O Jack-sses And A Dumbo

clipped from www.judicialwatch.org Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2009 list of Washington's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians." The list, in alphabetical order, includes: Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT): This marks two years in a row for Senator Dodd, who made the 2008 "Ten Most Corrupt" list for his corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for accepting preferential treatment and loan terms from Countrywide Financial, a scandal which still dogs him. In 2009, the scandals kept coming for the Connecticut Democrat. Senator John Ensign (R-NV): A number of scandals popped up in 2009 involving public officials who conducted illicit affairs, and then attempted to cover them up with hush payments and favors, an obvious abuse of power. President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However

End Of Story

clipped from www.moonbattery.com An NRO reader points out why Chairman Zero's tinkering with the deck chairs when he's not busy drilling holes in the hull will not reduce unemployment: As the owner of a 16 year old wholesale computer parts company with about 50 total employees here and in England, I can tell you it's not about easy loans and tax credits for hiring. As you say, it is risk aversion. It is the knowledge that my taxes are going to go up and also we just don't see other businesses willing to take inventory positions right now. $5000 tax credit to hire someone? That really sounds like a proposal from someone who has never hired a single person in the private sector. Small business will start to hire when one big thing happens. Sales Growth. End of story. It is amazing to me that they don't get that if they did one thing, cut the corporate tax rate, business growth would happen almost immediately. In case you missed this yesterday:

The Demon Sheep

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As was said on NRO, the sheep shots are just beginning...

How Low Can We gO?

clipped from blog.american.com President Obama would permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes below $200,000 ($250,000 for couples); statements that the president would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire are true only for households above those income levels. The president has also proposed some additional middle-class tax cuts. Should this make us happy about President Obama’s budget? Quite the opposite. As Arthur Brooks, Alex Brill, and I have pointed out, the middle-class tax cuts that the president would extend have large revenue losses and do relatively little to promote economic growth. The tax cuts at the top that the president would allow to expire would significantly lower marginal tax rates on saving and investment and promote long-run growth. Letting those tax cuts expire would ultimately harm the middle class by lowering their wages.

Distortions

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Allow me to make an analogy. As the Federal govt has the power to intervene in the market and cause massive harmful distortions it can also distort and damage our cultures. The grandparents of the 70-80% of Detroiters that are from single parent households came to Detroit to work in the industrial capitol of the world. Many did, and were gainfully employed without a problem. Then the federal govt started paying for single mothers causing an ever increasing number of them. With no father figure in the home the kids grew up feral, impregnated and abandoned teenage girls. These kids naturally did poorly in school. Eventually the school system became a kleptocratic patronage machine. While all this was happening state and federal money kept rolling in and anybody who pointed out that a)this was a waste of money and b)this was actually harmful to the communities causing a cycle a dependency was called a racist.

The Second Number

clipped from pajamasmedia.com David Sanger at the NYT stops just short of saying that President’s Obama’s policies are an admission that America’s pre-eminence on the world stage is over. It is broke and has no prospect of ever getting level again. The question is whether the budget simply recognizes this possibility or actually constitutes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sanger notes that the President’s budget contains two numbers. The first is a deficit percentage unseen since the Civil War, World War 1 and World War 2. It is a World War budget without a world war. But it is the second number that scares Sanger. But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. Yet it is, as Sanger says, Obama’s deficit that we are talking about now.

Glitch

clipped from www.zerohedge.com Last October the BLS announced it would revise historical payrolls lower by 824,000 on February 5 (this Friday's NFP release). First, here is what we know will be the BLS adjustment on Friday. Second, the reason for the adjustment has to do with the great recession, which having run for over 2 years now is still in no way abating (contrary to what you may be hearing in other still GE-contolled media outlets). Lastly, and most notably, the number that will have to be whacked from the payroll report in 2011 retroactively is even larger: according to Bloomberg it will be at least 990,000. And this is only for 9 months in the current period. a Moody's-like glitch has misrepresented the true payroll picture due to modelling error to the tune of over 1.8 million jobs. How that will impact the president's "jobs saved or created" calculation has yet to be determined. Unless of course all those jobs appear merely on the same excel file that the BLS uses for all it other erroneous calculations.

