President Obama is boasting about coming in under budget on one of his spending plans. He doesn’t bother to point out that all the money he spent is money the government doesn’t have. He is bragging about the few dollars that he won’t spend.  This is like me bragging to my wife that I only spent $99,000 more than I made this year instead of the $100,000 that I planned to spend. For me a thousand bucks is not pocket change but what’s more important is the $99,000 that I did spend. And what’s more important for the country are the trillions of dollars that Obama is spending beyond what the government will “earn”.

But Obama knows that probably half the people who heard his comment will think he is talking about achieving a balanced budget — that is, no deficit spending. His team probably budgeted more than they meant to spend so that he could make this boast.

Based on a discussion I heard on Morning Joe this morning Obama apparently used the word “privacy” instead of “piracy” in making some remarks on the rescue of the ship captain taken hostage by pirates. He reportedly said something like: We have to take steps to eradicate privacy. Most likely he was reading from a teleprompter and the teleprompter had it wrong. Will this be Obama’s “misunderestimate” moment? Don’t count on it.

In Tom Cruise’s latest movie he plays a German colonel plotting to kill Hitler. It has been reported that he had dreams about Hitler as a child:

“I always wanted to kill Hitler, I hated him,” Cruise, 46, said. “As a child studying history and looking at documents, I wondered, ‘why didn’t someone stand up and try to stop it?’

I’m wondering why the poor child wasn’t told by his teachers or parents that Hitler died about seventeen years before he was born. And that someone did stand up and did stop Hitler. In fact, millions of someones gave their lives to stop him.

Thomas Sowell has published another of his Random Thoughts columns. It is well worth reading. Sowell is my most favorite commentator on government, politics and economics. He understands the threat that Barack Obama poses to our culture of freedom and independence.

It looks like the government (meaning the taxpayers) is going to rescue people who made bad home-buying decisions. The government is helping so many people with financial problems now; I wonder if it would be willing to help me pay for a new set of tires for my car. I didn’t count on them wearing out as soon as they have. And it’s a public safety issue; if I keep driving on them I might have a blowout and kill someone.
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Quite frequently lately I hear about some survey finding that about 70 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. They never mention that every person surveyed probably has a different definition of the wrong track and the right track. One person’s wrong track might be another person’s right track and vice versa. It’s surprising to me that 30 percent think we’re on the right track. I don’t think I’ve ever believed we were on the right track. How close to the right track do we have to be to be considered “on the right track?”
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I’ve long thought the fact that we are constantly entreated not to be judgmental is kind of stupid. It would be hard to be successful in our personal or business lives without judging the people with whom we have to interact. I can remember when not being judgmental simply meant not judging someone harshly based only on superficial knowledge of that person. But, like many other things, it has been hijacked by the politically correctness crowd and now constitutes an outright ban. I’ll bet it hasn’t been long since you heard some teenager shout “don’t judge me!” — even if just on television.

Just yesterday I judged a bum (what we used to call homeless people) who approached me at a Burger King and asked for a buck because he was hungry:

Me: “I saw you walk across the parking lot carrying a large pack on your back. What’s wrong with you?”

Him: “What do you mean?”

Me: “There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with you. Why don’t you have a job? If 12 million illegal immigrants can find work here why can’t you?”

Him: “Uhhhh…”

Me: “Basically, you’re just a bum, right?”

Him: “Yeah.”

Me: “Okay, here’s a buck.”

Him: “Thanks, man.”
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It’s a certainty now that the Democrats will nominate a lipstick-wearing candidate. I’m sure Obama was wearing lipstick (or at least lip gloss) in a speech I saw reported on television this morning.

They’re still talking about whether or not the water-boarding interrogation technique is a form of torture. I think it’s a bit silly to try to define torture. Torture means different things to different people. Apparently a lot of people voluntarily watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I would consider it torture to be forced to watch Olbermann. Or to listen to Hillary Clinton speeches.

Think I’m too flippant regarding a serious subject? Then consider that one technique used to break terrorism suspects is to force them to listen to long sessions of loud rock music.

(After writing this, but before publishing it, I read a column by Bert Prelutsky in which he makes a similar point.)
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A few days ago I read an article (lost the link) about the ongoing debate on the conflict between Darwinian evolution and the account of the creation of humans in the Bible’s book of Genesis. In Genesis it says that God created man in his own image. Darwin says that humans evolved from monkeys. The resolution of this conflict is simple. God looks like a monkey.
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Imagine this: You’ve decided that you’re not satisfied with your current job. You want one that gives you more power and maybe a little more pay. You tell your boss that you’re going to spend 90% of your time over the next year looking for that better job, and that you expect her to keep paying you a full salary during that year.

Well, that is exactly what several of the candidates for president have done. Senators Cllinton, Obama and McCain and Representatives Kucinich, Paul, and Hunter obviously aren’t spending much time on their current jobs, but they’re still getting paid.

Fox News reports on a public-relations stunt conducted in Times Square where people were invited to shred or demolish with a sledge hammer their bad memories from 2007.

Apparently there are a lot of people who needed to be embarrassed publicly before they could face the new year. But the most pathetic of them all was Joe Costarella of Staten Island who took the opportunity to demolish a tall garbage can from his kitchen with an opening too narrow to scrape his plate. Before this, could you have imagined someone carrying a tall garbage can from Staten Island to Manhattan to destroy it so he could get a new one? Don’t you think placing it beside the road for pick-up and stomping on it a couple of times would suffice for most people?

