A Hands-On President–On Your Wallet, That Is | Power Line: "One would think that by now, even the stupid know better–after all, where was all that money supposed to come from? Michael Ramirez explains:"
Read More......
Attention, Protestors: You're Probably Part of the 1% - Yahoo! News: "In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?Doofusses. Ingrateful, innumerate doofusses. Read More......
$34,000.
That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it's $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000."
Libya Finds "Nuclear Materials" - Ricochet.com: "An update clarifies that they were "nuclear materials," not nuclear weapons. It's hard to say what they found from this, but this could challenge a few conventional ideas--among them that Qaddafi had abandoned his nuclear program in response to seeing what happened to Saddam, that he posed no strategic threat to his neighbors, and that the IAEA can find its rear end with two hands and then distinguish it from a hole in the ground."Not. Read More......
Government inflated the college loan bubble -- but Obama isn’t fixing it - NYPOST.com: "At best, it’s a band-aid solution. The real problem is that we’ve been running a higher education bubble, one that -- like the real-estate bubble -- has been pumped up by cheap government money. Since 1999, student loan debt has increased by 511%, while disposable income has increased by only 73%.Dear OWS doofuses: O Duce isn't here to help you. He's laughing up his sleeve at your useful idiocy.
That’s because when the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. College is no exception. Tuition has been increasing much faster than disposable income, and families -- believing that a college education is a can’t-lose investment, much as they used to think houses were -- have been making up the difference with debt. After all, we’re told, student loan debt is “good debt,” because a college degree guarantees more earnings.
Tell it to the Occupy Wall Street protesters, many of whom note that they’re deep in debt for fancy degrees that didn’t get them jobs."
Articles: Self-Reliance for Dunces: "I think it's a good day when anyone learns something about human nature -- no matter how late in the game.What a riot! H/T Glenn. Read More......
(1) Hand out free stuff and ever increasing number of moochers will come.
(2) There are "professional homeless people."
(3) Those sanctimoniously protesting the greed of others fight as hard as anyone to keep their own special privileges even if those are just organic beet salad with goat cheese.
Three more good tips to put in your growing How to Be Self Reliant folder."
Revolutions: Because it's Friday: Anti-Gravity Slinky: "Here's an interesting quirk of Physics: if you hold a Slinky spring-toy in mid-air and then drop it, the base of the Slinky becomes momentarily suspended in mid-air, apparently defying gravity:"Well, OK ... not quite. But it's fun anyway... But you have to click through to see it.
Read More......
Belmont Club » The Tiffin Party: "But though the names may never coincide, the concepts do. Ross Douthat of the NYT, though he never uses the ‘Tea Party’ word, clearly echoes some of their ideas in his latest opinion piece, probably because they are so obvious as to be almost self-evident.Yes. Why isn't the world beating a path to Greece's door? Except perhaps to try to get their money back... Read More......The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this “success” can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door. …The similarity of the Indian response to the condition of overgrowth in bureaucracy to that of the American Tea Party calls to mind the principle that “form follows function”. Similar problems will create similar solutions."
The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.
Was This News Story Scrubbed? Vote On It! | Power Line: "This, though, is the most interesting thing about the Strib article: its ending has changed. When I read it online last night, it ended with an anecdote about a metro transit bus that was blocked by the marchers. That concluding paragraph has now been deleted from the article, but its substance can be recreated with a Google search:The shock never ends... Read More......… Nicollet Mall, they blocked a northbound Metro Transit bus, but the driver was unperturbed. “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m on the clock either way.”Heh. The irony is palpable. That driver’s union leaders were participating in the demonstration that blocked his bus, but he didn’t care. No skin off his nose: he is on the clock either way! That pretty well sums up the overpaid, lethargic public sector. The reporter who wrote the story couldn’t possibly have missed the point."
Mock Turtleneck . . . Mock President - Ricochet.com: "I thought this was too funny to pass up.Read More......
And spot on.
Enjoy the weekend."
James O'Keefe Strips The New York Times Bare Naked, and It Ain't a Pretty Sight: "Rosen and Shirky also discuss how the Times helped the Occupy Wall Street movement and how the media could help defeat Perry and Bachmann, who they specifically tarred as "crazy".Go James. RTWT. Read More......
Having been stripped bare by O'Keefe, the defenders of legacy media have circled the wagons, claiming Shirky was not a consultant to the Times (Rosen is a regular contributor).
Whether Shirky is a paid consultant or not, he is clearly influential by dint of the heavy references and links to his work in the Times. According to Google's search engine, he has been referenced by the Times more than 5,300 times with a copious numbers of links to his work.
On his blog, Rosen offers a rambling set of explanations for his obvious and dishonest bias masquerading as "journalism".
And how did Rosen publicly react to this particular instance of classic investigative journalism? As you might have expected: he called O'Keefe a terrorist.
Which is about how you'd figure someone who writes for the Times to spin being caught red-handed. And I do mean red.
Whatever these pencil-necked twits are teaching, it ain't journalism."
Belmont Club » The End of the End of History: "What went wrong? One line of thinking is that the project itself created the crisis. By growing like a tumor the European superstate stifled growth. It malinvested in “social programs” which produced no return, only sullen dependencies like Greece and whole classes of people who felt entitled to guaranteed incomes in both old age and early youth. According to this analysis, the EU is dying like the dinosaurs, of gigantism. Richard Epstein of New York University does his best to convince NPR that ordinary life holds up the world in despite of the best efforts by planners to enlist its fruits in the Great Projects."
A unified theory of left-wing causes | Power Line: "Steven Den Beste comments on Steve Hayward’s population bomb post:Run, do not walk to read Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" if you haven't. If you've read it then you need to also read Black's "War Against the Weak". Read More......Isn’t it interesting that no matter what the current global crisis is, according to leftists, the solution is always the same: a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite, and mass transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations.Yeah, I think Jonah Goldberg wrote a good book with this thesis."
That’s what they want to do about global warming. It’s what they wanted to do about overpopulation. It’s what they wanted to do about endangered species.
