NoCo Surrounds Them - We Will Not Fall

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Unfair To Drunken Sailors

Moonbattery: I Want Your Money: "This fall we will finally have a reason to go out to the movies:"

Parallels

China: What Goes Around, Comes Around: "August 8, 2010:�Chinese leaders are increasingly worried about another revolution. The signs are ominous, for the Chinese are avid students of their own history, and how it constantly repeats itself. So while China is getting rich, there is much corruption in the government, the military and even the universities. This has created a growing number of unhappy Chinese, and they have a lot of unemployed (often because of corruption) college graduates, and people who are cheated and exploited by corrupt officials on a regular basis, talking about change. Attempts to fix the core problem, corruption, are not working, and that is seen as menacing by many Chinese, as dynasties usually fall because they were weakened, and torn apart by rebels enraged by the corruption. That's how the communists gained power in the 1940s. But their virtuous new government began to show signs of corruption within a decade, and it's gotten much worse since communist economic policies were dumped three decades ago. What goes around, comes around."

Luckily, nothing like that ever happens here... RTWT.

Outmoded

When Labor Is Capital: The Limits of Keynesian Policy — The American, A Magazine of Ideas: "From our more Austrian perspective, the Keynesian prescription will fail. Government spending tends to create or reinforce unsustainable patterns of production—temporary housing booms, transitory increases in auto sales, and the like. However, there is no reason to expect unsustainable patterns of production to stimulate the creation of sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. If anything, it would seem likely that government support for unsustainable patterns of production could make the market's recalculation problem more confusing. It will delay long-term recovery, rather than hasten it.

Some Keynesian economists have proposed an even more unlikely solution, which is to revive the New Deal program of government-created jobs, as in the Works Progress Administration. This idea represents a complete denial of the contemporary reality that labor is capital. Real employment in today's economy represents a long-term investment, not short-term make-work.

What needs to emerge are new, sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. Government does not have much incentive to create sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. In fact, the political system tends to favor subsidies to outmoded and unsustainable businesses."

Monsters

Michelle Malkin � Taliban executes Christian medical team in Afghanistan; 6 American doctors among those murdered: "A Western team of Christian medical volunteers that provided eye care to poor villagers in remote northeast Afghanistan was lined up, stripped, and shot to death by the Taliban.
Monsters. Evil monsters.
Via the Christian Science Monitor:
The execution-style killings of 10 people working for a Christian medical team in a remote region of northern Afghanistan fit into Taliban insurgents’ stated shift in tactics: Target Western civilians, especially Christians, as “foreign invaders.”"

Things Are Going To Get A Lot Worse

The Reference Frame: Guardian: Devil is driving climate deniers: "Reagan, the denier-in-chief, was caught as speading jokes about the USSR."

Saturday, August 7, 2010

hOles And Fiefdoms

The shock continues:

Hot Air � Why ObamaCare has gaping holes: AoSHQ’s Dave In Texas is a bit surprised that the voluminous new healthcare law does not, in fact, define health care:
Wait until the public discovers the government is now literally determining what qualifies as “health care” in America.

That isn’t a typo. ObamaCare mandates that insurers spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on benefits, but Democrats never got around to writing the fine print of what counts as a benefit. So a handful of regulators are now choosing among the tens of thousands of services that doctors, hospitals and insurers offer. Few other government decisions will do more to shape tomorrow’s health market, or what’s left of it.
The WSJ piece just quoted is addressing what will count as medical benefits for insurance “medical loss ratios” under the new law. However, we will see a variation on the same theme when the new Health Choices Czar gets down to the business of deciding minimum levels of benefits for insurance plans to be offered through the government-created Potemkin market known as the Health Exchange.

And successful Potemkinism means perpetuation:

"Indeed, Congress wanted to save those fights for later. Punting any issue likely to cause controversy keeps the Beltway carousel spinning. The interest groups already mentioned, plus those lobbying on everything to breast cancer to AIDS to chiropractic to medical device manufacturers will all be gearing up to lobby the vast new bureaucracies created under Obamacare for favorable consideration of one sort or another. Tossing the law’s hot potatoes to unelected civil servants allows Congresspeople to play the white knights, working the Rube Goldberg-esque machinery on behalf of their constituents and their donors. At the outset, this will be directed to establishing generous minimum benefits. Later, when the spiralling costs of the program produce plans for rationing care, pols will intervene to “save” valuable benefits from the bureaucratic reaper. The pols will also help steer groups to the crucial and costly counsel provided by their former staffers, to be employed at the K Street firm of “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”

In short, this process is how Congress disclaims responsibility for Leviathan it creates, as a way of squeezing money from the public to perpetuate their incumbency and their fiefdoms."

Any questions?

What Problem?

Chart of the Day, and a scary one too | Questions and Observations: "Just in case you were wondering."

