When the going gets tough for Obama, it’s time to appear on The Tonight Show

Obama’s approval numbers are tanking.  Now the NYT Caucus blog reports:

President Obama will be making a guest appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on Thursday, a White House official said, in a rare personal visit by a commander in chief to late night television.

Mr. Obama will swing by the Leno show as part of his trip to southern California. The White House official said that Mr. Obama plans to talk about the economy with Mr. Leno and said he will try to focus on substance, possibly a tall task given the show’s format.

Will he be funny? “As funny as the times allow,” the official said.

Presidential candidates often appear on television shows when they’re trying to get elected, but once successful, it is rare to find a commander in chief appearing on TV shows except as joke fodder. President Bush did show up on NBC’s “Deal or No Deal” last year, but it was in a taped appearance in which he voiced support for a contestant who had served three tours of duty in Iraq.

This could be a challenge for Obama because unlike his appearances on, say, The View, he can’t exactly flirt with Jay Leno.  No word on whether Obama will have his trusty teleprompter at hand.

Updates:

-   Nope, no teleprompter – with predictable results.

-  Jim Treacher channels Rodney Dangerfield and writes the gag lines Barry shoulda used for his “standup comedy act”.

What’s not to like? Tender, Juicy “Obama fingers” with a tasty curry sauce!

What can I say. From SPIEGEL ONLINE:

Tender, Juicy Obama Fingers Hit the Shelves

By Charles Hawley

A German frozen food company hopes to raise sales with a new product: Obama fingers. The tender, fried chicken bits come with a tasty curry sauce. The company says it was unaware of the possible racist overtones of the product.

The story later concludes:

The idea, she claimed, was to get in on the Obama-mania which is continuing to grip Germany. The word "fingers" in the name refers to the fact that it is a finger food. "It’s like hotdogs," Witting said. "No one would ever think they are actually from dogs."

For Americans in Germany, though, there is a risk that the product might be seen as racially insensitive. Fried chicken has long been associated with African-Americans in the US — naming strips of fried chicken after the first black president could cause some furrowing of brows.

Witting told SPIEGEL ONLINE the connection never even occurred to her. "It was supposed to be a homage to the American lifestyle and the new US president," she said.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Barney Frank

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Barney Frank charged Monday that a decision by financially strapped insurance giant AIG to pay millions in executive bonuses amounts to "rewarding incompetence."

Echoing outrage expressed on both sides of the political aisle in the wake of revelations that American International Group will pay roughly $165 million in bonuses, Frank said he believes it’s time to shake up the company.

The story goes on to say:

Frank said he was disgusted, asserting that "these bonuses are going to people who screwed this thing up enormously."

"Maybe it’s time to fire some people," he said. "We can’t keep them from getting bonuses but we can keep them from having their jobs. … In high school, they wouldn’t have gotten retention (bonuses), they would have gotten detention."

Ha Ha Ha.  Ya know, Barney, screw detention.  If there was any justice, your mega-millionaire friends at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be in jail right now.  Maybe you and Chris Dodd should be right there along with them.  Your big donor pals cooked the books so they could get mega-bonuses, and these deceptive practices helped facilitate the housing crisis, and screwed the American people in the process. 

What’s criminal on your part?   When confronted with the situation in OFHEO hearings, you said, among other things, I don’t see anything in this report that raises safety and soundness problems.  Did you believe that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, or was it a brazen, impeachable lie? You’re either a grossly incompetent fool, or a shameless liar. In either case you should resign.  You had second chances too!  It’s not as if John McCain didn’t propose legislation to Congress in 2006 (that would be you Barney!) which would have brought reform before it was too late:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

Sounds just about right, doesn’t it Barneykins?

But nooooh, instead of being punished, and demoted, or thrown out on your fat ass, you are being rewarded by Madame Pelosi, and hailed as a hero.  The same Nancy Pelosi who said that the crisis was able to “sneak up on us so silently, almost on little cat’s feet…”

 

 

Poor Nancy, not only is she dumb as a rock but she’s also deaf as a post.  I know we’re supposed to accommodate people with disabilities, but it’s time for Nancy to go too. It’s not fair to make the entire country suffer because she’s mentally and aurally-challenged.

Update: Michelle Malkin weighs in, although she inveighs against Congress receiving bonuses for their incompetence.  I care about that too, but it’s minor in comparison to everything else Barney has done to deserve our ire.

When business and government get in bed together, neither will get a good night’s sleep

This morning, John Fund cited cited that Reagan quote on Fox and Friends, as part of a discussion about A.I.G.’s bonus payments , which everyone is shocked, shocked, shocked about.  Fund noted correctly in my view (I paraphrase), that a contract is a contract and cannot be blithely disregarded because outraged taxpayers have assumed ownership of a private company, something which is a very bad idea in the first place. 

