According to Amazon, my new CD Goldfinger is a "hot new release in easy listening". Which sounds somewhat oxymoronic to me. But, on closer inspection, I see it's not that hot - just sneaking into the Top Ten behind Charles Aznavour and Paul Anka, but ahead of Henry Mancini and Burt Bacharach, which isn't to be sniffed at. Goldfinger is also available at CD Baby and, of course, via the Steyn store.
~As I've said, Obama's modus operandi is to penalize the lawful and incentivize the lawless. That's why, for his post-Ferguson "racial healing" confab at the White House, he invited race baiter and tax cheat the Reverend Al Sharpton. More ambitiously, mere days after his unconstitutional unilateral revocation of US immigration law, the bureaucracy required to process it is already hiring:
Department of Homeland Security officials wasted little time in ramping up for President Obama's amnesty, posting 1,000 job openings the day after his announcement and announcing it already has space for hundreds of employees at a new location in Arlington, Virginia — an indication that it had laid its plans well before Mr. Obama's announcement.
And even though Mr. Obama said his policy is temporary, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is hiring the employees for permanent positions, at salaries of up to $157,000 a year, according to the job postings listed on the official federal jobs website.
Anyone who's ever been stuck in the sclerotic dungheap of the "legal" immigration system will raise a mirthless titter at that announcement. As the appalling case of Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death for "apostasy" in Sudan and abandoned to her fate by the useless State Department, made plain, even essentially non-discretionary immigration applicants such as the spouses of US citizens take this grotesque dysfunctional bureaucracy years to process. Because that's just the way it is.
But suddenly, when it's advantageous to King Barack to fast-track a bazillion scofflaws, the torpid immigration bureaucracy rouses itself and opens up the express check-in.
I'm so bored listening to Congressional Republicans explain why it would be grossly imprudent to make either symbolic or substantive objections to this lawlessness - whether refusing the new Sovereign their podium for the State of the Union, or using the power of the purse to defund these new bureaucratic positions. This is a textbook example of what "self-government" has dwindled down to in America - a one-man legislature in the Oval Office making laws on the basis of caprice and political advantage, in alliance with an unelectable, unaccountable Permanent Bureaucracy that knows where its own interests lie.
~Later today, I'll be keeping my weekly date with Hugh Hewitt, live coast to coast across America at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific. I do hope you'll tune in if you're near a radio.