Free kibbles

Dayton NCR employees bitter, but at least one gets it. NCR is a global company and Georgia provided global services. The Tax Foundation ranks Ohio 47th in business tax climate. Michigan is only 20th. Michigan has a better business tax climate than Ohio. Georgia ranks 27th. The question isn't why did NCR move. The question is why did NCR stay here and get punished so long. California ranks 48th. New York ranks 49th. New Jersey ranks 50th. Dayton population.

Even the Amish are leaving Ohio!

Travis County deputy sheriff tasers 72 year old woman over traffic ticket.

Homeless man gets his act together, begins shining shoes and earns enough money for his first month's rent only to have San Francisco bureaucrat take it all from him by force to make him buy a permit. This should show everybody that government does not exist to help anybody. Government exists to help government.

Congratulations to Roger Federer for finally winning the French and tying Pete Sampras's record. Sampras says Federer is the greatest ever. At his best, Federer was the best I ever saw.

Video of Putin dressing down business owner shows how similar the Obama administration is to the Putin administration.

Militaries of our allies allow gays to serve openly. We should be able to determine whether or not that puts troops or missions at additional risk. Either it does or it doesn't, and once we know either way, we can put this "don't ask, don't tell" policy to rest. Majority of conservatives support allowing gays to serve openly, but this shouldn't be decided by politics.

Giving a college education entitlement to Americans would complete government's destruction of the value of a bachelor's degree.

As the social scientist Charles Murray writes in his book Real Education, "Saying 'too many people are going to college' is not the same as saying that the average student does not need to know about history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature. They do need to know—and to know more than they are currently learning. So let's teach it to them, but let's not wait for college to do it."

Absolutely.

Take this bullet point, proudly included in a November 2008 press release from the Boston public school system: "Of the [Boston public school] graduates from the Class of 2000 who enrolled in college (1,904), 35.5 percent (675 students) earned a degree within seven years of high school graduation. An additional 14 percent (267 students) were still enrolled and working toward a degree."

Yikes. Talk about low expectations.

Creditors file emergency brief with Supreme Court in an attempt to get a better deal from the sale of Chrysler.

George Will says GM is moving some manufacturing from China to the US. That will make their cars more expensive. It also stifles trade just as Smoot Hawley helped created the Great Depression. I'm often pointed out that Obama plans to create a market for his cars by driving up the price of gasoline. I don't think I've gone on record yet predicting he will subsidize the purchase of GM cars. He will.

Mickey Kaus explains that Toyota topped GM over the course of decades because it built reliable cars. Because of the US tax structure and the burden of unions, American companies can't afford to build cars that are as reliable as Japanese companies.

Susan Estrich celebrates the big comeback of big government and welcomes the takeover of GM. It's actually big trouble. This shows what I've said all along - all those leading liberals are really hard core socialists at heart. Normal liberals in the regular population aren't, but the leaders, like Obama, are experts are pretending to be moderate when they're actually radicals.

Democrat congressmen upset about Chrysler and GM dealerships closing in their districts. How very partisan of them. They ask Obama to fix it for them. The same Obama who doesn't want to run GM.

Kasich to take on Strickland for Ohio governor. The only reason Republicans are out of power in Ohio is corruption. I don't think Kasich will be identified with that corruption, and nobody can say he was ever corrupt. I like Kasich's direct style of talking, and I think that will win him votes, but I'll have to wait and see his policies. I hope he isn't just another Democrat-lite.

I call Obama Pharaoh all the time, but it never crossed my mind to make a joke about it when he gave that speech in Cairo. Duh. Peter Schiff reports team Obama's world tour is really a tour to convince our creditors we won't destroy the dollar. But like everything else Obama says, that's a load of crap. A few days ago I quizzically posted about Bernanke's call for reduced deficits in Congressional hearings and wondered if he was towing the Obama line or breaking from Obama. Peter Schiff says,

"Letting aside the fact that the recession is far from over and that the stimulus will actually weaken the economy in the long run, Bernanke's words were less a practical guide to Congress than a bromide for our foreign creditors. Meanwhile, Obama carefully peppers his speeches with calls for Americans to live within their means, to save more and spend less, to produce more and consume less. But nothing in the government's current fiscal or monetary policy will encourage such behavior. In fact, the objective of economic stimulus is to prevent such changes from taking place!"

Yet another example of Obama's words being just the opposite of his deeds.

"The laughter of Chinese students that greeted Secretary Geithner at Peking University shows how ridiculous this spiel sounds overseas. Actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the current Administration are deafening. Multi-trillion dollar deficits, bailouts, nationalizations, quantitative easing, and grandiose plans for government-provided healthcare, education, and alternative energy, render all their claims of future prudence meaningless. If our leaders will not make tough choices now, why should anyone believe they will do so later when those choices will be even harder to make."

I'm not the only one who recognizes that Obama's actions are directly opposed to his words all the time.

"However, once the psychology turns, there is no way to stop the rush for the exits. Remember how quickly the secondary market for subprime mortgages collapsed? One day, investors were lining up to buy; the next day, the stuff couldn't be given away. Make no mistake about it, we are issuing subprime paper and no amount of political spin can alter that reality. Bogus credit ratings aside, I think the world already knows this and it's just a matter of time before someone admits it."

