royalty play expensive, individualized sports requiring fancy equipment—polo for the royal family, golf for Obama.  (I doubt the Queen would do very well at bowling, but I doubt she would denigrate retarded children after getting a dismal score.)

Royalty are bestowed with honorary titles, awards, and ceremonies based on the mere fact of their existence.  Already Obama-friendly municipalities are naming roads, community centers, and paid holidays after him, to say nothing of his infinitely premature Nobel Peace Prize.

Royalty are famous for being famous.  How else can you characterize Obama’s overnight notoriety and meteoric rise to frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination after a mere speech he gave at a convention?  Obama became well-known for being well-known—liberals fell all over themselves to prove their commitment to the cool kid before everyone else found out it was cool to support him.

Royalty believe in bogus organizations like the UN and their power to bring about change through fantasizing.  They don’t appreciate the corruption inherent in such bloated Potemkin goodwill societies and the spite harbored by poisonous partners admitted due to an unrestricted membership policy.  Naivety about the organizational structure of the UN and its inefficiency in getting anything done may stem from the fact that royalty, like Obama in his guise as a former community organizer, don’t have actual responsibilities.

Royalty are given significant power and are thrust into the public eye at a young age despite negligible accomplishments.  They have the spotlight on them for so long that they forget what it’s like to live as everyday citizens.  Similarly, Obama was elected President of the Free World in his 40s after having served less than one full term as U.S. Senator, most of which was spent running for President, and before that serving as a state Senator in which capacity his most remarked upon accomplishment was voting “Present” 130 times.  As with Obama, royalty’s assumption of power is referenced using such adulatory terms as “ascension” and “coronation.”

Royalty are depicted in solemn portraits; their countenances are ubiquitous.  Similarly, you may have seen Obama’s face reverently displayed two or three trillion times since his presidential candidacy began.

For the British, the royalty are a harmless relic, colorful fodder for tabloid speculation.  For Americans, who have lived without royalty for centuries, the mere prospect of their reintroduction should be a dangerous reminder of what happens when our leaders are worshipped instead of held accountable as public servants.

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Deepwater Horizon is not Obama’s Katrina, because Katrina was not Bush’s.

The Katrina hurricane should have been addressed by state and local governments and residents who didn’t evacuate despite warnings of the impending storm.

Similarly, the Gulf spill should be dealt with by the company that caused it and has the best understanding of how to end it, British Petroleum.  The federal government’s role should be to adjudicate claims against BP.

Of course Obama and every liberal on the planet have been hollering for years that Bush was personally responsible for the Katrina-induced death of every man, woman, and crawfish in New Orleans.

Conservatives’ longstanding wish that liberals please stop trying to put the government in charge of everything recently prompted Frank Rich to sneer, “The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big.”

Rich’s solution is nonetheless preferable to two other New York Times columnists’ strategy for Obama, which is: to cry.

Maureen Dowd counsels Obama to offer President Clinton a job: “Bill would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire.  Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief.”  Tom Friedman, in his column “Malia for President,” advises that “the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would.”

It should go without saying that the spill is not Bush’s Katrina II, notwithstanding claims by Nancy Pelosi and Chris Dodd.

Given the role the federal government has historically adopted, and the Obama administration has claimed, in preventing and dealing with large-scale industrial disasters such as the BP spill, the incompetence and radical environmentalist ideology of this administration have only exacerbated the crisis.

In a special investigation, AP reported that the federal Minerals Management Service, responsible for overseeing oil rig safety, failed to adequately respond to AP’s Freedom of Information Act request for copies of the agency’s inspection reports over the past several years.  MMS provided reports for only January, February, and April 2010; inspectors were revealed to have spent no more than two hours examining the rig during each visit; and the agency had inexplicably whited out sections of the reports.  AP also found that in 2009 MMS awarded Deep Horizon a safety award.

The Obama administration took a week after the explosion to announce an inquiry into the cause.  The same day, the Interior Department “point person” assigned to the incident left town on a work trip that included rafting in the Grand Canyon.  Meanwhile, Homeland Security was busy denying that the Defense Department was involved in addressing the crisis, then backtracking and claiming that Defense had been there since the day of the explosion.

Michael Barone argues that the public views the spill as reflecting poorly on the administration’s competence, rather than its ideology.  Peggy Noonan calls the oil spill a “political disaster” for Obama and labels it an “unforced error” that was “shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.”

A good part of Obama’s judgment and instincts relate to his environmentalist ideology, which places the needs of caribou, fussy Democratic Senators with pristine oceanfront views, and other lowly creatures over those of everyday Americans.

As Charles Krauthammer asks, “Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?”  His answer: “Environmental chic has driven us out there…  [W]e go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production…  [I]n the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

After the spill, while BP was spraying the dispersant Corexit to prevent oil from spreading, the Environmental Protection Agency butted in and told BP it had 24 hours to replace Corexit with another, less toxic dispersant from a list of EPA-approved dispersants, or else provide documentation on why the other dispersants on the list didn’t meet BP’s requirements.  BP responded by tactfully noting that none of the dispersants on the EPA’s list met the toxicity and effectiveness criteria the EPA expected BP to live up to, and concluded that it would continue to use Corexit, the dispersant most readily available to it.

