Daily Dive 31 July 11

Posted on July 31, 2011 by

Quotes of the Day:

“That’s because Apple collects more money than it spends, while the U.S. government does not.” –Matt Rosoff from Apple Now Has More Cash Than The U.S. Government

Must Reads of the Day:

August 2 is but a few days away, and you know what that means: I need to buy mom a birthday card. Also THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE BUDGETARY MELTDOWN END DAYS WHERE WE FACE FINAL ARMAGEDDON UNLESS WASHINGTON GETS ITS BAR TAB RAISED ANOTHER TRILLION. Or something.

I know the consequences of failing to do so are too horrible to contemplate, but I went ahead and contemplated them anyway. This resulted in a bunch of 140-characters-or-less prophecies for the Twitter hashtag #ConsequencesofDefault, which I have edited and compiled for your edification. If my inner Nostradamus is any guide, the post-apocalyptic future of August 3, 2011 looks grim indeed….

This is speculation, so take it as such. It is impossible to know for certain what another person or people are going to do until they do it, but when Vanna turns enough letters around on the board, you don’t need to buy any more vowels.

I think the Obama regime is intentionally trying to get the Los Zetas drug cartel to overthrow the Mexican government, and do it fairly soon. This thesis is nothing new. If you want citations, do a google search of the terms “los zetas overthrow” and read up. What I want to address is the question of WHY.

The Obama regime wants to effectively dissolve the U.S.-Mexican border. A Los Zetas overthrow would accomplish this. Mexican refugees would flood into the United States. The U.S. would refuse to acknowledge the Los Zetas regime as a legitimate government. The U.N. and other illegitimate criminal syndicates operating as diplomatic fronts would immediately call for the U.S. to accept all Mexican refugees. Because the Mexican government would no longer be legitimate – and essentially would not exist – there would be no way to deport ANY Mexican nationals inside the U.S., because there would be no government in Mexico to hand them back to lawfully. So, we would have:

1. Completely open borders
2. MILLIONS of refugees streaming into the U.S.
3. Global insistence that the U.S. accept these refugees
4. Instant de facto amnesty for both pre-Zeta and post-Zeta Mexicans in the U.S.
5. Obama cast as savior of these Mexican refugees
6. Millions of new welfare-dependent Obama voters
7. A lawless Mexico, wide-open to unlimited muslim and Chinese staging

There will be no new world order, much less an end of history, pan-global democratic capitalism. Instead, regional hegemonies will fill the void and do as they please. For the Black Sea and Eastern Europe, a 19th-century-like Russia will set the rules. China will have sway over Asia up to the Indian border. A new Ottoman Empire will pressure both Greece and Cyprus, and give power and credibility to the Islamic anti-Israeli nexus. A chaotic Arab Islamic world will be united in its hatred for Israel. In the same fashion that the public is turned off by the now near daily teleprompted sermons from their “let me be perfectly clear” and “make no mistake about it” and “let’s be honest here” Obama, so too the world will tire of a Reverend Obama whose sermons increase in direct proportion to his threats of “consequences” and “ramifications.” At first, we Americans will appreciate the cost-savings and end to the hassles; soon, we will learn what we learned last time in 1941.

The Libyan War never caught the imagination of the American public, even though you’re paying for most of it. But in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing they’re following it. And they regard it as a useful preview of the post-American world. Absent American will, even a tinpot desert drag queen can stand up to the great powers and survive. The lesson of Obama’s half-hearted little war isn’t lost in the chancelleries of America’s enemies.

For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.

America has had two roles in a so-called “globalized” world: America’s government was the guarantor of global order; America’s economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, “life on this planet as we know it today” is going to change, and very fast.

As we look back on the horrors of the dictatorships and autocracies of the past, one particular question consistently arises; how was it possible for the common men of these eras to NOT notice what was happening around them? How could they have stood as statues unaware or uncaring as their cultures were overrun by fascism, communism, collectivism, and elitism? Of course, we have the advantage of hindsight, and are able to research and examine the misdeeds of the past at our leisure. Unfortunately, such hindsight does not necessarily shield us from the long cast shadow of tyranny in our own day. For that, the increasingly uncommon gift of foresight is required…

Must See TeeVee! 

From today’s senate debate on the debt ceiling. I particularly like the part where he pwns my senior senator Lurch Kerry (Dumbass-MA).

It’s about 15 minutes long and worth every second.

The Poster of the Day comes from the folks over at Moonbattery…

 village-idiot-obama

Japan and the softly glowing world…

M6.4 Earthquake Right Off the Coast of Iwaki City, Fukushima

Iwaki City is about 43 kilometers south of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. According to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, there has been no report of any damage at Fukushima I and Fukushima II.

The M6.4 earthquake hit at 3:54AM Japan Standard Time on July 31. It was felt throughout Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto, and Chubu (eastern half of Japan). Naraha-machi, where Fukushima II Nuke Plant is located, had the seismic intensity of 5+.

5-day forecast shows cyclone approaching Japan (MAP)

Maybe TEPCO should put a picture of the core on a milk carton… NHK: TEPCO doesn’t know where melted fuel is at in reactors or actual level of radioactive particles still being released — About to start checking

Fukushima I Nuke Plant: One Step Forward, One Step Back, and One Enigma

Remember TEPCO hasn’t done (or released) the testing of the water in the basement of Reactor 1 reactor building, and that water was gushing in steam which measured 1,000 millisieverts/hour. Something very hot (temperature and radiation) is under that water.

TEPCO has been sending in workers to Reactor 1 regardless, to install the heat exchanger for the Spent Fuel Pool.

That, by the way, is another thing that hardly any information has been released by TEPCO: the SFP of Reactor 1. What’s the radiation level of the water in the pool? What happened after the explosion? What’s the temperature of the water? What happened to the spent fuels?

