JD Samsom's Fine Whine About Occupying Wall Street

The NROnline has an excellent article that says what I've been saying in my blogs for a long time, that the entire Californification of the USA, about which read Cong. McClintock here, rests on Nietzsche's concept of Ressentiment which NRO defines thusly:

The great, and probably terminal, flaw of the Left’s various grievance-group “isms” is that they implicitly rely on a world in which trade-offs have been abolished. It isn’t just that Samsom should be free to move to New York and consecrate herself to her “art.” It’s that she should be free to do that while enjoying all the benefits of her choice and suffering none of the consequences. What she wants is not the freedom to choose but the freedom from having to choose.

What sort of worldview makes this fantasy conceivable? Well, if I had to pick just one French term of art popularized by a 19th-century German philologist to describe the Occupy Wall Street set and its attendants, it would be Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. Why does good old English “resentment” not suffice? Why is the extra ‘s’ and fancy French pronunciation required? Well, resentment is about begrudging the success of your betters as a way to avoid reflection on your own failures. The Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon described resentment as an “impotence self-righteousness” directed at your superiors, and contrasted it with anger (directed at your equals) and contempt (directed at your inferiors). But ressentiment is what happens when you take that impotent self-righteousness and define a whole morality of good and evil in terms of it, build a whole belief system out of it, build an ideology, a political movement — an occupation.

Nietzsche’s work is highly problematic, and has of course been misappropriated and abused for a hundred years, but I think he got this much right on. He was also correct to point out that out that the leaders of men, the successful few — you might even call them the one percent — are too busy acting, doing, and accomplishing to complain about their “emotional crises.” Contrast with the likes of Samsom, who in a stream of consciousness puts all her resentment on paper — writes it all down for the world to see — drawing a line — a squiggly, irrational line, but a line nonetheless — from her insecurity about not being able to make coffee or wait tables or draw a steady paycheck, to the demonization of Wall Street. Seriously, the first paragraph of her piece is all about how ill-equipped and incompetent she is (I didn’t say it, she did!) and the clarion cry at the end is that all this constitutes “Another reason to come together. Another reason to occupy Wall Street. Another reason for change.”

If this is how the other 99 percent think — or rather, don’t — we’re done for.

JD Samsom's moronic rant is on HuffPo, which I rarely like to link to. But surprisingly, The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting piece by a shrink who thinks her age-cohort is ruining the younger generations by abolishing competition in team sports and generally mollycoddling their youngsters never to feel failure or any kind of pain whatsoever.

Occasionally, besides Megan McArdle, The Atlantic has articles that DO make sense. I swiped it from a doctor's office.

Solyndra Mess Smells as Bad as Fast and Furious

MessNBC notes that a big Obama fund-bundler named Spinner pushed for a big loan despite publicly "recusing" himself because his wife's law firm

represented the company, newly released emails show.
The emails show that Steve Spinner, a former Obama fundraiser who helped monitor a clean energy loan guarantee program, was more actively involved in a loan for Solyndra LLC than administration officials have acknowledged.
Also revealed in the emails: A top Treasury Department official complained that the Energy Department was keeping her agency in the dark about Solyndra's precarious financial situation.
The emails, released by the administration in response to congressional investigators, show that Spinner was actively involved in a planned September 2009 trip by Vice President Joe Biden to Solyndra's Fremont, Calif., headquarters for a groundbreaking ceremony. Biden did not go on the trip but spoke via satellite. Solyndra declared bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million federal loan.
In the emails, Spinner, who founded a sports fitness company, repeatedly pushed Energy Department and White House budget officials to ensure that the loan was finalized before Biden's planned trip. The loan closing was announced at the groundbreaking ceremony on Sept. 4, 2009.
"How — hard is this? What is he waiting for?" Spinner wrote in an Aug, 28, 2009 email to a DOE official. "I have the OVP (Office of the Vice President) and WH (the White House) breathing down my neck on this. They are getting itchy to get involved."
Later that day, Spinner asked the same DOE official to "walk over there and force him to give you the answer.'
Advertise | AdChoices

The emails refer to a DOE loan guarantee official who was evaluating the Solyndra loan.
A White House official declined to comment when asked if Spinner's conduct was appropriate.
The Obama administration allowed news organizations to read the emails on Friday as it prepared to send them to investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The panel has been looking into the Solyndra and more broadly at the $38 billion loan guarantee program.
Spinner, who served as an adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu from April 2009 to September 2010, pledged in writing not to have "active participation" in any solicitation, due diligence or negotiation related to the Solyndra loan, which has become an embarrassment for the White House and a rallying cry for GOP critics of Obama's clean energy program.
Other political news of note

Spinner's wife, Allison Berry Spinner, is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm in Palo Alto, Calif., that represented Solyndra on the DOE loan. Federal records show the firm received at least $2.4 million in legal fees related to the loan.
In one email, Spinner asks a DOE official whether the White House budget office has completed its review of the Solyndra loan.
"Any word on OMB? Solyndra's getting nervous," he wrote, four minutes after receiving an email from Solyndra.
Official in charge of energy loans resigns
Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said Spinner acted as a liaison for the loan program under the economic stimulus law, but that he played no role in evaluating individual loan applications.
"Because his wife agreed not to participate in or receive any financial compensation from her law firm's work on behalf of any loan program applicant, Mr. Spinner was authorized to oversee and monitor the progress of applications, ensure that the program met its deadlines and milestones, and coordinate possible public announcements," LaVera said in an email Friday.
Spinner "was not allowed to make decisions on the terms or conditions of any particular loan guarantee or decide whether a particular transaction was approved," LaVera said, adding that the arrangement was approved by the Energy Department's ethics officer.
Spinner now is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely identified with the Obama administration, where he focuses on energy policy.
A biography on the CAP website says Spinner "helped oversee the more than $100 billion of loan guarantee and direct lending authority for the Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program and the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan program."

An administration official, speaking on condition that he not be identified because of the congressional investigation, said Friday that Spinner "clearly was actively involved in facilitating between DOE and OMB," the White House budget office, but said his main focus was the planned Biden trip for the Solyndra groundbreaking.
Administration officials cited an August 2009 email from Aditya Kumar, an aide to former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago mayor. Kumar asks Spinner who are Solyndra's major investors and receives a detailed answer.
The White House "doesn't even know the names of the (Solyndra) investors," said the official, refuting oft-repeated claims by some GOP lawmakers that the Solyndra deal was approved to benefit Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, a Solyndra investor and Obama fundraiser.
The emails also show that Mary Miller, Treasury's assistant secretary for financial markets, contacted the White House budget director in August with her concerns only two weeks before Solyndra filed for bankruptcy and was raided by the FBI.
When the company ran out of cash, the Energy Department agreed in February to a plan to restructure its debt. In that restructuring, some $75 million in private investment was ranked ahead of the government in the event of bankruptcy. That private fund was backed by a prominent Obama fundraiser.

Fast and Furious resulted in the deaths of two American government agents----wonder if Solyndra and F&F together can destroy this Demonrat RICO conglomerate of anarchists occupying Wall Street, SEIU union thugs and goons, victims of academicide, Hollyweirdos and trial lawyers?

Oops, almost left out the lamestream MSM---the NYT & all its pilot fish like NBC, CBS, ABC & Communist News Network.

Herman Cain Warmly Received At Values Voter Summit, Says Perry-Backer Calling Mormonism 'A Cult' Is Not Appropriate

The more I see of Herman Cain, the more I like about him. Not an ounce of affirmativ­e action fake elitist tone that Obamarx reeks of. The guy started from nowhere, was a math whiz and ballistics officer who started his own SUCCESSFUL business, was CHAIRMAN of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and knows more about economics both on the ground and theoretica­lly than the phony mulatto now sitting in the Oval Office. I don't see color, I see quality, and Cain is certainly more genuine than Romney, more rational than Perry and more electable than Bachmann. I think he and Marco Rubio as VP candidate would knock Obungler's socks off in 2012, despite the elitist media/acad­emicide/Ho­llyweird mafiosi and the union thugs and goons being all for Obungler's privatist socialism and gigantic government by regulation­s and rules and insane lez-bean queens.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Fast and Furious: The Crimes Continue with the Cover-Up

Eric Holder has been lying to Congress in the fiasco that saw a decorated US border agent killed with guns allowed to "walk" into Mexico. The POTUS and liar-in-chief says he supports Holder. A US Immigration Officer in Mexico was also killed with an F&F gun. Eleven other crimes in the US have been involved with the F&F arsenal that the ATF "lost track of" in another example of the criminal incompetence of this regime.

Watergate didn't result in the deaths of American agents, as Fast and Furious has. Obama & Holder have blood on their hands. No "Inspector General" will find anything and it will be another whitewash by the RICO thugs that comprise the DNC & SEIU international crime ring. When the fox is inspecting the chicken coop, don't expect to solve your problems.

Words of wisdom from Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh contends that President Barack Obama is "setting up riots" through the Occupy Wall Street protests that are spreading across the country.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the White House is behind this,” he said. “Obama is setting up riots. He is fanning the flames.”

The “anarchists” and “union thugs” who are rallying against corporate greed are Obama’s constituents, Limbaugh said.

“Occupy Wall Street is his base,” he said. “Those are his foot soldiers.”

Calling Obama’s news conference about the American Jobs Act this morning “incompetence on parade,” Limbaugh said the nearly $450 billion spending package has no chance of curing the economic ills.

“Somebody explain to me how spending $450 billion is going to get every bridge repaired, every school repaired, every road repaired,” he said. “This is utter foolishness.”

Obama is “trying to sell the notion that this bill . . . is a magic elixir,” Limbaugh said.

“He’s the one screwing everybody,” he said. “He’s the one happily managing the decline of the United States of America.”

Read more on Newsmax.com: Rush Limbaugh: Obama 'Setting Up Riots' With Occupy Wall Street
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

George Soros: Criminally Guilty of Insider Trading

Soros, the Nazi-loving Hungarian Jew who made a billion dollars shorting the pound lost his appeal of an insider-trading conviction in France in 2002.

The French criminal case hinged on trades that the Hungary-born investor had executed 14 years earlier in the stock of Société Générale that reaped his hedge fund, the Quantum Fund, $2.9m in profits.
Mr Soros was found by the court in 2002 to have had inside knowledge about the intentions of a group of super-wealthy French investors – the “golden granddads” – to bid for the bank.
Although the bid failed, Mr Soros’s fund profited by buying shares before – and selling after – the group’s intentions became public and resulted in a spike in SocGen’s share price.
Mr Soros was fined €2.2m (£1.9m), later reduced to €940,507 on appeal.
At the time, Mr Soros described the guilty verdict as a “gift to my enemies”.
He is now left with one final, unlikely, chance to rid himself of his conviction: an appeal to the grand chamber of the ECHR. Such appeals are only heard on an “exceptional basis”, according to the court’s rules.

This criminal Soros is, of course, one of the prime movers along with the lame stream MSM and POTUS O'Bozo insurrectionary "Occupy Wall Street" anarchy that demonstrates that when you have no policy or intelligence, rousing up the rabble is about the last best hope a criminal administration and its criminal supporters have left to rely on.

Only in America: Homecoming Queen Kicks Winning Field Goal over Arch-Rival after Half-time Crowning

Brianna Amat made the New York Times in spectacular fashion:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In his 18 years at Pinckney Community High School, Jim Darga, the principal, said, the homecoming queen had always been crowned at halftime of the school’s football game. Never before, though, had she had to be summoned from the team’s locker room.

Brianna Amat, the first girl to make the Pinckney varsity football team, said her teammates had “been so accepting of me.”
And that was just the beginning of Brianna Amat’s big night.

If being named homecoming queen is a lifetime memory for a high school student, so, too, is kicking a winning field goal. For Amat, 18, they happened within an hour of each other.

On Friday, with Pinckney leading powerful Michigan rival Grand Blanc, 6-0, at the half, Amat, the first girl to play football for the school’s varsity, was asked to return to the field. When she arrived, she was told that her fellow students had voted her queen. When the tiara was placed on her head, she was wearing not a dress, like the other girls in the homecoming court, but her No. 12 uniform, pads and all.

A short while later, with five minutes to play in the third quarter, Amat was called to the same field to attempt a 31-yard field goal. She split the uprights.

The kick proved decisive as Pinckney held on for a 9-7 victory against a Grand Blanc team that had come into the game ranked seventh in the state in its division. It also earned Amat the nickname the Kicking Queen.

The twin accomplishments were still sinking in Monday, said Amat, a senior who has played soccer since she was 3 but who tried out for the football team only last spring, at her soccer coach’s suggestion.

“It’s just starting to hit me today,” she said in a telephone interview. “The guys were congratulating me, but without them, I wouldn’t even have gotten close” to making the kick.

“It was pretty special,” said Darga, who watched Amat win her crown and the game and called her an “accomplished athlete.”

Before Friday, Darga said, Amat was known primarily as a student with a perfect 4.0 grade average who was involved in student government, serving as treasurer.

Although the high school has had a female player on its junior varsity team, Amat is the first girl to make the main squad in Pinckney, a village of 2,000 17 miles from Ann Arbor. The school, which draws from several rural communities, has 1,440 students.

Amat’s prowess as a defender on the school’s girl’s soccer team led to the invitation to try out as a football kicker. She competed against two male students, including one who wound up as the team’s punter.

“She won the position on her own merit,” Darga said. “She won it outright.”

Amat had no previous football experience before joining the team in summer training. But she spent hours kicking balls in a field to her father, Ronaldo, a window and door salesman, and her brother Brandon, a University of Michigan student.

Amat said her father and mother, Nanci, who works at the high school, approved of her playing.

“They’ve been really supportive of everything I do,” she said.

Amat made her debut during the Pirates’ first game this season, when she was called in to kick an extra point after a touchdown.

“The whole warm-up, I was nervous,” she said.

She said she stayed calm during the kick but that afterward, “my heart was beating in my ears from the adrenaline.”

Amat said she had not needed much adjustment to become Pinckney’s first female varsity football player. She was surprised at how quickly she was made to feel like one of the guys.

“They’ve been so accepting of me, it’s as if I’ve always been their teammate,” she said.

The main drawback has been the separate locker room provided by the school, which keeps her apart from the male players.

“After the games, they’re celebrating in their locker room and I’m by myself in my locker room,” she said.

On Friday night, Amat said she had an extra incentive to make her third-quarter field goal. She had missed an extra-point attempt in the first half, leaving Pinckney ahead by 6-0.

“I put pressure on myself to make it,” Amat said. “I wanted to apologize to the team.”

She added that the miss also distracted from the homecoming ceremony.

“I don’t think I went into homecoming mode,” she said. “I just wanted to get back into the locker room and be with the team.”

At Pinckney, students vote for a homecoming court made up of one male and one female student from the freshman, sophomore and junior classes, and three boys and three girls from the senior class. The king and queen are elected in a schoolwide vote.

In the locker room at halftime, Amat and a male teammate were told they were part of the court, and went out in their gear. (Had she not been playing, Amat said, she would have worn “a nice dress, a long dress, what the other girls had on.”)

She was met by her brother, her kick retriever, who had given up tickets to the Michigan-Minnesota football game the next day so that he could watch her play and, ultimately, to serve as her homecoming escort.

There was no time to relish the victories, said Amat, who went straight home to bed. As student treasurer, she had to rise early Saturday to help with decorations for the homecoming dance. She wore a black and silver dress to the event, which she attended with a group of friends.

Winning kick and coronation behind her, Amat said she was now concentrating on winning acceptance to Western Michigan, where she applied in September.

Amat plans to set sports aside to concentrate on a degree in business advertising. But she said she might reconsider if offered an athletic scholarship.

The attention, from classmates and the news media, has been a surprise to the kicking queen.

“For the longest time, I was the shyest kid ever, and now everybody knows my name,” she said. “It’s a totally different experience.”

Hans Christian Andersen couldn't have scripted it better. Sounds like it's ready for the big screen, but having her brother as her homecoming escort probably ruins the love-interest.

Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski Debate Rick Perry N-Word Controversy (VIDEO)

I think for once Mika beats Meathead Joe, the RINO phony on the importance of the issues. Invading Mexico is actually major-leag­ue crazy compared with some hunting camp. Joe has an obvious animus against Perry, so Mika wins the award for which issue has JOURNALIST­IC importance­. Joe just loves them gotcha' games, I guess.



I worked with Mika's father at CSIS and like the guy, who's an open-minde­d guy who's often wrong, but will consider other points of view. I also was at CSIS with Henry the K, who believed he could turn water into wine and then walk on it. All my colleagues who worked closely with both gave Zbig thumbs up and Henry the Italian salute....­behind his back.



Sadly, Morning Joe is the best of a bad lot on morning news shows, and the quality of journalism over the last couple of decades on air and in the print press---ex­cept for the WSJ which is now the most widely read American daily----c­ontinues to decline precipitou­sly. I'd say we're gonna have Euro-style street riots pretty soon---no dialogue going on with Obamarx & his buddies blaming everything but their own improviden­t "stimulus" spending for our economic bad times.



All the pols are so compromise­d that Herman Cain, who chaired the KC Fed and started and succeeded on his own in an HONEST [sorry, Mitt] business, is beginning to look like the best of a bad lot.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Garofalo & Company make huge fools of selves

Herman Cain is now a new indicator that a person is a "racist" if one supports Cain:

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. If you reject the policies of President Obama, you’re a racist. If you support the policies of Herman Cain, you’re a racist. What’s a “white” person to do?

As soon as someone plays the race card, you know that they lost the debate. It’s a 5th-grader’s playground trump card to win an argument he just lost in front of his friends. He got stomped, so he yells out, “Your mother wears army boots!” Liberalism can’t stand facts, and they can’t believe that opposition or support of a candidate is based on policy considerations. Sure, there are bigots out there . . . in both parties. Keep in mind that it was the Democrats that supported Jim Crow laws in the South. Following the logic of today’s race baiters, when Democrats began to reject these laws, they were racists.

The white queen of hate, illogic, and stupidity, Janeane Garofalo, said this about Republicans who support Herman Cain for president in 2012.

People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.

Karl Rove? Once again, it’s “everything is Bush’s fault” syndrome. In case you don’t know, Mr. Cain “is a businessman, a talk show host, a former executive of several multi-billion dollar companies. . . . He has for the last several years been a mainstay at Tea Party rallies all across the country and draws big, enthusiastic crowds among these conservative activists. He’s a powerful speaker and really knows how to wind up an audience. Lately he’s won several straw polls and is ranked no less than the number 3 candidate to take the Republican nomination. He is also black.”

Black comedian D.L. “Doc” Hughley has made similar comments about Cain.

Apparently, Herman Cain’s victory in the GOP Florida straw poll was too much for the liberal-minded Hughley to bear. On September 27, Hughley launched into a stream of demeaning, racially charged tweets about Cain on his Twitter account @RealDLHughley, which his loyal followers responded to in kind. You may remember Hughley’s fleeting CNN talk show was cancelled in 2009 because he said during an interview with former RNC Chairman Michael Steele “the Republican National Convention literally looks like Nazi Germany.”

Typical of liberal-minded, tolerant Democrats, there was a stream of bigoted comments to follow. Cain was compared to the “original Cream of Wheat,” “Stepin Fetchit” and the “butler in Gone with the Wind.” Do you remember when Michael Steele was running for the Senate in Maryland? They pelted him with Oreo cookies to identify him as “black on the outside and white on the inside.” Here’s how the Washington Times reported the story:

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.

Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.

“Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community,” she said. “His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people.”

So who’s really on the Plantation? Who’s beholden to their “masters”? Those who support the Democrat Party. If a black man attempts to escape and head for freedom, he or she will be dragged back and told to vote for their masters or else. It’s no wonder that Herman Cain said that Blacks “have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” especially since Democrat policies have kept so many blacks in poverty as well as a lot of poor whites for more than four decades.

And Remember that Eric Holder believes that the "NEW" Black Panthers have a right to carry automatic weapons in full view around voting booths in black precincts. The Demonrats are the real fascist slaveholders and project their own hatred and impotence onto tax-paying Tea Party members, whose ancestors made America the greatest country in the world.

Daniel Henninger on giving Herman Cain a second look

The WSJ has an interesting article on why Herman Cain should get a better look-see in the GOP primary season. Good article and makes sense.

Crony Capitalism or Privativist Fascism---Which one fits better?

Nancy Pelosi is going to her grave a wealthy woman, it seems, unless The Weekly Standard is getting its facts wrong:

Despite the growing Solyndra scandal, yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loans to green energy companies -- including a $737 million loan guarantee to a company known as SolarReserve:

SolarReserve LLC, a closely held renewable energy developer, received a $737 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee to build a solar-thermal project in Nevada.

The 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes project, near Tonopah, Nevada, will use the sun’s heat to create steam that drives a turbine, the agency said today in a e-mailed statement. SolarReserve is based in Santa Monica, California.

On SolarReserve's website is a list of "investment partners," including the "PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund (East) LLC." As blogger American Glob quickly discovered, PCG's number two is none other than "Ronald Pelosi, a San Francisco political insider and financial industry polymath who happens to be the brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives."

But wait... there's more! One of SolarReserve's other investment partners is Argonaut Private Equity:

Steve Mitchell and Argonaut Private Equity might have a chance to recoup some of their losses in the Solyndra debacle now that the Department of Energy has given a $737 million dollar loan guarantee to a company backed by Argonaut that also lists Mitchell among its board of directors.

Mitchell served on the Solyndra LLC Board of Directors. He also serves as Managing Director for Argonaut Private Equity, a company that invested in Solyndra through the LLCs parent company. After Solyndra declared bankruptcy, two Democratic members of the U.S. House asked that Mitchell testify about Solyndra. Though he has not appeared before Congress, he has "been asked to provide documents to Congress" pertaining to Solyndra.

And for good measure, it's also noteworthy that Obama is about to hold a big money fundraiser at the home of Tom Carnahan in St. Louis:

Carnahan, a member of the prominent Missouri Democratic family, has been tapped by the Obama campaign as its chief Missouri fundraiser. He is chairman of the board of Wind Capital Group, a wind energy company that makes it corporate headquarters in St. Louis. He formerly was president and CEO of the company.

Last year, Wind Capital's Lost Creek Farm facility in northwest Missouri received a $107 million tax credit from the Treasury Department, among many such wind operations receiving support from from stimulus funds.

Tom Carnahan is the son of former Missouri governor Mel Carnahan and former U.S. senator Jean Carnahan. He's also the brother of current Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan.

It's increasingly hard to tell the government's green jobs subsidies apart from the Democrats' friends and family rewards program.

Politics and Money:stuck together like a horse and carriage.....!

Can You Prove This Negative? Melissa Explains it all!

A Clown Named Harris-Perry comes close to proving one oxymoron-----social sciences are not social nor are they scientific! Here's the first paragraphs of James Taranto's deconstruction of another foolish cretinette:

Obama was helped into office by a wave of racial goodwill. Even many critics and skeptics, including your humble columnist, celebrated his election as the surest sign ever that racism in America was still dead. But if racism is dead--or, to be less hyperbolic, completely marginalized--we're still hearing an awful lot about it, in large part because the liberal left in America is obsessed with race. Even during the campaign, liberals found racism in the unlikeliest places, such as the observation that Obama is skinny. Then the Tea Party arose in opposition to Obama's fiscal recklessness, and phony charges of racism were central to the effort against it.

With the president limping toward 2012, it's safe to assume he and his supporters will try to guilt-trip voters into giving him a second term, arguing that the failure to re-elect him would amount to a betrayal of black America. One who states that case explicitly is Melissa Harris-Perry, a racially oriented political scientist from Tulane University.

"Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate's qualifications, ideology or party," she begins an essay in The Nation:

This form of racism was a standard feature of American politics for much of the twentieth century. So far, Barack Obama has been involved in two elections that suggest that such racism is no longer operative. His re-election bid, however, may indicate that a more insidious form of racism has come to replace it.

This is a familiar refrain. The left's view of racism has taken on a central trait of a conspiracy theory: unfalsifiability. The absence of "overt" racism is taken as evidence of "insidious" or "subtle" or "unconscious" racism, the presence of which can always be asserted and never disproved.

Click the link and see how much funnier Melissa gets as she combines illiteracy and lack of a triple-digit IQ to prove how some people get jobs at Tulane which are even dirtier than a janitor's....!!!!

Why Rasmussen is so Accurate and the PPP/CBS polls are not

Pollsters have biases and this note from The Democratic Strategist from December, 2009, demonstrates just how far off a bias in the methodology will skew the results:

In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama's approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen's use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen's results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval - disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.

A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen's results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen's polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.

According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.

Of course, Rasmussen's honest polling methods were only one seat off eleven months before the actual elections in November, 2010, when the GOP won 63 instead of the 62 predicted. The Democrats, like all leftists, lie to themselves and their constituents, which makes their polling methods and results the comic funhouse mirror absurdities that we see in PPP or the usual CBS polling, which always selects more Dems than the national pct. and doesn't ask about likely voters or even voter registration. The elaborate hoaxes Dem pollsters regularly pull off on the gullible public would put Bernie Madoff to shame. But the Democratic Strategist crew compound their absurdly dishonest "scientific" claims by making another one-liner straight from Homer Simpson's neuron ruts:

Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen's results with those of other national polls is possible--party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen's party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen's results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.

Yes, you Demonrat brainiacs are certainly right on your usual path to self-destruction. Rasmussen must have been wrong about the "average of all other national polls.....," yeah, that's the ticket.

It appears more and more likely that delusion is a significant part of the mental illness commonly called liberalism.

Why Rasmussen is so Accurate and the PPP/CBS polls are not

Pollsters have biases and this note from The Democratic Strategist from December, 2009, demonstrates just how far off a bias in the methodology will skew the results:

In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama's approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen's use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen's results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval - disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.

A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen's results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen's polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.

According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.

Of course, Rasmussen's honest polling methods were only one seat off eleven months before the actual elections in November, 2010, when the GOP won 63 instead of the 62 predicted. The Democrats, like all leftists, lie to themselves and their constituents, which makes their polling methods and results the comic funhouse mirror absurdities that we see in PPP or the usual CBS polling, which always selects more Dems than the national pct. and doesn't ask about likely voters or even voter registration. The elaborate hoaxes Dem pollsters regularly pull off on the gullible public would put Bernie Madoff to shame. But the Democratic Strategist crew compound their absurdly dishonest "scientific" claims by making another one-liner straight from Homer Simpson's neuron ruts:

Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen's results with those of other national polls is possible--party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen's party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen's results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.

Yes, you Demonrat brainiacs are certainly right on your usual path to self-destruction. Rasmussen must have been wrong about the "average of all other national polls.....," yeah, that's the ticket.

It appears more and more likely that delusion is a significant part of the mental illness commonly called liberalism.

Solyndra: Obama's Marble Boat

Clarice Feldman writes for The American Thinker and compares the hoax set up by Obama to help his contributors to the famous marble boat that Dowager Empress Cixi had constructed for her sailing pleasure on the lake near her palace in Kunming. China famously went down the tubes in the fifteenth century because its fantastic flair for innovation threatened the Mandarin bureaucrats whose jobs would be in jeopardy if new inventions changed the landscape. Like the Democrats, the Mandarins chose bureaucratic authoritarianism over capitalist innovation.

That's why China spent the next 500 years sliding south toward Antarctica.

Murderous Dwarf Putin on the Rise Again

Vlad the Empoisoner, the only head of state who routinely murders his opponents by poisoning them in foreign countries, appears ready to return as Stalin Redux. Read the Guardian story about the new book, Mafia State, and then read Chris Andrews and Vlad Mitrokhin's Sword and Shield to see how the old KGB & the new FSB both run the fascist sh*tpit called Russia.

Hemingway Summed Up in a Nutshell by F.Scott Fitzgerald

Papa's got a gun

Hemingway was for a long time the writer that, as a teenage kid, I wanted to emulate. The tough-guy with a soft heart was what I remember when I first picked up Across The River and into The Trees as a kid of thirteen.

I and my tastes outgrew Hemingway, even though I was told by everyone in my forties that I was his spitting image and should engage in the Key West look-a-like contest, but found the more sensitive, nuanced Fitzgerald better represented my Midwestern roots trying to replant elsewhere.

Alan Massie's new book on Hemingway brings Hemingway's offhand braggadocio and trickiness hiding a more tormented individual to the surface. I'd read Colette and Byron's Travels and now want to read the Hemingway bio. I'm also looking forward to his massive history of the Stuarts.

Like Anthony Burgess, Massie is an admirer of Hemingway with a keen appreciation of just how far short this over-hyped hyper-American stole the stage from better, if less self-promoting writers like Fitzgerald. Hemingway supposedly converted to Catholicism twice and then abjured that faith twice, surely a sign of the deeper struggles raging inside his soul.

Fitzgerald, whose book Tender in the Night, which I read during my honeymoon, according to Massie sums up Hemingway better in two sentences than anyone else ever did. The tormented Dick Driver could have been talking about F. Scott's former friend, who rose to prominence on Fitzgerald's fulsome praise in the early twenties, by this quote of Massie's:

"The change came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks."

Read the excellent review by the WSJ at the link above. I've read several books about Hemingway and most of his novels and short stories, but Massie's keen insights are among the best I've ever come across.

Gallup Says 55% of Americans distrust the lame stream MSM

Gallup makes an unusual comment on its graph....

"the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured."

Of course, the graphs demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans believe that the libtard lamestream losers at the NYT and LAT are retarded treasonous buttwads.

Gallup sums it up with:

"47% saying the media are too liberal and 13% saying they are too conservative..."

which shows once again that the American people are much smarter than Bri-boy Williams, the d-bag at CBS & Diane Sawyer take them to be.

Case in point: The main legacy media alphabet lame streamers like NBC, CBS, and ABC had ZERO coverage of the Greengate emerging from Solyndra, LightSquared and other crony capitalism deals that tiny Rahm and the crooked Jew Axelrod deny knowing anything about. NADA, except for Brian Ross & Jake Tapper on ABC, which makes it the least despicable collection of DNC pimps in the bunch.

Bad Days Ahead for Europe and its NATO Partner in North America

The Wall Street Journal has a good column by Bret Stephens which fits in nicely with my current reading of Tony Judt's magnificent POSTWAR, a book that should be required reading for Euroweenies everywhere.

As a personal aside, Nikos Papandreaou, the brother of the current Prime Minister, had a one-on-one dinner with me a couple of decades ago and explained the essential corruption of the Greek economy, which is based on no civic accountability and massive tax evasion, plus a giant dose of sheer graft and peculation. Essentially, in Greece everyone lies to everyone else and a wink and a nod are what make the country muddle through from day to day. At the time, his father was the Prime Minister, and his description of an essentially fraudulent state puzzled me. He described it as a third-world country, long before it was foolishly admitted into the Maastricht Accords and the Eurozone. Greece was even back then guilty of massive fraud of a Madoff-size Ponzi numbers scam just to get into the Eurozone and get all that free money. And Nikos laughingly described his countrymen as self-described political experts, who sat around coffee shops all day while the women did the housework and their state-sector jobs did themselves by means of a coat hanging on a chair in their government "office."

Here's Bret Stephens:

When the history of the rise and fall of postwar Western Europe is someday written, it will come in three volumes. Title them "Hard Facts," "Convenient Fictions" and—the volume still being written—"Fraud."

The hardest fact on which postwar Europe was founded was military necessity, crisply summed up by Lord Ismay's famous line that NATO's mission was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." The next hard fact was hard money, the gift of Ludwig Erhard, author of the economic reforms that created the Deutsche mark, abolished price controls, and put inflation in check for generations. The third hard fact was the creation of Jean Monnet's common market that gave Europe a shared economic—not political—identity.

The result was the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, Les Trente Glorieuses in France and il miracolo economico in Italy. It could have lasted into the present day. It didn't.

In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones.


Former FDIC official Vern McKinley gives a brief history of moral hazard.

It was during this general slowdown that Europe entered the convenient fiction phase.

There was, for starters, the convenient fiction that if you just added up the GDP of the European Union's expanding list of member states, you had an economy whose size exceeded that of the United States. Didn't this make "Europe" an economic superpower? There was the convenient fiction that Europe didn't need robust military capabilities when it could exert global influence through diplomacy and soft power. There was the convenient fiction that Europeans shared identical values and could thus be subject to uniform regulations governing crime and punishment. There was the convenient fiction that Continentals weren't lagging in productivity but were simply making an enlightened choice of leisure over labor.

And there was, finally, the whopping fiction that Europe had its own "model," distinct and superior to the American one, that immunized it from broader international currents: globalization, Islamism, demography. Europeans love their holidays and thought they were entitled to a long holiday from history as well.

All this did wonders, for a while, to mask European failures and puff up European pride. But there is always a danger in substituting grandiosity for achievement, mistaking pronouncements for facts, or, more generally, believing in your own nonsense.

Here is where Europe slipped from convenient fiction to outright fraud.

There was the fraud of Greece's entry into the euro, a double-edged affair since Athens lied about its budgetary figures and Brussels chose to accept the lie. There was the fraud of the so-called Maastricht criteria—the fiscal rules that were supposed to govern the euro only to be quickly flouted by France and Germany and then junked altogether in the current crisis. There was the fraud of the European Constitution, overwhelmingly rejected wherever a vote on it was permitted, only to be revised and imposed by parliamentary fiat.

What is now happening in Europe isn't so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it's a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.

And then Italy will go Greek. Europe's crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America's economic woes will lap on Europe's—a two-way tsunami.

America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, "Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression." The "fiscal union" that's being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won't stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.

What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it's not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It's a long, likely parade of horribles.

Where is the Europe of Ismay, Erhard and Monnet? It's there in memory, if anyone cares to recover it. Give it another 50 years, and maybe someone will.

Nouriel Roubini, the only major economist to predict the 2007-8 crash, expatiates:

Greece is stuck in a vicious cycle of insolvency, low competitiveness and ever-deepening depression. Exacerbated by a draconian fiscal austerity, its public debt is heading towards 200 per cent of gross domestic product. To escape, Greece must now begin an orderly default, voluntarily exit the eurozone and return to the drachma.

The recent debt exchange deal Europe offered Greece was a rip-off, providing much less debt relief than the country needed. If you pick apart the figures, and take into account the large sweeteners the plan gave to creditors, the true debt relief is actually close to zero. The country’s best current option would be to reject this agreement and, under threat of default, renegotiate a better one.

Yet even if Greece were soon to be given real and significant relief on its public debt, it cannot return to growth unless competitiveness is rapidly restored. And without a return to growth, its debts will stay unsustainable. Problematically, however, all of the options that might restore competitiveness require real currency depreciation.

The first of these options, a sharp weakening of the euro, is unlikely while the US is economically weak and Germany über-competitive. A rapid reduction in unit labour costs, through structural reforms that increased productivity growth in excess of wages, is just as unlikely. Germany took 10 years to restore its competitiveness this way; Greece cannot wait in depression for a decade.

The third option is a rapid deflation in prices and wages, known as an “internal devaluation”. But this would lead to five years of ever-deepening depression, while making public debts more unsustainable.

Logically, therefore, if those three options are not possible, the only path left is to leave the eurozone. A return to a national currency and a sharp depreciation would quickly restore competitiveness and growth, as it did in Argentina and many other emerging markets that abandoned their currency pegs.

Of course, this process will be traumatic. The most significant problem would be capital losses for core eurozone financial institutions. Overnight, the foreign euro liabilities of Greece’s government, banks and companies would surge. Yet these problems can be overcome. Argentina did so in 2001, when it “pesified” its dollar debts. America actually did something similar too, in 1933 when it depreciated the dollar by 69 per cent and repealed the gold clause. A similar unilateral “drachmatisation” of euro debts would be necessary and unavoidable.

Major eurozone banks and investors would also suffer large losses in this process, but they would be manageable too – if these institutions are properly and aggressively recapitalised. Avoiding a post-exit implosion of the Greek banking system, however, may unfortunately require the imposition of Argentine-style measures – such as bank holidays and capital controls – to prevent a disorderly fallout.

Realistically, collateral damage will occur, but this could be limited if the exit process is orderly, and if international support was provided to recapitalise Greek banks and finance the difficult fiscal and external balance transition. Some argue that Greece’s real GDP will be much lower in an exit scenario than in the hard slog of deflation. But this is logically flawed: even with deflation the real purchasing power of the Greek economy and of its wealth will fall as the real depreciation occurs. Via nominal and real depreciation, the exit path will restore growth right away, avoiding a decade-long depressionary deflation.

Those who claim contagion will drag others into the crisis are also in denial too. Other peripheral countries have Greek-style debt sustainability and competitiveness problems too; Portugal, for example, may eventually have to restructure its debt and exit the euro too.

Illiquid but potentially solvent economies, such as Italy and Spain, will need support from Europe regardless of whether Greece exits; indeed, a self-fulfilling run on Italy and Spain’s public debt at this point is almost certain, if this liquidity support is not provided. The substantial official resources currently being wasted bailing out Greece’s private creditors could also then be used to ringfence these countries, and banks elsewhere in the periphery.

A Greek exit may have secondary benefits. Other crisis-stricken eurozone economies will then have a chance to decide for themselves whether they want to follow suit, or remain in the euro, with all the costs that come with that choice. Regardless of what Greece does, eurozone banks now need to be rapidly recapitalised. For this a new European Union-wide programme is needed, and one not reliant on fudged estimates and phoney stress tests. A Greek exit could be the catalyst for this approach.

The recent experiences of Iceland, along with many emerging markets in the past 20 years, show that the orderly restructuring and reduction of foreign debts can restore debt sustainability, competitiveness and growth. Just as in these cases, the collateral damage to Greece of a euro exit will be significant, but it can be contained.

Like a broken marriage that requires a break-up, it is better to have rules that make separation less costly to both sides. Breaking up and divorcing is painful and costly, even when such rules exist. Make no mistake: an orderly euro exit will be hard. But watching the slow disorderly implosion of the Greek economy and society will be much worse.

David Brooks: A Self-Admitted "Sap" Confesses his Past Sins of Omission

David Brooks seems to have rewired his attic and his lights are now turning on in the top floor of his brain cavity:

...When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

David and his high-minded admiration for the crease on Obama's well-tailored bespoke suit had been mesmerized for years by the flatulent flimflammery this community organizer with a flair for self-promotion had beguiled the gullible "brain-dead liberals," as David Mamet would characterize them, with all sorts of intriguing back alleys of political ingenuity---calling something "shovel-ready" when there was a union-restricted proviso attached to the infrastructure improvement being proposed. David was a center-left dupe or fellow-traveler of this protean chimera of a politician, whose only identity seems to be that of a shape-shifter or a chameleon-on-plaid, Brooks was gulled because he is a natural egghead, and his ideals take many blows before he allows them to shatter, or in this case disappear into a cultural-revolution type confession of "crimes against the people." But, like a much finer mind such as that of Augustine or Whittaker Chambers, perhaps this self-confessed "sap" may have finally seen the light. Here's more of his lugubrious musings:

....The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.

Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away. He whispered about seriously reforming Medicare but then opted for changes that are worthy but small. He talks about fundamental tax reform, but I keep forgetting that he has promised never to raise taxes on people in the bottom 98 percent of the income scale.

That means when he talks about raising revenue, which he is right to do, he can’t really talk about anything substantive. He can’t tax gasoline. He can’t tax consumption. He can’t do a comprehensive tax reform. He has to restrict his tax policy changes to the top 2 percent, and to get any real revenue he’s got to hit them in every which way. We’re not going to simplify the tax code, but by God Obama’s going to raise taxes on rich people who give to charity! We’ve got to do something to reduce the awful philanthropy surplus plaguing this country!

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. I’m a sap.

Writing a letter to the NYT is like shedding a tear in the ocean when it comes to politics, but here's my latest comment I submitted on David Brooks column:

It's apparent that Obama's absurd new package of roughly $1.5 trillion in "revenue enhancements," removal of tax deductions on charitable contributions and dozens of other tax and spend schemes are, as Brooks finally concedes, simply political markers without a chance of passing in Congress. Rather than having a "Sister Soljah moment" as Clinton did when he pivoted to the center, Obama appears to have doubled down on some sort of "Give 'Em Hell, Harry" strategy and will soon be whining about the "Do-Nothing 111th Congress" or some such silly frontal attack on the GOP. It worked when everyone thought Truman's chances were slim or nil, and Obama's economic haplessness assures another year of no growth.

The top US earners are already double-taxed on capital gains and Obama is removing any motivation to invest in a country which punishes entrepreneurial risk-taking and rewards falling into the 51% of the population, mostly Democrats, who pay no taxes at all. Why invest when regulatory watchdogs and excessive imposts remove any real chance or incentive to succeed. First, Sarbanes-Oxley and now Dodd-Frank are paralyzing the American business environment---and if in the remote chance, one succeeds in innovating or marketing a viable product, without the political backing such as Solyndra had, one's chances of success recede to a vanishing point.

Obama is anti-business and for a mixed-economic regime resembling the corporatist crony capitalism of the Thirties. Despite the efforts of the elite media and academic theoreticians, he is simply going to lose this battle against a windmill of his own imagining.

And Obama'a high-minded rhetorical pomposity is now descending to the silliness of "gun-to-a-knife-fight" bravado and resembles marxist tropes of setting up class warfare as a model for democratic politics. He should be ashamed of himself. A one-termer for sure.

Obama Says "Never Raise Taxes in a Recession" in 2009

Upchuck Todd shows his slavish adulation of O'Bozo in this YouTube where the First Imbecile-in-Chief since Jimmy Carter says something which he is in the process of reversing at this very moment, having called for $1.5 trillion in new revenues just yesterday.

I'm sure serial-suck-up Todd will ignore this, or else come up with some flimflammery such as "we're not technically in a recession, yet."

On top of Fast and Furious and the Greengate called Solyndra, our worst POTUS since Jimmy Carter now calls for massive tax increases, all the while denying that he's doing what he told Joe The Plumber he was doing, "spreading the wealth around."

White House Economic In-Fighting Reflects Obungler's Lack of Leadership

Robert Suskind has a book out that should rival The Big Short and Reckless Endangerment as object lessons or at least as a cautionary tale of the rampant self-serving special pleading of disobedient subordinates of this "community organizer" about six levels over his Peter Principle level of competence & capability.

Also, dissing the distaff advisors should have extended tot he egregious Ms. Warren who has shuffled back to Hah-vahd Yahd to organize a Senate expeditionary campaign that hopefully will hit an iceberg bigger than the one that sank the Titanic. Christine Romer says that even Obama didn't bother to recognize her during a meeting, but she put her tail between her legs and took it like a man....!!!

However, ignoring Anita Dunn and her absurdities, including admiring Chairman Mao's "philosophy" [of mass murder???] was probably beneficial to the intellectual tone, such as it was, of the back-stabbing sessions as described by Suskind. Anita's double-digit IQ produced brain farts which could only be ignored in any polite or intelligent discussion of politics and policies.

Muddled Class Warfare

If you want to find the most biased, marxist gibberish among the loons of the lefty commentari­at, read the insufferab­le Robert Kuttner on how Paul Ryan's comment that taxing more heavily those with money to invest in the economy and to do venture capital risk investment­s in small start-up businesses is "pure malarkey."



Actually, a majority of Americans are intelligen­t enough and gifted with common sense to the degree that they realize that those college profs preaching marxist theories of how businessme­n parasitize off of the workers they hire is pure and simple balderdash­.



And the Dodd-Frank bill to drown financial institutio­ns in paperwork is as loony as the Sarbanes attempt a few years back to do the same. Politicize­, then bureaucrat­ize, then threaten banks with discrimina­tory practices if they "red-line" folks wanting a mortgage by asking them if they have any up-front money and a job to pay the monthly mortgage. The CRA was a crackpot idea of Jimmy Carter, the least successful president of the twentieth century, Hoover included, and it was taken up again by Clinton to stave off the left after he dared to impose welfare reform on hopeless slackers.



Class warfare is a polite way to characteri­ze the economic havoc that will ensue if Obama continues to tax and spend----e­specially spend money he can't tax because of a diminishin­g employment base.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

NYT's Crusade Against Football More Absurd Than Ever

Pinch Sulzberger is obviously too effeminate, despite ostentatiously riding Harleys around the hills of North Carolina, to ever support a manly sport like college football.

Theodore Roosevelt saved football from the effeminate losers such as Pinch back in the early 1900s when girly-men like Sulzberger wanted the game outlawed. Robert Hutchins would probably have preferred the US to have lost the Cold War and have us all speaking Russian than participate in a real manly male enterprise. Pointy-headed eggheads like him and Adlai Stevenson would have surrendered to the Soviets rather than risk getting their hands dirty in anything like an armed confrontation. POTUS's like Dwight Eisenhower, an All-American at West Point, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan all played football.

Democrats are nancy-boys, so they don't like to play rough sports---although JFK tried out for the Hah-vahd team, I understand.

Islam: "Religion of Peace" or a Terrorist Death Cult?

As a long-time student of the Middle East, I also happen to be a State Dept-trained Arabist who has lived in three Arab countries as Political Officer---Lebanon, Saudi Arabia & Yemen. Pakistan is not an Arab country, but its virulent brand of Islam is worse than the Salafist Wahhabism that keeps Saudi Arabia culturally and socially in the 16th century, AD.

The official murder sanctioned by the Pakistani government with no legal representation of this young woman demonstrates the barbarity of the entire country and the cowardice of the worst president in the history of the USA since Jimmy Carter---or maybe James Buchanan. Hillary Clinton, the laughable Secretary of State is worse than Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright as a complete moral failure and diplomatic featherweight when it comes to representing American values in the international arena.

I personally made over a dozen business trips to Pakistan in the 1980s and was a personal friend of Arnie Raphel, our US Ambassador murdered there by terrorists, or perhaps murdered by ISI, since President Zia Al-Haqq was also killed in the plane that blew up in mid-air just after picking up a huge load of mangoes [yes, MANGOES!] from Multan, which I can assert grows the tastiest in the world. ISI is a terrorist organization that makes the CIA look like a finishing school and the KGB like a goodwill organization. ISI's terrorist cadres are fighting America and aiding Al Qaeda and are also responsible for the Mumbai massacre almost two years ago. The Paks are accomplished liars as well as specimens of canine breeding and porcine hygiene---Founding President Jinnah used to enjoy eating pork and bacon, just to demonstrate the essential hypocrisy and fraudulent fake religiosity of this collection of human riff-raff. I say open our country to non-Muslim Indians and throw out the Paki imbeciles and morons who have sneaked into the USA.

I say this even though I still have my honorary marshal's badge for Pakistan Day in New York City back in the mid-'80s. I was working for Denis Neal and Charlie Wilson back then as well, and met a lot of Pakis---even gave a speech to their political PAC convocation at the Commodore Hotel in New York City in 1986.

I had the opportunity to have a half-hour interview with the number two ISI Chief at the time and it didn't go very well. He was a brutish specimen of nasty arrogance. I've been in every part of Pakistan except the Beluchi part and it is a beautiful country, but is now governed by terrorists and an Army riddled by corruption, treason, & hatred for the USA.

Despite the sacrifices of our brave fighting men, my firmest hope is that the USA let the Taliban take over Afghanistan & Pakistan, so we and India can nuke the sh*t out of these two Islamic hellholes. Ditto for Iran. I also happen to be a State Dept trained Arabist who has lived in three Arab countries---the Pakistanis also persecute what they consider heretical types of Sunni Islam and the Shi'ites as well---however, as they are both terrorist states, the Paks get along well officially with Iran.

Sadly, the PRC is the true friend of Pakistan & got the stealth helicopter parts left behind in the killing of POS Osama bin Laden. Pakistan isn't worth one US life and represents Islam at its worst. A sort of Fareed Zakaria as if he were a country----full of lies, BS, and treachery.
UPDATE Admiral Mullen met with the chief Pakistani about the Haqqani network being run out of ISI which is killing Americans in Kabul and Afghanistan & Indians in Mumbai. I doubt if he'll get anything but the usual lies or defiance by the specimen of murderous thug he's meeting with.

Obama "Jobs" Bill Helps Unions, Blue States in Deep Debt

Obama's RICO scheme aims to give the lion's share of all monies from his "Jobs" bill to blue states.

Last Thursday, the president urged Congress to pony up roughly $200 billion in taxpayer money to "provide more jobs for teachers [and] more jobs for construction workers" and more money to carry out other state and local activities. He urges Congress to spend this money even after handing out hundreds of billions of dollars for similar purposes as part of the 2009 stimulus package, as well as a score and more billion dollars again in 2010.

These vast contributions to the coffers of state and local governments, though pitched as a jobs bill, are in reality the latest in a series of bailouts for debt-ridden state and local governments. They are of special benefit to states in the blue regions of the country where the president's most fervent supporters reside.

In many blue states, legislators have copied the politicians in Washington by running up state debts to extraordinary levels. Nationwide, state debt is running around $3 trillion. If unfunded pension liabilities are factored in, estimated liabilities leap forward by another $1 trillion to $3 trillion, depending on the optimism of the assumptions made.

The crook in the Oval Office is scaring the bond markets....

The bond market has taken notice. Before the 2008 financial crisis, state sovereign debt was just about the safest place to invest. Because investors did not pay taxes on the interest, states were able to borrow money at rates below those paid for federal securities. With the onset of the financial crisis, not only did borrowing costs rise across the board, but differences in interest rates among states widened dramatically. Bond holders concluded that some states, like Greece, had been extraordinarily profligate and, even worse, lacked the will to rein in their expenditures.

In a new study at Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, we discovered why the Obama administration is so interested in helping out the states. States with a bluish hue—that is, states with legislatures that are heavily Democratic and have a highly unionized public-sector work force—must pay interest rates that are often an extra half a percentage point higher than states with a reddish coloring.

Specifically, a 20 percentage-point increment in either the Democratic share of the state legislature or a comparable increase in the share of the public work force that is unionized drives up interest rates by nearly a half a percentage point on a five-year security note. That amount is nontrivial. In Obama's home state of Illinois, it is costing governments over $700 million annually.

The impact of these political factors on interest rates is in addition to the impact of standard economic factors, such as a state's unemployment rate, its gross domestic product growth, and its debt-to-GDP ratio, all of which are themselves shaped in part by the state's political climate.

In short, the bond market has concluded that the more unionized the state and the bluer its political coloring, the riskier it is to hold bonds marketed by that state.

Why doesn't this pimp just stand out under a street light and attract suckers to his sick economic policies?

When it comes to fiscal sovereignty, U.S. federalism is exceptional. Hardly any other country in the world has anything like it. Only Switzerland and Canada—two nations that aren't doing that badly these days—come close.

But federal fiscal bailouts put our federal system at risk. In essence, the national government is acting as if states are too big to fail. In the next financial crisis, the federal government may decide that states need to be treated like General Motors or, at least, be given ever bigger handouts of the kind the Obama administration seems committed to making.

But if the federal government is going to tacitly assume responsibility for state debts, then those $3 trillion in sovereign state debt must be added to the $14 trillion national debt that has already caused grave concern, pushing the current U.S. debt into the danger zone. Even if pension liabilities are ignored, the combined federal-state-local debt runs in excess of 120% of GDP.

The costs go beyond dollars and cents. The more often the federal government bails out the states, the more Washington bureaucrats will insist on regulating state and local affairs. At some point the United States will see the end of state fiscal sovereignty and the demise our federal system of government.

The Supreme Court should stop this cat burglar from ruining the rest of our economy by dragging profligate states like
California, New York & Illinois plus a few other red-light districts into his destruction of the American Way of Life.

Even repeat-cheat CBS has O'Bozo at 43% Approval

CBS News habitually has more Dems than independents or Republicans in its horribly-biased polls, so this is actually newsworthy only because it's the first time ever their silly polling unit has ever admitted the man-child is dumber than dirt [or that's what I infer from the numbers.]

Wonder what the PPP Jensen Poll, owned & run by the DNC, is going to come out with.

Gallup and other halfway-decent polls have Obummer's economic numbers at around 30% approval. The Dems should ask Hillarious to step up to the plate---Barry Soetero or whoever he is appears to be toasting quite nicely in the national kitchen.

Changelessly Hopeless

CNBC has this about "Hope for Future?":

Americans remained gloomy about the future with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, a survey released Friday showed.

Read the entire article, but I believe Sarah Palin's immortal "How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for you?" is the appropriate insertion of just how disillusioned the USA is with this failed "community organizer."

D-bag historian Simon Shama tells libtard-C-in-C Charlie Rose that the NYT editorial page continues to be "brilliant." Maybe Shama should put on some tinted glasses or do something or perhaps drop that "a" from the end of his name to clarify his ethical and moral stature.

Perry has Love of Politics in his Veins---Rich Lowry

Lame-duck Obummer had better watch out---and Mitt Romney had better get a personality, because Gov. Perry has just ridden into town and he ain't taking prisoners....

Even during the debates, where his performances have been uneven, Perry has usually been loose and confident. He never shies from a fight, and (most of the time) seems to enjoy them. He laughs easily. No one would vote to elect him to the Oxford Union, but if it somehow happened, he’d have a heck of a time exchanging frank views with “the fellas.”

What we’re about to see is if these qualities of Perry — call it his “hossness” — are enough for him to become the durable frontrunner in the Republican-nomination fight. He can go a long way just by demonstrating he’s a fighter in the mold of a Sarah Palin or a Donald Trump. That means making the occasional incendiary comment, never apologizing, earning the hatred of the elites, and not sweating the details. All of this, Perry has nailed.

But to become president of the United States, he’ll have to reach persuadables who don’t value outrageousness for its own sake. If he’s never willing to back down, he’ll have to go — should he win the nomination — all the way to November 2012 defending the notion that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is possibly guilty of treason. On Social Security, he’s managed to take what turns out to be his thoroughly conventional Republican view that the program should stay the same for seniors and near-retirees while it’s reformed for younger people and make it radioactive through his choice of words and his theoretical musings. His campaign so far has no policy except generalized statements celebrating Texas and condemning the federal government.

Tellingly, his weakest moments in the debates have come when he’s been attacked from the right and can’t fight back with brassy, crowd-pleasing one-liners. He’s made uncomfortable by his streak of pragmatism as Texas governor. For all his self-portrayal as an anti-government purist, he’s adept at marshaling and using power. When he says he’s pro-business, he’s not kidding. Republicans will have to quickly drop the phrase “crony capitalism” from their vocabulary if he’s the nominee.

In this year of populist discontent, the blunt outsider Rick Perry has a natural call on the Republican heart. The question is whether he can maintain enough appeal over time to the Republican mind, which will eventually calculate the odds of a prospective nominee vanquishing the incumbent. Whether Perry makes it or not, he’ll never be dull. If success were solely a matter of animal spirits, he’d be a lead-pipe cinch.

Of course, how his tougher than nails and nasty in-your-face persona plays with the independents is the key. And he doesn't look like he wants to pussyfoot and play pattycake with the meth-NBC crew of pirate bolshies.

