Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Run Away, Run Away!

Clare 'Bear' McKaskill (D, Mo) is not going to the Democrat convention.  She's in serious trouble in Missouri.  And being seen anywhere near The One will just make it worse.

Missouri used to be a 'swing' state.  BHO has turned it into a Red state.  For which I am truly grateful.

Thursday, June 07, 2012

The best argument against Obamanomics

From the Estonian Finance Minister:
"We cannot solve our poverty . . . by borrowing money and buying ourselves expensive things."

One more reason I love Texas


85 Mile Per Hour Speed Limit Seen on State Highway 130

Toll road two thirds completed runs from I-10 east of San Antonio to Georgetown, north of Austin



Read more: http://radio.woai.com/cc-common/mainheadlines3.html?feed=119078&article=10180726#ixzz1x8PHqHR6

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Assassination as a regular element of foreign policy

Feel the change!



THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D SEE THINGS LIKE THIS IN THE NATION. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Assassin-in-Chief in the Oval Office. “Assassination as a way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.”

The Power of Price

If you want a market to produce better products and falling costs it needs to have real prices.  It is this lack of real prices that cause education, government and healthcare to be so expensive and broken.  The first goal of any policy should be to reintroduce as much real price signalling at the point of consumption.


As resource economist Julian Simon taught us years ago, we never have, and never will, run out of scarce resources like oil because as a resource becomes more scarce, its price will rise, which will set in motion a series of actions that will counteract the scarcity.  For example, higher prices for oil will increase the incentives to: a) find more oil, b) conserve on the use of oil, and c) find more substitutes.  And that's exactly what's happened recently in response to higher oil prices - domestic crude oil production reached a 14-year high in March, and the share of rigs drilling for oil (vs. natural gas) set a new record high of 70% last week.  

And now an LA Times article today highlights how companies are making efforts to find substitutes for high-priced oil, here are some examples from the article:

1. Ford has eliminated 5 million pounds of petroleum annually by using soybean-based cushions in all of its North American vehicles. The company also got rid of an additional 300,000 pounds of oil-based resins a year by making door bolsters out of kenaf, a tropical plant in the cotton family.

2. BioSolar of Santa Clarita, Calif., dealt every day with the fact that solar modules are typically made with a glass front, an aluminum frame and a back sheet made out of a petroleum-based plastic or polymer.

"We saw where the price of petroleum was going," BioSolar CEO David Lee said. "We're not economists, but we knew that the price of oil was going to keep going up. The cost of photovoltaic cell manufacturing was going to skyrocket." BioSolar has changed its process to instead use castor beans.

3. Los Angeles businessman Neal Harris once relied on beads made from a petroleum-based polymer to hold fragrances for his company's products. Harris' company, Scent-Events, sells fragrances as a marketing tool to enhance movie premieres, concerts, parties and products. This year, he'll use ceramic beads 95 percent of the time. "It's saving us money, and we no longer have to keep track of oil prices," Harris said.

4. In March, McDonald's began a trial of double-walled paper hot-drink cups in 2,000 restaurants, in place of polystyrene containers, which start out as petroleum. 

5. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are becoming bioplastics bottlers.

As Daniel Yergin, energy consultant and Pulitzer Prize author of a book on the history of the oil industry, told the LA Times, "Now there are accelerating efforts to squeeze oil out and find ways to substitute for it. That is the power of price."

Related: Duke economist and blogger Mike Munger explains here why "peak oil" is "peak idiocy" and why "Of all the idiotic things that people believe, the whole "peak oil" thing has to be right up there."

So remind me again, why was Scooter Libby imprisoned?

I guess because he worked for Dick Cheney.  In the corporatist/fascist world the laws apply to you based upon what group you belong to.  And Scooter was an enemy.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama Leaks Risk National Security For Political Gain.

The pattern of national security leaks under this administration and its political exploitation of what should be secret has even liberal media flagship CNN wondering if “President Barack Obama’s administration can keep a secret — or in some cases even wants to.”

With a collapsing economy, rampant joblessness and mushrooming debt, foreign policy seemingly is the only place Obama can boast of any accomplishments.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Boastful Babbling A Gift To Our Foes.

That's because Bill Clinton doesn't want to see the Democratic Party destroyed

And Chicagoization of the Democrats guarantees it's destruction.  Except in a handful of places like...Chicago.  It sure seems to be happening in Missouri.

HMM: “Bill Clinton Does Not Want Barack Obama to Win.”

"Men can't be alone in the children's section"

The criminalization of men marches onward.  You know that if you drive us out, society collapses, don't  you?

Man ejected from children's section of Barnes and Noble store because men can't be in there alone.

Public employee unions are dying - killed by their own greed

Up to now it has been private sector unions that have collapsed.  But with the multi-year financial crisis and the discovery that public workers are overpaid and protected, the public is now tiring of the public sector unions.  Even teachers.  The times they are a changing:

TEACHERS’ UNIONS HAVE A POPULARITY PROBLEM: Only 22% of Americans think unions have a positive effect on schools.

