Bad. Period.

Why Cronyism Is Always Bad | Power Line: "In today’s Wall Street Journal, Charles Koch explains concisely why corporate cronyism, a hallmark of the Obama administration, is bad–not just when it’s the other side’s cronies, but bad, period:

“We didn’t build this business—somebody else did.”

So reads a sign outside a small roadside craft store in Utah. The message is clearly tongue-in-cheek. But if it hung next to the corporate offices of some of our nation’s big financial institutions or auto makers, there would be no irony in the message at all.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the role of American business is increasingly vilified or viewed with skepticism. In a Rasmussen poll conducted this year, 68% of voters said they “believe government and big business work together against the rest of us.”

Businesses have failed to make the case that government policy—not business greed—has caused many of our current problems. To understand the dreadful condition of our economy, look no further than mandates such as the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “affordable housing” quotas, directives such as the Community Reinvestment Act, and the Federal Reserve’s artificial, below-market interest-rate policy.

Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers. This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of our culture."

RTWT.

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Lapdogs

Instapundit » Blog Archive » CHARLES GASPARINO: The Party Of Wall Street: Among the many falsehoods pushed at last week’s D…: "CHARLES GASPARINO: The Party Of Wall Street:

Among the many falsehoods pushed at last week’s Democratic Convention is that this is the party of the people, unafraid to hold Corporate America responsible for its many ills.

Judging by the records of the last two Democratic administrations, just the opposite appears to be true. Certainly, President Obama and, to some extent, Bill Clinton like to talk a good game in terms of class warfare, but under both men, real corporate crime-fighting has been at best a side issue — despite the immense amounts of white-collar fraud their administrations faced. In fact, neither Obama nor Clinton can hold a candle to the corporate crime-fighting record of George W. Bush, that supposed lapdog for large corporate interests.

Consider: As we near the four-year anniversary of the financial crisis, not a single Wall Street fat cat has been charged with violations of securities laws in connection with the 2008 collapse."

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Intelligence-less

Obama Missing Daily Intelligence Meetings Regularly - By Katrina Trinko - The Corner - National Review Online: "First, it came out in July that Barack Obama hadn’t held a meeting of his jobs council since January — because he “has obviously got a lot on his plate,” according to the White House. Now, the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen reports that Obama was also too busy to attend more than half of the daily national-security intelligence briefings"

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Zzzzzz ... Clank, Clank, What The???

California’s Prop. 31: The Revolution Will Not Be Publicized - By Stanley Kurtz - The Corner - National Review Online: "We are two months away from fundamentally transforming the State of California, and barely anyone knows it. With a five to six point lead in the latest poll, Proposition 31 has a solid shot at passage. The measure is meant to bail out California’s failing cities by creating regional super-governments empowered to raid and redistribute suburban tax money. It’s the end of the system of local self-government that has served as the bedrock of American democracy since the time of the Founders — in the nation’s largest state, no less. Yet virtually no one is paying attention."

Change Chains you can will believe locked in.  This is somewhat beyond a RTWT -- sit up and pay attention.

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Free Ice Cream

Whistling past the graveyard at the Democratic convention - Right Turn - The Washington Post: "If you had been dropped from outer space into the Democratic National Convention, you would have thought that we enjoyed full employment, reduced poverty and stared down Iran, leaving us with deeply important issues like paying for birth control for grown women. You would have thought that a large majority of Americans weren’t sympathetic to Israel and weren’t religious. You’d have thought that the federal government had money to burn and no looming debt crisis. You would never have thought that Obama had signed a “historic” health-care bill. And you’d have thought that the political heavyweight in the Obama household was Michelle. (Well, you might have been right about the last one.)

But knowing that the America of 2012 is so very different than the convention portrait, it’s worth asking how the Democrats’ convention became so divorced from reality.

We saw a party in which the inability to tackle the monumental problems of our time ( entitlement reform, fiscal crisis, endemic high unemployment, a nuclear-armed Iran) has left a large gaping hole where its core should be. As our problems have gotten bigger, the party has gotten smaller, angrier and less grown-up. The house is burning down, and the Democratic constituencies want free ice cream.

So, how does it happen that days are spent on abortion on demand (which we essentially have anyway until the Supreme Court decides differently) and contraception, while big-ticket items are ignored?

The answer is twofold, I think. The current state of the Democratic Party is both the natural consequences of a longtime trend and the reflection of a president who is tragically unequipped to do his job.

Constituent politics is nothing new to the Democratic Party, of course. Ever since FDR strung together an alliance of urban blacks, Southern whites, labor and immigrants, the Democratic Party has been collecting interest groups like a girl collects charms for her bracelet. The groups have multiplied (gays, Native Americans, public employees), but the concept has been the same for 70 years. In exchange for votes the Democratic Party will give you lots of “free” stuff. To get free stuff you have to pay a lot of taxes and idealize government as the font of good deeds, so that citizens won’t mind an increasingly intrusive and expensive government. The point is not to solve problems or even measure success; the point is to keep the swapping (votes for free stuff) going strong."