Perhaps he got the idea from the commercials running on TV that show people dramatically destroying their old trucks so they can get a new one. I came up with an apparently very clever idea years ago; I sell the old truck and use the money on the purchase of a new one.

Since I’m off the subject now, why do the commercials showing people driving with booze sloshing around in their cars imply that they have been drinking? It seems to imply the opposite to me.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program about four years ago. It has given rise to another what-did-Bush-know-and-when-did-he-know-it witch hunt by the media. As if the general public is entitled to know every step the executive branch of our government takes. Can you imagine dealing with any adversary, much less the regime in Iran, by always putting all your cards on the table before negotiation begins? Do you suppose that any of the media idiots, like David Gregory, ever consider the possibility that they are being used?
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we had the option of voting for none-of-the-above on all elections? And if none-of-the-above gets the most votes, none of those running would be allowed to take office? Of course you might ask, what would we do then about filling the office? My suggestion is to just leave it vacant until a new election can be held — in which none of the candidates from the previous election would be allowed to run.

Chances are that none-of-the-above wouldn’t win by a clear majority that frequently. But wouldn’t it be great when one of the candidates has to conduct a run-off campaign against none-of-the-above?
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Is a President Bitch, President Diversity or President Hairspray really the best the Democrats have to offer? The one candidate, Bill Richardson, that might actually have the kind of experience needed is not even in their first tier. It seems to me that if their goal is something other than to ensure eight more years of Republican control of the White House they would offer us someone like Joe Lieberman.
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Have you noticed how many twenty-somethings are passed off as experts on one subject or another on the talking-heads channels? Most of the young women are really easy on the eyes of this old man but I don’t give much weight to their opinions or those of the young men. I don’t care how bright they are or what school they’re from they don’t know that much yet.
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Am I turning into Andy Rooney?

It’s curious to me that liberals wear their "tolerance" like a badge of honor. To tolerate something is to endure it without repugnance. That is, you can barely put up with it without having to hold your nose or look away.

A modern, softer, political definition of tolerance is "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one’s own." Even it says that if you’re tolerant of something you inherently disagree with it.

Tolerance is also defined as "freedom from bigotry." How can someone promote "freedom from bigotry" and practice tolerance at the same time? Bigotry is a practice that most of us abhor, but it seems that we aren’t supposed to be tolerant of bigotry. So who gets to choose what is to be tolerated or not tolerated? Apparently the liberals do.

Anyway, what constitutes tolerance? Where do we draw the line between tolerating something that we disagree with and not tolerating it? The race hustlers demonstrated the limits of their tolerance when Don Imus called some women basketball players nappy-headed hos. Why are celebrities forced to apologize when they do or say something stupid? It would be fine with me to just tolerate them. It seems that tolerance is something you practice only when it doesn’t really matter to you that much.

Tolerance, like diversity and multiculturalism, is just another empty, meaningless concept that liberals are trying to use to advance their agenda — which seems to be to destroy the American culture.

A problem we face is that we rarely find a great leader who can get elected. The best candidates for president are not likely to be willing to do what they have to do to get elected. This is why we mostly get shallow bozos like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for our presidents. I believe that Ronald Reagan was an exception to this recurring dilemma. And I don’t believe Fred Thompson is an exception. In fact, there are no exceptions in the 2008 race at this time.
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There is a basic difference between Western countries and countries like Iraq. Western countries want law and order above most all else. We are willing to bend quite a lot to avoid violent confrontations and to preserve our orderly system of government. We prefer to work out our differences through the political or judicial processes. Sure, there are a lot of Iraqis that would prefer law and order. But the problem is that there are too many that don’t.

There was a lot of violence in our past but we managed to reach where we are today in just a few hundred years. The Mesopotamians and other Iraqis have been there for thousands of years and they still can’t coexist peacefully.
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Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has boasted that the United States was being defeated in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts. I hope he knows the difference between defeat and cutting losses. Sometimes a cost-benefit analysis indicates that you should give up certain pursuits, but it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t succeed at some cost.

I hope he understands that, even if we pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, we can still destroy both of them and Iran without breaking a sweat — if we become sufficiently motivated.
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A popular argument against allowing the use of cheap Mexican labor in America is that the taxpayers are paying for their healthcare and other social services.  The biggest problem though is not the use of cheap Mexican labor.  It is the fact that government provided healthcare and other social services exist in the first place.
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For what it’s worth, my favorite columnists are: Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Burt Prelutsky, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Greenberg, David Limbaugh, Debra Saunders and Diana West. I used to like Pat Buchanan but lately he seems to have flipped his lid. You can find all of them at Townhall.com.

The AP reports that an Iranian military official, General Mohammad Alavi said:

One of the issues enemies make publicity about is their cruise missiles. Now, we possess the necessary systems to confront them (cruise missiles).

OK Mo, but do you really expect to prevail in that confrontation? A six-year-old child can confront a heavily armed policeman.

Alavi also warned that Israel was within Iran’s medium-range missiles and its fighter bombers, while maintaining that Israel was not strong enough to launch an aerial attack against Iran.

If you were really smart, Mo, you would reconsider the fighter-bomber thing. You should take a moment to think about how long it has been since fighter-bombers have been effectively used against the US or one of its allies. Then you should contemplate the reason for that.

I’ll give you a clue: There aren’t enough women and children up in the sky for the fighter-bombers to hide behind. Now you take it from there.