Obama flew gaggles of lawyers, EPA officials, and environmentalists to Florida in the weeks following the Gulf tragedy, which shows where his priorities lay: not in rapidly and effectively solving the crisis, but in preventing federal liability claims, ensuring compliance with executive rulings upholding green dogma, and using the event as a PR opportunity to ban future drilling.  As Noonan writes, “When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble.”

Although the leakage of radioactive gases at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 yielded no casualties or even detrimental health effects, the accident helped pave the way for a moratorium on building new plants in the United States for the next 30 years.  This, despite the fact that “eco-friendly” countries like France, Sweden, and Switzerland all get more than twice as high a percentage of their power from nuclear sources as the U.S.—80% in France’s case.

The Gulf oil spill isn’t Obama’s Katrina—it’s more like his Three Mile Island: a rare but inevitable accident, an unavoidable byproduct of an essential method of power production, and an incident used by a far-left administration to phase out an entire category of energy production in the hopes of scaling back industrial civilization as we know it.



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I’ve got it—an excuse the Obama administration can use to explain why it waited so long to take substantive action in dealing with the Gulf oil spill, an account that also manages to stick it to George W. Bush: Obama was so busy cleaning up Bush’s messes that he didn’t have time to clean up the mess in the Gulf!

The timeline of events since the explosion of the British Petroleum-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20 reveals a less than flattering picture of the acuity and alacrity of the government in fulfilling its role in handling the crisis.

Three days after the explosion, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted to reporters that the catastrophe would not affect the President’s plans to open several microscopic pockets of our vast offshore oil reserves for drilling, the only reassuring result of this debacle.

It is important to understand that in Obama WhiteHouseSpeak, Gibbs’ statement is tantamount to announcing, “It’s a teeny-tiny spark that’ll be put out by morning, and we’re not remotely worried about it.  Why bow over spilt milk?”  The administration that popularized the saying “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” and would love any excuse to backtrack on its recent Democrat-infuriating promise to minimally expand drilling would not have let the opportunity to renege on its promise go by if it had truly apprehended the full extent of the impending disaster.

True, the first Deep Horizon oil leaks were not discovered until the next day, after the Coast Guard had called off its search operation for the missing rig workers.  Yet somehow it took until the following Tuesday, a full week after the explosion, for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to announce that he would be launching an investigation into the incident.

One might wonder whether the department had fully grasped the enormity of the situation even then, given that on the same day, Salazar’s chief of staff, Tom Strickland—whom Salazar had assigned to be the “point person” on this issue—set off with his wife for a three-day “work-focused” trip to the Grand Canyon that apparently included a day of “work-focused” rafting.

Days later, when the potential danger of the spreading oil spill was beginning to dawn on department staff, the National Park Service rushed a helicopter to the 55th state to airlift Strickland out of the Canyon and whisk him off to New Orleans.

In the meantime, Homeland Security Secretary Janet “The System Worked” Napolitano, whose department was supposed to be working closely with the Interior Department to address the crisis, told reporters that the Defense Department had no involvement in addressing the spill: “If and when they have something to add, we’ll certainly make that known,” she snapped.

Just as Napolitano had changed her answer regarding the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing from “The system worked” to “The system didn’t work,” three days after her disavowal of Defense Department involvement in the cleanup she told “Meet the Press” that the Defense Department had been in the Gulf “from Day One.  This was a situation that was treated as a possible catastrophic failure from Day One.”  (The administration later flirted with the idea of claiming Napolitano had actually said “May One,” but then decided even they weren’t dishonest enough to pull that off.)

To reconcile her conflicting comments, a department spokesman claimed that in her latter statement, Napolitano had been referring to the presence of the Coast Guard, which had been in the Gulf since Day One.

Yes, the Coast Guard was very probably on the scene since Hour One, since that is their mission whenever such an accident happens at sea.  For Napolitano to claim that a search mission by the Coast Guard was equivalent to sending Defense Department resources to the area to deal with “a possible catastrophic failure” is like saying that flight attendants collecting trash from passengers on Northwest Flight 253 reflected the Transportation Security Administration’s initiative in helping stop underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

At least Obama is pointing the finger at BP for their role in the disaster—a potential conflict of interest, one might think, given the recent revelation that Obama is the federal candidate who has received the greatest amount in campaign contributions from the oil company over the past 20 years.

Normally I wouldn’t rag on Obama for failing to address the oil spill crisis sooner, but he brought it on himself when he parachuted into New Orleans as a newly elected Senator in 2005 to make a big show of mouthing off, Kanye West-style, about the incompetence of the Bush administration in dealing with the Katrina aftermath.  Obama stepped into this oil slick all by himself, so to speak.

To paraphrase two unfortunate Kanye West quotes: “BP, I’ma let you finish cleaning up the Gulf… But Barack Obama doesn’t care about Louisiana jumbo shrimpers!”



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Over the weekend a poor lithium battery plant worker from South Carolina named Doris stumbled into a bear trap we’ll call “Obama in a contemplative yet incoherent, feisty yet expansive mood.”

Dear Doris asked Obama a question and was hit with a 2,600-word, 17-minute onslaught that makes any rambling reply Sarah Palin supposedly ever gave seem like the soul of brevity.

To be fair, Doris had placed a tall order: she had asked Obama to sell her on the recently passed health care overhaul legislation via a diatribe that rehashed the history of Medicare, trotted out charges against Bush, and stopped along the way for an analogy involving leaky roofs.