Panama II

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Jimmy Carter's signature achievement was throwing away strategically vital control of the Panama Canal, which America built. Chairman Zero can match that easily — by throwing away the Internet: Without the ingenuity of America's brightest minds and the investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars, there would be no Internet, as we now know it today. Now, the Obama administration has moved quietly to cede control of the Web from the United States to foreign powers. … In an effort to show the world how inclusive, sharing, cooperative, and international America can be, the Obama administration set off on a plan to surrender control and key management of the Internet by the U.S. Department of Commerce and its agents. The key to the control America has over the Internet is through the management of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the giant servers that service the Internet.

What Reality Looks Like

clipped from www.moonbattery.com It looks like Chairman Zero will be forced to back down from his plans to grant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other prominent Al Qaeda terrorists a giant soapbox a few blocks away from Ground Zero. While the NPR/PBS crowd pouts at this setback for social justice, the rest of us are heaving a sigh of relief — especially Louis Pepe. Here's why: I was a federal prison guard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. In 2000, I was with a prisoner, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, taking him back to his cell. His cellmate was Khalfan Khamis Mohamed. They were accused of bombing two embassies in Africa in 1998. Later they said that they worked with Osama bin Laden and that they helped set up al Qaeda. They sprayed me with some kind of hot sauce. I couldn't see. They pulled me into the cell and hit me — boom, boom. They hit me so much, I swear to God, like a hundred times. They put it in my left eye. It went three inches into my brain.

unsustainOble

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Last week, Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf testified before the House Budget Committee. That prompted this exchange: Q. In the report you use the term "unsustainable," a term which a number of people use in terms of the current budget deficit track and a term I've used myself. ... I'm not sure that there is a complete understanding of the consequences of inaction here in this town. We use the term "unsustainable." Can you be a little more specific and describe to us what that -- what happens? We do nothing; we now look at deficits of $500 billion to $1.5 trillion as far as the eye can see; what happens? ELMENDORF: I think a particular thing that's unsustainable is to have federal debt constantly rising as a share of GDP because that requires a larger -- ever-larger share of investors' portfolios to be occupied by treasury securities. And at some point they will refuse to hold them, or will insist on much higher interest rates to do so.

Helpless To follOw

clipped from www.popularmechanics.com The new budget, announced Monday, seems merely an attempt to disguise the demise of U.S. leadership in space. The president does away with Constellation, its Orion spacecraft, and its Ares I and Ares V boosters. The abrupt cancellation means the U.S. no longer wishes to send its explorers to the frontiers of knowledge and spacefaring skill. We are deliberately choosing to have no better space capability than do Russia, China, or India. During the height of the shuttle program in the 1990s, we launched six or seven shuttles and about 40 astronauts per year into orbit for science and defense purposes. Starting next year, and for the foreseeable future, just four Americans will make it into space annually—as passengers on foreign rockets. Is this a bold new course for the nation? With no ability to launch humans past the ISS, we will watch, helpless to follow, as China pursues its determination to be the next nation to send its explorers into deep space.

Competition

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Still, it's hard not to be a little shocked. The budget says, at page 40: Reduce the Itemized Deduction Write-off for Families with Incomes over $250,000. It's easy to understand the Obama administration's purpose with regard to churches and private charities, which it regards as competitors of the government. It wants to damage or destroy them by making contributions more expensive. But what about the mortgage interest deduction? The administration purports to be concerned about the decline in home prices that triggered the economic crisis of 2008-2009. But severely reducing the mortgage interest deduction will inevitably depress home prices. And not just the prices of expensive homes, either; as those prices fall, the values of less-expensive houses will decline as well. Is this really what the administration wants? It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Obama administration simply doesn't care about America's economy.

Brit Beeb Bunscombe Buncombe

clipped from bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com Has anyone else noticed a massive "push" this week by Pravda to tell us we are all wrong when we look out at the frozen snowy British landscape in the middle of winter and say "fuck me, it's 'taters!"? Guess why.... The man responsible for looking after the fat pensions of the boys and girls at the BBC is a climate change fanatic, and he is part of an international group of investment managers who bust a gut to invest in 'climate change' schemes. He's called Peter Dunscombe, and he runs the £8.2bn corporation pension fund, advising trustees on a day-to-day basis about their investments. Update: I've been going through the latest BBC Pensions Trust report, and it reveals that Helen Boaden, who is the overall boss of the BBC's news and current affairs operation, was appointed to the trust in 2008. So the woman who tells environment reporters such as Roger Harrabin and Richard Black that the science is settled also works to maximise the returns of the pension fund with Peter Dunscombe.