Xtranormal Explains The European Non-Bailout Best - With A Cartoon | ZeroHedge: "While it is not the bears doing the explaining in this latest all too realistic summary of the European non-bailout, it is the next best thing."
Some amusing weekend observations from TTMYGH's Grant Williams: "The EFSF is basically an empty box filled with promises of money - many of them from the very people who are most likely to need to borrow that same money. Should they need to borrow the money, they won’t be able to make good on their promises so there will be less money for them to borrow. Now the brain trust running Europe have decided, in their collective wisdom, to apply leverage to the non-existent money in the empty box that they have yet to actually borrow, so it can backstop even more of the hundreds of billions of Euros of sovereign debt issued by countries whose finances are in such dire straits that they either require the kind of robust growth that is hardly likely to materialize any time soon or the forgiveness by the holders of that debt of a large part of it.... Of course, granting Greece the package they did this past week, the Eurocrats have rather incredibly found yet another corner into which to back themselves. You can hardly champion the ‘One Europe’ manifesto on the one hand but then, as the next country lines up at the counter, declare “No soup for you!” - but that seems to be the ‘plan’ at this stage."Read More......
And I do mean "high" at the "Occupy" "protest" in front of St. Paul's in London. What else would you possibly expect?
RTWT. Read More......Reporting From St. Paul’s | Power Line: "A key activity is sitting around smoking joints and knocking back lager. Complaints circulate about drunk people urinating on the steps of the cathedral and on each other’s tents. It becomes clear that undisciplined behaviour is affecting the camp’s image and driving some of its residents away. Among the professional protesters, those from the anarchist group Anonymous form a tight knot of tents and are distinguishable by the plastic Guy Fawkes masks they carry and sometimes wear to obscure their faces.... The reporter confirms that this is a Potemkin protest. Thermal imaging has indicated that only one-tenth of the tents that protesters have pitched are occupied overnight. The reporter says that his tent touches five others, and he has never seen anyone enter or leave three of them.
The only uniformity in the camp is that just about everyone, when not inhaling marijuana, smokes cigarettes (roll-ups, of course). The mornings are a cacophony of hacking coughs."
One consistent feature of these gatherings of leftists is squalor...
Herman Cain sounds off on race, a debate win, and the need to simplify government | Byron York | Politics | Washington Examiner: ""Here's my theory," said Cain, leaning forward in his chair. "Let's talk about the current field of Republican candidates. They can't go after Obama as hard as I can because they're not black. I think that, either subconsciously or deliberately, they are being coached to not say it a certain way, that you're going to be labeled a racist and the liberal media is going to try to bring you down, because they still want to protect their precious Obama."Yup. Read More......
Cain believes his audiences are a different story. "The voters, they hear my message first, not 'He could take it to Obama,' because they are more concerned about stopping Obama than taking it to Obama," he explained. "This is what I'm hearing and this is what I'm feeling. And the race card is going to be short-lived if Herman Cain gets the nomination."
But wouldn't liberals and Democrats still find a racially-based way to attack Cain? They certainly found a way to attack Clarence Thomas, the black, conservative Supreme Court justice.
"They're going to come after me more viciously than they would a white candidate," Cain responded. "You're right. Clarence Thomas. And so, to use Clarence Thomas as an example, I'm ready for the same high-tech lynching that he went through -- for the good of this country." Cain smiled broadly. "I'm ready for the same high-tech lynching."
Great news: Obama’s student-loan changes puts $8 in borrower pockets per month « Hot Air: "The president understands that he’s not dealing with people who took out loans for math degrees.This comment is on an analysis that Obama's hyped student loan interest reduction will save the average progressive education victim $8/month. A trip to Quiznos as another commenter put it.
myrenovations on October 27, 2011 at 10:13 AM"
1. antonNigel debating the TOTUS would be an absolute hoot!
Since we have broken the rule about electing foreigners President why don’t we take a stab at getting Nigel the job? He seems to have a mush better grasp on things that the current Resident, I would bet that he would do just fine.
October 26, 2011 - 8:27 am Link to this Comment
Instapundit » Blog Archive » EUROPE: Merkel wants ‘permanent’ supervision of Greece, warns of war. Wait, this sounds familiar s…: "EUROPE: Merkel wants ‘permanent’ supervision of Greece, warns of war. Wait, this sounds familiar somehow. . .Read More......
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 11:21 pm"
Inflation Concerns Go Beyond Rise in Consumer Price Index | Mercatus: "What’s troubling is that the goods in the earliest stages of production jumped the most, which might foreshadow increases in the inflation rate for the goods in the CPI down the road.Read More......
Specifically, year-to-year increases for three areas in particular might be cause for concern: Finished goods are up almost 7%, intermediate goods are up 10.5%, and crude goods are up nearly 21%.
In a paper I wrote last year entitled “Why Inflation Matters,” I noted that moderate to high inflation is one of the surest ways to cause havoc in an otherwise productive economy and to undermine most people’s standard of living, especially those in the middle and lower class and those on fixed incomes.
As such, even if high inflation is not an immediate threat, the explosion in the deficit and debt over the last few years provides a reason to remind ourselves of the problems it can cause."
Cain’s Yellow Flowers - By Jonah Goldberg - The Corner - National Review Online: "Katrina – Thanks for the explainer on Cain’s smoking ad. Can you get me the Cliff’s Notes on this one now?"
Math Fun with President Obama - By Peter Kirsanow - The Corner - National Review Online: "But even if the president meant to say $5,500, his math continues to pose some challenges. According to the IRS, a total of 235,413 taxpayers earned more than $1 million last year. If each “was willing to pay $[5,]500 extra to help the country,” that would generate only $1.3 billion in revenue — approximately what the federal government spends every three hours. Wouldn’t it be just as patriotic for President Obama to turn off the federal spigot for three hours and dedicate the savings to funding those 400,000 jobs?You voted for an innumerate doofus for President. My children thank you for the burdens he is piling on them.
The president at least deserves credit for finally bringing down the cost of all those jobs his administration “saves or creates.” Saving 400,000 jobs at a cost of $1.3 billion comes to just $3,250 per job — far less than the $250,000 per each job allegedly created by the 2009 stimulus bill.
