It's The Level Stupid

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk Two facts that should give pause for thought. 1) Japanese data released on Thursday showed that exports fell yet again in July. They are down 39.5pc to the US, and 26.5pc to China. Japan is the world’s second biggest economy. It lives on exports. 2) The Baltic Dry Index measuring freight rates for bulk goods and commodities has been falling almost continuously for eleven weeks, dropping from 4,290 to 2,778 on Thursday. Is this just a glut of ships or is this telling us what the Shanghai market is also telling us, that credit tightening by the Chinese government is pulling the rug from underneath the latest commodity bubble? I have no idea when stock markets and commodities – especially base metals – will reflect the hard facts on the ground (ie, an end to the Chinese construction bubble). Timing is not my forte. Nor is the market. But I am absolutely convinced that those who think we can return to the status quo ante of the credit bubble as if nothing has happened are delusional.

COTD: Seeing Through The Lies

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk I just finished another summer of teaching some of the executive program MBA’s here in Boston and came away with some of the learning that I always hope to gain from my students while I work to teach them. My second “section” this summer was 30+ students mostly 28-35 years old. Once again the awareness of the Asian students, both Indian and Chinese, stood out loud and clear, and while I had the pleasure as always of a dozen or so very capable, hard-working Americans, it is the Asians who seem most willing to accept, undertake and complete the painful academic slog that I put them through. They seem better equipped to deal with the circumstances of the world around them, and they don’t need the lulling of feel-good to get on with their work and lives and they use their time learning and not complaining nor feeling that they are the proverbial victims. Maybe it’s in part the ability to see through the lies to the eventual truth and recovery that helps them get the most out of each day.

Did I Forget To Mention Profit?

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com What Obama says in favor of a public option -- as of today, at least -- tells us how little he understands competition. The public option's virtue, he told Smerconish, is that "there wouldn't be a profit motive involved." Profit (along with loss) is what enables competition to perform its discovery role: "Suppose for a moment that we try to take the profit motive out of health care by going to a system in which government pays for and/or directly provides the services. ... (P)ublic-spirited politicians and bureaucrats have replaced profit-seeking firms. "By what method exactly will the officials know how to allocate resources? By what method will they know how much of what kind of health care people want? And more important, by what method will they know how to produce that health care without wasting resources?

Yeah, right. Like My Letter To Betsy Will Even Be Read...

clipped from proteinwisdom.com Some people, including Medicare recipients, will have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the nation’s health-care system, Rep. Betsy Markey told a gathering of constituents in Fort Collins on Wednesday. Markey has repeatedly said during the August congressional recess that Medicare spending needs to be reined in to help pay for reforming the broader health-care system. “There’s going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work,” Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. “But we have to do this because we’re Americans.” Betsy, who is this “we” you talk about? My rights as an American includes telling you, and that donkey you rode in on, to go to hell.

Letter found here.

ODemagoguery

clipped from www.foreignpolicy.com "Energy independence" has become a byword on the American political scene, and invoking it is now as essential as baby-kissing. There are many causes behind last year's oil price spike, but Saudi Arabia is not one of them. Unlike large oil companies, which have been slow to respond to the supply crunch with more capital investments, the kingdom realized that such investments -- even if they seem counterintuitive in the short term -- are essential to avoiding catastrophic energy shocks. But Americans don't hear all this from their political leaders. In one of his very first speeches as U.S. president, for instance, Barack Obama declared that "America's dependence on oil is one of the most serious threats that our nation has faced." He said that it "bankrolls dictators, pays for nuclear proliferation, and funds both sides of our struggle against terrorism," and announced what he called "the first steps on our journey toward energy independence." The allure of demagoguery is strong

You really know the world has turned upside down when one of the leaders of the country you still think we should invade has a better story to tell than your own President.

Sigh.

The Tithe

clipped from www.ft.com The protracted debate over how to clean up after the financial crisis – and how to reform our accident-prone financial system to prevent another such episode – is stuck on the problem of how to regulate markets without undermining the benefits they bring. What is sorely missing is any real discussion of what function our financial system is supposed to perform and how well it is doing that job – and, just as important, at what cost. The crucial role of the financial system in a mostly free-enterprise economy is to allocate capital investment towards the most productive applications. The energetic growth and technological advance of the western economies suggest that our financial system has done this job pretty well over long periods. Aside from the recession, it is important to ask what this once-admired mechanism costs to run. Beneath those losses are real economic costs due to wasted resources: mortgage mis-pricing led the US to build far too many houses.