The Great Depression didn't happen all at once. It was actually three different recessions. The first recession was created by loose credit in the 20s that led to Black Friday. The second, deeper recession was created by Hoover's policies and more loose monetary policy. The third and deepest recession was created by FDR's policies. What Schiff is describing is the secondary recession we're headed towards, but because we're so over leveraged compared to the 30s, it could be significantly worse.

"In the meantime, by continuing to lend, our creditors merely supply us the shovels to dig ourselves into an even deeper economic hole. Their credit enables our government to grow when it needs to shrink, finances bailouts of companies that should be allowed to fail, and enables a nation that should be saving and producing to continue borrowing and spending. As a result, the more money the world loans us, the less capable we are of paying it back. I really wish the world would stop doing us favors, as neither party can afford the consequences.

For an timely example, just look at California. With an unmanageable $20 billion deficit, California recently asked Washington for a bailout. With none immediately forthcoming, California was forced to make real and needed budget cuts. The hard choices, which will benefit California in the long run, would not have been made if federal funds had been committed. We all should be so lucky."

Schiff was one of the few brokers who predicted this crisis (he's an Austrian economist) and made money off of it. We should listen to him.

Hackers claim to have taken control of T-Mobile's operations, finance and subscriber data. Yikes. This will give Obama's plan to take control of the internet under the guise of security a big boost.

Recently on my message board I wrote:

When you read this essay, you begin to understand the magnitude of the collapse that is coming sooner instead of later. Too mitigate the damage, you can expect red states that are fiscally responsible to separate from the blue states that are dragging down the country. That's why secession talk is growing. You can expect fences to be erected to keep the starving welfare state lovers from invading the red states and bringing them down too. It's going to be ugly. It'll be the greatest collapse the world has seen in at least 2000 years.

And we have it in our power to turn it around the next election by voting out the two parties which are destroying our country, but we won't. Liberals won't give up their welfare state benefits by kicking out Democrats, and conservatives will claim they have to vote Republican to hold off the Democrats.

Now somebody with more expertise than me is predicting pretty much the same magnitude of collapse, but much sooner than I predicted.

Mr. Celente's forecast on our impending future is based on his study of history. He says we are bent on destroying our currency, bankrupting our government, and unleashing a violent citizen-against-citizen eruption as the economy collapses into chaos and martial law fascism.

Quite a claim. And God help us if he is right -- again.

“We’re sounding the alarm about the ongoing downward economic cycle”, Gerald told Human Events. “In 2002, we predicted that the collapse of the American empire would fall like the World Trade Center in a thunderous crash -- in slow motion before our eyes. And now it’s happening.”

Mr. Celente follows over 300 trends: family, crime, war, education, consumer & business patterns which TRI synthesizes to predict the future.
...
"Another trend we wrote about over 2 years ago was the tax revolt. What’s happened? Tax revenues have collapsed by 33%. And the wealthy people are leaving."

"We predict state secessionist movements will rival the breakup of the Soviet Union."

"The only way we can ever recover is to return to individual community, personal responsibility, local government. Next, average will disappear, Quality will return. Look at GM. Junk cars financed by junk bonds. Now owned by a junk government. As a consumer, don’t consume quantity -- consume quality."

"How will it all end?", we queried. Will the dollar survive?

"The dot com bubble should have burst and gone away in a short sharp recession. But the boys at the Fed re-inflated the economy by lowering interest rates to a 46 year low -- and in turn created the real estate bubble -- much bigger than the dot com bubble. "

"Now they’re creating the bailout bubble -- which will ultimately dwarf the real estate bubble. It will cause the implosion of the global economy world wide -- which will not be able to be repaired by creating yet another bubble. Every time the government fails, it tells a bigger lie and then a still bigger lie."

"These previous bubbles were not allowed to pop -- but they didn’t destroy the infrastructure of the country. This bailout bubble will."

"But this bubble will be the last one. After the final blowout of the bailout bubble, we are concerned that the government will take the nation into war. This is a historical precedent that’s been done over and over again."

That was a fun read.

How to plan an escape from the collapse.

Ron Paul introduces a bill to protect patient's medical privacy from the government.

Pirate Party from Sweden wins seat in EU parliament.

Austrians distrust the EU.

Obama's moral relativism is disgusting.

It's funny how when you listen to the media, you get the idea that all Europeans are blaming free markets for the current crisis and embracing socialism as a response, but when the election results come in, liberals and socialists have suffered historic defeats in Europe.

Obama's flip-flops are good. And he walks on water too.

Schwarzenegger comes out in support of a flat tax in California. Good for him. Of course a 15 percent state income tax rate is outrageous.

I'm happy to see that liberal aristocrats are worried that pharmaceutical and health insurance companies might kill government supplied health care. Naturally Olympia Snowe is helping push Obama's plan through.

Jimmy Carter supports Obama's Israel policy. Israel should be very afraid.

Billboard company refuses to run campaign questioning Obama's birth certificate. Its their billboards. Find another place to run it.