Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

A veritable cornucopia of pictures designed to entertain and frighten

At least insofar as a hardened Internet jockey like yourself can be entertained and frightened:

• Spotted at Legal Insurrection:


Points & Figures states that "this chart says it all":


• At DefenseTech, 'Special Operators’ Holographic Maps':


• Finally, via Sundries Shack, we learn of the theory of Nemesis and possible new evidence that refutes its existence.

Go ye therefore hence and suckle at the teat of sundry wisdom.


Real Debt of Genius: Rating Agencies Warn U.S. of Impending Downgrades

Our hapless RINO leadership deserves a share of the blame for this report. In short, the rating agency Fitch suggested that the U.S. may lose its AAA status by the end of August.

The rating agency wants to see a credible plan to reduce the budget deficit... Fitch expects to conclude its review of the U.S. sovereign rating by the end of August. As the debt deal currently stands, it is possible the U.S. debt rating could be downgraded at that time, Fitch said.

Moody's also warned the U.S. that it needs to get its house in order.

Moody’s Investors Service said the U.S. credit rating may be downgraded for the first time on concern that fiscal discipline may ease, further debt reduction measures won’t be adopted and the economy may weaken...

...JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimated that a downgrade would raise the nation’s borrowing costs by $100 billion a year. It could also hurt the rest of the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of mortgages, auto loans and other types of lending tied to the interest rates paid on Treasuries...

...Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. government on notice on April 18 that it risks losing its AAA rating unless lawmakers agree on a plan by 2013 to reduce budget deficits and the national debt. Fitch Ratings said today the U.S. is under a review as the nation’s debt burden increases at a pace that isn’t consistent with an AAA sovereign credit rating.

Good work, Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell. Your feckless leadership:

• allowed the nearly one-trillion dollar Stimulus -- originally sold as a one-time "emergency" spending push -- to remain in the baseline budget without so much as a whimper

• didn't even force President Obama to produce a real budget

• didn't force the Democrat-controlled Senate to produce a real budget

• and undermined the wildly popular Cut, Cap and Balance plan from the very outset with the idiotic, stillborn McConnell and Boehner 1.0 plans

In effect, they drove a hard bargain -- with themselves.

Idiocy.

How does "House Speaker West" and "Senate Majority Leader Rubio" sound to you?


Monday, August 01, 2011

Grim milestone: Barack Obama surpasses Jimmy Carter again, this time when it comes to America's pessimism about the future

Nothing says "change" like this headline: "Americans’ Economic Pessimism Grows, With Gloom ‘Pervasive’:

[A] CBS/New York Times poll from June ... showed that over the last year, more Americans have come to believe the current economic downturn is part of a long-term permanent decline and that the economy will never fully recover. In October 2010, 28% of respondents agreed with that statement, versus 39% last month...

..."Americans are so pessimistic about the economy now ... . And the level of public pessimism is actually higher than the deep 1981-82 recession overall," due to grim personal outlooks on a number of issues like jobs, retirement and health care, says Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at AEI who co-authored the report...

Mark Levin has said for years that "liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid."

You would think after a pair like Carter and Obama, Americans would have learned their lesson. Electing leftists to high office is somewhat akin to giving a 16-year old boy a fifth of Cuervo and the keys to the Ferrari.

That is: many scenarios can play out -- and every single one of them is catastrophic.


Chart: Zero Hedge.

California discovers innovative new way to destroy small business

Rumor has it that the fastest-growing business in California is organized crime, thanks to legislative strangulation like this:

Many Californians ignore the "use tax" - the equivalent of sales tax but remitted by state residents for products bought from out-of-state retailers that did not collect sales tax...

...[A new state effort to collect use taxes has] prompted an outcry from small businesses [thanks to] the "qualified purchaser program," enacted by legislators in 2009 and in effect since last year. It calls for California to contact service businesses that have more than $100,000 in annual gross revenue, registering them for a program in which they have to fill out a new form detailing their use-tax obligations...

About 500,000 businesses, from chiropractors to dental offices to tax preparers, got the notice. But some were actually pretty small concerns; a landscaper whose supply costs are part of that $100,000 in revenue might only net about $20,000, for instance. Many were confused by the new regulation, and dismayed by the costs of filling out the form.

