Category Archives: Government
Ben Bernanke’s Money
What good is quantitative easing if Ben Bernanke can’t get a loan? The former Fed chairman confided last week that he was unable to refinance his $850,000 home mortgage. It’s true he’s out of a job but ex-government swells are never out of the money. Bernanke is still making the stuff from thin air (or hot air) by cranking out speeches at more than $200,000 a pop.
Helicopter Ben Bernanke
IBD notes that even Barney Frank now lays some blame on the government for the 2008 banking crisis. It forced banks to lend to risky home buyers and now Dodd Frank is overcorrecting by putting the clamps on the banking industry. Banks have been forced to close branches to pay penalties. They’re sitting on piles of free money but they’re reluctant to lend, even to Helicopter Ben.
In that same speech he also discussed how the government can always avoid deflation by printing more dollars and referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, about using a helicopter drop of money to fight deflation. Since then, Bernanke has had the nickname of “Helicopter Ben.”
Disney World Government
Departed Secret Service director Julia Pierson wanted the Secret Service to become more like Disney World – more welcoming. Omar Gonzales felt welcome enough to dash through the unlocked front door of the White House with a knife. Former Director Pierson has a legacy. In fact the new culture seems to be taking hold throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Peggy Noonan calls the attitude “the new bureaucratic brazenness”. Actually not so much welcoming as we don’t give a damn what you think.
Everything sounds like propaganda. That will happen when government becomes too huge, too present and all-encompassing. Everything almost every level of government says now has the terrible, insincere, lying sound of The Official Line, which no one on the inside, or outside, believes. The other day, during the big Centers for Disease Control news conference on the Dallas Ebola case, a man from one of the health agencies insisted in burly (and somehow self-satisfied) tones that the nation’s health is his group’s No. 1 priority. And I thought, just like a normal person, “No, your No. 1 priority is to forestall a sense of panic. To do that you’ll say what you need to say. Your second priority, connected to the first, is to assert the excellence and competence of the agency with which you are associated. Your third priority is to keep the public safe.”
Doyle McManus just wants to know what happened to good old American know-how.
I like my Grumpy character – Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Since Obama threw him under the bus I drew him with tire tracks on his back. Too bad he’s facing you.
Empty Chair for an Empty Suit
The Obama Under the Bus Body Count rose by one this past week. When the usually reliable Steve Kroft asked the president how ISIS came to power on his watch, Obama blamed National Intelligence boss James Clapper.
Empty Chair
That didn’t sit well with the spooks and they let it be known that Obama is a no show for most intelligence briefings. Obama says, being a 21st Century kind of Commander-In-Chief, he takes his briefings remotely on his I-pad.
Maybe Clint Eastwood was on to something with his empty chair conversation at the 2012 GOP convention.
White House Secret Service
On Monday President Obama expressed full confidence in Secret Service director Julia Pierson.
Director Pierson resigned on Wednesday. It turns out the guy who broke into the White House earlier in the week wasn’t tackled at the door as we were led to believe. He knocked over a female Secret Service agent and briefly roamed the house until he was tackled outside the East Room where the president makes speeches. Director Pierson also failed to mention the president’s elevator ride with a gun packing felon.
On Wednesday President Obama expressed confidence in government efforts to control Ebola.
Jonah Goldberg explains government incompetence here.
Wartime President
The man elected to “end war” has become a wartime president.
In a UN speech on Wednesday President Obama called the civilized world to arms against the barbarians. He sounded positively Bushian.
There can be no reasoning, no negotiation, with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death.
Axis of Evil anyone? Dana Milbank thinks so.
Wartime
The WSJ (The Latest Mideast Breakdown) said he sounded like a “Nobel Peace Prize winner mugged by reality”.
