Things I’d Like to Post About Today ….. (012309, Morning)

….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• Besides the raw news (”Oceans are cooling according to NASA “; HT Hot Air) about cooling, not warming, the linked story contains a useful reminder — “In the peak of the recent warming trend, 1998 actually ranked 2nd to 1934 as the warmest year on record.” A related August 2007 BizzyBlog post noted that this came finding came about after NASA fixed flawed data.
• “Obama Snubs Medal of Honor Recipients” — “In total, nine presidents and 56 years have gone by, and each inaugural evening the new president arrived to thank the veterans and Medal of Honor recipients in attendance (at their ‘unofficial’ ball). ….. it meant quite a bit to have the president show up and make an appearance. Except this time.” I’m going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt on this for being tone-deaf instead of deliberately shunning the group, but it’s here as a memory-jogger in case a pattern emerges. Recall that even draft-dodging military loather Bill Clinton made sure to do visit this ball at his inaugurals.
• “Obama meets the White House press corps, gets annoyed” (original Politico piece is here) — At about the 3:20 mark of the vid at the link, a reporter asks a question about lobbying, and Obama says, “I can’t come down here and visit you guys if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here.” Imagine the reax if a Republican president said and acted as Obama did.
• Here’s a little dust-up that should be watched — “Three news agencies refused to distribute White House-provided photos of President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday, arguing that access should have been provided to news photographers. The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France Presse said the White House was breaking with longstanding tradition in not allowing news photographers to capture the president at work in the Oval Office on his first day. …. The White House later released a photograph of the president retaking the oath of office with Chief Justice John Roberts, which the AP also rejected.” Possibly a first-day faux pas, but perhaps an indicator that Team Obama intends to exert tight control over the images we see of him. If that’s the case, my bet would be on the press acquiescing.
• “Connecticut adds 800 workers during a hiring freeze” — No, it’s not The Onion, and Christopher Fountain is not amused (HT Instapundit). Connecticut’s governor is RINO Jodi Rell, who managed to settle the Kelo mess as best she could in the wake of an odious Supreme Court decision, but has been captured by the spendthrifts.
• Re the Geithner nomination, which sailed through the Senate Finance Committee by an appalling 18-5 margin yesterday — For what it’s worth, I set up a TurboTax 2007 file and entered a W-2 with Social Security and Medicare wages and no withholding and wasn’t told that there was a problem (though I’m not sure I got as far as I needed to get to prove that). Given the fact that Geithner was reminded on a quarterly basis of his obligation to pay these taxes, and was given money in the form of additional “gross-up” compensation to pay these taxes, and that he had previous run-ins with the IRS going back to 1993 over the Social Security-related “nanny tax,” the “TurboTax said I didn’t have to” excuse is really, really lame.
• Also relevant to Geithner — Caroline Kennedy’s withdrawal as a New York US Senate candidate may have had other causes, but one of the biggest appears to be a nanny tax problem of her own. So let’s see, you’ll have a hard time being a US senator if you don’t pay a few thousand bucks in nanny tax, but you can be Treasury Secretary if, just for starters, you have failed to pay your own self-employment taxes for four years running involving amounts that may be 10 times as large, use the statute of limitations dodge to avoid paying some of them until you’re about to be nominated, and take a blatantly illegal deduction for overnight summer camp. Why is this? One big reason: Kennedy would eventually have to face the voters. Geithner never will.