Follow the money...

Trust: Laundry Edition

clipped from www.securefreedomradio.org YERUSHALMI: Well that’s exactly right.  You would think that if they couldn’t own it maybe they could’ve got the Treasury Department.  But the Treasury Department had no legislative authority to take equity from AIG either.  So what did they do?  They came and opened up a discount window but created a so-called “independent trust” and they hired three trustees, and they insisted that these people were independent non-governmental actors, no conflicts of interests.  But in crafting the trust agreement they slipped in a barely noticed provision of the trust agreement which said “Oh by the way, the Fed controls the trust completely, its terms and effectively the trustees.”  Under anybody’s rendition of trust law this is not a valid trust, this is simply a ruse or an artifice for the Federal Reserve Bank.  The second– GAFFNEY: Which makes the proposition- David we’re just about out of time.  Which makes what they did as I understand it from a technical, legal sense, money laundering.

Trust

clipped from www.securefreedomradio.org YERUSHALMI: So here’s what we find out in the midst of discovery when we depose the Treasury Department’s deponent and the Fed and get documents, here’s what we’ve learned: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time that it structured the debt that it was going to give AIG insisted that not only did it get the debt, not only would it get principal and interest payments and collateral for that, it wanted 80% of AIG, precisely 77.9% of the shares and the voting rights.  But the Federal Reserve Bank and Geithner knew that it was illegal for the Fed system whether there’s a Fed or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to own that, so what did they do?  They created this independent trust.

Red Hot Bugs

clipped from chiefio.wordpress.com see his website “Musings from the Chiefio“ The empty ocean goes infinite hot on a null anomaly What to make of THIS bizarre anomaly map? Well, you always need a baseline benchmark, even if you are ‘benchmarking the baseline’, so why not start with the “NULL” case of baseline equal to report period? It ought to be a simple all white land area with grey oceans for missing data. Well, I was “A bit surprised” when I got a blood red ocean everywhere on the planet. You can try it yourself at the NASA / GISS web site map making page. “Houston, I think you have a problem”… Well, the code NASA GISS publishes and says is what they run, is not this code that they are running. Yes, they are not publishing the real code. So I simply can not do any debugging on this issue, because the code that produces these maps is not available. But what I can say is pretty simple: If a map with no areas of unusual warmth (by definition with the baseline = report period) has this happen; something is wrong.

Doublethink Doubletalk

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COTD: Cancelled

clipped from www.zerohedge.com by Anonymous on Mon, 02/01/2010 - 21:13 #214234 Im a realtor in nw indiana suburb of chicago. Banks are canceling the sherif auction homes the day before the sale every single month for over a year even the ones that have been vacant for over a year. I dont think they can afford the write off's is what i been told. out of the 400 that go every month only 4 or 5 are sold every single month reply

Alas

clipped from www.zerohedge.com Everything that the government has done so far, with a few minor detours, has been almost exclusively focused on maintaining home prices high, by tweaking either the supply or the demand side of the housing equation. As the bulk of consumer net wealth is concentrated in the housing sector, and a wealthy and confident consumer, much more so than the banking system, is critical to the recovery of America's economy, the Administration will do everything in its power to achieve its goal of artificially manipulating the housing market Short-lived remedies Shadow Inventory Strategic Defaults Quantitative Easing Price Double Dip And there you have it: the best that the government can hope for is to extend and pretend, and to avoid presenting the sad but very simple reality to the American public. Alas, as long as the reset button is not pushed, the only beneficiaries are the very same Wall Street kleptocrats who want nothing more than further perpetuating the status quo.