Diane Amble, owner of Smog Queen, a San Francisco test-only smog shop, got the notice in the mail a few months ago... "The letter said, 'Here is your account number, fill this form in and pay your use tax or we will estimate what you owe,' " she said. "I tried to call (the Franchise Tax Board) but they're incommunicado; you can't get ahold of them. This is ridiculous. We buy supplies once in a blue moon and everything we buy is from California; I try to do that to support the state. This is a shotgun approach to try to make money off the backs of small businesses."

Not to worry, California residents. You can count on a burgeoning black market to take care of most of your needs "under the table".

Which is, of course, one of the distinguishing characteristics of a Third World country.


Sunday, July 31, 2011

Lede of the Day: Stanley B. Greenberg Self-Beclownment Edition

If Stanley B. Greenberg ever decides to leave the "center-left political" polling business (if that is a real business), I think he has a future on the comedy circuit with one-liners like this one:

Barack Obama can’t catch a break from the American public on the economy, even though he prevented a depression and saved global capitalism.

HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAAHhAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHA AHHAHAH (***cough***) AHAHAHHAHAHAH AH AHA HA HAHA HA HA AHA HA HA AH AHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA (***wheeze***) AHAH AHA HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA (***owww***) HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHH AHHA HA HA AHHAHAHAH (***sh--***) OWWWW HA OWWW...

Ow. Ow. I think I just wrenched my clavicle.

Greenberg is a hilarious kook of a propagandist. Obama, in fact, helped cause the housing meltdown as an agitator for ACORN, which harassed banks into issuing subprime loans.

Obama blew trillions of borrowed dollars on 'shovel-ready projects', only to admit later that there was no such thing.

The Obama administration was also held in Contempt of Court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, one of many steps the president has taken to destroy the domestic energy industry.

Obama also bludgeoned a wildly unpopular "health care reform" bill through Congress -- thousands of pages of legislation that no one had a chance to read or understand -- which is frightening business owners around the country and crushing hiring.

Obama also told a major aerospace manufacturer that they could not locate a billion-dollar manufacturing facility in a right-to-work state, an unprecedented act by a president completely dependent on unions for campaign donations.

And, most recently, Obama set the nation on a course of a downgrade from its once-unchallenged AAA credit rating by borrowing 40 cents of every dollar the federal government spends.

Stanley Greenberg has a future at Second City.


Moody’s: Boehner and Reid plans both completely fail to avoid downgrade

Gee, this is unexpected:

Moody’s, best known for “Subprime is AAA,” is belatedly coming to the realization that a country running serial deficits of 10% of GDP is not a AAA credit.

Well, admitting you have a problem is the first step. And today, Moody’s is admitting what we’ve been telling you for some time, that the debt ceiling charade is a farce and the real problem is the debt itself.

President Subprime McTrainingWheels could not be reached for comment.

And, gee, who could've predicted such a turn of events?

House Speaker John Boehner had two nuclear weapons at his disposal. And he chose to use neither. He had the debt ceiling and a threat of a downgrade by the rating agencies.

Cut, Cap & Balance addressed both issues.

If Republicans had united behind CCB, they could have forced a vote in the Senate -- by putting massive pressure on the 20 Democrats who had earlier pledged to support a Balanced Budget Amendment -- and send it to the President's desk.

Boehner could then tell the American people: there's only one plan that addresses the deficit and prevents a downgrade.

And let Obama deal with the fallout of a veto -- if he has the guts.

Instead, we submit a plan that still results in downgrade and default.

Idiocy. Sheer, unmitigated idiocy.

We need to elect a boatload more conservatives in 2012, politically eradicate the RINOs, and jam true conservatives into leadership positions.

Because all of these pantywaists -- put together -- don't have the cojones of Michele Bachmann.

They're wimps who are selling out the American people -- just a tad bit slower than the Marxist, Democrat Left. We're headed for fiscal apocalypse and these feckless RINOs won't even put up a fight.


Friday, July 29, 2011

John 'Forrest Gump' Boehner Gets Played Again

Using every arm-twisting, committee appointment, and earmark bribe in the book, John Boehner was able to slam his ridiculous faux debt-ceiling bill through the House, 218-210 a few minutes ago.

Let me be the first to predict what will now happen.


It will go to the Senate, where it will be rejected, rewritten, revamped and -- in general -- shredded by Chuck Schumer's mannequin, Harry Reid. In other words, it will become an even more pathetic "deficit reduction" vehicle than it was to begin with.

Then, with only hours to spare, it will be sent back to the House, whereupon the media and the Democrats -- but I repeat myself -- will predict total economic calamity should it not pass.

