You Wanted Change? You Got it.

He kept promising it, and he certainly has delivered: Obama is changing everything we've come to expect from the White House.

From his habit of glaring like an angry four-year-old when people say things he doesn't like, to mocking reporters and causing the rest of the press corp to giggle like fools.

The one change that was uncertain to get backlash, however, was his control/manipulation of the press.

Throughout the primaries and the 2008 election cycle, the press was all too willing to accept these machinations, but now, it seems, they have had quite enough.

At a press conference yesterday, during the daily press briefing, the White House press pool learned that the upcoming "town hall" meeting with the president would only contain pre-screened attendees and pre-approved, pre-written questions.

It's worth watching.

When cornered, our president's Joey Goebbels impersonator started giggling like a fool and (taking a cue from his classy boss) tried to make lame, snarky comments to deflect attention from the obvious problem he was hopelessly trying to defend.

Change, indeed.

Somewhere, the Angels Can't Get their Wallets Out Fast Enough

While still mourning the loss of Billy Mays (I'm not beings sarcastic), it's worth noting the demise of one of his competitors -- an individual Billy was intent on destroying (as he hilariously noted on this radio show) in his final, tragically shortened, days.

I'm talking about the ShamWow guy.

It turns out Mr. ShamWow, aka Vince Shlomi, beats the living crap out of hookers. To see his handiwork, check out these mugshots (which feature both the punching bag and the puncher).

The story is that ShlomWow paid $1000 for the services of said punching bag, then things turned bad when she bit his tongue and wouldn't let go and the subsequent face beating began in earnest. You can read the arrest report here.

How does something this bizarre happen? My guess is that he tried to pay with ShamWows.

Somewhere, I'm sure Billy finds this amusing.

But he doesn't have time to gloat; heaven is a huge, untapped market for must-have household products.

Rest in peace, Billy.

JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE!!!!

In an unexpected moment of justice, SCOTUS has overturned the miscarriage of justice perpetrated against the New Haven, CT firefighters.

The Supreme Court today narrowly ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said they were denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor and others that had come to play a large role in the consideration of her nomination for the high court.

The city had thrown out the results of a promotion test because no African Americans and only two Hispanics would have qualified for promotions. It said it feared a lawsuit from minorities under federal laws that said such "disparate impacts" on test results could be used to show discrimination. [...]

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. [...]

The New Haven case, Ricci v. DeStefano, has become the ruling that Sotomayor's critics most point to for evidence that she lets her background influence her decisions.

Kennedy's opinion referred to the judgment of Sotomayor and the other judges only by noting the short opinion.

Kennedy said the standard for whether an employer may discard a test is whether there is a strong reason to the employer to believe that the test is flawed in a way that discriminates against minorities, not just by looking at the results.

In New Haven's case, "there is no evidence -- let alone the required strong basis in evidence -- that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the city," Kennedy wrote. [...]

The case has drawn considerable attention not just because of Sotomayor's role but because of the sympathetic nature of the claim brought by the firefighters, who said they were discriminated against simply because of the color of their skin.

For years SCOTUS has existed as a way to correct the biased, inaccurate, misinformed, under-educated and blatantly wrong decisions made by lower court judges, such as Sotomayor (who has had SIXTY PERCENT of her decisions reversed).

By elevating her to the highest court, American citizens no longer have a source of respite or last resort from her pathological mistreatment of the law.

Regardless, I haven't been this happily surprised since Ramos and Compean were set free.

It's a great, great day in America.

A Second Try at Disaster

In a perfect world, the debate about who is responsible for the economy's meltdown would be over.

The people instinctively blaming Bush would have long since realized that the President had nothing to do with the Senate committees that set mortgage rate and banking standards. It'd be nice to point out that these committees were owned and operated by democrats, specifically Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

The only good to come out of this -- with confused blame or not -- is that the Senate, and especially those two senators, would never try something stupid again.

But, as usual, there is no end to the things the Left is willing to do wrong.

Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages. [...]

In a letter to the CEO's of both companies, Representatives Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner warned that a 70 percent sales threshold "may be too onerous."

I can't begin to wrap my brain around this. If ever there was someting indefensible, it is this.

06/27/09: Also Worth Noting

At any given moment, we are all just one bad , meth-fueled weekend away from this.

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Barry got his feelings hurt when a reporter asked him why it took him six months (and, frankly, his entire political career) to mildly condemn Iran. But, to be fair, corrupt politicans who buy elections are wise to not throw stones at one another.

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Proof of water on Mars! Hooray?

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Drunk hecklers at the U.S. Open?! How will the sport ever recover?!

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Our fearless leader wants to spend $1 trillion on healthcare AND shut down the majority of U.S. factories due to their perceived impact on the environment. So where, exactly are we getting money from if we dont sell anything and we give away healthcare? Don't be surprised when Barry-O holds another press conference next week announcing his new plan to monetize good vibes.

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An article about the "Best Places to Buy Ice Cream in the U.S." is pretty frustrating if it fails to list a place anywhere near where you live.

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All politics aside, John Hodgman's speech at the Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner was very funny.

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Here's another news flash: The first lady is an insufferable human. I mean, who doesn't find passive aggression charming?

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I've stolen quite a few traffic cones in my day, but I've never done something this cool with them.

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In an attempt to show that they are a reasonable player on the world stage, and after an embarrassing series of murders ordered on peaceful protestors, Iran has decided to appoint a man aptly nicknamed "The Butcher" to carry out the interrogations of the people arrested at these protests. You may remember Saeed Mortazavi's other great moments, such as his 2003 order for a journalist (with dual Canadian-Iranian citizenship) who was caught taking pictures of a secret prison to be arrested and raped to death. But don't worry, I'm sure Iran will use its nuclear power responsibly.

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Clones of 9/11 rescue dogs! Hooray?

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Parents in Chicago are outraged after 60% of students in a single school did not pass the 8th grade. Amidst accusations of racism (of course) and the faults of school administrators, the parents missed this simple fact: Your children are dumb as hammers AND IT IS YOUR FAULT.

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Why would a reporter commit himself to doing mindless puff stories about our president? What's in it for him? Well, being appointed to posh committees, for starters.

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Reuters offers us this breaking news from the "No $#!&?% Sherlock" department: "New York drivers named most aggressive, angry in U.S."

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A virtual tour of the White House? Ok, I'll try it out.

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Here's a way to foster a critical, objective, insightful press corp: If our classy president doesn't like your question, he'll mock you and the rest of the reporters will giggle. I love this administration.

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Forget what you may have heard, the Evangelical Right is alive and well thanks to forward-thinking, rational programs like this.

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You've got to hand it to Letterman, he will laugh right back at you.

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It is a bad couple weeks to be a Scientologist. After weathering the declaration of war from some group of nerds over a year ago, a three-part expose (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) has been printed in the St. Petersberg Times. Sure, the SPT isn't exactly world renowned for it's brilliant team of investigative journalists, but one of the headquarters of Scientology is in nearby Clearwater and, perhaps, this is payback for an article written by a Scientologist-sponsored publication listing the history of misdeeds (primarily racism and sexism) perpetrated by the SPT. The expose is interesting reading, if not necessarily unbiased. It even comes with a flashy multi-media landing page.

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I know the idea of 56 face tattoos is shocking, but if you are dumb enough to "fall asleep" (i.e. pass out) during a tattoo session, you deserve to look like this. If you let this guy do it to you, you doubly deserve it.

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Some blogger with pink hair got punched in the face? By the look of him, this is long overdue.

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This is a pretty impressive shot. But I want to see it happen 2 times in 50 tries.

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Sarkozy is trying to ban burqas in France. I can understand his reasoning, but why is he so desperate to be bombed? Or does he realize that France is such an insignificant piece of Western culture that the collective Islamic terrorists will overlook it indefinitely?

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Sure the Obama Era isn't exactly rational or moral, but they did pretend to be those things once upon a time. That makes their merger with ABC a bit surprising, though not unpredictable. Also interesting is that during the White House Infomercial on ABC, not only did opposing opinions get banned from the news program, but organizations that wanted to pay to have their views aired during commercial breaks were also banned. Stay classy, Barry!

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While crackpots and attention-hungry former politicians wail frantically about how hot our rapidly cooling planet is getting, they ignore real environmental problems like overfishing. Al has never burned any calories worrying about deforestation, erosion or ocean ecology, but that's only because there's no money in it for him.

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After years of worring he would one day flame out like Elvis, Michael Jackson is dead. It's very sad. We'll always have the Thriller album, and for that, I'm sure he's pleased.

Transformations Afoot

During the election, the Manchurian Messiah produced a comically long string of promises that no one bothered to question.

It was obvious he was lying, even, in all likelihood, to his most avid supporters, but no one seemed to mind.

When he wasn't lying about the future, he was lying about his past, and, when the dust started to settle, he lied about the facts behind his genuinely terrible plans for the country.

This problem has, once again, become clear in the run up to the "Let's All Get Unemployed" climate change bill.

More significant than the eight ostensible conservative GOP reps that voted for the bill, is the lengths the Obama Administration went to supress the facts about what this bill will mean to the economic interests of our country.

Note:

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington has obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.”

In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.

On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study.

“There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls, etc.” On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency’s climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision… I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the “process” of ramming the EPA’s endangerment finding through. Truth-in-science took a backseat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from “a very negative impact.” [...]

The EPA now justifies the suppression of the study because economist Carlin (a 35-year veteran of the agency who also holds a B.S. in physics) “is an individual who is not a scientist.” Neither is Al Gore. Nor is environmental czar Carol Browner. Nor is cap-and-trade shepherd Nancy Pelosi.

Carlin’s analysis incorporated peer-reviewed studies and, as he informed his colleagues, “significant new research” related to the proposed endangerment finding. According to those who have seen his study, it spotlights EPA’s reliance on out-of-date research, uncritical recycling of United Nations data, and omission of new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures and a new consensus that future hurricane behavior won’t be different than in the past.

Other pieces of legislation might have only destroyed the livelihoods and life savings of people who use electricity, drive cars or buy things from stores. But this bill will effectively make the energy you expend while jogging for 30 minutes a resource the government can regulate and incarcerate you for producing without a permit.

No, I'm not exagerating.

Legislation like this does nothing to benefit the lives of American citizens, but places immense, new, centralized powers in the hands of the Federal government. This fact is worth a moment's consideration amidst the self-congratulating press conferences at the White House and the House of Reps.

Speaking of this bill in the glowing terms of a co-conspirator, Commissar Pelosi noted, "We passed transformational legislation, which will take us into the future."

She's exactly right, but while she keeps the mansions paid for with her Starkist dirty money, the rest of us will get to enjoy the truly transformational future she's helping create.

Obama Reaches Zero

The Great Uniter is having some real problems delivering on those pipe dream promises to bring together a divided nation.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 33% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-three percent (33%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of 0.

This has come quite a way from inauguration day his approval index was +28 -- back when no one knew anything about him. Back when people still believed that a man with no credentials, no leadership experience, no tangible ideas, and no concrete solutions could lead a super power.

The BHB promises to never stop shaming everyone who elected this man.

But, of course, it's not like our other option was a real champ, either.

Intrawebs, Please Note: You've Been Warned

Cantankerous old men are delightful (as documentaries have noted), but perhaps none more than legendary American author, Ray Bradbury.

His love of libraries is commendable, but it is made especially enjoyable when he contrasts this passion with his vintage old-man distaste for the intrawebs.

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

I nominate this as the single greatest old man rant of the year -- possibly ever.

Hitting the Fairway, Hitting Rock Bottom

It's amazing how the Obama Era can even make a game of golf is suddenly sublime.

