Obama: stirring up apathy!

Well, O is on his way home from stirring up apathy in Asia. Sources here indicate that he might just as well have stayed home for all the credit the US received from friends and opponents alike. I don't count the applause he received in Jakarta, after all, he spent 4 years of his youth there. Yet, protests against his visit continued outside the US embassy well after his departure.

While complaining about the futility of competitive currency devaluation, he commissioned Bernanke to print over a trillion dollars, i.e. instant devaluation. Mind you, I am not at all sympathetic with the Chinese who refuse to devalue their currency either. About all they offer internationally is sour grapes. They are at odds with South Korea, Japan and the US and are not at all liked in Southeast Asia. Then again, the US virtually handed China the technical hardware, software and training to manufacture what we had been happily producing for decades. We kept too little for ourselves and we are now paying the price.

I suspect O will also pay the price in the form of a single term president. He went from a bang to a whimper in record time and still seems incapable of capturing the hearts and minds of the public at large. Some say, and I agree, that he will be like Jimmy Carter and make too many wrong moves and bad decisions. His future to some extent depends on the gravity of the Republican candidate. He would beat Sarah Palin, but not Huckabee or even Romney. Too bad that the US does not punish candidates for telling porkies as in the UK. That would make short work of nearly all these scoundrels.

I like the term 'headcount creep' with respect to released civil servants returning to service. I am afraid that our US bureaucracy is, like the third world, populated by tens of thousands of individuals with political connections. As the largest employer in most countries, the civil service needs reducing across the board. I have always found that these people almost need to commit murder to be fired. The ministries and secretariats serve as employment agencies to repay political favors and for nepotistic purposes. Also, like the third world, if no places are available to place the minions, new ministries or departments are created. We have done a very good job of this with respect to our top heavy, and overpopulated security services.

The newly elected senators and representatives are arriving in DC. Monday, they will be scrambling for office space which is allocated on a seniority basis. In the meantime, senior Republicans are threatening to enact legislation to ban earmarks. Reminds me of O's first month in office. After that month, all was quiet on the earmark front as he took a scalding from old timers who must have threatened non-cooperation if he insisted on fighting against their pork barrel projects. I seriously doubt the Republican majority in the House will have any more success and if they do, it would be a major sign of political reform.

Our beloved governor, Rick Perry, looks like a matinee idol. He has longish flowing hair, a permanent tan and is always impeccably dressed. Everything about him is just that, a facade. Sadly, he just won another term against a Democrat who had served well for four years as the mayor of Houston. He, too, came to the table with multiple skeletons in his closet, but to my mind was the lesser of two evils. You may recall that Perry threatened to take Texas and cede from the union; which is a legal Texas right dating back to the time it joined the US. He is an idiot, spends lavishly, puffs up, blows smoke and eventually crawls back into his hole to lick his wounds. A loser.