Saturday, October 18, 2008

WSJ, Change Defined

A Liberal Supermajority - WSJ.com

I had continued to hope that a lot of the worst I had been concerned about in this Blog would not come to pass. The WSJ runs down a littany here that coveres most of it without collection of guns, removal of deductability for religous contribution and further indoctrination of the youth through mandatory head start and mandatory "public service".

More than ever, it will be important for those Americans that retain transcendent values to realize that this life is very short compared to eternity, and even in a gulag, it is possible to be happy with a focus on the truely important.

Friday, October 17, 2008

BO Trys Humor



Game try, standup is very hard to do, but if one can tell character by ability to do comedy, the wrong guy is leading.

Priceless McCain Humor



Wow, John ought to go into comedy! He laid on some real funnies. I wonder if BO has any sense of humor? Be interesting to see his segment, I'll have to try to find it.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Shatner On Guns




Simple, direct, gets the point across. Nice drama, poor defensive technique. Center of mass, keep firing.

Lady in CA that had been attacked and killed assailant: "Why did you fire 7 rounds into the perpetrator?"

Answer: "That was all that was in the gun".

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Spread The Wealth Around



Hey, BO as Mr Robbing Hood ... goin to take from the greedy and give to the needy! Of course some of the "greedy" are not very likely to sit still and get fleeced, so what always ends up happening is that the total pie shrinks and the needy end up suffering more than the supposed hard working "greedy". Socialists never learn.

Worst Case Scenario

Worst Case Scenario

Fred Barnes isn't known for being very "out there" on the right, but sadly, he agrees with me that a BO administration would likely try to wipe out the conservative viewpoint in the media through use of "The Fairness Doctrine". The other big move he points to is the removal of the secret ballot in union organization so that thuggery can come back to power in union organization.

Wow, I wish moderate conservatives were not starting to agree with me about how bad this thing could get!

BO and Acorn

Obama and Acorn - WSJ.com

Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and has 350K members. It picks up taxpayer money to "get out the vote", which turns out to be "the Democrat Vote", and as in many things Democrat, a huge number of the "voters" turn out to be duplicate, dead, or both. The following, quoted from the article gives a bit of background:

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage,"
for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental
goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a
major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make
home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd
lower credit standards.

Isn't that special. To have tax dollars used to help union goals, sub-prime loans and against things like school choice. Here is some information on the quality of the "voters" that they get out.

Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than
2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the
deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann
Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut
estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July,
the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000
registration cards submitted by Acorn.

Where is the BO in all of this?

During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body
funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign
paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the
Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound,
lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

So we have a Presidential candidate that formerly worked for a corrupt left wing election fraud organization and later has funneled them over a million dollars. News story? Nah, only in the WSJ and occasionally with the McCain campaign. The MSM is "unbiased", so they needn't cover it.




Monday, October 13, 2008

BO Thugocracy

Michael Barone : The Coming Obama Thugocracy - Townhall.com

I've covered most of this, but it is really pretty amazing that the MSM isn't just a LITTLE concerned about First Amendment rights. I guess having BO in power means that there doesn't need to be an opposition.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Republican Rage?

Michelle Malkin » Crush the Obamedia narrative: Look who’s “gripped by insane rage”

Apparently a few boos and a couple names directed at his Deity BO is a horrible racist rage. We have comparisons between McCain and George Wallace but of course THAT is NOT "name calling".

Michelle pulls in a few 10's of examples of a SMALL part of the lefty rage of the last 7 years that includes a lot of "F**K Bush" bumper stickers and T-Shirts, lots of "Kill Bush" stuff in all sorts of methods and just TON of stuff in absolutely all sorts of obscenity, hatred, threats and some of the most completely uncivil false and scurilous accustations in US history. MSM concern? Zero. BO gets some Boos or accusations of "terrorist" just because he palled around with a guy that helped blow up buildings and is unrepentent? Well, "horrible, insane racist rage".

Seems obvious.

Friday, October 10, 2008

When Will They Remove This One?



I imagine that this will get pulled from the web as well as everything else pointing out that the Democrats are the source of the sub-prime debacle has. Guess the age of BO Fascism must already be here, truth has to be removed at every quarter.

