Oct 9, 2013

Welcome, Janet

I see by the news His Ineptness is anointing you as the new Ben Bernanke. Savor it.  I am Janet Yellin Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System of the United States of America. 

Rolls trippingly from the tongue and carries a nice salary, $199,700 per annum, about a 20 grand raise from your current gig as second banana to Ben. Plus, I hear, the servant will wheel a silver service of fresh orange juice into your office each morning promptly at ten.

So I'm happy for you. It is much more promising than your rumored backup ambition to be corporate spokeswoman for Victoria's Secret.

TBC on a more serious note, but I wanted to lose no time at all in tendering  congratulations and wishing you every success.



Jim Chee, policy analyst

You don't go to Tony Hillerman's Sgt. Jim Chee for your political insights, at least not on purpose. So it's fun when you just happen to run across one.

Jim is working on a homicide on the Navajo reservation. The FBI is claiming jurisdiction and getting in the way of honest police work. He explains it as a life lesson to his young and lovely deputy, Ms. Bernadette Manuelito:

"It is a political law. Like physics. ... When a federal agency gets into something, the number of tax-paid people at work multiplies itself by five, raw number of hours taken to get it done multiplies by ten, and the chances of a successful conclusion must be divided by three."


Oct 8, 2013

Shutdown side bar -- Mrs. Obama is more equal that others

Not all .gov sites are dark.

Michelle's is up and running. It's a must read. Where else can you see her as sexy hip-hop stunner in one frame, then gushing about healthy federal chow (which the kids won't eat) in the next.

I'm gonna take your ball and go home

It is the soul-sliming pettiness of the thing, the "shutdown."

A paid vacation for a million bureaucrats has consequences, some of them probably bad, some perhaps good, but most as unremarkable as that bland tan paint you slap on the wall because you can't decide on a real color.

Beige is too neutral for fun television, so you have to create drama. 

"No, goddammit, you may not walk up to the Vietnam wall and shed a tear for your dad who died there because the Tea Party closed America." 

"And stop whining about all the black dot.gov sites.  Can you fools not see that permitting access to historical data bought and paid for years ago corrupts the nation?"

When a national administration spends hugely to erect steel barriers long the sidewalks meandering through open-air memorials, you know you are being governed by snit-fits. The teevee loves it. So do grandstanding politicians from the left, right, and muddle.

The same occurs when the world's greatest wire service defines the impact by caterwauling with a Kansas farmer who doesn't know what to do because he isn't getting the latest breathless crop-yield predictions from the USDA. Should he go short or long on wheat futures? He doesn't know because his vacuum head has no mental resources other than the federal government's guess about how much grain will be grown in America, Argentina, Greece, and Tierra del Fuego.

It has gone beyond the silliness of the absent park tour guide -- the kid in the Smokey hat in front of Lincoln's statue, explaining that cuddly ol' Abe freed the slaves.

It has become the dangerous confluence of a leader's snake-handling pentecostal oratory wedded to power on a national stage populated by chanting citizenoids massed in front of the Department of Treasure edifice. "Whadda we want? MORE. When do we want it. "NOW."  And forevermore.

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Making all necessary allowances for "studies," does this help explain it?