Ridiculous Delusion

clipped from www.zerohedge.com Today, to much fanfare, the administration released its ridiculous $3+ trillion budget (we say + because at that size the one thing certain is that the budget will certainly never hit the target concerned with what is not included, namely $2.8 Trillion and $1.9 Trillion of MBS guaranteed portfolios at Fannie and Freddie, and an additional $782 billion and $809 billion in company debt outstanding for the two GSEs, respectively. This amounts to a total of $6.3 trillion in liabilities which should be counted toward the budget. And yet, oddly, the error-checker somehow made this rather justifiable omission: after all if we were to look at a number which written out looks as follows $6,264,000,000,000.00, we would also probably just avoid it What we definitely know is that we now live in a system where delusion is the norm: we have an administration that willfully and consistently deludes its population from representing just how bad our economic debacle really is

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Slowly, relentlessly, the regime is dying.  But it is taking a lot of good people with it.  The recent rise in violence in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan can be tracked back to Tehran.  Western intelligence services are aware that Khamenei has given the Revolutionary Guards carte blanche to kill as many infidels as possible, wherever they have the opportunity.  And within Iran, they are hanging their children.  Listen to my brave friend, Potkin Azarmehr, tell the awful story of a boy executed for a crime he could not have committed (he was actually in prison when the event occurred). The State Department condemned the recent executions, which is to its credit.  But there will be many more hangings and stonings, of Kurds, of Baha’i, of random dissidents.  It’s time to put this evil regime out of its misery.  Help the Iranian people win their freedom, and thereby change the world.  Is there no leader in the West who will do it?

catOclysm

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama's "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran's intransigence and aggressiveness; China's headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia's determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states' refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments President Obama's foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm.

Kissing Reality Goodbye

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Today the Obama administration unveiled its budget for FY 2011. The budget ostensibly covers the next ten years, but its projections for future years are meaningless. The only year for which it has any significance is 2011, in which it anticipates $3.8 trillion in spending and an astonishing $1.6 trillion deficit. In 2006, the last year in which the Republicans controlled Congress, the deficit was $248 billion--one-seventh what Obama proposes for next year. In his budget announcement today, Obama said: "[O]ur government is deeply in debt after what can only be described as a decade of profligacy." So he proposes to put the country far more deeply in debt through profligacy of a sort that was undreamed of just a few years ago. Either Obama has completely lost touch with reality, or he thinks we have. Obama won in 2008 with what Michael Barone called a "top and bottom coalition." Now, Obama can kiss the top part of that coalition goodbye.

Both Ways Now

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com No one expects consistency from Democratic politicians, but the Institute for Energy Research notes an egregious contradiction in President Obama's FY 2011 budget: [Obama's budget] contained $36.5 billion in new taxes over ten years on the oil and gas industries, while heaping new billions in taxpayer support for politically-favored energies. The White House budget request claims that, "Oil and gas subsidies are costly to the American taxpayer and do little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices." In the first place, it is odd to hear the White House worrying about high energy prices, and also to hear it deny that tax policy gives incentive for production. Both of these points flatly contradict the whole philosophy behind the White House's favored cap-and-trade scheme, which is expressly designed to (a) raise the price of fossil-based energy and (b) reduce the incentives to use such energy sources. The White House can't have it both ways

Put Them In Restraints

clipped from www.moonbattery.com In unveiling his record budget, with its record deficit, Chairman Zero read the following words off his Teleprompter: "We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences, as if waste doesn't matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money, as if we can ignore this challenge for another generation," - B. Hussein Obama, February 1, 2010 Oh, really. "We can't?" Because it sure as heck looks to me like that's what you're doing. His budget plan does not cancel the remaining TARP spending, does not cancel the remaining Spendulus spending, does not cut back discretionary spending to where it was before he and his Congressional majority increased it 24%, and does not cancel his increased health care spending. Tell me, does this graph look like fiscal restraint to you? 'We Are Trying on Every Front to Increase the Role of Government' - Barney Frank, (Dumb-Mass) 26 October 2009

2.29 Lies O Minute

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Lost?

clipped from www.politico.com Democrats knew they lost reform with the Massachusetts election and some of them like Rep. Barney Frank essentially said so. “The first reaction to the Massachusetts election was the honest reaction,” O’Donnell said. Frank later walked back his comments. But since Election Night, he said, Democrats have moved into “full bluff mode.” “We’re absolutely in full fake cheerleading mode. I think Nancy Pelosi has absolutely no moves left. I think she knows that now. I think Harry Reid knows that. And that’s why they don’t bring it up,” he said. “They had a Senate leadership press conference (Thursday) and it was as if (reporters) were asking about World War I” when they asked about reform. O’Donnell attributes the theatrics to the need to deal with a liberal base that will go bonkers if Democrats quit on reform. “I’ve never heard leadership admit publicly to being so lost,” O’Donnell said. “In ’94, we never admitted we didn’t know how to proceed after we crashed and burned in the Senate.

