Where Are My Keys?

Maybe Kimmel could beat LeBron in a game of horse..

Kimmel Beats LeBron2019s Half Court Shot - Watch more Funny Videos

The "Hoops Whisperer"..

Meet Idan Ravin.

Mr. Ravin's goal is to create so much chaos and stress on a player during workouts that the physical game becomes less cerebral and more automatic. He uses a combination of humbling psychological tactics and exhausting, unorthodox and sometimes spontaneous drills. He's been known to fire tennis balls at players while they're dribbling or make them stare straight ahead while dribbling two balls in each hand in uneven rhythms and walking from side to side.

In one particularly exhausting drill, Mr. Ravin throws 25 balls, one at a time, in different directions. The player's job is to catch them after only one bounce and then shoot.

One day this summer, as Mr. Anthony's 15-month-old son Kiyan sat in a stroller nearby, Mr. Ravin put the one-time All-Star through a drill called the "full court lay-up," in which Mr. Anthony had to run from one baseline to the other while making only two dribbles. Mr. Ravin times every drill and never hesitates to let a player know how much faster another superstar client completed it. "He knows exactly how to get into [players'] heads -- especially mine," says Mr. Anthony.

Well done, Mike Church Band..

Found this over at Michelle Malkin's blog:

Who better to fix the problem, than one of the guys who helped create it?

Instapundit has a post on a potential Number Two for Geithner.

VETTING? Nominee For Treasury’s Number Two Helped Draft Legislation Deregulating Banks “Tim Geithner’s new nominee for number two at the Treasury Department, Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us. The law that Wolin helped draft has been blamed by some critics, many of them Democrats, for easing up regulatory pressure on huge financial institutions, tangentially helping create today’s mess — and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings.”

Should be an easy job for Wolin, right?  All he has to do is put the horse he helped to set free back in the barn.

 

Another step toward Socialism, courtesy of Barney Frank..

Frank wants to set the pay of all employees at firms receiving TARP/Bailout money:

But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the "Pay for Performance Act of 2009," would impose government controls on the pay of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The purpose of the legislation is to "prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards," according to the bill's language. That includes regular pay, bonuses -- everything -- paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.

Good luck finding (and retaining!) employees that do the job effectively and efficiently.  Where is the incentive and motivation to work harder and better than the guy in the cube next to you?  The banking/financial industry will soon look like the Post Office.

Snort-worthy part of the linked piece:

Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who wrote the bill, told me its basic message is "you should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure." Grayson expects the bill to pass the House, and as we talked, he framed the issue in a way to suggest that virtuous lawmakers will vote for it, while corrupt lawmakers will vote against it.

(emphasis mine)

Yep, Rep Grayson, folks shouldn't "get rich off of public money, or from abject failure".  Kinda sounds like you and you fellow "employees" in that wonderful Organization you "work" for, doesn't it sir?

Take the wheel..

A somewhat loose usage of the word "setup"..

The tape of Joe Biden's daughter snorting coke (allegedly) was "preplanned by a man trying to get rich selling the tape".

The Vice President has been one of this country's leading warriors in the fight against drugs and helped create the Drug Czar post. But scandal exploded around him in the past few days when RadarOnline.com uncovered that a man was hawking a tape that shows a cocaine-snorting woman who looks identical to Biden's 27-year-old daughter. The seller represented that the woman is Ashley Biden and hired a Washington, D.C. law firm to help him sell the tape.

Biden has not commented and his daughter has been unreachable.

RadarOnline.com viewed the tape but did not offer to purchase it. The man who made the tape shopped it to several media outlets but did not receive any written offers, we've learned.

Now, RadarOnline.com has discovered that the woman who is alleged to be Ashley Biden was set up in an elaborate plot by her "friend." The man bought cocaine and a hidden camera and brought the cocaine to a party.

He then made sure that he was in correct position to film her when she snorted the drugs.

How is this a "setup" exactly?  Dictionary.com has "setup" defined like this:

a prearranged situation or circumstance, usually created to fool or trap someone; trick; scheme.

Here's my problem with Ms. Biden being portrayed as "setup".  It makes her sound like an innocent pawn in some nefarious plot to get her.  While it appears that the guy filming her was out to "get" her, no one held a gun to her head, and forced her to sniff a few lines of coke.  In public.  At a party.  How was she "fooled"?  How was she "trapped"?  "Tricked"?  She was merely put into a situation which she likely been in before, and acted as she has in the past.  When the cops do an undercover operation to catch hookers or "John's", are those loosely called "setups"?  No, they are called "stings".  The use of the word "setup" makes Ms. Biden sound like a victim.  Keep in mind, she used illegal drugs, at a party, in public.  She knew what she was doing.