All Bush's Fault? Not Any More...

clipped from www.realclearmarkets.com Yesterday President Obama confirmed what futures markets seemingly already knew, that Ben Bernanke would be reappointed as Fed Chairman. Whatever one's opinion of Bernanke, his successes and failures will now reflect on the man who chose to keep him in place at the Federal Reserve. Bernanke's reappointment is yet another reminder that Washington is truly a different world. While business failures in the private sector are routinely starved of capital so that they can no longer bring harm to customers and investors alike, Washington failures get reappointed and are handed an expanded portfolio of duties.

Uranus Bound

clipped from gregmankiw.blogspot.com Economistmom says the actual budget deficit over the next decade is likely to be close to $14 trillion:

Micrometer Mania

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Better yet, and here is where I got my epiphany, scientists have produced a long-term graph of sea level changes, about 20,000 years worth.  The graph below was taken from Wikipedia, but the data behind this graph are widely known and accepted.  NASA, for example, accepts this data and the government of Canada publishes a similar graph. First, look at the vertical scale.  It ranges over about 120 meters (not millimeters), about 400 feet.  On the page you see this graph, a change of 200 millimeters (or the change in the last 120 years per the IPCC) would be would be about the width of your eyelash.  When the seas were 400 feet lower, people could walk from Russia to Alaska and from France to England. We engineers have a saying: measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an axe.

Define That System

clipped from www.americanthinker.com cap and trade bill there is a provision that will spend billions of our dollars to plant 18 million acres of trees. This was put in the bill as an attempt to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. It is well documented that tress do NOT store carbon. Trees are net absorbers of carbon only during the early growth stage. A mature forest is carbon neutral. Trees are mortal organisms. Trees give back ALL the carbon they absorb when they die. The illusion that the left uses is all in how one defines a system. If one defines the forest system as 'the first five decades', then tress do indeed absorb more carbon dioxide than they release. A definition any longer and said trees give back all the carbon they soaked up. I was taught in school "Always look at the definition of any system first" We are about to spend billions on junk science with the illusion that trees can store anthropogenic carbon. Trees are mortal and simply cannot do that! Once again, I guess we are left with "follow the money"

Upside Down: Cartoon Of The Year?

clipped from sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com

Lyin?

clipped from sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com

I Was Going To Follow The "If You Can't Say Anything Good" Model...

clipped from pajamasmedia.com NICK GILLESPIE: Ted Kennedy and the Death (Hopefully) of an Era. “There is, buried deep within Kennedy’s legislative legacy, a different set of policies worth exhuming and examining, precisely because they were truly a break with the normal way of doing business in Washington. During the 1970s, Kennedy was instrumental in deregulating the interstate trucking industry and airline ticket prices, two innovations that have vastly improved the quality of life in America even as—or more precisely, because—they pushed power out of D.C. and into the pocketbooks of everyday Americans. We are incalculably richer and better off because something like actual prices replaced regulatory fiat in trucking and flying. Because they do not fit the Ted Kennedy narrative preferred by his admirers and detractors alike, these accomplishments rarely get mentioned in stories about the late senator.

... but I have to give Nick Gillespie some real kudos for this in allowing me to find some good.

And what negative I'm going to say I'll put into bigger context thus: Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, Bush, (almost) Clinton, (Senator Kennedy for life), King Barack, ad nauseum describes nothing so much as a corrupt monarchy and rapidly ballooning and about to collapse banana republic.

Where have I gone wrong?

Opting Out

clipped from www.qando.net It appears at least some plan too. Dr. Alfred Bonati, who heads the American Society of Medical Doctors, says he plans to say “no” to accepting patients under a government run plan and, according to a poll he cites, so do an awful lot of other physicians: Perhaps this is why a nationwide, nonpartisan poll of physicians this month found that a full 70 percent oppose the health care reform proposals under consideration by Congress. Sixty-six percent feel that a government-run health insurance plan would restrict doctors’ ability to give the best advice and offer the best care possible to their patients. Perhaps most importantly, 60 percent said they would not accept new patients covered by a government insurance plan.

Squelching Discovery

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com "Choice, competition, reducing costs -- those are the things that I want to see accomplished in this health reform bill," President Obama told talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week. Choice and competition would be good. They would indeed reduce costs. If only the president meant it. Or understood it. In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market -- actually, the consumer -- holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed. So the hope for reducing medical costs indeed lies in competition and choice. Today competition is squelched by government regulation and privilege. But Obama's so-called reforms would not create real competition and choice. They would prohibit it. Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek taught that competition is a "discovery procedure."

