The audio:

Sure thing, Rosie – but your money, first.

Just terrible:

…Running a first-rate campaign, Obama and his supporters argued, showed that Obama could run the federal government, even at its most testing moments. He could set goals, demand accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, bend the sprawling federal bureaucracy to his will.

Fast forward to 2010. The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing out of control. The Obama administration is at first slow to see the seriousness of the accident. Then, as the crisis becomes clear, the federal bureaucracy becomes entangled in itself trying to deal with the problem. “At least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response,” the New York Times reports, “making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes.”…

Its all been a muddle – no one knows what to do. No one knows who is really in charge – or, indeed, if there is really one person you can go to for a hard and fast “yes” or “no” answer. Absurdities like Holder talking criminal prosecution rise the forefront of an Administration which doesn’t know how to make a decision, but does know how to lawyer up. At this point, the fix will come more as an accident than as part of a plan – eventually the gang which can’t shoot straight will hit the target, but only by pure, dump luck.

The spill, itself, is not Obama’s fault – but the abject failure to see the threat and set up a group for dealing with it shows for all the world to see that we have a government incapable of decision. They react to events and their primary concern seems to be assigning blame rather than resolving issues.

We’re stuck with this President until at least January 20th, 2013 – but let this be a lesson to all of us about the wisdom of electing a community organizer from the hard left.

Shaping up to what could be one of the major battles of 2010:

Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.

Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.

There is a reason the public sectors unions are viewed as an intransigent public enemy – this revolves around the fact that they are, well, an intransigent public enemy.

As long as the gravy train kept rolling along, public sector unions could remain untouched. This is especially true of police, firefighter and teachers (especially teachers!) unions. The strength of propaganda in favor of what these entities represent entirely trumped the reality of what some of them were doing. To argue for any sort of budgetary reform of education, for instance, allowed the unions – spending vast sums on politics extracted from the membership, even when the members were Republican or Independent – to paint a person as “anti-education”.

Regardless of what one thinks of individual policemen, firefighters and teachers (and majority of these are hard working and dedicated to their vocations), substantial minorities of these are time-serving wastrels. This wouldn’t be bad except for the fact that the unions have become organizations dedicated to the protection of the wastrels – fighting fiercely to protect them as sources of union dues, with the unions being defended in this by the primary recipient of union political donations, the Democrat party.

What has resulted from the mutual political back scratching of unions and the Democrat party is that we’ve got a hopelessly corrupt government over-staffed by over-paid bureaucrats who can retire quite young on fat pensions and health care benefits for which they contributed little or nothing. And all of it paid for by an increasingly impoverished population which can only dream of the benefit package most government employees obtain (and think about this government workers get paid, on average, more than private workers…think of the insanity required to have the employees paid more than the boss!).

All around the nation, cities and States are functionally bankrupt. As you go from city to city and State to State, you’ll find it invariable that public employee pension and health care benefits are at the center of the budget crunch. Some local and State governments might be forced in to actual bankruptcy. What is the union response to this? Demands for tax increases to keep not just the current levels of pay, but to actually increase pay (what are the New Jersey bureaucrats angry with Christie over? That he wants to freeze pay – not cut it, just freeze it, and they are up in arms).

Public sector unions have become job-destroying parasites on the productive economy and they must go – each and every union will have to give in to demands for cuts, or be crushed completely. Personally, I would go back to a system where government employees were forbidden to be in unions. You want to work for government? Fine, but you do it at our pleasure – and if you don’t like it, go get a job in the private sector. People, I think, are starting to understand this – and thus the growing popular animosity towards unions.

For the sake of our nation, come what may, we must have this fight. If you want to tackle Big Government, your main obstacle is Big Union. The time has come to call and end to government employee unions and the corruption and waste they generate.

Just another report on the increasing Islamization of Turkey:

The women wore veils. The men donned green Hamas headbands with swirling Arabic script. They gathered by the thousands in a sunny, working-class plaza in Istanbul, bellowing: “Damn Israel!”

The Saturday demonstration seemed incongruous with the image Turkey has long had in the West as a secular friend of Israel and the United States…

The image has been false for about a decade now – and should have been abundantly clear when Turkey, our alleged NATO ally, refused permission for a US division to transit Turkey to Iraq in 2003. The plain fact of the matter is that Turkey is turning its face firmly from the West and increasingly embracing the worst aspects of Islamo-fascism. It is time to live in reality and understand that Turkey is no friend of the United States.