With Michael Phelps' recent brush with a cellphone camera, one would think that those in positions of celebrity would be more careful with their surroundings.

In fact, why isn't Phelps given the same "he was setup" excuse?

Just as I don't think that party was the first time Phelps had smoked weed, I don't think this is the first time Biden has used cocaine.  Yet Phelps gets pilloried, and Biden walks, even though her drug of choice is far more dangerous.

For the record, I'm more Libertarian on the issue of drugs than I am Conservative.  I don't care if you use drugs.  Alcohol and prescription meds do just as much, if not more damage than the drugs Society deems illegal.  If you are drunk or high, and you cause an injury, or get pulled over, you'll get prosecuted.

This episode is a great example of the double-standard that exists in the Media when it comes to the coverage provided Republicans and Democrats.  I posted the other day on how the Media will cover this story.  In the story linked today, they are ignoring the fact she was snorting coke, and have portrayed her as the "victim" of a "setup".

Phelps was a stand-up guy, made the morning show rounds, and took his lumps.  I'mbetting Ashley Biden suddenly takes that safari trip through Africa she's always wanted to go on.

Did you know?

A new "decider"? +++UPDATED+++

Carl Levin (D-MI) says Obama didn't consult with Congress before firing Rick Wagoner from GM:

President Obama didn’t want any advice from Congress on the decision to ask GM CEO Rick Wagoner to resign, according to Carl Levin (D), Michigan’s senior senator.

“He didn’t ask us about it, he informed us,” Levin told reporters in a conference call Monday afternoon. “The president said he’d already decided.”

Levin said he and three other lawmakers were informed of the decision in a phone call Obama made from the Oval Office. Obama told the members of Congress that Wagoner needed to resign so that the administration could show the public it was making an effort at a fresh start with helping the auto industry, according to Levin.

Levin repeatedly described the decision as “sad,” and noted that Wagoner had given a lifetime of service to GM. He praised Wagner’s willingness to voluntarily “retire” from his post, and did not say whether he disagreed with Obama’s decision.

Obama formally announced Monday morning that he was rejecting restructuring plans submitted by GM and Chrysler because they would not make the two automakers viable. He also made it clear that Wagoner was asked to resign as a condition for GM getting more aid.

I'm curious about something.  If we gave the Auto Guys loans a few months ago, because they were "too big to fail", what happens now?  It certainly appears that GM is headed for bankruptcy, and Chrysler will follow suit if the deal with Fiat doesn't go thru.

When GM (does that stand for "Government Motors" now?) does go thru bankruptcy, why is it ok now, and it wasn't ok several months ago, before they took taxpayer money?

What did the taxpayer "get" for their loaning GM billions of dollars?  Where did those monies go?

+++UPDATE+++

As usual, the guys over at Powerline articulate this much better than I ever could.

Much has been made of Obama's firing of the Chairman of General Motors, Rick Wagoner. My guess, for what it's worth, is that this was mostly misdirection. Months ago, we and many others wrote that what General Motors needs is bankruptcy. Its legacy obligations, especially to retired UAW members, are simply unsustainable. Until those contracts are broken, bailing out GM was pouring money down the drain. It was not so much bailing out GM as it was bailing out the United Auto Workers. Obama more or less admitted as much today:

Now, while Chrysler and GM are very different companies with very different paths forward, both need a fresh start to implement the restructuring plan they developed. That may mean using our bankruptcy code as a mechanism to help them restructure quickly and emerge stronger.

Translation: I've wasted billions in taxpayer dollars. We now see that those who argued that the only path forward lies in bankruptcy were right. To distract attention from that fact, I'll fire Rick Wagoner.

It remains to be seen how significant today's actions will be in the long run. If GM goes into bankruptcy and sheds its legacy obligations and Chrysler is acquired by Fiat, and the Obama administration more or less gets out of the way, the long-term ramifications could be relatively slight. Unfortunately, however, today's power grab is only one of several fronts on which President Obama appears determined to extend the long arm of government into American business, and American life generally. How far he will succeed in doing so, and at what point the American people will rebel, are shaping up as the key questions to be answered over the coming months and years.

Visual representation..

What does a trillion dollars look like?