My curiosity piqued, I searched for the source of this Reagan quote.  It turns out that Fund has it slightly wrong, but no matter.  The original quote was part of a timeless  1977 speech given at Hillsdale College:

But, you know, if you lose your economic [freedom], you lose your political freedom, all freedom. Freedom is something that cannot be passed on in the blood stream, or genetically. And it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it, or it’s gone and gone for a long, long time. Already, many of us, particularly those in business and industry, there are too many who have switched rather than fight. And it’s time that particularly, some of our corporations learned, that when you get in bed with government, you’re going to get more than a good night’s sleep.

This speech deserves to be read  its entirety, beginning with this anecdote made by then Hillsdale President, George C. Roche 111 as he introduced then Governor Reagan:

I know a lady, who, twice in her life has lost her country. She lost it the first time as a very young woman when, in Czarist Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred and she barely escaped with her life. She came to Cuba, started again from scratch, once again built up a very successful competence, was doing very well. And this time, as an elderly woman, again, she lost her country at the time Castro took over. Now, losing one’s country once would be enough for most of use, I suppose. Losing one’s country twice would be enough for the toughest person in the house — but not for this very indomitable lady. She came to the United States where again she started from scratch and again built up a very successful competence. And now as a very elderly person, I’ve heard her tell this story on more than one occasion and invariably someone in the audience, when she is finished, will say, "You poor, unlucky woman. How you have suffered. What an ordeal you have been through." And her answer is always the same: "I, unlucky? Ah, no. I am one of the luckiest women who ever lived. Twice I have lost my country. Twice I have had a country to which I can go. When you Americans lose your country, where will you go?" I’ve heard her ask the question more than once. I’ve never heard a convincing answer.

Here’s Reagan on the cause of inflation, which should be of grave concern to all of us as we spend trillions in order to expand government:

At the economic conference in London several months ago, one of our American representatives there was talking to the press. And he said, "You have to recognize that inflation doesn’t have any single cause. It’s caused by a number of things, and therefore there is no single answer." Well, if he believed that, he had no business being at an economic conference. Inflation is caused by one thing, and it has one answer. It’s caused by government spending more than government takes in, and it will go away when government stops doing that, and not before.

Here’s a fun paragraph, about how hard it is to us grasp the value of a billion dollars:

But we’re so used to talking billions. Does anyone realize how much a single billion is? A billion minutes ago Christ was walking on this earth. A billion hours ago our ancestors lived in caves, and it’s questionable as to whether they’d discovered the use of fire. A billion dollars ago was 19 hours in Washington, D.C. And it’ll be another billion in the next 19 hours, and every 19 hours until they adopt a new budget at which time it’ll be almost a billion and a half. But let me really paint the picture for you. If you gentlemen sent your wives out on a shopping spree, and gave them each a billion dollars, and told them not to spend more than a thousand dollars a day, they won’t be home for 3000 years.

Fast forward to the Obama Administration’s Trillion dollar “stimulus” shopping spree.  A trillion has 12 zeros, and equals a thousand billions, or, to put it another way, a million millions.  So I guess that means that if you gave your wives a trillion dollars, and told them not to spend more than a thousand dollars a day, they wouldn’t be back for 3 million years (2,739,726 to be exact). Yikes!

Reagan concluded his speech like this:

Will we, before it is too late, use the vitality and the magic of the marketplace to save this way of life, or will we one day face our children, and our children’s children when they ask us where we were and what we were doing on the day that freedom was lost?

Who says that Reaganism is dead?

By the way, this video does a good job of helping us grasp how much a trillion is:

 

Updates:

Noting that AIG has "received substantial sums" of federal aid from the federal government, Obama said he has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "to use that leverage and pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole."

Good luck with that, Barack.   You and I both know that this is nothing but a political stunt, and the clueless American people will be cheering you on, oblivious to the fact that you are picking our pockets with your “stimulus” plan while pretending to care about the welfare of taxpayers. 

I’m not a lawyer, but I betcha that the “legal avenues” to break these contracts are few and far between.  If you do succeed it will be because you have abused the power of the Treasury, and that is far more worrisome to me than the $100,000 bonuses going to A.I.G. employees.   And to put a tax cheat like Geither in charge of this effort to “make Republicans whole” is just the cherry on top of the ice-cream sundae.

Allahpundit responds to Obama’s A.I.G. antics in classic form.  Video: Obama outrageously outraged by AIG outrage

R.S. McCain links to Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, who asks:

Do any other old codgers out there in my audience remember back when $1 trillion was a noteworthy figure, rather than the minimum price needed to get people to take your policy seriously?