Courtesy of, well you guessed it – Drudge:

OMG! Abandon ship!

Of course it is still about 2,000 points higher than it was 2 years ago, specifically on January 20, 2009. Now who was in office until that date?

And just for the record, the Dow did drop 163 points today on more European stock fears. Still, it’s a lot better than the 8,000 point level we saw when Bush turned things over.

Jane Hamsher blogging today asks:

Will Salazar Let BP Wait 20 Years To Compensate Gulf Fishermen?

What she is referring to is the 20 years it took for compensation to come out from the Exxon-Valdez spill. The problem is this wasn’t because of the executive branch or any administration. Jane even states the reason for the delay in her post:

Those promises were hollow.  Just ask John Platt, an Alaskan fisherman whose business was decimated by the Exxon-Valdez. spill.  Platt was one of 32,000 plaintiffs whose case was fought all the way to the Supreme Court by Exxon-Mobil.  It was finally settled last year.  Twenty years later, Platt — deeply in debt — saw his $400,000 settlement check go straight to the government for $600,000 he owed in fishing licenses,.  He still has to pay taxes on the settlement money.

Yup – blame Obama for the courts. Welcome to straw man fail, from a blogger we have (sadly) come to expect that from.

So this morning I read this interesting article:

Republicans are stepping up their criticism of the Securities and Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the nation's financial system.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."

He said in a statement Thursday that SEC officials "were preoccupied with other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.

Following reports? Well I do remember seeing something about those reports, but couldn’t remember when. Thankfully we have the power of the Google:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a drubbing [1] these days for its abject failure?despite detailed tips [1]?to catch Bernie Madoff in what appears to be the biggest Ponzi scheme in our nation’s history.

Now, thanks to little-noticed report [2] from the agency’s inspector general, we have a detailed glimpse into other bad behavior by some SEC employees.

The report [2], released the day after Thanksgiving, reveals that some employees at the agency were clearly preoccupied with matters other than their mission [3] of "protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets." The semi-annual report to Congress, which covers the period from this past April to September, details among other things a handful of employees circumventing internal controls to download porn. Let’s pause for some detail:

Ah yes now I remember. The day after Thanksgiving that happened. But here’s the catcher. That was the day after Thanksgiving 2008.

So now we have a case of interesting timing. This issue went basically untouched for over a year and a half. After all, this occurred during the Bush Administration and went untouched until the SEC made big news again by filing the lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. And going back to the original article I linked, it appears that might have something to do with it:

"That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious," said Robinson, now with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects the head of the SEC, Mary Schapiro and her team, are "very focused on" the issue.

Schapiro has been parrying GOP complaints about the Goldman Sachs lawsuit, which agency officials hoped would mark a new era of tougher oversight of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure to catch Ponzi kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.

Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans

Republicans are doing everything they can to protect Goldman Sachs. Yes government employees shouldn’t be checking out porn while earning pay from our tax dollars, but the Republicans really weren’t interested in the 18 month period from when the report was initially released up to the time that the SEC filed the lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. Like I said – very interesting timing.

Update:

A little interesting fact that many may not know is that Darrell Issa is ranked the richest member of the House:

I don’t know if it means much or not, but it is a nice tidbit of information none the less.

Update 2:

Apparently a new memo has been released recently that basically recants what was said in the 2008 OIG report about employees watching porn. MSNBC and CNN have both reported on it. It does beg the question though why no attention was given to the original report in November of 2008?

Update 3:

Another interesting thing about Issa and his war against the SEC. This week Issa has been making claims that the SEC colluded with the Obama administration to bring charges against Goldman-Sachs. The Obama administration has denied this and Issa was forced to admit he has no proof. So it sounds like Issa has declared his own personal war against the SEC.

Appearing on the Washington Times right now:

Obama skips Polish funeral, heads to golf course

And when you read the article, you start getting an eerie feeling of déjà vu:

Mr. Obama has played golf far more often than former President George W. Bush. In his eight years in office, Mr. Bush played just 24 times. His last time as president was Oct. 13, 2003.

He said in 2008 that he gave up golf "in solidarity" with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq.

So here we are back to the old meme of Obama golfing again.

But there’s also a very interesting mangling of the basis of the story here. The basis is that Obama didn’t go to the funeral of the Polish president. Here’s how wingnut blog Powerline describes it:

So it is interesting to see that Barack Obama went golfing today rather than attending the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria.

No. What’s interesting is how wingnuts totally mangle what actually happened. John is trying to sell it as Obama just skipping the funeral, when the fact is that President Obama was forced to cancel the trip because of the ash cloud over Europe. The news has had nonstop coverage of the volcanic eruption and the disruption in flights because of it. Does John think his readers at Powerline are really so stupid as to believe that President Obama just decided to blow off the funeral to go golfing? It would appear that way.

And Powerline isn’t the only wingnuts going with this story. There are many more on memeorandum.

Wow – what a potty mouth:

Hamilton County Republican chairman Alex Triantafilou accuses Rep. Steve Driehaus of using ‘a vulgarity’ in a fundraising email, and is demanding an apology.

