Santa and Frank

Townhall - Santa and Frank

PJ O'Rourke does a much funnier version of the Democrats being Santa and the Republicans being god, but the effect is about the same. People in general, and especially post "New Deal" Americans love to get stuff under the assumption that "someone else will pay for it". Prior to Reagan, the Republicans always played the particularly bumbling Charlie Brown foil, and their unwillingness to constantly 100% fall on their butts to clean up the Democrats latest drunken spending orgy has brought the nation to what I believe to be beyond recovery -- in an time frame those of us 50 and older are likely to see.

We started scratching the surface of this grave with TR, took some big scoops out with Wilson, dug deep and wide with FDR, started lowering the casket with LBJ, shut the lid, folded the flag with Bush (love that bi-partisanship), and now BO is furiously pouring dirt in on the grave of the USA.

Sowell does a good job with the Lucy / Charlie Brown analogy though ... worth a read.

Foreign Praise for BO Leadership

With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932 - Telegraph

Well, actually, he isn't mentioned -- but why should he be? He figured all that had to be done was to borrow and spend a bunch of money and prosperity would be just around the corner. What's left now? Tax increases?

Here is the kind of an honest view you aren't likely to see from the American MSM:

Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.

Remember '08? The "depression" word was regularly used by the MSM, as in "Bush Depression" -- once BO got in, we had to have a big stimulus to keep unemployment from rising about 8%. Much like the MSM created "Katrina Bush debacle", this was going to be GREAT -- BO would walk in to what they figured wasn't nearly as bad as what they had been saying, take charge, spend some money, and the "liberal success" that they had been waiting for ever since before Jimmy Carter would finally be theirs! Hope was high for their boy from Hope, Slick Willie, but he flamed out in less than two years and had to be rescued by a Republican congress -- earning his greatest fame in "Presidential Emissions".

The real world is just a bit more dangerous than MSM dreaming -- most likely we are very due for the big terrorist event that will precipitate the next massive drop of the economy and the emotions of Americans. Elect a clueless community organizer and kill your countrymen -- experience is the best, but often the most expensive teacher.

Dow 1K?

Strategies - Robert Prechter’s Market Forecast Says ‘Take Cover’ - NYTimes.com

This would pretty much insure BO being more remembered than Carter.

WSJ On Pessimissm

Op-Ed Columnist - The Pessimism Bubble and the Economy - NYTimes.com

Good to see that the WSJ connection with reality is solid enough for them to understand that things haven't been going so swimmingly since we began the "era of change" with the Democratic congressional takeover in '06, followed by the BOslide of '08. Their explanation? It's a "bubble" ... a "pessimism bubble".

How grim? Well, after the United States limped through five months of anemic “recovery,” last Friday brought news that our economy actually shed jobs in June, thanks to the expiration of more than 200,000 Census positions. It’s now been 30 months since the beginning of the recession, and it looks as if it could take another 30 or so to regain the level of employment we enjoyed in the autumn of 2007.

That is the potential "good news" ... the public seems to erroneously think it is worse than that.

Pessimism bubbles formed during America’s last two economic crises — the stagflation era in the late 1970s and the post-cold war recession that ushered Bill Clinton into the White House. Go back and read Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise speech,” which liberals have lately been rehabilitating. With its warnings about retrenchment, rationing and a permanent energy crisis, it feels like a contemporary document. But it isn’t, and Carter’s prophecies were wrong: the grimmest speech any modern president has given was delivered just a few years before America kicked off a long era of impressive economic growth.

The tiny little post gulf-war recession was like the late '70s? The only real disaster parallel there is that folks were so spoiled that just that small little recession ushered in Slick Willie, but fortunately, we sobered up quick, and got Newt and company to right the ship two short years later. Let us pray that sobriety is as swift in 2010!

Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell

I stand in awe of Sowell as an author. This is a 551 page economics book that is close to as concise as possible given the breadth of the subject, extremely readable, and I think "life-changing" in it's conveyance of what seem like, and really are, very simple facts of life that we actually understand when we see them, but are far too easy for humans to forget. I hope and believe that Sowell as found a way to imprint them indelibly in my tiny brain.