Boehner, the consummate Beltway insider, will panic, cry, and force it through the House, echoing the same predictions of complete economic collapse of Timothy Geithner. It will enforce no cuts, it will command no deficit reduction measures, and it will also grant Barack Obama unconditional permission to borrow another trillion dollars (or two) from our kids and grandkids.

And it will tiptoe this country right to the edge of fiscal collapse.

It's a game of hot potato, and Gump will have been handed the scalding hot potato with no time to spare.

Instead of hammering Cut, Cap & Balance through the House and Senate, the feckless GOP leadership will have folded like a deck-chair in a typhoon.

The imperative for 2012 could not be more clear: replace every RINO with conservatives in the primaries. Then obliterate the Marxist pod-people that have subsumed the husk of the once-proud Democrat Party. We have no alternative if we are to save this Republic.


Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Boehner Plan For Dummies

Someone far smarter than me can correct this assessment in the comments but -- as I understand it -- the Boehner plan is:

• Raise the debt ceiling with no real cuts - check

• Hold secret meetings with an elite "commission" of masterminds - check

• Trying to avoid blame rather than fix problems - checkety check

• End up getting pwnt by legacy media anyhow - check and mate

I'm sure glad the current RINO leadership wasn't advising General Washington at Valley Forge.


Related: How Barack Obama is destroying the American economy in two nauseating charts


How Barack Obama is destroying the American economy in two nauseating charts

You don't need to be a math major to understand these devastating charts (slightly modified from the originals to depict the beginning of the "one-time, emergency Stimulus"):

...next time Obama or his allies in the press go back to the well and recite the well-worn verse that spending is all the other guy’s fault, take a look at the facts...

President Obama has steered a fiscal course that will lead to more spending and deeper deficits and ultimately to vastly higher taxes...

...If you want to know the real cause of our deficits today, the answer lies primarily with Obama. If you want to know the real cause of our deficits in the near future, the answer lies in entitlement spending, which Obamacare increases.

That John Boehner, who was put into power by the same Tea Party conservatives he condemns, could ignore the so-called "emergency Stimulus" package -- and leave it in all subsequent baseline budgets -- is a freaking moral outrage!

Fight! Why won't they fight? Because: (a) they're cowards; or (b) they like big government. Either answer is un-freaking-acceptable. Has Barack Obama given an inch in his battle to Cloward-Piven-ize America? No! Did Stretch Pelosi? No! Did Harry "Chuck Schumer writes my speeches" Reid? Hell, no!

Boehner had two nuclear weapons at his disposal. And he chose to use neither. He had the debt ceiling and a threat of a downgrade by the rating agencies.

Cut, Cap & Balance addressed both issues.

If Republicans had united behind CCB, they could have forced a vote in the Senate -- by putting massive pressure on the 20 Democrats who had earlier pledged to support a Balanced Budget Amendment -- and send it to the President's desk.

Boehner could then tell the American people: there's only one plan that addresses the deficit and prevents a downgrade.

And let Obama deal with the fallout of a veto -- if he has the guts.

Instead, we submit a plan that still results in downgrade and default.

Idiocy. Sheer, unmitigated idiocy.

We need to elect a boatload more conservatives in 2012, politically eradicate the RINOs, and jam true conservatives into leadership positions.

Because all of these pantywaists -- put together -- don't have the cojones of Michele Bachmann.

They're wimps who are selling out the American people -- just a tad bit slower than the Marxist, Democrat Left. We're headed for fiscal apocalypse and these feckless RINOs won't even put up a fight.


Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Hanson: the Collapse of Our Failed Welfare State Will Purify Us

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is far more optimistic than I regarding the aftereffects of the impending debt implosion here in the U.S. We are approaching $15 trillion in national debt, which does not even take into account the $60+ trillion entitlement programs that will soon overtake our ability to pay. In that light, Hanson asks:

• "Should those on welfare who have more than three children still qualify for increased assistance for each additional offspring?"

• "Does the affluent class deserve mortgage-interest deductions on second and third homes?"

• "Should U.S. troops subsidize the defense of an allied and rich Germany or Japan 66 years after World War II?"

Hanson observes that the aberration of deficit spending will soon result in a return to rationality:

...the dogma that a teenager with dyslexia or a mature man with a bum knee will receive years of Social Security disability benefits will be assessed as an historical aberration of the last twenty years. A decision by an insurance company or government agency that a 62-year old must settle for arthroscopic surgery on a chronically torn meniscus rather than a complete knee replacement will not be interpreted as social cruelty.

