As the nation stews with political corruption, stupidity and incompetence, the can-do spirit springs inelegantly to life in NJ

FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP, N.J. — A momentous deal to cap property taxes was all but done, but Gov. Chris Christie was taking no chances, barnstorming the state to commiserate with squeezed homeowners and keep pressure on the Legislature.

Outside a farmhouse here in central New Jersey last week, buttoned up in a dark suit despite the triple-digit heat, Mr. Christie promised to tackle rising pension costs, transportation financing, municipal spending — all while poking fun at his opponents, the news media and, mostly, himself.

When a reporter suggested that the governor do a rain dance, he said, “Don’t want to miss that, baby.” And in the rare instance of his withholding judgment on an issue, he said he preferred to know something about the issue before opining, although, he added, tongue in cheek, that actual knowledge was not necessarily a requirement.

It was a model taste of Mr. Christie, six months into his term as governor: blunt, energetic, clearly enjoying himself.

And having his way.

Obama becomes a joke, like his predecessors

"Political satire matters when it is larger than the joke. The growing rap on Obama is that he is a man both ineffective and meek; a man who is loved by all and feared by none.

Bill Maher hit the punch line first in mid-June: "You don't have to be on television every minute of every day. You're the president, not a rerun of 'Law & Order'... TV stars are too worried about being popular and too concerned about being renewed."

Soon Maher came to his key point: "You're skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady, but so is Lindsay Lohan. And just like Lindsay, we see your name in the paper a lot but we're kind of wondering when you're actually going to do something."

Witty revelations for our time

On the lighter side

Political axioms

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the
support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which
debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-G. Gordon Liddy

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on
what to have for dinner.
-James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in
rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
-Douglas Casey,

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys
to teenage boys.
-P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to
live at the expense of everybody else.
-Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short
phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if
it stops moving, subsidize it.
-Ronald Reagan (1986)

I don't make jokes... I just watch the government and report the facts.
-Will Rogers

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it
costs when it's free!
- P.J. O'Rourke

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as
possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
-Voltaire (1764)

Just because you do not take an interest in politics
doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
-Pericles (430 B.C.)

Talk is cheap...except when Congress does it.
-Unknown

The government is like a baby's alimentary canal: a happy appetite at
one end and no responsibility at the other.
-Ronald Reagan

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to
fill the world with fools.
-Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995)


AND THE BEST ONE.......

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong
enough to take everything you have.
-Thomas Jefferson

Hat tip to my cousin Warren...

The Obama cabinet, a work in progress

ACORN nominee Barack Obama, who has been assured by the shadow Central Committee, which will count the votes, that he will win the election, has begun selecting his top aides. Word is that the following are likely choices:

Director of Central Planning: William Ayers, Chicago
Direct of Corporate Disintegration: Barney Frank, congressman from Massachusetts
Director of National Reeducation: Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Chicago
Director of Security for a new Office of Instant Citizenship for Kenyans, Jamie Gorelik
Director of National Entertainment: Spike Lee, movie maker, New York
Director of Education, K through PhD: Maxine Waters, congresswoman from California
Director for the Proper Conduct of Sports: O.J. Simpson
Selector of Proper Movie Scripts: Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam
Director of Contemptible U.S. Armed Forces: John Kerry, senator from Massachusetts
Director of Gun Confiscation from Angry White Churchgoers: Michelle Obama
Director of Voting Fraud: to be conducted in-house by Obama, outsourcing to ACORN
Director for Nullification of the Constitution: outsourced to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco
Director of the Budget: Tony Rezko, Chicago

This lisst will be updated as appropriate.

A hard-boiled perspective

Politics is hard to follow sometimes. Here's a hard-boiled perspective.

Chicago, 1968. Saw the fires. Heard the glass breaking. Saw Mayor Daly call in the B-52s.
Everybody else thought it was Civil War II. I figured Dusty's had run out of vodka again.

Last night, at the debate, Tom Brokaw asked John McCain where he spent his honeymoon. McCain jumped on a table and shouted, "I'm not George Bush."

Brokaw asked McCain for his favorite color. McCain shouted, "I'm not George Bush."

Passtimes? "I'm not George Bush."

