Throw money at the problem

Here's an interesting graphic about Obama's experts:

source: http://blog.american.com/?p=7572

In case you missed it...

...this has been going around the Internet lately:

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"

...especially when the crown reads, "White House Social Secretary."

It will be interesting to see the fallout from the party crashers. It is generally believed that the absence of someone from the Social Secretary's Office at the credentials table allowed the ruse to take place.

The ultimate boss of the Social Secretary is the First Lady. Perhaps that explains why Barry and the girls pardoned the turkey without Michelle.

So, who is the Social Secretary. Well, she's a friend of the Obama's. (No surprise there.) And she was the one-time head of the Illinois State Lottery. (She's got that political appointee thang on her resume.)

And she worked PR for People's Gas and Allstate Insurance.

She is Desiree Rogers.

Desiree is the one with the super-short haircut. The one with the pearls is Valerie Jerrett, perhaps Obama's most-trusted advisor. Also in both photos is Linda Johnson Rice. (Johnson, as in Ebony and Jet magazine Johnson.)

So, will Desiree take the fall for the security breech? I'm guessing she won't. There will be some Secret Service changes and a couple of poor agents will wind up looking for fake fives in Fargo for the rest of their careers.

But Desiree clearly owes Michelle one. Maybe a couple.

In a bit of foreshadowing, an article about Desiree appeared in The Chicago Tribune on the Ides of March. It quoted Ms. Rogers thus: "Something that we've talked about from early on is making it the people's house," said Rogers, sitting at a table in her East Wing office, a view of the Truman Balcony behind her.

She's certainly done that.

Finally, some empathy

Now the politicians can understand how we feel.

Here we have this great country and people sneak past the guards and help themselves.

These brazen trespassers just waltz in like they own the place. They didn't really cause any trouble. In fact, they were acting just like the people around them.

Still, they need to go. And we ought to fix the hole in the fence, don't you think?

Drilling

This just in...Obama has indicated that he approves of deep drilling in ANWR. Rumor is he is looking for his approval ratings. ;)

Working for Obama

Workers build the floor to a tent on the South Lawn of the White House for Obama's first state dinner. (Reuters)

Um, do you see anyone in that picture working?

Update: This just in. According to the report on the impact of the stimulus money, eight jobs were saved on this project. How so? They would have all been fired if Obama weren't the president.

Another TARP

We all know about TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program. It was supposed to cover all the bad loans that were dragging down the banking system. Pay the banks for those and the credit market loosens up, right?

Well, they seem to be spending the TARP money for other things these days. Bank stocks are rising, but we didn’t see the kind of real relief we expected. But that’s a story for another time.

I’ll call this caper "TARP 2," because tarps are used to cover things up. And that’s exactly what the stimulus money is doing; covering up the mistakes of governments. State-level mistakes mostly.

For example, the State of Illinois has been under-funding education for decades. And when the State doesn't pay their share, the burden falls on property owners.

There have been efforts to fix the problem. There was the 51% campaign in the 90s. It went nowhere. There was the Lottery in the late 70s. The idea was that the State would sponsor gambling and the school fund would benefit. And the Lottery money began to flow quite nicely.

But…the State turned it into the Lootery. They would give all that money to education and give education LESS from the general fund. The net result was that the State had MORE money to spend on other things and education spending stayed flat.

To make matters worse, Illinois is late in making payments to the school districts. (Late, like 6 to 9 months late!)

So…..along comes the stimulus money…save and create new jobs…get the economy back on its feet.

TARP 2 is being used to cover all the sins of the State of Illinois by giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the State for old bills, not local jobs or programs. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “It appears the state treasury -- not students or school districts -- was the prime beneficiary of the education stimulus jackpot in Illinois. In great measure, funds simply were used to replace general aid payments already owed to local districts by the state. That gave Gov. Pat Quinn breathing room in his struggle to rein in a whopping two-year budget deficit of more than $10 billion.” (“Illinois data on stimulus-related jobs saved, created don't add up” - Chicago Tribune, November 4, 2009)

And just today, The Daily Herald reported that over a billion dollars in stimulus money will be used by Illinois to pay past-due Medicaid payments:
“The state is expecting to get more than $1.1 billion from Washington because the federal government has temporarily increased its Medicaid reimbursement rate as part of the stimulus package.

“The money will help the state pay Medicaid bills owed to hospitals and some other providers, including pharmacists.”

Gee, health reform isn’t even passed yet and Obama is passing out the bribe money.

No doubt Washington is pulling similar stunts in other states. Since the states can’t print money, Obama is going to give them some off the federal presses.

And the worst of it is that they are claiming to be creating jobs with this money. What they are doing is masking the failures in the States by shoring up their treasuries. Like I say, TARP 2.