Yup. RTWT.

But I disagree with her happy talk conclusion that voters will in the end want to fix the big things and be willing to forego free stuff to do so.

It ain't happening -- we are already far on the downside of the slide where the voters have discovered they can vote themselves money:

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. -- Benjamin Franklin

It won't stop until mass destitution and violence -- the exact opposite of what these rocket scientists think they are achieving...

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I Think I'm Feeling A Bit Less Uncertain Today...

Scientists cast doubt on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: "It is often assumed that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to both the intrinsic uncertainty that a quantum system must possess, as well as to measurements. These results show that this is not the case and demonstrate the degree of precision that can be achieved with weak-measurement techniques.

"The results force us to adjust our view of exactly what limits quantum mechanics places on measurement," says Rozema. "These limits are important to fundamental quantum mechanics and also central in developing 'quantum cryptography' technology, which relies on the uncertainty principle to guarantee that any eavesdropper would be detected due to the disturbance caused by her measurements.""

... but I'm not entirely sure ;)

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COTD: How Can An Intelligence Analyst Tell When A Politician Is Lying?

Belmont Club » We Didn’t Know Nothing: "20. RWE
Back in the mid-90’s when Pakistan exploded its first nuclear weapons and India responded with additional tests of its own, I was struck by an NPR report on why the intelligence community missed these developments.

The report said that the CIA analysts had heard the clear statements by the leaders of Pakistan and India, but “assumed that the leaders were lying, based on their experience with US politicians, who often lie.”

Remember, this was during the Clinton Admin.

So, based on Slick Willie’s performance, the analysts assumed that the leaders of Pakistan and India were lying about building nukes. And that Saddam was lying about not having WMDs.

The analysts could not handle politicians who tell the truth."

ROFL! What a screwed up disaster of a world we live in when the people have forgotten how to tell when a politician is lying but the (now "Plame-ly" politicized) "intelligence community" hasn't!

And just think of the implications for Iran: When the Muslim loonie rulers claim they're going to wipe out Israel the "intelligence" community thinks that's now a big guffaw -- just like when they say they're anti-gay. No, wait...

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Obama And Democrats Say They Support Gays And Muslims

Muslims burn 3 gay men alive for allah and his minions | MRCTV: "Muslims burn 3 gay men alive for allah and his minions"

Excuse me while I call horsesh*t on having it both ways.

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Spotting It

SOON AND BRIGGS: Global-warming fanatics take note – Sunspots do impact climate | Watts Up With That?: "Consider the accompanying chart. It shows some rather surprising relationships between solar radiation and daytime high temperatures taken directly from Berkeley’s BEST project. The remarkable nature of these series is that these tight relationships can be shown to hold from areas as large as the United States.

This new sun-climate relationship picture may be telling us that the way our sun cools and warms the Earth is largely through the penetration of incoming solar radiation in regions with cloudless skies. Recent work by National Center for Atmospheric Research senior scientists Harry van Loon and Gerald Meehl place strong emphasis on this physical point and argue that the use of daytime high temperatures is the most appropriate test of the solar-radiation-surface-temperature connection hypothesis. All previous sun-climate studies have included the complicated nighttime temperature records while the sun is not shining."

Whoops!

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Bridge Building

Sous les ponts de Barry - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online: "But who knows? By 2018, there might be some 70/30 UN/federal bridge plan, under which the UN pays 70 per cent, and the feds pay 30, and thus the town would only be liable for 20 per cent of the state’s 40 per cent of the feds’ 30 percent. And the estimate for the bridge will be a mere $2.7 billion.

While the Select Board was pondering this, another bridge was condemned. The state’s estimate was $415,000, and, given that the previous bridge had been on the to-do list for six years, they weren’t ready to pencil this second one in on the schedule just yet. So instead the town put in a new bridge from a local contractor. Cost: $30,000. Don’t worry; it’s all up to code—and a lot safer than the worn-out temporary bridge still waiting for the 80/20/60/40/70/30 deal to kick in. As my friend said at the meeting:

’Screw the state. Let’s do it ourselves.’

I prefer that to “Let’s do it together.”

Contemporary American liberalism can’t build bridges. Its language is now so divorced from action that it thinks “bridge-building” is a term of outreach: Barack Obama is building bridges to the Muslim world, or the transgendered community or whatever. Big Government builds metaphorical bridges, and that’s it."

How's that O de bureaucracy worship working out for you pal?

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Send Him Back

I Wish to Register a Complaint: Of Obama and Dead Parrots - By Charles C. W. Cooke - The Corner - National Review Online: "In the parrot sketch, when Cleese asks the shopkeeper why the parrot is lying motionless on his back, he is told that “the Norwegian Blue prefers kippin’ on its back!” Look, Cleese replies, “I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there.” Last night, even the president’s supporters could not spin away the weariness. The nails have come away.

It must be a crushing realization for his devotees, but the president’s plumage is no longer beautiful. He is, further to paraphrase our desperate shopkeeper, “tired and shagged out after a prolonged squawk.” A one-trick parrot, he is pining for the fjords of Chicago. It’s time to send him back there."