Palin Abused Power

Panel: Palin abused power in trooper case - CNN.com

Boy, the MSM and Democrats can be REALLY quick on investigations! When Slick Willie was in the White House, "Troopergate", where Arkansas troopers said that he used them for his personal bimbo delivery service, "palace guard" to keep Hillary away, and they were summarily fired if Hillary or Bill didn't like something they did was "no news". Gee, Palin working to get a guy that tazered a 10-year old and drank beer in his squad car fired is an "abuse of power". Want to bet that these folks would be JUST as outraged if she HADN'T tried to get him fired for those offenses? I think the REAL issue here is that they don't like Sarah Palin!

How Does One Get Confidence?

A Market Meltdown That Won't Stop: Is This Rational? - TIME

Gee, Time magazine may even be starting to realize that removal of confidence from the public can have a downside rather than just the upside that they believe it will have of electing BO.

But as necessary as those moves may be, the stock market — the most visible gauge of investor sentiment — has not been convincingly reassured. Why doesn't the news of government's quick and sweeping response stop the slide? "The news has got nothing to do with it," says Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James. "What it is, is a sequence of events that have brought us into crash mode." Saut traces that sequence of events from the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which wiped out the stockholders of those institutions, to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which did the same to that company's investors, to the run on money-market mutual funds, to the run on Washington Mutual, to the House's unexpected failure to pass the bailout bill the first time around.

"This is a confidence game," says Saut, "and the public has lost confidence not only in financial institutions but also in their elected officials." And confidence, unfortunately, is much easier to lose than to gain.

Nice that Time is starting to figure this out NOW! Would have been a bit better if they had figured it out while they were braying about "recession" in the middle of mutiple quarters of GROWTH!! Once people start to believe in the UNreal, how in the world are they going to get them back to believing in the real?

McCain Proposal Backlash

McCain faces conservative backlash over mortgage plan - CNN.com

I suspect that the MSM has a hard time understanding this, the thought probably crosses their mind: "Isn't he THEIR candidate"?? I'm sure the idea of ideas/principles being more important than political power is something that they can't even fathom. It is something that I believe that Republicans in general and conservatives in particular have not figured out.

To be "conservative" means having some transcendent ideas and values that are more important that ANYTHING else. If they aren't more important, then they aren't "transcendent". Not all conservatives think that deeply about this stuff or get into the big words, but "God", "America", "Personal Responsibility", "Family", "life" ... one or more ideas almost always are of bigger import to a conservative than the day to day hustle and bustle. While the primary mover of a liberal is always emotion, for a conservative, the emotions will usually be secondary to some idea or set of ideas.

I've thought at written a lot on the question of Bush / Republican Congress either having been imperfect enough on conservative ideals to warrant the abandonment of them by the right side of the Republican base. My general thought has been that while I was heavily disappointed in a number of things (earmarked pork, Abramoff, drug benefit, insufficient troops in Iraq, etc), I felt that given the direness of both our national security / economic conditions and the sad state of politics and proposals on the left, Republicans would have been FAR better served to continue to work to get folks elected and strive to change the direction from inside the party. No matter, in '06 they stayed home in droves or voted for "independence" candidates and we suffered and are still suffering the consequences.

I haven't decided yet if I can hold my nose enough to go out and vote for McCain after the $300 Billion proposal in the debate. He is a guy that conservatives have never been able to trust, and it shows that he is very much STILL that guy!!

BO Magic

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama's Magic

Read it all, it covers a few of the fallacies very well. I especially liked this paragraph:

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects
whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most
politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You
might have even heard that much of today's financial mess tracks to
loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will
show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation
and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules.
Presto!


Where McCain has really let us down is by thinking that the populist rhetoric of "blame Wall Street / CEOs / Business" is acceptable. The reason FDR could never fix the depression is because you can't sit around and blame the folks that have to get you out of the hole you are in for all the known ills. It really matters not at all "who is responsible", what matters is "where do we go from here". Railing against "Wall Street" is just going to have all the productive parts of the society sit on the sidelines until the windbags get through yelling.

"The little guy" can't work until there is some place for him to work. You can scream all day long about how much you hate "Wall Street", but what we need is a TEAM EFFORT. We just succeeded in "benching Wall Street". Congratulations!