The vulgarity: “tea bagger.”

The Driehaus campaign calls the GOP release “nonsense” and says “no offense was intended.”  Spokeswoman Melissa Wideman cites the Oxford American Dictionary definition of the term: “a person who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773.”

Tea Bagger is a vulgarity? If that’s the case then the Tea Party people out protesting this week should be arrested for displays of public vulgarities:

(Photo by Ana Marie Cox)

This isn’t the first time I have talked about Triantafilou, the head of the Hamilton County Republicans. Last year Triantafilou decided to show what a real class act he is when he used a picture of a bald Arlen Specter to compare him to Dr. Evil. Of course Specter was bald in that picture because of his brain cancer.

Triantafilou is no authority on class, let alone what is a vulgarity and what isn’t. He’s just proving that the Tea Party is an extension of the GOP.

That would be Republican Bruce Bartlett, who worked in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, as well as being a former staffer to Ron Paul:

On March 16 the Tea Party crowd showed up for yet another demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington. Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses--a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people.

[SNIP]

Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.

Wow – could the tea baggers be even more wrong? Of course they could:

Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president. And given the economic circumstances, it's hard to imagine that a tax increase would have been enacted last year. In fact, 40% of Obama's stimulus package involved tax cuts. These include the Making Work Pay Credit, which reduces federal taxes for all taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 by between $400 and $800.

So the Tea Party, and the Republicans that support them, are actually opposing lower taxes. Way to go guys! You really are on the losing side of history.

From Raw Story:

An increasing number of Indiana residents are declaring themselves "sovereign citizens" and personally seceding from the United States, says a report from ABC channel 6 in Indianapolis.

By doing so, residents contend that they no longer have to pay taxes, claiming their homes as embassies and using identification cards that show them as diplomats, 6News' Rafael Sanchez reported.

Indiana authorities call such proclamations both illegitimate and illegal. About 10 people every month ask the state to put a seal on a document so that they can claim freedom from taxes.

When I read this story I had this clip from Family Guy stuck in my head:

It didn’t end very well for Peter Griffin in that episode either, as he found the United States declaring war upon him and his house surrounded by the military. Maybe that’s what should happen to a few of these morons also.

John Cole reminds us of a harsh reality when it comes to the little $15 billion jobs bill:

What is fifteen billion? A couple weeks of unemployment benefits? Not to go all Everett Dirksen and everything, but we ***LOST*** almost that much in Iraq, and no one flinched. But $15 billion is going to remedy job losses of tens of thousands every month on top of millions of lost job over the past two years? Isn’t that less than California’s budget deficit? And the only way it was going to get substantially bigger was to lard it up with pointless tax cuts?

Democrats should be ashamed of putting forth such a small bill to handle such a huge problem, but even worse is the Republicans who voted against it. Many of these were the same ones defending the lost billions in Iraq by going “oh well”. They absolutely have no concern for the American people.

Drudge is pushing this headline today:

Largest-ever federal payroll to hit 2.15 million employees...

It goes to a Washington Times story talking about the increasing workforce of the U.S. government – not a bad thing with unemployment where it’s at. But let’s take a look at where these numbers are coming from:

Mr. Obama says the civilian work force will drop by 80,000 next year, mostly because of a reduction in U.S. census workers added in 2010 but then dropped in 2011 after the national population count is finished. That still leaves 1.35 million civilian federal employees on the payroll in 2011.

From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.

Including both the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service workers.

So there really hasn’t been that big of a jump in the size of government, well except for defense, which is about 79% of the increase. Will the right start demanding that we make cuts there? Haha yeah right. Let’s take a closer look at these defense numbers:

After years of decline at the end of the Cold War, the Defense Department is restaffing. Mr. Obama estimated that the Pentagon will have 720,000 employees this year and 757,000 employees next year - up from a low of 649,000 in 2003.

The data also show that the Department of Homeland Security will grow by 7,000 a year in 2010 and 2011, and the Veterans Affairs Department will grow by 12,000 in 2010 and an additional 4,000 in 2011.

One thing that blows my mind there is that we have to keep hiring more and more people to oversee these contractors. It really seems like it would be cheaper to do away with contractors and hire the people directly.

The Washington Times also speaks truth here, but I believe their intent is a little out of context:

Mr. Obama is in a situation similar to that of Mr. Clinton, who took office when the budget deficit was at a record high and government bureaucracy was expanding, even though the Pentagon was shedding workers with the end of the Cold War

So Obama and Clinton share the same experience entering office. What else do they share? Could it be the fact that they inherited those deficits and huge jumps in government bureaucracy from Republican administrations. Nah that wouldn’t be the case. We are talking about the party of “fiscal responsibility” and “small government” after all. I also just saw a pink unicorn running past my window.

A story being pushed by Drudge is about tonight’s address by President Obama and how it conflicts with ABC showing A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m sure this will be taken by people like O’Reilly as a massive first strike in the War on Christmas. Luckily the tragedy has been adverted as ABC has rescheduled the show for next Tuesday at 8pm.