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Full Employment Through Unemployment

Today’s Jobs Numbers: The Silver Lining - By Peter Kirsanow - The Corner - National Review Online: "Instead, look at the bright side. If Americans continue to give up looking for work at a rate of 370,00 per month, the unemployment rate will likely fall below 6 percent by the end of a second Obama term. As Joe Scarborough proclaimed about today’s report, “This is good news for the president.”

Obama-Biden: Full employment through unemployment."

OMG.

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This Is Called Keynesian Economics...

Instapundit » Blog Archive » ANDREW KLAVAN: Obamanomics 101, Understanding How the Obama Economy Works. UPDATE: Reader V…: "ANDREW KLAVAN: Obamanomics 101, Understanding How the Obama Economy Works."

or Kenyan economics... Or banana republic economics... Or bankruptcy... Or something...

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Occupying The Occupiers

The PJ Tatler » Jason Mattera Occupies the DNC: Hey, Sign this Communist Petition on My iPad!: "Jason Mattera and I were partners in crime back in the day. This week he’s occupying the occupiers who are occupying the DNC. In this episode, Jason gets a communist sympathizer to sign a petition on his capitalist-created iPad, practically begs the occupiers to share their tents, and “overstimulates” some sick guy.

Whatever you do, don’t overstimulate occupiers. Apparently it’s like feeding a Mogwai after midnight or something."

Droll comedic perfection at the expense of Demo-commie dimwits. Watch and weep...

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The Won: Voted Off The Island

Page 4: Bob Woodward Book: Debt Deal Collapse Led to 'Pure Fury' From President Obama - ABC News: "But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner's "Plan B" would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was "voted off the island," in Woodward's phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default.

Frustration over the lack of clear White House planning was voiced to Obama's face at one point, with a Democratic congressional staffer taking the extraordinary step of confronting the president in the Oval Office.

With the nation facing the very real possibility of defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history, David Krone, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told the president directly that he couldn't simply reject the only option left to Congress.

"It is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B," Krone said, according to Woodward."

RTWT.

Good God. What a mental midget. Go back and look at this to remind yourself who the people are that he has great confidence in his ability to persuade.

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Schiff In Charlotte: No Matter Where You Turn, There's Another Rocket Scientist!

Peter Schiff to Democrats: Who’s up for banning corporate profits? « Hot Air: "To cleanse the palate, a little fish-in-a-barrel fun with the regulars in Charlotte. His producer e-mails to stress that they deliberately avoided the tents outside the convention, where the radicals are camped out, so that they could get a more “mainstream” take. The result: Cluelessness leavened with a sprinkle of leftist dogma."

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Yes, What WILL Happen?

News Flash: Obama Approved Democratic Platform | Power Line: "Things got so bad that President Barack Obama was forced to personally intervene, ordering language mentioning God and naming Jerusalem as the rightful capital of Israel be added.

Obama had seen the language prior to the convention, a campaign source said, but did not seek to change it until after Republicans jumped on the omissions of God and Jerusalem late Wednesday.

Of course not. For Barack Obama, politics always comes first. He would prefer to express his far-left views honestly, but if doing so carries a political cost, he is always willing to throw far-left principle under the bus. For the moment, anyway: the question always remains, what will happen if he never again has to face the voters?"

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Marx ... And His Errand Boy

The Dialectic of Destruction - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily: "And, as we have indicated, in the "beyond-communism" stage, the stage of universal no-ownership and therefore of no action and no use of resources, death for the entire human race would swiftly ensue.

Marx and his followers have never demonstrated any awareness of the vital importance of the problem of allocation of scarce resources. Their vision of communism is that all such economic problems are trivial, requiring neither entrepreneurship nor a price system nor genuine economic calculation — that all problems could be quickly solved by mere accounting or recording. The classic absurdity on this matter was laid down by Lenin, who accurately expressed Marx's view in declaring that the functions of entrepreneurship and of allocation of resources have been "simplified by capitalism to the utmost" to mere matters of accounting and to "the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic." Ludwig von Mises wryly and justly comments that Marxists and other socialists have had "no greater perception of the essentials of economic life than the errand boy, whose only idea of the work of the entrepreneur is that he covers pieces of paper with letters and figures."[9]"

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Incomplete

Instapundit » Blog Archive » I GUESS THAT’S BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE STILL HAVE JOBS: Obama: I give myself an “incomplete” on the…: "I GUESS THAT’S BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE STILL HAVE JOBS: Obama: I give myself an “incomplete” on the economy.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 5:03 pm"

Du'O.

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Make My Day

Ace of Spades HQ: "I've watched this like seven times now and I like it better every time. True, the first time around, I was worried that he wasn't going to come to his points. He was sometimes stammering and slow to get to his next killer line. But in each case, he did get 'round to that killer line -- in 2 seconds, rather than the professionally-preferred 0.8 seconds."

Heh.

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