A mass of a few more quotes than I would usually do ....

"Different kinds of economies are essentially different ways of making decisions about the allocation of scarce resources."

"It is not money, but the volume of goods and services which determines whether a country is poverty stricken or prosperous".

"Economics is not simply a topic on which to express opinions or vent emotions. It is a systematic study of what happens when you do specific things in specific ways."

"But life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options. Economics is one of the ways of trying to make the most of those options."

"Knowledge is one of the most scarce of all resources and a pricing system economizes on it's use by forcing those with the most knowledge of their own particular situation to make bids for goods and resources based on that knowledge, rather than on their ability to influence other people in planning commissions, legislatures or royal palaces."

"What is at the heart of the fallacy of composition is that it ignores interactions among individuals, which can prevent what is true for one of them from being true for them all."

"The interaction that is ignored by those [advocating supposed "job saving policies"] is that everything the government spends is taken from somebody else. The 10,000 jobs saved in the widget industry may be at the cost of 15,000 jobs lost elsewhere in the economy by the governments taxing away the resources needed to keep those other jobs. The fallacy is not in believing that jobs can be saved in given industries or given sectors of the economy. The fallacy is in believing that these are net savings of jobs for the economy as a whole."

"Speculation is often misunderstood as being the same as gambling, when in fact it is the opposite of gambling. What gambling involves, whether it is in games of chance or in actions like playing Russian roulette, is creating a risk that would otherwise not exist, in order to profit or exhibit ones skill or lack of fear. What economic speculation involves is coping with an inherent risk in a way as to minimize it and leave it to be borne by whoever is best equipped to bear it."

"While capitalism has a visible cost--profit--that does not exist under socialism, socialism has an invisible cost--inefficiency--that gets weeded out by losses and bankruptcy under capitalism. The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in a capitalist economy implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency. Put differently, profit is a price paid for efficiency."

I could go on, and on, and on ... it is a long but pithy book. The bottom line is that Sowell describes the principles of economics that exist, like gravity, no matter what we "want". What we "want" is in many ways irrelevant, and when we try to use faulty levers as a nation to gain it, we nearly always create perverse incentives that create different results. We may want the economic machine to produce more ice cream and less broccoli, or vice versa, but by our institutionalized slap-dash hammering at the controls, we are likely to get less of both, and a lot of something completely different -- likely neither fun or healthy.

Often, as in the first quote above, the point is "x is going to be done in any case", it is just a matter of "who / how". Decisions WILL be made on how to allocate the scarce resources -- either by someone that is hungry buying a product, by someone investing their money in hopes of return, by an executive looking to turn a profit, or by a lifetime employed government bureaucrat waiting for the clock to turn to 5.  The decision gets made, at best, we get to decide how.

Same thing with scarcity -- he makes the point that a government decree that everyone had a "right" to a beach front palace would do absolutely nothing for the availability of such. "And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life?" What statists fail to realize is that this is often every bit as true for nations as it is for people.

Allocation of scarce resources and incentives -- it pretty much all comes down to that, but  it takes a mind like Sowell's to make that easy and understandable in a mere 551 pages. Don't settle for my poor words ... read it!

Sacrosanct

Townhall - What a Sack of Sacrosanct

It's Ann, but she isn't very snarky here, and she is onto one of what I believe to be the core modern American problems -- liberals don't know any real Americans and know nothing about what America even is.

As Kagan herself described it, on the Upper West Side of New York where she grew up, "Nobody ever admitted to voting Republican." So, I guess you could say being a Democrat was "sacrosanct."

American liberalism has more in common with the Amish or radical Islam than it does with being an American. They hold THEIR "truths" to be so self-evident that they believe it impossible for any one with an ounce of brain matter to hold any other opinion.

Words Mean What I Say They Mean

Townhall - How to Spot a Legal Progressive

Super article, short, just read it. It covers the obvious -- progressives find that rights the constitution says nothing about (abortion) apply to all ... federal, state, city, but rights that the constitution directly enumerates (guns), are questionable at all levels.

