I Am The Mob

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Set Aside

clipped from bariumtitanate.blogspot.com Saqib Rahim and Jessica Lebers of ClimateWire made one mistake in their recent NY Times article: there's no mention of any skepticism regarding these DOE funds for batteries. It seems odd that all of this money is circulating and no one is asking any difficult questions about it. For example, I don't think I've read a single article on this battery funding that questioned the underlying supply of lithium ion or the fact that instead of obtaining oil from the middle east we will be gathering our lithium from Bolivia or China. Also, no reporter has examined the relationship between winners/losers of stimulus funding with basic lobbying/campaign donation funds at OpenSecrets.org. I'm not saying anything is amiss for certain. But, it seems good journalism practices would at least lead one to inquire into some of these issues. It just feels like ever since the Obama administration began, all the tough questions have been set aside.

Question Time

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Gore customarily used excessive language like “brown shirts.” Senators Durbin, Kennedy, and others compared our soldiers to Saddamites, Pol Pot’s killers, and Nazis. Ward Churchill compared the victims in the Twin Tower to “little Eichmanns.” Sen. Robert Byrd likened Pres. George W. Bush’s policies to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros agreed with Fidel Castro, the Iranians, and North Koreans in comparing Bush to Hitler. Jonathan Chait wrote in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush.” Garrison Keillor likened Bush’s Republicans to “brown shirts in pinstripes.” Even old hero Sen. John Glenn said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.” There’s more. UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson thinks the townhalls are tame: I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but it occurred to me with all the media wetting themselves over the tenor of the town hall meetings, haven’t they ever watched Question Time on C-Span?

Remember

clipped from atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com The Jews were concentrated mainly in the four "Holy Cities": Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. By and large, the Jews were regarded as second-class citizens of the Ottoman Empire. They encountered legal discrimination at every turn, and evidence given by them was not recognized by the courts. Jews were debarred from attaining high government office. They were subject to daily mockery and scorn, were forbidden to ride camels or horses within the city limits, and were obliged to make way for Moslems. Their persons and possessions were unprotected by law and prone to constant abuse (without any possibility of appealing to the courts of justice). M. Reisher, who lived in Jerusalem, writes in 1866: "When a Jew walked among them in the market, one would throw a stone at him in order to kill him, another would pull his beard, and a third his ear-lock, yet another spit on his face, and he became a symbol of abuse". Remember that. Historical accuracy versus Islamic revisionism.

Don't Call Them Death Panels Though

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now. So Obama "suspects" that the legislative process will produce some sort of independent group that can give non-determinative "guidance" on end-of-life care for the chronically ill, with an eye towards saving money.  Just don't call them death panels!

Sounding Familiar

clipped from mises.org The economic position that the United States is now in is the result of a series of economic bubbles. To explain the nature of bubbles, I'm going to start by talking about their history; I'm not going to go all the way back to Tulip Mania and John Law, but I do want to mention some things from the Roaring Twenties that might sound familiar to us today. Over the eight-year period of that boom, the money supply increased by 62 percent. I always talk about the economics of booms and bubbles in the framework that Murray Rothbard outlined in his great book, What Has Government Done To Our Money. He points out that inflation confers no general social benefit. Just creating more money does not create more benefit for the general public. It merely redistributes wealth to the first people to receive the new money. Since 1998, the money supply (as measured by M2) has doubled. So we have an expansion in the money supply now that is similar to what we had during the Roaring Twenties.

Paglia Dimly Senses The Blatant Lies

clipped from neoneocon.com But Paglia’s still thinking, at least, and asking the right questions: I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy. Girlfriend, let me help out and connect the dots for you. The insane rush, the failure to give the American people the details, are purposeful and not accidental. They are cheating on us, and “they” includes Obama. They are lying, and they know it. Have you not seen this video?

Raisin' Canes

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Broken

clipped from money.cnn.com But it's clear that bankers are loath to pull back on their support for the financial system before it's clear the economy has staged a stronger recovery. And the Fed has a long and painful history of ignoring asset price inflation. "The central bankers have this textbook belief that the only inflation is the kind that appears in consumer price indexes," said Simons. "They don't believe what they're doing could cause an asset price bubble." For now, Fed chief Ben Bernanke and other central bankers can console themselves for now with stable consumer price inflation readings in major economies. But comparing the bankers with a driver pulled over for speeding for the umpteenth time, Simons said, "At some point, you have to say maybe your speedometer's broken."

