Who Are The Real Racists?

clipped from ace.mu.nu Conventional wisdom says that Obama lost control of the stimulus bill when he delegated it to Nancy Pelosi to craft. Well, I don't think it's fair to give Nancy all the credit. Many of the ideas in the Spendulus abomination bear the unmistakable whiff of the Messiah's input. To Wit: Our friends at Naked Emperor News have unearthed yet another telling video from Obama's past:

Pixie Dust

clipped from www.bloomberg.com It’s a jobs-creation program. No, it’s investment in our future. It’s a tax-relief plan. Wait, it provides assistance to consumers hardest hit by the economic recession. It’s legislation to jump-start the economy. No, it’s a recovery program. It’s a life raft for state and local governments. It’s a spending bill. Which is it? Fiscal stimulus is all things to all people. In other words, it represents the triumph of faith over reason. Attempts to spend their way out of a slump by Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush, Japan (in the 1990s) and Europe yielded little in the way of results, Mitchell says. There is no Santa Claus. The federal government can’t give something to one person without taking it away from someone else, either today or at some point in the future. There is a tooth fairy. It’s called the Federal Reserve. The Fed has pixie dust. It’s called a printing press. Unlike the fiscal authority, the Fed has the gift that keeps on giving.

We're All Fascists Now Part II

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago.  What a pity!  No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville. There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville’s scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht.  We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us. Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.  It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.  Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…

Ledeen has this nailed. Read it and weep at the sheep around you.

Icebreakers

clipped from www.financialsense.com At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, the defense attorney for deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess argued that Stalin was equally responsible for starting the war. The Soviet leader set the war in motion by signing a secret pact with Hitler. The agreement involved a joint invasion and partitioning of Poland. In the course of this invasion Stalin cheated Hitler by delaying the Soviet invasion of Poland for 17 days. Hitler was shocked at the betrayal. “Where are the promised Russian troops?” Stalin’s coy answer: “Our forces aren’t ready.” But Stalin wanted Hitler to fight, because Hitler was – according to Stalin – the “icebreaker” of the revolution. By giving nuclear and missile technology to Iran, the Russians prepare a new “icebreaker.” But today, there are many strategies on many continents: there is Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the North Koreans, and the rapidly arming Chinese.

Amateurs

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Christopher Flavelle at Slate describes the skyrocketing political and economic price of supplying Afghanistan. When it became clear that the US was going to shift the weight of its effort to that landlocked country, the market power of the countries which control the supply routes has increased dramatically. Flavelle describes “the ethical predicament now looming in Central Asia, where Obama may soon need to choose either funding a vicious dictator in Uzbekistan or hindering the mission in Afghanistan. Getting into bed with Uzbekistan could be Obama’s first ugly but necessary foreign-policy compromise.” Uzbekistan’s human rights record is so odious that even the Bush administration—no pushover for world opinion—cut ties with it four years ago. The logistical consequences of the shift to the “good war” now have to be faced.  Amateurs it is said, think of war in terms of tactics, but professionals see it in terms of logistics.

The Only Man For The Job

clipped from ace.mu.nu Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama's senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. To date, the president has not nominated any assistant secretaries or undersecretaries at the Treasury, and the handful of mid-level staffers who have started work were still finding their offices and getting their building passes and BlackBerrys. Yes, we know how dependent the Obamatons are on their BlackBerries. So they spent weeks working on a plan without determining its feasibility and without consulting with the industry. The Secretary had a last-minute crisis of confidence and then...what? Too proud to tell the President he needs more time to develop a rescue plan? Too wedded to his artificial deadline? These decisions have real-world consequences now. I can see why Geithner was the only man for the job. /sarc

Did I Forget To Mention Morgenthau?

clipped from ace.mu.nu `We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say, after 8 years of the administration,''... "we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.'' The administration and the expert? FDR's The Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau.

On Nazi-Like Xenophobes

clipped from www.thedailybeast.com Given the opportunity, Republicans can once again tap a reservoir of resentment, some of it justified. For a generation, the white-collar liberals who now dominate the Democratic Party have shown a remarkable ability to dress up their own economic interests in the rhetoric of globalization and anti-racism while attacking the motives and assaulting the characters of Americans who are far less wealthy and privileged. They conveniently forget to pay taxes for their illegal-immigrant maids and nannies, and then they denounce fellow citizens who can’t afford servants as Nazi-like xenophobes for insisting that all immigrants, not just some, obey federal immigration laws. They use their status as alumni of elite universities to get their mediocre children admitted by means of legacy programs (class-based affirmative action), and then they blame racism when working-class and middle-class whites criticize race-based affirmative action.

