I know I’m late to the game to add my two cents to the Obama-vacay-in-Spain-water-cooler-talk. I’ve been busy living the glam life with Brittany Cohan in Wisconsin.

Or at least the relaxed life. I left the kids at home.

This is my summer vacation.

A $393.89 plane ticket purchased with reward points. An awesome friend with a guest room. A low-key Sunday spent in pajamas, on the couch, watching chick flicks and reading about Sookie Stackhouse, and drinking a little too much cheap wine.

It’s not Hawaii, but times are tight. And it’s not like it’s going to get easier anytime soon, what with the largest tax increase in history coming up in mere months.

It’s Wisconsin for me, because that what my budget allows for. It’s not a lavish hotel in Spain, where Michelle and one of her daughters vacationed over the weekend. Which I really wouldn’t care about under ordinary circumstances. They have money. Great. Fantastic. They should spend it however they want. Beauty of America and all that jazz.

Except that the majority of the trip’s cost was covered by Mr. & Mrs. Taxpayer. Almost $150,000 for transportation costs alone. Michelle apparently paid for her own hotel room, but America paid for the lavish lodging of her security detail at the Ritz-Carlton. Who knows how many other associated costs were paid for by you and me?

So let me get this straight: My taxes are going up so that Michelle can quite literally have tea with the Queen of Spain while I’m drinking a $4 bottle of wine in Wisconsin?

Is anyone else scratching their head?

Cover the extra costs yourself, First Family, or come on over to Wisconsin. I’ll even pour you a glass of cheap wine.

President Obama was on The View this morning. I didn’t watch. Not out of protest or anything; it just didn’t seem like something that could possibly be of any interest to me. President Obama making an early campaign stop for 2012, Whoopi and Joy drooling all over him, Elizabeth trying to ask tough questions but not being able to do so, and that other chick that always seems to have a blank stare on her face.

Not exactly something I’m going to waste my limited time on. Instead of watching The View, I grocery shopped, did laundry, made beds, bathed children, cooked lunch, tripped over toys, cursed, told the toddler not to curse, and finally got them settled for nap/quiet time.

And then I started scrolling twitter, and I saw a few tweets that said something along the lines of, “Imagine if President Bush had called black people ‘mongrels.’”

Hmmm… who could it be? Joe Biden is always a prime suspect. Possibly Harry “no negro dialect” Reid, or Nancy “foot in mouth” Pelosi.

Turns out is was President Obama, during his View appearance.

When asked about his background, which includes a black father and white mother, Obama said of African-Americans: “We are sort of a mongrel people.”

“I mean we’re all kinds of mixed up,” Obama said. “That’s actually true of white people as well, but we just know more about it.”

The president’s remarks were directed at the roots of all Americans. The definition of mongrel as an adjective is defined as “of mixed breed, nature, or origin,” according to dictionary.com.

Obama did not appear to be making an inflammatory remark with his statement and the audience appeared to receive it in the light-hearted manner that often accompanies interviews on morning talk shows.

I find it offensive to apply the term mongrel to any person. It conjures up images of wild and feral creatures. I have been informed by a conservative black friend that this is not a big deal in the black community. The only thing I can say about that is that we have different definitions of “mongrel.”

The part of this story that really irks me is the double standard. In 2006, Republican Senator George Allen was thrown under the bus and dragged for miles because he referred to someone of Indian decent as “macaca.”

Come on, mongrel has to at least be as bad as macaca.

Can people stop pretending that the media is unbiased now?

P.S. I will happily print a retraction if the main stream media plays the clip over and over and uses it as proof of Barack Obama’s racism, as they did to Republican George Allen.

I am not a journalist. I am a commentator. I present the facts and I offer my opinion. I try to be persuasive and logical, because my goal is to get readers to see my point of view, understand it, and even occasionally agree with it.

I don’t report on stories, as reporters do. Reporters report the facts, just the facts. They do not pick and choose their stories. They do not ask softball questions to public figures they like and grill those they don’t care for. In fact, they are so unbiased in their reporting that determining their political affiliations is difficult.

At least that’s how journalists and reporters used to be. That’s not quite the case these days. Reporters today get tingles up their legs when they listen to President Obama. Journalists call Sarah Palin an idiot, but laugh off then-Senator Biden when he said FDR went on television in 1929 to address the public. Household television sets didn’t exist in 1929, nor was FDR the President, just in case you needed a brief history lesson.

Personally, I wasn’t surprised to find out about JournoList last month. JournoList was an online forum created and controlled by liberal blogger Ezra Klein, and its membership was limited to “several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks, and academics.”

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I believe that government programs are money pits. Like old, rickety houses, they demand more and more of your hard-earned cash in order to stand upright and resemble something somewhat pleasing to live with.

In an old home, the furnace will blow, the pipes will burst, the roof will leak, and just as you’ve sunk another chunk of your nest egg into a repair, something else will go wrong. Government programs are much the same way in that the need for constant influxes of cash never goes away.

Government is a necessary evil. We need roads. We need elected officials. We need cops and firemen. What we don’t need aregovernment programs. They are unsustainable and riddled with fraud and abuse. Take Medicare and Medicaid for example. Even the Government Accountability Office admits that it’s a high-risk program. It’s estimated that 20 percent of Medicare and Medicaid payments are fraudulent. That’s a lot of my money in someone else’s pockets.

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“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” — Margaret Thatcher

Not a day has gone by in the past two years that I have not heard, spoken, or at least thought these words. I have been frustrated over and over again by well-meaning friends that believe that the government should take care of us from the moment we enter the world until the moment we leave it.

The government should pay for our mother’s prenatal health care, our childhood vaccinations, our educations, our food and housing, medical care when we need it, and our retirements.

It’s the right thing to do. Everyone deserves a good life, and it’s just so unfair that some people are born as Paris Hilton while others are born in slums. (Although it’s probably a toss-up as to which of those two fates is worse than the other.)

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It’s hard to tell which has messed up in the Gulf more, BP or DC. Both are doing a phenomenal job of neither kicking ass nor plugging the hole. British Petroleum, who couldn’t be bothered to follow safety rules, had to remove it’s PR nightmare CEO Tony Hayward from the clean-up operation last week following the Oil Summit. Even though he is the head of BP, Hayward appeared clueless as to what caused the leak, how to stop the leak, and how to clean up the spilled oil from the leak.

The government, which couldn’t be bothered to enforce safety rules, hasn’t been much better. The Obama administration refused the help of the Dutch, and as Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston said, “What’s wrong with accepting outside help? If there’s a country that’s experienced with building dikes and managing water, it’s the Netherlands.” Those in Washington have refused to let local authorities in affected states and communities take charge. When President Obama made the gulf oil spill the topic of his first Oval Address last week, even the folks over at MSNBC thought it was ineffective at best.

It’s safe to say that both entities are mucking things up royally. And refusing to play nicely together. Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton made jokes about Tony Hayward taking in a yacht race over the weekend, saying:

“You know, look, if Tony Hayward wants to put a skimmer on that yacht and bring it down to the Gulf, we’d be happy to have his help…Tony Hayward, I guess, took himself at his word that he was going to get his life back here. It’s clear that he has. But what’s important to us is that the people in the Gulf get their lives back. It’s not so easy for them to just take a weekend away and forget about everything that’s happening down there.”

It’s just not right for Tony Hayward to indulge in some rest and relaxation over the weekend while there are people losing everything down in the gulf. Right or wrong, even I agree it doesn’t look good. So what did Mr. Burton have to say about President Obama’s Saturday golf game?

“I don’t think that there’s a person in this country that doesn’t think that their president ought to have a little time to clear his mind.”

Hypocrites. One leader is shrugging off his responsibilities, the other is clearing his head. I guess some animals really are more equal than others.

From POLITICO:

Obama talked about America’s dependence on fossil fuels and how we could not “transition out of a fossil-fuel-based economy overnight. We can’t do it in five years. We can’t even do it in 10. So we’re going to continue to need to develop domestic oil consumption. We’re going to still need oil exports. And if it’s safe, then offshore drilling can be a part of that.”

He said, however, we have to invest in research and continue development of new resources building on the work that’s already been done on “solar and wind and biodiesel and energy efficiency in cars and buildings.”

“And if we don’t, then accidents are going to happen again,” he said. “They may not be of this size and this scope, but we’re going to continue to see big problems.”

If the government doesn’t invest in green energy, accidents are going to happen? Huh? Accidents are going to happen, period. Accidents have been happening since the dawn of time, and many evolutionists would even have you believe that our very existence is an accident. Even if, at some distant point in the future, we don’t use oil for our energy, whatever the new means are will be accident-prone. It’s just the way life is. Before people died in car crashes, they died in horse-drawn buggies. No amount of government regulation is going to fix that.

Obama also talked about what he considers a key issue: the role of the federal government. “I will say that there is a debate that we’ve been having for a long time and we’re going to keep on having in this country about the proper role of government,” he said. “And I think that this crisis has been a good case study in how some people feel pretty contradictory about that role.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much. Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying, this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

There was some real irritation in his voice when he said: “And so — and this translates into very concrete terms — I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies, and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, Big Government over-regulation and wasteful spending.” (Emphasis mine)

If people can’t understand the difference between the government taking over private business and the government responding to a natural disaster in a timely manner, then there’s nothing I can do. No one is asking the government to crack down harder on oil companies.

I would like to ask that the safety procedures already in place be followed. BP may have been negligent, but the government turned a blind eye and rubber-stamped its approval.

I would also like to ask that the government not stand in the way of people offering to help. Just three days after the explosion, the Dutch government offered to send ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms. The White House declined the offer.

Maybe, just maybe, the federal government can step back and let state and local governments do what they need to do to protect their constituents. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal requested boom barriers right away, and was apparently brushed off by the federal government.

What the heck good is a government that bankrupts us, but doesn’t help us in our hour of need? What is the point?

I swear I’m getting more and more libertarian everyday.

*grumble*

John Hawkins of Right Wing News joins the show this week, plus cocktail time with Mike G. Oh yeah, and the President says the three letter word for derriere.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Keep it classy, Mr. President.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar, we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

My latest at The Stir:

President Obama delivered the commencement speech last Saturday at the US Military Academy at West Point, attempting to fill the new graduates with hopey-changey optimism by eluding to a new world order.

I’m sure that most of those military types were scratching their heads.

It’s hard to get into West Point. You have to really, really want to go there, you have to be super-strong and whip smart, and above all, you have to love America and promise to defend it to the death. It’s not exactly a place for pansies, as well suited as a pansy might be elsewhere. Say in a pink tank top on her couch with her laptop clacking out a post on American exceptionalism for The Stir.

Yeah, you heard me. I’m a pansy. At least when stacked against a West Point graduate. But I do love America, and I will fight to the hard drive death for it.

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