Record Torrential Rain Prompts 375,000 People to Evacuate in Niigata, Fukushima

Contaminated Water Treatment System: 58% Operating Rate, Amount of Water Increased by 3000 Tonnes in a Week

Bloomberg: “Everyone is being bitten by invisible snakes that will eventually kill them” says professor visiting Fukushima

 

World News:

Japanese Military Analyst: Chinese Nuclear Submarine Accident in Dalian, China??

According to the information I just obtained, a nuclear submarine of the Chinese Navy had an accident in the port of Dalian on July 29, and there is a leak of radiation. The area is strictly closed off by the Chinese military, and the situation is said to be very dangerous.

I doubt that the Chinese government will announce the accident. The neighboring countries should take defensive measures, and the Japanese fishing boats in the area should be careful.

One more thing. According to a “foreign” insurance company, China’s high-speed train accident has 259 people dead, 183 injured, and 154 still missing. The numbers are set to increase, according to this insurance company.

The question is what happens to the global economy going forward? For the answer we again turn to Sean Corrigan, who remarks on some very disturbing developments in the global macro arena, which when tied in to core tenets of the Austrian Business Cycle theory, indicate that the global soft landing may be a mirage, and that the downslope we are already in, may convert into a stall from which the global airborne Titanic does not recover.

European leaders hope they can sweep Europe’s financial problems under the rug by shooting the (American) messengers of bad news.

Go ahead, Anderson. Forget what 300 Muslims did to Lara Logan. Forget that punching, kicking little misunderstanding of Islam while you were there before. After all, that was supposedly Hosni Mubarak’s posse that beat the crap out of you. We all know Hosni’s out of the picture now. It’s a democracy now, right?

Please go to Egypt to report on the triumph of democracy in the “Arab Spring,” Anderson.

Whether true or not, there’s no happy ending here.

  • The thing I discovered a long time ago is that whenever anyone screeches “widespread famine in Africa” you do not look at the pictures of the poor starving kids, you look at pictures of the adult men. If they are not walking skeletons then there is no “widespread famine”, there may be a food shortage but no famine. Why do I say this? Because in sub Saharan African societies the men eat first and the women and children get the scraps. Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-Linked Islamist Group Al-Shabaab Claims Famine An Infidel Hoax…

 

  • As a Penguin the only part I don’t like is the ‘open shores’ bit. If you leave them open you just end up with the beaches being cluttered with fat, lazy, stinky Leopard and Fur Seals to whom Penguins are their equivalent of Lay’s potato chips-none of them can eat just one…The Happy Feet Penguin Political Party

This morning I was hunched over my desk writing up a politics interview which was not particularly interesting when a flurry of activity in the office announced that it was time for everyone to stop work, because it was Happy Feet’s feeding time.

As I switched over to the live feed, the penguin and the politics fused in my mind and all of a sudden the Happy Feet Penguin Political Party (HFPPP) was born.

I mean, why not? He’s going to be here for ages with very little else to do, and is already more popular than most of our existing party leaders.*

*Would you watch a 24-hour live feed of John Key? No. Would you stare mesmerised at Phil Goff having a nap? No. Would you tune in religiously to watch Russel Norman eat his breakfast (it is bran)? No. Would you stare at Don Brash for half an hour just on the off chance he scratches his butt with his beak? Ok, yeah, maybe that one.

This will happen again and again, in larger and larger numbers, with ever-weepier celebrity telethons to accompany the carnage. But you’ll see no calls to save the world from corrupt building practices on your bags at Whole Foods. Nobody will suggest that the U.S. government enter into seismic risk reduction treaties with other nations.

Spin the wheel: Bogota, Cairo, Caracas, Dhaka, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Katmandu, Lima, Manila, Mexico City, New Delhi, Quito, Tehran. It will be one of them. It isn’t too late to save them. But we need to discuss truthfully why they’re at risk in the first place.

What a sad state of affairs in the United States under the Obama Administration with his help from his minions Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. The unemployment situation in the US is bleak at 9.2%  and the economic growth is anemic at 1.3%.  But wait, that is Obama’s master plan. Make the economic situation in the US so terrible that the illegal Mexican immigrants will stay in Mexico where there are actually jobs. According to a recent Sacramento Bee article, there are less illegals in California as they are finding the “American Dream” south of the border.

There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.

“It’s now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico,” Sacramento’s Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. “We have become a middle-class country.”

Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.

With the job destroying policies of Obama, it would appear that he will not be happy until Americans are crossing the border illegally into Mexico to find employment.  Maybe Obama should run for President in Mexico in 2012 … because America cannot afford another 4 more years of his “Hope & Change”

Canada GDP Declines .3%, Largest Drop in Two Years – Don’t Worry It’s “Temporary”; Canadian Apologists Be Warned

 

 

US News:

 Land of the Six Dams News and Info sources:

 

No wonder the MSM has been totally silent about this…

Follow the facts closely:  This piece of crap signs up for the U.S. military as a Muslim. He then refuses to go to Afghanistan and goes AWOL on the 4th of July. The Army finds his computer loaded with child pornography. The piece of crap traitor is finally found, hiding out in a hotel with a cache of weapons,l ammo and a bomb. IT WAS A WORRIED GUN DEALER who helped lead the Army to him. THANK GOODNESS for our gun dealers who are paying attention.

“Ebert said Abdo, who went AWOL from Fort Campbell, Ky., arrived in a taxi and bought a magazine for a pistol and 30 Winchester Premium shotgun shells. He also bought six pounds of smokeless gunpowder that totaled $250, but he apparently wasn’t sure what it was.

“Well, that’s absurd,” Ebert said. “You’re not going to buy six pounds and not know what it is, so the red flag goes up.”

In its December 2010 newsletter, Courage to Resist promoted Abdo as a “Muslim Peacemaker.”
The group wrote an item on Abdo entitled, “The missing story of a Muslim peacemaker.”
Stated the newsletter: “The problem is that almost the only time Muslims are featured in the media is when a Muslim engages in an act of violence. A one-sided focus on violence committed by some Muslims fuels the racist narrative that “Islam is a religion of violence”— which underwrites the so-called “Global War on Terror.”