Right. 78.

clipped from iowahawk.typepad.com Hi, this is Barack, the night orderly on 14. Can I get someone up here to open the balcony door in 1417? Patient Laverne Petrowski. P-E-T-R... Sorry Mrs. Petrowski. With all these budget cuts and strikes, it looks like we had to cut the third shift maintenance crew. Say, how about we take you for a ride down to the cafeteria? It's almost empty this time of day, and I bet they have that green jello you love so much. Mmm... num, num, num! Please, Mrs. Petrowski, put down the phone. The other patients are all asleep. Besides, after that incident yesterday, you know we had to unplug it. You remember how agitated you made everybody with those crazy stories about "death panels" and what not. Remember when I was giving you the sedatives, and I explained that your mind was playing tricks on you? And how those nice men were only End-of-Life Quality Assurance Counselors? *ding* The best part of being an orderly is talking to old people like you, up in their 90's and 100's. Right, 78.

The Once And Current Sedition

clipped from volokh.com 2. My next object would be to restrict by every means in my power the liberty of the press. For the free discussion of public characters is too dangerous for despotism to tolerate. Hence I would multiply laws against libel and sedition, and fence round the characters of the officers of government by well contrived legal obstacles. Whatever should tend to bring them into contempt should be sedition, however contemptible or reprehensible they might be. Hence too, I would impress the idea that all who were opposed to my measures were enemies of the government, that is (in my construction) of their country. It should be the business of my partizans to inculcate this, and cry down all such persons as dangerous and seditious, as disturbers of the peace of society, and desirous of overturning the Constitution.

Whoops

clipped from www.bernardgoldberg.com What seems like a long, long time ago Dan Rather was a very powerful force in American journalism.  He not only was the anchorman of the CBS Evening News, he was also the face of the network’s renowned news division — the “Tiffany” network of bigger-than-life legends like Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Mike Wallace and many, many others. Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue:  the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed.  But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed.   This is it:  Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Unhinged

clipped from michellemalkin.com Nabbed: Left-wing Obamacare supporter Maurice Schwenkler, not Obamacare foes, arrested in attack on Denver Democrat HQ I called out GOP fake hate crime perpetrator Ashley Todd last year and have documented a long list of hoax crimes across party, racial, and gender lines for nearly two decades. So, the latest case of so-called progressives vandalizing a Democrat headquarters in Denver comes as no surprise. And neither does the initial attempt by Colorado Democrats to blame “hate” by “the other side” and to shamelessly tie the crime to town hall protesters. Meet the hoaxer: A 24-year-old arrested this morning on suspicion of smashing 11 windows at Colorado Democratic Party headquarters tried to conceal his identity while allegedly committing the crime, according to police descriptions. Another non-surprise: Schwenkler was paid by the SEIU-related front group CCC, according to Colorado blogger El Presidente.

Arthur Update

clipped from naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com It has been argued that Chester Arthur’s occupation of the White House set a legal precedent for Obama since both Chester and Barack were born of British fathers.  But the public – at the time Chester was running for VP and later when he became POTUS – never knew that Chester Arthur was a British subject since he successfully lied to the public about his parental heritage. The law review article goes into great detail concerning the issue of who exactly rises to the level of natural born citizen.  It discusses law cases and legal precedent in its analysis, but it does not even mention the current President – Chester Arthur – even though Attorney Collins steadfastly denies that a person born on US soil to an alien father could be a natural born citizen. But the article does not mention President Chester Arthur because Chester Arthur managed – through blatant deceit - to cover that issue up.  He successfully concealed his British birth from the American people.

Intimidation Update

clipped from pajamasmedia.com OUCH: “A few weeks ago, Eric Holder saw nothing wrong with Black Panthers using billy clubs to intimidate voters. Today, he thinks intimidating terrorists with cigars is a crime. Holder is the one who should be answering tough questions under oath.”

You Are A Pwn

clipped from online.wsj.com The Federal Reserve chose a labor leader to succeed a former Goldman Sachs executive as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of New York's private-sector board of directors. Denis Hughes, president of the New York state branch of the AFL-CIO, had been serving as acting chairman of the New York Fed board since May, when Stephen Friedman stepped down from the position.

The Smell Of Money

clipped from hotair.com I am an MD. When I saw the hospitals climb on board I knew they smelled money! No one makes more profit in health care than the hospitals, even after covering indigent services. Why? Example: surgeon reimbursement for total hip replacement including post operative visits for 2 months or more…not more than $2000. Hospital reimbursement from Medicare or insurance company for the hip and stay…more than $70,000. Wonder why health care is so expensive? Hospitals and our dependence on health insurance is where the money is.