However Wisconsin’s recall election turns out on Tuesday, teachers unions already appear to be losing a larger political fight—in public opinion. In our latest annual national survey, we found that the share of the public with a positive view of union impact on local schools has dropped by seven percentage points in the past year. Among teachers, the decline was an even more remarkable 16 points. . . .

The survey’s most striking finding comes from its nationally representative sample of teachers. Whereas 58% of teachers took a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43% do in 2012. The number of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled to 32% from 17% last year. Perhaps this helps explain why, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, top officials of the National Education Association are reporting a decline of 150,000 members over the past two years and project that they will lose 200,000 more members by 2014, as several states have recently passed laws ending the automatic deduction of union dues from teachers’ paychecks.

Well, after the behavior of teachers in Wisconsin, it’s easy to see why.

Monday, June 04, 2012

Commerce considering tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels

Another example of enviro fascism.  We are told that 'global warming' is the most important issue of the generation and that 'energy prices will need to rise'.  Yet when the chips are down, the Obami are supporting the people who are part of their ruling coalition.  Even as it makes it much harder to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As it is with windmills and raptors, environmentalism is only important if it gives the ruling coalition more power.  Which is corporatism - which is just another word for domestic fascism.


  • Commerce Department's consideration of a 31 percent tariff on solar panel imports — to help US manufacturers compete with China — could drive prices up for consumers and ultimately result in job losses.


    They don't believe any of this crap, they just want money and power.

    Despicable.

The capital strike goes on and on and on and on and on....

Unemployment up to 8.2% and growth down to 1.7%.

We hope for a change......

Now the salt hysterics are proved wrong

Fat, booze, global cooling, global warming, malthusian famine and now salt - there's no end to the 'expert' advice that we are fed that turns out to be bogus.  Yet our brilliant statists continue to claim that they have the expertise, and just the doggone innate and superior goodness to save us from ourselves. If only we would give them more coercive power and money.

So:  How do you know what you know?


SOMEBODY TELL MIKE BLOOMBERG: Gary Taubes: Salt, We Misjudged You. “With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death. Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a ‘safe upper limit’ is likely to do more harm than good. . . . Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives.” Of course they do.

Friday, June 01, 2012

They technical word is Carterization

Pete Wehner states the obvious:  Obama is overwhelmed by events and has absolutely no idea what to do.  He is a modern Jimmy Carter.

It’s difficult to overstate just how depressing May’s job report is – and how much damage it will inflict on President Obama’s chances for re-election.

It’s not simply that the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 percent to 8.2 percent, or that it’s remained above 8 percent for 40 consecutive months, or that in May we gained less than 70,000 new jobs. Nor is it simply the fact that in May the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) increased from 5.1 million to 5.4 million. Or that the average work week fell to 34.4 hours. Or that, as John points out, March and April’s jobs reports were revised downward. Or that in May, stocks suffered through their worst month in two years.

All of this matters quite a lot, of course. But what’s particularly injurious to the president’s re-election prospects is that May was the worst economic month in what is turning out to be a very bad economic year. The trajectory of events is down, not up. The economy is slowing down. Consumer confidence is dropping. Virtually every economic indicator is getting worse, not better.

This would be very troubling news for any incumbent president – but for one who has virtually no achievements he can point to with pride, it is triply damaging. Whatever fault one wants to ascribe to Obama’s predecessor, and whatever excuses the president can dream up, what is now beyond any reasonable dispute is that Obama has no clue how to fix things. That is not a political judgment; it’s an empirical one.

Barack Obama may be well-intentioned. He may be a fine father. He may have an excellent jump shot. And he may be a first-rate community organizer. But as president, he is simply — and by now almost undeniably — overmatched by events. By Obama’s own standards – by what he said and by what he promised — he is a failure.
For Obama, that is a politically lethal conclusion for a majority of the American people to come to. They were well on their way to arriving at this conclusion before today. They’re now further along than they were. And soon, very soon, there will be no way to undo it.

Reification and Reactionaries

Now that left institutions are ascendant, they are the reactionaries.  Mickey Kaus explains reification and the intellectual incoherence of the imitable E.J. Dionne.  It's the Brezhnev doctrine in birkenstocks.

MICKEY KAUS: Shorter E.J. Dionne: The Wagner Act exists. Therefore it must always exist. “Marxists would call this ‘reification’-–the attribution of a false permanency to what are in fact only transient, man-made institutions (like the organizations created by the Wagner Act). Back in the ’60s, when Dionne went to college, leftish types fought reification. The point was to change the system, after all, not to play games within it–-by The Man’s rules! But reification has now become the routine basis for Democratic arguments against Republican reform. . . . Dionne says Walker insidiously used ‘incumbency’ to produce these changes. ‘Incumbency’ in this case means a law was passed by a democratically elected legislature (incumbents all) and signed by a democratically elected incumbent governor.”

Obama to do six fundraisers in one day

Well at least there's one thing he's good at....and while he's fundraising he can't do any other damage.  Can he?  HT Instapundit

Related: Incredible: In Wake of Jobs Disaster, Obama Departs for Six Fundraisers.