Jeebus This Man Is Full Of It

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com All I'm saying is let's take the example of something like diabetes, one of --- a disease that's skyrocketing, partly because of obesity, partly because it's not treated as effectively as it could be. Right now if we paid a family -- if a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they're taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that's $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 -- immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Well, why not make sure that we're also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation, right? That will save us money. (Applause.) For those who detect something fishy, don't forget to apprise Linda Douglass at the official flag@whitehouse.gov email address. For those who take special pleasure in observing a b.s. artist recklessly slinging it, here is the video.

I don't know what's more scary: What a con artist he is or how stupid his cultists are.

The Fishiness Rots From The Head

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I'm Giving Pie To Me

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COTD #2: Rock The Vote!

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com " ... When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance ..." What a coincidence! This is the largest demographic most likely to be self-abosrbed, impressionable, and vote Democrat. Rock the Vote!

COTD: DUH!

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com " ... He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character. ..." DUH! What else would you expect of someone who was born and reared in Hawaii thousands of miles from "the Heartland", spent a bulk of his most important formative years attending Muslim schools in Indonesia, and nursed Marxist, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic and black separationist hatred from mentors such as Frank Marshall Davis, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dorhn, and Leftist professors at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard?

OSaching Your Gold

clipped from www.nypost.com Speaking Thursday night at a campaign rally in Tysons Corner, Va., Obama pleaded his case that we've turned the corner economically -- despite a record number of people on food stamps and no slowdown in home foreclosures -- with these words: "I'm convinced that actions we've taken in the first six months have helped stop our economic freefall. . . . We're losing jobs at half the rate we were at the beginning of the year." But the president appears to have helped people who weren't in that crowd break the laws against insider trading. The White House and the Treasury Department get the jobs report one hour after the financial markets close on Thursday. But the rules are that these numbers are confidential, and they are supposed to stay secret for a reason. Another curious thing happened before the employment report was made public. Sometime before late afternoon Thursday, Goldman Sachs suddenly broke with the Wall Street pack that was predicting a loss of 320,000 or so jobs in July.

Czars

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Shovel Ready

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Up Is Down

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com The democratic state-run media redefines America... Domestic Terrorist, Obama Pal, HuffPo Blogger and Accused Cop Killer-- A respected professor of education. Tea Party Protester-- Un-American Nazi Mobster

Mackerel Mania

clipped from tigerhawk.blogspot.com Which party contains 99 percent of the people who believe (or believed): -- O.J. is innocent; -- Bush shirked his National Guard duty; -- Sarah Palin's infant child, Trig, was actually the child of her daughter; -- Justice Antonin Scalia threw the 2000 election to Bush so that his son could get a legal job with the Labor Department; -- The spectacularly guilty Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed; -- The Diebold Corp. secretly stole thousands of Kerry votes in 2004; -- Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper; -- Bill Clinton did not have sex with "that woman"; -- Heterosexuals are just as likely to contract AIDS as gays; -- John Edwards didn't have an affair with Rielle Hunter; -- John Edwards' campaign aide Andrew Young is the father of Rielle Hunter's child. And as has been recently noted, a 2007 Rasmussen poll showed that 35 percent of Democrats believe Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, while 26 percent aren't sure ... Holy mackerel.

DeRailing

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Heh.

#2

clipped from taxprof.typepad.com With a combined federal and state corporate tax rate of 39.1%, the U.S. continues to impose the second-highest overall corporate rate among industrialized countries. Only Japan's 39.5% combined rate is higher. As the chart below indicates, the weighted average (accounting for country size) corporate rate of non-U.S. OECD nations is now below 30% for the first time in history. 2009 marks the 12th consecutive year in which the average corporate tax rate of non-U.S. OECD nations has been below the U.S. rate. In short, these two Obama supporters are citing as "proof" that the tax is lower provisions that Obama is eliminating.

Implacable Hostility

clipped from hotair.com Liberalism’s implacable hostility to market economics — their attacks on investment and profit, in service of their politically motivated demonization of “the rich” — is one of those ideas that has consequences. Everyone with a 401(k) account has suffered directly from the collapse of the stock market. Measures that prevent recovery will only prolong the misery, and one investment manager summed up the current situation Friday: “Nobody’s investing because there’s no reason to invest,” said Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Financial Group. Exactly. If companies can’t make profits, what’s the point in buying stock? But the government is now controlled by liberals who want us to believe that corporate profits are evil, and so the prospects for investment are bleak. “Investment” is just another word for “capital,” and you can’t make capitalism work without capital. As Michelle Malkin said in September 2008, The Fundamentals Suck.