Oh wait—she didn’t; that was what she got.  She asked Obama whether raising taxes in a recession was a good idea.

A prickly Obama jumped in and implied that Doris and millions of other Americans who had been reading about the health care legislation over the past twelve months were badly misinformed, easily misled by huckster politicians, and quite possibly morons.

He launched into one of several internally and externally redundant lists cataloging the reasons for health care reform (which was not Doris’s question).  In a vastly condensed nutshell:

List 1, Point 1: Some people don’t have health insurance.

L1, P2: Some people with health insurance might not have it in the future.

L1, P3: Sometimes insurance companies operate according to the profit motive and fail to chase down policyholders to shower them with free money they don’t have coming to them.

L1, P4: Health care is expensive.

Obama then lamented how all government-instituted health insurance programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP, are running out of money, which means that we need: more government intervention!

Obama embarked on another list explaining what provisions the health care overhaul bill contains (again, not Doris’s question):

L2, P1: Everybody will get coverage.

L2, P2: We will drive insurance companies out of business—which will really improve the chances that they will pay consumers’ claims!

L2, P3: We will get rid of excess, waste, and overload in Medicare (at which point the thinking half of the audience wondered how Obama would accomplish this when he couldn’t even get rid of excess, waste, and overload in his response).

Obama repeated Republicans’ objection that adding 30 million Americans to the insurance rolls might require some sacrifice and would not reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars as claimed—an argument he promptly shot down as the addle-headed straw man it obviously is.

To do this, he told a story about some people living in a house with a leaky roof that dripped water into some of the rooms, and explained why the people in the rooms without leaks would be better off if the government forced them to pay for the leaks in the other rooms.

Missing from his analogy were the caveats that random strangers don’t involuntarily live under the same roof, fixing one person’s leaky roof does not increase the quality of life for someone without a leaky roof, and the government is not a mortgage holder empowered to make these decisions for residents.  But give him points for creativity, I guess.

List time again—this one involving how the administration was going to pay for the health care overhaul:

L3, P1: We will get rid of excess, waste, and overload (see L2, P3).

L3, P2: We will increase taxes.

Finally!  Obama arrived in the same ballpark as Doris’s question.

Obama then noted that Doris pays Medicare taxes but Warren Buffet doesn’t—ignoring the fact that Warren Buffet doesn’t want or need Medicare.  (Doris might not either, but let’s assume for the moment that she does.)

The President proposed that we tax, for the sake of fairness, individuals making over $200,000 or couples making over $250,000 a year—you know, Warren Buffet, basically—an exorbitant amount for services they probably don’t want or need.

He did not address the tax—sorry, “fine”—to be levied on citizens who do not comply with the individual mandate to purchase government-approved health insurance, which is presumably what Doris was alluding to in her question.

Obama closed with a litany of campaign-style talking points: he mentioned for the 1.3 trillionth time that he had inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit; condemned the cost of the prescription drug plan and Medicare Part D; bashed the Iraq war and the Bush tax cuts; bemoaned mounting credit card and home loan debt; cited the stimulus bill and something called FMAP; referenced PAYGO and earmarks and… ugh, I can’t take it anymore.

One wonders what Doris did to deserve the karmic retribution of such a longwinded, tortuous answer, or why Obama decided to inflict it upon her.  Perhaps he was using an innocent victim to try to compensate for twelve months of failing to take a leadership role in pushing his bill through Congress or allay constituents’ concerns about its costs.

If Obama is still going around giving a 17-minute apologia for a fundamental point of the bill he claims Americans are clamoring for but just don’t realize yet, he’s going to have an awfully hard time changing anyone’s mind on his whirlwind national health care snake oil tour.



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The problem with modern-day liberals’ penchant for implementing proposals not authorized by the Constitution isn’t just that they’re sticking their noses where they shouldn’t; it’s that they aren’t sticking their noses where they should.

Fresh out of the gate, in the early days of his administration, President Obama decided to continue President Bush’s plan to take over the nation’s largest car companies and banks by tempting them with bailout funds, then tightening the noose around their necks and micromanaging them from Washington.  Soon after, Obama decided to force taxpayers to guarantee virtually all U.S. mortgages, thus sticking a $5 trillion tab to people who had largely paid their mortgage bills on time.  Recently, Obama decided to cap executive pay for banks that took bailout money, and has expressed an interest in monitoring executive pay for even banks that didn’t take TARP money.

Congress is currently considering unconstitutional legislation—stalled only because they are trying to pass even bigger, more expensive unconstitutional legislation—to impose cap-and-trade regulations to restrict and tax individual citizens’ energy use.

This summer, Obama carried out an amusing little $3 billion scheme that involved paying car owners to destroy their used automobiles and buy new ones, a jaunt that resulted in no significant net energy conservation in the U.S., boosted the auto industries of Japan and South Korea, and hurt the American used car business.

Since July, Democrats’ pet project has been to take over the U.S. health care system.  Not crazy enough to try to force through a single payer system, Senate Leader Harry Reid nonetheless went “rogue” on Monday, in defiance of Senate committee members and moderate Democrats, and announced that the Senate version of the health care reform bill would offer a public health insurance option, though such an option has zero chance of passing in the Senate.

