And the band played on: Obama's House party at taxpayer expense

One of the classic signs of imminent collapse of a culture is the brazen decadence that its leaders and elites start to exhibit.  Nero and Commodus magnified lavishness to scales unprecedented even as the Roman Empire was rotting from the inside and slowly collapsing.  The nigh-invincible Babylonians were in a drunken stupor of self-edification until Cyrus invaded and Alexander after him.  Louis XVI wasn't a "bad" man per se but he was too busy partying and having fun while being horribly negligent about the affairs of the French people... and then he lost his head as bad as anyone could.

There are too many other examples that could be cited from the tale of years.  And you would think that we might have learned something from six millenia's worth of them...

But here was the scene last night at the White House.  In spite of the "sequester" that is halting performances by the Blue Angels and nearly derailed the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn and is now threatening to shut down air traffic control towers, Barack and Michelle Obama held a glitzy, vainglorious command performance in their own honor.

It was called the "Memphis Soul" concert.  Queen Latifah, Justin Timberlake, Booker T. Jones, Al Green, Cyndi Lauper and others performed for the President and First Lady and their closest friends and supporters.

But none of the peons got to attend.  We did get to foot the bill for this however.  The money for this and the nine other concerts the Obamas have "hosted" all came from the publick treasuries.  But if you feel bad about that, at least PBS let everyone watch it live last night...

If a group of musicians want to celebrate soul music, fine.  I don't see a problem with that.  But they should do it on their own dime, not mine or anybody else's.  I don't even have a problem with them using the White House for their celebration of an art form... but they should pay rent for the privilege.  Pay it to us.  Because that's our house, not Barack Obama's.  The President - whoever he or she might be - is only a temporary tenant.  We The People own it... or we're supposed to own it anyway.  It's funny: celebrities like Timberlake, Queen Latifah and others can get the red carpet treatment at the White House, but school children are completely shut out.

There's not enough money for you and I to visit the people's House but there's plenty of money for the Obamas to get down and boogie.  It's like grand theft squattery.

Let's drop the pretenses.  This was all about Barack and Michelle Obama feting themselves.  Unfortunately it is not a new occurrence.  I've watched shameful waste of our money at the White House for years now, irrespective of whether it's a Democrat or Republican in the Oval Office.  And this should be something to outrage everyone regardless of their political affiliations.  But it has to be said: Obama has taken it to a whole new level.  Between he and Vice President Biden, they've had eight vacations so far this year.  Also paid for by us (Biden's one-night stay at a hotel in Paris cost $585,000: that better have been the best mint on a pillow in the history of anything).

Eight vacations in just over three months?  In that same time I've been doing everything from writing to computer support to farm work to make ends meet.  I'm looking hard for employment... and I'd dare say that I've done more real work than Obama and Biden put together.  Where the hell is my vacation, huh?!

A lot of people are looking for good, honest work.  They want to support themselves, their families, make a better future for their children.  What little money they can scrape together, they want and deserve to use it for their own benefit.

It wasn't meant for Barack Obama or anyone else to squander on parties for themselves.

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Ma Chalmers lives, and she's destroying school lunch

Please tell me that isn't a soybean that Michelle Obama is extolling the virtues of in that photo.

The current First Lady has somehow become the nation's Food Czar, with a capacity of recommending, implementing and apparently enforcing her own policies on the country. No other First Lady has enjoyed such power. Not even the much-beloved Nancy Reagan, who channeled the massive respect given her toward no more a gesture than encouraging America's children to steer clear of drug abuse, was granted such authority to wield.

Michelle Obama, however, is hellbent on imposing her own whacked nutritional vision upon the children of those who "just said no".

Michelle Obama has directed the United States Department of Agriculture to mandate school lunches that can best be described as "skimpy" and "lacking". Not to mention downright unpalatable. The government is determined to limit elementary kids to 650 calories and high schoolers to 850 calories.

Hasn't Michelle ever paid attention to her own children? I mean, elementary kids are supposed to run around and be energetic and that burns up calories. To say nothing of high school students engaged in sports like football and basketball. I was on our high school's swim team and I ate a lot to have fuel for practice and meets: I don't think I could have gotten fat if if I tried during a season.

The students are starving, they know it and they also know who's responsible for it. Some enterprising youngsters have even begun operating black markets for such federally-verboten items as chocolate syrup and potato chips. The kids just don't want to be commanded by the government about what they can and cannot eat when their parents are supposed to be in charge of their nutritional needs. One of the obvious consequences? Vast amounts of food getting wasted and thrown away.

And yet in spite of it, the government is blaming the children for apparently lacking enough wisdom to enjoy federal oversight of their lives! From Kyle Olson's article at TownHall.com...

Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for New Bedford Public Schools, was quoted as saying that hummus and black bean salads have been tough sells in elementary cafeterias. That means even smaller children are going through the day fighting hunger pains, which can never be considered a good thing.

One government official tried to put the blame on the students.

"One thing I think we need to keep in mind as kids say they're still hungry is that many children aren't used to eating fruits and vegetables at home, much less at school. So it's a change in what they are eating. If they are still hungry, it's that they are not eating all the food that's being offered," USDA Deputy Undersecretary Janey Thornton was quoted as saying.

I know of no other way to put it than this: Michelle Obama has become Emma "Ma" Chalmers.

If you've never read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Ma Chalmers (mother of Kip Chalmers: he who instigated the chain of events that led to the horrific Winston Tunnel disaster) comes in fairly late in the novel. With the national economy imploding under the weight of looters and moochers and as the transportation infrastructure is collapsing, Ma Chalmers comes on the scene with her national mandate for soybeans...

But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean -- an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise. "Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee--and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number--that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient."

Ma Chalmers exploits her "friendships" and political pull to bring the bulk of the country's available railroad cars to her soybean collective in Louisiana, while at the same time a record harvest of corn and wheat - more than enough to feed the country - is bulging at the seams in Minnesota... and the farmers have no way of moving it.

It does not end well.

In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives--and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.

Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering piles -- a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins -- and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him.

As for the government-mandated soybeans...

The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

"Unfit for consumption." That's a good a description as any for darn near everything coming from our "brilliant" leaders in Washington D.C.

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$3 BILLION of your tax dollars to study Antarctic Jell-O wrestling and shrimp on treadmills

Y'know, I doubt that even if I were smashed drunk and high on acid that I could have ever come up with a headline like that on my own...

A laundry-folding robot, studying the metabolism of shrimp being exercised on treadmills, and researching wrestling in Jell-O at the South Pole are among the "projects" sponsored by the National Science Foundation which have been funded with THREE BILLION DOLLARS of OUR tax money!

Other stuff that we've paid for through the NSF: "a YouTube rap video, a review of event ticket prices on stubhub.com, a 'robot hoedown and rodeo,'" and "a virtual recreation of the 1964/65 New York World's Fair".

I'm just trying to visualize how exactly a shrimp is put on a treadmill...

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iPolitics: Michigan kids may get free MP3 players

State reps in Michigan want to give each child in that state a free iPod, courtesy of the taxpayers of that state.

That has to be one of the worst and most stupid proposed abuses of government power that I've ever heard of. The Detroit News expresses blunt outrage in an editorial about the proposal, that says it better than I can here.

You know, if this goes through, these Michigan politicians are going to be encouraging crime. Think about this for a minute: free iPods for people who might ordinarily not be able to afford an iPod. Well, is the government of Michigan going to be getting iTunes for all of those people to go along with their new iPods? Probably not. These kids will have an MP3 player but no MP3s. And the music for those iPods has to come from somewhere...

So if this goes through, the state of Michigan will in effect be encouraging illegal music downloading among its people. It would be like handing out free bongs but not supplying the marijuana: of course people would be looking for weed to use it with!

I'll bet the RIAA is already salivating at the legal prospects that would be coming with this, if this proposal passes (which hopefully it won't).

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