Almost everything that can be said has been said about illegal immigration — and about the sustainability and morality of millions of Mexican and Latin American nationals crossing the U.S. border unlawfully and plugging into the American entitlement system. But an insolvent state like California, despite the liberal protestations, cannot continue to house 50,000 Mexican nationals in its penal system at a per capita cost of nearly $35,000 a year, or to extend free tuition in its broke university system to those without legal residence, or to provide social services to illegal aliens that may well cost the state nearly $10 billion a year. Even to suggest such limits was once considered illiberal. Now, not to state the obvious — that those without education, English, and legality have been expecting far more than what they could contribute in return — will be considered derelict.

Do the almost 50 million people now on "food stamps" all truly need them? Are they all starving to death? Is the program fraud-free and used only to buy bare necessities?

Is 99 weeks of unemployment (or more) reasonable?

Can someone who owns an iPhone, a big-screen television, a laptop computer, and a comfy leather couch really be called "poor"?

We can no longer afford the liberal philosophy of redistribution. Hanson concludes that there "...is a certain brutal honesty about this debt crisis. It is slowly beginning to force us to see the world in the tragic way it is, rather than in the therapeutic way we dream it must be."

But as Greece showed us -- and the public sector battle in Wisconsin hinted at -- civil unrest could be on the horizon rather than a becalmed expiation of liberals' sins.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.


Hat tip: Pundit & Pundette.

The question for the House Republican leadership: are you going to do what you think is politically expedient -- or will you do what is right?

Unbeknownst to most who live outside the Beltway, there's a silent and furious battle being waged over control of the Republican Party. Earlier this week, arms were being twisted and talking points disseminated in support of House Speaker John Boehner's erstwhile "compromise" plan. You know, the one that cut roughly 0.02% of discretionary spending in 2012.

No less an éminence grise than Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a reliable spokesman for intra-495 conservatives, parroted the Boehner line. In short, the Speaker was doing the "right thing" in introducing something that could conceivably pass the Senate and arrive on Obama's desk.

That Boehner's plan did nothing to tackle the deficit nor avoid a downgrade by the rating agencies was not discussed. Never mind that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared it "dead on arrival" and President Obama vowed to veto it.

Erick Erickson at RedState perfectly described the disastrous strategy of the Speaker and the old guard Republicans:

One week ago the entire conservative movement was unified behind Cut, Cap, and Balance [CCB] as was both House and Senate GOP caucus — no small feat to be sure.

Then, because Harry Reid denied CCB a vote through a procedural motion, John Boehner produces a crackpot plan that rips the conservative movement apart at the seams and after taking two stabs at it, still can’t get to the promised $1.2 trillion in cuts he initially claimed it would have.

The bill is being whipped against by Pelosi (which CCB was not) and will likely draw less Dem support than CCB. The bill is said by Reid to be DOA in the Senate.

But Boehner believes that it is strategically smarter to die on this hill and force it down Senate Dems throats rather than try to do that on a bill in which he has the support of all his members, all the movement, and 66 percent of the American people.

These people need to be put in a mental ward.

Precisely.

Let me get this straight: the Speaker wants to pass a bill in the House that doesn't remotely address the deficit problem and therefore still results in downgrades by the rating agencies. And then Obama -- in typical Alinsky fashion -- blames the Republican plan (or Bush, or William McKinley, or anyone else but him) for the downgrades?

There's only one plan that lifts the debt ceiling and saves the credit rating of the U.S. That's CCB, which is supported by a whopping two-thirds majority of American adults.

What can you do?

If you want to stop the GOP from taking a bad deal out of fear, go to http://www.redstate.com/action right now and call your member of Congress to oppose John Boehner’s plan.

Tell them to pass CCB again and force a vote in the Senate. We, the American people, will apply massive pressure to a few "moderate Democrats" -- who run home pretending to be fiscal conservatives -- and all 20 Democrats who once promised to support the Balanced Budget Amendment.

Then let Obama veto the best chance we have to repair the fiscal damage he's done. If he has the guts.


Update: Boehner, get real!

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Liberals stunned to discover that "trickle-up economics" works about as well as the Stimulus, Cash-for-Clunkers and Obamacare

Remember when Democrats mocked "trickle-down economics" (shhh... forget that the Reagan revolution created an unprecedented 25-year economic boom)?