I started to get the picture. McCain didn't actually go on a honeymoon with his wife. Bush did. That kind of thing sticks in a man's craw.

My advanced insight tells me the McCain campaign has polls that show Bush to be the single biggest obstacle to his election as president. That wouldn't surprise me. I don't think there will be another President Bush for 100 years.

McCain seems fixated on "crossing the aisle." He goes on about it as if it was a sacramental act, like ordering two beers at a time at Dusty's. You never hear him talking about walking down the aisle. I guess that seals it.

If this doesn't work out for McCain, maybe his wife, Cindy, will move on. She's still a chick. Maybe we'll have a beer some time at Dusty's.

I saw some odd things while I wrote about politics for 150 years. Once I was talking with Walter Mondale in a bar, and I noticed that he always had an aide sitting next to him. One would leave, another would jump into his place. It was choreographed. So I asked. Mondale was afraid that a woman would sit down next to him and someone would snap their picture. He's a preacher's son, you know. You also know he's never been touched by scandal, real or imagined.

Bob Dole was a stitch, the funniest politician I ever shared a plane with. You have to admire a man who was shot up in Italy and was still delivering hilarious, side-splitting one-liners decades later. Most of the World War II vets are gone now, and we'd be better off if they weren't.

I rode on Ted Kennedy's plane during one of his campaigns. They lost my bag. I didn't know that happened on charters. Kennedy's life and career are another matter

The most interesting landing I ever made was in South Dakota, at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. I had been flying all day on a four-seater with George McGovern. The problem was that it was almost dark when we arrived, and the reservation didn't have an airport.

I thought this was going to be a problem. When I looked down, I saw dozens of cars lined up on a meadow with their lights on. Has McGovern said or done anything lately that pissed off the Indians? I wondered. But we got down and bounced to a stop across the meadow.

A couple of hours later, when it was even darker, we took off. I'm still here, which is something of a mystery to me.

I guess we have to get back to the debate, although I'd rather not. It wasn't interesting. It wasn't illuminating. It was canned rhetoric. I guess the only reason I watched it was that I wanted to know how many times McCain would talk about "crossing the aisle." I lost count.

Doesn't he understand that his crossing the aisle is the reason a lot of conservatives don't like him? Is he willing to go on alienating conservatives in exchange for liberal recruits? How does that math work out, exactly?

The biggest advance we could make in election technology is a new line that says, "None of the above."

A fairy tale for our time

Once upon a time in America, how you lived your life mattered.
If you went to school, got a part-time job, graduated from college and got a good job, you were on your way. Your income made it possible for you to buy a house. If you had managed your life in such a way that you easily could handle your monthly bills, the mortgage that you got to pay for your house carried a modest interest rate.

If you did well at your job, you got a better job at a higher salary. So you got married. Now that you could see a future for yourself, with a family, you worked even harder, and got a still better job, with higher pay. So, you became a father, which made you work even harder because you wanted to take your kids to baseball games.

You moved up the ladder at work. More money, more respect, more invitations, more trips, a better life.

Then, all of a sudden, without you even knowing it, your luck turned.

The Democratic Party decided to reward the minorities and low-income people who had been voting for its candidates for many years, and to make sure their children stayed loyal to the party.

So, way back in the 1970s, the Democrats passed the Community Reinvestment Act, which forced lenders to write mortgages for low-income people. It didn't matter why those people had low incomes. Bad luck? Lazy? Drunk? In jail? It didn't matter. It also didn't matter if you had paid your bills on time. If you were poor you could get a low-interest mortgage. How you had lived your life didn't matter anymore.

I could make a detour here and write that this sent a bad message to young people. You didn't have to take care with your life to get a nice mortgage later on. But I won't do that because I want to get on with this fairy tale.

What happened here is called liberalism. One of the things you have to realize about liberalism is that it doesn't have to make sense. It just has to feel good. The liberal has to be able to say he helped somebody out today. It doesn't even matter if the helping hurts.

As the years went by, the Democrats, in and out of Congress, made more and more rules for the lenders. More and more people got mortgages, whether or not they had taken care with their lives.

One reason the lenders got by with writing more and more mortgages for poor people is that they didn't have to worry any more about the risk they were taking. In fact, the risk was so low that you would have needed a magnifying glass to find it.