Other fun and unconstitutional dalliances the administration has undertaken in recent months include:

•    Nationalizing the student loan system

•    Nominating for the Supreme Court a justice who believes in ignoring the equal protection offered under the law and considering race and gender in her rulings

•    Threatening to violate free speech rights by regulating the Internet and talk radio in order to ensure “balanced” views and prevent “irresponsible” content

•    Attacking a private organization, FOX News, for criticizing the administration, and threatening its right to freedom of the press by shutting it out of White House interviews to which other major news organizations are invited

•    Appointing 34 unaccountable czars—“green jobs czar,” “science czar,” “diversity czar,” “czar witness protection program czar”—to set policy while circumventing Congress’s approval of either policy or czars

•    Engaging in massive, unprecedented deficit spending to stimulate the economy

Obama’s expansion of federal government rivals the explosion of federal agencies resulting from FDR’s New Deal and the establishment of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the 1950s.

If the Obama administration finds a free moment from poking around in the Constitution identifying such lame justifications for its schemes as “promoting the general welfare,” it might consider dealing with the following urgent tasks, which are actually allowed by the Constitution but seem to have fallen by the wayside:

•    Providing adequate troop levels for our ongoing war in Afghanistan, as the General whom Obama hired to turn around the war requested several months ago.  Joseph Curl of The Washington Times notes, “The White House bristles when asked whether Mr. Obama is so distracted by domestic affairs and health care that he is unable to focus on Afghanistan.”  Hint to Obama: People don’t “bristle” about something that isn’t true—they brush it off their shoulders and move on, because they and everyone else know it isn’t true.  Instead of bristling, Obama might want to consider that his interlocutors are on to something.

•    Taking steps to protect the U.S. and its allies from the threat of a nuclear Iran—beyond Obama’s chilling warning to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he will meet him “without preconditions or preconceptions.”  As the UK Telegraph recently reported, Israel’s former deputy defense minister has somberly observed that Israel can no longer rely on the U.S. to rein in Iran’s nuclear program if Israel wants to survive as a nation.

•    Sticking up for allies Poland and the Czech Republic and honoring our agreement to defend them against potential Russian aggression

•    Providing adequate funding for missile defense rather than slashing it to make room for bloated domestic spending

•    Standing up for human rights in Iran—by not waiting a week after anti-government protests to support the protestors; in China—by not having our Secretary of State rhetorically place the issue of human rights below that of reversing climate change; and in Tibet—by not refusing to meet the Dalai Lama in order to appease China

•    Defending the Honduran government’s enforcement of its constitution in their ouster of President Zelaya for attempting to violate presidential term limits

Recently, The New York Times’ Bob Herbert came out against fighting crime in New York; he called it a racist promise for Mayor Bloomberg to make in his reelection bid.  The Times’ editorial board no doubt approves of Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder’s early decision to drop charges in the Black Panther voter intimidation lawsuit brought last fall after a harassment incident in Philadelphia on Election Day.

If protecting citizens against violent crimes by fellow citizens isn’t a legitimate Constitutional function, then what is?

I think we have a good idea regarding the priorities the administration will and will not be focused on for the next four years.

For the measured consideration of the International Olympic Committee, I present 16 reasons to host the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro instead of Chicago:

(1)    President Obama wants them in Chicago.  Really badly.  More important than his wanting them in Chicago is his decision to drop everything in the middle of a recession, a health care debate, and two wars to head to Copenhagen on separate jumbo jet junkets with his wife to make a special entreaty for his home city.  Obama has taken a stronger stand on the Windy City’s candidacy than he has on, say, any particular health care provision or whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.  Even more important than Obama’s not having his priorities straight is his obvious, calculated presumption that because the world loves him so much, it would be the diplomatic equivalent of kicking us out of the UN not to award Chicago the Olympics after his in-person plea.

(2)    Billions of dollars’ worth of building contracts and infrastructure development would be required in a city (Chicago) known for construction payback schemes, money laundering, insider dealings, an overloaded transit system, and general public corruption, incompetence, inefficiency, and interruption of service.

(3)    Numerous Obama cronies own property near Washington Park, the proposed stadium site, and would profit handsomely from the games being held there.

(4)    No one actually wants to be in Chicago in the summer—or any time of the year, for that matter, except for about three hours in late spring.  Dozens of Chicago residents die heat-related deaths every summer, and they’re not even competing in decathlons.

(5)    Everyone wants to be in Rio, any time of the year.

(6)    In fact, everyone wants to visit South America, and Rio would be only the first city on the entire continent to have ever hosted the Games.

(7)    If the Olympics absolutely have to be in Chi-town, why not the Winter Olympics, a much smaller and less disruptive affair than the Summer Olympics, and one that suits the city’s climate?

(8)    Chicagoans have been clamoring since spring not to have the Olympics in their hometown.  This is the first campaign I know of in which the best case for the games to be held in one city (Rio) is being made by residents of another city (Chicago).  Following the procedures of standard Chicago thug-style machine politics, the Chicago Olympic Committee recently ordered a local Fox affiliate not to rerun a segment airing interviews with numerous Chicagoans who told reporters to “Take it to Rio!” and to hold the event “Anywhere but here!”

(9)    The website “Chicagoans for Rio 2016” posts numerous fun and horrifying facts about the travails suffered by past Olympic host cities, such as the following: (a) Montreal took 30 years to pay off its Olympics-related debts from 1976; (b) 21 out of 22 stadiums and arenas built for the Athens games just five years ago are currently unused; and (c) Barcelona actually became a slightly less cool city for having once hosted the games.