Remember when President Obama said that "spreading the wealth around" would create jobs and opportunity?

Well, turns out that crap -- like all of the Democrats' social engineering rhetoric -- was, for lack of a better phrase, an epic fail. Mmm hmm, like everything else the Democrats have touched.

The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.

These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.

Say, Dems: how's that "Great Society" working out for you?

How are all of those social engineering programs, ostensibly designed to create "equality of outcome", doin'?

How's that Marxist class-warfare crap treating you?

Yo. We're Americans.

Do you know the race of those who pumped the fuel that transported your food to market? Do you know the religion of those who grew the wheat that became your bread?

No! And you don't care! The free market is the most advanced form of society ever seen on Earth; it has brought more happiness, more scientific and medical breakthroughs, more advancement for humankind than any other system!

Liberals: I encourage you to join the biggest tent of all: the freedom tent. Individual liberty, private property, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Because free enterprise knows no color, no race, no religion.

What is the alternative? Do you prefer a failed, European-style socialist state bent on incessant deficit spending? Do you like the riots in Greece? Because that's where the Democrats are taking us.

If you want a future for your children, as I do, you'll join us.


Hilarity: White House Press Secretary and Former MSM "Reporter" Jay Carney Gets Punched For 10 Minutes Straight on Lack of an Obama Plan

President Obama probably never anticipated that one day he'd yearn for Robert Gibbs.

After bobbing-and-weaving for nine minutes, Carney finally says what everybody knows: the president won’t put his plan on paper because he doesn’t want it to become “politically charged” before a compromise can be reached. In other words, you’ve got to pass it to find out what’s in it...

...So POTUS doesn’t have a plan, as such. The Republicans, for their part, have several. But the president’s senior advisers are recommending that he veto the latest.

Of course! He wants to "fundamentally transform" the country by bankrupting it!


The only qualification you need to write for The New York Times: you must be a lying sack of excrement

Yesterday's Times op-ed on the debt ceiling ("The Republican Wreckage") does an admirable job of parroting the Obama administration's talking points: diffuse blame for the debt crisis; obfuscate the cause of the debt crisis; and ignore the 820 days that Democrats have gone without producing a budget.

In short, The New York Times welcomes America's new Chinese overlords.

Consider the key logs the authors squeezed out:

"[Republicans] have largely succeeded in their campaign to ransom America’s economy for the biggest spending cuts in a generation"


Please review the accompanying chart, courtesy of the Office of Management and Budget (a claque of neo-con terrorist racist teabaggers, no doubt). In short, the 111th Congress and President Obama initiated the biggest spending spree and deficit spending in all of world history.

That some conservative Republicans are trying to unwind it is heroic. Failure to do so will mean a debt rating downgrade; and that will be on Obama's head -- not the Republicans.

As for wrecking the economy? What do you call Obama's wreck-ord?

"In a scathing prime-time television address Monday night, President Obama stepped off the sidelines to tell Americans the House Republicans were threatening a 'deep economic crisis'"


Scathing? Or did it simply consist of reading pure, unadulterated, focus-group-tested demagoguery off a teleprompter?

How did we get to this point?

Could it be that in 1960, federal spending was 27% of GDP... today it is 37%. On the Obama trajectory, federal spending will consume 50% of GDP by 2038. Could it be that today 51% of working Americans have no federal income tax liability and 70% take more than they put in?

The system is unsustainable. Of course, economic collapse -- or, as Obama likes to call it, "fundamental transformation" -- appears to be the goal of the Cloward-Piven Democrats.

And what's with the incessant demonization of "corporate jets"? Who builds these "corporate jets"? Who services them? Who flies them? Who fuels them? A bunch of "millionaires and billionaires"?

No. It's just more standard, Marxist class-warfare rhetoric, designed to divide Americans and destroy free enterprise. Which is the intent.

"Mr. Reid’s proposal does at least protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security"


Medicare just had $500 billion stolen from it by Obamacare and is set to go bust in a dozen years -- that's according to the right-wing, tea-bagging, homophobic extremists known as the Medicare Actuaries. Medicaid is bankrupting the states. And Social Security will collapse a few years after Medicare kicks the bucket.

Some "protection".

