Sunday, January 31, 2010

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

It's a buyer's market, so haggle.

TAX AND SPEND:

The $787 billion in stimulus money is paying for fewer than $600,000 jobs. That's $1.3 million per job. I wish I could get that kind of work. Assuming $50,000 per average private sector job, Obama's stimulus bill killed 26 productive jobs for every unproductive job it saved or created. So Obama wants $100 billion more so he can kill 2 million more private sector jobs to create 70,000 more unproductive jobs. He's doing it to us on purpose.

Taxes on pollution are the new sin taxes.

Lots of us are getting sick and tired of big-spending Republicans attacking Democrats for spending and acting like they're something other than big-spending Republicans. I couldn't stand hypocritical Democrats who attacked Bush for spending too much either. All we have in Washington are self-serving hypocrites. Nice chart of annual spending increases for presidents back to Eisenhower. And it's good to see Republican organ National Review go after hypocritical Republicans on this too.

Charts of the growth of federal "aid" to state and local governments.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama admits that the CBO estimates on his health care bill are artificially low.

WAR:

The TSA lied about its full body scanners which TSA requires to be able to send and receive images. Lying is what government does best. Even better than blowing stuff up.

How aristocrats exaggerate the threat from terrorists to keep the people scared enough to give them more and more power.
"A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants."
Did I call this or what? Think pregnancy implant for a much bigger bomb. Terrorists really are going to do this, but giving government more power is the sure way to disaster. The solution is to embrace freedom and trade freely with mainstream Arab Muslims so they'll stop becoming terrorists and instead turn on the hard-core terrorists they don't want running their lives either.

CIA agent who said waterboarding quickly makes terrorists crack has changed his story. I don't care how quickly it works. It works. The terrorists gave interrogators information that saved American lives, and they're no worse for wear and neither are the cool-kid reporters who had themselves waterboarded to prove their reporter bona fides. None of those reporters has offered to allow an interrogator to beat, electrocute, burn, use pliers, or use other actual torture technique on them. Waterboarding is not torture. If the terrorists want Geneva Convention protections, they can put on uniforms and start following those conventions. If they were subjected to actual torture, the torturers should be prosecuted.

POLITICS:

Political change starts locally.



I wonder if the Republican 2012 candidate will have the nerve to use these slogans. What's the scariest thing you will ever hear? I'm Barack Obama, and I'm here to help. How can you tell when Barack Obama is lying? His lips are moving. Barack Obama isn't the solution to our problems, Obama is our problem. I doubt it.

The Republican power-brokers who created the lost decade forming new political group to fleece the Tea Partiers.
"Republican leaders expected to be affiliated with the group include former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Bush adviser Karl Rove, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, and Republican donor Fred Malek.
A House leadership aide told Washington Wire today that Rob Collins, a political operative and senior aide to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, is leaving Capitol Hill to be the executive director of the 501(c)4."
I'd love if the Tea Party folks would just say no, but you know these power-hungry fruitcakes are going to suck big bucks out of the anti-government movement and funnel it to leviathan-government Republicans, mostly themselves, just like they always do.

This is important insight into Obama from author of Obamanomics.
"NB: It's very hard to reconcile what the president has done with his rhetoric during the campaign, and even his rhetoric now, he was stumping for Coakley, and he's talking about how 'we don't need another big business senator in Washington'. The way you describe it, Obamanomics is a necessary consequence of Obama's agenda, not necessarily how he would have set out to accomplish that agenda.

CARNEY: Well, let me put it this way. What I'm not saying, and I write this explicitly in the book, what I'm not saying is that Obama is bought and paid for by special interests. You could look at all the money he got from Wall Street and the drug makers and look at how the drug makers benefit from health care reform and Obama likes all the bailouts and say, okay he was bought and paid for, but that's reading into his heart and mind and that’s just not something you can do from available evidence is know what his actual intentions are.

I’d say there are two reasons why Obama ends up teaming up with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Pfizer. The first is tactical necessity. He needs allies in his efforts to make these broad changes, whether it’s Wall Street, health care, the environment, etcetera.