Break Your Chains

clipped from bloomberg.com the largest banks have actually grown during this crisis: Bank of America Corp. took over Merrill Lynch & Co., JPMorgan assumed Bear Stearns Cos. and Wells Fargo & Co. acquired Wachovia Corp. Bigger isn’t better for consumers. Prins says these institutions have “less incentive (since they have more market share) to offer higher savings rates, or broader credit terms to consumers, or open mortgage restructuring policies, or even lower fees on regular accounts -- they simply don’t have to, and it was not a condition of their bailout money to make it so.” Your best recourse may be to limit credit card use, make insured deposits at local thrifts and regional banks -- the deposit insurance limit is generally $250,000 per account through 2013 -- and turn to alternative sources of lending such as credit unions and your own family. Avoid commission-based services through banks, insurers and brokers.

Contradiction

clipped from hotair.com It would be an interesting argument - how best to relieve the plight of the poor, improve conditions at emergency rooms, deal with whatever trade-offs, etc. - but that’s not the argument the country has been having. The problem is that the two ideas - help the poor, save money - contradict each other, in a way that runs parallel to the “fatal flaw” in the Obama sales pitch isolated by Ramesh Ponnuru, the contradiction between (my words) shouting in alarm, “This system is an urgent interstellar catastrophe from top to bottom!” and soothingly promising, “Don’t worry, what you’re happy with won’t change, and it won’t cost anyone but the evil rich anything!”

Mengele Update: The Complete Lies System

clipped from hotair.com Sarah Palin has kicked off (another) firestorm of criticism because of the statement she released on her Facebook page: The incoming fire has been withering, as usual. Palin is accused of becoming the “Zombie Queen,” certifiably insane, “clinically wrong,” and espousing a “gruesome mix of camp and high farce.” These critics, however, didn’t take the time to find out to what Palin was referring when she used the term “level of productivity in society” as being the basis for determining access to medical care. If the critics, who hold themselves in the highest of intellectual esteem, had bothered to do something other than react, they would have realized that the approach to health care to which Palin was referring was none other than that espoused by key Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekial Emanuel (brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel). Dr. Emanuel sets forth the principles of “The Complete Lives System.”

Lies about Palin that is.

COTD #2: Thieves

clipped from proteinwisdom.com Ephesians 4:28 Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. The motivation for the government is power. It always is. For their sycophants I think it is a combination of wanting to have something to share for with the needy but being too lazy to work for it, so they steal, and an immature desire to destroy that which they cannot or will not attain for themselves. They know know that government health care is going to suck, but it will such the same for everybody, and that is better to them than for someone else to be able to afford health care that doesn’t suck.

The Blood Funnel

clipped from www.rollingstone.com The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson.

As Poorly As He Does Economics

clipped from tigerhawk.blogspot.com For those few of you who may have wondered "how can Paul Krugman be such a huge fan of government intervention in our daily lives," we now have the answer: Blame Isaac Asimov! What most readers probably don’t know is the reason Krugman became an economist in the first place. “I went into economics,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “because I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, in which social scientists save galactic civilization, and that’s what I wanted to be.” Yes, Krugman wants to save galactic civilization. No wonder he likes Barack Obama so much. I would suggest that the central theme is the advantage of small a small responsive government over a large bureaucratic government. Physcohistory was the microscope to observe and predict mass actions that also becomes useless as a tool if the masses learn of it. It is obvious that Mr. Krugman understood Asimov as poorly as he does economics.

The last two sections are from a comment. RTWT. Nice.

Leah For VP

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Katrina Pierson for Prez, Leah for VP

There we have a ticket folks.

And not any British queens either.

COTD Plural: Souring On The Wealthy Few

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com Hot Air has an example of the very vissible hand that people are afraid of. Apparently CA is demanding that taxes be paid on the IOUs they are using to pay vendors. And the state will not take those IOUs back to cover the taxes, they want actual money. This is the kind of thing that is souring the mood of the country. Frank Rick displays not a hint of irony. the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” Classic. I wonder if the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, SEIU, or ACORN count as "interests" or if George Soros, Warren Buffet, or Oprah Winphery count as the "wealthy few".

Forget About It

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com “The proof of the pudding in this is not going to be who votes for it, if you have Republicans or not,” said Mr. Schumer, who is heavily favored to win a third term in 2010. “It’s going to be when it passes and when it goes into effect: does it work?” Well, it may "work" in the sense that a revived base allows the Democrats to preserve control of both houses in 2010 (this no doubt passes as a long-term perspective for Dem strategists). But suppose the long term consequences of the bill are disastrous.  Just for example, what if one result is a drastic reduction in investment in new medical technologies (drugs, procedures, and so on) in response to likely "cost-cutting"?  Europe already "saves" a tremendous amount by free-riding off of US research and development; off of whom will the US free-ride? Hey, that will only be a problem down the road, not in 2010!  If the baby-boomers don't get breakthrough Alzheimer's treatments, well, Chuck Schumer can just tell them to forget about it.