But wait, that means that each of the 400,000 jobs will only pay $ 1.60 an hour — far below the lawful minimum wage. And that’s without benefits. Aren’t those the kind of jobs Americans won’t do?"
Instapundit » Blog Archive » NO, NO, YOU’RE ONLY SUPPOSED TO BRING THE PITCHFORKS TO OPPONENTS OF THE REGIME! Protesters Occupy …: "NO, NO, YOU’RE ONLY SUPPOSED TO BRING THE PITCHFORKS TO OPPONENTS OF THE REGIME! Protesters Occupy GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s Connecticut Front Lawn. “Occupy Wall Street protesters took a field trip from Zuccotti Park on Saturday morning, all the way to the wealthy suburban enclave of New Canaan, Conn., where they took their anger at income and tax disparity to GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s front lawn.”Read More......
I have to admit that In the land of the free, they tax me but not G.E.! is sorta catchy. No word on what President Goldman Sachs thought about this, but I note that the group involved, Working Families, is an offshoot of the ACORN group that was disbanded after a teen-prostitute scandal...
UPDATE: “Glenn Beck Gets Results.” Heh.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:37 pm"
The Week in Review -- October 22 - Ricochet.com: "* Vice President Joe Biden caused a stir after delivering a speech at the Capitol on Wednesday in which he said that rape and murder would continue to rise if Republicans block President Obama’s new jobs bill. The White House dodged a public relations bullet, however, when Press Secretary Jay Carney noted that Biden’s remarks were not meant to support the American Jobs Act, but rather to promote awareness of National Mental Health Week.They're all pretty good. Worth a read if you need a chuckle. And who doesn't fit in that category lately? Read More......
* In a sign of the growing complexity of the Republican presidential race, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain now have a combined total of five positions on abortion."
What Do Samuel Alito Sr. and Mario Rubio Have In Common? | Power Line: "The Post’s story had the paper’s own Jennifer Rubin hopping mad. She points out, among other things, that according to the Miami Herald, “Rubio’s office has told both the Washington Post, the St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald that his parents came to the United States prior to Castro taking power. And he has said it more than once.” So the Post’s would-be scoop wasn’t just irrelevant, but wrong."But John has a howler of an ending:
Still, it is good to know that America’s reporters haven’t completely forgotten how to do research. Given the lack of interest they have shown in Barack Obama’s early life–that is, his life before 2004–to say nothing of his father’s history–and the studiousness with which they avoided learning anything at all about John Edwards, I thought maybe they had given up researching presidential candidates altogether.RTWT. Read More......
Ron Paul: "Blame The Fed For The Financial Crisis" | ZeroHedge: "An OpEd from the only sane person in Washington, written for the Wall Street JournalNow click through and read the other six paragraphs before you go back to watching Dancing with the Stars.
Blame the Fed for the Financial Crisis
The Fed fails to grasp that an interest rate is a price, the price of time. Attempting to manipulate that price is as destructive as any other government price control
To know what is wrong with the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the nature of money. Money is like any other good in our economy that emerges from the market to satisfy the needs and wants of consumers. Its particular usefulness is that it helps facilitate indirect exchange, making it easier for us to buy and sell goods because there is a common way of measuring their value. Money is not a government phenomenon, and it need not and should not be managed by government. When central banks like the Fed manage money they are engaging in price fixing, which leads not to prosperity but to disaster.
The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank's creation in 1913. It pumps new money into the financial system to lower interest rates and spur the economy. Adding new money increases the supply of money, making the price of money over time—the interest rate—lower than the market would make it. These lower interest rates affect the allocation of resources, causing capital to be malinvested throughout the economy. So certain projects and ventures that appear profitable when funded at artificially low interest rates are not in fact the best use of those resources.
Eventually, the economic boom created by the Fed's actions is found to be unsustainable, and the bust ensues as this malinvested capital manifests itself in a surplus of capital goods, inventory overhangs, etc. Until these misdirected resources are put to a more productive use—the uses the free market actually desires—the economy stagnates.
The great contribution of the Austrian school of economics to economic theory was in its description of this business cycle: the process of booms and busts, and their origins in monetary intervention by the government in cooperation with the banking system. Yet policy makers at the Federal Reserve still fail to understand the causes of our most recent financial crisis. So they find themselves unable to come up with an adequate solution."
The EFSF As A Hedge Fund | ZeroHedge: "So, your business plan is to go and buy stuff that no one wants, that is unlikely to ever be in position to repay the debt, and you aren't even price sensitive? The EFSF guys are getting very excited, they can tell this investor is on the hook, and now all they have to do is reel them in. They explain that it is even better than that. A couple of the big guarantors are in trouble themselves, but by buying their bonds we help ensure that they don't default. Investor, now wishing they were anywhere but at this pitch, frowns, rubs hand over face, and asks for clarity. Are you really telling me that some of the assets you purchase will be debt of the countries that are providing the guaranty? The EFSF can smell a sale, and explains once again it is even better than that, and reminds the investor that not only will they be buying bonds of some of the countries that are providing the guarantees, but they will also be buying equity stakes in the banks of those countries.And if you're having trouble understanding the glory of our financial and political genius overlords by reading about it, there's always this:
The investor now just can't resist and asks what is going to happen if someone defaults. For the first time EFSF is a bit confused. They had been told this investor was a smart guy and they cannot understand why he would be asking such a dumb question."
Dear, God, please grant Steve his prediction:
Jobs on Obama’s Jobs Performance | Power Line: "This is prologue to the story reported today that the forthcoming Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, who naturally supported liberal Democrats (and for some reason put Al Gore on Apple’s board) ripped Obama when they met. From the Puffington Host:But O Duce thinks he's making all the right choices.“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.Jobs clearly had no clue that he was essentially asking Obama to become a Republican, since reining in the regulatory state and stiffing the key power base of the Democratic Party amounts to asking Democrats to give up their reason for being. Did Jobs really not know that the public school system is run for the convenience of the teachers? Does he really think the union would sit still for working longer hours and being open 11 months a year?"
Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.
Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883 - Technology Review: "Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations.That's interesting. Now back to puerile name calling and Jersey Shore. Just like O Duce wants...
Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: "So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event."
A sobering thought."
Ten Things to Keep In Mind for 2012 - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online: "With an eye on 2012, here are ten important but sometimes counterintuitive facts to keep in mind:Click through and read the links referenced in the list. It's a serious dose of reality. Read More......
1. There is no austerity.
2. There was no deregulation.
3. You can’t trust Republicans on spending.
4. Wall Street loves Democrats.
5. People who voted for Barack Obama on civil-liberties grounds are fools.
6. If you aren’t for massive entitlement reform, you’re for massive tax hikes.
7. But taxing the rich won’t close the deficit.
8. The housing bubble was largely a political creation.
9. Well-meaning politicians are just as dangerous as self-serving ones.
10. There’s no way out of this jam without big cuts to popular programs.
The real debate isn’t whether to cut, only what and how much and when. (My preferred answers: almost everything, a lot, now.)"
Nassim Taleb On #OccupyWallStreet And His Updated Views On The Global Banking System | ZeroHedge: "There was a time when Nassim Taleb media appearances were a daily thing. Then he decided to take a sabbatical from the public's eye, and literally fell off the face of the planet. And while over the past year or so, he has gradually resurfaced, his extended discussions on various topics are still almost as rare as a double digit move in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Tonight he broke his vow of silence, and joined Bloomberg TV's in discussing the "Occupy Wall Street" protest, which he expects to devolve into class warfare, as well as his view of the global banking system. And an interesting tangential discussion to develop is his observation of applying the principles of the "Hammurabi's Code" to the banking system."
Occupy Wall Street protesters said yesterday that packs of brazen crooks within their ranks have been robbing their fellow demonstrators blind, making off with pricey cameras, phones and laptops — and even a hefty bundle of donated cash and food.Good God. Yup, just like the Tea Party. Well if the Tea Party was filled with puerile drug soaked doofusses that is... Read More......
“Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” said Nan Terrie, 18, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale.
“I had my Mac stolen — that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was . . . get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!”
LOL!
Finally: Herman Cain sings John Lennon songs — about pizza « Hot Air: "An instant classic via the Omaha World-Herald, which dug up this ham-tastic 20-year-old performance at the Omaha Press Club as part of its look back at Cain’s years in Nebraska working for Godfather’s Pizza. Watching it, two things are clear. One: Lennon’s ode to possessions-less brotherhood actually makes a hell of a corporate jingle. And two: The inauguration ball is going to be amazing.This is great! I feel another contribution coming on...
Lyrics as transcribed by Dave Weigel are printed below the clip. I admit, I got a little misty at the line about making a lot of dough."
Former Fed colleagues praise Cain - POLITICO.com Print View: "“Inflation was always the big bugaboo,” Jennings said at the time. “And when it comes to monetary policy, he was an inflation hawk. I’ll tell you, that’s the most conservative bunch of guys I’ve ever met.”Cain-mentum.
Both inside and outside the boardroom, former colleagues say, it’s not hard to see how Cain’s easy leadership style translates into momentum on the campaign trail.
“My recollection of Herman in the boardroom is exactly what you see in his public persona now,” said Robinson. “And that is an open, humorous, questioning kind of guy who, underneath the current, was dead serious. But on the surface he got along with people beautifully.”"
As near as I can tell, only about 25,000 people in the world have watched this on the combination of YouTube and Vimeo. If you take that as a percentage of the U.S. population, that means that less than 0.01% of us have watched it. And even lower if you consider these video sites as a worldwide resource.
You need to just drop everything and WTWT (click here to watch -- embedding has been disabled for this video). H/T ZeroHedge. By the end you'll realize that the fact that so few people know about this pretty much explains the general state of ignorance not to mention the OWC doofusses:
Kyle Bass @ AmeriCatalyst 2010 | 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind' - YouTube: "As Founder and Managing Partner of Hayman Advisors, LP, J. Kyle Bass has proven himself to be one of the most well respected hedge fund managers and forecasters in the global investment community. Renowned for his conviction as well as his investment savvy, Bass hit the headlines with his prescient trades in shorting the subprime mortgage market in 2007. Behind the headlines was one of the most unique and rigorous investment methodologies ever used in mortgage-related investing. Since that time, Bass has been one of the most proactive investors in Washington and abroad, warning about unsustainable fiscal deficits poised to destabilize the global economy and markets with a magnitude similar to the 1930s.Read More......
Todd Groome and Toni Moss spoke with Kyle at AmeriCatalyst 2010 in Austin in September, asking him about his thoughts on prospects for housing market recovery, current policy issues and national debt implications, global debt imbalances and his perspectives on the influence of policy on the timing, sequence and magnitude of potential sovereign defaults and debt restructurings."
Mort Zuckerman is waking up a bit. You can guess who he's talking about.
Unprompted he offers this by way of contrast:
The Weekend Interview with Mortimer Zuckerman: The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire - WSJ.com: "Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.This is not a mandatory but certainly an interesting read. Perhaps most interesting is the following:
Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. "I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan," says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff's release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.
"Reagan surprised me," says Mr. Zuckerman. "He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts."
'I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him," continues Mr. Zuckerman."
Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, "there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country." Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, "The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he's not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing."They'd be completely brain dead if they said anything else now wouldn't they? Read More......
Video: OWS meltdown star a Columbia grad student … with a trust fund « Hot Air: "Yeah, I know, you’re shocked, shocked to discover that one of the viral-video stars of the Occupy Movement is a dilettante with a trust fund. Tina couldn’t decide whether Edward T. Hall III (no, not kidding about the name) was a master satirist or just completely insane, but after Larry O’Connor and Breitbart TV’s investigation, I’m willing to concede that Hall III isn’t going to challenge Jonathan Swift in the near future:"
Friday Night Lights(out): Bank Failures in Slow Motion | Douglas E. French - YouTube: "Presented by Doug French at the 2010 Mises Institute Supporters Summit: "The Economic Recovery: Washington's Big Lie." Recorded in Auburn, Alabama; 8 October 2010."