As a NATO ally, Turkey is supposed to be on our side in case of military conflict. Can anyone name a nation we might wind up at war with where Turkey would be even benevolently neutral, let alone a good ally? Having the Turks in NATO just allows a potential enemy to obtain knowledge of our weapons and military organization. It is time to close the door.

We can, at any event, find better allies among the Bulgarians, Kurds, Georgians and others in the area. It is better that we don’t have peace time military alliances – but if we are to have them, lets have them with friends, not enemies. As Turkey buddies up to Iran, Hamas and other American enemies, it is time to act accordingly and lay our plans with at least the contingency of armed conflict with the Turks. They have made their choice, and we must make ours

The circle of corruption goes ’round and ’round:

In case you were tempted to buy the faux Washington outrage at BP and its gulf oil spill in recent days, here’s a story that reveals a little-known corporate political connection and the quiet way the inner political circles intersect, protect and care for one another in the nation’s capital. And Chicago…

…Shortly after Obama’s happy inaugural, eyebrows rose slightly upon word that, as a House member, Emanuel had lived the last five years rent-free in a D.C. apartment of Democratic colleague Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and her husband, Stanley Greenberg…

…Greenberg’s consulting firm was a prime architect of BP’s recent rebranding drive as a green petroleum company, down to green signs and the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.”

Read the whole article – it stinks to high heaven. And its just par for the course in Democrat politics.

To remind everyone: the reason Matt and I wrote Caucus of Corruption was not to tell a tale of Democrat corruption but to point out that nothing ever gets done about it. The reason you have these incestuous politico-economic relationships is because Democrats rarely get punished for corruption – and then only when it looks like their corruption might cost an election.

Absent that, and you can rise as high as you like in the Democrat party – even such things as having a whore operate out of your DC condo (Barney Frank) doesn’t result in punishment. Only risking a loss – such as was the case in former NJ Senator Bob Toricelli; his scandals put his seat at risk…and here’s the kicker: the means Democrats used to bump him off the ballot and save the seat were illegal.

Do you think any of these Democrats are going to show any shame or remorse over this? Heck no! Rahmbo is looking forward to parlaying his White House time in to yet more public office in the future – and as long as he looks like a man who can win elections, Democrats will stand by him. Only when Democrats start going to jail – and Democrat rank-and-file voters start punishing them in primaries – will this Caucus of Corruption be destroyed.

So, what ails us? Our Aborted Future.

Euro zone heading for zero growth. I think that is being optimistic – they’ll be lucky if they only get a severe, year-long recession.

More on Euro: Iran dumping Euros for dollars. Flight to quality, such as it is – even nut job Islamists aren’t stupid enough to bet on the Euro.

Helen Thomas: Idiot or anti-Semite? Discuss.

Republicans lead in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Indiana. Still a good year to be a Republican.

More from Rasmussen: Obama becomes even more unpopular.

Crudezilla!

He doesn’t tolerate dishonor – from NRO’s The Corner:

The Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza, and the effort of “humanitarians” to break it, put me in mind of the Karine A. Do you remember that episode, in 2002? The Karine A was the freighter bearing a big ol’ arsenal of rockets and such for the PLO. Israel seized the freighter and displayed the goods: Busted, the PLO were.

I was talking to an Arab journalist once, who said he loved President George W. Bush. “Why?” I asked. He said, “Because Arafat told him one little lie, and he divorced him! Arafat told him that he had nothing to do with the Karine A, and then Bush found out it was a lie. And he washed his hands of him, forevermore: froze him out. Everyone knows that Arafat lies. Everyone expects Arafat to lie. Everyone tolerates Arafat’s lies. But not Bush!”…

While our liberal friends insist that President Bush lied all the time, the fact remains that I don’t have an incident where he told a lie. Said things he could have phrased a lot better? Yep. Said things which should not have been said? Sure. Made mistakes? Without a doubt. But he never got up there on the podium and said something which was a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people. President Bush is a man who tells the truth – and thus couldn’t stand a man who told a lie.

