Political Football

Fox News anchor Brit Hume reported today:

The president-elect isn’t shy about his penchant for exercise. He begins most mornings with a visit to a gym and frequently discusses his love for sports. Associated Press reporter Deanna Bellandi describes the incoming first couple as “fabulously fit.” Back in June, Men’s Fitness magazine ranked Obama the candidate as one of the 25 fittest guys in America.

So if this virtue of exercise is praised, how, you ask, have reporters referred to President Bush’s workout routine? They have used words such as “obsession,” “indulgence” and even “creepy” to describe the President’s exercise habit.

——-

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing.  The people who count the votes decide everything.….Joseph Stalin

——-

Interesting article here (clip below)
Did Democrats Have Something to Do with the Economic Troubles?
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
By Mike Baker

…..

Citigroup deftly showed other big companies how to play bailout bingo earlier this week. They got theirs in record time even though most of the nation didn’t know they were in trouble until a few minutes before the check was written. By the way, lost in the back pages of the Citi story is an interesting sidebar about former Citi director and senior advisor Robert Rubin.

In case you’re not familiar with Robert Rubin, he was treasury secretary during the Clinton Administration and joined Citi in 1999 as a trusted smart guy. How smart? Reporting shows he made somewhere in the region of $100 million while working with the organization. Rubin claims that he studiously avoided any daily management issues, in part because Citi over the past few years has had some bad management issues. So that $100 million wasn’t for management, it was for things like schmoozing, making big picture pronouncements, pondering and muttering smart things in the CEO’s ear while glancing furtively side to side.

He left in August of this year after helping to fill the bucket of poo but before it was thrown at the fan. Rubin’s also been working as an economic advisor to Obama’s transition team. It appears that several Rubin protégés, proponents of Rubinomics, are being positioned within the new Obama administration.

So here’s what I find amusing, in a curl-up-in-a-fetal-position-and-scream-loudly kind of way.

Remember during the campaign how this whole economic mess, according to the Obama camp, was the fault of the Bush administration and the past 8 years? They had all those excellent slogans… we can’t afford four more years of the same… remember? I don’t want to say that a lot of people bought that crap, but anytime you tried to talk about actual economic history and how this mess evolved, most people glazed over and muttered “past 8 years… more of same… must change.”

Well, just this Sunday while enjoying a piping hot cup of joe and a danish, I was reading through the Sunday papers. Being desirous of news from all sides, I always start with the New York Times. Eventually I finish up with Guns & Ammo. The Times had a story on the front page entitled Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk.

The story continued on the inside pages and on page 34, paragraph 15 of the story I came dangerously close to throwing myself off my deck. Here’s paragraph 15:

“When he (Robert Rubin) was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.”

Is the New York Times now suggesting that the Democrats might have had something to do with our current economic troubles?

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed