The news story:

President Barack Obama fired a surprise broadside at the defense industry, saying he intends to clamp down on practices that have resulted in billions of dollars in cost overruns and delays in recent years.

At a time when Washington faces the prospect of bailing out multiple sectors of the economy, contractors’ cost overruns are showing up on the radar of many in the capital. And the Pentagon, which spends about $330 billion a year to buy everything from fighters to paper clips, is a particular focus of the new administration.

Mr. Obama has singled out the defense industry as one of the most wasteful. Last year, the Government Accountability Office found that 95 major Defense Department weapons contracts were over budget by a total of $295 billion — though some point out that the GAO’s figure includes legitimate changes to some contracts.

“In this time of great challenges, I recognize the real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich,” the president said Wednesday.

Which is all well and good and any military veteran can tell you that waste in Defense is rather endemic – it is what happens when you’re spending other people’s money, which lesson liberals should take to heart as they go about spending trillions of dollars of other people’s money with Obamunism. Don’t fault the actual troops in the field – the problem usually comes in with defense contractors and those civilian and military Defense personnel who are looking for a cushy berth as well as pork-barreling politicians (like Jack Murtha (D-PA), to name a particularly nauseating sample of the species). As with all government agencies, a careful examination of Defense will discover a lot of money which is being wasted – and the more we attack such things, the better our military will be.

But as we go about looking for waste, fraud and abuse, we must not demonize the Defense industry, nor the military, nor cut vital programs just because they are large and expensive. The defense of the United States of America is the most important function the federal government has, and we must never find ourselves in a future war in the condition we were in 1941, when understrength military forces were using obsolete weapons to fight off powerful enemies – men died because short sighted politicians in the 1930’s stinted defense. We cannot engage in that level of criminal irresponsibility ever again.

It is a natural that a liberal, Democrat Administration will seek to cut defense – elections have consequences and one of them will be our military having to do more with less. The troops are up to it, but we must not betray them and send them into battle with anything less than the best we can provide at the time.

Than die on their feet:

Seventy-five percent (75%) of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of an average citizen to own a gun, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Just 14% say gun ownership is not a constitutional right. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.

We have had some useful polls of late – how many Americans think politicians know best (13%), think government is the solution (28%) and now how many people are afraid to defend themselves (14%). We’re closing in on figuring out just how many people are completely dyed-in-the-wool liberal weenies in this nation. Once we’ve got that figured out, we can work on tricking them into not showing up on election day…we’ll tell them they’ll have to bring a gun and make up their own mind. They’ll never vote again!

Interesting analysis from Real Clear Politics, with good and bad news for GOPers and Democrats. Well worth reading.

Yeah, right – perhaps we should have sent a different broad:

Russian media has been poking fun at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she gave her Russian counterpart a “reset” button with an ironic misspelling.

Clinton’s gift to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at their meeting in Geneva on Friday evening was meant to underscore the Obama administration’s readiness to “to press the reset button” in ties with Moscow.

But instead of the Russian word for “reset” (perezagruzka) it featured a slightly different word meaning “overload” or “overcharged” (peregruzka).

Daily newspaper Kommersant put a prominent picture of the fake red button on its front page and declared: “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton pushed the wrong button.”

Do keep in mind that I consider Hillary one of the few adults in the Obama Administration – but being as she is a liberal Democrat and the SecState of the first socialist President of the United States of America, its a natural that sheer idiocy will become national policy. Only in the paranoid, raving mind of the kook left was there any need for a “reset” of US/Russia relations – we have our problems, but to consider the last 8 years a complete disaster, as the kook left does, is to ignore the fact that, by and large, President Bush had treated Russia as necessary and was rapidly building up the collective security net around Russia necessary to curb Russia’s imperialist ambitions.

In comes Hillary with words of wisdom from her boss, and it all goes up in a puff of laughter as a stupid conception of foreign relations meets a stupid symbolic gesture, which was then done all wrong.

Its going to be a long four years, boys and girls.

The editors of The Atlantic ponder:

What hidden issues like this lurk in a Citigroup bankruptcy? Compared to Citigroup, Lehman was a simple entity; it borrowed some money, it issued some securities, it bought and sold some other securities. Citigroup is a bank, a trading operation, an insurer . . . and it has commercial banking operations in something like 119 countries, all of whom have their own opinion about what should happen to the company, and regulatory authority over at least a piece of it. It’s tempting to think that the Lehman bankruptcy has already exposed the potential problems from any collapse.

The actual answer: its assets will be picked up for a song by other enterprises which weren’t as boneheaded as Citi and after a few years, most people will forget there ever was a Citi for us to worry about. Its called life – and some times it doesn’t work out the way we like.

Attempts to keep failed corporations like Citi alive via infusions of taxpayer dollars are foolish and counter-productive. They just put off the day of reckoning and ensure that when it does come, it will be worse than otherwise.

He was railing in the campaign about high corporate profits and how they need to be stopped.

Mission Accomplished, Mr. President.

Is this straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, or much ado about nothing?

ChangeTracker, our handy tool that watches for changes on White House Web sites, noticed wide changes to the whitehouse.gov biography of George W. Bush.

References to Bush creating “prosperity” through “an ownership society” are stripped in the new version, and praise of the No Child Left Behind Act has been softened.

We contacted the White House for comment, and a spokesman told us that the version of the biography currently on Whitehouse.gov is actually not new, but an old one written at the end of the Bush administration.

Our research says otherwise. The biography preserved in the National Archives is a near-perfect match for the old version, suggesting that the version now on Whitehouse.gov is, indeed, new. (Peter Bray, founder of Versionista, the system that drives ChangeTracker, just wrote a piece in Slate about the changes.)

Politics and Critical Thinking finds the whole thing suspicious…

Is this standard practice or even a big deal? I don’t know, but for some reason I found this unsettling because of the sneakiness and denial. There is much truth in the statement, “To the victors go the spoils.” But that is usually left to a conqueror, not a publicly elected official. I just wonder how many more “changes” they are going to enact when it comes time to start covering for their failures?

Good question.

Obama took a question from the New York Times asking if he was a Socialist. He brushed off the question and later felt the need to call reporters from the Oval Office to “clarify” his response.

oF course, the question is rather silly… we already knew he was (and is) a Socialist.

Can someone say “too little’ too late?”

President Barack Obama has chided his attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., for describing America as a “nation of cowards” when discussing race, wading into a tumult that flared over Holder’s indictment of the way this country talks about ethnicity.

“I think it’s fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language,” Obama said in a mild rebuke from America’s first black president to its first black attorney general.

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, the president said that despite Holder’s choice of words, he had a point.

“We’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict,” he said, adding, “We could probably be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.”

In fact, not only was this too little too late, but Barack Hussein Obama essential agreed with Holder’s ridiculous assertion.

It seems like everyday Obama is determined to prove to the country that he wasn’t ready to be president. Between his failure to put a cabinet together or nominate individuals who aren’t ethically challenged, abandoning his campaign promise of bipartisanship, blatantly lying about earmarks in the stimulus bill, growing the national debt in 8 weeks quicker than any past president has, attacking his media critics, or insulting the UK, it is quite clear this guy is an amateur who has no business in the White House.

The disgusting nature of liberalism, at its worst:

…now the philanthropic world has something else to worry about. Today the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a research and advocacy group, will release a report offering “benchmarks to assess foundation performance.” Its real aim is to push philanthropic organizations into ignoring donor intent and instead giving grants based on political considerations.

The committee is part of a rising tide of politicians and activists who are working to change the face of American philanthropy — and not for the better.

The report, titled “Criteria for Philanthropy at its Best,” advises foundations to “provide at least 50 percent of grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups, broadly defined.” The committee looked at 809 of the largest foundations in the country, whose combined three-year grants totaled almost $15 billion, and concluded that the majority of foundations are “eschewing the needs of the most vulnerable in our society” by neglecting “marginalized groups.”

Two years ago, an advocacy group in San Francisco called Greenlining began releasing similar reports. Greenlining’s aim then was to pass legislation in California mandating that foundations report to the public the percentage of their dollars given to “minority-led” organizations and the percentage of their boards and staffs made up by racial and ethnic minorities. The legislation was dropped when several foundations promised to donate money to causes Greenlining favored.

Now Greenlining has put out reports in Florida, Pennsylvania and New York trying to shame foundations into distributing grants differently, as well as pressure them into recruiting more “diverse” board and staff members. The NCRP report picks up on this theme to suggest that foundation boards and staffs should include people with a “diversity of perspectives.”

To translate from the liberalese: “This is a nice, little charity you have going here – be a shame if something were to happen do it. Know what I mean?”

Real charities – to differentiate from the more bogus charities which go by the name of ACORN and PUSH, for instance – have to achieve results in order to keep the donations coming in…and there are just tens of billions of dollars floating through these hard working and dedicated charities. And what the heck does all that money do? Buy food and clothing? Provide a little medical care? What’s that all about? Liberal layabouts need some swag – and so the shakedown is on. Having already held up the government and corporations for ransom, the only large pot of money untapped by corrupt liberal “charity” groups is, well, charity money. You kick in that $5 to United Way, and now you can be pleased to know that 10 or 20 cents of that money will flow over to some “community organizer” who lives in a rich neighborhood while “organizing” a poor neighborhood.

Cool, huh?

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America, boys and girls.