As reported by ArcaMax.com, according to the word-watchers at Global Language Monitor, the media tracking and analysis firm of Austin, TX, the top 10 most used words/phrases since President Obama's inauguration are:

Gee, I'm a little surprised. I mean, some of those make sense to me, based on what I've been seeing and hearing since January 20th, just 231 days ago (can you believe it?), but others surprise me so far as a "top 10" list goes. And I guess one thing that surprises me the most is some of the words left out, rather than some of those included.

I would've thought any "top 10" list of most-used words/phrases since Obama's inauguration would include (in no particular order -- well, except for the first three, of course):

 

Being Vegetarian Shrinks Brain

Becoming a vegetarian could be good for the planet, but it's bad for your brain. Scientists at England's Oxford University have found that vegetarians are six times more likely to have brain shrinkage than those who include meats in their diets. The cause could be a lack of vitamins. Vegetarians are more likely than meat-eaters to be deficient in vitamin B12, which is mainly found in meats, and a B12 deficiency is known to cause anemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Oxford researchers examined 107 people between the age of 61 and 87 using physical exams, memory tests and brain scans. When the same volunteers were retested five years later, those with the lowest amounts of B12 had the most brain atrophy. And here's the political twist -- you knew there had to be one, right? -- more liberals than conservatives are vegetarians. Ba-rump-bump!

Obama Claims Health Care Costs Will Be Reduced
 
Obama has secured the commitments of six major trade associations to reduce the cost of health care spending by 20% over the next 10 years. The groups involved say that the success of their commitments rests on the passage of Obama's health care reforms (well, of course they do -- they had a meeting with the president and he wants universal health care - besides, maybe they're afraid he might just take their companies over, too), but no concrete methods of reducing spending have been detailed (then, uh, how do they know they can reduce health care spending by 20% over the next 10 years?). Obama predicts cost savings of $2,500 a year for a family of four. Huh? If you don't yet have a plan (there's that pesky word again -- like with GITMO) and you therefore don't know if you can realize the 20% savings, how can you say that would result in savings of $2,500 for a family of four? Just because it sounds good? Guess so. It's something like Team Obama saying all the time that they will either create X-number of jobs or save X-number of jobs. Create, I can understand, because you can check to see how many they created, but saved gives me a problem, because it seems a lot like proving a negative. You know, like, here's how many we didn't lose. Again, huh? How do you know, even if you hadn't done whatever it was that you did, that you still wouldn't have lost them -- that they might have been saved, or survived, in spite of whatever you did? Just askin' - Just sayin'.

Obama's Budget

Consider these facts, compiled by the Institute for Policy Innovation: Under the Obama budget, the nonpartisan, non-ideological Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the national debt will soar over the next 10 years from 40 percent of GDP today to 82.4 percent. Obama's budget also states that total federal borrowing will grow by $2.7 trillion this year alone, an increase of 27 percent in one year! The budget Obama proposed for this year increases federal spending by an incredible 34 percent, just compared to the previous year, with a total of $4 trillion in federal spending, the highest ever.

Pelosi's Tuna

Star-Kist Tuna's headquarters are in San Francisco, Pelosi's home district. Star-Kist is owned by Del Monte Foods and is a major contributor to Pelosi. Paul Pelosi, Nancy's husband, owns $17 million dollars of Star-Kist stock. Star-Kist is the major employer in American Samoa, employing 75% of the Samoan work force. In January 2007, when the minimum wage was increased from $5.15 to $7.25, Pelosi had American Samoa exempted from the increase so Del Monte would not have to pay the higher wage, thereby making Del Monte products less expensive than their competition's. In 2008, when the huge bailout bill was passed, Pelosi added an earmark to the final bill for $33 million dollars for an "economic development credit in American Samoa." Can we all say "payback"? Or is that "payoff"? And Pelosi has called the Bush administration corrupt? Oh, please! So, remember to serve your next Star-Kist tuna dish with ample side dishes of hubris and hypocrisy, please. 

Napolitano Again

Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recently declared that "...crossing the border illegally is not a crime per se." What? Makes me want to ask what part of "illegally" don't you understand? Or, if se didn't do it and it therefore wasn't per se, then who did it? I couldn't make this stuff up, folks. I'm just not that imaginative. Napolitano is definitely gaining on Biden for gaffes.....but I don't think she'll ever catch him. 