Umm. How About Ours?

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com But Israeli politics always has an extra wrinkle or two, and in this case there is talk that Netanyahu may have trouble bringing in Yisrael Beitenu wihout losing UTJ. That's because, of all things, right-wing Yisrael Beitenu strongly favors the right to civil unions for homosexual couples. UTJ has indicated that its rabbis would direct the party to walk away from a coaliltion government that supported civil unions. A coalition that included Yisrael Beitenu but not UTJ would have the support of only 60 Knesset members. I guess it's possible to conceive of a democratic form of government more flawed than Israel's, but I don't seem able to do so.

The Way Democracy Would Go

clipped from pajamasmedia.com JERRY POURNELLE ON California’s budget problems: “It is essentially the way the classical political philosophers would have predicted that democracy would go. It’s not so much that the voters vote themselves largess from the public treasury, although that certainly happens; it is that those with a particular interest, such as civil servants including teachers and prison guards unions will always organize effectively while those who are affected less directly won’t, and the result will go in one direction. We’re certainly getting an illustration of that in California.”

"Banks"

clipped from hughhewitt.townhall.com According to the FDIC there are nearly 8,300 banks in the United States.  However, if you look at the Federal Reserve’s report on consumer credit, you will note that banks provided at little more than a third of the total loans.  A quarter of all consumer credit was provided by securitized pools, so-called “asset-backed” securities. If you look at mortgages on 1-4 family residences, once again you will see that banks provide less than 30% of such mortgages and that securitized pools represent over two thirds of all mortgages outstanding. We have only reviewed two categories of debt, but you get the picture.  If you consider commercial loans, then the nearly $2 trillion commercial paper market and public debt markets come into play and are outside of most all commercial and savings banks. So who are the lenders besides the 8,300 “banks?”  They are insurance companies, money market funds, brokerage houses, hedge funds, off-shore banks, and governmental funds

Joking

clipped from www.boston.com Kuni, you have got to be joking, right? "And Wingnut radio is nothing more than one giant fraud being perpetrated on its listeners." You wanna talk fraud? Try these... "I won't have any lobbyists working in my administration." "I will start withdrawing troops from Iraq on Day One of my administration." "I will accept public campaign financing." "My administration will not condone aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects." "We will end rendition of terror suspects." "I will close the camps at Guantanamo Bay." "I never heard Jeremiah Wright make that kind if inflammatory statement before." "I had no idea my good friend Governor Blagojevich was dirtier than a pig in mud." "I believe in the Second Amendment."

Another Loony Astronaut

clipped from news.bostonherald.com SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming. "I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York. Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making." Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.

Not.

Arbitrary Vomit

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com What I am describing is merely the massive, systemic corruption that is endemic to any Nanny State. In the grand scheme of history, we may well discover that absolute monarchy is more consistent with fiscal rectitude and individual freedom. In the meantime, we must accommodate ourselves to absolute politicians, and the bureaucracies they create to regulate the details in our private lives. What I fear is worse than corruption, however. Into the transient pain of a market correction -- supply exceeding demand; wherein the impoverished but rational citizen can take advantage of falling prices -- we have the utterly unpredictable effect of governments vomiting utterly unprecedented volumes of cash, in an utterly arbitrary manner. This creates circumstances in which the citizen simply cannot behave rationally, and in which he will almost certainly be punished if he saves (given the inevitable inflation), and punished if he spends (money he desperately needs to husband).

Bonk

clipped from www.qando.net

Memetic Misery

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com Obama hasn't finished his press conference yet, but here is the gist: DOMESTIC POLICY: "I'm with the government and I'm here to help you." FOREIGN POLICY: "Peace in our time."

OLevitation

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com The Senate bill had $2 billion. The legislation coming out of conference "compromised" on $8 billion. How did this happen? Well, some of that $8 billion, as the Washington Post reported Friday, seems intended for "a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers." Reid of course played a major role in putting together the final bill. That's the kind of policymaking the new Obama administration has embraced in its signature legislative proposal: a congressional process as unseemly as ever; an emergency bill that barely addresses the emergency; a "stimulus" bill short on stimulus (is that magnetic-levitation rail line "shovel-ready"?). What accounts for this debacle? You could start with a lack of presidential leadership.

