Apr 122009
 

Reflections on blurbs on the front page of Friday’s WSJ:

Obama urged families to take advantage of low mortgage rates by refinancing.

Gee, if this president gig doesn’t work out, Obama could get himself a career in the real estate business. Or he could work as a used car salesman. (I think it was at a 1968 Republican election rally at my college’s gymnasium that a young man amused some of us by going out on the gym floor with a big photo of Nixon, demanding to know if we would buy a used car from that man. Little did we know that we would eventually have a president who actually would make a car sales pitch from his office.)

The government said it hasn’t made progress in lowering the rate of food poisoning in the last four years.

But in the actual article, there was nothing to tell us what that rate is, and nothing to inform us as to whether or not it’s reasonable to expect it to go lower.

The CIA banned interrogations by contractors, Panetta said, part of the dismantling of Bush-era agency policy.

It isn’t much in comparison to all the bad things being done by the current administration, but here the Obama administration has done something right. Policing, tax collecting, and war-making are government functions that should never be privatized. Education, on the other hand…