A little dated now, but still a goody -- my untiring communiques with my U.S. Representative and Senators

"I cannot believe you voted FOR the pork-laden Omnibus Act of 2009. At a time when our economy is struggling, at a time when President Obama has at least said he forswears earmarks, this legislation contained 8,500 - 9,000 of them, 60 percent by Democrats and 40 percent by Republicans. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.

At least President Obama was ashamed enough about going back on his promise to eliminate earmarks that he signed it into law behind closed doors instead of at a public signing. I guess even he doesn't have that much hubris.

And why pass the Omnibus bill anyway? Why not just do a CR (Continuing Resolution) to fund the government for the rest of the year? The Democrats set up the current half-year funding requirement by only appropriating enough for the first half of the FY, probably in hopes that 'their guy' would be in the White House by the time it was time to fund the second half and with the intention of loading it up with pork in the process.

Shame on all of you who voted for this abomination of an Omnibus Act and shame on President Obama for not sticking to his word. He should have taken his red Sharpie and lined the pork spending out, vetoed the bill and sent it back to Congress. Shame on all of you who voted for this overblown and 'oink-ful' legislation."
 
Guess it's a good thing I didn't feel like telling them what I really thought, huh?

AIG 90% Bonus Tax

Here's a "barn burner" I sent my U.S. Representative, Gerry Connolly, back in March. I got an automated reply thanking me for my "interest," but I haven't seen much change in his performance since then, sad to say:

"Although you're still a freshman Congressman, your voting record so far is making clear that you vote lockstep along Democratic party lines and in keeping with Speaker Pelosi's desires. Your motto seems to be -- No independent thinking or action here, thank you!

Have you ever thought that maybe you were elected to be a Blue Dog Democrat? One with a little independence, one at least sometimes more concerned about his district, his state and his country than just his party?

Your voting for the targeted and punitive AIG 90% Bonus Tax is just the latest example of your Democratic party compliant ways and was an outrageously flagrant abuse and overreaching of the Congressional taxing authority.

Not only was it ex post facto, a bill of attainder, and therefore an unconstitutional overreach by Congress, it was also Democratic party political posturing of the most obvious and egregious kind -- done to appease the public that its Congress identified with its outrage and was doing something, as well as, and more pointedly, to obfuscate how many Democrats (at least Senator Dodd, Secretary Geithner, and some senior White House staffer, if not the President himself) were involved in allowing the AIG bonuses in the first place. You know, tucked away in that legislation which nobody read but Democrats produced and rushed to overwhelmingly vote for? Haste does sometimes make waste, or at least cause problems, doesn't it?

It's one thing to cast a populous vote "for the people," to symbolize the outrage of Americans over bonuses being paid to the very people who caused their companies to collapse and necessitated the use of taxpayer money to bail them out. But it's quite another thing to connive to vote as "cover" and "distraction" for mistakes your party made, and still quite another thing yet to ensure that such a vote is at least constitutional. You were elected to not only do the popular thing, your party's thing, but also the right thing, the legal thing, the constitutional thing. Your oath of office says so.

This is not a time in our country when simply going along to get along will suffice, Congressman. Increasingly, the American people are dissatisfied with their Congress, and not only the two major political parties but also individual Senators and Representatives are being tracked and examined. Accountability is not now expected of only your party but also of you personally.

We are watching, Congressman Connolly, and counting on you to do only the right things."

Dear Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charlie Rangel, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Chuck Schumer, et al.:

I've come to the point now where I'm wondering if you've all just gone stark, raving mad there in Washington, D.C. I just can't come up with any other plausible explanation for a federal government so unaccountably run amok. I mean, I want my government and my country to be successful, so I keep trying to believe the best of you, but you keep doing things that make me believe the worst.

Did some clever and nefarious terrorist - oh, sorry, "man-made disaster" - group conduct their own "overseas contingency operation" and sneak something into the White House and Capitol Hill drinking water? Or is there some odorless and colorless airborne vapor they've found a way to infuse into the already rarefied air in and around both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue?

Something has got to explain (logically and rationally would be nice) how you people think we can keep on spending, spending, spending for every bright and shiny new idea you come up with, with little to no regard for how much debt it all is heaping on this country and its current and future generations.

If any big or small business in this country, or any American family sitting around their kitchen table, tried to run their business or budget for their family like you idiots in Washington are running the federal government, they would be out of business and/or maybe going to jail in no time. I think that's what should happen, starting in 2010 and finishing in 2012 - you all need to be put "out of business" and some of you should probably go to jail as well.

And, of course, no businesses, much less America's families, can just print more money like you can - and have - and are. Have none of you, or your vaunted economic "experts," ever heard of "inflation"?

You have already run deficit spending up into the trillions of dollars over the next ten years, like it's some new national credit card account you just qualified for in the mail. You've passed a huge stimulus plan, which hasn't stimulated much of anything so far, and probably won't until about when the recession would have probably begun recovering on its own. You've passed a huge budget, filled to the brim with pork barrel projects of exactly the kind Obama said he would never tolerate - but did. You've bailed out companies which should have been allowed to fail, while letting others, perhaps deservedly, go down the tubes. You've said those you've saved with billions of our taxpayer dollars were "too big to fail," yet some of them you sought to "save" have failed or are failing anyway. And where's the return on investment for all that? Will the American taxpayer ever see any return, or are all those billions just "sunk costs"?

And what about the billions you can't even account for? Like about 80 billion in TARP funds. Just gone, eh? Poof! "Oh well, too bad, so sad, our bad." Is that it? I'm sorry, but that's at least misfeasance, or gross negligence and/or downright criminal. Somebody should be going to prison. Bernie Maddoff is, so why not someone in the government? After all, $80 billion "unaccounted for" is more than Maddoff ripped off. Do you know what would happen to the "average" person if they worked for an employer who discovered at the end of the day that only $80 was in the till, instead of the $100 which should be there? Yeah, you bet - that employee would at least be fired, if not prosecuted. How are you guys any different? The American people are YOUR employers and we want to know where OUR money went, and is going. 

Your governmental track record on running financial businesses and auto companies in particular has been, well, uh, lackluster at best and outright inept at worst. Tell me again who did or did not know what about the AIG bonuses and when? You know, those bonuses, the amount of which has grown over time from something like $170 million to over $430 million now? Do you people even know what's really going on? Well, that's what we pay you for, you know.

Maybe, instead of trying to run outfits for which you have no expertise and no qualifications, while firing CEOs, talking down Big Business and trying to influence federal bankruptcy judges to favor Big Union over other stakeholders, you should stick to just trying to run the government itself more efficiently.

You set aside billions of taxpayer dollars for something euphemistically called "health care reform," but without any plan for how you're going to actually achieve that health care reform. Cart before the horse comes to mind, just like with closing Guantanamo without any plan for what to do with the detainees. And now it comes out that you're considering inventing and/or increasing taxes on the half of Americans who actually pay all the taxes to provide "universal health care" for 40 million or so who don't have health care coverage, to include taxing the taxpaying public's health care to help pay for it! Are you NUTS?! Or are you just that drunk with the power of being in control of both the White House and Congress?

And you incredulously claim not to understand what the TEA Party protests were about April 15th? Unbelievable. Well, wait until July 4th. Then, it may begin to dawn on even you out-of-touch, so-called Washington elites. Actually, elitists would be more like it.

Despite the denigrating gay jokes many so-called "news" commentators and snarky "celebrities" made about the "teabaggers," TEA stands for "Taxed Enough Already." With estimates ranging from 360,000 to over 750,000, "ordinary Americans" turned out in a truly grassroots demonstration in thousands of communities all across America for the TEA Party protests, and you ain't seen nothin' yet. And if those protesters thought they were "Taxed Enough Already" in mid-April, just consider what they're probably thinking by now. Yet you still persist in dreaming up new things for which to spend and tax more and more? Incredible! It's like adding insult to injury. Either you just aren't listening, or you just don't care. Either way, you're not adequately responding to and representing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans and may sooner-than-later find yourselves looking for other employment, if not worse.

But, I want to give you all the benefit of any doubt, so please just tell me that it actually is something in the drinking water or something in the air which is making all of you act so crazy - irresponsible - unaccountable - detached - disingenuous - corrupt - and maybe even criminal. Any of you? Anyone? You know, sometimes insanity is a valid defense. Not always, but sometimes - even when the inmates are obviously in charge of the asylum.