How can you spot a legal progressive? A legal progressive is someone who believes rights that are not stated in the Constitution, but inferred or extrapolated, should be given more weight than rights plainly enumerated.

A legal progressive is someone who knows there is a fundamental constitutional right to gay marriage, for example, even though the Constitution says nothing directly about marriage, but that a law-abiding individual has no right to own a gun, even though the Constitution clearly states that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The Third Depression

Op-Ed Columnist - The Third Depression - NYTimes.com

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

Nobel prize winning economist Krugman feels we are now in depression. We could have escaped it, had we just done more deficit spending. All mankind that has gone before has been but a bunch of idiots --- all their problems could have been solved by deficit spending as well. Exactly how much deficit spending, Paul is not clear on, other than "more". Oh, if only we could have faced the "tough choices" and spent even grossly more than we already did -- how sad, depression, all because of our failure to really pull out the stops and spend with complete and utter abandon.

Oh, the humanity.

Killing Greatness, Let's Double Down!

Op-Ed Columnist - When Greatness Slips Away - NYTimes.com

Bob Herbert is left of left, and apparently being left of left means that one sees the world with two left eyes. There is no "other side", only doubling down on the policies of failure. Bob seems old enough to realize we have been here before -- Jimmy Carter!!! We let the left have the keys in the late '70s and they promptly drove in the (left)ditch, plus sowed the seeds of a lot of what became more recent/current problems -- increasing the capabilities of S&Ls to try to help the poor which became the S&L debacle 10 years later, and Community Reinvestment Act, which became Sub-Prime, the root of our financial crisis.

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the “economic royalists” and asserting that “we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.”)

Well, first of all, Carter policies coming home to roost -- along with all the FICA, Medicare and other heavy taxes slowing the economy helped at least as much as "laissez-faire economics". I wonder if the thinkers around laissez-faire would have envisioned the SEC, SOX, the IRS, and hundreds of other federal and state agencies as some sort of "pure market"??? Somehow, when the Vikings lose a game, the zebras are always a major factor. How come when the economy goes bad, even though the government is an ever growing part, it NEVER shares in any blame according to the MSM ... including the Bob corner.

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything.

TRUE! But the question is WHY? Can it possibly be that we are "short on government"? We have more of it than we have EVER had at all levels, and even by Bob's analysis, things suck! Bob can't envision that pouring water on the engine of productivity puts out the fire, but are the rest of us that MSM blinded??? **THE** reason that America used to be exceptional was FREEDOM ... which meant INDIVIDUALS had a shot to make vast improvement in their lives, and as a result, in the lives of their countrymen.

What happened is that in the 20th Century, the "progressives, statists, liberals, socialists, collectivists, etc (they are all really the same)" showed up and crapped all over the basic element that made us exceptional!! Now Bob is surprised we are no longer exceptional? When people are looking to the government to solve their problems, that is an extremely good definition of helplessness.

There are plans aplenty for demolishing large parts of what’s left of Detroit, which in its heyday was the symbol of an America that was still a powerfully constructive force, a place that could produce things and improve the lives of its people and inspire the rest of the world.

YES, YES Bob!!! Detroit was the VERY MODEL of the "progressive experiment" -- huge unions, huge income re-distribution, corporate and government partnerships, urban planning, huge investment in the public school system, entirely under the direction of union teachers. It was indeed a symbol of the "America" that Bob sees as best -- a "progressive" sort of America that isn't really American at all. The Detroit experiment FAILED!! Completely!!! Even Bob can see that -- he just doesn't realize what the problem is, or more likely, just doesn't want to admit it, even though it is awfully plain.

How is it possible that we would let this happen? We’ve got all kinds of sorry explanations for why we can’t do any of the things we need to do. The Democrats can’t get 60 votes in the Senate. Our budget deficits are too high. Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck might object.

Meanwhile, the greatness of the United States, which so many have taken for granted for so long, is steadily slipping away.

Bob, it happened because you and the progressive movement never understood what America was and you are well on your way to destroying it! Stop now, before this once great nation looks like Detroit and even more of the population are lost and unable to see the sad truth that America was exceptional BECAUSE it had LIMITED GOVERNMENT!