(10)    An average of 5-10 or more crimes a day are reported in Washington Park alone, including assault, battery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, robbery, and sex offenses.  Chicago was the murder capital of the country in 2008 with 510 victims.  The Chicago Police Department doesn’t even publicly report the incidence of rape, which should tell you something.

(11)    The Chicago 2016 website advertises that it would host a “Blue-Green” event, meaning the following: “low-carbon Games” with energy-efficient technology, reduced water usage, recycling of 85% of tournament materials, and “sustainability.”  As an afterthought, “showers for athletes” was added to the budget for the games.

(12)    Chicago’s city deficit stands at almost a quarter of a billion dollars.  Beijing had an estimated 26 billion dollar overrun for its 2008 games.  Athens’ was $17 billion in 2004.  London estimates a $9 billion overrun in 2012.  Yet Chicago’s 2016 website boasts that its budget includes a piddly “$450 million contingency to cover unforeseen costs.”  Quick—complete this analogy: Chicago : Olympics :: Obama : _____.  (And I swore I wasn’t going to write about health care this week!)

(13)    Each host city tries to top the previous host city in sheer spectacle, bombast, and expense.  Beijing spent $42 billion in 2008.  Hmm… are there are any stimulus funds left over for “shovel-ready” projects like building unwanted stadiums in Chicago?

(14)    Rio de Janeiro means “River of January.”  Chicago derives from a Native American word for “wild onion.”

(15)    Chicagoans for Rio pits the two leading contender cities head-to-head in a number of categories, and the winner is clear every time: nicknames (The Marvelous City vs. The Second City), beaches (Copacabana, Ipanema vs. 63rd St., Calumet), histories (capital of the Portuguese empire vs. rail yard), statues (Christ standing vs. Lincoln sitting), signature events (naked people dancing vs. chubby people eating).

And most damningly:

(16)    Michelle Obama said in her Copenhagen speech this week that holding the Olympics in Chicago might inspire another child there to become the next… Barack Obama.

Another one of those seemingly boring, legalistic White House scandals has popped up again—the kind that was legion during the Clinton era.  This one bears scrutiny because of the contrast between the media’s treatment of it and a similar but benign Bush controversy.

In 2006, George W. Bush asked eight U.S. attorneys to resign.  Bush had full discretion to fire the attorneys, who as members of the executive branch served at his pleasure.  He could have removed them for not wearing flag pins if he felt like it.  The mainstream media and Congressional Democrats screamed bloody murder.  Proving that Democrats are more likely to defend evil than Republicans are to defend good, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sheepishly resigned over his involvement.

In the past week, the Obama administration has discharged two Inspectors General: Gerald Walpin, IG for the Corporation for National and Community Service, which includes AmeriCorps; and Judith Gwynn, IG for the International Trade Commission; and made life miserable for a third, Neil Barofksy, IG for TARP.

Obama fired Walpin in retaliation for his critical report on Obama supporter and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson’s misuse of funds with nonprofit organization St. Hope Academy.  The agency received $850,000 from AmeriCorps to tutor students, redevelop buildings, and fund arts programs; instead, Johnson used the money to pad salaries, pay employees for personal favors, and bribe constituents to interfere in a local election.  Johnson was barred from receiving federal funds.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office agreed that Johnson could receive federal funds if St. Hope paid back half the grant—which was never going to happen, because St. Hope had gone out of business, though Johnson still gets to receive federal funds.

The ITC fired Gwynn because of a report she issued that an agency employee had taken documents from her that she needed to do her job.

Obama, instead of giving Congress 30 days’ notice regarding Walpin as required, had a staffer contact Walpin at night on his cell phone and tell him he had one hour to resign or be fired.  When Walpin asked why, he was told it was “time to move on” and any connection with the St. Hope affair was a “coincidence.”

Walpin wrote an e-mail explaining that he could not make this decision with such short notice and that he believed his independent judgment was being threatened.  He refused to submit to Obama’s Chicago machine thug tactics.

Walpin quickly contacted Senator Charles Grassley, who wrote a letter to Obama asking why Walpin had been fired, adding: “There have been no negative findings against Mr. Walpin…  [H]e has identified millions of dollars in AmeriCorps funds either wasted outright or spent in violation of established guidelines.”

Obama’s response was to dash off a note to Congress stating that Walpin was to be fired in 30 days and immediately put on suspension, with this non-explanation: “It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General.  That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General.”  Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill insisted that Obama had not provided sufficient reason for the firing—perhaps she had lost “confidence” in him.

The White House then admitted it had lied about the reason for the firing.  In another letter to Congress five days later—this one containing the real reason Obama fired Walpin, honest!—Obama wrote that Walpin was, at one—one—AmeriCorps board meeting “confused, disoriented, and unable to answer questions.”  You might quibble that an executive who offers three different stories in the space of a week is unable to answer questions himself.

Walpin replied that the board kept cutting him off before he could respond.  Walpin’s only recourse would have been to speak over his inquisitors—the result of which no doubt would have been the board declaring him “hostile, belligerent, and unable to withstand criticism.”

Obama’s staff called Walpin’s firing an act of “political courage” because—get this—some people might think it had been politically motivated, but really, it wasn’t!  Obama should get Rod Blagojevich to recite Rudyard Kipling poetry in defense of his bravery.