Oops.

Like I said in the earlier post, I can’t think of another reason for Abdo to go to Killeen, TX if it wasn’t to take advantage of the Under the Hood Cafe and the denizens there. The fact that IVAW has gone silent only reinforces that contention. Given the nutty behavior that springs from Under the Hood, from people like Bobby Whittenburg, buddy of Carl Webb and the others in the Austin area, under the tutelage of Doug Zachary, I’m not surprised Abdo would be radicalized.

If he had a bitch with the Army, it makes more sense for him to remain at Fort Campbell and commit his terrorism there for retribution for the perceived injustices committed against him. It makes no sense to go to the middle of Texas, 150 miles from his home and far from his home station, unless you take UtH into consideration. And his Facebook friends support this contention as well.

 

Your “surprisingly unexpected” economic news of the day:

Quarterly GDP since Pres. Obama took office.

2009 2nd Qtr:…..-.7%
2009 3rd Qtr:…..1.7%
2009 4th Qtr:…..3.8%
2010 1st Qtr:…..3.9% (Obamacare passed March 2010)
2010 2nd Qtr:…..3.8%
2010 3rd Qtr:…..2.5%
2010 4th Qtr:…..2.3%
2011 1st Qtr:…..0.4%
2011 2nd Qtr:…..1.3%

The conventional wisdom is that it takes at least 2.5% GDP growth to lower unemployment numbers.

For comparison, here are annual numbers from the Carter years

1977….4.6
1978….5.6
1979….3.1
1980…-0.3

And of course what MSM story about the economy would be complete without the “unexpectedly” part?

Economists had expected the economy to expand at a 1.8 percent rate in the second quarter. Fourth-quarter growth was revised to a 2.3 percent rate from 3.1 percent.

The Keynesian stimulus put in place by the Democrats two years ago has been an economic disaster. Sadly, these latest data prove it. Our budget deficit is bad enough. But our growth deficit is devastating.

The most recent economic news is figuratively, if not quite literally, depressing.

Click for full size. Note the gap between spending and revenue. This ship won’t be afloat for long

In short, Mr. Reagan’s economic experiment created “Hiring Now!” signs.  Mr. Obama’s economic experiment has created “Going Out of Business” signs.

Where are those 400,000 jobs? Or the millions that Pelosi said will be coming down the pike? They don’t exist. Nor will they.

Pelosi said this July 1, 2010. Just over a year later, where are those jobs?

Here is the update. As of last night, the US Treasury had just $51.3 billion in Federal Resere cash, and furthermore, Tim Geithner let the $5 billion in residual CMBs under the Fed’s Supplementary Financing Program mature without rolling. In other words, the Treasury just burned $15 billion, or $20 billion when accounting for the CMB roll off, overnight. At this burn rate there is precisely 3 days or so of cash, although this naturally does not include the bulk payment due to SSTN discussed previously. It is now officially time to panic, although those who so wish, can put their money in not just Apple ($76.2 billion), but GE ($136.4 billion) and Microsoft ($62.4 billion) all of which have more cash than Tim Geithner. Of course, as Gartman put it, in three days everyone will have more cash than the US Treasury. Incidentally, someone may wish to inform the irrelevant data chasers that a far better comparison is that of the US Treasury not to companies that have X cash, but to those that have a $15 billion cash burn per day.

When Deutsche Bank’s Joey perma-LaWronga finally gives up on his call that has been wrong for about 3 years now, it may be time to i) panic or ii) buy everything with three hands (thank you Fukushima). We are leaning to the former, especially after the upcoming downgrade forces the Fed to launch QE3 in about a month.

So we went from an estimated 1.9% to 1.6% to now 1.3%. Expect that to be quietly downwardly revised in a couple of months, just like last quarter.

Well, at least something went up. Obama will probably consider this an accomplishment.

Inflation, as measured by the core personal consumption expenditure index, rose 2.1% in the second quarter, the fastest pace since the fourth quarter of 2009.

It’s all so unexpected.

Anyone who wondered what he meant when he promised to fundamentally transform America ought to have a good idea by now.

According to the National Urban League, virtually all of the impressive economic gains achieved by blacks over the past 30 years have been wiped out by the current recession/depression/“recovery”. As Patrick Graham of the Urban League of Central Carolina observes,

“It takes time to build anything. But it doesn’t take very long to destroy it.”

What our current rulers are destroying by suffocating the economy with excessive taxing and spending, monstrous debt, overbearing regulations, and general malignant intrusiveness will take generations to rebuild, if it ever can be.

A sterling example of Wynn’s point is the Dodd-Frank law that was supposed to solve the problems that led to the 2008 financial collapse. It empowered regulators to decide which firms are “systemically important” — too big to fail, in other words. Enshrining this concept into law will only make huge financial losses more likely, as firms deemed too big to fail will have an incentive to take more risks, in the knowledge that the government will bail them out when they get into trouble.

That is bad enough. Even worse is not knowing which firms are “systemically important.” Yet the Obama administration has yet to make that determination, which means that many large financial companies don’t know whether they will be covered, and so don’t know whether they will have to raise capital or reduce their leverage. That means that industries that rely on these companies for funding do not know what their cost of capital will be. As journalist Robert Tracinski points out, this is “the most basic piece of information in a functioning economy.” The only thing worse than bad rules is not knowing what the rules are.

 

 The Debt Ceiling/Budget Kabuki:

NOTE: Things are moving so fast that I can not keep the blog up to date with the rapidly changing events concerning the Debt Kabuki. (I don’t blog for a living, I have no one helping me with this and I am still repebbling the nest). So, I am posting background, analysis, interesting events and other items pertinent to the subject. If you want the latest, up to date infoz check Drudge Report.

It just goes to show that some people can have their cake and eat it too.

