Political Payola on Parade

Stimulus Pushers - WSJ.com

Were the Republicans executing a direct political payoff for a major voting block with deficit funds in an an election year with all sorts of seedy attempts to contramand state budgets to the benefits of their special interest, the MSM would be screaming holy hell. Doing it during a recess, in August and rushing it through with no chance for media discussion? Sauce for the goose ... and again, not problem at all for the MSM. Remember when "the swamp" needed to be drained?

"Transparency"? HA! And some fools think that the Queen of Slither, Nancy, is going be doing any draining? Why don't we have Charlie Manson run a home for wayward girls? Those kiddies are no doubt distracted by her little forked tongue flicking in and out while she signs away more of our present and their future.

My god, have they no mercy at all? Those innocent kids in such close proximity to Nancy? What if her tail swings around and whacks one of them? Does the term "political grandstanding" just completely fall out of the MSMs brains when Democrats are in office? A spectacle that gives shamelessness a bad name.

Kickbacks and lining their own campaign coffers in one fell swoop ... with innocent litte kiddies looking on. Political child porn.

Keep in mind that this teacher bailout also amounts to a huge contribution by Democrats to their own election campaigns. The National Right to Work Committee estimates that two of every three teachers belong to unions. The average union dues payment varies, but a reasonable estimate is that between 1% and 1.5% of teacher salaries goes to dues. The National Education Association and other unions will thus get as much as $100 million in additional dues from this bill, much of which will flow immediately to endangered Democratic candidates in competitive House and Senate races this year.

***

So in the name of still another "stimulus," Democrats are rewarding their own political funders, putting the most fiscally responsible states into even greater distress, and postponing the day of reckoning for spendthrift states. Oh, and Mr. Obama rushed to sign the bill Tuesday, violating his campaign pledge to give the public five days to read legislation online. As we say, the only way for voters to stop such fiscal abuse is to run this crowd out of town.

US Bankruptcy

U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know: Laurence Kotlikoff - Bloomberg

Actually, some of us DID know, but no matter.

But delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”

That just means that we would have to DOUBLE our current tax take, which isn't going to happen ...

The Embarrassment of BO

Fouad Ajami: The Obsolescence of Barack Obama - WSJ.com

I'm a long way from declaring the danger or the damage of BO as being somehow "over" ... this column may be correct in a lot of it's conclusions, but I think it is too early to be drawing them until January 20th 2013 with the embarrassment safely out the door and healing under way.

This paragraph captures a general mood of August 2010 for more and more people. I've been embarrassed since the summer of '08.

It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

Democrats Making Sense

RealClearPolitics - Real Democrats

Pretty good column. I hope BO fails to take her advice, because I'd love to see him be a one term president ... in fact, even with "compromise", I'm not sure our country can survive two BO terms. I'm absolutely sure that I don't want to try.

I think the real message here is how huge the difference is between the MSM treatment of Democrats and Republicans. I'm not sure that Bush vacationed much of anywhere other than his Texas Ranch -- and the MSM was all over him for taking any vacation at all with "troops in the field". (did they all come home recently?) My main MSM coverage comes from CNN and NPR -- they aren't very concerned about either Michelle's Spanish junket or the family planned outing to the Vineyard. In fact, were it not for some right wing media exposure, I'm not sure I'd know about either.

I think Susan is pessimistic here. The MSM is very powerful, and even more powerful among Democrats. While they constantly harped on W being "out of touch, arrogant, rich, not caring for normal Americans, stupid, not dedicated to his job, etc, etc", you can bet they will continue to do the opposite with BO ... even though I'd argue that actual evidence, even from a real Democrat like Susan, is actually pretty much that what they had wrong about W, they would have right about BO -- were they willing to say it.

NOBODY is more arrogant than BO, and that almost insures being out of touch. He is certainly "rich enough" now in his Tony Rezko aided Chicago home, and in the future, he will roll it in like Slick Willie to the tune of 100's of millions. BO has played plenty of golf all along and had his share of good times -- do I begrudge him that? No, only one ought to think a bit of the contrast with the quality of the work done by Bush, or for that matter Reagan, while the press harped and harped about any opportunity they took for R&R. Let's face it, over 50 days before hardly even noticing the oil spill would have been plastered all over the press forever -- see Katrina, or the Challenger disaster for that matter as past examples. When a Republican is in the WH and something bad happens, the MSM KNOWS who is at fault right away!

Stupid? Well, in Forest Gump terms, "stupid is as stupid does". IQ is pretty useless as a measure -- the Unibomber is a total genius, but I don't think that would make him a good President. Media pronouncements aside, "Presidential Intelligence" is pretty much "Emotional Intelligence", which means paying attention to the kinds of things that Susan discusses here. Very hard to rate it when the MSM goes completely overboard to try to make one guy look as good as they can, and to make the other brand look as bad as they can -- but I think the fact that we now have more and more Democrats seeing to the obvious concerns about BO that Susan does here, gives a bit of strong insight.

The Cash Nexus, Niall Ferguson

"Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000".

I continue to marvel at Ferguson, "erudite" is a word that clearly applies. Hopefully I'll be able to get some blogs out on a series of books to provide myself with perspective of the current financial and political state of the US and the world, and this book is one of the cornerstones.

"This books conclusion is that money does not make the world go round any more than the characters in "Crime and Punishment" act according to logarithm tables. Rather it has been political events --above all wars--that have shaped the institutions of modern economic life: tax collecting, bureaucracies, central banks, bond markets, stock exchanges. Moreover, it has been domestic political conflicts--not only over expenditure, taxation and borrowing, but also over non-economic issues like religion and national identity-- that have driven the evolution of modern political institutions: above all, parliaments and parties."

Niall isn't the most reachable of authors, but he did deliver on that thesis in my opinion.

"In the modern democracy...policy may ultimately be controlled by, and in the interests of, the majority of an electorate consisting mainly of the poorer classes, while revenue is obtained mainly from a minority of wealthy persons."

"The lack of deficits before 1973 also casts doubt on the theory of the inherent "democratic deficit", which predicts that democracies will tend to run deficits because the electorate favors public spending but is averse to taxation". 

Ferguson is British, so Britain gets at least as much scope as the US, but he is trying to be general. Essentially, a lot of the issues come back to the old "gold question". Without a fixed peg, countries and financial systems tend to just float off into speculation, inflation, and finally crash.

"Set in this comparative perspective, the subsequent increase of the debt under Reagan--which at the time caused commentators so much angst--was modest ..."

His point, as is the point of the book, is PERSPECTIVE -- relative to GDP, relative to winning the cold war, relative to historical debt in the US and other countries. One of the main weapons the MSM and especially left politicians like to use is the supposed "primacy of the moment". What is happening TODAY is "special, unique, maybe a "crisis", maybe "the greatest (or worst) ever" ... depending on of course who is in power. For the MSM, deficits under Reagan and under Bush were horrific -- deficits 3-5x as large under Obama? No problem at all, with many talking heads indicating that they "ought to be larger", and "deficits aren't really a problem.

"All these countries are actively encouraging their citizens, by a variety of incentives, to provide for ill health or retirement by investing directly, or through mutual and pension funds, in the stock market. In combination, these forces are causing an unprecedented shift in the balance of financial forces, so that the market capitalization of the NYSE is now for times greater than the stock of US Treasuries."

Er, at least they WERE encouraging (Britain, Germany, US, etc) ... with the failure of trying to start some privatization of FICA and now the add of health care to the never ending list of "entitlements", it appears that the US has lost it's way from this happy approach.

"Since 1899 the price of a loaf of bread in Britain has risen by a factor of 32; the price of an ounce of gold by factor of 38. Indeed, an ounce of gold buys approximately the same amount of bread today as it bought in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, more than 2,500 years ago."

As I said, I'm reading a series of books on past and present economic and political crisis. The basic bottom line is "get at least 5% of your portfolio in gold -- maybe 10%".  Pay no attention to what looks like "record prices"  --  ratios like the above tell you what you need to know. When governments get stupid, private ownership of gold as a store of value is key, and the time to buy is NOW -- before they make it illegal to own gold, as they did in the past.

"Past experience therefore tends to suggest that asymmetric fiscal problems--often, but not necessarily generated by war--quickly cause monetary unions between politically independent states to dissolve. In the case of present day Europe, it seems quite possible that the strains caused by unaffordable social security and pension systems could have similar centrifugal effects ..."

What is obvious to a historian like Ferguson, and what ought now be obvious to even the most out of touch liberal at this juncture, is that most of the worlds social security, pension, and medical systems are unaffordable. When something can't go on forever, it doesn't.

"further democratization may retard growth because of the heightened concern with social programs and income redistribution"

"...concluded that political instability is more harmful to growth than the absence of democracy".

In other words, investors and business people know they have to deal with "real risk" -- competition, natural disaster, price fluctuations, etc. What  they can't deal with is "created risk" -- what new tax, fee, rule, directive, price control, etc will be randomly hurled down from the idiots in Washington (or London). They know that the "real risk climate" is pretty much a constant and beyond anyone's control, but once they have seen "reasonable government", they are unlikely to invest and create under "activist government".

Excellent work, bit of a tug, but worth the struggle. Not reachable enough for me to recommend to all, but if one is up for a bit of a worthwhile challenge, I have yet to see Niall disappoint.

Krugman's detour on 'Roadmap' to solvency - JSOnline

Krugman's detour on 'Roadmap' to solvency - JSOnline:

I think this past blog post on Krugman ought to have completely removed his credibility on deficits. To argue that smaller deficits are huge problem under W, then to turn around an argue that HUGE deficits are too small and no problem at all under BO is simply proof that he is either insane, or merely a pure partisan.

Ryan may be one of the best hopes for keeping this collapse to '70s levels vs 30's levels. His Roadmap ought to be the economic plank for returning the Republicans to control of congress. An excerpt:

"It reforms Medicare and Social Security so those in and near retirement (55 and older) will see no change in their benefits while preserving these programs for future generations of Americans. We do not have a choice on whether Medicare and Social Security will change from their current structure - the true debate is if and how these programs will be made solvent."

Senator Scum

McConnell scolds Franken for making faces from dais during his speech - TheHill.com

There is no excuse for Al Franken. "Civility" is going to require promotion beyond the grade school level.

BO's Father Served in WWII

But for what country? Certainly not the US ... his biological father was Kenyan and too young. BO was known as Barry Souetto (BS ... maybe more apt) up to early adulthood. Maybe that Philipine stepfather served? or maybe he is just fabricating like he usually does.

In any case ... BO doesn't know if his father served in WWII, Dan Quayle can't spell potato ... one is a big news story at the time, the other is nada.

Our media is unbiased.

Imagine a Lunatic

Op-Ed Columnist - The Lunatic’s Manual - NYTimes.com

Reading this column made me thing of John Lennon's "Imagine" ... "nothing to fight or die for". I strongly suspect that Herbert can't "imagine" anything worth that kind of commitment, thus the column.

The strange idea that war at any level is a "shared commitment" that requires the "sacrifice" of tax increases, while massive entitlements apparently are not, is especially curious. Historically, the situation is exactly the reverse -- WWII, which Herbert holds up as an example was of course paid for via a massive level of government debt.

Virtually nobody sees national defense as anything but a national priority of the highest order. If a couple major cities are smoking nuclear wastelands, considerations as to "infrastructure" and the latest entitlement will drop extremely far on the priority list of the sane.

In the "Herbert Universe", both Bush and BO are "lunatics", and I guess "somewhere out there" exists the level of sanity confidently declared by Bob Herbert.

One quote:

It’s time to bring the curtain down for good on these tragic, farcical wars. The fantasy of democracy blossoming at the point of a gun in Iraq and spreading blithely throughout the Middle East has been obliterated. And it’s hard to believe that anyone buys the notion that the U.S. can install a successful society in the medieval madness of Afghanistan.

So BO just declared that HIS ADMINSTRATION had brought the troops home and was "declaring victory". So is what is happening in Iraq a "fantasy that as been obliterated"? Once we "put the lunatics manual" aside, what do we see? The world as seen by Herbert?

Two Ways To Live Life

Op-Ed Columnist - The Summoned Self - NYTimes.com

First, I want to applaud Brooks for even travelling this ground, most folks seem happy to not even think about what they are up to for their four score and ten. Now to get snarky.

There are two kinds of people, those that divide groups into two groups, and those who don't ;-)

or my favorite, there are 10 kinds of people, those that understand binary and those who don't!

It is interesting to me that Brooks assigns Christensen, "the well planned life" and the "other" as the "summoned life". Supposedly, the person in the "summoned life" is always asking "what are my circumstances asking me to do?". Christensen is a Christian, part of what he does is ask God what his life is about. I'd argue that if one is determined to come up with two basic categories, the categories are life based on Transcendence (God, something bigger, philosophy, etc), or "Situational Ethics" ... what does it seem is the right thing for me to do today based on knowledge, experience, the environment, etc. So were I to label Brook's categories, they would be "Summoned" -- the God (or other transcendent) directed life, or "Situational" ... I'll make it up as I go along.

I'm not really a "two class" person ... I think "avoidance, distraction, ignorance and procrastination" are all more common categories for "how to live my life" than the ones that Brooks happened to pick out, but it is worth low cost of the quick skim anyway.

The Social Welfare Bubble?

RealClearPolitics - Not a State-Broken People

This is a rather long George Will speech that is well worth reading through. I SINCERELY hope that his thesis, borrowed from Orwell, that "we are not a state broken people" will hold true in November and beyond. Putting the likes of BO in the WH is taking a severe risk, I think it remains to be seen if this regime will allow itself to be slowed by the vote. 

I've been reading a number of books that dovetail with my view that we are in for a very extended "age of re-assessment" -- involving significant loss of wealth, lifestyle and our very liberties being very much in doubt in America. Like all Presidents, Bush was a dissappointment, especially in his 2nd term. Most people forget how difficult Reagan's 2nd term was -- Iran Contra may refresh the mind. What was very new is that this time, for the first two years of that term, Republicans were in charge of Congress, and had already fallen prey to that very real temptation to spend the current and future people's treasure, heavily contributed along with the painful drag of the two wars, to "the base" abandoning the Republican brand.

Republicans as a voting block forgot that in order to govern for the long run, many candidates that are far far less than perfect must be tolerated as the lesser of two evils. The idea that "we may as well have Democrats if they can't do any better than this", has now, very quickly been proven to be demonstratively false. The sad problem is that like the AM hangover compounded with very real damage done to your reputation, family, finances, or all of the above, bad decisions often have much longer term consequences.

In my opinion, we are seeing a series of very long term bubbles pop, and they will continue to pop ... home prices, markets, personal and public debt, the dollar ... an yes, "entitlements". For a century ... with peaks in the 30's, 60's and  now 10's, BOTH PARTIES (the W drug benefit is like 1/3 the size of BOcare) have engaged in an orgy of vote buying through entitlements that are largely to be paid (they thought) by "future generations".

Folks, welcome to the future! We have seen it, and it is impoverished! Thank you "Progressives"!

Anyway, I recommend the whole Will article. Here is just a little teaser on the "welfare bubble".

In 2007, per capita welfare state spending, adjusted for inflation, was 77 percent higher than it had been when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated 27 years earlier. The trend continues and the trend is ominous. Fifty-one days ago the president signed into law health care reform, that great lunge to complete the New Deal project and the Great Society, that great lunge to make us more European. At exactly the moment that this is done the European Ponzi scheme of the social welfare state is being revealed for what it is.

GOP Stupidity

RealClearPolitics - The Politics of GOP Stupidity

What we have here is a failure to communicate .... the fact that conservatives and liberals have a completely different model of government.

 EJ's model is that we OUGHT to "be like Europe". There isn't any "American Brand" -- the only way to solve problems is by more and more government, and any other approach is "stupid". EJ is so intelligent that he's cut that board three times and is shocked and dismayed to find that it is still too short -- when your only tool is your "saw" (government), there simply is no other way but to keep using your saw ... harder, deeper, faster, and for longer.

It used to be that America was PROUD to be different. We looked at things with a more optimistic and different approach, and it didn't involve changing the structure of our government:

Then there's the very structure of our government. Does any other democracy have a powerful legislative branch as undemocratic as the U.S. Senate?

When our republic was created, the population ratio between the largest and smallest state was 13-to-1. Now, it's 68-to-1. Because of the abuse of the filibuster, 41 senators representing less than 11 percent of the nation's population can, in principle, block action supported by 59 senators representing more than 89 percent of our population. And you wonder why it's so hard to get anything done in Washington?

Here the left has a stranglehold on Congress and the Presidency, but it is STILL not enough for them ... they want ABSOLUTE POWER!

EJ wants wealth redistributed at all costs -- if it costs jobs, fails to improve the budget or anything else, it is "inherently good". He sees a "Robin Hood model" as somehow "just", but that model assumes that the system fails to allocate income correctly, so somehow, "central command" has to REallocate it.

Frank Rich, Review of "The Promise"

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’ | The New York Review of Books

I won't have time to read "The Promise", and it was tough to skim through this review. It is most interesting to note the liberal thought tenets:

• Liberals are smarter, BO is smartest of all, human intelligence is "the deal" -- forget spirit, emotion, intuition, etc ... liberals are smarter, liberal leaders are smartest of all, that is certain to be the answer to all our problems very soon.
  
• It all CAN be done by pulling on the right government levers -- once you have a smart enough rat pushing the levers, nirvana is at hand.
  
• "the masses", especially those that fall into the evil of conservatism, are too stupid to understand, or often even to be manipulated to the correct path. They fall prey to "ideologues", "partisans", religion, etc ... they lose the true and saving faith in the garden of liberal earthly delight, which the truly wise know is "just around the corner" (see that rat pushing those levers??? ....) 

There is always a certain happiness and passion to liberals when they are out of power -- their certainty that they have all the answers is so solid it defies any doubt when they are looking on from the sidelines, or quarterbacking on Monday morning. The only thing that stands between them and great joy is that damned "less than liberal" in power at the time.

Once they sit down to the daily task of pushing and pulling on those levers of power with Delphic brilliance, there is a certain panic, depression and confusion that descends upon them. "The damned conservatives have broken the machine too badly!!!" ... "This is FAR worse than we thought, we must re-double and triple our efforts to spend money, to regulate, to legislate, to pontificate, and to demonize !!!" ... "Why, oh why can we not find the right lever? The evil conservatives must have hidden it. Nirvana was right at hand, we could see it! But now there are all these damned problems!" ... their travails would be humorous if it wasn't the levers of power in a real nation, OUR NATION that they are randomly pushing, pulling and abusing with no clue of reality.

One often wonders how one can last past 30 as a liberal. It just seems like the real world would have bitten you in the ass by then and convinced you that "brains ain't everything". Brains are nice, but even Einstein is dead -- much better to try to branch out a bit.

Shoe Bomber Sentencing

snopes.com: Judge William Young -- Shoe Bomber Sentencing

Worth a read, got in the mail and had to verify it was true, thus the Snopes link. My big concern with the left today, is I'm not at all certain they still honour this  paragraph from the sentencing:

It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You
hate our freedom.  Our individual freedom.  Our individual freedom to
live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not
believe as we individually choose.  Here, in this society, the very
wind carries freedom.  It carries it everywhere from sea to shining
sea.  It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are
here in this beautiful courtroom, so that everyone can see, truly see,
that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely.  It
is for freedom's sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on
your behalf, have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of
you before other judges.

Wolfram TED

It is worth going out and playing with Wolfram Alpha, it is pretty amazing and I would be completely unsurprised if it replaced Google for some classes of knowledge work.

I have "A New Kind of Science" -- I'm really not going to say that I understand it, but kind of like at the end of the video, I believe one has to take a "Super Programmers View of the Universe" ... it is all about software, "models".

Physics is a mathematical model that accurately predicts much of the physical universe, but it has to some degree broken down at the levels of the very small, the very hot and the very fast.

Wolfram believes that he has a better idea, Cellular Automata, as a better way than existing forms of mathematics to explain "virtually everything" ... the structure of the universe, language, thought, evolution ....

There are pieces that I think I kind of get ... sort of like reading the classics, Greek and Roman History, and a few thousand other things, I'm hopeful that I can reduce demands on my time in the future to undertake getting a bit smarter about this area.

(In my dreams, I may even take on and somehow come to grips with Roger Penrose: "The Emperors New Mind" ... sort of like "A New Kind of Science", I've taken a couple of runs at that one and decided, "I need a bigger brain, or A LOT more time" .... I have this sneaking suspicion that while "in theory", even a mortal ought to be able to figure some of this stuff out by taking longer, drawing on more supporting material, creating intermediate analogous models, etc, there is a fairly high risk this is "Non-computable in MooseSpace".

I think it IS fascinating to watch however!