What have we got now? A President who lies with wild abandon – just as we had under Bill Clinton. It’d be hard to find something that President Obama has told the truth about – he even tells rather stupid lies, like the one where he said that the Gulf Spill is the first and last thing he thinks about every day…presumptively between rounds of golf and parties at the White House.

And we’re paying the price for this – and one of the prices is the renewed danger of war in the Middle East between Israel and the Moslems. Give corrupt, hate-filled fanatics the impression you’re weak, and they will attack – and Obama’s serial untruths about what has happened in the Middle East and about the history of Islam is a ringing bell to all Islamists, signaling the time to attack.

You can read the sad tale – and view the alarming chart – over at The Daily Reckoning.

This is what tax and spend liberalism has brought us – mountains of new debt to exacerbate the problem of the debt we already had. When are we supposed to pay this back?

I don’t know what they’re thinking in DC – that the economy will actually turn around and give us 6 or 8% growth necessary to service the debt; that we’ll head in to hyper-inflation thus making the debt moot (and wiping out the middle class); or do they just not care? I think its the latter more than anything else – our leaders have tunnel vision and the only thing I see them caring about is this November. Democrats want to limit their losses – so they’re doing everything they can to puff things up until over the vote is taken.

A cynic would want the GOP to lose right now – a massive crisis is heading our way and if we win in November, we’ll bear responsibility for fixing it. On the other hand, the fate of our nation is too vital for such thinking – even if the painful cure costs us in 2012 and beyond, we should still work for smashing victory in 2010 so that we can save our nation.

It just infuriates me, though, to think about this grand nation – this nation of Washington and Lincoln – should be governed by the liked of Obama, Pelosi and Reid…and be governed by people so lacking in sense and public spirit. We will have our financial day of reckoning – that is for all of us. But we must also have that day of reckoning with the liberalism which has driven us up on the rocks.

Belated, but still interesting:

Ha’aretz has revived the mystery surrounding the inability to find weapons of mass destruction stockpiles in Iraq, the most commonly cited justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom and one of the most embarrassing episodes for the United States. Satellite photos of a suspicious site in Syria are providing new support for the reporting of a Syrian journalist who briefly rocked the world with his reporting that Iraq’s WMD had been sent to three sites in Syria just before the invasion commenced.

The newspaper reveals that a 200 square-kilometer area in northwestern Syria has been photographed by satellites at the request of a Western intelligence agency at least 16 times, the most recent being taken in January. The site is near Masyaf, and it has at least five installations and hidden paths leading underneath the mountains. This supports the reporting of Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who said in 2004 that his sources confirmed that Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were in Syria.

One of the three specific sites he mentioned was an underground base underneath Al-Baida, which is one kilometer south of Masyaf. This is a perfect match. The suspicious features in the photos and the fact that a Western intelligence agency is so interested in the site support Nayouf’s reporting…

Intelligence agencies can get things wrong – very much so. But they don’t usually report something as being there which doesn’t exist, at all. Every intelligence agency in the world pre-liberation was convinced that Saddam had at least partially reconstituted his WMD program – we get there and find nothing conclusive (but even the inconclusive stuff was a strong indicator that his regime was up to no good). Did we and everyone else just get it flat wrong, or did the WMDs go somewhere?

If I’m ever asked about what I think were Bush Administration mistakes, the one I’ll refer to is the fact that we waited until March of 2003 before going in to Iraq. We should have gone in there a year earlier. By August of 2002, at the latest. We did the whole UN/WMD dance for political purposes – mostly to help Blair build the case for British involvement. All the delay did was allow Saddam’s forces to prepare the insurgency as well as, I’ll bet, allowing the Russians (and, possibly, the French) to move out Saddam’s WMDs.

Speed is the most vital thing in war, and this should remind us that if we’re ever going to fight, get in to the middle of it as fast as its physically possible to do so. Delay always and only plays in to enemy hands – we build our military to be instantly ready to go with overwhelming force even when not by-the-book fully up to snuff (in a fully ready unit there is a lot of redundancy “just in case”, as it were). We delayed and that not only cost us lives, but also allowed the circumstances to develop where the anti-American left, seconded by Democrats, to undermine the entire war effort.

Lesson learned – but, also, we now do have to be concerned. If Saddam’s WMDs did wind up in Syria, will they one day wind up in rockets in Lebanon aimed as Israel? In terrorist bombs for New York? We need to find out, for certain.