The Hobgoblin Of Little Minds

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Today's Rasmussen survey has data that shed considerable light on the health care debate. The question posed to likely voters was whether they favor a single-payer health care system. ("Single payer" is a euphemism for socialized medicine.) Americans overwhelmingly reject government medicine, 57-32 percent. But what is really interesting is the partisan breakdown. Most Democrats, 62 percent, do want single payer. That explains why, when Democrats are among friends like Barack Obama addressing an SEIU group, they aren't shy about their intention that the "government option" evolve into the only option. The problem is that Americans who aren't Democrats overwhelmingly reject socialized medicine: 87 percent of Republicans are opposed, and those not affiliated with either party reject single payer by a decisive 63-22 percent margin. So it's hard for Democrats to stay consistent.

King O Manufacturing

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A Longer Way To Go

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com The July decline in the jobless rate came about not because more people had jobs, but because 422,000 people removed themselves from the labor force, essentially giving up the search for work. The number of long-term unemployed people -- those who have been out of a job but looking for more than 26 weeks -- rose by another 584,000. "There's nothing really happening right now," said Marc Patterson, 31, a Southeast Washington resident unemployed for seven months who had little luck finding work as a janitor. "There aren't too many jobs." And the number of jobs with employment services companies continued declining in July. Increases in that number tend to forecast broader gains in employment as companies reluctant to hire permanent employees bring on temps to handle rising demand. "If we don't see temp jobs go positive by September or October, in my mind, that would indicate we've got a longer way to go," said Roy G. Krause, chief executive of Spherion, a large employment services firm.

Thoroughly Confirmed

clipped from pajamasmedia.com I have long argued that the Iranian people hate this regime, and would rise against it, and that we should be supporting them.  Rarely has any analysis been so widely derided or so thoroughly confirmed as this one.  Nobody can doubt the desires of the people to rid themselves of their beturbaned tyrants;  and I dare say that any debate between the appeasers and those in favor of supporting the Iranian people, would be over in very short order.  Those who oppose support are primarily those, like President Obama, who believe America has traditionally played a malignant role in world affairs, and that any hint of American support would cause the Iranian people to turn on a dime and join with Khamenei to fight the Great Satan, even at the cost of their own freedom. It just doesn’t parse. Or do you prefer the terrible choice of  bombing or waiting to be bombed by them?

Castro's Cuban Karma

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com After fifty years of socialism, Cuba's economy has regressed to the point where its government is now encouraging farmers to plow with oxen. Government-owned oxen. Cuba gets 100,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela, for free, but still can't afford to run its small supply of tractors (also government-owned). "I am thankful for the revolution," 52-year-old [Zenaida Leon] said. "But we don't get boots, tools, irrigation that works." Socialism is the most inept, most destructive system of organization ever devised by mankind. Why would we even consider turning our health care system over to its discredited principles? What's the medical equivalent of plowing with oxen? Maybe someday our grandchildren will wait in line to be bled by leeches or have their teeth extracted with pliers.

The Sick Joke

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The New York Times reports on the pharmaceutical industry's lavish support for Obamacare: The drug industry has authorized its lobbyists to spend as much as $150 million on television commercials supporting President Obama's health care overhaul, beginning over the August Congressional recess, people briefed on the plans said Saturday. By way of comparison, John McCain's entire Presidential campaign spent a total of $126 million on television advertising. There is a reason why lobbyists are thriving as never before during the Obama administration: everyone wants to get their hands on your tax dollars (or your children's, since pretty much all the money in question will be borrowed). The Obama administration's claim that Americans who oppose socialized medicine must be in the pay of "moneyed interests" is a sick joke to anyone who understands today's actual political dynamics.

Suckers

clipped from www.qando.net The disaster that is California government has now turned into the theater of the absurd: Small businesses that received $682 million in IOUs from the state say California expects them to pay taxes on the worthless scraps of paper, but refuses to accept its own IOUs to pay debts or taxes. The vendors have filed a federal class-action lawsuit. But the depth that government will stoop too to collect revenue never surprises me. With housing prices crashing everywhere, local governments continued to try to collect at the same value rates as before or, in some places, actually raise the taxes. And here we have California issuing, what to this point are absolutely valueless promises to pay – maybe – and then expecting those in receipt of those worthless bits of script to treat them as real money and to pay taxes on the amount in real money. The onions it takes to make that sort of demand is just breathtaking.

And one of the commenters nails it: “How dare you ask us to accept our own worthless promises as payment! What do you take us for? Suckers like you?”

COTD: Where Corruption Abounds

clipped from naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com “In a State where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.” – Tacitus