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hat we do without that source of endless bemusement and artery-scrubbing blood pressure surges, the SF Wrongicle?  Life without Marc Morford?  Where would the guffaws come from?

But it just might happen as Bloomberg reports:

Hearst Corp. may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle if the publisher can’t make cost-saving measures, including job cuts, “within weeks.”

The Wrongicle hasn’t turned a profit since at least 2001and circulation fell another 7.1 percent in the last six months … which should put it at about 17 and a half.  And here I thought San Franciscans were so much smarter than the rest of us – surely the sort of people who read newspapers.

Maybe it’s just that newspapers have such huge carbon footprints …

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Gary Locke’s appointment as the president’s third try at securing a Commerce Secretary hasn’t even reached the official announcement stage yet, and it looks like his Dem-sordid past is sneaking up to bite him.

Michelle Malkin covered Locke’s political fundraising shenanigans extensively when she was at the Seattle Times, and she blesses us today with a synopsis of that coverage from 1997 and 1998.  Hoo, boy!

Let’s preface this by saying Locke’s still a free, unindicted, unjailed citizen.

But enough of that!  Locke took $1,000 from John Huang, the Dem fundraiser who most definitely is not free, unindicted or unjailed, and another $30,000+ through Huang-arranged events.  When confronted, Locke did what Dems do; he played the race card:

“The fund-raising scandal will have repercussions for several years. It will make our efforts doubly hard to get Asian Americans appointed to top-level positions across the United States. If they have any connection to John Huang, those individuals will face greater scrutiny and their lives will be completely opened up and examined – perhaps more than usual.”

As it turns out, examination is warranted. Locke donors connected to Huang and his cohort, Ted Sioeng, an Indonesian real estate and tobacco baron suspected by the FBI of supplying Chinese government money to American candidates, included:

Hoyt Zia, a Commerce Department counsel, who stated in a sworn deposition that Huang had access to virtually any classified document through him; Melinda Yee, another Commerce Department official, who made routine phone calls to Lippo and is under investigation by the Justice Department for destroying notes she took on a China trade mission; Ginger Lew, who allegedly helped pilfer classified intelligence documents when she left Commerce last summer; Praitun Kanchanalak, mother of indicted Thai influence-peddler Pauline; Kent La, exclusive distributor of Sioeng’s Chinese cigarettes in the U.S.; and Sioeng’s wife and son-in-law.

Then there was the time Locke channeled Al Gore and held what looks and smells like an illegal fund-raiser at a Redmond WA Buddhist temple, collecting fistfuls of $1,000 checks from “monks and nuns who barely spoke English, couldn’t recall donating to Locke, or were out of the country and could never be located.”

Concludes Malkin:

It’s illegal to funnel campaign contributions through straw donors. It’s illegal for tax-exempt churches to hold campaign fund-raisers. It’s illegal to accept money from foreign citizens who are not permanent residents of this country. It’s illegal to file false public disclosure forms (four years after the temple fundraisers, PDC records were not amended with the Buddhist monks’ correct addresses and occupations). It’s illegal to commit perjury to cover up a political money-laundering scheme.

In a trade-dependent state such as Washington state, the incentive to engage in quid pro quos is high. At Commerce, it’s even higher. Locke’s campaign finance scandal-tainted past raise sserious issues about his judgment.

As I’ve said before, Obama should hire the Palin vetting team; they were much more competent than the bozos vetting the president’s prospective men of hench.

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Politico points out something rather troubling to those of us who remember the spectacular failure of Soviet and Chinese five-year plans: Washington DC is now the financial capital of the USA. And true to form, as investors start looking to the dismal swamp instead of Wall Street for signs and omens, the results are not good.

Remember last summer when Chuckie Schumer (chair of the Joint Economic Committee of the Senate) criticized IndyMac’s precarious financial condition?  Remember how there was a run on the bank and it failed a few days later?

The banking regulator said it closed IndyMac after customers began a run on the lender following the June 26 release of a letter by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., urging several bank regulatory agencies that they take steps to prevent IndyMac’s collapse.

In the 11 days that followed the letter’s release, depositors took out more than $1.3 billion, regulators said. (CBS)

Then the admin’s chief tax-dodger Tim (“Only Little People Pay Taxes”) Geithner bumbled the roll-out of the supposedly brilliant next step of the supposedly brilliant Obama team’s financial recovery scheme and the market fell 382 points.

Then last Friday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris (“Mortgage Meltdown? Me?”) Dodd told Bloomberg TV’s savvy audience that banks could be nationalized and the Dow plummeted a hundred points in 60 minutes.

Finally, just yesterday Prez O himself chaired the Fiscal (“Ir-”)Responsibility Summit, held a press conference, and led the Dow to a 251-point drop.

What does the Left have to say in retort?  Not much:

Not only is there no particular significance to the stock market as such, but there’s no particular significance to [the Dow]. (Yglesias)

Matt, as I watch my 401(k) dip to 40% of its prior value, I say there is significance, very real significance, to the market.  For starters, it’s a pretty good measure of consumer confidence, and we have never exited a recession on crappy consumer confidence.  And if you don’t like the Dow, show me one broad index that is performing much differently from it.

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ext week, Barack Obama will convene a health care summit, which at least doesn’t generate guffaws like yesterday’s “fiscal responsibility” summit did. (Obama preaching fiscal responsibility after his trillion-dollar first month in office is like Bill Clinton calling a monogamy summit after not having sex with that Lewinski woman.)

As he pulls together the nation’s health care leaders, he might want to consider that at current rates of federal health care spending – $8,160 per year per person in the US – the massive Medicare trust fund will go bankrupt in 2016 … the year after I become eligible for benefits, coincidentally.

The forecast, issued by the Dept. of Health and Human Services, admits that its projections are low and paint an inaccurately rosy [black roses] picture because it did not take into account the recently passed SCHIP legislation that expanded medical coverage for children of low income working parents. That’s low income as in 300 percent of the poverty level being the eligibility cut-off.

As a sign of how costly the health care biz has become, federal health care costs managed to increase a whopping $356 per person, or nearly five percent, this year.

Obama’s answer to this will be, of course, to spend more money on health care and to increase federal oversight and involvement.   Spending more money in the new Obama hallmark fiscally responsible manner will require a good economy so the fed coffers can fill with cash … but the Conference Board’s just-announced measure of consumer confidence in the economy are the lowest in a decade, with the index at 35.5 for February, down from 37.7 in January.

So what’s a fiscally responsible president to do?  Delay costly new exapansions of federal health care programs?   Tighten up eligibility?  Narrow benefits?  Rely more on free market forces? Don’t hold your breath … it’s bad for your health.

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I. Kid. You. Not.  Out of ten-gazillion photos snapped at the balance-the-budget summit spin session today, this is the one AP chose to run with its run-down story:

Lovely, isn’t it?  Prez-O appears so humble as the golden light of his aura encircles him.  Good thing:  It’ll take a miracle for him to cut the ballooning deficit in half … as the stock market apparently knows better than the sycophants at the spin fest – the Dow fell another 251 points on bizarre quotes like this:

“If we confront this crisis without also confronting the deficits that helped cause it, we risk sinking into another crisis down the road.  We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences.”

If deficits helped cause the crisis, why is Obama quintupling the deficit with his stimulus program?  Anyone?  Anyone?  And if he really wanted to avoid deferring the consequences, would he be content to end his first (and last?) term with the national debt still at two and a half times the size of the Bush deficit?

And how, pray tell, will he accomplish that if next week he holds a health care summit, which is sure to lead to another round of unparalleled spending and the accompanying expansion of government?

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merica is the land of dreams and opportunity and all, but really, what’s a bus driver doing with an $800,000 home? (That’s it on the right.)  And why should we bail out her hyper over-extension? Michelle Malkin provides the commentary from an SF Wrongicle sob story:

ACOSTA: Like countless other Americans, Garcia admits she and her husband bought more house than they could afford, but she says the lender made the purchase all too easy. Now her mortgage is worth more than her house.

(on camera): How much was the house when you bought it?

GARCIA: Eight hundred.

ACOSTA: Eight hundred thousand dollars?. And how much is the house worth?

GARCIA: Right now, it’s like $675,000 on the market.

Before you run out of hankies crying for Garcia, consider this comment from a discussion item I posted on a building industry LinkedIn page asking for commentary on the Obama housing bailout:

It will be a good stop-gap and stabilize market prices in many areas of the country. However, long term it will not solve the problem because many of these homeowners will end up back in the same situation. Even if the package paid off their mortgages completely, it wouldn’t be long before they leveraged all of that equity. So it will likely pass, it will likely work short term, and in the end it will fail to make a lasting difference.

Got that? Do you think Rahmbama has thought this through? Do they really think that these overly entitled, bailed out “victims” won’t immediately turn around and draw out the equity boosts they got thanks to non-victims like us?

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ea culpa here: My car is German, my wife’s is British.  But I’m not in government, and I’m certainly not on the Obama task force that will sit in judgment of the GM and Chrysler restructuring plans.  And anyway, if I were buying a new car today, it would be a Cadillac CTS (if I let my automotive lusts run ahead of my economic sensitivities) or a Ford Fusion hybrid (if I did the opposite).

