He wines and dines, we know that, hopping the nearest jet plane to New York for a night on the town, grinning like that renowned cat.  But did we know he also whines?

“Let’s just lay everything on the table,” [Sen. Charles] Grassley said. “A Democrat congressman last week told me after a conversation with the president that the president had trouble in the House of Representatives, and [Obamacare] wasn’t going to pass if there weren’t some changes made … and the president says, ‘You’re going to destroy my presidency.’ “

Illustrations:

Dat’s de cat.

Dat’s de grin.

More on governmental fiscal reliability, albeit as part of a gruesome overall situation.  How many billion?  (At least they are keeping track.)  How many did Enron lose?

The Taxinator may be breathing a sigh of relief over “fixing” California’s budget problems.

But darker clouds loom.

Case in point:

California’s huge government pension fund is expected to report today a whopping annual loss of an estimated $56.8 billion, almost a quarter of its investment portfolio. [Italics added]

That’s from the irreplaceable Michelle Malkin, thanks to link from the irreplaceable Instapundit.  Instant is right.  It’s how the b’sphere works — hand in hand with the main stream, in this case LA Times.  Malkin reads the paper for us, Insta’s Glenn Reynolds reads Malkin, etc., creating an epidemic of information disseminated by trustworthy sources.

Michelle’s closing comment is as scary as a Terminator left hook:

And as California goes, so goes the nation.

Or worse, one of his super-pistol blasts.

“Who’s Minding the Store at the Federal Reserve?” asks David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy, presenting a video of the Fed’s “inspector general” knowing nothing from nothing about the whereabouts of three big ones (these days, trillions). 

(Go here for the video, which would allow itself to be embedded yesterday but not today.  YouTube has its reasons, to be sure.)

The video has almost a million hits, notes Bernstein, who calls it “pretty shocking stuff” in that “the Fed is lending trillions . . . with apparently no oversight, even internally.”

It’s not their money, yes, but you’d think they’d give a care.

The congressional interrogator, Alan Grayson, is a Florida Dem, for what that’s worth.

============

Later: Reader email notes the personal performance of the testifier, judging hers as a difficult position — too much power!  But the matter is institutional, not personal, as is clergy abuse, to pick one example, in which abusers are less the issue than coverups by prelates and apparatchiks — once endemic, now less so, thanks to media and other pressure.  Governmental institutions are what look bad here, specifically the Fed, and the question is asked in effect, Would you buy a used car from that dealer?

Oak Park’s Les Golden, whose zeal as a tree-hugger got him in trouble with the law a few months back — with reactions con and pro — is looking for a good man or woman to run for Republican Committeeman next year. 

“As you know,” he writes,

there is effectively no GOP organization in Oak Park under the current committee[wo]man.  Indeed, the one and only function held was done at my urging, a breakfast at Peterson’s Ice Cream after the victory FOUR YEARS AGO!! 

I was there, meeting the winner, a travel agent by name of Marlene Lynch.  The rolls and coffee were good, the setting congenial, Ms. Lynch cordial.  But Les is right.  It was the end of contact initiated by her.

[T]he committeeman has held no meetings, organized no functions, raised no money, slated no candidates, organized no election judges, and does not attend any Cook County meetings. [!]  

I know.  I called her about being a judge and one other time for comment for a Wed. Journal column, and she was in a hurry each time.  Impatient, she had no interest in Republican matters.  Oak Park needs a new committeeman, Les writes, offering some motivation, quoting a Founder:

As America becomes a socialist state, only grass roots can bring back the ideals of our founding fathers.  As Jefferson wrote,

“The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.”

He delineates a committeeman’s primary responsibilities:

1.  locate and organize election judges
2.  run a Lincoln day celebration, a summer picnic, and candidate debates/parties

And adds what else the person could do:

3.  hold monthly meetings
4.  rent an office space for formal/informal gatherings
5.  find, slate, and fundraise for GOP candidates
6.  attend County meetings
7.  put up and post to a website
8.  increase the GOP voter numbers in Oak Park
9.  work with west suburban committeeman to reinvigorate the GOP
10.  attend meetings of other west suburban GOP organizations

“It may seem like a lot,” he adds, “but with a competent staff it isn’t that much work.”  He has “a core group” to gather signaturesm days contact him if you’re interested or know someone who is.

And if you’ll help get signatures, he wants to know that too.  Call 708 848-6677.

Go Les!  Go dormant OP GOP!

After six months of Obama, writes Rex Murphy in the Globe & Mail,

What we can say with confidence . . . is that had he run on (a) transforming the U.S. economy by massive federal government intervention, (b) taking an owner’s stake in the automobile industry, (c) transforming the rules of America’s energy economy, (d) instituting a national health-care system – all of these simultaneously and in the centre of a financial meltdown – Barack Obama wouldn’t merely have lost the election, he wouldn’t have got as many votes as gnarly old Ross Perot did in an election long past.

He fooled us, in other words, hiding behind smooth talk and glowing rhetoric.

Mr. Obama has taken the real crisis of the U.S. (and world) economy and used it as the screen and lever for a massive agenda of transformation, a transformation that calls for expenditures on a scale never before seen in the history of government on this planet.

Bait and switch.  His was an  

agenda of massive government expansion, or attempted expansion, into everything from the auto industry to health care – all of them sold with cries of urgency and executed with reckless haste. Massive bills were passed before there were even copies of them to read. The U.S. government’s debt is being swollen beyond all previous records.

We cannot imagine that he did not know this agenda.

He knew what he wished to do when he was campaigning, but he was not going to whisper the scale and range of his designs while the campaign was on. It would have scared off people.

And now?

He’s flying high in dazzling hubris. The American economy is not yet fixed. It may get worse. And it is in this parlous and critical context that Mr. Obama has launched history-making expenditures and a reordering of American governance.

Daring if you believe in it, “reckless – to the point of real danger if you do not.”  It’s a “trapeze act — the greatest . . . in the history of North American politics.”