Lame

clipped from pajamasmedia.com A REALITY CHECK FOR A LAME WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT TALKING POINT: From the comments to my Tea Party column in the Washington Examiner: And how many times did you take to the streets to protest the deficit during the Bush presidency? I’m guessing zero. You see this kind of thing pop up in comments a lot, and sometimes even out of the mouth of the less-honest variety of pundit. Which means, of course, that once again it’s time to roll out this graphic: Notice anything? Like maybe how Bush’s deficits are dwarfed by Obama’s? And maybe how the deficit was falling throughout Bush’s second term? Related: The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday.

Bush: ~$2 Trillion in Deficits. It sucks to be us.

O Duce: Nearly $2 Trillion in 2009 alone and CBO projections of ~$8 Trillion if he does two terms. That's over 4x Bush's deficits. Oh, and the "what about the off balance sheet money" doesn't work because BOTH OF THEM DO THAT.

And if we're lucky enough to get rid of O Duce after just one term then CBO projects ~$5 Trillion. "Only" 2.5x what Bush did in 8 years. But in 4.

There are simply no words to describe this.

And of course if O Duce was a CEO put in this situation he would be given a year, maybe 2 tops to get rid of the red ink. Or be history.

4%

clipped from www.rasmussenreports.com Sixty-five percent (65%) of voters nationwide now hold populist, or Mainstream, views of government. That’s up from 62% last September and 55% last March. Mainstream Americans tend to trust the wisdom of the crowd more than their political leaders and are skeptical of both big government and big business (see crosstabs). While Republicans and unaffiliated voters are more likely to hold Mainstream views than Democrats, a majority of those in the president’s party (51%) hold such views. Only four percent (4%) now support the Political Class. These voters tend to trust political leaders more than the public at large and are far less skeptical about government. When leaners are included, 81% are in the Mainstream category, and 12% support the Political Class.

So Screwed

clipped from pajamasmedia.com “WE ARE SO SCREWED.” “Perhaps more than anything else, failure to recognize the precariousness and fickleness of confidence-especially in cases in which large short-term debts need to be rolled over continuously-is the key factor that gives rise to the this-time-is-different syndrome. Highly indebted governments, banks, or corporations can seem to be merrily rolling along for an extended period, when bang!-confidence collapses, lenders disappear, and a crisis hits.”

Something Big

clipped from pajamasmedia.com PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE ON OBAMA AND THE BCS: One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinal trough in the House of Common’s men’s washroom. Attlee arrived first. When Churchill arrived, he stood as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill said: “That’s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.” I’m reminded of that story by news that President Obama plans to regulate the college football playoff system. . . . With the government already running the banks and the auto industry, and trying to take over the health care industry, however, one might have hoped that sports would escape the ravening maw of Leviathan. But I guess Attlee and Obama are kindred spirits. Well, let’s hope that Obama doesn’t do for America what Attlee did for Britain, though that does seem to be the goal . . . .

Responsibilities

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com But as the president was quick to point out, with a 41st vote in the Senate and the ability to block legislation through filibuster come pressure on Republicans to share in the political risks of making hard choices. “The responsibility to govern is now yours as well,” Mr. Obama said in his State of the Union speech, a message that was certainly heard by party leaders here in Honolulu. Hmm.  The Democrats have had outright majorities of the House and Senate since 2006; they enjoyed a brief Senate majority from the summer of 2000 until January 2003, and have always had more than 41 Senate votes. So when Obama rails against the failed policies of the past eight years, is he running against Pelosi, Reid, Senator Obama, and the rest of the Democrats?  I don't think so. Mr. Nagourney also fails to mention the Republican "Better Solutions" package offered to Obama as inoculation against the "no ideas" charge.

Enemies

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com Former CIA head Michael Hayden blasts Obama's legalistic approach to the war on terror and ends with this zinger: There's a final oddity. In August, the government unveiled the HIG [High Value Detainee Interrogation Group] for questioning al-Qaeda and announced that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about the alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general's report. They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway. Eric Holder knows who the enemy is.