The Detroit News reports today that the Obama car team is, first, not prone to buying American – and that’s just the start of the problem.

Here’s the skivvy on their car choices:

• Co-Chair Timothy F. Geithner owns a 2008 Acura TSX.
• White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers owns a 1995 Mazda Protege.
• Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag owns a 2008 Honda Odyssey and a 2004 Volvo S60.
• Carol Browner, the White House climate czar, own an automobile. Public records show she once owned a 1999 Saab 9-5 SE.
• Energy Secretary Steven Chu doesn’t own a car.
• Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson owns a 2008 Toyota Prius and a Honda Odyssey miniman. “It’s great,” she said of her Prius.
• Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist for the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, owns a 2004 Toyota Highlander.
• Joan DeBoer, the chief of staff to LaHood, drives a 2008 Lexus RX 350.
• Heather Zichal, deputy director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, owns a Volvo C30.
• Lisa Heinzerling, senior climate policy counsel to the head of the EPA, owns a 1998 Subaru Legacy Outback station wagon.
• Diana Farrell, the deputy National Economic Council director, doesn’t own a vehicle.
• Dan Utech, senior adviser to the Energy Secretary, owns a 2003 Mini Cooper S.
• Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist, owns a 2005 Honda Odyssey.

Buying American were (only) Gene Sperling, counsel to the Treasury Secretary, who owns a 2003 Lincoln LS;  Edward B. Montgomery, senior adviser to the Labor Department, who owns a 1991 Harley-Davidson, and Rick Wade, a senior adviser at the Commerce Department, who owns a 1998 Chevrolet Cavalier.

Worse than their flag loyalty is their purchase choices – the lamest, most uninspiring cars out there, with the exception of the Acura TSX, the Mini Cooper S and the Harley.  It is obvious that the people who hold the fate of GM and Chrysler in their hands are not car buffs, have no appreciation of anything other than utilitarian transportation, and do not suffer from one iota of automotive lust.

Sorry, but that’s the equivalent of putting know-nothings in charge of Obama’s economic policy.  Oh.

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Plans are underway for Durban II – a follow-up to the UN-sponsored “anti-racism” conference in 2001 that quickly morphed into an ugly, racist anti-Israel conference … as if Israel were racist, as if its accusers weren’t some of the most racist country on the planet.

The Bush admin famously washed its hands of Durban I, but Obama’s team is participating in the set-up meetings for the follow-up show - a controversial decision that led the State Department to release a statement positioning its participation as an effort to make Durban II less of a racist fiasco than Durban I:

We sent this delegation to work with countries that want to achieve a successful review conference that focuses on combating racism, racial discrimination and other forms of intolerance and to explore whether it is going to be possible to focus the Durban Review Conference on these serious issues.

Trouble is, says Forbes columnist Anne Bayefsky, the Obamaites did no such thing, and worse, is actively covering up its true actions at the prelims.

The reality, however, was nothing of the sort. Instead, Obama’s Durban II team slipped easily into the U.N.’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish environs, taking the approach that “fitting in” was best accomplished by staying silent.

She points to two critical junctures when the Americans sat on their hands.  The first occurred when the U.S. delegation refused to comment when the Palestinian delegation worked to insert language that called for “the international protection of the Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory,” and

Furthermore, the new Palestinian provision “Calls for … implementation of international legal obligations, including the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the wall …” This is a dramatic attempt to change an “advisory opinion” into a “legal obligation”–a status which attaches to no advisory opinion.

More troubling was the U.S. response to an Iranian effort at Holocaust denial:

Negotiators from the European Union suggested on Wednesday a new provision to “condemn without reservation any denial of the Holocaust and urges all states to reject denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full, or in part, or any activities to this end.” Iran–whose president is a Holocaust-denier–immediately objected and insisted that the proposal be “bracketed” or put in dispute. The move blocked the adoption of the proposal and ensured another battle over the reality of the Holocaust in April–at these supposedly “anti-racism” meetings. After Iran objected, the chair looked around the room, expecting a response. He said: “Is there any delegation wishing to comment on this new proposal by the European Union? It doesn’t seem the case. We move on.” U.S. delegates said nothing, even after the prompt.

Obama’s State Department may call this working “to achieve a successful … conference,” but it falls far short of the Bush admin’s adamant refusal to allow America to get caught up in Arab Jew-hatred.

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nside-the-Beltway Mom and Ex-Ambassador Step-dad need a ride to LAX this morning for their flight to Hawaii, so my time is limited. What you see is what you get this week.

