Tuesday Mashup (7/19/11)

Not a lot today, so I might as well get to it…

To begin, I give you former New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu here in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer…

Consider Shaun Donovan at Housing and Urban Development, Steven Chu at Energy, Ray LaHood at Transportation, and Gary Locke, who just left Commerce. They have spent almost every day of their adult lives as academics, government staffers, or elected officials.

That doesn't make them bad people, but it means they have no firsthand experience with how their policies might affect businesses' investment and economic growth. There is no substitute for the private-sector demands of hiring and firing, managing cash flow, and putting capital to work. By comparison, this experience has been abundant in previous administrations.

I suppose I could point out yet again the supposed business “cred” of the Bushco gang, including Dubya himself who ruined every private enterprise he ever touched, or “Deadeye Dick” Cheney, who, while running Halliburton, contributed to the poisoning of its workforce with asbestosis as noted here, as well as installing faulty wiring in showers that ended up electrocuting members of our military here.

Instead, though, I’ll merely link here to more information on Sununu and point out that he “earned both an S.B. and S.M. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and an Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard University in 1991. After graduating, he worked in the high-tech industry, at one time for the company of Dean Kamen and as a management consultant for PRTM.”

And that was before he was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1996. And that’s commendable, but guess what?

It shows that he doesn’t have experience with “hiring and firing, managing cash flow, and putting capital to work” either.

Next, in a thoroughly predictable development, it looks like the Repug chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, is threatening to “(withhold funds) to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for the welfare and education of 4.8 million Palestinian refugees, and the underfunding of U.N. peacekeeping operations,” as noted here.

Which is exactly the type of move that earned the U.S. the designation of “deadbeat donor” from former Secretary General Ban Ki Moon here, with the requisite pouting and foot-stomping in response from Ros-Lehtinen. And feel free to criticize our Kenyan Marxist pre-zee-dint and that supposedly nasty 111th Congress for making sure we paid our debts.

Continuing, it looks like Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn haz a sad here…

I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems — that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet. And until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. . .

Do you know what this is really all about people?

Wynn and his fellow business barracudas like Sheldon Adelson got their poor widdle feelins hurt when Obama made a critical remark here about Vegas and corporate junkets, and Obama also had the temerity to suggest here that families might wants to prioritize college education for their kids over Vegas vacations.

And they’ve been pouting ever since.

What was that phrase from the last election? Man up, I believe…

And that’s about as good of a transition to the following item about Mikey the Beloved as I can imagine.

As noted from Mikey’s Media Center on his congressional web page here, he wrote a letter to Harry Reid, head of the “Democrat-controlled” (nice) U.S. Senate on July 8th, “demanding” Senate action on passing a budget, saying, among other things, that the Senate had “800 days” to do it but had not delivered.

Well, as noted here (from April, for God’s sake)…

WASHINGTON -- The Senate passed a bill on Thursday to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year, putting an end to months of uncertainty over 2011 government funding.

The upper chamber approved the bill 81 to 19. It passed through the House of Representatives a few hours earlier by a vote of 260 to 167.

Fitzpatrick continues to be nothing but an utter embarrassment; a pox on those who voted for him, as well as his actual P.R. service that pretends to be an actual newspaper.