Laugh Until You Cry...

iowahawk: Undocumented Imam's Refusal to Perform Interracial Gay Handicapped Wedding Leads to Charges of Racism: "NEW YORK - Charges of racism, sexism, and religious discrimination filled the air this afternoon outside the just-completed Cordoba House, the gleaming new $100 million 15 story mosque and Islamic cultural center near the ruins of New York's World Trade Center, following a tense 5-hour standoff prompted by the mosque's refusal to host a wedding between a lesbian African-American woman and her blind white transgendered partner.

Over 200 NYPD officers and multicultural crisis counselors were bused to the site to quell the simmering 17-way tensions between Muslim, Black, LGBT, immigrant, disabled, and lawsuit community activists. The scene was punctuated by outbursts of pushing and shoving, including a brief confused intramural scuffle among members of Reverend Louis Farrakan's Nation of Islam, but the only serious injuries reported was a hernia suffered by a legal aide distributing plaintiff's briefs. The incident resulted in one arrest, a 7-year old girl who was seen operating a lemonade stand without a permit."

Ripped from the day after tomorrow's headlines in our looming cesspool of competing interest group politics. RTWT. When iowahawk is on a roll, he's unstoppable...

Friday, August 6, 2010

Today's ICE'y Shocker

Who'd a thunk it?

Belmont Club � On ICE: "The Washington Examiner reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “through their union … released a letter announcing its recent unanimous ‘vote of no confidence’ in ICE agency heads, accusing them of ‘misleading the American public’ regarding illegal immigration in order to further a pro-amnesty agenda.”

The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council and its affiliated local councils cast a unanimous 259-0 vote of no confidence in ICE Director John Morton and Assistant Director Phyllis Coven, according to Fox News Channel’s Martha MacCallum.

The Center for Immigration Studies has further details of the letter’s contents. They accuse ICE leadership of abandoning its enforcement mission to pursue a goal of “amnesty by policy”."

The only surprise is that it's so bad that unions can't take it any more...

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Sunday, August 1, 2010

How About Supporting Policies America Actually Likes?

Saturday, July 24, 2010

The Kleptocrats Support The Local Police

Isn't it great? They've finally come around to supporting the police just like us! Ummm, not exactly...

Well folks, there's a difference between supporting your local police and being the sheep in a police state. You can guess where Harry Reid comes down, can't you?:

Senate Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid is quietly trying to nationalize rules governing every police, fire and first responder union in the nation. Through the benignly named Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (H.R.413) Reid wants all first responders represented by collective bargaining rules emanating from Washington D.C. Naturally he thinks that it is necessary as a matter of national security.

Reid is pushing this monstrosity as a major sop to his union supporters who will greatly benefit from nationalized rules for police and fire unions. This plan would replace with federal rules all state laws on collective bargaining between state and local governments and their first responder unions and would greatly empower unions to dictate pay scales and benefits on a national level.

Imagine the loss of control that local governments will face when first responder unions no longer have to deal with local rules and laws but can force a federal one-size-fits-all style rule on all local governments. Local governments will no longer be able to determine pay scales and benefits and will lose control of their own ability to budget. Reid’s plan will also completely remove the ability of voters to have any say in local matters as a top down control from Washington will rule the day where it concerns local police, fire and other first responders.

Also remember, if a local government wants to fire a policeman or fireman they now have to deal with local laws and home-based unions. If H.R.413 passes no local government will be able to fire a cop or fireman without appealing to the federal government, a source far, far removed from the local area and a source completely unfamiliar with the needs and interests of that local area.

And where freedom dies, you can predict what happens to your hard-earned dollars now can't you?

In truth this law will wildly inflate the costs of our police and fire protection to state and local governments. With a nationalized set of rules the high costs of large governments will be visited on the smallest, first responders will no longer be under any local control at all, union bosses will gain outsized powers to control local government budgets and costs will soar as a result. And who can’t imagine this is the first step on the road to a national fire department, a national police force or other such bloated country-wide force controlled by politicians in Washington D.C. And imagine the soaring costs of court cases as these union disputes become federal cases in every instance.

H.R.413 also outrageously violates the most basic tenet of American politics: local control. This is the worst example of statism, one that must be defeated.

To which your JournOlist-informed fellow "citizens" say "Baaaaaa, fleece me".

Monday, July 19, 2010

Our Kids Are Picking Up The Bill

Friday, July 16, 2010

Peas In O Pod

Wow. WTWT.

H/T New Zeal.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Witch Offense Now?

You needed a good laugh today...

H/T Moonbattery

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Speaking Of U.S.A. R.I.P.

If we elected Jan Brewer President then we'd have one with not only a brain, but two additional things that start with a "b" and are currently MIA.

And speaking of the giant brain now in charge, this bumper sticker pretty well sums the situation up: