Zee Links and Minifeatures: March 2009 Archives

Carnival of Personal Finance

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I'd Like To Hear The Left's Comments About The Expansion Of "Executive Power" Now ...

I'm still in rather stunned disbelief about the White House ousting GM's CEO.

I'm still stunned, but not in disbelief. Only in how fast things have gone downhill.

Lileks (Twitter)

Maybe I'm old-school, but "President fires CEO" looks as wrong as "Pope fires Missile."
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My desktop spent the day at the shop. I just don't find writing on a laptop to be as comfortable, or as conducive to thinking. Touchpad versus 4 button trackball. Small screen versus large. Not to mention that the laptop isn't as aggressively protected (so I have to be a lot more careful what websites I visit) and doesn't have a lot of the information I've stored on the desktop. Awkward versus practiced.

The laptop is a convenience for servicing clients so I can take the information, print a few things, and bring it all back to the office. The desktop is where I do serious work. So not having it seriously cramps my style.


So much for Obama's campaign promise to increase transparency.

Don Surber: Open government hits women, minorities hardest:

It is pathetic to watch Democrats backtrack on Barack Obama's pledge for more openness by appropriating Obama's wife. Apparently, if the first lady is at a meeting, the public is not going to be allowed in.

I agree with Don:

Excuse me, but when an Ivy League-educated lawyer enters the political ring to lobby for legislation, she is fair game. I don't care who she is married to.

Ain't that right, Hillary?

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I agree. Bring this guy to the US, or at least clone him. Watch the video.

What the heck, here's an embed:

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Via neo, Presidential Straw Man Argument

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Powerline
How Non-Political Can You Get?

But an e-mail and flyer recently circulated to Justice Department employees indicate Attorney General Holder has an interesting definition of what it means to be "less political." The flyer invites all employees to attend a speech in the main Justice building on Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, it notes, all "[s]upervisors are encouraged to grant official time to employees to attend this event."

And what pillar of the legal profession will be lecturing Justice employees to help them "serve justice" in a "less political" way? Why, none other than Donna Brazile, whose own website biography describes her as a "[v]eteran Democratic political strategist" and a Vice Chairman at the Democratic National Committee."

I think that the folks at Powerline are correct in that the only possible fig-leaf to make this appear non political would be to give the employees official work time to listen to a speech by Karl Rove. But since both of these people are mouthpieces for political parties, that wouldn't be non-political; it would merely be balanced. The current situation is neither.

Actually, it's quite a bit worse

Under this reasoning, anyone who says we should secure our borders, enforce our employment laws, and deport illegal aliens is engaging in criminal oppression and intimidation. Should anyone who has expressed his views on this subject, particularly in connection with an election, expect to be called in front of a federal grand jury to answer for his "crimes?" While the views espoused by Walsh, Blumberg, and Kappelhoff are well outside the mainstream, they are perfectly aligned with liberal groups who do not believe that voter registration applicants should have to answer questions about their citizenship, and who in fact make a point of not advising registrants of citizenship requirements.
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NEW PREZ FLUNKING GLOBAL TESTS

All new administrations stumble a bit as they seek their footing. But President Obama's foreign-policy botches have set new records for instant incompetence.

Contrary to left-wing myths, I wasn't a fan of the Bush administration. (I called for Donald Rumsfeld to get the boot in mid-2001.) But fair's fair. Despite his many faults, Bush sought to do good. Obama just wants to look good.

Vice President Dick Cheney was arrogant. Vice President Joe Biden is arrogant and stupid. Take your pick.

Don't worry about the new administration's ideology. Worry about its terrifying naivete.

Consider a sampling of the goofs O and his crew have made in just two months:

Read the whole thing.

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Video: If government doesn't work, why expand it?

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Freddie Mac's Duel With Regulator: Does It Report Government's Role in Its Losses?

But when Freddie Mac's executives concluded a few weeks ago that they had to disclose that the government's management of the McLean company was undermining its profitability and would cost it tens of billions of dollars, the firm's regulator urged it not to do so, according to several sources familiar with the matter.

Freddie Mac executives refused to bend. The clash grew so severe that they threatened to go to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees corporate disclosures, to secure a ruling that the regulator's request was out of line. The company's regulator backed down, the sources said.

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Simon Jester Lives

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Expert Financial Advice Cuts Brain Activity

I hope I'm not cutting anyone's brain activity. That would be one thing that might me consider not writing any more. Because I agree with the conclusions and warnings given:

"This study indicates that the brain relinquishes responsibility when a trusted authority provides expertise, says Berns. "The problem with this tendency is that it can work to a person's detriment if the trusted source turns out to be incompetent or corrupt."

It is hard to know whether someone is an expert. Those confident-sounding types might just be wishful bettors. Sometimes they stand to profit if they can get more people to listen to them and so they strive to sound credible.

You can not escape the need to think - at least not without paying a price.

I always try to provide evidence and reasoning that others can follow as to why I recommend the path I do as opposed to others.

At least that way, if I'm full of it, somebody else can see it and point it out. Or at least decide they don't believe me on the basis of insufficient evidence.

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In addition to all the other deficit spending, The Social Security surplus goes deficit

All of this money we've all been lending Congress? They're going to have to start paying it back. Any bets on when they start to delay eligibility for Social Security and reduce benefits still further?


Here is the difference between Israel and its Arab enemies

Well, one of them anyway:

When terrorists kill Israeli women and children with bombs or missiles, they regard it as a triumph worthy of celebration; sweets are passed out; the terrorists themselves are venerated as martyrs. When Israeli soldiers deliberately kill Arab women and children, on the other hand, most Israelis regard it as a disgusting aberration, and a legal investigation is launched.
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I cannot believe I'm reading this:

South Africa bars Dalai Lama from peace conference

But because the Dalai Lama isn't being allowed to attend, it is now being boycotted by fellow Nobel Peace prize winners retired Cape Town Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president F.W. de Klerk as well as members of the Nobel Committee.

"It is disappointing that South Africa, which has received so much solidarity from the world, doesn't want to give that solidarity to others," Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad told The Associated Press in Oslo, referring to the decades-long fight against apartheid.

The government of South Africa is saying the Dalai Lama visit would be too high in profile, and disrupt the peace conference. Why? He's never disrupted anything peaceful before.

ANC (the current ruling party of South Africa) spent lots of effort getting people to divest from and boycott South African goods in the seventies and eighties, among many other things. This divestment and boycotting was against our own best interests, but we did it to help them win a voice in their government - a voice which turned out to be the dominant one. And they can't host an exiled leader of a conquered (now) province who doesn't want nearly what the ANC asked for and got out of the world - only to stop the persecution and repression of his people, not a voice in the government?

Seems to me there's a biblical story with more than a grain of universal truth about that, and for that matter a different one in the Koran as well. Just because I'm not a Christian or Moslem doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't concede their wisdom when it is appropriate. Even just the Golden Rule of "treat others as you would like to be treated" is directly applicable. Shame on President Kgalema Motlanthe and the ANC heirarchy, shame! The men who won the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the change to South Africa have bowed out of the conference on the basis of this development. Anyone who feels like a badly used tool because of this is entirely justified, and until the ANC makes amends, I think we ought to boycott South Africa again.

Nobody can be entirely free while others are enslaved as the Tibetans are. We helped the majority of South Africans win their political voice, and this is how they pay that debt forward? Shame!

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More of how Obama going to save our foreign policy after Bush and make everybody like us: Obama Upsets Sarkozy With Letter to Jacques Chirac

Even the French got tired of Chirac. Sarkozy has been their president for almost two years now. While Bush was president, the French called Sarkozy "The American" and his popularity is pretty high. Now that Obama has written to his predecessor, who knows? This is act that would be about equivalent to Valdimir Putin and Hu Jintao writing to George Bush - out of office and a member of the opposing political party - looking forward to working with him over the next four years.

Obama keeps this up, and he might as well change his name to Larry Harmon, because he's going to be synonymous with Bozo

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Talking ourselves to death: Obama must get tough on an increasingly dangerous Iran

Well, if we don't want to end up as a radioactive wasteland

Every U.S. administration since 1979 - yes, including the last one - has reached out to the Iranians. To adopt President Obama's inaugural metaphor, every open hand has met a clenched fist. It is the same dismal story with five years of efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.

It is not that the Iranians don't want to talk - they do. That's all they want to do, play for time. They seek the technical know-how that will give them the breakout capability to produce nuclear weapons in a short period. They are in the midst of producing stockpiles of low enriched uranium. They are adding centrifuges faster than the UN Security Council can step up the pressure and are learning about the art of connecting a large number of centrifuges to a vast amount of pipe work, while maintaining everything in a vacuum.

Simultaneously, they are enhancing their ability to launch long range ballistic missiles, a potential delivery system of nuclear weapons. What madness it is to empower Iran to do what it most likes to do - hold hostages, in this case the entire region.

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The Economic Contradictions of Obama-ism

The Obama budget envisions an explosion of economic growth as the country recovers from the current recession--more than four percent a year from 2011 through 2013. This will supposedly be sufficient to halve the $1.75 trillion deficit it projects for 2009. But there is something off here. Many of the policies Obama and his team are pursuing, cap-and-trade being the most obvious, are likely to interfere with growth in exactly the sectors in which the United States will need it. If the goal is growth, as it should be, the role of government should be to determine ways in which its conduct can fuel that growth. And that is precisely what Obama is not doing.

Ladies and gentlemen, business does not end up paying taxes - its customers do. Otherwise it can't stay in business. These costs are passed along to us in the form of higher prices. Higher prices mean lower sales. Lower sales mean fewer jobs. Fewer jobs mean fewer people have the money to pay those prices, meaning they are spread between fewer people and the cost per person goes up again. It also further raises the tax burden on the rest of us when those people who would have had jobs, but don't, mean the government has to raise taxes again so those of us who still have jobs can pay what they need paid. At a certain point, a business will shut down completely, meaning that not only does nobody have a job there, it doesn't have owners or managers either, and its products are no longer available.

The upshot of this is that if you tell me you want economic growth, but what you do is enact policies that restrict growth and encourage constriction of the economy, I know which of the two contradictory positions I believe. And no matter how many cheerleaders you have, there comes a point when it's going to get through to even the most religious followers of Obama-ism.

BLAME WASHINGTON MORE THAN WALL STREET FOR THE FINANCIAL CRISIS (it's eighty two pages, but worth reading)

Michael Barone:

But I have noticed what I think is a paradox in the Geithner plan. He is asking the most unregulated parts of the financial system--hedge funds, private equity firms--to bail out the most regulated part of the financial system--the banks. With government help, or subsidy, of course. But of course the government isn't really regulated either, is it? Except, I suppose, through the political process.

Democrats like Barack Obama and Barney Frank, at least on the campaign trail or in sound bites, have portrayed the financial crisis as the product of deregulation. The solution, they say, is more regulation. In that vein Frank, one of the brainiest members of Congress, is proposing that the Federal Reserve become a regulator of systemic risk, with the power to regulate firms that because of their size or strategic position are of systemic importance.

Obama wants to be more European? Then maybe he should listen to the President of the EU: EU Presidency: Obama Plans 'a Way to Hell'

He slammed the U.S.' widening budget deficit and protectionist trade measures -- such as the "Buy America" -- and said that "all of these steps, these combinations and permanency is the way to hell."

Q and O with some good perspective:

It is also important to understand that "cutting the deficit in half" is a mask for the fact that it means he'll still be running up a record deficit of over 600 billion a year. That is not progress in deficit reduction or "fiscally responsible" government. But it sounds good when thrown out there in a sound bite

Yes, Bush was horrible in that he spent waaayyyy too much. I and many others in the libertarian and conservative camps said so repeatedly. But Obama has already left Bush's spending record that in the dust, and he's less than three months into his term. Not to mention "tu quoque" is an attempt to divert attention from Obama's indefensible deeds, rather than an actual defense of them, and a nasty strike against any claim to leadership ability that Obama might make. He's not a leader; he's an inciter of the mob.

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Headed toward extinction?

Darwinism presupposes, and modern biology teaches, that all organisms breed to the limit of their available resources. Yet starting in the world's richest, best-fed nations during the 1970s,and now spreading throughout the developing world, we find birthrates falling below the levels needed to avoid long-term, and in many instances, short-term, population loss. The phenomenon has spread beyond Europe and Asia to Latin America.

Once upon a time, there were two primary reasons why people had kids. The first was survival of their personal gene pool, the second was old age insurance: someone to personally take care of them when they are too old to work any more. Social insurance programs worldwide together with increasing personal wealth have largely eliminated that second reason, vastly reducing the effective benefits of having children. Furthermore, in modern society the personal costs of having children are skyrocketing - not just money but time, constraints upon personal desire (I and my wife have at least four sets of free movie tickets her employer has given her, sitting in the desk drawer unused for years. It isn't that we don't want to go to free movies, it's that the constraints associated with the kids are preventing us), constraints upon personal space, etcetera. Everyone who has kids lives with this fact every day. Is it any wonder that people are looking at their individual costs and benefits of having children, and deciding to have fewer of them, or none at all?

(Let me say this, though: raising two children is the most rewarding and most important thing I will ever do in my life)

The children of a society, though, are its true future wealth. It is intellectually trivial to reverse the economic conditions that are causing birth rate to fall. It's simply a matter of finding the will, and find the will we must, because as Japan is discovering and China will soon, if there aren't enough workers in the next generation to pay for the social insurance programs, those social insurance programs will have no choice but to reduce benefits or even be eliminated entirely. Standards of living will slip as there aren't enough workers to run all the needed specializations in the economy. You take it from there.

By the way, our low savings rate as a society is also coupled with generous social insurance.

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Memo to the prez: No free lunches

Now we are told that all those ambitious budget plans to overhaul health care, education, energy and taxes are going to cost one heck of a lot more than President Obama told us they would. At least the Congressional Budget Office says so, and while there may be some give in their estimate that we will have to borrow $9.3 trillion over the next 10 years if they go into effect, there is not much room to argue. Actually, one probably should bet on that estimate being conservative.

Does this really astound anyone? Not if they have been paying attention to initial estimates attached to initiatives dating back to the establishment of Social Security and then Medicare, whose sponsors' original cost estimates were a fairy tale designed to get them adopted. What is astounding is that the new president seems to believe he can accomplish this by increasing the bite on only the top 5 percent of taxpayers while giving the other 95 percent a cut.

Every time I hear about one of Obama's social engineering programs and the allegedly low costs for it, I can't help but think, "and then Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin will hand out free manna and ambrosia to everyone!"

Dreaming of President Petraeus and an American Surge

You and me both, sir. You and me both.

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Even the possibility of this is very good news: Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough

Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.

The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

Twenty years ago a couple of guys thought they had something, but nobody could reproduce their results. Cold Fusion has therefore acquired kind of a voodoo reputation in the scientific community. If this is really cold fusion, it has the potential for immense (and fairly portable) energy sources, and petroleum engineers become the guys who make interesting plastics and OPEC diminishes in importance (and income) by a factor of 10 at least.

On the other hand, don't break out the champagne yet

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss's published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

"It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons," he told the Houston Chronicle.

The acid test will be if anyone else can reproduce their results. Expect that to take a while.

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Obamateurism of the Day

Obama: It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.

So after the two days of research to find out what he's talking about, he didn't know that his own Treasury Secretary asked for the language that allowed the bonuses to be paid? Obama doesn't want previously written contracts to be honored? He doesn't want the people who just might know enough to protect the taxpayer's $180 billion (and climbing!) investment in AIG to stay, at a cost of $165 million, less than one tenth of one percent of the amount taxpayer's have at risk? Economic insanity.

Furthermore, Mr. "Constitutional Law Professor" is completely clueless about the fact that both bills of attainder, that target one specific person or group, and ex post facto laws such as the confiscatory tax he was calling for are explicitly prohibited in the Constitution?

There are many excellent reason for those prohibitions, by the way. Our founding fathers had experience with them via the british, and knew they were a far more fertile avenue of legally destroying political enemies (or anyone!) than anything else. To use a comparison, the Fourth Amendment protects against the manufacturing of evidence, while if Bills of Attainder or ex post facto or both were constitutional, there would be no need to manufacture evidence because the people in change could take down anyone, at any time, for any reason that struck them as sufficient.

Or is Mr. "Constitutional Law Professor" fully cognizant of that prohibition and intentionally trying to destroy those protections? I'd rather attribute it to stupidity, but he's supposed to be one of the smartest guys we've had as President. You can't have it both ways: Either he's terminally stupid about something he's supposed to be an expert on, or he is intentionally attacking two of the most important protections of constitutional liberties.

Or, of course, he doesn't mean a word of it and is politically grandstanding for the benefit of his ignorant supporters and whipping them into a frenzy for whatever purposes he may have. Take your pick, but I think that one is more reprehensible than stupidity, and gives directly attacking major constitutional protections a run for its money.

On the same subject, via Instapundit, an interesting article from Mark Steyn:

We have a president who shows no instinct for economic issues; a Treasury Department that, in a supposed crisis, is just one designated fall guy rattling around an all but empty building for whose senior positions no one has even been nominated; and thug legislators-for-life who bear far more direct responsibility for this mess posing as champions of da liddle guy in order to extend their already disastrous "oversight" ever deeper into the private sector. Things are going to get a lot worse.

The full letter Mr. Steyn references is here. Mind you, this is a one sided editorial, but it paints a compelling picture that he has earned that money and is entitled to it, ethically as well as contractually.

As opposed to the ignorant words of fomenting the rabble from Mr. Obama and his allies.

Those more I see of President Obama, the more I hope to discover something impeacheable for which even the Democratic Congress will have no alternative but to vote him out of office. Joe Biden may be stupid, but he doesn't have the ability to inspire millions of ignorant morons, which means the damage he would do is far more limited.

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Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told

"For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside," Chatham explained. "You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.' But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it."

I would take issue with the proposed solution, though.

Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Real Estate

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Iran's response to US shows mind-set of leadership

"It's the first stage of the bargaining in classic Iranian style: Be tough and play up your toughness," said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of regional politics at United Arab Emirates University. "The Iranian leaders are not about concessions at this stage. It's still all about ideology from the Iranian side."

Well, duh. These clerics are locked into a mindset that makes the Inquisition look flexible and compromising. They're looking for a bigger stick to hold on the rest of the world, because they have seen the respect that the west gives North Korea, a tiny little disaster of a state that has managed to procure a nuclear arsenal and some long range missiles to launch them on They want that kind of respect. They want that kind of power.

"Have you released Iranian assets? Have you lifted oppressive sanctions? Have you given up mudslinging and making accusations against the great Iranian nation and its officials?" Khamenei said in a speech in the northeastern city of Mashhad. The crowd chanted "Death to America."

The US plays a political function to the Iranians much like the Jews did to the NSDAP: The enemy to keep the masses united against. The Iranian clerics are not interested in being friends. They're just interested in keeping the US from ever making up its mind to actually invade. Right now especially, when they're on the verge of a nuclear arsenal. They see a threat, and it's not unreasonable from their point of view: Where are Iraq and Afghanistan with respect to Iran? Once they get a nuclear arsenal, they quite correctly expect that we'll leave them alone to basically do what they want. Democracies (real ones anyway) do not elect the kinds of leaders that are willing to take the kind of losses necessary to a nuclear battlefield. I don't think we've even got the will for a containment policy any longer - witness the incredible ease with which a resurgent Russia has gotten its way on everything of substance (help us in exchange for dropping the missile defense system? Why would they do that? Obama campaigned on dropping it anyway! Don't think they don't listen to our politics. Putin would want another concession, one that even Obama doesn't want to give).

The difference between Putin and the Iranian clerics is that while Putin might be what we call avaricious for power, he's rational about the possibility of losing it and won't go over a line which would cause the necessary coalition to band together for the purposes of ousting his regime. The Iranians are insane enough to turn everything they can into a glowing wasteland to earn their places in heaven, rather than accept defeat

Belmont Club has context, and more.

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Villainous Company contrasts the treatment military families have received from our current and former presidents.

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Mark Steyn

But don't forget, folks: Somewhere in Texas a village has been reunited with its idiot, and we now have the whip-smartest administration of David Brooks's lifetime.

Read it and weep - for ourselves.

Commandante Obama

The American tried to shrug off the Latin Americans' warning. To his consternation, he found that he couldn't. Peron, Fidel, now Chavez, they insisted. The emergence of misrule, corruption and economic stagnation in Latin American nations follows a particular sequence or progression. Now the sequence was unfolding in the United States.

and

"The last step?" asked the Cuban. "Censorship. It won't be obvious at first--they're always too smart for that. But it will come."

"Never," replied the American. "We have the First Amendment."

"And soon enough," the Cuban said, smiling sadly, "you will also have the Fairness Doctrine."

Read the whole thing.

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Our Partisan President

I am worried. Not because I am enamored of bipartisanship. I like Ike - but I like "Give 'em Hell" Harry, too. I have no problem with the sharp elbows approach, even coming from the White House. I am worried because I thought partisan reconciliation was an animating force of Obama's candidacy, a big reason why he thought he - rather than one of the 306 million other Americans - should be President. I am worried that, amidst a credit crisis, two wars, and a lack of confidence in our nation's institutions, we have installed as President a man apparently willing to abandon a foundational premise of his candidacy not three months into his tenure.

I, on the other hand, never drank the Obama Kool-Aid. I observed his prior electoral behavior before he even had the Democratic nomination (disqualifying opponents from the ballot, disqualifying a critical number of their sponsorship signatures, vilifying opponents via opposition research and proxy attacks) and thought it likely we would see more of the same from a President Obama. I watched his tactics, and those of his proxies in the primaries, and found them despicable. My assessment has been borne out, and more rapidly and more definitely than even I thought. He's about as post partisan or bipartisan as Josef Stalin. Remember "A leopard does not change his spots without clear and convincing reason" His spots were succeeding wildly for Barack Obama - there was no reason for him to change.

What do we do now? The only thing we can do is help Obama opponents get ready for 2010. They're not all Republicans. A considerable number of Democrats oppose his policies and are worthy of sponsorship in the primaries. The alternative - catching Obama in an impeachable offense - is not under our control and his supporters in the Senate will prevent removing him from office anyway. (Facts? You silly person, these are Democratic party hacks we're talking about. They haven't considered facts since they came to Washington - they will vote against removal. Bill Clinton's impeachment proved that. He was guilty, everyone knew he was guilty of perjury, the House managers proved it beyond a any possible doubt - and how many Democrats voted to remove him? The answer is zero. I guess nullification is a good thing where Democratic political interests are involved)

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Bonfire of the Trivialities

That's $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he'd still be left with more than half his personal fortune.
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This would be funnier if it were less true: Obama to Limit Pay for Wall Street, NFL, NBA, MLB

"In America you can dream as big as you want, but everyone agrees we need strict controls on those whose dreams have come true," Mr. Gibbs said. "The people deserve a system in which there are no limits to your potential, only to your achievements."

If the supremely productive few are taxed as heavily as Mr. Obama would like, what incentive is there to put in the kind of hours and effort and risk to create the kind of companies that produce the well paying jobs for employees?

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Via Volokh Conspiracy, the past, present and future of Obama's Public-Private partnerships

Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

They never do connect the dots to what you would ask of any other Chicago dirty deal: "Who got paid, and who did they pay off to get it?" despite (because of?) the fact that several of these folks are members of Obama's team. PS The Boston Globe is a Democratic party mouthpiece.

Give Investors A Place To Rest Their Fulcrum

The FDIC will lend 85% on a non-recourse basis, which means that they can only look to the underlying assets of the investment vehicle for repayment and can not attempt to collect any shortfall from the private investors. (This creates the "heads I win, tails they lose" problem to which people refer).

Sounds like a sweet deal to me - 15% of the money for all of the possible upside. Where do I sign up? I don't? "Qualified Investors only"? I wonder exactly how much in campaign contributions means you "qualify"? (Look up how much investment bankers contributed to Barack Obama over John McCain. In what way can you demonstrate that this is not a probable political payoff of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, an amount to beggar the combined fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?)

Marginal Revolution thought the numbers were a typo

The remaining 15 percent will come from the government and the private investors. The Treasury would put up as much as 80 percent of that, while private investors would put up as little as 20 percent of the money, according to industry officials. Private investors, then, would be contributing as little as 3 percent of the equity, and the government as much as 97 percent.

How do I get a piece of that action? Oh, that's right - I can't. Neither can you, unless you're a member of that privileged club of investment bankers, who just happen to have made about eighty percent of their quite substantial campaign contributions to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

They say to the victor go the spoils, but the electoral spoils have never been this valuable, or this blatant, before.

While we're at Volokh Conspiracy, a guest author on what Obama could easily change if he were even a little bit serious about changing the way Washington does business. We'll see how far these recommendations go.

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So solar power isn't so environmentally friendly? Who knew? Feinstein seeks block solar power from desert land

"It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem," said David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy.

and

"This is unacceptable," Feinstein said in a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. "I urge you to direct the BLM to suspend any further consideration of leases to develop former railroad lands for renewable energy or for any other purpose."

Okay, she's got a valid point. The land was donated for wildlife conservancy, but the point is that solar and wind are being sold to the public as the environmentally friendly alternatives - but then they are unacceptable because they damage the environment too?

We've got to get our power from somewhere. Megawatt-hours do not magically appear in the power transmission lines.

This one's so easy Arnold can get it unambiguously right

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained about environmental concerns slowing down the approval of solar plants in California.

"If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it," Schwarzenegger said

So let me sum up: We're not being permitted to develop new petroleum sources because of environmental issues, forcing us to develop wind and solar instead. But they won't let us develop wind or solar power either because of environmental issues.

Question: What happens when we start running out of power? Who goes without? More correctly, who goes without first? What are the economic, societal, and cultural effects of this result?

Question: What could be the possible reasons behind such an agenda? If you can't come up with at least ten, you're not trying. Which are not contradicted by other deeds?

Question: How many "environmentalists" need to be actively malicious (as opposed to stupid ignorant dupes) in order to direct the goals of the organization towards a given result for a given reason?

Question: based upon the premise "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity", what would you estimate the most likely reason behind the agenda is?

The clock is ticking. Help us figure this one out. We start not having enough power, and that's a real problem


Carnival of Personal Finance

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Obama Takes a Dive on Earmarks

President Obama has vowed to curb the number of earmarks, also known as pork, in future spending bills. A commendable promise, had his number been zero. Unfortunately, the president wants to deal with an unsavory dish by cutting the portion size.

If a given earmark cannot survive upon the merits of the project, irrespective of who gets the money or where the work is performed, we have a problem. Obama promised to cut earmarks. Thus far we have lots of soaring rhetoric on the subject from him, but no actual action.

Wrong Move: Obama's Liberal Agenda

Obama's proposed budget shows all the vision, restraint and grace of a grasping committee chairman, using the cover of a still-unresolved banking crisis to push through a broad liberal wish list before anyone notices its costs and complications. The pledge of "responsibility" has become the massive expansion of debt, the constant allocation of blame to others and the childish cultivation of controversy with conservative media figures to favorably polarize the electorate. The pledge of "honesty" and "sacrifice" has become the deceptive guarantee of apparently limitless public benefits at the expense of a very few. The pledge of "bipartisan" cooperation has become an attempt to shove Republicans until their backs reach some wall of outrage and humiliation.

I tried to tell people why Obama was selling us a phony bill of goods but people had their fingers stuffed into their ears. Now we're stuck with this clown for four years (unless we can catch him doing something impeachable - in which case we're stuck with Gormless Joe Biden, an even bigger idiot, difficult as that may be to believe. But at least Gormless Joe doesn't have religious worshippers getting tingles up their leg every time he speaks, so he wouldn't be able to do as much active damage.)

The Brokest Generation

Just between you, me, and the old, the late middle-aged, and the early middle-aged: Isn't it terrific to be able to stick it to the young? I mean, imagine how bad all this economic-type stuff would be if our kids and grandkids hadn't offered to pick up the tab.

Well, okay, they didn't exactly "offer" but they did stand around behind Barack Obama at all those campaign rallies helping him look dynamic and telegenic and earnestly chanting hopey-hopey-changey-changey. And "Yes, we can!"

Which is a pretty open-ended commitment.

Read the whole thing

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Even Richard Nixon didn't focus-group his enemies list.

Team Obama -- aided by Clintonistas Paul Begala, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg -- decided to attack Rush Limbaugh after poring over opinion research. White House senior adviser David Axelrod explicitly authorized the assault. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned a White House official to coordinate the push. And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gleefully punched the launch button at his podium, suckering the White House press corps into dropping what they were doing to get Mr. Limbaugh.
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LISTEN TO THE GITMO FIVE

Desperate to placate its blame-America supporters, the Obama administration has clamped down on news from Guantanamo. Why? After their lurid criticisms of Gitmo, the Dems now have the world's worst killers on their hands.

And they don't know what to do. Responsibility sucks.

Today's imbecile measure by the Administration?

Obama administration says it will no longer use one of Bush's key phrases: enemy combatant

I am not making this up. I wish I were.

It's not Bush's phrase. It's a technically defined term under the Geneva Conventions. It denotes someone who has conducted armed operations against this country. And Obama thinks we're treating the poor widdle babies too harshly by keeping them contained in a prisoner of war camp with all the comforts except the freedom to kill Americans.

I just hope that the lives these bozos take when (not if) they attack again belong to the idiots who made the decision to release them. Alas, such is extremely unlikely. But they will kill Americans.

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Morally Unserious in the Extreme

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. George Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

This was strictly red meat for the "We hate Bush!" crowd, because there is no case made as to the morality of the change, and the case that can be made is sabotaged by what he did on cloning. Purely political.

PJ O'Rourke, himself suffering from cancer, rips the President's argument to shreds.

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For the first time since Grover Cleveland, a president is going to skip the Gridiron dinner: Gridiron singed by Obama no-show

"I don't think he understands the implications of not coming to the club in the first year. It's not your ordinary state dinner. I think it would be helpful for him and his relations with the Washington establishment to come to the club."

Here's the issue, skirted around in the article and never confronted head on: traditionally, the Gridiron dinner is a celebrity roast with the President as the roastee. The presidents have long expected to tell jokes about themselves (President Bush did very so very well), and sit through a series of speakers and skits whose object is to skewer the President (whatever party he may belong to).

President Obama has decided he's not willing to serve as a target, either out of an inflated sense of self-importance or because he expects at least a few of the barbs to hit too close to home. Furthermore, it gives journalists the idea that the President is a regular guy with foibles and capable of making mistakes, an impression team Obama has been doing its best to pretend is not the case (when's the last time a Presidential candidate designated their own official seal? Not in my lifetime!), and he definitely doesn't want to encourage the idea that it's okay to make jokes about him - too many good jokes there, of a sort that would do real political damage.

The excuse that Michelle Obama decided otherwise is transparently thin. That's not the real reason, and everyone in Washington (and those who pay attention outside the capital) knows it. This decision came from the President himself. He can't face even light satirical criticism. It would show him up for the lightweight he is.

If familiarity breeds contempt, Barack Obama is the best case in point I've encountered since at least Jimmy Carter. I keep thinking nobody can really be that bad, and I keep finding out I'm wrong.

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Now Obama Tells Us?

I can't see him getting elected to the White House if he had given a speech honestly disclosing what he intended to do upon inauguration.

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My imam father came after me with an axe

Actually, it's worse than that: After beating her repeatedly from the age of 5 on, and repeatedly raping/molesting her, he came after her with a gang of men armed with axes, etcetera.

Oh, and this didn't happen in some nameless village in the 'stans. It happened in England. Read the whole thing.

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Ed Morrissey on how Obama is getting burned by a fire he stoked: The bailout backlash problem

The angry populism in the electorate didn't begin with the bailouts, or the economic crisis. Democrats spent the last two years -- really, the last six years -- stoking that anger and attempting to turn it into electoral gold.
**********

Hot Air also rips the president to shreds for wanting to offer government health care to everybody while wanting to offload the care for wounded veterans onto private insurers.

What's that I said above? "I keep thinking nobody can really be that bad, and I keep finding out I'm wrong." Here's another example. These men and women earned that care - and they already paid for it in terms far more precious than cash. And after wasting $1.6 Trillion dollars in the last two months, our President can't come up with the little bit extra to meet the obligations we have accepted?

Do you really need me to spell out how penny wise and pound foolish this is? Or what the likely effects will be on our armed forces?

I just found a reason why I'm sure I want him impeached and out of office if we can find a way. Gormless Joe Biden may be an incompetent idiot, but better an incompetent idiot who can't get anything done than one who can get all the wrong things done.

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

As Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, has stated, "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Obama has used this crisis to cram at least 1.6 Trillion dollars in irrelevant Democratic patronage programs down our national throat.

If Obama Is Wrong, the U.S. Will Be Bankrupt

Then came his near-$4-trillion budget last week. It is a manifesto to usher in a new age of government activism that involves levels of borrowing and spending never before seen in the US and is a document of such staggering ambition and risk that even some of Mr Obama's Democratic supporters are suddenly beginning to feel a little queasy.

A keen poker player, Mr Obama is gambling not only his own presidency, but the future wellbeing of the country. If he pulls it off, they might find room for him on Mount Rushmore. If he fails, he could bankrupt the world's largest economy.

The problem is that he's wrong - testably verifiably historically wrong. These tactics have been tried before, and they failed miserably. In fact, they are the exact opposite of the only thing that has worked in the past. But cutting taxes doesn't feed Democratic special interest groups and Democratic electoral supporters.

Obama's fear-mongering

Numerous commentators, including me, have pointed to this never-waste-a-crisis mantra as ideological evidence that Obama's budget priorities are a great bait-and-switch. He says he wants to fix the financial crisis, but he's focusing on selling his long-standing liberal agenda on healthcare, energy and education as the way to do it, even though his proposals have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the housing and toxic-debt problems that are the direct causes of our predicament. Indeed, some -- particularly on Wall Street -- would argue that his policies are making the crisis worse.

Beware the Debt Star

Now You Own It, Mr. President

If Washington had a buck to spare, it still wouldn't stop at the top. But let's, for the sake of argument, concede that presidents trigger recessions. Well, then, we also must concede that nearly every initiative enacted in the first 50 days by the Obama administration has exacerbated what Bush started.

Isn't it too early to judge? It would be if Obama had not accelerated the timeline with his "ambitious" agenda, including the partisan trillion-dollar project masquerading as a stimulus bill and the deficit-busting budget. It would be if Obama had not worked early to support agenda-driven omnibus pork bills, job-killing cap and trade schemes, and union assaults on workers' rights, to name just a few of his priorities.

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Health 'Reformers' Ignore Facts

The Democrats' case to expand government health care is so full of holes that passing it quickly is their only hope. If Americans slow down and ask questions, they will be hard-put to come up with answers.
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The Great Pretender

Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he's doing things that he isn't, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made "responsibility" a personal theme; the budget's cover line is "A New Era of Responsibility." He says the budget begins "making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline." It doesn't.

The Anti-Stimulus Plan

These programs are not directed at the economic emergency, but are instead unrelated, enormous policy initiatives. They are not akin to the New Deal but to the Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s, which were the outcome of a progressive worldview that wanted to change the character and role of government in American life. But the Great Society was not enacted in the midst of an economic crisis. It came in the middle of a lengthy and sustained period of growth and prosperity and was in part understood as a way to make use of the tax revenues flooding federal coffers. The kind of ambitious expansion of government Obama envisions requires similar economic growth.

The President Starts War on Business

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Islam Should Prove It's a Religion of Peace

Many Muslims seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion -- while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as a religion of peace, love and harmony.

Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are "pigs and monkeys," that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn't, then, Mr. Wilders's criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.

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Obama Politicizes Stem-Cell Research

Yesterday President Barack Obama issued an executive order that authorizes expanded federal funding for research using stem cells produced by destroying human embryos. The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even "politicizing science."

Agree with Obama or You're an 'Ideologue'

The President has things precisely backwards. In a stem cell context, the "ideology" is that Science, the great abstraction that only really smart people understand, trumps competing considerations. What Science wants, Science deserves -- didn't you know?

The difference between destroying embryos for research and torturing "subraces" for medical knowledge a la Dr. Mengele is one of degree, not of kind. The last eight years we have found many workarounds and alternatives - more ethical ones - because federal funding was prohibited if you destroyed another life.

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Economic crisis shows government isn't the answer

Far from demonstrating the demise of free enterprise, this long-running, deepening recession is revealing the limitations of government.

Government, in its various yet powerful incarnations, has been offering one fix after another since August 2007.

The more the Fed and Treasury have tried, the less sure they seem and the more nervous the money makers have become.

Q and O

He's precisely right - it wasn't a problem with lack of regulation or lack of legislation. It was a lack of proper regulatory oversight and a willful decision by legislators to ignore the building crisis coupled with government distorting the market and actually incentivizing risk taking far beyond that which is prudent that led us here. And now that they have us in this position, all of them, Greenspan included, are engaged in a flurry of finger-pointing and name calling at every one but the right ones. This wasn't a crisis which happened in just the last 6 months or 8 years. This one has been building for a while.
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Putting Obama on the Couch

Well, I think I've figured it out: The White House, fatigued if not overwhelmed by the horrific economic crisis, may be suffering from a number of "cognitive biases" as identified by the burgeoning field of behavioral economics. This approach looks at the various flawed ways humans make choices in the real world vs. the "econ" world where supposedly we're all cool, calculating "rational agents."

It has been obvious to me from day one that Obama and his team have started with the answer they wanted, then figured out a way to justify it. Other people are starting to figure it out.

A Presidential Crisis of Competence

Less than two months into this administration, three things are clear.

First, its agenda is every bit as radical as many of us expected and feared. Based on President Barack Obama's supposedly unimportant past, there was every reason to believe that this would happen. That some Obama supporters are surprised is a "tribute" to a media elite that treated decade-plus relationships with radicals Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and others as "distractions from the real issues," and to a McCain campaign that refused to treat Obama's candidacy as the threat that it was, and now is.

Second, despite strong signals that he is guiding the ship of state in the wrong direction, Obama and his administration have largely refused to bow to reality. Having triumphed in the presidential campaign with marketing and misdirection, they actually believe that voters gave them a mandate to spend hundreds of billions of dollars we don't have, and to bail out banks, companies, and homeowners without apparent limit. While the markets continue to beg to differ, Obama has been essentially indifferent.

The beauty of the modern era is that a President doesn't need intermediaries such as a "Kitchen Cabinet" (Roosevelt's name for his friends who guided him from outside of official positions) to find out what people think, or for a reality check. He can go onto the internet and find out.

But Obama doesn't want to hear that the Titanic is headed straight for that iceberg. That's the way he wants to go; therefore, that's the way we're going to go if he can cajole, trick, intimidate, shame or a combination of all available techniques into going along with his desires.

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The "Man-Cession" Continues

If this disparity was the other way around, we'd never hear the end of it for all the feminist accusations of "Sexism!" and "discrimination!"


WOW! Most important article I've seen in months!

The Triumph of Banality

If we wish to get health-care costs under control, then we should at least be honest with the American people and admit that we are all paying a collective fortune largely for three reasons: (1) to keep functioning into their 60s those who drank, smoked, and ate too much and in a past era would have passed on at 60; (2) to give us all an extra three to five years of mobility and functionality after we reach 75; (3) to fit us up with IVs, feeding tubes, and respirators so that in our last six months of life we can die in a rest home or among machines and specialists in a hospital rather than in our own home with a few morphine tablets for pain and a bowl of soup with a straw on the nightstand.

If we're going to keep spending all this money, we have to understand that it comes with a price. And it's not just health care.

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Looks like even some Democrats are starting to understand that class warfare doesn't work - or at least that it will impact their campaign contributions

Obama aides to defend budget plan to Congress

Lawmakers in both parties question Obama's call to reduce high-income earners' tax deductions for the interest on their house payments and for charitable contributions. Also drawing fire is his proposal to start taxing industries on their greenhouse gas pollution - a move sure to raise consumers' electric rates.

and

"This massive hidden energy tax is going to work its way through every aspect of American life," said Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee. "How we light our homes, heat our homes and pay for the gas in our cars, in every phase of our daily lives, we will be paying higher costs."
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Will Obama Stand Up for These Kids?

That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.

This double standard is largely unchallenged by either the teachers' unions or the press corps. For the teachers' unions, it's a fairly cold-blooded calculation. They're willing to look the other way at lawmakers who chose private or parochial schools for their own kids -- so long as these lawmakers vote in ways that keep the union grip on the public schools intact and an escape hatch like vouchers bolted.

In short, better schools for the well off politicians children (and children of other limousine liberals), but not for the children of the working class. Can't contribute to breaking the stranglehold of teacher's unions, a Democratic constituency.

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WAGING WAR ON PROSPERITY

But they have enormous economic significance. Those who earn more than $200,000 pay almost 60 percent of America's income taxes and account for a third of its total disposable income. If these spenders and investors are hunkering down, waiting for the revenuers to beat down their doors, their confidence will be anything but robust. Their spending will drop; they'll be unlikely to invest (except in new tax shelters).

This is economically assured self-destruction. These folks are the ones that create jobs for ordinary people. Their struggles to increase their income makes for more and better jobs. They put in hundred hour weeks so they can expand their businesses. But when everything extra they earn would be confiscated, why should they bother?

Lest you not understand, you want them to bother. That's where all these beautiful high paying jobs come from. That's where they get the money to pay taxes. What happens when these extremely productive people decide they'd rather live in Hong Kong or Mumbai? Without these people, we're eventually looking at turning into Zimbabwe, if not Somalia. They are why we became the world's economic powerhouse. It wasn't the government that created our Oil or Steel or Railroad (or Automobile or Airplane or Semi-Conductor or ...) industries - it was entrepreneurs looking to make money. They are why people have jobs and cars and homes and cell phones and computers and internet instead of horse drawn plows. The government didn't do it. Individual people building businesses so they could make money did it.

Communism is an experiment that has been tried about 100 times in the last 92 years. It has never worked once, and while they were failing in spectacular fashion, they have led to all but one of the worst human disasters of the last 100 plus years and something north of 100 million murders. Even the exception has a lot more in common with communism than the capitalist system.

This guy understands: Entrepreneurs are best stimulus for the economy. It really isn't a stretch. We did this once in the early eighties, and it worked. There was more turnover in the Fortune 500 under Ronald Reagan than the previous fifty years. It wasn't that old companies were necessarily dying, although a few did. It was that the Reagan tax cuts opened the doors for newer, more efficient businesses.

Tax the Rich and What Do You Get?

In short, a complete klutz has a better chance of joining the Flying Wallendas than the bottom 95% of taxpayers do of getting a tax cut. Instead, they will all see a significant tax hike, whether in their marginal rates, in excise taxes, corporate taxes, fuel taxes, or other forms of indirect taxation. And as those taxes begin to mount up, and the national debt does it's best imitation of the Challenger, people will work and produce less and less, and tax revenues will dry up.

That is the plan for our recovery. Read it and weep.

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Michelle Obama's Patient-Dumping Scheme

The University of Chicago Medical Center has received a good deal of justly opprobrious press over its policy of "redirecting" low-income patients to community hospitals while reserving its own beds for well-heeled patients requiring highly profitable procedures. Substantial coverage was given to a recent indictment of the program by the American College of Emergency Physicians. ACEP's president, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement suggesting that the initiative comes "dangerously close to 'patient dumping,' a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act, and reflected an effort to 'cherry pick' wealthy patients over poor."

You sure you want these people running the only health care there is?

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Things That Need To Be Said...Unofficially (for now)

Investors are not going to sit around and wait to have their Euro-denominated paper revalued in Drachma. They'll immediately start dumping that paper, and moving all the assets they can out of not only the offending nation, but any other country that looks like a weak sister. As the article Bruce quoted notes, "Such a wholesale shift would lead to a collapse in the money supply..." Gee, you think?

The era of governments being able to borrow money at will is on its last legs - mostly because so many of them have abused the ability worse than homeowners ever abused stated income loans.

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McCain Slams Obama: "So Much For Change"

Jim Cramer: different subject, same conclusion:












You help grade Obama:


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An Assault on Authentic Compassion

President Obama is willing to see private charitable giving to the poor decrease in order to see the scope and size of government increase. These are the actions of an ideologue, not a "pragmatist."

The Obama budget is going to give us a record fiscal deficit. It will create a troubling compassion deficit, as well.

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The Feds' Bailout Black Hole

If it wasn't already obvious, this week's $30 billion check that the U.S. Treasury handed to insurer American International Group should demonstrate the folly of propping up crippled companies.

This is the fourth bailout to AIG, which already has put over $170 billion in government funds at risk, and it won't be the last. AIG lost $62 billion in the last three months of 2008.

Once we admit they're too big to fail, we commit ourselves to propping them up. But if they don't turn themselves around, that amounts to a continuing unlimited drain on taxpayers. Furthermore, having access to the federal checkbook gives many companies (such as GM) an excuse not to undertake needed actions and reform to return to profitability. In short, the taxpayers are funding companies that now have very little incentive to compete.

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Obama: The Great Divider?

And in the case of Sen. Obama, in his nascent career in the Senate, he had already compiled the most partisan record of any Democratic Senator. He had attended religiously one of the most racially divisive and extremist churches in the country. His Chicago friends were not moderates. His campaigns for state legislature, the House and the Senate were hard-ball, no-prisoner affairs of personal destruction, even by Chicago standards. Campaign references to reparations, gun- and bible-clingers, and Rev. Wright's wisdom were not words of healing.

President Obama: Just because you can rely upon traditional media to spin the story in whatever way is most favorable to you doesn't mean that folks won't figure out that it's not the truth eventually. It's been just over a month now, and more people are figuring it out all the time. Jimmy Carter had a far more monolithic media with fewer alternative channels available, and people still figured it out en masse in time for the 1978 midterms.


Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Real Estate

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"Card Check" Not as Bad as Thought! It's Worse.

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The budget reveals the liberal Obama

Take this budget at face value, and when Mr Obama talks about "a new era of responsibility" he does not mean: "We are all in this together." He means: "The rich are responsible for this mess and it is payback time." Leftist Democrats are thrilled, and rightly so. The budget has three themes: healthcare reform, public investment and unflinching redistribution. This is indeed a new social contract: we get, they pay. Liberals never had it so good.

Question: What happens when the 5% Obama claims he wants to soak to the exclusion of everyone else leaves the country, or simply decides to stop earning quite so much money? Will he expand the target, or will he merely shift it onto the most affluent people who are left? Here's some cold hard numbers: If you soak the richest 5% for every last penny they're not already paying in taxes, it's not enough to pay for Obama's budget now.

Class warfare not only doesn't work, it's actively suicidal for a society.

There are those trying to save us: here's one group (put April 15th on your calendar). I joined their Facebook group, I intend to be at whatever San Diego rallies there are on April 15th.

If Mr. Obama doesn't back off his current course, he's going to be the best recruiter the Republican Party has ever had. I'm old enough to remember what Jimmy Carter did (and didn't do) and why Reagan won.

Victor Davis Hanson remembers also.

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I wouldn't be this polite: Media Objectors to New Dover Photography Rules Can Pound Sand

That early graph is quite telling. If the aim is to honor the fallen, then with the permission of the surviving family, the best way to honor a fallen American man or woman is to capture their indiviual coffin and procession. Name them. Explain who they were, what they did, why and where they served. That's honoring them.

But most of the media simply doesn't want to get dragged out to individual funeral processions. It's quite a bother. Instead, their objectives are often disconnected from honor and instead focused on journalism critical of war efforts.

Don't take my word for it. Look at the coverage of the Iraq war sans images of draped coffins. How many soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines were you introduced to? How many reports of individual stories of sacrifice, courage and honor did you hear? How many of the fallen did you actually get to know as they were dutifully honored by the national media?

The aim is not to honor the fallen. It is to show bodies coming back. It is to to create popular sentiment against the war. In other words, propaganda. I don't think the fallen need to feed anyone's propaganda machine. To their credit, neither the Bush nor Obama administrations has attempted any noteworthy war propaganda. But that doesn't mean there isn't any. There's quite a bit of organized, directed, anti-war propaganda, and most of it is lying in the most vile ways possible.

Using photos of men like these to dishonor their sacrifice? I don't think so. The current rules (family permission required) make sense.

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Wanting Obama to fail

Here's a confession: I'd be lying out of my 3rd point of contact if I said I wanted him to succeed. That's because "success" would mean the subversion of everything I find important into something I loathe. It would mean the supplanting of free market and capitalistic economic mechanisms with those designed by government. It would mean sanctioning and approving govenment driven market distortions. It would mean approving government picking economic winners and losers. It would mean agreeing that it is the job of government to provide health care, welfare, and retirement. And on and on we go.

I'd prefer that Obama fail to implement his agenda (or any more of his agenda), which is going to do major damage even if the Republicans win all available seats in the 2010 elections and reverse everything immediately (they're not going to do either of those). That's the absolute minimal fail possible - failure to implement any more of his disastrous agenda.

Beyond that, though, it isn't a matter of "hoping" he fails. It's a matter of watching something as inevitable as gravity unfold. Once started on the path, it's only a question of how bad the disaster gets, and how long we sit in denial watching it get worse. The Gods of the Copybook Headings ride again.

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(Eliminate the spaces and change parentheticals to the symbols, of course)

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About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Zee Links and Minifeatures category from March 2009.

Zee Links and Minifeatures: February 2009 is the previous archive.

Zee Links and Minifeatures: April 2009 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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