Here’s the kicker: the law Obama broke, the Inspector General Reform Act, is one he cosponsored last year.  The point of the law was to strengthen the independence of inspectors general and protect them against political firings.  The language of the bill—Obama’s bill, just to remind you—states, “The requirement to notify the Congress in advance of the reasons for the removal should serve to ensure that Inspectors General are not removed for political reasons.”

Bush’s firing of his attorneys, while politically motivated, was within his right; Obama’s firing was illegal (according to the law Obama cosponsored).  So naturally, mainstream newspapers broke the Bush story the second they got a whiff of it and didn’t remove it from their front pages until months later.

Their response to the Walpin firing has been decidedly more tepid.

Five days after the firing, the Washington Post published a blog entry on the controversy.  On the sixth day, it covered the story in print for the first time.

The New York Times ignored the incident for six days.  When it got around to printing a story, it opened with the very balanced headline “White House Defends Inspector General’s Firing” and a picture of diligent AmeriCorps workers assembling chicken coops at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

The only “risk” for potential U.S. attorneys after the Bush “scandal” was that they might not get jobs with an administration that had a different political philosophy.

The risk for potential IGs after Obama’s actions is that they will be removed for investigating organizations with ties to the White House, and thus be unable to serve as watchdogs.  According to Walpin, the effect of this incident “is going to be immense in chilling the responsibility and actions of inspectors general to do their independent investigations.”

But to the mainstream media, this isn’t news—it’s just personnel review.

In a survey conducted in early June, Rasmussen found that Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on six out of eleven top issues.

It’s no surprise that Republicans lead on national security: after 9/11, when Bush implemented policies to fight terrorism, Republicans’ trust ratings skyrocketed, because Americans saw the problem at hand and liked the way Republicans were dealing with it.  Years later, Obama and other Democratic presidential candidates boasted how much more effective they would be on national security—a fraud they were able to perpetrate because Bush had kept us safe since 9/11 and the threat of attack seemed remote.  Even if Americans actually came to believe that the way to defeat terrorists is to love them, Obama soon co-opted Bush’s entire war policy, thus validating Republicans’ arguments for the past eight years.

So we know national security isn’t Democrats’ strong suit.  Perhaps to distract from their unpopular war agenda, Obama and the newly engorged Democratic Congressional majorities started talking about “a new era of transparency.”  After 384 Obama appointees turned out to be tax cheats, liars, campaign underwriters, and lobbyists, Republicans now lead on government ethics, the second-most important issue to voters.

When ethics didn’t prove to be Democrats’ trump card, Obama started traveling around the country handing out stimulus goodies and talking about projects and jobs funded by the Recovery Act.  Then ABC’s Jake Tapper started uncovering all of Obama’s lies about the nonexistent effects of stimulus spending, and economists deconstructed the lunacy of his “saved or created” jobs argument.  Now a plurality of Americans wants the unspent portion of the stimulus recalled.

In a desperate gambit, Obama took over GM and strong-armed Chrysler’s secured creditors into lousy bankruptcy terms.  The Fed spent $1.2 trillion to lower mortgage rates, which increased, and pledged so much spending that long-term interest rates are spiking.

So now—surprise!—the public trusts Republicans more on the economy, the top-rated issue.  As Rasmussen reports, “Voters not affiliated with either party now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues by a two-to-one margin.”  So the economy doesn’t seem to be Democrats’ ace in the hole, either.

In a sleight of hand, Obama then renewed his push for climate change legislation and health care reform—gargantuan spending boondoggles that would somehow miraculously save our economy, too!  Then Democrats rolled out their plans, and businesses that would actually be affected by the legislation ran screaming.

In Rasmussen’s report, Democrats get their “highest” rating for health care (47%)—but this was measured before we heard actual health care proposals from Democrats, before the AMA and the Chamber of Commerce condemned Democrats’ government-sponsored plan.  Democrats’ lead on the issue has shrunk 8 points just since last month.

The other issues where Democrats do “well” are Social Security (43%), education (44%), and abortion (41%)—all issues no one is making major legislative proposals about right now.

Democrats’ confidence ratings are like a shell game: whichever issues the nation is dealing with are correctly seen by Americans as more capably handled by Republicans, but Democrats are assumed to be wonderful—just wonderful!—on all the other concerns we don’t happen to be tackling at the moment.  As soon as Democrats get their hands on something and we see what they actually want to do to us, trust in their ability plummets, and they move on to another, more pressing priority.

The further the nation is from the reality of an issue, the more likely Democrats are to be trusted; the closer it gets to that reality, the more likely Republicans are to be trusted.

“Ending the war in Iraq” sounds reasonable—until you read the fine print and realize Democrats don’t care whether we win first.  “Renewing relations with the Muslim world” sounds kindhearted—until the president makes nominal demands to Muslim leaders and they start blowing things up again.

“Introducing ethical standards” sounds noble—until Obama nominates actual human beings to fill posts and we get a whiff of their backgrounds.  “Being the first post-racial president” sounds refreshing—until Obama nominates for the Supreme Court a former Puerto Rican separatist who thinks “inherent physiological differences” force judges to decide the way they do.

“Stimulating the economy” sounds invigorating—until it is translated into a 1,588-page doorstop that no one has time to read.  “Moving quickly to prevent an economic crisis” sounds prescient—until you find out that four months later only 5% of stimulus money has been spent and the administration is lying about funded projects.

“Cutting taxes on 95% of Americans” sounds generous—until you realize the things Obama wants can’t be paid for without raising taxes on current or future generations.  “Saved or created 150,000 jobs” sounds impressive—until the administration admits this figure is based on theory and not facts.

“Saving the planet” sounds conscientious—until you find out that it involves so many devious machinations and new ways to burden Americans that the Senate had to hire a speed-reader to recite the bill.  “Health care reform” sounds bighearted—until you hear that it will cost $1 trillion and that Democrats want a 25% national sales tax to pay for it.

You can usually tell when public figures accused of crimes are guilty—their supporters invariably take several steps back and make broad, abstract statements: “She’s an excellent teacher whom no one has ever spoken ill of!”  (But did she commit statutory rape with a student or not?)  “He has always worked to promote racial justice in his borough!”  (But did he accept kickbacks for minority contracts or not?)  “He has a lovely wife starring in ‘I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!’”  (But—oh, never mind.)

Similarly, for strategic reasons Democrats like to keep things intangible, “big-picture,” “forward-looking,” “high-minded”—not concrete, detailed, present-looking, practical.

Every time one of their shells is revealed to contain nothing underneath, Democrats lose the public’s trust on that issue, but the trust always seems to pop up again elsewhere.  Instead of playing Whac-a-Mole with Democrats’ confidence ratings, Republicans should reveal their entire game as the swindle it is.

In an unintentionally comic piece, Stanley Crouch claims, “On President Obama’s watch, patience is the ultimate virtue.”

Is he kidding?  To rephrase the expression, Barack Obama never waited a day in his administration.  (Up until the presidential campaign, “worked an honest day in his life” covers him pretty well, too.)

Obama would have nationalized healthcare, banned carbon dioxide, withdrawn from Iraq, and started a second New Deal while still in the “Office of the President-Elect” if he could have gotten away with it.

President “I want a stimulus package on my desk by January 20” Obama couldn’t be bothered with niceties like posting the bill online for 48 hours for voters to read, even though he waited four days after it passed to sign it.  In his quote from the week before the $800 billion boondoggle was brought to a vote—“We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary”—by “perfect” he evidently meant “a bill with completed wording.”

Obama is just fine with Nancy Pelosi ramming “healthcare reform” through Congress with a simple majority by inappropriately using budget reconciliation to write it into law after the budget is approved.

President “Delay is no longer an option” is content to let the Environmental Protection Agency enact cap-and-trade regulations if Congress doesn’t pass them soon enough for his liking.

Our Hastener in Chief is willing to lose the war in Iraq so he can make sure combat troops are home in time for the midterm elections.

And President “Bow at the Waist” Obama just can’t wait until he and Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are on good enough terms that he can add them as Facebook friends, even though Castro hasn’t promised to confirm his request.

Crouch explains Obama’s leadership style thus: “He clearly understands that a democracy with many, many circles of power is prone to a slow velocity of policy achievements.”  Apparently Obama understands it well enough to cut Republicans out of committee meetings on the stimulus package, cut the American people out of a chance to look at and comment on the bill, cut shareholders out of hiring and firing decisions at automobile manufacturers and banks, and cut Congress out of passing environmental regulations.  That’s one way to deal with “many, many circles of power,” otherwise known by our Founding Fathers as “checks and balances” and “limits on rule.”

Crouch contrasts Obama’s administration with a dictatorial or totalitarian regime by explaining that in the latter, “Orders are given to go with a theory…  Physical threats can almost always guarantee compliance and the speed once called ‘greased lightning.’”

Let’s recount what orders Obama has served up so far to go with his “theories.”  There are the massive stimulus package and budget to go with the discredited theory of Keynesian economics.  There are the wasteful bailouts to go with the meritless theory that some companies are “too big to fail.”  There are the suicidal environmental regulations to go with the delusional theory of man-made global warming.

As for threatening those who do not follow orders, Obama has already set his staff on private citizens who might impede his progress (Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer), fired or intimidated CEOs who interfered with his plans (Rick Wagoner, Vikram Pandit), ordered creditors to accept lousy bankruptcy terms and warned that he would ruin their reputations if they didn’t comply, and issued a veiled threat against dissenters by implying that he might unleash the Department of Homeland Security as a bulwark against their dangerous right-wing tendencies.

Crouch sagely counsels, “It is always good for our nation to sit back, be patient, be determined, be disciplined and listen carefully to everything that is said.”  Sorry—who was it who didn’t have time to post the stimulus bill online for Americans to read so they could “listen carefully to everything that is said”?  Who is too busy to provide promised details on how the stimulus money is being spent so we can be “disciplined” and spend it wisely?  Who isn’t “patient” enough to let U.S. soldiers in Iraq finish their job and let Congress and the American people have a chance to debate nation-altering healthcare and environmental legislation?

Perhaps what Crouch really meant is that Obama’s “patience” is demonstrated by his willingness to wait a long time for our problems to be solved.  Maybe Obama believes that precipitous action is needed now, and then we can relax and engage in luxuries like “debate.”  But if these issues have allegedly gone unaddressed for so long and will take years or decades to resolve, then we can certainly afford to spend a mere few months discussing them.