When criticism began to circulate about Bush's occasional golf outings, he responded like this:

In August 2003, Bush said he decided to stop playing golf to show his respect for the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” Bush said in an interview with Politico and Yahoo News on May 13, 2008. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

However, even giving up golf was met with criticism because critics stated (with some accuracy) that it seemed too little too late.

But now, the Manchurian Messiah's regular golf outings (each one recorded in loving detail by the press) despite the same war and an economic meltdown are a source of praise.

The Washington Post on June 9, 2009, staff writer Richard Leiby wrote. “The attraction seems to be simple. It’s a great escape; the game demands such attention that nothing else matters. It’s time spent with friends, an unhurried afternoon in loose clothing (shorts seem to be Obama’s preference).”

Leiby continued, “To some, Obama’s frequent outings reflect a cool self-confidence.”

As noted before, we have reached a stage wherein Obama could bring a reporters mother on national TV, hit her with a shovel while shouting homophobic slurs and then wakeup the next day to a glowing front page story about it.

Alas.

Dogs Bites to the Face, And Other Things Obama's Healthcare Plan Won't Fix

Barry-O's scary wife has some really interesting ideas about health care reform, i.e. implementing universal health care regardless of the cost.

As the debate over health care reform escalates on Capitol Hill and in the White House, first lady Michelle Obama told "Good Morning America" in an exclusive interview that "no system is going to be perfect" and "it's not going to be easy."

Although she states that it "won't be easy," she's certain it will happen because, in fact, it has been remarkably easy for her.

It was not all that long ago that Mrs. Obama, who had obtained a position as a ranking hospital administrator thanks to her promises of grants from her corrupt local politician husband (before and after he was elected), came up with a very interesting way to deal with unwanted (e.g. poor, black) hospital visitors. It was a policy that ran directly afoul of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). A document which just happened to be signed into law by Ronald Reagan (you'll find him in the dictionary under Presidents, real.)

She gave her program a pretty, sophisticated name, but it was, at it's heart, good, old-fashioned patient dumping. A practice also known as "kicking poor folk out on the street to make room for rich people."

A local U.S. Rep went so far as to call for action. Representative Bobby Rush stated, "Congress has a duty to expend its power to mitigate and prevent this despicable practice from continuing in centers that receive federal funds."

Why did Congress need to get involved? Because Michelle's hospital took government money and operated under the protection of being a non-profit entity -- thus, the money they saved kicking people out went back into their own pockets.

However, the somewhat scary Michelle Malkin notes that they weren't much of a non-profit, even by their own twisted standards:

The hospital had nonprofit status and received lucrative tax breaks in exchange for providing charity care.

Yet, in fiscal year 2007, when Mrs. Obama was employed there, it spent a measly $10 million on charity care for the poor -- 1.3 percent of its total hospitalexpenses, according to an analysis performed for The Washington Post by the nonpartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. The figure is below the 2.1 percent average for nonprofit hospitals in surrounding Cook County.

I'm guessing Barry won't send anyone in to do an investigation. We know how that turns out.

So how did Scary Michelle's program work out?

Malkin notes,

In February 2009, outrage in the Obamas' community exploded upon learning that a young boy covered by Medicaid had been turned away from the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Dontae Adams' mother, Angela, had sought emergency treatment for him after a pit bull tore off his upper lip. Mrs. Obama's hospital gave the boy a tetanus shot, antibiotics and Tylenol, and shoved him out the door. The mother and son took an hour-long bus ride to another hospital for surgery.

I'll guarantee you this: You'll never see the Adams family featured at an Obama policy summit or seated next to the first lady at a joint session of Congress to illustrate the failures of the health care system.

Sure, the American College of Emergency Physicians responded with a stern condemnation of Michelle's policy, but they dare not push this too hard, lest they get called racists for questioning our wise president.

Unless you can cocoon yourself in bubble wrap, I'd be very wary about getting super excited for Barry's overhaul of medicine.