Neither do I, but it’s certainly a highly entertaining slogan. I can come up with some more:

Obama 2012: No Longer Lacking Executive Experience

Obama 2012: Everyone Deserves a Second Chance

Obama 2012: Purely By the Law of Averages, He’s Bound to Do Better

Add your own in the comments.

His Majesty: “Lord Vader, which audience do you mean? The American public, or Congress?”

Yes.

Lost in thought

In fairness, though,  many of us have “thinking tics”; little idiosyncratic behaviors we engage in when deep in thought. Personally, I tend to pace. I’ve also been known to rock back in my chair and stare at the ceiling. I used to chew my fingernails back when I had some.

What are your thinking tics? Comments are open.

2. “No one wants banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.”

President Obama made this claim following a December meeting with big bank officials, then contradicted himself by urging bankers to take “third and fourth” looks at rejected business loan applications. But the administration has been even more enthusiastic about encouraging another type of credit: the precise risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.

Mortgage lending standards have declined, and the amount of risky debt taxpayers are underwriting has rapidly increased, under Obama’s guidance. A 2009 audit found that the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) was failing to vet lenders, ignoring missing borrower documentation, and declining to consider negative information prior to guaranteeing loans. More important, the FHA still guarantees mortgages with a minimum down payment of only 3.5 percent, despite abundant evidence that a borrower with low equity is more likely to default than any other type of borrower. (See Lie No. 3.) Defaults on government-approved loans continue to rise, as do redefaults on mortgages refinanced under HAMP.

Undaunted, the administration wants to give unpromising borrowers greater access to debt. At press time, the Treasury Department was considering allowing borrowers to get HAMP modifications by using only pay stubs, rather than tax records, to prove their financial status.

This financial crisis was all about bad debt. Why is Obama working so assiduously to create even more bad debt?

I’m not much of a tin-foil-hat type. But if Obama really was a Manchurian candidate whose secret plan was to destroy the United States, what would he be doing differently?

I don’t actually believe Obama is a Manchurian candidate. I’m just highlighting how his policies could not be more stupid even if he was.

Politics as usual

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences,” Obama said in unveiling a budget with a record $1.6 trillion deficit this year that will be the highest as a share of GDP since World War II. He warned against treating taxpayer dollars as “monopoly money,” even as he proposes a budget of $3.8 trillion, and against ignoring the challenge of the debt “for another generation,” even with a $1 trillion deficit projected at the decade’s end.

Translation: The rich cannot possibly be permitted to continue holding their riches when we need the taxes so badly.

His Majesty finds these kinds of debates amusing. He points out that, when it comes time to shear the sheep, there is only so much wool to be gathered no matter how closely you shear. And skinning the sheep only ensures there will be no wool next year.

His Majesty understands sacrificing principle for pragmatism. It’s what politics is all about. Sacrificing pragmatism for principle may occasionally have its place, when the principle is sound. Sacrificing pragmatism for no discernible principle, which he considers the hallmark of the Obama administration, is simply insane.

De gustibus non disputandem est. But since there are lawyers persent, I’m very curious about this part of the caption:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

If this is an official White House photo, doesn’t that mean it was produced by a government employee in the course of his official duties? And if that’s the case, isn’t it in the public domain, meaning I can do whatever the profane metaphor I want with it, including Photoshopping a mustache on Caroline Kennedy?

It does sound like I’m free to use it unaltered, since I’d never use it in a way that “suggests approval or endorsement of the President.”

The 23%, I mean.