The Empty Chair

Media Strikes Back After Dirty Harry Dares To Mock Obama

It only adds to the fun that a masterful piece of comedic acting by Eastwood went straight over the heads of Obama worshippers like Roger Ebert.  Delicious!  The empty chair metaphor was genius, and it's now established as a campaign icon that's not going away.

As Eastwood has repeatedly demonstrated as a director, he's a lot smarter than you assumed.

Byron

Increasingly Bizarro World of CM

Chris Matthews (no relation) seems to be going off the rails in front of his dozens of viewers, even stepping all over a colleague's interview to demand she put her own questions aside and pursue his screwball world view.  

Matthews' degree of aggressive agitation has accelerated to a point somewhere between hilarious and alarming. If he stays on this trajectory, liability issues or outraged colleagues may force network executives to schedule some kind of hiatus, or intervention, or something.

The latest example was last night during Andrea Mitchell's convention-floor interview with Condi Rice, who had just given a superbly thoughtful and substantive speech. This was a plum for Mitchell, but Matthews breaks in, and with his craziness does his best to ruin it.

See the video (link) and notice the extremely awkward position Matthews heedlessly puts Andrea Mitchell into when he breaks in from a remote location and demands, on camera, that she ask his goofy, bizarre question of Rice. Mitchell does it with some reluctance, and Rice, no dummy, proceeds to answer a sensible question not asked, ignoring the screwball query Mitchell was forced to forward, and leaving Matthews soaking in his private fever swamp. It's quite a sequence.

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the subsequent conversation between Mitchell and Matthews, because you can bet the house there was one. 

Matthews to Rice: You meant to go after birthers with your speech, huh?

Byron

Bump in the road

GM to shut down Chevy Volt plant for four weeks — for the second time this year

I guess the various Government agencies can't absorb enough of these turkeys -- built on the taxpayer dime -- to soak up all the unsold, and unsellable, inventory, despite huge price subsidies gouged from those same taxpayers to provide a payoff to the UAW.

OK, maybe they can be made into boat anchors for the Seventh Fleet, or automobile-theme planters to beautify the entrances to public housing projects, or mobile shelters for Occupy-Whatever demonstrators to live in, or -- who knows?  Any and all suggestions gratefully considered, I'm sure.

Send your recommendations to President Barack Obama, Peerless Automobile Industry Expert, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, D.C. 20500, with subject line "RE: All those Volts you're squandering huge sums of our money on, because you know how to spend it more efficiently than we do -- Some ideas about where you can stick them."

Be succinct.

Byron

Telling it like it is

Big Income Losses for Those Near Retirement

Excellent article -- amazing to see it in the NYT.  Skim the graphs, at least -- the Obama Effect (2009 and onward) is visible in every one.

The comments are also extremely good, and also quite surprising given where they appear.

Picking winners

Treasury: U.S. to lose $25 billion on auto bailout.

“The Treasury Department says in a new report the government expects to lose more than $25 billion on the $85 billion auto bailout. That’s 15 percent higher than its previous forecast.”

Obama is so much smarter than the capital markets...

Should GM have gone through bankruptcy?  Of course it should have.  Now it's a mega money-loser being propped up by fleet sales to -- wait for it -- government.  So taxpayer money is being used to buy GM's substandard cars that nobody wants to buy, and on which taxpayers are already losing money by paying to build them.  And huge sums of taxpayer money continue to be squandered on Obama's green energy daydream.  What the hell are you smokin' over there, champ? 

If the activity/enterprise is worth supporting, private investment capital will flood in and and support it.  What does it tell a person of average intelligence when private capital wouldn't touch GM, or windmills and solar panels, with a ten-foot pole?  What it told Obama was that public money needed to be poured in by the bale.  He's gifted with a sort of reverse-genius.

Taxpayers didn't build this mess -- government stupidity built it.  And it did it by extracting money from the private sector, where it could have been allocated to productive uses, instead of being flushed down the government toilet.  We absolutely have to get this idiot out of the presidency.  He knows nothing.

Byron

Ryan vs. Obama (video)

Paul Ryan: Hiding Spending Doesn't Reduce Spending

But they said there'd be no math...