It's almost like the Medicare Actuaries don't exist; the CBO doesn't exist; all of the economists who've warned that the deficit spending is unsustainable don't exist. Only within the Times' progressive reality field do Obama's massive deficits make fiscal sense.

Which is why the only qualification to write for The New York Times is that you need to be a lying sack of excrement. And don't smell your hands after reading a copy.


Hat tip: Memeorandum.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Remember Obama's 'Civilian National Security Force'? Soros Puppet Podesta Still Pitching Armed Force to 'Advance Progressive Change'

John Podesta, one of Barack Obama's key 2008 campaign advisers, has laid the "D" card on the table.

No, not "depression". We've already got that.

I'm talking about a de facto "dictatorship". Bypassing the will of the people -- as if that hasn't happened enough in the last two-and-a-half years -- through a set of unconstitutional Czars and the administrative state.

And armed force, if necessary, according to Podesta.

Oh, Doug -- that's so controversial.

Fine. If it's not a dictatorship, please tell me what you would call the form of government that Podesta calls for?

Because it's certainly not a representative republic nor Constitutional in any way.

The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy... The ability of President Obama to accomplish important change through these powers [including executive orders and armed forces] should not be underestimated [in] continuing to make progress.

In March of 2009, at the dedication ceremony of the National Defense University's Abraham Lincoln Hall, President Obama expressed his need for a civilian national security force (MP3, 74:00 mark; DOD press release, transcript):

America must balance and integrate all elements of our national power. We can not continue to push the burden onto our military alone, or leave dormant any aspect of the arsenal of American capability. That's why my administration is committed to renewing diplomacy as a tool of American power and developing our civilian national security capabilities.

"Our civilian national security capabilities?"

In July of 2008, Jim Lindren noted a couple of peculiar sentences in a Barack Obama speech.

In Barack Obama’s July 2, 2008 speech calling America to national service, Obama proposed “a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as our military... This has prompted some in the blogosphere to raise the specter of a huge new domestic paramilitary organization...

[Obama said] "We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Curiously, the official transcript of the speech omitted those last two sentences.

After the last two-and-a-half years, can there be any real doubt as to what Obama meant?

And what George Soros John Podesta is after?

The Left used to enjoy calling Bush a fascist, but the closest thing we've ever had to a dictator -- from the iconography to the vicious language to the unconstitutional power-grabs -- is Barack Obama.


Hat tips: The Blaze and Gateway Pundit.

Rush Transcript: After jamming through massively unpopular Stimulus and Obamacare bills, Obama demands compromise and balance on debt

This is a rush transcript. Any errors are solely the responsibility of my dogs, who kept barking at Obama.

Class warfare! Corporate jet owners! Hedge fund managers! Millionaires and billionaires! Oil companies!

Radical Republicans holding the entire country hostage!

Blame Bush: inherited this crisis... made crisis better... economy is awesome now, and the Republicans are ruining it!

Balanced approach!

Balanced!

I will lead from behind!

And may Allah bless these 57 states of America.

Fore!

Mr. President:

The election of 2010 meant something.

We won. You lost. Time to slash your ridiculous spending programs that have failed -- utterly and completely -- to stimulate anything other than the growth of the federal bureaucracy.


Rally at John Boehner's Hometown Office

A hastily arranged Tea Party rally at John Boehner's hometown office took place earlier today. Karl writes:

...Several Ohio and Kentucky Tea Party groups rallied at Speaker Boehner's office in Ohio today...

...It was a rowdy group of right wing extremism. Grandmas and Grampas, Moms and Dads, and a couple children. Each arrived with a personal letter to the Speaker which was then handed to a gentleman from the Speaker's office. Letters were collected for those who could not attend and handed over in a binder. 350 letters!

There are more pictures at Karl's place.


In which I write the speech John Boehner should give

The Speaker of the House -- a guy reportedly named John Boehner from Ohio who apparently needs to be primaried -- has proposed a short-term spending plan the adjectives for which have yet to be invented.

Republicans insisted if the President wants his debt ceiling increase, the American people will require serious spending cuts and reforms...

--Cuts That Exceed The Debt Hike. The framework would cut and cap discretionary spending immediately, saving $1.2 trillion over 10 years (subject to CBO confirmation), and raise the debt ceiling by less - up to $1 trillion.

--Caps To Control Future Spending. The framework imposes spending caps that would establish clear limits on future spending and serve as a barrier against government expansion while the economy grows. Failure to remain below these caps will trigger automatic across-the-board cuts (otherwise known as sequestration).