Isn't that something? The lenders made more and more risky loans, and the risk they were actually taking almost vanished. No wonder people have started thinking that politicians are sleight-of-hand artists. They had taken something that used to be thought of as dangerous and made it disappear. Maybe they'd do that with rattlesnakes.

If you looked closely, though, you found that the risk didn't vanish. It just moved away. It had become somebody else's problem.

As soon as the lender wrote the mortgage, the lender sold it to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, two companies with funny names that the government had set up, but didn't actually run. They were actually run by politicians, who aren't used to thinking about things like risk, costs, or profit. The reason is, when politicians want money, they can take it away from people like you, who have taken care with their lives, any time they want. They think costs are something other people worry about. That's because people who have taken care with their lives are paying their costs, whatever those costs are.

Besides, Fanny and Freddie didn't have to worry about risk either. They put mortgages in bundles and sold them as soon as they could. The risk moved away again.

This kept on going, and growing, for many years.

Then, some people stopped paying their mortgages, and word got around. Soon, bankers who had loved mortgages for years, started to sell them for whatever they could get, and the banks started going out of business because they had bought a lot of mortgages that were losing value.

This is the strange part. The people who got stuck with all those mortgages when they lost their value were the masters of the universe at Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and other big investment banks that were famous for making people rich, especially the people who ran them.. A lot of the masters of the universe don't have jobs now, but for some reason they're still rich. But you won't find Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers in the telephone book any more.

It's going to cost a lot of money to pay for the damage. The politicians wrote up a bill for $700 billion. The people who will pay that bill are the people who have taken care with their lives.

It's like I told you before. Liberalism doesn't have to make sense. It just has to feel good. The politicians want to help out.

Bids stranded at the buzzer

Friday's House vote on the bailout bill stopped the auction and left a lot of bids unprocessed. Here are some of those failed bids:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, $10 million: He wanted to be impeached so he doesn't have to be governor of California any more. Resignation would have wrecked his Hollywood image. Impeachment would have spiffed it up.

Bill Clinton, $10 million. He had another list of people he wanted pardoned but isn't president any more so he needwd a waiver. For some reason, Hillary was on the new list.

Sarah Palin, $1,500: Having dealt with the dregs of American politics in Washington, she wanted to relinquish her vice=presidential nomination and go back to Alaska.

Todd Palin, $1,500: He had a list of 50 Washington politicians and 75 Washington jouralists he wanted to punch in the nose, and wanted a prepunch pardon.

Barney Frank, $7,500: He wanted to be named permanent U.S. ambassador to Madagascar, where, under a new name, he would be beyond the reach of Bill O'Reilly.

Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of General Electric, $8 million: He wanted to submit a bill compelling a publisher to print and distribute his new book, "Goddam It, I Just Can't Play This Game."

Although these bids remained unprocessed at the buzzer, they may become grist for another auction because House members had so much fun at the first one.

New word

New word: maverdick
Usage: I call myself a maveric but, in fact, a lot of my fellow Republicans don't like me because I tend to drift over to the other side, so in truth I am a maverdick.

Earlier post: New times, new words

I'll bid $50,000 for 3 more zeros in par. #7

This is simply pathetic. We have a first-class auction going on in Washington, with billions of dollars in assets and tax breaks on the table, and who's in charge?
Not an auctioneeer.
Instead, we have an assortment of unindicted politicians sorting out bids and writing new entries in the Wall Street bailout bill.
No wonder we get so little for our money.
What we need in that room is an auctioneer who knows the meaning of the covert wink, the three fingers in the air, the shoulder shrug. How else are the bill's authors going to know who has high bid?.
Professionalism, that's what congress lacks.
They're selling the country, piece by piece, and all they're getting for it is a trip here, a lavish dinner there, tens of thousands of dollars in camplaign contributins and who knows what else.
Here, I specifically exclude Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, who is accused of hauling in a freezer-size payoff, is under indictment, and also is running for reelection. You have to put that down as superior performance.
The thing to do now is put an auctioneer in charge.
Don't let some future Mark Twain say there are two things a human being should never see - sausage being made and laws being passed.