Instapundit » Blog Archive » DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: Sharpton: “If you won’t get the jobs bill done in the suite, we will get…: "DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: Sharpton: “If you won’t get the jobs bill done in the suite, we will get the jobs bill done in the street!”Mild mannered no more. Heh.
Up yours, Al, you pathetic Jew-hating demagogue. And together with the anti-semitism we’ve seen elsewhere, this kind of talk is making me ready to call for a temporary suspension of Godwin’s Law. But beware of other legal issues.
Related: Nazis and Communists Throw Their Support Behind Occupy Wall Street Movements.
Also: Video: Occupy Portland Protesters Sing…”F*ck the USA”.
And: Obama Campaign Seeks To Capitalize On Anti-Wall Street Anger. President Goldman Sachs thinks the protesters will be useful. So what does that make them?
And where’s ThinkProgress?
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:56 pm"
Check out Burt Folsom's "Myth of the Robber Barons". Then ask yourself if it was accidental that they never told you the truth about James J. Hill. Read More......Instapundit » Blog Archive » JOHN STOSSEL: Government Is The Biggest Job Killer. I guess Obama doesn’t know that the Transcon…: "Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.Incredible.
Where have we heard that recently?
The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.
The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific — all those rail lines we learned about in history class — milked the taxpayer and then went broke.
One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:30 am"
Why Interest Rates Tell Lies About Inflation, Growth And Just About Everything Else - Forbes: "Yes, interest rates tell us the truth about ourselves, and that’s exactly the problem. You see, we don’t want to hear the truth about ourselves. We can’t handle the truth. And like any dysfunctional system that can’t handle the truth, we need an enabler.I can't recommend this one strongly enough. A short but strong RTWT. Read More......
Our chief enabler is our own central bank. When credit is short because capital accumulation is not occuring, our central bank creates credit out of thin air. When savings rates rise, but savers hoard, rather than invest, the central bank pushes its newly created money out of short-run credit markets and out into the whole yield curve. They don’t try to deal with the underlying problem, which is that holding high cash balances are a rational response to anti-wealth creation policies and regime uncertainty. They simply declare the existence of an unexplained “liquidity preference” because of a lack of Keynesian “animal spirits” and tell us that the only way to get out of a “liquidity trap” is easy money, and then they rev up the printing presses once again, as they are doing now.
But if large businesses are holding on to money, they have a reason to do so. And it’s not “greed.” Greed doesn’t cause you to save money in cash accounts yielding nearly zero percent. Fear does."
Obama Channels FDR–Again | Power Line: "Liberals who hoped that Obama would be the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt, delivering a new New Deal, were ironically right all along. As we know from the increasing volume of revisionist research like Amity Shlaes’s book The Forgotten Man or Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly or Burt Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? (just to name three book-length treatments of the subject), the New Deal helped put the “great” in the Great Depression. And Obama seems to be trying to emulate most of FDR’s same mistakes.He's an ignorant, self-absorbed jack*ss just like virtually the entire leadership of his
One of them concerns the uncertainty the economy faces right now with regard to regulations, tax rates, trade policy, and the nation’s fiscal future. At the most recent meeting of Obama’s private sector jobs council (the one chaired by GE CEO Jeff Immelt), at least one member mentioned business uncertainty to Obama, and he waved it off, mentioning a recent New York Times article he’d read saying this factor was badly exaggerated. (Irwin Stelzer has a great takedown of Obama’s jobs council up at the Weekly Standard.)"
Cronyism You Can’t Script - By Andrew Stiles - The Corner - National Review Online: "Even for the Obama administration, today’s news dump ($1.3 trillion deficit, the demise of the CLASS Act, and war in Uganda) is something to behold. On top of everything, the White House has released its list of major campaign bundlers for the third quarter of the year.Read More......
One name in particular warrants a mention.
Steve Spinner, who served as a Obama fundraiser in 2008, was also an adviser for the Department of Energy loans program responsible for the Solyndra debacle. As it turns out, he was also married to a partner at the law firm representing Solyndra during its loan application.
But despite signing an ethics agreement in which he pledged not to involve himself in any negotiations regarding the Solyndra loan, a series of e-mails reveal that Spinner was rather intimately involved in the negotiations and was advocating on behalf of the company."
Instapundit: "JOSEPH STIGLITZ’S SWITCH IN TIME:There's nothing derogatory I can say right now that shouldn't be drowned out by your loud cussing... Read More......Speaking before a group of protesters in Zuccotti Park, Nobel economics prize winner Joseph Stiglitz urged on the crowd, telling them they are “right to be indignant.” Professor Stiglitz goes on to explain, correctly in my view, that we have a financial system of socialized losses and privatized gains.
What the good professor fails to mention is only a few years ago, for what I understand was a nice paycheck, he was denying this very fact. In 2004, along with Jonathan and Peter Orszag, Professor Stiglitz wrote a paper for Fannie Mae in which he “estimated” that the “risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero.” The paper goes on to argue “that the expected cost to the government of providing an explicit government guarantee on $1 trillion in GSE debt is just $2 million.” Now I understand his Nobel is in economics, not math, but $2 million sounds no where near the actual cost so far of $160 billion.
Certainly there was a time where some could be forgiven for not really understanding the nature of Fannie and Freddie, but this was published after Freddie’s accounting scandals came to light and while Fannie itself was being investigated.
So yes, you do have a right to be indignant. Especially at those “academics” who sold their work to the highest bidder defending the system and now pretend to be shocked at how everything turned out."
» The Email Archive of the #OccupyWallStreet Movement: Anarchists, Socialists, Unions, Democrats and Their Plans - Big Government: "On August 10, 2011, the hacker group “Anonymous” announced that it would join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. That’s what sparked my interest in monitoring #OccupyWallStreet.In Britain, they call environmentalists "watermelons" since they are green on the outside and red on the inside.
I reached out to a colleague and asked if he would be interested in studying the protest with me. At first, it seemed disorganized, and we believed it would only be a few hundred protestors.