Eurozone May be Saved by Dallar's Liquidity

Dollar Rides to the Rescue is the gist of a Wall Street Journal article replete with ironies that even the dumbest Euroweenies can't miss. But the whining from the Eurosnobs in Frogland didn't stop there---

The central-bank move is a de facto admission that dollar funding has been drying up for many European banks. We warned on June 27 ("Money-Market Mayhem") about the dangers to U.S. money funds from their lending to banks heavily invested in Greek and other sovereign debt. The money-fund lobby said we were exaggerating, but the funds have since cut their lending dramatically. This is prudent, since the world doesn't need a repeat of 2008 when a U.S. money fund broke its $1 net asset value.

The problem is that this withdrawal by money funds reduces the options for European banks to finance their dollar-lending operations. Moody's downgraded two of the three biggest French banks on Wednesday, citing liquidity and short-term funding needs. The CEO of Societe Generale—one of the downgraded banks, with Credit Agricole—said his bank was "adjusting to the reduction in the money-market fund exposure."

It gets funnier still when the ENArch fuddy-duddies sniffed yesterday at the WSJ for daring to publish a piece by a French banker about their shortcomings.

We [at the WSJ] received our own immersion in the issue this week after we published an op-ed Tuesday by contributor Nicolas Lecaussin quoting an unnamed executive from BNP Paribas as saying the bank had lost its access to dollar funding. BNP immediately said it was "fully able to obtain USD funding in the normal course of business, either directly or through swaps." It also acknowledged a "reduction and shortening of resources" from U.S. money funds.

In its official statement, BNP Paribas said only that its borrowing from U.S. money funds had recently declined to €36 billion outstanding from €46 billion, so we asked the bank to support its claim that it was "fully able" to meet its dollar needs. BNP's treasurer, Michel Eydoux, elaborated in an interview that "some of the money market funds have not renewed" their loans and others are of shorter maturities—generally one month instead of three to 12 months previously.

He said BNP is thus relying more on foreign-exchange swap contracts for its dollar needs. The counterparties to these swaps are, according to Mr. Eydoux, "banks and corporations who want the same maturities" that BNP is seeking and can no longer obtain from the money markets. The bank is also trying to expand its dollar deposit base among corporations and governments in Asia and Middle East that need someplace to keep their dollars.

Much to our surprise, BNP Paribas also requested that the French equivalent of the SEC, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, "open an investigation into the publication of erroneous information about its funding in dollars in an article in the Opinions section of the Wall Street Journal."

The AMF is "tasked with safeguarding investments and maintaining orderly financial markets in France" and it can also conduct investigations, although by its own account its jurisdiction does not normally extend to the press. An official at the AMF declined to say how often newspaper articles lead to investigations.

Meanwhile, a senior French government official called us "as a reader," he said, to express his shock that we had published Mr. Lecaussin's op-ed. The article, he said, "was quite damaging to this bank and to French banks generally." At least he conceded that perhaps he was "abusing his position" as a top government official to express his displeasure.

We certainly hope the French government and BNP intention isn't to shut down reporting on French bank problems. We can't imagine, say, White House chief of staff Bill Daley calling us about a story on Bank of America, or BofA siccing the SEC on us. Relations between banks and the government are closer in France than they are in the U.S., but we'd have thought French politicians had enough problems without picking a fight over press freedom.

All the more so because we're far from the only messengers. In a report last week, JP Morgan analysts argued that French banks as a group had one of the lowest ratios of highly liquid assets to short-term funding needs in Europe. JP Morgan pegged BNP's so-called liquidity-coverage ratio at 70%. When asked about that figure, one BNP official sputtered that JP Morgan's own coverage ratio was only 52%. Under the Basel III international banking standards, banks are required to achieve a 100% liquidity-coverage ratio by 2015.

The funding status of French banks is news because fears of 2008 are still fresh and Europe's woes could spill into U.S. banks and the larger world financial system. Europe's banks have done far less than American banks since 2008 to strengthen their capital base, own up to their bad assets, and generally clean up their act. Until they do, the world's lenders will treat them with well-deserved wariness.

Ca alors! Qu'est-ce qui se passe? On ose mentionner que les enarques sont des imbeciles dans l'Haute Politique & concernant des affaire foncieres? Que les sales 'ricans et leurs dollars .......!

Nobel Physics Laureate Resigns APS over AGW Hoax

Pope Pius IX caused a furor in 1870 when he declared that any Catholic dogma proclaimed by the Pope is "infallible," if he speaks ex cathedra.Read the linked story on how and why a Renssalaer Professor who won his Nobel in 1973 disagrees that

the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Fox News and Climate Depot have stories on how the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax is being discredited as an example of "Cargo Cult Science" of the type Richard Feynman warned about in his famous CalTech 1974 commencement address .

Pinball Wizard Starts to lose his touch?

Che Lives in My Oval Office in Spirit and in my Bolshie Policies

Bob Turner defeated a liberal Demonrat named Weprin who was a State Assemblyman in the Weinergate run-off special election, showing GOP strength in a district that had NEVER elected a Republican---although its Catholic & Orthodox Jewish constituencies are more conservative than most of Brooklyn/Queens bolshie netherlands.....

I just can't wait for the WH comment tomorrow or how the mentally-retarded Baghdad Bobs of the liberal Demonrat commentariat are going to try this electoral catastrophe for their socialist policies go away. The upstate victory last Spring after a GOP moron showed his six-pack abs in the mirror for admiration on Craigslist was of a mediocre GOP female by a highly-funded and supported Demonrat RICO conspiracy. This GOP victory in the heart of the Bolshevik archipelago is something else.

My guess is that deaf, dumb and blind kid [or shall we say man-child?] in the Oval Office won't even acknowledge that he is swirling slowly downward in the porcelain bowl towards his true cloacal home---the sewer of community organizing and agitpreppie BS which spawned him in the first place!
UPDATE
Debbie Wasserman-Schmuck and the compulsive motor-mouth Upchuck Shumer, now a US Senator, will have a difficult time explaining how Shumer's old CD where he served as a Congressman [when I met and talked with him---or rather he bragged at me that he was the first Jew on Harvard's basketball team---at a Sag Harbor cocktail confab with Betty Friedan, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. & a bunch of other "social elite" stroking each other's egos]. By coincidence, this seat has not been GOP since 1920 and was also the springboard for Geraldine Ferraro's career. I just can't wait to hear the agitpreppies try to spin this catastrophe into some sort of Demonrat victory....!!!

ft's Wolfgang Munchau on Bad Times ahead for Eurozone

FT's Munchau and Martin Wolf are two of the best FT writers. Here's the two opening paras on WM's take on the near future:

The two real options for a resolution of the eurozone crisis came into full conflict last week. The first is a common eurozone bond. The second is a monetisation of national debt through the European Central Bank. Angela Merkel rejects the former. Europe’s central bankers reject the latter. Jürgen Stark, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, rejects both, and last week resigned in protest. Along with other conservative economists, he is advocating a third way, adjustment through depression – the simultaneous deleveraging of the private and public sector debt.
As an advocate of eurozone bonds, I have to admit their prospect looks grim after last week’s ruling of the German constitutional court. The court upheld the European financial adjustment facility, the crisis mechanism. This was, undoubtedly, good news. But after I read the whole ruling, which ran to 29 tightly written pages, I realised that this judgement was not a victory for the eurozone at all. On the contrary, it categorically rules out any policy option beyond what has been agreed so far. I cannot see how it can be consistent with the survival of the eurozone, given the policies of member states and the ECB.

Bismarck famously pronounced that "God has a special providence for drunks, idiots, children and the United States of America." Once again, no matter how badly things go in our own land of the free, the land Euroweenies despise and Muslims in Grovesnor Square hate BECAUSE of our democratic freedoms, we are lucking out, even if it is through Bernanke's sneaky "quantitative easing."

The FT is a beast on copyright infringement, so read the rest of the article and find out why Europe has EVEN harder times ahead than the USA. The good news, the USA might be able to slough off the -power-drunk idiot man-child now living in the White House. Ain't it great that God's "SPECIAL PROVIDENCE" Bismarck spoke of prioritizes the USA before drunks, idiots and children?