Cashflow Decapitated?

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Well, maybe. But for sheer news value you'd think this one might stand out. Look at this picture. That's the very definition of "moderate Muslim". Look at the late Aasiya Hassan, beautifully coiffed, glossy-lipped. On countless occasions since 9/11, I've found myself at lunch or dinner in New York, London, Washington, Paris or some other western city, sitting next to a modern Muslim woman like Mrs Hassan telling me how horrified she is at how hijabs and burqas, honor killings and genital mutilation, forced cousin marriages and the disproportionate number of Muslim wives in European battered women's shelters, how all these have come to define Muslim womanhood in the 21st century. Yet Aasiya Hassan ended up no differently - all because her husband's TV network had a cashflow problem? The media's lack of curiosity is in marked contrast to their willingness to propagandize for the launch of Mr Hassan's station. It also helps explain why the US newspaper business is dying.

Lawyers

clipped from taxprof.typepad.com 50% of the lawyers in the Boston area have hemorhoids; the rest are perfect ________.

My other favorite is: "Q: What do you call 1,000 lawyers on the bottom of the sea? A: A good start."

And of course a huge number of politicians are lawyers. Need I say more?

We Are All Fascists Now

clipped from pajamasmedia.com But that’s not socialism.  Socialism rests on a firm theoretical bedrock:  the abolition of private property.  I haven’t heard anyone this side of Barney Frank calling for any such thing.  What is happening now–and Newsweek is honest enough to say so down in the body of the article–is an expansion of the state’s role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business.  Yes, it’s very “European,” and some of the Europeans even call it “social democracy,” but it isn’t. It’s fascism.  Nobody calls it by its proper name, for two basic reasons:  first, because “fascism” has long since lost its actual, historical, content;  it’s been a pure epithet for many decades.  Lots of the people writing about current events like what Obama et. al. are doing, and wouldn’t want to stigmatize it with that “f” epithet. Second, not one person in a thousand knows what fascist political economy was.

What Kills A Skunk

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Ham quotes Rep. Schock: I found it very interesting that after the president finished his speech and I stayed around, not one employee at that facility approached me and asked me to vote for this bill. In fact, I have received over 1,400 phone calls, e-mails, and letters from Caterpillar employees alone asking me to oppose this legislation

Chinese Hate

clipped from www.dailyreckoning.com 02/13/09 London, England “We hate you guys…” Mr. Luo Ping, director general at China’s Banking Regulatory Commission, speaking in New York on Wednesday, shared his opinion of U.S. bailout policies: “Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion …we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.” Reports in the press this week say that China is considering ways to diversify out of the dollar. The Chinese are no fools. They see what is coming. And they know what it will do to them – the holders of the largest pile of dollars ever assembled. The Financial Times made it perfectly clear to them in a cartoon yesterday. It shows Barack Obama in front of a huge smoking trashcan filled with dollars. The president is pouring on gasoline. Yes, dear reader, Mr. Ping has caught on.

We Don't Have Time To Do That

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Republican Congresscritters Are Idiots

clipped from pajamasmedia.com NO LOVE FOR THE STIMULUS FROM LAMAR ALEXANDER: “This bill will give American workers $8 a week in their paychecks in exchange for passing along a $1 trillion debt to our grandchildren. The entire New Deal in today’s dollars cost only half of what this bill costs.” To be fair, it’ll be $13 a week until next January.

Which means there are no words to even describe the Democrats.

Welcome To Your Future

clipped from www.nytimes.com Essentially, Americans had migrated from one society to another — from a society of high trust to a society of low trust, from a society of optimism to a society of foreboding, from a society in which certain financial habits applied to a society in which they did not. In the new world, investors had no basis from which to calculate risk. Families slowly deleveraged. Bankers had no way to measure the future value of assets. Cognitive scientists distinguish between normal risk-assessment decisions, which activate the reward-prediction regions of the brain, and decisions made amid extreme uncertainty, which generate activity in the amygdala. These are different mental processes using different strategies and producing different results. Americans were suddenly forced to cope with this second category, extreme uncertainty. President Obama’s promises of 3.5 million jobs now seemed a sham and his former certainty a delusion. The political climate grew more polarized.