As we engaged in monitoring its growth, we recruited other people to help us begin the collection of data available via social media. We began mapping out key players, and monitored Anonymous’s efforts to organize protests in the San Francisco Bay area public transportation system (#opBART) in order to detect patterns and key influencers.
Then, at the end of August, we were alerted by a fellow researcher that information about USDoR (U.S. Day of Rage, to which Occupy Wall Street is connected) had been posted on Shamuk and Al-Jahad, two Al-Qaeda recruitment sites. We began to take the “Occupy” protest more seriously, and dedicated more time to research and monitoring."
Ace of Spades HQ: "You've people got it backwards. Capitalism calls for insolvent banks to fail. Socialism calls for them to be bailed out.Bingo. Read More......
submitted 11 hours ago by r3compile
Edit: Some more complete thoughts:
The free market gets rid of risky, unstable businesses. Capitalism means if you don't have a viable product, you go away. People vote with their own money.
In Socialism, you vote with other people's money. You keep throwing good money after bad because you like the idea of a stable bank and you don't want to admit that it needs to go bankrupt.
All a businessman can do is try to sell you something that you think is worth the money.
But a government can take your wealth by force, and allocate it to an area that has no viable market, purely for the benefit of catering to voters and trying to get re-elected."
Ski season opens early in Colorado | Watts Up With That?: "I’m sure somebody will find a way to blame global warming.Read More......
Colorado ski resort opens early with 44 inches of powder
By R. SCOTT RAPPOLD
OutThereColorado.com
WOLF CREEK SKI AREA, COLO. – The ski season in Colorado officially began on Oct. 8.
It was announced not with the din of snow-making machines pasting a path of man-made snow between dirt and rocks, but the distant whoops of avalanche-control bombs.
And accompanied by heaps of powder.
On Oct. 8, 1,500 skiers and snowboarders converged on remote Wolf Creek Ski Area, four hours from Colorado Springs, Colo., for the most memorable ski season opening in recent memory."
American Autumn - Mark Steyn - National Review Online: "Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually non-existent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for."Done for indeed. RTWT. Steyn rocks.
Read More......
Instapundit » Blog Archive » PHOTO ESSAY: The People of OWS: like the people of Wal-Mart, only not as smart. Kinda mean, really…: "MORE: Did I bury the lede? A reader emails:The "Occupy Wall Street" moniker turns out to be particularly apt. Because all these drug-addled doofusses are wasting their lives learning useless liberal crap, they're not available to do productive occupations. We need illegal immigrants to do those. Du'O. Read More......I should prefer this not be attributed to me. However, in your recent post on OWS and the higher ed bubble, you touched what seems to me to be the core of the issue — in the last paragraph.
“UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Card emails: As a consultant travelling to Kentucky for a contract. I was watching the local news last night and a local machinist shop was being interviewed about not being able to find enough workers. The money quote, that I thought you'd be interested in, was ‘You can buy gas from a college graduate, but I can’t fill a $70,000/year machinist position.’”
First: This is also my experience as an employer. I have more college graduates wanting to work for me than I can employ — but good machinists, good mechanics, good technicians are hard to find."
Instapundit » Blog Archive » ROGER KIMBALL: Obama’s Other Jobs Policy. “If Barack Obama has his way — that is, if the policie…: "ROGER KIMBALL: Obama’s Other Jobs Policy. “If Barack Obama has his way — that is, if the policies he has advocated actually become law — another Steve Jobs would be squashed in his garage by government busybodies or (should he miraculously survive) regulated and taxed to death by federal bureaucrats. Steve Jobs was a walking embodiment of the American spirit of innovation. Barack Obama’s entire administration is dedicated to stamping out that spirit. He wants to centralize innovation, punish success, and regulate ingenuity. Obama’s fundamental error is his belief that economic success lies in redistributing rather than in creating wealth. His so-called ‘Jobs Bill’ is in reality an anti-jobs bill. Despite his apparent personal fondness for Steve Jobs, the sad irony is that the bill is also at bottom an anti-Jobs bill.”The title's a bit brutal, but so are O Duce's SEIU thugs. Ask Kenneth Gladney... Read More......
Luckily, he can’t even get Congressional Democrats to support it.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 9:27 pm
Obama's "Millionaire Tax" Collected Over Next Ten Years Will Plug 4 Months Worth Of Deficit | ZeroHedge: "In order to keep the ongoing class warfare waged by the administration in perspective, today the CBO was kind enough to score the revenue impact of the proposed and much debated Buffett Tax, now appearing in non-populist literature as "Surtax on Millionaires." According to the Budget Office, said tax which is the source of substantial consternation among the population, would generate, over the next decade, a grand total of... drum roll... $453 billion. Why the drum roll? Because as we pointed out a few days ago, the US closed the 2011 fiscal year having added $1.23 trillion in debt (a number which would have been $1.4 trillion absent some year end settlement gimmickry). In other words, last year the US government had on average a $100+ billion deficit each month. In yet more other words, the great populist gimmick that is the Buffett Tax will have the great benefit of generating, between 2011 and 2021 enough money to plug a debt hole, at the rate America currently spends money, of 4 months."Du'O. I have already pointed this out here. Read it and weep... Read More......
Quotes of the day « Hot Air: "Bill Clinton –Heh. I just contributed again. How about you? Read More......First Black President(white)
Barrack Obama –First Black President(half-white)
Herman Cain – First Black President.
carbon_footprint on October 7, 2011 at 10:30 PM"
Ray has a nice post about the little doofusses:
Wall Street Protesters In Their Own Words | rayharvey.org: "The following video clip will give you an idea of the caliber of economic understanding these protesters possess, and I post this clip not because I side with Adam Kokesh (I don’t), but because I myself have been astonished by the number of emails I’ve received from libertarians asking me if I “stand with” the Wall Street protesters.
Emphatically I do not.
Here are a handful of the reasons why:"
What ‘Occupy Wall Street’ seems to want--David Harsanyi - NYPOST.com: "We demand the end to health profiteering, because everyone knows that all the wondrous and lifesaving advances in modern medicine were invented in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. Smart people work for the good of humanity, not because they’re greedy.Read More......