$16 Billion

clipped from hotair.com Among the ostensible motivations for health-care reform, cost savings from treating the uninsured ranks the highest and most understandable.  Reformers argue that the uninsured wind up in emergency rooms, getting the most expensive treatment possible The New York Times looks at the numbers behind the endorsement of ObamaCare by hospitals, where a nugget of information contradicts the notion that this small minority of Americans creates that much of a problem: Now a cost-benefit breakdown quietly posted on the Web site of the Tennessee Hospital Association helps fills in the answer. The breakdown estimates that the industry will receive additional money of about $171 billion over those same 10 years as a result of reimbursements for newly insured patients who would be covered under the overhaul plan. In other words, the hospitals would give up $155 billion in cost cuts, but take in $171 billion in new money — a net gain of $16 billion.

No Pumpkin

clipped from pajamasmedia.com THE OBAMACARE DEFICIT BLOWOUT: “The press corps has noticed the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the House health bill increases the deficit by $239 billion over the next decade. But government-run health care won’t turn into a pumpkin after a decade. The underreported news is the new spending that will continue to increase well beyond the 10-year period that CBO examines, and that this blowout will overwhelm even the House Democrats’ huge tax increases, Medicare spending cuts and other ‘pay fors.’” What’s more, judging by the experience with Medicare and other programs, actual spending will be much higher than even these projections.

Indestructible

clipped from pajamasmedia.com A.P.: Young Obama backers AWOL from health care fight. “Add this to President Barack Obama’s problems in selling his health care overhaul: A lot of the tech-savvy activists who helped put him in office are young, feeling indestructible and not all that into what they see as an old folks issue.”

Never Mind

clipped from proteinwisdom.com CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Former Air Force Reservist Gale Reid received a letter from the Veterans Affairs Department that told her she had Lou Gehrig’s disease, and she immediately put herself through a battery of painful, expensive tests. Five days later, the VA said its “diagnosis” was a mistake. [...] The National Gulf War Resource Center said at least 2,500 letters informing veterans of disability benefits for ALS sufferers were sent, with almost half — some 1,200 — a mistake. Those who received the letters have undiagnosed neurological disorders, according to the Gulf War veterans group, which provides information, support and referrals about illnesses to people who served in the military.

Cover

clipped from hotair.com LaRaza has already gone on record saying it’s illegal aliens (”undocumented immigrants” as they insist on calling them) who need healthcare most (and want it at our expense, of course). LaRaza has also demanded that there be no citizenship requirements in the HC bill (and the Dems have already obliged them). Obama and the Dems know the public would never support the creation of a massive new entitlement program for illegal aliens (which is what this healthcare bill will become if it passes), so they continue to lie about it. How many times have we seen Dem politicians (and Obama himself) say that the bill will not cover illegals — even though they specifically wrote the bill so that it covers “all persons” living in the U.S. (not all citizens, or all citizens and legal residents), and specifically prohibits healthcare providers from requesting any kind of ID to verify eligibility before rendering services. Obama and the Democrats continue to lie, and the MSM continues to cover

Today's OInnumeracy Watch

clipped from hotair.com Once you do some fairly basic math, you come up with the same figure that the Kaiser Family Foundation arrived at. The liberal Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured Americans who don’t qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million. Assuming we bought individual health insurance plans for each of these people at $300 per month, a cost that having a 14-million-member pool should allow.  We could insure them for $50.4 billion a year.  That would not be a very good solution for a number of reasons, but it costs  a lot less than the $2 trillion over ten years that the CBO estimates ObamaCare will cost, plus it avoids the entire issue of overhauling a system most of us like.  In fact, if the idea is to save money through ObamaCare, then this should be the baseline: any plan Congress creates should cost less than the $50.4 billion a year it would cost to simply buy insurance for everyone who can’t afford it.

Unanswered

clipped from sites.google.com Presented are Health Care questions from members of the blog Little Green Footballs (http://littlegreenfootballs.com) collected by Keith Gabryelski (healthcarequestions@gabryelski.com).  Some of the questions were pulled from other sites by LGF members.  Attributions have not been kept, but can be found here (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34424_What_Would_You_Ask_About_Health_Care). Section 1: What is the bill being voted on? Question 1.1: What is the name of the bill? Status 1.1: UNANSWERED   Question 1.2: Where can the text of this bill be found online? Status 1.2: UNANSWERED   Question 1.3: Will the text of the bill be complete and not subject to further change before you vote on it? Status 1.3: UNANSWERED   Question 1.4: Has everyone that will vote on this bill read it, understand it, and understand its benefits and consequences? Status 1.4: UNANSWERED

That's right. It goes on like this for over a hundred questions. So far, the author thinks he has found one answer by relying on factcheck.org. I don't trust them farther than I can throw them so as far as I'm concerned there are no answers.