On W As A Comparative Genius

clipped from hotair.com Until now, most people assumed that the US conducted its Predator strikes on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets from bases in Afghanistan.  Now, however, Senator Dianne Feinstein has exposed a Pakistani partnership on Predator launches that the previous administration tried to keep quiet.  Her offhand remark may put the entire program in jeopardy: A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States. This isn’t the first time Feinstein has blown a sensitive operation by opening her mouth, either.  Californians will recall that Mayor Feinstein called a press conference to discuss the Night Stalker case She divulged previously-confidential information about Richard Ramirez’ shoes and gun — and on hearing it, Ramirez promptly dumped them into the bay

Heh

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3.27

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Washington seems to be in chaos at this moment, as no one is sure what is actually in the bill the Democrats have (apparently) agreed on. U.S. News' Washington Whispers column--which, by the way, was a feature of the magazine when I started reading it in the mid-1960s--says that if you want to be able to read the bill, you pretty much have to be a lobbyist: We're receiving E-mails from Capitol Hill staffers expressing frustration that they can't get a copy of the stimulus bill agreed to last night at a price of $789 billion. What's more, staffers are complaining about who does have a copy: K Street lobbyists. Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin asked the Congressional Budget Office to figure out what the cost of the pork bill will be if its 20 "most popular" provisions--I'm not sure how those were identified, but the list includes sacred cows like Head Start--are kept in place for ten years. The answer: $3.27 trillion. Which implies either mind-boggling debt or major tax increases.

The Raid

clipped from www.qando.net Health: The plan includes subsidies to allow people who are laid off to purchase health insurance through the federal COBRA plan. There is also money to support hospitals seeking to modernize health information technology. Infrastructure: The infrastructure section of the package includes funds for building and repairing highways and bridges, expanding transit systems, upgrading airports and rail systems and building and repairing federal buildings — with the focus on making them more energy efficient. Funds are available for clean water projects, cleanup of environmental waste areas and nuclear waste cleanups. Nothing listed here is stimulative. Nothing. This is all the pork that everyone has denied is in the bill. This is the left’s shopping list of the last 40 years rolled into one big raid on your wallet.

I Can't Wait For The Second Month

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com The pork and the overall spending are every bit as bad as the critics say, but in the long run, they are mere distractions. The real damage comes from other, less noticed provisions in the bills. The House and/or Senate stimulus bills would undo the 1996 welfare reforms, explode entitlement spending by a cool quarter trillion dollars, lay the groundwork for the federal government’s takeover of our health care system, double Uncle Sam’s already overbearing role in education, require taxpayers to pick up the bail tab for potentially dangerous felons, allow unemployed Wall Street executives to qualify for Medicaid, and reignite the fires of trade protectionism, thereby risking a global trade war.   Not bad for the first month of unified liberal rule in Washington, eh?

The Bloat Hole

clipped from www.youtube.com

Amended

clipped from townhall.com Roosevelt didn't have an easy time with his agenda; he had to first emasculate the U.S. Supreme Court. Higgs points out that federal courts had respect for the Constitution as late as the 1930s. They issued some 1,600 injunctions to restrain officials from carrying out acts of Congress. A more fundamental question is: Should Washington be guided by the Constitution? In explaining the Constitution, James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce." Has the Constitution been amended to permit Congress to tax, spend and regulate as it pleases or have Americans said, "To hell with the Constitution"?

The Hammering This Time

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Obama's superficial and dishonest treatment of serious problems might work at press conferences, but it works much less well among those we know are paying attention, e.g., people who have their savings on the line. Today his Treasury Secretary announced the next phase of the bank bailout plan. It turns out that this will involve a largely undefined "public-private partnership" to raise a trillion or so to buy off these "troubled assets" (i.e., the crooked sub-prime loans Fannie and Freddie did so much to push). The stock market promptly tanked. . . .The MSM is saying that this is because Secretary Geithner's plan is short on specifics. The truth is that the market tanked because it knows exactly what the muzzed-over specifics will be: The few remaining relatively healthy banks will be forced to buy billions in poisonous assets. In other words, as ever in the nicey-sounding world of "public-private partnerships," the private parties will get hammered.

That Was Him

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com An excerpt from Geithner's presentation today: The causes of this crisis are many and complex. They accumulated over a long period of time, and they will take time to resolve. Governments and central banks around the world pursued policies that, with the benefit of hindsight, caused a huge global boom in credit, pushed housing prices and financial markets to levels that defied gravity. Geithner was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The "central banks" that "pursued policies"? That was him.