Defying the laws of economics – After whipping out an $887 billion spending bill, following the two-parrt $700 billion Bush bank bailout and preceding the $75 billion housing loser bailout, Prez O tells us he’s going to cut the budget deficit in half by the end of his first term. Let’s see; that’s $1.7 trillion on top of the so-called $1.3 trillion existing deficit – and he’s going to do it by getting out of Iraq in 16 months and raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 – while cutting taxes to everyone else? There’d better be a lot of those rich folks, and they’d better be making a whole lot more than $250,000.

(Of course the real deficit is vastly larger.  Obama’s $1.3 trillion figure does not include unfunded mandates that the government is legally obligated to pay, like Social Security.  He can pretend the number’s not there, but it is.

New Watcher of Weasels Feature – The Watcher of Weasels has started a new, intermittent feature, Weekend Weasel, and kicks it off with the decidedly weasely Stephen Fowler:

The first member nominated to the Watcher of Weasels wall of shame is none other than San Francisco celebrity liberal Stephen Fowler. This elite ass appeared on wife swap and was paired up with Gayla Long, a woman from a small town in Missouri that Fowler affectionately referred to as a “dumb redneck” and “lower class.”

Check it out. The Watcher really winds up a roundhouse on this one.  The only thing worse – much worse – than a San Francisco liberal is an arrogant San Francisco liberal.

War Gaming - Don’t know if you caught Glenn Beck’s War Room this week. Chilling stuff; experts talking about worst case scenarios with the economy, meltdown, and societal reactions.  One section talked about the “Bubba Factor” – folks becoming so afraid of the way the government’s going that they begin to protect themselves in armed compouds, like the militia movement that grew under Clinton’s watch.  Say what you will about this, but don’t say what Glenn Greenwald does:

What was most remarkable about this allegedly “anti-government” movement was that — with some isolated and principled exceptions — it completely vanished upon the election of Republican George Bush, and it stayed invisible even as Bush presided over the most extreme and invasive expansion of federal government power in memory. Even as Bush seized and used all of the powers which that movement claimed in the 1990s to find so tyrannical and unconstitutional — limitless, unchecked surveillance activities, detention powers with no oversight, expanding federal police powers, secret prison camps, even massively exploding and debt-financed domestic spending — they meekly submitted to all of it, even enthusiastically cheered it all on.

Where to start with this bufoon? Obama has expanded Government more in three weeks than Bush did in eight years.  Bush did nothing unlike what Lincoln or FDR did in times of war.  The surveillance programs Bush employed were limited and checked.  There was oversight over the detention program – Congress.  The “secret” prison camps were well known and were for terrorists, like a POW camp, not for U.S. citizens.  Guilty on the debt – but not nearly as guilty as Obama.  With idiots like this running around and having the ear of the new administration, hunkering down with an assortment of guns doesn’t seem alike all that bad an idea.

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leeting tweets are flying in defiance of the ponderous, lumbering doom of Porkasaurus, as Top Conservatives on Twitter (#TCOT) uses its network of Twitter-ing conservatives to create a nationwide network of Tea Party USA protests against Porkasaurus next Friday.

Here’s the bare formative steps taking place in California - so far the protest is just in “your town” at “the Pacific Ocean” at 9 a.m.  But people are starting to log in, and expect it to grow.  SoCal folks, watch here for updates as future tweets result in specific protest rallies being formed.

The events look like they’ll all be similar in structure – people gather with some good signage, someone will present a shredded copy of Porkasaurus, and with great ceremony it will be thrown, Tea Party-like, into a handy body of water.  Native American dress optional.

On this page, you can find updates for your city or a city near you – including Obama’s home town. And Biden’s. And Harry’s.  How about you folks in Pelosiville?  Michele Malkin has a running update of activities – complete with a suggested play list for the rallies.  Investors Business Daily has a history of the movement including:

To be sure, the protest sizes so far are a far cry from the left’s anti-globalization and anti-war demonstrations of the past decade. But they appear to have grass-roots origins. The organizer of the Kansas protest, Amanda Grosserode, calls herself a home-schooling mom who is “fed up” with the spending in Washington. She has been a member of Fair Tax Kansas City since last fall.

“My husband and I were feeling frustrated that the stimulus had passed with very little debate and no one had read it,” she told IBD. “I said, ‘We need to do something.’ ”

She began contacting family and friends, and eventually received attention via Fair Tax Kansas City and local talk radio.

Grosserode received considerably more publicity after e-mailing popular conservative commentator and blogger Michelle Malkin.

“I think the taxpayer revolt is the new counterculture,” said Malkin, who has been publicizing the protests on her blog. “People want to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m paying for that, I do not support that.’ “

Remember Amanda Grosserode – she may be the Rosa Parks of this new civil rights movement, demanding freedom from stupid, overbearing government overspending on the road to socialism.

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