The second is the economic laws that I was discussing earlier. Big government will inevitably benefit big business. A caveat there: a giant communist steamroller will crush big business. A single payer plan will crush big business. But the big government of the sort Obama is willing to do, a left of center big government, that will inevitably help big business. So you can even imagine Obama believed he was going to run the special interests out of town, and then he starts erecting his, you know, his health care reform, his cap and trade, and all of a sudden the big businesses come flocking going 'we love it! tweak this, tweak that, and we'll make profit.' And he might have been a bit surprised, but I don't think so considering that he raised more money form Wall Street than any candidate ever, he raised more money from the drug industry, from the health insurance industry, and even from the oil industry, than any candidate ever. I don't think he was surprised by the big business embrace of his agenda."

A lot of people are missing this. Obama's leftist supporters think he's sold out to big business. Even many libertarians and conservatives think that. It isn't true. Obama recognizes the political reality that he needs big business on board in order to dramatically increase the burden of government to collapse our economy and spark a Marxist revolution as quickly as possible. If Obama tried to outright seize those businesses today, he'd never succeed, he would be outed as a Marxist, and his presidency would be over. He has to create the bigger crisis, the next dip in the recession he's worked so hard to create, and he has to successfully blame the "free market" in order for the people to allow him to seize those companies. He has to do this in steps, and he's well on his way. Big businesses are Obama's useful idiots, supporting his agenda for short term gain without seeing the ultimate conclusion which runs over them like a steamroller."My broader point is, Obama is GE's whole story; they are the for-profit arm of the Obama administration. Obama says embryonic stem cells, GE starts an embryonic stem cell line. Obama says high-speed rail and freight trains, GE goes ahead and hires Linda Daschle to be their lobbyist in that. Obama says health care reform, GE launches a line of health care imaging, MRI-type things. Obama says global warming, GE is all over that creating greenhouse gas offsets already, something that only gets a real value once cap and trade passes. And GE spends more on lobbying than any company in America. When you put that all together, you see the success of Barack Obama is the success of General Electric, so that's where the conflict of interest is just utterly glaring."This is a great interview. I'm going to buy this book.

Both AP and Cato find Obama failed to present the facts in his State of the Union speech.

The Democrat meltdown continues as SEIU president calls Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman terrorists for not supporting union card check.

It looks like the Nashville Tea Party Convention is collapsing because of fears it's a scam.

George Will summarizes Obama's position based on his State of the Union.

"Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington shouldconscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc."
Good one.

MEDIA:

Chris Mathews said he forgot Obama was black during the State of the Union. Democrats can never be colorblind. It's like they're genetically programmed for bigotry and they feel guilty about it so they overcompensate by becoming harmfully patronizing.

MISC:

The Constitution, replacing the Articles of Confederation, was the first big power grab by the political elites.
"Compared to the overtaxed, overregulated society that is America today, the America of the 19th century was one of astounding liberty and prosperity. However, even America after 1787 had much more government than America in its first decade. We are taught that this was a grave problem and that the Constitution was necessary to avoid imminent destruction from any number of horrors, including invasion by a foreign power, civil war, or economic upheaval as a result of protectionism by the states. We accept these assertions as facts because of the reverence we hold for the founders of our country. However, how different was the atmosphere surrounding the Constitutional Convention from that surrounding the Patriot Act, the TARP bailout, or the current efforts to expand government power in the name of environmentalism? Despite the pure heresy of the idea, there was really no difference at all.
...
Like the Patriot Act, the TARP bill, and the coming Climate Treaty, The U.S Constitution was conceived and drafted in an atmosphere of panic that was created by proponents of big government for the express purpose of using fear to win support for a massive expansion of government power. Also like TARP or the Patriot Act, it was debated in secret by a convention of delegates that were told that unspeakable horrors awaited America if they did not pass it immediately. Like most expansions of government power, its proponents did not get everything that they hoped for, but they got a lot more power than they had. Most importantly, the next debate over the size and scope of government started from there. The seeds of America’s multi-trillion dollar welfare-warfare state really lie in this seminal expansion of government power."
Government always uses crises, real or fabricated, to grab power.

Jeff Tucker teases us about Robert Murphy's new introduction to economics for high school students called Lessons for the Young Economist. This should be a great intro for everybody.

Next generation is skeptical of big-government and big-business. That's great news. I hope it isn't too late.

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