What a surprise.

Blackout

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com The Horror!... The absolute horror! The New York Times reported this weekend that the CIA threatened Al-Qaeda terror leader Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri with a drill and a gun if he failed to talk. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was the top Al-Qaeda suspect in the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 American sailors. The New York Times wept for this terrorist thug yesterday: A Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s report set to be released Monday provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including details of how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. In May 2007, The Smoking Gun published a series of torture drawings that were captured at an Al-Qaeda torture house in Iraq. Nine days after the images were released, neither ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times nor The Washington Post ran a story with photos of the shocking evidence of al-Qaeda’s barbarism.

Sunk

clipped from pajamasmedia.com WHAT HAPPENED TO CANDIDATE OBAMA? “As for the idealism, no president has sunk so far so fast. Candidate Obama chastised Washington as a place where good ideas died. He summoned young voters with high-minded slogans and Kennedy-esque rhetoric. Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were mere politicians; he was the leader of a whole new era in politics. Now? Opponents of health care are stooges, evil-mongers, and villains. Citizen activists are to be reported to the authorities for spreading misinformation or ridiculed. The candidate with the superior temperament has devolved into a peevish president exasperated that mere citizens would question his wisdom or stand in his way.”

The Real W

clipped from www.ft.com There are also now two reasons why there is a rising risk of a double-dip W-shaped recession. For a start, there are risks associated with exit strategies from the massive monetary and fiscal easing: policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they take large fiscal deficits seriously and raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity soon, they would undermine recovery and tip the economy back into stag-deflation (recession and deflation). But if they maintain large budget deficits, bond market vigilantes will punish policymakers. Then, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields would rise and borrowing rates will go up sharply, leading to stagflation.

Clunked Out

clipped from www.nola.com Roy McDonald, a salesman with Levis Used Car Clearance Center in Slidell, can't wait for the Cash for Clunkers program to end. "It's our worst month ever. It's killing us," McDonald said. "Customers are not even coming to the used car lot. They're going straight to new cars." The program, officially known as the Car Allowance Rebate System, offers federal subsidies of as much as $4,500 to those who trade in their old vehicles for new, more fuel-efficient ones. The program, which is scheduled to end on Monday, has jumpstarted sales of new vehicles. But used car dealers in the metro New Orleans area say they've been shut out of the party. That's because the Cash for Clunkers program does not allow participants to purchase used vehicles. It also requires dealers to destroy the clunker trade-ins they receive, a move that shrinks the number of older cars on the market and drives up the price of used vehicles. McDonald said sales over the past month have fallen at least 60 percent.

The Wonders Of Duct Tape

clipped from www.qando.net From a friend, a little humor to start your Sunday: (10) Your annual breast exam is done at Hooters. (9) Directions to your doctor’s office include “Take a left when you enter the trailer park.” (8) The tongue depressors taste faintly of Fudgesicles. (7) The only proctologist in the plan is “Gus” from Roto-Rooter. (6) The only item listed under Preventative Care Coverage is “an apple a day.” (5) Your primary care physician is wearing the pants you gave to goodwill last month. (4) “The patient is responsible for 200% of out-of-network charges,” is not a typographical error. (3) The only expense covered 100% is, “embalming.” (2) Your Prozac comes in different colors with little M’s on them. AND THE NUMBER ONE SIGN YOU’VE JOINED OBAMA’S HEALTH CARE PLAN (1) You ask for Viagra, and they give you a Popsicle stick and duct tape

It Will Bend Upward

clipped from www.qando.net This was the difference between the Obama administration and the CBO estimate based on the Obama administration’s 10 year budget. At the time the CBO said that the budget estimate would raise the debt by 9.1 trillion dollars. The Obama administration said, at the time, that the CBO was wrong. Quietly, at 7pm this last Friday night, the Obama administration raised its estimate of what their budget would add to the debt by the 2 trillion the CBO had said was always there. What that means for the chart is you can ignore the pastel red bars – the Obama estimate – in favor of the dark red bars. So when the administration says that health care reform will save money and the CBO says it will “bend the cost curve upward”, what should this example lead us to believe? The cost curve is going to bend upward.

Robbing Peter To Pay Goldman Sachs

clipped from pajamasmedia.com While the commentariat’s condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama’s room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren’t very keen about the government barging into their lives. . . . This isn’t about liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. A majority oppose Obama’s policies because they fly in the face of this country’s bedrock values of personal liberty and limited government. Robbing Peter to pay Goldman Sachs does violence to that fundamentally American ethos.

About That Swastika

clipped from hotair.com