Oh. My. Heavens.

$1.2 trillion over 10 years is a joke. A pittance. Since President Obama took office, the government borrows about $1.6 trillion each and every year. In other words, Boehner's ten-year "savings" would be eaten up in around nine months at the current levels of spending.

And "caps to control future spending"? How have those worked out in the past?

If this plan passes, the rating agencies are certain to downgrade the country's credit rating. Standard & Poor's already said as much. And then Republicans get the blame either way!

John Boehner needs to be primaried. He's too weak to fight the existential threat represented by the Democrats' spending; it is the most massive borrowing program in world history.

How hard is it to explain? Here: let me write the damn speech for John Boehner:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

These are the facts related to our difficult budget situation:

• Democrats took a one-time "Stimulus" program and then intentionally refused to pass a budget so that those spending levels would run on "auto-pilot"

• The annual budget requires that we borrow around $1.6 trillion a year, or roughly four times the worst Bush-era deficit.

• At minimum, the entire $800 billion "Stimulus" must be removed from all budgets going forward. That is non-negotiable.

• Why? Because failure to do so will mean certain downgrades and economic calamity.

• The Stimulus was a scam. Only 6% of its funds were used on "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects. The rest of the money, borrowed money mind you, was used to fund a Soviet-style grab-bag of failed social programs, welfare, and other wealth redistribution schemes.

For the sake of our children, the "one-time Stimulus" must be removed from the baseline budget. If not, then the Democrats can pass the Cut, Cap and Balance bill. Those are their only choices.

Call us when you Marxist crackpots make up your mind.

See? It's just that simple.


Sunday, July 24, 2011

Comment o' the day: American Bar Association faces scrutiny as job prospects, debt burdens of law school grads worsen

Earlier today, the Washington Post sounded the obligatory alarm klaxon for would-be law school students (something that Professor Glenn Reynolds has warned of for years):

Since 2008, a retrenchment at the nation’s law firms has had newly minted attorneys wringing their hands over the rapidly shrinking job market.

Yet enrollment at law schools has continued to climb, with a record 44,004 people earning law degrees last year. The result has been that employment rates for new graduates are at their lowest levels since 1996, a gloomy prospect for students who borrow heavily to attend law school. Recent surveys of graduates show a growing proportion carrying loans of $120,000 or more.

Now, regulators and members of Congress are pressing the agency that accredits law schools — the American Bar Association — to step up efforts to keep student debt levels down and reduce the risk of default.

The article spotlights a Department of Education review that pins much of the blame on the American Bar Assocation (ABA).

“The ABA appears to be doing little to assess student-loan default rates in its law school accreditation process,” [Sen. Dick] Grassley wrote.

The ABA shot back Thursday with a letter to Grassley’s office, saying it does not track student loan default rates for all law schools because most — 181 of the 200 ABA-approved schools — are part of larger universities that do not break out the data for each academic program. The ABA, however, does track default rates for the remaining 19 schools, which operate independently; default rates at those schools range from zero to 7.4 percent.

ABA President Stephen Zack said he shares Grassley’s concerns about making law school financing and postgraduation job prospects transparent, and that the compliance issues raised by the Department of Education “are being dealt with in an expedited manner.”

Commenter 'Terminator_x' offers some rational perspective:

The problem is that there are countless liberal arts majors getting out of college with nothing to do. They are only 21 or 22 years old, and seek out law school as a "defined" career path. They are duped and misinformed by law schools into unrealistic expectations about how many new attorneys actually get big firm jobs. Movies and TV similarly dupe non-lawyers into thinking that the practice of law is a ticket to wealth in a profession where one earns a living merely by arguing cleverly across a table for eight hours a day and, and when the day is over, have flings with hot co-workers.

The reality is that young attorneys spend hours in the library reading boring materials and writing lifeless boilerplate. The business model of most law firms is to convince clients to pay for attorneys' work, one hour at a time. Attorneys don't make money unless they earn it by billing their time to someone who is willing to pay for it, in six minute increments. It is not a sexy job.

There are several simple solutions: (1) Any schools (law schools or otherwise) that offer student loans must be on the hook for 10% of any defaults; (2) No federal loans for any school with defaults beyond a given threshold; (3) Schools must index nominal tuition to inflation if they are to offer federal student loans.

These three suggestions make eminent sense, which means that they are certain to be ignored by the federal government.