We demand these rights because of the mass injustice of being able to freely protest against racism and corporatism without any real fear of imprisonment in the most diverse city on earth. And to the wiseguy who walked by the other day and claimed that I’d be writing this manifesto with a quill pen on parchment paper if it weren’t for capitalism, we have two words for you: Koch brothers. Think about it.
This is the fifth communiqué from the 99.9 percent. We are occupying Wall Street, and we’re not going home until it gets really cold."
Instapundit » Blog Archive » SURE, WHY NOT? What We Really Need is Anti-Corporate Anarchy, With Our ‘Organizers and the Law Te…: "SURE, WHY NOT? What We Really Need is Anti-Corporate Anarchy, With Our ‘Organizers and the Law Team’ Writing Our Demands. “Anarchy — you keep using that word. I do not think it means…No, actually, you’re using absolutely spot-on, even if you don’t know it.” It’s not anarchy until it’s been through the approved committee process.Perfect. Read More......
But really: If you’re not protesting against President Goldman Sachs, you’re not protesting against “Wall Street.” You’re just a hack. Sorry. “The modern anarchists are just the far-left’s muscle. Look at when and where they show up, who they march with and for, and how carefully the press ignores them and their acts.”
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:00 am"
Pajamas Media » Steve Jobs: An Unexpected Appreciation: "Something else happened as well: Steve got sick. Steve Jobs, pancreatic cancer survivor, made his first public appearance with his celebrated Stanford graduation speech. This was a new Steve. If some of his bad habits remained, they were also tempered by the new-found wisdom of someone who has just faced his own mortality. In an odd way, the cancer seemed to purify Jobs, removing the small things in life at which he often showed his worst, and focusing him on the big things, where he was always in his glory.This is a RTWT. Read More......
Though he was idolized long before that, it was only in the last few years that Steve Jobs reached his full potential and became the great figure he was always destined to be. Seemingly knowing that his time was short, and stripped of the ego that had been his biggest burden, Steve at last became a great CEO, just as he had always been one of the greatest of all entrepreneurs. To that unmatched run of landmark products, he now accomplished one more thing never achieved by his famous Valley predecessors — he took Apple from the garage to become the most valuable company in the world. It was the perfect finish to one of the most amazing lives of his generation — and even those of us who knew-him-when found ourselves cheering."
World facing worst financial crisis in history, Bank of England Governor says - Telegraph: "Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession.Read More......
Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.
Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.
“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”
Announcing its decision, the Bank said that the eurozone debt crisis was creating “severe strains in bank funding markets and financial markets”."
neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Notes from Chairman Lenin—and Dostoevsky: "sergey Says:This is an oldie. But as you can see, a goodie. Read More......
March 10th, 2009 at 6:26 am
On several occasions I had conversations about Dostoevsky with Westerners and almost every time observed the same knee-jerk reaction. They told me how deeply Dostoevsky understood Russian soul and how better they now understand it after reading him. I objected: Wrong. Dead wrong. He wrote not about Russian soul, but about human soul. Almost everything he wrote specifically about Russians simply is not true – a wishful thinking of a delusional Russian nationalist. But everything he wrote about humans as such is profound and just as relevant to you as to me. Note that Grand Inquisitor has no hallmarks of nationality or time: it is a mysteria, it happens everywere and at any time. (There never was Inquisition in Russia before Dostoevsky; it was created 40 years after his death.) Never delude yourself that your epoch or civilisation is so exceptional that you can be totally immune to medieval horrors and wide-scale societal collapse and regression: nobody is immune, and Germans felt it on their hides during Third Reich. Barbarians are not across the pond, they are inside your skulls.
I also often heard the same tired arguments from the left: Communist experiment got botched in Russia because of Russian mentality; we can do it better. They leave naked wires under high voltage not because they are Communists, but because they are Russians. Wrong again. The same tragedy occured in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Camboja, Zimbabwe – in every land and culture where socialism was imposed on society."
Secret panel can put Americans on kill list' | Reuters: "(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.I know. It's all Bush's fault. Bad Bush, bad bad Bush.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.
The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process."
Instapundit » Blog Archive » A RESPONSE to some Occupy Wall Street demands. My question is, why aren’t they presenting their d…: "A RESPONSE to some Occupy Wall Street demands.Click through and read the post. Yes, the "demands" may be too organized for anarchists to posit, but they're plausible enough for rabble from their Mom's basement. And Ryan Young's vivisection of them is highly entertaining to sentient beings... Read More......
My question is, why aren’t they presenting their demands to President Goldman Sachs at the White House? Where do they think Obama’s campaign donations came from? Who has gotten rich — and bailed out — under his Administration?
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 5:39 pm"
Does this treatment sound familiar? | Watts Up With That?: "Yeah, consensus science never fails.Read More......The shy, 70-year-old Shechtman said he never doubted his findings and considered himself merely the latest in a long line of scientists who advanced their fields by challenging the conventional wisdom and were shunned by the establishment because of it."
AP NewsAlert: "AP (AP) - _ Apple says Steve Jobs has died "It seems that yet another greedy, heartless capitalist has died. At least, that's what all those on the left will say ... well at least those who didn't worship him as a God in place of the more traditional one.
Read More......
The corrupt should be in jail and the press should be making sure it happens. Good luck with that, huh? Read More......Is CBS News Covering Up Fast and Furious for White House? | Power Line: "After our initial conversation earlier today, I called McNair back and left a message with her office. I also sent McNair an email asking whether Attkisson’s unavailability has anything to do with reporting that the White House and Justice Department were angry at her. I further asked McNair if the White House or Justice Department contacted CBS News about Attkisson since yesterday. McNair has not responded to my inquiries.We live in a strange era, in which our dominant news organizations consider it their most important function to prevent certain news from reaching the eyes and ears of the public."
Instapundit » Blog Archive » I MENTIONED THIS IN PASSING EARLIER, BUT IT DESERVES ITS OWN LINK: White House kept Democratic sena…: "I MENTIONED THIS IN PASSING EARLIER, BUT IT DESERVES ITS OWN LINK: White House kept Democratic senators hanging on the phone. “Obama left his party’s top senators, who had assembled for a conference call, hanging on the phone for nearly 20 minutes before National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling came on the line with a seemingly vague notion of what the call was supposed to be about, Democratic sources said.”I wonder if the Secret Service has taken to looking the other way while the Obozos are all sneaking off to smoke joints in the bathroom... Read More......
The disorganization and lack of courtesy is a hallmark of this White House, and bespeaks management problems that go well beyond any deficiencies in policy. Bad staff work keeps embarrassing Obama, but this sort of tone is set from the top.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:37 pm"
Perfect! ROFLGood news: New iPhone appears to be self-aware « Hot Air: "Woe betides us if our society confuses imitation of sentience with actual sentience.Too late, Obama already got elected.
Nessuno on October 4, 2011 at 8:57 PM
sharrukin on October 4, 2011 at 9:02 PM"
Guest Post: When Money Dies - A "Live From The Summit" Report | ZeroHedge: "To ensure that everyone would be on the same page, Doug began with a “definition” of government as the monopoly of force within a certain geographic location. And that government will use this force in a coercive manner to get what it needs. As the Greater Depression grinds on, tax revenues fall and interest costs on the national debt rise, the government will find itself in desperate need of more money – your money, of course.Read More......
He pointed out that during depressions the rich usually do okay, and the poor, having little to lose and being on the government gravy train, will get by – they will demand and get more help from government.
It is the middle class that will get killed because they save in dollars. When the dollar is ultimately destroyed, the middle class will be as well.
Doug’s talk was peppered with some typical Casey-esque one-liners that drew roars of laughter. My favorite: When observing that the government shouldn’t be in the letter delivery business and comparing the bankrupt USPS to profitable FedEx, he rhetorically asked: “Why is it you never hear about an employee going FedEx?”
A classic Casey moment.
A hard act to follow, indeed. Yet Bud Conrad gave the audience all the data and analysis to support Doug’s Greater Depression forecast.
In line with the summit’s theme – dying currencies – Bud started with a few slides of ancient Roman coins showing an evolution through several iterations: first minted from gold; then copper was added; then copper was the major alloy; and finally there was no gold content. The money was systematically debased until it became worthless.
This is an early example of inflation.
It is no coincidence, he pointed out, that as money is debased, it undermines the cohesion of a society. The decline of honest money goes hand in hand with the decline of a country. This is what the US is experiencing today – the decline and fall of the American Empire."
Appreciating Fran Tarkenton | Power Line: "Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.Read More......
Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?"
Instapundit » Blog Archive » A DAY LATE AND A TRILLION DOLLARS SHORT: Just a reminder: Obama’s jobs bill still has no cosponso…: "A DAY LATE AND A TRILLION DOLLARS SHORT: Just a reminder: Obama’s jobs bill still has no cosponsors. In either house. “We have a federal system, not a parliamentary system, so our legislature doesn’t take votes of no-confidence to force an executive out of power. But given the high-profile rollout of the AJA by Obama, including his demand for a joint session to escalate pressure for action, the lack of any co-sponsors on these bills is about as close as we’ll get to a vote of no confidence in this executive short of an outright floor-vote failure in the Senate on the bill.”Read More......
Somebody should start calling Democratic members and asking why they haven’t signed on as cosponsors to their own President’s urgent bill. . . .
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 11:17 pm"
This is completely insane:
The Weekend Interview with Harold Hamm: How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - WSJ.com: "When it was Mr. Hamm's turn to talk briefly with President Obama, "I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this."And this defies words completely:
The president's reaction? "He turned to me and said, 'Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'" Mr. Hamm holds his head in his hands and says, "Even if you believed that, why would you want to stop oil and gas development? It was pretty disappointing."
Washington keeps "sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: 'Why aren't you creating more jobs,'" he says. He roils at the Interior Department delays of months and sometimes years to get permits for drilling. "These delays kill projects," he says. "
A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Continental's crime was killing one bird "the size of a sparrow" in its oil pits. The charges carry criminal penalties of up to six months in jail. "It's not even a rare bird. There're jillions of them," he explains. He says that "people in North Dakota are really outraged by these legal actions," which he views as "completely discriminatory" because the feds have rarely if ever prosecuted the Obama administration's beloved wind industry, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds each year.No corrupt stupidity here. Just move along now folks... Read More......
The Failure of Health Care Reform: An Insider's View - Forbes: "The point is that ObamaCare was meticulously crafted by people who didn’t have a clue how health insurance worked or how people respond to the various economic incentives in health care and insurance. And we just got another example of my claim with the notice of the probable mothballing of the CLASS Act, yet another actuarially unsound provision in ObamaCare.Read More......
The ObamaCare effort was like those utopian planners who have a vision for how an economy should work, and then try to force everyone to conform to that vision.
And the people who did understand the health care system—and I’m not just talking about health insurers—who should have known better, mostly remained on the sideline … if they weren’t actively helping.
Well, Obama got his health care law—along with a lot of economic turmoil and public dissatisfaction. And now we have to hope the Supreme Court or the 2012 elections will save us from the utopian fools who are only now beginning to learn that remaking a sixth of the U.S. economy was tougher than they thought."
Instapundit » Blog Archive » BYRON YORK: “Soft” America — What Obama Really Means. “Look at Obama’s speeches in the last coupl…: "BYRON YORK: “Soft” America — What Obama Really Means. “Look at Obama’s speeches in the last couple of months, and he has repeatedly scolded audiences for not working hard enough and for not sacrificing enough to achieve the goals he has set for his administration. He’s done it with both supporters and with adversaries. With friends, his message has been: Nobody told you this would be easy, and you’ve got to work harder to enact my agenda. With adversaries, his message is: You’ve had it too easy, and you’ve got to make sacrifices to enact my agenda. Obama’s ‘gotten a little soft’ remark fits into that theme: A soft America is one that is insufficiently willing to work and sacrifice to enact the Obama agenda.” Let’s just say that I’m not inspired to sacrifice for President Golfpants.President Golfpants! LOL Read More......
UPDATE: Reader Kevin Walsh emails: “In other words BHO is saying, ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves’.” Heh. Pretty much.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:29 am"
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