Not Used

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com This afternoon, I heard John Cogan of the Hoover Institution present a persuasive analysis of why the Democratic spending legislation (and in particular the House version) will not appreciably stimulate the economy any time soon. Cogan proceed from the assumption, unassailable I think, that the way government policy can help stimulate the economy is by causing unproductive resources (e.g., a worker or inventory) to be put into productive use. By and large, the House stimulus package does not meet this test, especially during the time period when we're likely to be in the current recession. According to Cogan, about 20 percent of the package consists of temporary tax cuts. These didn't work when we tried them a year ago and aren't likely to work now. The reason is that, in bad economic times, people tend not to spend money they receive on a one-time basis. Cogan presented charts showing how small an effect on consumption the 2008 tax rebates had.

What Problem?

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COTD: Cataclysm

clipped from rate.forbes.com Doing nothing is the best option. The credit markets went haywire after Lehman failed because the market had expected the government to bail them out like they had everyone else. Government interference in the markets is bad enough; inconsistent interference in the markets causes cataclysm. Some level of turbulence in the markets should be expected and respected. That is life. To demand that there be no creative destruction in the economy is to adopt a spoiled, childish attitude. Instead of complaining about bank misbehavior, people would be better off spending their time protesting the stealing of money from the taxpayer to bail out banks. And bankruptcy is not nationalization. They are two different concepts. To go bankrupt is to cease financial existence. To be nationalized is to be taken over by force by the government. The former happens; the latter is illegitimate. The government has no business declaring winners and losers in the market.

The New Boss (Daley Edition)

clipped from pajamasmedia.com GOOD THING THE ERA OF BUSH IS OVER! Obama Administration Invokes State Secrets Privilege in Anti-Torture Lawsuit. ‘Cause if Bush did this, it would be a sign of lawlessness, and incipient fascism. [Well, sure, if Bush did it. -- ed. Yeah, that's what I said.] Plus, Glenn Greenwald: “Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully. . . . What makes this particularly appalling and inexcusable is that Senate Democrats had long vehemently opposed the use of the ’state secrets’ privilege in exactly the way that the Bush administration used it in this case, even sponsoring legislation to limits its use and scope. Yet here is Obama, the very first chance he gets, invoking exactly this doctrine in its most expansive and abusive form.” Meet the new boss, yada yada. Some of us are more surprised about this than others . . . .

Discuss

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com My question for today is, what will the citizen do when he has lost his job, can no longer depend on the "social safety net," and needs to earn money any way he can? Forget the minimum wage -- just money for immediate food and shelter. We are presented, it seems to me, with two terrible "options." The first is, that honest citizen methodically continues to obey all laws, and he and his immediate dependents quietly starve. And the second is, the entire economy is metamorphosed into a black market, carrying society into real lawlessness, as the Nanny State crumbles under its own weight. Perhaps my prognosis is too dire. Discuss.

Missing Madoff

clipped from neoneocon.com In 2000, Markopolos was the resident math whiz at Boston’s Rampart Investment Management when he was asked by his boss to figure out a way to match Madoff’s fabulous double-digit returns by figuring out how Madoff did it. But that proved much easier said than done: “I’d say, ‘Hey Harry, how come you can’t run a program like this?,’ ” said Frank Casey, a former Rampart colleague who now runs a consulting firm for hedge fund investors. For Markopolos, though, it was no joke. Again and again he could not simulate Madoff’s returns, using information he had gathered about Madoff’s trades in stocks and options. Madoff seemed to make money whether stock markets went up or down, a red flag to Markopolos. “You can’t dominate all markets,” Markopolos said. “You have to have some losses.” Also, Madoff seemed unusually secretive, even to his own clients—another warning sign.

Unmitigated Disaster

clipped from finance.yahoo.com The fiscal stimulus bill being debated in Congress not only won't help the economy, it will make the recession much worse, says Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. Schiff scoffs at the notion the economic decline is starting to level off and concedes no government action means a "terrible" recession. But the path of increased government intervention will lead to "unmitigated disaster," says Schiff, who gained notoriety in 2007-08 for his prescient calls on the housing bubble and U.S. stocks. the government is "now taking on the mantle" of consumer of last resort, he continues, predicting the bond bubble will soon burst - if it hasn't already - ultimately leading to a collapse of the dollar and an "inflationary depression worse than anything any of us have ever seen." If nothing else, Schiff is an nonpartisan critic of American policymakers, comparing President Bush to Herbert Hoover and President Obama to FDR, and neither in a favorable way.