UNlimited government has killed a once exceptional nation! Look around the world, there is NO SHORTAGE of unlimited government -- and unsurprisingly, a lot of the rest of the world looks a lot like post-liberal Detroit!

Bush The Idiot?

Was George Bush an Idiot??????
 

 Before you answer with a resounding yes, read this through.
 

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a TelePrompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how  inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes? If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky? If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia , would you have approved? If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the nonexistent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a  minor slip? If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States , would you have said that he is clueless.   If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas , would you have thought he was a self important, conceited, egotistical jerk.   If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment? If George W. Bush had misspelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoes as proof of what a dunce he is? If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite? If George W. Bush's administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown   Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get what happened on 9-11? If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in  New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence? If George W. Bush had created the position of 32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America , would you have approved. If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?  So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 15 months -- so you'll have two years and nine months to come up with an answer.

Stimulus as Depressant

The best stimulus? Spend less, borrow less - Jun. 24, 2010

For Meltzer, the courageous, damn-the-sages stance that Thatcher took three decades ago should guide President Obama today. "If Obama announced a strategy to deal with the long-term debt and stopped doing things to increase the uncertainty that businesses face, it would do a great deal to stimulate the economy," declares the 82-year old Meltzer.

The difference is that Thatcher believed in people, business and the essential correctness of the principles of capitalism. It ought to be very clear  by now that BO does not. He believes that the answer is ALWAYS bigger government, in any form, even the form of limitless debt.

Today, the administration is pursuing a totally different policy. It's sharply raising expenditures when the U.S. already faces gigantic, chronic deficits that barely shrink even in a recovery, and burgeoning debt. "Keynes specifically warned against structural deficits when both U.S. and British economists were pushing for them at the end of World War II," says Meltzer. "He never said that more spending on top of chronic deficits was a stimulus. Just the opposite, in fact."

The rub is that the shadow of inexorably rising debt, with no plan to curb it, isn't a stimulus at all, but a heavy depressant. The solution is to sharply reverse course and bring the budget into balance over the next decade. That solution will require either a 50% increase in taxes, a 35% reduction in spending, or some combination of the two. The weight should fall heavily on the spending side.

The modern media looking glass world means that on the political front and many more, certain myths are stated as facts even beyond the point that they are clearly false, at which point, they are just dropped as stories. Thus, in this past week, we see BO move to hang his Afghan war effort on the General once derided as "General  Betray Us" with his tacit approval (he refused to vote for a "sense of the Senate" repudiating the ad). BO was 100% wrong about the surge. The media notices not at all, since their royal BOness might be seen as less than perfect for such a turn of events.

Sadly, not reporting on the emperors lack of clothing does nothing to cover his nakedness -- nor ours, as his wrong headed policies destroy our economy, security, and culture.

BO Screams In Praise of Bush

Charles Krauthammer - Afghanistan: The 7/11 problem

Actions speak much louder than words.

Great article by Charles.

Remember "General Betray Us"? Hill-Billy once said you had to "suspend disbelief" in order to listen to his reporting on the surge. BO sat on his hands rather than repudiate the shameful MoveOn.org Ad with most of the Senate. How the slimy have slithered.

Now they are staking the future of what THEY declared to be the "must win war" on the capability of Bush's general. Yes, that supposedly incompetent previous President, the one that looks much smarter as BO keeps stinking up the place. BO's hand picked golden boy, General  McCrystal? Summarily discharged for insufficient BO worship.

General Perspective

Flashback: Media Promoted Military Criticism of President Bush | NewsBusters.org

For people with any memory, please recall that from 2003-2008, the national media policy was that any military officer of any stripe that would publicly criticize Bush in any forum was "a courageous whistle blower, concerned for our nation, worthy of our highest respect" -- the media question would always be "is Bush Listening". Any recollection at all of Gen. Eric Shinseki??