Even Stalin probably didn’t institute one of his Five-Year Plans without sleeping on it.

In celebration of Obama’s first 100 days in office, PolitiFact.com published a series, “The Obameter: Tracking Obama’s Campaign Promises.”  The site compiles 514 promises Obama made during the campaign and tracks his daily progress in fulfilling them.  PolitiFact assigns each promise one of the following outcomes: Kept, Compromise, Broken, Stalled, In the Works, No Action, and Yes We Can (just kidding on that last one).  They also identify his “Top 25” most important promises.

This seems like such an even-handed, nonpartisan way to evaluate Obama, one we can all agree on.  Indeed, as of Day 96, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times-housed, Pulitzer Prize-winning site, lists only 5% of Obama’s promises as Kept, 12% as In the Works, and 79% as No Action.

It’s interesting, however, that for PolitiFact, the baseline for success is whether Obama keeps his promises.  The assumption is that his promises are worth keeping.  As Obama said, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

A better way to track Obama’s performance might be to first classify his threats—er, promises—into three categories: Harmful, Inoffensive, and Worthy.  By this system, I determine that 15 out of 25, or 60%, of Obama’s Top 25 promises are Harmful, 24% are Inoffensive, and 16% are Worthy.  Off to a great start!

Second, let’s give Obama 1 point for every Worthy promise he’s kept, a ½ point for every one that’s compromised, stalled, or in the works, and 0 points for every one that’s broken or not acted on.  Give him 0 points for every Harmful promise, no matter what stage it’s in, except let’s give him a ½ point for every Harmful promise he’s broken, because he might just have been appeasing his base during the campaign (though he still loses credit for scaring us).  Inoffensive promises get no points.

And now, PolitiFact’s Top 25 Obama Promises, deconstructed and scored by me:

1. Create a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners; or, “Pour $10 billion over Niagara Falls.”  Harmful/Kept: 0.

2. Create a tax credit of $500 for workers. If he had made it $500,000, he might have captured my interest.  Inoffensive/Compromise: 0.

3. Repeal the Bush tax cuts for higher incomes; or, “Decrease incentives to work and engage in entrepreneurship; increase income non-reporting and tax loophole exploitation.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

4. Create a National Health Insurance Exchange. I’m allergic to any campaign promise with that many capital letters.  Harmful/No Action: 0.

5. Require children to have health insurance coverage; or, “Drive up the costs of health insurance and provide cover for the government to step in and start rationing.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

6. Invest in electronic health information systems; or, “Do what hospitals and clinics are already doing, but less efficiently and at greater cost.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

7. Fully fund the Veterans Administration. Gee, this doesn’t have anything to do with rubbing it in Bush’s face over those rats they found in the VA a couple of years ago, does it?  Worthy/No Action: 0.

8. Begin removing combat brigades from Iraq; or, “See if we can lose the war just as we’re crossing the finish line.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

9. Send two additional brigades to Afghanistan. Worthy/Kept: 1.

10. End the use of torture. First, we don’t torture.  So Obama’s promise is to stop splashing water on Muslim terrorists, which means they’ll no longer be bathing daily.  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

11. Close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. This was never actually fulfillable, because there is no sane option for what to do with the detainees that would be acceptable to anyone but the ACLU.  Harmful/In the Works (supposedly): 0.

12. End warrantless wiretaps; or, “Shoot ourselves in the collective eardrum.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

13. Seek verifiable reductions in nuclear stockpiles. Any state we don’t trust will, by definition, not negotiate with us to reduce their stockpiles or halt actions to develop nuclear weapons.  Harmful/No Action: 0.

14. Centralize ethics and lobbying information for voters. Sort of like the database Obama created to document contributions made by supporters, in order to ensure foreign nationals were not making donations—oh, wait…  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

15. Require more disclosure and a waiting period for earmarks. Earmarks make up but an infinitesimal fraction of government spending.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

16. Tougher rules against revolving door for lobbyists and former officials. Worthy/Broken: 0.

17. Secure the borders.  Obama will support “additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.” This is too vague to mean anything one way or the other.  Inoffensive/In the Works: 0.

18. Provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Lovely, but this isn’t anywhere near the Top 25 issues we face.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

19. Reform mandatory minimum sentences. A real liberal would have the guts to talk about decriminalizing drug use, as some libertarian Republicans have.  Worthy/No Action: 0.

20. Secure nuclear weapons materials in four years. See “reduction in stockpiles.”  Any country that would comply is not a threat.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

21. Strengthen antitrust enforcement; or, “Stop the next Microsoft before it floods the market with inexpensive technological advancements that make everyone’s life better.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

22. Create new financial regulations; or, “Make sure every new American company sets up shop in London, Hong Kong, or Singapore.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

23. Create 5 million “green” jobs; or, “Be ready to fight the next round of global cooling after the current round of global warming is over.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

24. Reduce oil consumption by 35 percent by 2030; or, “Encourage caveman chic.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

25. Create cap and trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming; or, “Make Al Gore give up 80% of his SUV fleet by the time his grandchildren are old enough to drive.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

Total score: 1 point out of a maximum of 25, or 4%.  Congratulations, Obama!  I believe that is what’s known in high school as an “F minus minus minus.”

Obama didn’t even get any half-points for breaking any of his harmful promises.  And here, under my system, he could have scored a 30% just by abandoning every one of his rotten ideas.