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Confidence, Reality, Rights

Listening to MPR today I heard the economist that they tend to bring in whenever there is big financial news talk about how "the underlying US economy is sound, what we have is a financial liquidity problem caused by sub-prime mortgages". Yesterday, on NPR, I heard a discussion about the Financial Bailout in Britain of $1 TRILLION, which is something like 1/3 of their total GDP, MUCH larger than the US $700 Billion, especially compared to GDP (1/3 vs 1/13).

Here we have a more or less standard view from Thomas Frank's, author of the book "The Wrecking Crew".
Here's what I mean: You've got people in the Republican Party whose philosophy is one of cynicism towards government and one of complete disrespect towards particular branches of government. ... They've run these branches of government completely in reverse, put people in charge of them who don't believe in the mission, and done everything else to make government accountable not to the voters, but to the business community. 
This has resulted in disaster in numerous cases. Now, when you look upon the disaster, do you say this is because government doesn't work? Or do you say, this is because a philosophy of government doesn't work? The obvious conclusion to anybody watching this stuff unfold is to say government just can't do anything right -- look how badly it's botched this job. 
But the correct answer is that government obviously does work in certain circumstances, in other countries, and it's even worked here when it wants to. What they're doing right now at the Fed and the Department of Treasury is they're playing the game exactly right -- they're intervening decisively, quickly -- they're doing it exactly right. When the chips are down and when it's something conservatives care about, they can make government work.
So, if Europe is the shining star of where "government regulation works", why would England need a BIGGER percentage bailout then the US? Wouldn't that mean that the "standard story" is wrong? The issue is NOT the "free market economy" if in fact in MORE socialist oriented, more controlled economies the situation is WORSE??

I become more and more convinced that what we are seeing is a "tipping point". In the US, the MSM and the Democrats have moved completely beyond any sense of reality on a list of fronts so wide that it defies description -- Iraq/Surge, Economy/Markets, Rights/Responsibility, are all examples.

In the late '90s we were CONSTANTLY lectured that "Bill Clinton has brought us prosperity, if you keep hounding him, the market might drop". The market dropped because the "prosperity" was nothing but the Internet bubble, BUT, the MSM had a point they really didn't realize--it is DANGEROUS for a nation/world to lose all confidence in their leadership and institutions.

It appears that we may now be beyond that tipping point where people have enough confidence to allow the system to continue to operate. My personal belief is that BO and the Democrats have realized that they WANT to get back to the 30's, for them that was the BEST OF TIMES!! They see BO as a "new FDR", sort of an "inverse Reagan", but in order to get what they want, they NEED to have DISASTER, and they NEED to "blame it on Republicans / the market / business"!!!

The worst part of the slump in the '30s happened between the 32 elections and FDR taking office the following spring. Hoover had lost all confidence from the public and the congress and the government stood idly by and let all manner of institution fail. Hoover begged FDR and company to help him do something, but in a way that only Democrats can do, they realized that it was in their political best interests to let things get as bad as possible before they came in so they could look better when it improved. Sadly, it never did improve until WWII -- none of the stuff that FDR did ever worked!!

Bush has been as powerless as Hoover was since '06, and the Democrats have worked him like a puppet on everything but the Surge. Barney Frank and company kept the pedal to the metal on Feddie and Fannie, giving as many seedy loans as they possibly could. The Dems took credit for the "stimulus", but gave Bush the blame for the deficit it added to. Economic numbers ceased to make a difference--we were in a RECESSION, no matter how much growth there was. Normally, trying to claim that our economy was "broken" when it obviously wasn't (and still probably isn't except for CONFIDENCE) would seem absolutely stupid for people that live here as all the media people do, but the MSM emotional hatred for Bush / Republicans has blinded them to the effects of a complete destruction of confidence in the both the Government and Business systems.

Two things that made the 30's as bad as they were was the constant thrashing of new government programs that added uncertainty to the economy coupled with the criminalization of normal business behavior. We are deep into both of those problems at this point. If we could have acted quickly and decisively on the underlying liquidity problem with the bailout when it first came up, MAYBE it would have been enough to get a re-start, but we couldn't. We needed to play a bunch of politics first. When both the far left and the far right are in agreement -- as they were against the bailout, my rule of thumb is "watch out".

