Friday, April 30, 2010

Outlawing Outlaws?

Here we go with some more upside down world political logic.

Democrats Use Arizona Immigration Law as Rallying Cry for Federal Action
The law would make it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant and require police to question individuals about their immigration status if they suspect they could be in the country illegally. 
Imagine that. You have to create a state law to make law breakers outlaws to wit law enforcement of the law could actually take place.  And the retort to a law that tries to make a law enforceable?

"The idea that state by state would start developing its own immigration laws in the country -- imagine what a patchwork that might look like," Dodd told NBC's "Meet the Press." "It's demanding a national answer to immigration policy, so before this even gets further out of hand, we've got to step up and do the job." 
Dodd called the Arizona law "outrageous." 

The very idea that the federal government is getting upset about states trying to enforce federal regulations bogglers the mind.
But Democrats are defending the decision to pivot, rebutting charges that they're doing so to woo Hispanic voters ahead of the midterm elections. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said Sunday that Congress needs to act to make sure other states don't follow Arizona's lead. 
That is right. This is all about stay in power election politics. Just like the Wall Street takeover, this move is  more about what needs to be done to get re-elected than the administrations most avant guard radical agenda planks.

Forget Socialism; Totalitarianism is the name of this game!

Thursday, April 29, 2010

High Drama Obama

The orchestrated overly dramatic bashing of Goldman Sachs employees is just another example of this administration playing to the lowest common denominator. Nothing to see hear but an over produced advertisement for the next thing on the radical agenda. Unfortunately what is being proposed does not supply any protections. But that does not stop the soap opera and the demagoguery being performed by the ruling party.

Son of Sarbox
Our postpartisan President came out swinging this weekend at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, claiming in his now familiar ad hominem fashion that the Republican had decided to oppose the Democratic financial reform bill only after meeting with bankers. This takes some nerve from a President whose own bill would expand federal bailout authority
The ironies here and the subterfuge are legion. Which of the big banks on Wall Street oppose the legislation? None that I know of. The mom and pop banks on Main Street do however. the Republican had decided to oppose the Democratic financial reform bill only after meeting with bankers. What does the President have against small town bankers?

  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau........The bureau would have broad power to set the terms of financial products and services, labeling as abusive whatever officials (or outside allies like Acorn) dislike, and paving the way for large new litigation costs. This bureau would barely touch Wall Street, which doesn't oppose it in any case, but it would slam small banks, car dealers and others that extend credit. The entire point of the bureau is to put politicians in charge of allocating credit.
  • Too big to fail. The Dodd bill allows too much discretion to federal regulators to determine which firms to regulate and how, which firms to rescue or close down, and which creditors to reward and how.

Just like health care, this is a take over. Not for direct control, but for absolute control. Only the powerful with the best political connections will be able to survive. Wall Street did not give the majority of their campaign contributions to the democrats for nothing. Goldman Sachs did not give a million dollars to presidential candidate Obama for nothing.

And the show must go on! After the president dashed out onto the stage and came out swinging, the choir that is the senate soon harmonized and chanted the chorus that would reveal the villains to the easily amused.

Senators vs. Goldman
Yesterday's hearing of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations came in the wake of a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing Goldman of fraud. The SEC case concerns a 2007 transaction arranged by Goldman in which John Paulson's hedge fund bet that subprime mortgage-backed securities would decline, while institutional investors IKB and ACA bet they would rise.
So the senators are protecting Wall Street fat cats ACA? This does not exactly fit the populist playlist, but hey, it's a show, just sit back and enjoy.
In sum, it appeared to be another bad day for the SEC's specific case against Goldman. But lawmakers seemed intent on finding the firm generally guilty of meeting institutional (emphasis mine) demand for subprime housing risk.
We're not sure which of the politicians at yesterday's Senate hearing did the most to confuse spectators. Investigations subcommittee chairman Carl Levin of Michigan seemed unaware of the difference between a market-maker, whose role is to offer prices at which a client may buy or sell a given asset, and an investment adviser, whose role is to act in the interests of the client as a fiduciary.
Never let facts and reality stand in the way of a good fable. Our modern day Esop's also have motives for their story line.
Noticeably absent were any of these alleged victims who in 2007 were happily chasing yield and hoping to enrich themselves off subprime housing.
You can't make this stuff up! Or can you?

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Whizzing on Wall Street

I have no pity for Goldman-Sachs. They danced with the devil, gave him a million dollars, and helped Obama get elected, and now the devil is coming for their souls. Goldman-Sachs is also the company that brought you Gov. John Corzine, the limo liberal millionaire governor of New Jersey who drove that state into a ditch.

On thursday the president kicked off his campaign to take over Wall Street with his signature style 'pass my legislation or we are all doomed' fear mongering battle cry. Just like the ones you saw in the health care debate.

President Obama's agenda here is not the rescue of the free market, it is a take over by proxy. The way the proposed law is currently structured the federal government has arbitrary discretion in deciding what Wall Street can and cannot do. This will not save the economy from the next swindle. The same retards who were equipped with the regulations to catch Bernie Madoff but could not, will now be equipped to line their pockets and be influenced without any checks or balances. The folks who surf porn rather than utilize existing regulations to catch the bad guys are suddenly going to snap into action. Right! The administration that pretends to despise lobbyists and special interests has just created a new market, and put a yoke on the golden goose. The cash cow (wall Street donations) that was key to his victory in 2008 will be key in 2012. Most would think that alienating Wall street is not a good idea, but this is a Chicago style takeover. His administration will be making the rules, and it will be pay to play. Wall Street will surely pay. The economy and the country is slowly looking more and more like the faux democracy of Russia.

I am not saying do nothing. In fact I truly believe that like health care the fix is simple and does not mandate intrusive government intervention by bureaucracy. Like health care the administration is once again making lofty rhetorical arguments, to which the bill does nothing to address.

back to basics on financial reform
Still, it took extraordinary forces to turn a subprime bust into a global financial crisis. The key forces were excessive leverage on and off bank balance sheets, and derivatives that allowed massive but opaque side bets on the future value of U.S. homes. And it was these two factors that magnified (and exported) the losses in the mortgage market; legislators should focus on them. Instead, both the House and Senate bills are packed full of scatter-gun regulations that owe more to the prejudices of legislators than to a rational assessment of what actually went wrong.
and the proposed bill does nothing about Fannie and Freddie.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending


''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
Yet, while pretending that this take over of financial markets will help the middle class or the economy, it merely sets up a system where bribes and influence will be the only way to do business.  First you had the incredible expansion of Czars. Now we introduce the Wall Street Kommisar's! Ja Ja! 'чудесно '! Eh comrade!

Monday, April 19, 2010

A Spin Too Far

It is way too easy to poke fun at the New York Times, but today I could not help myself. The flagship state run media outlet is doing contortions to keep the idea that only looney people are unhappy with the direction of the government is staggering.

It seems like the latest co-ordinated defense seems to be, 'what are you complaining about?'. Like driving in a car with 'toonces' the cat, the fact that you have not experienced a fatal car wreck is evidence that you are in no danger.

Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless
It makes sense that people would take to the streets to protest government spending and enormous deficits during the Great Recession, when they are feeling economic pain most acutely.
But the Tea Party supporters now taking to the streets aren’t the ones feeling the pain.
So clearly, until you are actually victimized, you have no right to raise concern. Really?
In the results of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, they are better educated and wealthier than the general public. They are just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good.
So, the logic at the grey lady goes as follows. "Even though the better educated, more intelligent, and more productive members of society are waving their arms in an attempt to ward off the advent of socialism and fascism, it is the uneducated, and unintelligent feel good progressive ideas that we should be listening to".
“It is entirely predictable,” Mr. Perlstein said. In the poll, Tea Party supporters said they want to focus on economic issues. But the widest gulfs between Tea Party supporters and others — Republicans and the public in general — are in their responses to questions about social issues, from gay marriage to abortion to immigration to global warming.
What the hell does this mean? If you dare worry about the defecit then you will forfeit your cherished socialist programs? Unlimited government or no gay marriage for you! Is that the deal?

Perhaps, the most telling evidence that these avowed critics of big government are really mourning an America of the past is in their shifting attitude toward George W. Bush. Only a short time ago, he was reviled on the right for his spendthrift ways (his Medicare expansion), his federalizing of education standards (No Child Left Behind) and his creation of a vast new government agency, Homeland Security.
At rallies, Tea Party supporters often nod to President Bush’s role in creating the deficit. Yet in the poll, 57 percent of them view Mr. Bush favorably — about the same percentage in the general population that has an unfavorable view.
In the new world led by President Obama, Mr. Bush is apparently a figure these new populists can pine for.


Can I get an 'Amen'!

The grey lady thought she was revealing some sort of hypocrisy here but what she really is reporting is the 'buyers remorse', and the the disenchantment with 'Hope and Change'.


xxx

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Let them eat cake

With a dismissive arrogance Obamantoinette scorned the seriousness of the unrest taking place outside his palace walls.

Obama's 'tea party' complex

First there were the "bitter-clingers," then Scott Brown's truck. Now President Obama has taken on tea party protesters, saying he's "amused" by their failure to see that the average American's tax burden has lessened under his stewardship.
"You would think they'd be saying thank you, that's what you'd think" the President said. 
The audacity of nope.
A New York Times/CBS News poll says only two percent of tea party protesters realize that their taxes have likely gone down this year (compared to 22 percent of the general population who understand that). Given college tax credits, making work pay, college loan relief, and home buyer credits, 90 percent of Americans got a tax break this year. The average tax refund is 10 percent larger than last year. 
"The rise of the Tea Party at time when taxes are literally at their lowest in decades is really hard to understand," William Gale of the Brookings Institution told Political Hotsheet.
I would be very interested in seeing the question that was asked for this poll. The 'let them eat cake', 'why should they complain' mentality belies the bald-faced lie that tax hikes will not be coming in the very near future. It is a head in the sand, 'what? Me lie?' arrogance that tries to telegraph the fantasy that taxes are not going to go up, based on the premise they have not yet.

The Tea Party protests are not protesting existing tax law, they are protesting the impending tax burdens. No intelligent, responsible citizens believes that you can double down on the reckless spending of the Bush administration and not raise taxes.
But to distill the tea party message down to simply an argument over this year's 1040 form, critics say, isn't only a failure to understand the tea party's DNA, but also factually questionable given recent analyses showing that the tax burden on Americans is likely to rise in coming years.
What's more, tea party protesters aren't just worried about taxes, but the rising federal debt and creeping entitlement programs they say threaten individual liberty as defined by the Constitution.
"I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
He repeatedly vowed "you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."
And the tobacco tax increase is not the only example of a raised tax. So what are we supposed to be thankful for?





xxxxx

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Chomsky the Chump

Apparently Noam Chomsky is fearful that we are headed toward fascism.

Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America

Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Cheering mobs? or angry mobs? Didn't you get the memo from Nancy Pelosi Noam? These mobs are angry. What does Noam suppose they are cheering about? Query-some. The only cheering crowds are for the well spoken orator swept in to power not because of an understanding of his ideology but because of a rejection and dissatisfaction with a war time president who was not able to deliver a victory. Sound familiar?

Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.
And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”

I do see the parallel. However, I would say that the regime he fears is already here. The far far  left (socialists) only had 10% of the vote. But the public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances. Enter the Obama administration.
When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis (National Socialists), “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.
This is exactly how Obama was elected, and his National Socialism agenda began.
“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
I am sorry but I have to through a flag on the play here. Nice try. But are you seriously suggesting that now is a scarier time than the violent 1960's? Really? How so? Bill Ayers and the underground blowing up public buildings was benign in comparison with angry tax payers carrying signs? I'm sorry, that is being intellectually dishonest. It is evidence that Noam is merely playing his part in the Saul Alinsky tactic of accusing the other side of the things that you are doing.

I am old enough to remember watching the news in the 60's on my mom's black and white TV. What I saw back then is all out war compared to a Tea Party protest. If Tea Party protests are scary and convey violent undertones, then the far left violence at strikes and anti-war protest are full blown insurrections. The fact that the left thinks they can spin what is going on, and make the country believe that there should be real fear out there is an insult to ones intelligence.

They decried the anti-terror movement as the politics of fear. Somehow they believe you should not fear people who have and still desire to kill thousands of Americans at a time. But fed up tax payers? Well, then by all means use the politics of fear to change the subject.

Fascism isn't coming Noam, it is here!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Crash the Tea Party!

I was curious as to why I had a sudden spike in web traffic yesterday. There was a spike in visits from search engines where the user was searching for the phrase 'crushtheteaparty.info' and 'crushtheteaparty.org'.

Well, it was not until later that I heard the story about the web site crashtheteaparty.org. This site is soooooo  great. It documents the attempts by the left to overtly frame the tea party movement as a bunch of whack jobs. The whack jobs they imagine people who don't agree with them to be.

And the search statistics on my site reveal the freudian slip that lefty loons hope to 'crush' the tea party rather than 'crash' it. The irony of rhetorical violence.

 Post subject: Crash the Tea Party Websites

These darlings in the Tea Party movement are quite afraid of violent rhetoric. Let us use this. We should begin to create fake accounts, and post such rhetoric and watch as they get extremely upset...it is quite funny to watch. I posted something similar (farther down the page) to this on the Tea Party patriots website and instantly stirred the hornets nest. If we want to corrupt the image of this short-lived populist movement, we should be promoting violence in the name of the movement. Post on their websites and bring the radical rhetoric to their rallies, especially on 4/15. 
Consider rhetoric like this:
The Invisible Tea Party
My proclamation is simple: the current Tea Party Movement needs more violence. There is a coming insurrection in this country towards our worthless government and this movement is the vehicle to deliver this momentous change.
Many will mock and preach out against this type of activism, the most cynical would not even call it activism, but do let the cowards fool you. Everything is about to change. Not through a ballot box, not through elected officials, not through any system man has conceived to rule himself. The change will come from the minds of the bravest TPPs and his or her methods will be considered very extreme by those who fear for his/her societal or ruling position. 
The mainstream Tea Party Movement that controls this site is afraid of posts like these and often deletes and suspends free thinkers such as ourselves. Such cowardice can not stand in such a beautiful movement 
More to follow…
The Invisible Tea Party
So do you still think that there were not plants in the D.C. protest where representatives were allegedly called the N-word? It is a right out of the Alinsky playbook tactic. "Accuse others of what you are doing".

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Economics 101: The Subsidy Rule

Just like all sciences, there are laws and there are theorems. Laws are those things that are known definitively and can be proven. Physics has such a law. It is called the law of gravity.
What goes up must come down.
Actually there is a lot more to gravity than that, but the old idiom does pretty much cover it. Economics also has some laws. There is the law of taxes and subsidies.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you tax something, you get less of it.
It is a law because there is not a single example where the idiom is not correct. If you tax cigarettes, then you will get less smokers. If you tax investment income, then you change the risk/reward formula and you  you will get less investment. And generally, this is the desired affect. The exception is income taxes, which is why there are loop holes and complex rules. Income tax is about revenue generation. They understand that de-incentivizing people to make more money would hurt revenue generation and that is the reason you have a complex set of deductions.

Subsidies work in the opposite way. If you subsidize the price of a crop, you get more people that will plant and sell the crop. If you give people money not to sell that crop (a subsidy) you get more people that won't grow that crop. If you subsidize health care, you'll get more demand for health care procedures.

The Obama administration knows this, yet their agenda seems to ignore the law of economics in exchange for the the cheap pose of the benevolent tyrant. The cheap pose of the redistribution radical. The politics of the sanction of the victim is in play. How do we know this? Because Larry Summers is the administrations economic advisor.

Incentives Not to Work

"The second way government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work. Each unemployed person has a 'reservation wage'—the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase [the] reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer."
Any guess who wrote that? Milton Friedman, perhaps. Simon Legree? Sorry.
Full credit goes to Lawrence H. Summers, the current White House economic adviser, who wrote those sensible words in his chapter on "Unemployment" in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, first published in 1999.

But alas, the easy to amuse and less interested with opportunity and prosperity demographic is growing. The number of people who get subsidies and entitlements from the government is growing beyond the number who contribute to funding those subsidies and entitlements. It's called the tipping point, and we are just about there.
Despite all of this evidence, Democrats seem to think that extending jobless benefits for another 20 weeks is a big political winner. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin recently roared, "Is there any compassion at all left with Republicans for people whose checks are going to run out?" New York's Chuck Schumer calls Republicans "inhumane."
The sanction of the victim. The politics of unicorns, rainbows, and fuzzy bunnies. Everybody wins. Everybody gets a trophy, and we are all 'too big to fail'.
perhaps the Senate should listen to another Obama Administration economist, Alan Krueger of the Treasury Department, who concluded in a 2008 study that "job search increases sharply in the weeks prior to benefit exhaustion." In other words, many unemployed workers don't start seriously looking for a job until they are about to lose their benefits.
While I think the findings are accurate, I would cast the conclusion differently. I think the unemployed do perform a serious search while unemployed. I would characterize the activity before benefits running out as panicked rather than serious. But their point is taken. The subsidy of unemployment benefits merely delays the panicked search.

The take away synopsis is that we are doing no favors to the economy by continually extending unemployment benefits. The expectation that you must make as much as you did before you lost your job is unrealistic. Just like thinking that the price of your house before the bubble burst is what you should expect after the bubble burst is unrealistic.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Hypocritical Hypocrites!





Now here are seasoned Alinsky operatives at work. This is the way the left does demonstrations. Pull some dirty tricks, and then blame the other side for doing what you clearly knew was wrong. Classic Alinsky.

The only problem is that in this age of new media, there is a high degree of probability that your protest is being filmed.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. On the right you may get the occasionally lone wolf loon, on the left, it's just part of their 'bag of tricks'.  Standard operating procedure.

So where is the video of the DC Tea Party protest where democrats lied about being spat on and called the N word? Every foot of their procession is on video yet no one has said 'look, see, right there, that is where I was spat on. That is where some guy called me the N word'. Why not? Because they are lying!

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Back to the Future of Health Care

While previously denied or danced around, President Obama has admitted in public that his historic health care plan is really Mitt Romney's health care plan.

Patrick's Price Controls
'This is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now Presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts," President Obama said in a recent interview defending his national health-care plan—and few disagree, Mitt Romney excepted. So the Massachusetts preview of ObamaCare is all the more instructive after this week's imposition of de facto price controls on its remaining private insurers.
And so far the upshot and result of such a plan?

Your Massachusetts Future
OCTOBER 14, 2009
Meanwhile, Massachusetts is offering a preview of where all this will end up. The state passed a prototype for ObamaCare in 2006 on the same cost-control theory as Senate Finance, only to see spending explode. So now Beacon Hill is contemplating far more drastic spending-control measures, such as a plan to "require residents to give up their nearly unlimited freedom to go to any hospital and specialist they want," as the Boston Globe reported on Sunday. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told the Globe that "You can't reap these savings without limiting patients' choices in some way."
Massachusetts now has the highest premiums in the country, and now the situation in Massachusetts is so fiscally horrible they are going to try price controls. Price controls don't work. They never have, they never will. Chavez uses price controls. The Russians use price controls.

I hope you are happy.

Friday, April 2, 2010

What does a girl have to do to get on TV News these days?

Remember when anti war protests were all the rage? Ah yes, the good old Bush years.

But these days the press is in full agreement with the administration that it is more important to ignore protests whenever possible rather then let the public know that they are happening.

I mean just imagine if the press reported that the president was being constantly protested from the left and the right. The administration wouldn't like that so they don't.

To the administration, 'Code Pink' was a useful idiot, but really they are just an embarrassment.

Here is code pink protesting the Presidents appearance at a fund raiser for his friend Duvall Patrick Yesterday.

Watching the video it looks more like an awkward moment than a protest. The line of people waiting to get into the $500/plate dinner would have been fist pumping the air two years ago, if they had been in the presence of such an event. Now they stare at the ground, look away, or make constant use of eye contact in their now important small talk. The protest appeared more like entertainment. You know, those guys who wander around with a violin while you are waiting for the hors d'oeuvres?

I think a lot of people who watch this video with a violent Tea Party mindset will say, "Now see? That's how you conduct a protest. You sing songs. You get ignored, and you are happy for it"

Code Pinko

In the 1990s, Benjamin and other Code Pink Marxists focused their energies on organizing sometimes-violent protests against free trade across the globe, targeting large corporations with high-profile campaigns and lawsuits that cost consumers and companies like Gap, Nike and Starbucks millions of dollars. As with the anti-war protests of the moment, the Marxist World Worker’s Party website has played a crucial organizing role in their anti-corporate activities, letting would-be agitators know when and where to show up for demonstrations.
Meanwhile, other Code Pink organizers were making a name for themselves in domestic and eco-terrorism in the 1990s. Code Pink Co-Founder Jodie Evans also sits on the board of directors of Rain Forest Action Network (RAN), a radical anti-capitalist, anti-corporate coalition of environmental groups co-founded by Mike Roselle, who also founded the domestic terrorist organization Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which along with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is ranked the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat by the FBI. The FBI attributes over 600 criminal acts and $43 million in damages to the two groups since 1996. Wherever RAN pops up, you’ll also tend to find the Ruckus Society, which has trained activists for ELF/ALF. Ruckus Society organizer Steve Kretzmann, also a Code Pink coordinator, has helped train activists in the agitation tactics that have earned the Ruckus Society its reputation. The Ruckus Society, it’s also worth mentioning, is a coalition member of Benjamin’s United for Peace and Justice.

Wow? The Tea Party has nothing on them! Where is the light that should be shown on them?