“I would love nothing more than compromise — but compromise that’s not a solution is a waste of time.”

Not to mention money… lots of money.

We’ve talked about it here many times. What good is “compromise” if it simply means going to hell in a slightly slower handbasket? Even worse, often it results in a faster handbasket. Rubio nailed it.

Ring.

Ring.

Tim Geithner: “Hel.. Hello?”

Obama - slightly out of breath: “I need your help. You can’t ask why. You can’t ask where. But I need to bury an economy. Can I count on you?”

TG: “Of course, but one question: Why did you dial my cell? I’m lying at the foot of your bed.”

Obama: breathing

TG: “I can see you.”

Obama: “ummmm”

TG: “Forget it. I’ve got some shovels in my van.”

Run with it, morons. Who else does Obama call?

Make me laugh. More importantly, make Andrew Breitbart laugh.

THE ISSUE is this White House’s pathological need to demonize George Bush, and by extension Republicans, and now the Tea Party.  Obama and his staff have a psychological condition that obviously precludes them from accepting responsibility and like a 5 year old, they blame others when confronted with their misdeeds.

Concurrently, Americans should consider that an affront, that their President would fudge the math regarding our fiscal mess.  Not only does this show that Obama is not trustworthy, but it highlights the glaring reality that this administration will recolor history, use accounting gimmicks, and juggle the books to make themselves look good, but they absolutely refuse to do anything about the fundamental problem of our out of control spending.  It is the message, it is the placing of blame.  They will create a post that required hours of inventive math, but this White House will not even put forth a plan to deal with our fiscal mess.

Now you know why Boehner walked out on Obama.  How do you negotiate with a pathological liar whose desk placard must read the “Buck stopped on January 19th, 2009″.

It’s been said before but bears repeating — President Obama might end up with the ability to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling through 2012 and beyond. Since most of the alleged “cuts” are pushed off well into the future, the government might basically have $2.4 trillion to play with heading into the 2012 election, and the “cuts” that pay for it won’t hit until some of them are out of office (if ever). This is something that must have Obama salivating:

Reid would have President Obama request a $2.4 trillion debt-limit increase in two installments of $1.2 trillion each. The requests would be subject to congressional resolutions of disapproval, but these would do little to restrict the president.

Obama could veto any resolution of disapproval, and it would take a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to override him.

By the way, $2.4 trillion would be the largest debt ceiling increase ever. It was raised a record $1.9 trillion only 18 months ago.

Somehow they’re managing to sell this as “cutting the size of government”?

The Tea Party types in the House did the right thing. The problem is that there aren’t enough of them… yet.

You don’t see this every day…

Nor, in this argument over the big-deficit/big-government/high-tax/redistributive state is there much awareness of comparative evidence: Did the EU redistributions to southern Europe result in economic prosperity and fiscal stability, do blue states have smaller deficits and better employment percentages than red states, do the blue-chip Obama economists—a Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers—still write and argue that their massive Keynesian agendas brought prosperity from 2009 to 2011?

Conservatives are looking at the bottom line and rightly experiencing sticker-shock. As Lawrence Lindsey recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, the normalization of in interest rates, likely overruns in ObamaCare spending, and slower-than-predicted economic growth (which we’re already experiencing) will add upwards of $9 trillion to a ten-year deficit already projected to be $10 trillion. That $19 trillion is on top of the $14.3 trillion the federal government has already borrowed.

Given the situation, are we to believe that that a cut amounting to less than 1% of the federal budget is the best we can do? If so, then we better snap a few pictures of America, because it won’t be around much longer.

As I recently wrote in piece titled “Plan Nine from the DNC,” there are political opportunities aplenty waiting in all of those bookkeeping nooks and crannies, assuming the Democrats are willing to play politics with something like this. (Not that I’m insinuating Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s crew would ever stoop so low, mind you.) But if you stop and think about it, it’s a fairly simple matter to fail to send out a check or two to some medical supply companies. And when that happens, the Democrats find a young boy named Timmy in a wheelchair that didn’t get his replacement oxygen bottle this week, and suddenly he and his bedraggled, single working mom are instant television stars in political advertisements which run non-stop until the Republicans finally cave in.

But the Democrats would never actually do that… right?

Post-crisis, the Obama administration currently doles out three times as much as did the hardly parsimonious first Bush one, as recently as 1990, burning through as much in a year as its predecessors in office managed cumulatively to consign to the flames in the entire first three decades of the post-WWII experience.

To put it another way, he lost twice as many followers today as jobs created last month. Go have a look at his Twitter feed. His staff was beaming out the Twitter handles of congressional Republicans every few minutes for six hours. They could have achieved the same thing by tweeting this once every half-hour, say, until the House vote finally began. And the dumbest part? The congressmen they were targeting were trying to compromise by passing Boehner’s bill and advancing the ball so that a deal can be struck before Tuesday. If anyone needed lobbying to “compromise,” it was the 22 Republican tea-party holdouts.

But that’s not the punchline. This is:

But could this strategy have an unintended consequence for the president? With 9.4 million followers, Obama’s campaign account is one of the most followed. Mentioning GOP foes to Obama’s followers could help boost their followings on Twitter.

By midafternoon on Friday, that seemed to be the case.

A Senate Republican staffer told National Journal that Republican Senators, in total, added about 6,500 new followers throughout the afternoon.

A look at Reid’s record, however, shows that in the last decade his own voting on the issue of the debt ceiling is not only partisan but perfectly partisan. According to “The Debt Limit: History and Recent Increases,” a January 2010 report by the Congressional Research Service, the Senate has passed ten increases to the debt limit since 2000.  Reid never voted to increase the debt ceiling when Republicans were in control of the Senate, and he always voted to increase the debt ceiling when Democrats were in control.

Other Democrats have also accused Republicans of partisanship in the debt fight. “It’s time for bipartisan leadership, not partisan gamesmanship,” said the number-two Democrat in the Senate, Richard Durbin, after Republicans pulled out of budget talks with President Obama.  And Obama himself described the debt debate as a “partisan three-ring circus” — leaving no doubt that it is Republicans who are practicing partisanship.

At look at Durbin’s record shows that he, too, has voted along absolutely partisan lines.  In the last decade, Durbin never voted to increase the debt ceiling when Republicans were in control and always voted to increase the debt ceiling when Democrats were in control.  As for Obama, there were four votes to raise the debt ceiling when he was in the Senate.  He missed two of them, voted no once when Republicans were in charge, and voted yes once when Democrats were in charge.

We don’t know all the details of the negotiations between Mitch McConnell and the White House which apparently are closing in on an agreement, but one thing is clear, Harry Reid has become a sideshow.

The master of the Senate was left to denouncing Mitch McConnell as, basically, a liar for saying an agreement was close and there had been progresss, only hours later to announce that a vote on Reid’s futile bill would be postponed for 12 hours at the request of the White House.  Reid was left looking like the only guy in the room who didn’t know.

McConnell went around Reid, as had John Boehner, and there was nothing Reid could do about it.

Whatever else these negotiations yield, the end of Harry Reid as we know it is one positive outcome.

“Unfortunately, after weeks of negotiations, it became clear that Democrats in Washington did not view this crisis as an opportunity to rein in spending,” Kyl said in the GOP’s weekly address. “Instead, they saw it as an opportunity to impose huge tax increases on American families and small businesses.”

They’re addicts and quite obviously won’t be going into spending rehab any time soon.

That’s odd, I don’t remember the CBC asking George W. Bush to turn the presidency into a dictatorship.

So we’ve been called extremists, terrorists, suicide bombers, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and now fraggers by the left (I’m sure there’s a bunch I’m missing); what’s next?

And while I’m at it, here’s two pics of Schakowsky’s fellow liberals supporting actual fragging.

Rep. Barney Frank of Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac fame told Neil Cavuto this morning that if Moody’s downgrades the US debt, “We just don’t pay much attention to them… Don’t sell.” He then went on to blame the ratings agencies for ignoring the mortgage crisis… that he helped create.

Unreal.

Just when you thought you’d heard everything, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi whined tonight that the Boehner budget plan was not bipartisan.

Is it at all possible that this woman has a conscience?… Honestly?

Separating economic myths from economic truths

As Sun Tzu advised, “He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.” For the Tea Party, now is the time to lock and load and wait till next year.

The media praises far-left politicians while demonizing advocates of limited government.

 

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany”…

“We reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters”. Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three?

If we have eight million new voters who care about …… and will be voting. We will be creating a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle…

That’s what this is all about folks – votes and socialist power.

Everyone interviewed strongly felt that Napolitano’s statement was completely false and the administration needs to make the border secure and safe. Although education and prevention are a component, demand will always be a factor and the immediate problem is not going to be solved by school anti-drug programs. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne cited the fact that last year, just in the Tucson sector, there were 400,000 who crossed the border. Leo Banks, an Arizona journalist, stressed that there are fewer workers coming across, but there are more corridors that are out of control, with more drug traffickers “who are a nasty bunch, bolder, more violent, more sophisticated, and unafraid.” There are isolated incidents spilling over into the US from kidnappings and murders, to bullets flying across the border. In Arizona Horne told of incidents of drug cartel violence: a beheading in Chandler, a policeman and one of his investigators shot, and a rancher killed.

Lucy Nashed, Deputy Press Secretary to Texas Governor Rick Perry, commented that the drug traffickers have become “increasingly confrontational in protecting their lucrative criminal enterprises … It is an affront to suggest our border is secure as innocent lives on both sides continue to be threatened due to ongoing drug cartel violence. This administration’s comments prove that they either don’t understand or don’t care about the turmoil occurring along our border.”

ATF Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City testified they were denied information about Operation Fast and Furious that was being run out of the Phoenix Field Division. Once they found out, they said they were “disgusted” that so many guns had fallen into the hands of violent drug dealers. The testimony was that Mexicans and agents will be in danger for decades due to the reckless sales of Americans guns to cartels, which was ordered by ATF supervisors.

Know your enemy.

Obama’s so-called jobs bill gave more cash to at least 10 different government agancies that the Small Business Administration. Yet, they claimed it was a jobs bill? Hardly.

So, in effect, the government is ordering carmakers to shoehorn millions of car buyers into superexpensive, glorified electric golf carts that they clearly don’t want. Some deal.

Even worse is the fact that, as IBD reported last week, the fuel mandate will be deadly. Various studies found that the last time the government forced the industry to sharply boost fuel economy back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it directly led to anywhere from 49,000 to 100,000 additional crash deaths, as carmakers were forced to build and sell smaller, less-safe cars.

Does it make any sense for the same EPA that’s forcing power plants to spend billions in a fight against negligible environmental health risks to now force the auto industry to build cars that it knows will kill thousands, if not tens of thousands?

We’re hardly surprised that the Obama administration is willing to overlook all this in its zeal for environmental purism. But for the auto industry to go along for the ride is disheartening.

Team Obama and their green allies undoubtedly think it is great fun to gamble with other people’s assets and livelihoods, even if it means imposing safety risks on motorists. If we were living under a constitution of liberty, that sort of mischief would not be allowed.

“You ever read Superman comic books?” Eric Edelman, the former Pentagon policy chief, once asked me. “Well, acquisitions is like the Bizarro universe. Everything is reversed; the world is square, not round.”

Allow me to disagree. This world has no simple shape. From the looks of this chart, it’s a twisting, endlessly-recursive, M.C. Escher-on-LSD three-dimensional hedge maze. Actually, it’s kind of amazing our troops have any gear at all.

It was an article of faith with Obama’s snootier acolytes that George W. Bush was a philistine and a moron. (“Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot” was stripped across the bumper of many a Prius puttering around the reality-based community back in the day.) In fact Bush’s appointments showed he took the cultural agencies seriously. If not a man of high culture himself, he knew one when he saw one. To the NEH he brought a world-class historian of Renaissance painting, Bruce Cole. He selected Dana Gioia, one of the country’s most admired poets and literary critics, to lead the NEA.

Although unusually accomplished, these men were in line with the appointments of previous presidents, who generally picked their chairmen from the country’s large reserve of artists, scholars, and arts administrators. Even Bill Clinton had the inspired idea to pick the celebrated actress Jane Alexander to run his NEA. And he’s from Arkansas.

But Barack Obama? Memoirist, prose stylist of distinction, resident of Hyde Park, prowler of used bookstores, professor of constitutional law? The man whom Michael Beschloss (Distinguished Professor of History, Charlie Rose Tech) called “probably the smartest guy ever to become president”? Surely he would use the opportunity to look beyond the things that divide us as Americans and, drawing on our core common values that we all share as Americans, appoint chairmen who could lift us up and speak to the heart of the American narrative about who we are as Americans. Some artist or scholar—a well-known pottery maker, even. A macramé artist. Pete Seeger. I don’t know.

No, though. Instead Obama has used the agency chairmanships as spoils of political hackery

 

 

2012: The Fork in the Road…

What Dowd and her fellow libs are feeling is impotent rage. They can revile the Tea Party as “terrorists” or accuse them (in the case of Sen. John Kerry) of holding “the entire economy hostage,” but they are helpless to anything beyond calling names. Which is precisely where those of us who scratched our heads over the prospect of a President Barack Obama were in 2008. We understood then that the young, inexperienced senator who had captured the fancy of so many—partly because of the color of his skin—was grossly unprepared for a job of this magnitude. We also glimpsed the less flattering aspects of his personality, especially the arrogance and egotism, that many of his supporters still fail to acknowledge.

But there was nothing those in the conservative media could do beyond sending up warning flares. It is not a happy feeling to watch helplessly as the nation you love is taken captive by the forces of willful ignorance. Whether the Tea Party’s tough love proves to be an antidote to what ails the country remains to be seen. But what is a fact is that those who now whine about it and curse its existence are just getting a taste of their own medicine.

It is enough to make one wonder, where did our healing President go?  Where is the man that calmed during a time of toxic rhetoric?  Where is the man who urged Americans to talk in a way that helped rather than harmed? 

That man is a myth.  He simply does not exist.

We will never hear the President denounce such vile language from his side of the aisle.  In fact, we consistently hear the drone of silence from a supposed leader, where such silence equates to consent.

The better question is – Where has our leadership gone?

I’ve watched Presidents use the bully pulpit for a long time. Can’t remember the last time I saw one use it to say “I need this to get re-elected.”

Maybe Nixon.

It is that nobody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. At the height of Bill Clinton’s troubles there were always people who’d say, “Look, I love the guy.” They’d often be smiling—a wry smile, a shrugging smile. Nobody smiles when they talk about Mr. Obama. There were people who loved George W. Bush when he was at his most unpopular, and they meant it and would say it. But people aren’t that way about Mr. Obama. He has supporters and bundlers and contributors, he has voters, he may win. But his support is grim support. And surely this has implications.

The past few weeks I’ve asked Democrats who supported him how they feel about him. I got back nothing that showed personal investment. Here are the words of a hard-line progressive and wise veteran of the political wars: “I never loved Barack Obama. That said, among my crowd who did ‘love’ him, I can’t think of anyone who still does.” Why is Mr. Obama different from Messrs. Clinton and Bush? “Clinton radiated personality. As angry as folks got with him about Nafta or Monica, there was always a sense of genuine, generous caring.” With Bush, “if folks were upset with him, he still had this goofy kind of personality that folks could relate to. You might think he was totally misguided but he seemed genuinely so. . . . Maybe the most important word that described Clinton and Bush but not Obama is ‘genuine.’” He “doesn’t exude any feeling that what he says and does is genuine.”

Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don’t care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat. No one was colder than FDR, deep down. But he loved the game and did a wonderful daily impersonation of jut-jawed joy. And people loved him.

We don’t think these two are ever going to agree.

 

 

Gunwalker/Fast & Furious/Castaway

The “stench of cover-up” grows stronger even as the mainstream media put a clothespin on their collective nostrils.

It gets worse. Issa and Grassley also have identified a dozen Justice Department officials who they say knew about the program, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.

Yet President Obama insists that Holder & Co. knew nothing about it. “My attorney general has made clear that he certainly would not have ordered gun-running to be able to pass through into Mexico,” he said last month.

Hmm. In a joint April 2009 appearance with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Obama said: “Our focus is to work with . . . everybody who is involved with this, to coordinate with our counterparts in Mexico, to significantly ramp up our enforcement of existing laws. In fact, I’ve asked Eric Holder to do a complete review of how our current enforcement operations are working and make sure we are cutting down on the loopholes that are causing some of these drug-trafficking problems.”

Fast and Furious began a few months later. Coincidence?

The FBI certainly had to have known that the ATF was misrepresenting their forensic findings in the Terry murder, but did nothing to correct that misrepresentation to Congress or to the public, and had no comment regarding this revelation.

The most significant revelation of the week is that someone in the White House was made aware of the operation. Did the president or his chosen officials not only allow but encourage the illegal purchase and smuggling of arms into Mexico, a foolish and cynical attempt to further gun-control policies unobtainable through the legislative process? We now know that knowledge of the program was within a few steps of Obama.

Meanwhile, the MSM continues to avoid perhaps the most important, most deadly scandal in modern American history.

Something tells me this one is going to get worse before it gets even worse.

The Obama administration’s cover-up continues to this day, as Eric Holder’s Department of Justice stonewalls Congress, seemingly in order to prevent the investigation from reaching into the highest levels of the administration. If the media’s need to protect the fast-sinking Obama administration were not so acute, this would be quite a scandal. It will be interesting to see how many newspapers outside the Southwest border region print the AP’s latest story

 

 

Look for the Union Label/Whackademia/The Badger Rebellion:

The plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for public employees may be the issue that sparked this year’s recall campaigns against six Republican state senators, but neither side is talking much about that issue now as the elections approach.
Instead, Democrats are telling voters Republicans have gone the wrong way with the state budget by cutting schools by nearly $800 million and providing tax breaks to businesses and investors. Republicans are touting their ability to honestly balance the state budget and keep a lid on taxes.
“Both parties have decided that (collective bargaining) doesn’t have any traction,” said Michael Kraft, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

So the shocking outrages the touched of the protests don’t move the voters, and the recall elections are like normal elections, asking voters whether they’d like their next helping of legislation to be conservative or liberal. In which case, let’s relive what was, I think, the most trenchant commentary about the recall elections: “Isn’t that a crime?”

It is no accident that Marxism, communism and fascism appealed to “intellectuals” everywhere whereas free-market philosophies appealed to virtually none. In a free-market society, self-styled intellectuals are reduced to the role of teachers and authors. The ability to manipulate people to vote this or that way grants little influence in a society in which the vast majority of decisions are made by individuals who must assume immediate responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. It’s easier to persuade someone to spend someone else’s money collected at the point of a state gun than it is to persuade them to spend their own money voluntarily.

In a society and polity based around state coercion, “intellectuals” have more power and status so intellectuals fantasize about changing contemporary society to one in which state coercion plays a much greater role. That is why leftists always argue for greater state involvement in every facet of life (except sex). The greater the power of the state, the greater the power of those who manipulate the state. All leftist ideology has been an ever-shifting set of rationalizations intended to persuade non-intellectuals to invest more power in the state and thereby elevate the power and status of the intellectuals.

Modern leftists lack the courage to imagine and work towards a world in which they are not particularly important. Instead, they are moral cowards like Milton’s Lucifer who would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. They would rather live as the highest status members of an impoverished and authoritarian society than live as ordinary members of a wealthy and free society.

So, if you’re a non-leftist, be proud of your lack of “imagination”. Failing to have the “courage” to imagine a world were pseudo-intellectuals rule the rest of us is a moral and mental “failing” we can all live with.

 

 

In Other News…

Bush was sitting with a group of children who were reading aloud when he said he saw reporters at the back of the room getting the news on their cellphones, which he described as like ‘watching a silent movie’.

Then his chief of staff Andy Card walked behind him and whispered in his ear: ‘A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack.’

He said he realized a lot of people beyond that classroom would be watching for his reaction.

‘So I made the decision not to jump up immediately and leave the classroom. I didn’t want to rattle the kids. I wanted to project a sense of calm,’ he said.

A sense of calm. Unlike his successor, who uses every “crisis” he can find to instill panic in the public.

He goes on to describe his most iconic moment in the aftermath.

In the hour-long interview, which will be broadcast on August 28 as part of a week of programmes on the cable network that mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks, Bush also said that visiting the site was like walking into hell.

He said: ‘From the air it looked like a giant scar. But when I actually got to the site, it was like walking into hell.

These may not look much like the jobs we are used to, but if we learn to recognize and exploit the opportunities around us, we will soon become much more comfortable in this strange new land we’ve reached.

private companies are on track to continue investing billions of dollars in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus natural gas. According to the study, $5.3 billion was spent on drilling activities in 2009, an estimated $11.5 billion will be spent in 2010, and on pace to $12.7 billion in 2011.

More zoning jihad. Why not, the Dept of Islamic Justice has stepped into at least two other local mosque controversies (here and here), and threatened to intervene in any successful anti-sharia laws.

Goodwin Liu, the light-loafered, radical, lying leftist who was too much of a resume-fudger to be confirmed even by the Harry Reid  Democratic Senate, is now back like a bad habit in California. Governor Moonbeam wants to make him a state supreme court justice, to replace an outgoing Spanish-surnamed justice.   In typical nuevo-Cali-politburo fashion, this is all that is needed to start a race war between the two “entitled” minority classes: Asians and Latinos.   Hilarious!

Through his ties with labor unions and community organizations, Cedillo actively organized an opposition campaign to Proposition 187, California’s 1994 initiative to ban public benefits such as health care and education to undocumented immigrants. His efforts culminated in a 150,000-person march, one of the largest mass marches in the history of Los Angeles.

The pattern is the same across the United States. Virtually all major Latino immigration activists have ties to marxist organizations – mostly the Communist Party USA, or Democratic Socialists of America.

Gil Cedillo is no exception to the rule.

If anyone’s feeling an uneasy soup-stain-on-shirt-front sense of embarrassment, it should be Mayor Bloomberg’s Health Department. That department has gone on a huge public campaign to encourage odium for sodium, with processed soup a designated villain, as with a notorious public-service ad showing salt crystals spraying out of a can of the product. Doesn’t seem to be working, now, does it?

In fact, the science on salt and health has long been more complicated than you might think. Per Scientific American, “In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart attacks, reduces your blood pressure or has no effect at all.” This month, the venerable science monthly ran an article by Melinda Wenner Moyer under the startling headline, “It’s Time to End the War on Salt.” City health commissioner Thomas Farley must have needed reviving with smelling salts, assuming his office hasn’t tried to ban those yet.

The political campaigns again and again seem oddly unrelated to the science. The Obama administration‘s proposed guidelines on marketing purportedly unhealthy foods to kids, for example, are so restrictive that according to a Kraft foods official, “foods like reduced fat peanut butter or 2% milk string cheese could not be advertised to children.” Meanwhile, restrictions on “word of mouth” marketing could bring down federal wrath on promoters of Girl Scout cookies. Chocolate milk bans are moving forward in various states and cities despite pleas from school food managers who say it’s the only way they can get some kids to drink milk.

Even running errands with toddlers may be changing.  This summer Whole Foods stores in Missouri are offering child-free shopping hours (kids are allowed inside but childcare service is available for parents who want to shop kid-free.) Meanwhile in Florida, a controversy brews over whether kids can be banned from a condominium’s outdoor area. That’s right, some people don’t even want kids outdoors.

When did kids become the equivalent of second-hand smoke?

 

 

MSM Circus and Celebutard Side Show:

There are some legitimately non-hyperbolic editorials coming out from the Left. However– a disproportionate amount coming from actual establishment news organizations and writers should be cause for alarm. Yes, there is the regular alarm-pulling at the Nation and the Daily Kos– but there is a troubling trend. The most heavy– and even obscene terms are being thrown at the GOP. Below are just some examples from this month alone.

As we stumble closer to Aug. 2, it has become clear that many in the tea party are willing to inflict massive harm on the American people to obtain their political objective of a severely shrunken federal government. Their persistence in rejecting compromise, even as the economic effects of the phony crisis they have created mount, has taken their radicalism beyond tough negotiating, beyond even hostage-taking.

So, if we apply the same “logic” (or, should that be, apoplexy?) to the Democrats, they are willing to inflict massive harm on the American people in order to continue spending more money to increase the size of the federal government and mortgage and destroy the future of our next generations.

Tea party members must reassess their distorted vision of patriotism and join true patriots in Congress in raising the debt ceiling promptly until 2013

It’s called the “political process” Sparky, get used to it. Boy, the left loves rabble-rousing holdouts when it comes to laying on the tracks to stop conservative legislation, but when the roles are reversed, suddenly the stubborn ones are worse than Al Qaeda.

The entire article is a caricature of itself — almost Onion-worthy.

But it all made sense when I read the bio of the author:

William Yeomans, an American University law professor, served as Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as a Justice Department official.

And if anybody is fit to judge the morals and ethics of others, it’s somebody who worked for Ted Kennedy.

As Senator Marco Rubio said yesterday, “if we had $1 billion for every time I heard the words ‘tea party extremist,’ we could solve this debt problem.”

Allahu akbar!

Like many too-clever stratagems from progressives, the point they’re trying to get across is presumptively embedded in the question. The graph itself may not so much be a way to gauge public opinion, but rather a way to drive home the notion that raising taxes will raise revenue.

I have the feeling more and more people now see through that subliminal technique.

But I feel that if this false premise was removed from the underlying structure of the graph, then the majority-zone would skew much more toward Tea Party Corner; since most Americans want to cut spending and raise revenue, if you educated them on the point that lowering taxes can indeed stimulate the economy enough to end up increasing government coffers, then the Tea Party position could very rapidly become the centrist position.

And that is where the Tea Party therefore needs to spend its energy: Explaining the “lower taxes = higher revenue” hypothesis. They’ve already won the argument on the issue of cutting spending; now they can seal the deal by making a convincing case for the other half of the equation.

You just cannot have an intelligent conversation with these lefties, especially in the MSM. Love how Rand Paul ended the interview.

Some will argue that the violent, evil state behavior described above is actually the result of communism, and not the economic system. Those who do so ignore at their own peril that the two have been inextricable for most of history. “Socialism or death” is the chant schoolchildren are forced to recite in communist classrooms– long ago did socialism become much more than an economic euphemism for the state apparatus. There are exceptions, of course, which Maher eagerly tries to turn into rules: Sweden, Canada, the Social Contract ideal of small European villages where people look out for each other. But to make those nations– a tiny, wealthy, Caucasian slice of humanity that looks a lot more like Bill Maher than most of humanity– the face of socialism is to do a disservice to the majority of socialist states on the planet that happen to not be comfortably underpopulated frozen paradises: Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia, Angola, et al., and renders his entire argument moot.

I can’t wait to miss it.

Over at Weasel Zippers, ZIP reminds Lopez that Canada’s Prime Minister is a conservative and their Parliament has a conservative majority. But Lopez probably already knew that because he’s so much smarter than Sarah Palin.

George, a lot of people might want to leave the country if your guy is re-elected, but they can’t afford to go anywhere except the unemployment office. Try and show a little empathy.

 

Global Warmening:

Now hold on just a darn second. We thought the few fish that didn’t die in the oil were horribly sickened by it, had given birth to deformed little fish fingers and that they would all end up devastating animals further up the food chain.

“If something was wrong with the food, the first place it would show is with the birds,” said Clay, also known as the “the pelican guy.”

In other words, if something were wrong with the science and the scientists, this is also the first place it would show up.

But let’s not talk about that. Hey, look over there. It’s a bright, shiny object.

 

 

The Sock Drawer:

Wellington Zoo staff say it is hoped Happy Feet will be sent home in late August – logistics are all that stand in the way now.

“He’s making really good progress; he’s put on a lot of weight, his body condition is really good,” says Wellington Zoo veterinary science manager Lisa Argilla.

“Before, when he was having all these procedures, you could actually see his spine, you could see his pelvis, now he’s got a really nice thick layer of fat, which is perfect so that means he will have a good chance of surviving in those icy cold waters.”

Thank God for air conditioning. I mean it. I’m not being casual about Whom to thank. I thank the everlasting Creator who imparted his universal wisdom into a series of inventions and ideas until a misguided therapy for malaria gave us the means to create ice.  God bless! And then some Luddite, glacier-chopping Ice King  quashed John Gorrie’s idea in order to save his own fortunes, and we sweated for 50 more years.  I hope Hell’s thermostat got an upgrade of 50,000 extra degrees just for Mr. Tudor’s arrival.

Air Conditioning is a miracle of civilization but it’s not a new, modern desire. Hot, sweaty people have been seeking relief for ages.  Cool, dry beds to sleep on are not to be dismissed lightly.  It’s why all children should be forced to go camping in summer. Make ‘em appreciate civilization, abhor primitive living, and grow up to be fine young Capitalists like Carrier.

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