So, we have heard a bunch of braying about "CEO Pay", "golden parachutes", "billions for Wall Street, nothing for Main Street", etc. Unfortunately we have heard it from both parties and McCain and Palin have joined in to suggesting more programs and blaming "Wall Street and not Main Street". Maybe emotionally satisfying for some, but this plays right into the Democrats hands in pushing us over the cliff.

CEO pay and golden parachutes are about CONTRACTS. The BEDROCK that allows our current western civilization to live even close to the manner that we have become accustomed is the enforceability of contracts!! When the government decides that it is going to break existing contracts that people have negotiated in good faith and legality at the time they negotiated them, then NONE of our contracts are safe. Say GE is in dire straits and decides that Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, now retired, is the best man to get them moving. Lou looks at the situation and sees that, yes indeed, the odds are very long and the work will be very hard. Does a guy that is already worth 100's of millions have to work for potentially FREE in order for him to come on board?

The most logical thing for both parties is for GE to give him a "golden parachute" of say "50 million", but stock options / etc that are POTENTIALLY worth 100's of millions if he can pull it off. If Lou takes the job, there is no doubt he wants to win, but one isn't going to give up retirement with 100's of millions to go do a very hard job that may well be impossible knowing that if it can't be saved you walk away with nothing. If GE and Lou negotiate that contract, but the government now says "no golden parachutes", how many decades will it before there is enough faith in the rule of law to allow the retention of such talent for needed activity? A very long time to NEVER is the right answer, and even worse, if that contract isn't safe, why is ANY contract?

Essentially, all the Government involvement can be lumped under that same idea. The government is able to change the rules of the game during the game, and they have now decided to do that on a daily basis. The most likely effect of that kind of uncertainty is to have more and more people sit on the sidelines waiting to see when the game is going to stabilize. Why jump in when you aren't really even sure what game you are jumping in on? Worse, things like Sarbanes Oxley and other laws now being contemplated may put you in JAIL for actions that you took that were LEGAL at the time you took them, but are LATER declared illegal!!!

There isn't such a thing as "risk free business or investment". The riskiest things tend to have the highest potential for BOTH loss and gain. Sometimes there are boundaries put on that say "that has so little chance of return, it is illegal" ... the folks that are selling that are just making money off the selling, they aren't selling a legitimate product. Society certainly CAN make those kinds of laws, but it does so at the peril of missing some excellent opportunities for innovation and growth. Today's "stupid idea" in finance like technology, may well be tomorrows "big deal". OR, as in mortgage backed securities, yesterdays great idea may well be pushed beyond some boundary and become today's debacle. AFTER THE FACT a whole bunch of things look completely obvious. I ought to have bought Microsoft Stock in '85 and sold it right before the 2K crash. OBVIOUS, but only in hindsight.

So, the markets are in free fall, and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put confidence back in again. In my opinion, starting in the '30s we set ourselves on the road to become a nation where a whole bunch of things were "rights and entitlements" vs "responsibilities and privledges". We had a "right" to retirement without savings (FICA), free medical care for the aged (medicare), food, shelter, clothing ... and eventually, even a home of our own(CRI, Sub-prime). Only problem is that very very few things are ACTUALLY "rights". About the only "right" that can be given all the people is the "right to opportunity", which is essentially the "right to work and keep the vast majority of what you earn". That is the only fundamental right that a government can really provide, and by providing it, the magic of free enterprise produces wealth beyond compare.

Apparently, the "right to home ownership" as expressed by the Community Investment Act proved to be "one fake right too far", BUT both parties and the MSM have decided to "blame the market" rather than blame the producers of fake rights -- the government (and those that elect it and avail themselves of the fake rights, US). The reason for that is because as the critics of the American experiment had predicted long ago, the reason the government did what it did is because the politicians were elected by people that wanted a lot of fake rights. We ALL really "want them" if we don't look too deeply at the COST of those fake rights. Ultimately, that cost is the loss of our freedom, our prosperity and any security that we thought we had.

So, will people come to their senses prior to that happening, or will they go on blaming the business and markets that make all the money that has created the greatest living standard in the world, or will they realize that all the supposed "rights" that they have created are completely illusionary without the business and market activity that produces the resources needed?? I'm completely unsure at this point, and obviously, so are a whole bunch of other people. Say your prayers, and do your part to try to get people to understand that paying attention to reality is critical to the financial health of the whole world.