At that time, every media person was a war expert, as well as any military person current or retired that agreed with them. The war in Iraq was clearly lost, there was no hope, we should get out -- and focus on the war in Afghanistan, which we MUST WIN!! Wesley Clark ran for President largely on a "General knows better than Bush", and there were all sorts of "Generals Against Bush" (all, or nearly all retired) sorts of political Ads out there. They knew that Iraq was lost as well. It was all as certain as global cooling in the early '70s and the fact that the planet was out of oil in the late '70s. Wisdom is rarely popular, and popular thought is rarely wise.

My how times have changed!!! Now, relatively mild criticism from a Generals staff in a Rock and Roll mag, that is about process, not policy, "calls into question the civilian control of the military". The MSM (and BO) were wrong about Iraq -- it wasn't lost, the surge worked. While the MSM is of course completely ignoring it, the much vaunted "day one changes in policy" in Afghanistan failed, and now the "setting a date and surging more troops with months of dithering to make the decision" is at least in grave question. Since we set a date, apparently Afghanistan is no longer "the war we must win".

Oh, and lest I forget, they had disparaging remarks about Joe Biden. How unusual! Has anyone that has ever worked for ANYONE else not heard some "bitching about the leadership over beers"? Certainly, having a reporter there was completely stupid, but again, confident and strong leadership isn't going to be bothered by that -- although I'm sure that pompous, vacuous, prima donna Slow Joe, was incensed beyond belief. Truth can be so hurtful.

It seems pretty clear from a media POV that at this point "BO is the President that must be successful", and right now that is more important than National Security and the Economy at least. After 60 days of the oil spill, there is some dithering in the MSM if BO's success is more important than the environment.

Should Generals go out and let their staff get wasted with Rolling Stone Reporters? No, absolutely not. However, last I recalled, BO is a smoker, which I believe even he would admit is "less than perfect", and who knows, it is remotely possible he may have other faults -- say a couple of small narcissistic tendencies.Strong leadership tends to not be overly threatened by the problems that come with having humans on your team -- the bigger issue is what players can best accomplish the task at hand with the minimum loss of our soldiers.

But then we already knew that BO wasn't any sort of a leader at all, let alone a strong one, so I can't see that he had, or likely even considered seriously any other choice but to fire McChrystal.

The Anti-BO?

Ride Along with Mitch

Mitch Daniels, 2nd term Governor of Indiana. National secret.

Long article, very much worth the read. If the Democrats had ever had a candidate that looked this good during the Bush years, he would have sucked the whole media spotlight in like a black hole. This guy sounds far too good to be true, he must have tried to get to 2nd base with some girl in 9th grade or something disqualifying for a Republican like that.

Actual executive experience that produced solid results. What a concept for a leader!!

Disturbing Anti-Statists

RealClearPolitics - The Right's Disturbing New Anti-Statists

The language of the new anti-statists, like the language of the 1950s' right, regularly harks back to the U.S. Constitution and the Founders in calling attention to perceived threats to liberty.

A group called Tea Party Patriots (many Tea Party groups include the word "patriot" in their names) describes itself as "a community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded!" Tea Party Nation says it is "a user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers."

Wow, what a radical group! Harking back to the Constitution and Founding Fathers. Radical!
It is pretty clear that in the EJ model, any amount of government (state) is great, and individual liberty and responsibility are completely off the wall radical concepts.

Thus has Obama brought back to life a venerable if disturbing style of conservative thinking. In the short run, the new movement's energy threatens him. In the long run, its extremism may be his salvation.

Even though it is the state that has coercive powers and was correctly identified by Hobbes as a "Leviathan" in 1660, not to mention the 20th century with the states of Germany, USSR, China, N Korea and Cambodia killing 100's of millions of people, EJ remains completely convinced in the benevolence of this monster, as well as of the horror of individual freedom protected by a written Constitution.


Get this straight folks. "Patriot, Founding Fathers and Constitution" are radical, disturbing and dangerous!! Untrammeled state power? The only rational way for a nation to go! We are so far down the Progressive / Statist agenda that the MSM, most of academia and probably 20% of the voters find the Constitution and Patriotism to be "radical and disturbing"!