† Your Bonus: $0. Continued Employment: Priceless.: Reading off a TelePrompter, as is his wont, President Barack Obama expressed his ire over “this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat,” and paused to clear his throat, explaining, “Excuse me. I'm choked up with anger here.” One can almost see the stage direction [PAUSE TO CLEAR THROAT] scrolling on the TelePrompter Screen, followed by his next line, “Excuse me. I'm choked up with anger here.”  

You see, if he really was angry and not just play-acting, then he would have to direct his anger at himself and Treasury Secretary Tiny Tim Geithner, as they both knew “for months” that AIG was going to spend a significant chunk of public funds enriching private citizens – many who brought the company to ruin, and some who aren’t even fellow Americans who can get taxed to recover this ill-gotten income, reports The Associated Press:

It wasn't until the money was flowing and news was trickling out to the public that official Washington rose up in anger and vowed to yank the money back.

Why the sudden furor, just weeks after Barack Obama's team paid out $30 billion in additional aid to the company? So far, the administration has been unable to match its actions to Obama's tough rhetoric on executive compensation.

Worse, according to The Wall Street Journal “the real AIG outrage” is that the faltering insurance giant “has sent $120 billion in cash, collateral and other payouts to banks, municipal governments and other derivative counterparties around the world”:

This includes at least $20 billion to European banks. The list also includes American charity cases like Goldman Sachs, which received at least $13 billion. This comes after months of claims by Goldman that all of its AIG bets were adequately hedged and that it needed no "bailout." Why take $13 billion then? This needless cover-up is one reason Americans are getting angrier as they wonder if Washington is lying to them about these bailouts.

Given that the government has never defined "systemic risk," we're also starting to wonder exactly which system American taxpayers are paying to protect. It's not capitalism, in which risk-takers suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And in some cases it's not even American. The U.S. government is now in the business of distributing foreign aid to offshore financiers, laundered through a once-great American company. …

Whether or not these funds ever come back to the Treasury, regulators should now focus on getting AIG back into private hands as soon as possible. And if Treasury and the Fed want to continue bailing out foreign banks, let them make that case, honestly and directly, to American taxpayers.

It’s not even 100 days into his administration and Obama is proving both incompetent and a liar.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reports that when asked whether Tiny Tim’s job is in jeopardy, White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel “categorically dismissed” the suggestion. Voters and pundits across the political spectrum want to know why Obama just doesn’t admit he screwed up again and cut his losses – and ours.

† Multiculturalism: Jihad By Other Means: The Reverend Noble Samuel, a Pakistani-born Christian minister who debates Muslims on matters of dogma on his gospel TV show, was attacked by a man who reached into his car through the half-open window, yanked his hair, slapped and punched his face and neck, then ripped off his cross, reports The Daily Mail (London). Two other men also grabbed Samuel’s laptop and bible from the car. The police are treating the incident as a “faith hate” assault and are looking for the three Pakistani assailants. Though Samuel was warned, “If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs,” he did his show as usual that day. According to The Daily Mail, “[d]uring the show the Muslim station owner Tahir Ali came on air to condemn the attack.”

† Take That, Al Gore!: To better understand how much natural atmospheric and oceanic variability affects climactic change as compared to human activity, Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee used a branch of applied mathematics known as “synchronized chaos” for climate data taken over the past 100 years, reports WISN-TV (Channel 12-Milwaukee):

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other.

Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift. …

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

Meanwhile, Christopher Booker, a columnist with The Telegraph (London), tells a tale of two international global warming conferences:

[T]he contrast between them could not have been starker.

The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy". …

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed.

[T]he media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. …

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence. …

The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

† A Dog By Any Other Name: In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, environmental journalist and dog rescuer Judith Lewis explains why misguided animal rights activists have complicated the Obama family’s search for a dog:

So what's the problem? Why has a task as simple as getting a dog eluded the Obamas for so long? Perhaps the answer can be divined in Michelle Obama's interview: She said she wanted not just any Portuguese water dog but a rescued one. An adult with a good temperament. Perhaps even house-trained.

Certainly that should satisfy the activists agitating for the Obamas to adopt a stray. The rescue-only crowd insists that every dog purchased from a breeder is a death sentence for a stray. They make no distinction between responsible breeders who nurture sound-tempered dogs and puppy-mill operators who crowd breeding bitches so tightly into cages that they chew off each other's legs.

Rescuing a dog is indeed a noble gesture, even if there will never be enough humans to save every abandoned dog. But for the health of their daughter, the Obamas want a purebred dog. And last time I checked, Portuguese water dogs weren't turning up at the pound with any regularity. …

Symbolically, it would be nice if the Obamas could rescue a dog. But to insist that the only good dog is a rescued dog is to relegate our future with the canine species to random relationships in which humans are forced to settle for whatever renegade breeders produce and fail to care for.

And let it be said that the reason there exists such a thing as a Portuguese water dog at all, or any dog with a hypoallergenic coat and a game temperament, is not a happy accident but a triumph of the selective breeding humans have been practicing with canines for millenniums - the very practice so many people who claim to care about dogs would prefer to see turned into a crime.

BTW: Although there were plans afoot to present Obama with a Labradoodle when he visited Canada last month, our Neighbors To The North apparently thought the better of it and the president went back to the White House empty-handed.  

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, “There's No Such Thing As Free Healthcare”): Three years ago then Gov. Mitt Romney (R) joined forces with Dem lawmakers to enact state-subsidized mandatory healthcare coverage for all residents, “deferring until another day any serious effort to control the state’s runaway health costs,” reports The New York Times:

Thanks to new taxes and fees imposed last year, the health plan’s jittery finances have stabilized for the moment. But government and industry officials agree that the plan will not be sustainable over the next 5 to 10 years if they do not take significant steps to arrest the growth of health spending.

With Washington watching, the state’s leaders are again blazing new trails. Both Gov. Deval Patrick, Mr. Romney’s Democratic successor, and a high-level state commission have set out to revamp the way public and private insurers reimburse physicians and hospitals.

They want a new payment method that rewards prevention and the effective control of chronic disease, instead of the current system, which pays according to the quantity of care provided. …

The state faces several hurdles, including securing federal permission to impose the changes on Medicaid, a shared state and federal program, and more unusually on Medicare, which is financed entirely by Washington. …

Some health policy experts argue that changes in payment practices will not be enough to slow the growth in spending, even when combined with other cost-cutting strategies. To truly change course, they say, the state and federal governments may need to place actual limits on health spending, which could lead to rationing of care. …

Because Massachusetts now requires its residents to be insured, it cannot fall back on the strategy used by other states in hard times - to simply remove people from the public insurance rolls by restricting eligibility.