Destructive flailing department

The Obami are thinking of tossing hundreds of billions of business tax breaks (aka fiddles) into the mix in a desperate attempt to goose the economy and save their bacon.

Breaking late Thursday was this Bizarro-World news: "With less than two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks -- potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars -- to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations. Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research and development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States."

So the Obami have prolonged the recession by screwing with every knob and switch for the economy that they can reach.  Now they've decided that the answer to the chaos they've caused is to get a really tall ladder and screw with all the knobs and levers that they couldn't reach.

Business needs simple stable rules so that it can make long term plans.  Until it believes it has got them they (and their employees and shareholders) are going to sit on their hands.

Having a top shelf Law Degree with honors really is no guarantee of wisdom is it?

"Bushy come back!....

....any kind of fool could see that we were wrong and we just can't live without you!"

With apologies to Player.

Mosque-itos in their natural environment

"Moderate" Islam asks to be part of our gorgeous mosaic without being required to adhere to its basic moral precepts.  They get the 'Honor thy God' above all else bit.  They flop on the 'treat others as yourself'.  America has demonstrated that we can integrate people who disdain the first Great Commandment, we now are undertaking an experiment to determine if we can sustain a society with significant elements that won't even acknowledge the second.  Here's an example of our "Mosque moderates" ignoring GC No 2:  It seems they won't condemn terrorists when they murder Israelis.

It's going to end in tears.


H/T Commentary

John McWhorter: Instead of Marching, End the war on drugs

The war on drugs is a civil war against the poor and black in our society.  It is uncivilized and tears at the heart of our nation:  its young men.  John McWhorter, a leading black conservative makes sense.  Listen to him.  H/T Carpe Deim
Every time I see one of these marches or forums covered as significant, what occurs to me is that there is one thing we should all be focused on instead. It is, of all things, the War on Drugs. The most meaningfully pro-black policy today would be a white-hot commitment to ending its idiocy.

1. The War on Drugs destroys black families. It has become a norm for black children to grow up with their fathers in prison and barely knowing them. Data are unanimous in showing that children, especially poor ones, do better with two parents. We see the young black man in a do-rag pushing a baby carriage as a welcome sight rather than as a norm. That must stop.

2. The War on Drugs discourages young black men from seeking legal employment. Because the drugs' illegality keeps their price high, there are high salaries to be made in selling them -- not at first as a low-level runner, but potentially as one rises in the hierarchy. This makes selling drugs a standing alternative to legal employment, especially if one has a poor education.

3. The War on Drugs brings firearms into black lives. Policing turf for drug sales entails guns, which then become tools for maintenance of the pecking order, including settling petty scores. A striking difference between surveys of black ghettos before the War on Drugs and today is how common guns have become.

Marches don't hurt, but they are a misdirection of energy. And not from an equally empty war on racism in the Tea Party or the n-word. Black uplift in 2010 should be about a war on the War on Drugs -- after the success of which, I can guarantee you, slowly but surely, the teens would start pulling up their pants."

Man bites dog, Brooks likes Beck

Again, you just can't make this stuff up.  David Brooks talking to Gail Collins in the NYT.   H/T Commentary

I have to confess I really enjoyed it. I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights. … There, at Saturday’s rally, were the most conservative people in the country, lauding Martin Luther King Jr. There they were, in the midst of their dismay, lavishly celebrating the basic institutions of American government. I have no problem with that.

You can't make this stuff up

MA Governor and Obama prototype Deval Patrick saying on the radio that he wishes American wasn't a free country.  Michael Kinsley:  "A gaffe is when a politican accidentally tells the truth."  Hat Tip Commentary.

The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, appeared on a Boston radio show and was asked about the right of Glenn Beck and the hundreds of thousands of attendees at his Lincoln Memorial rally to do what they’ve done: “It’s a free country,” he said, then added almost off-handedly, “I wish it weren’t. but it’s a free country, and  you gotta respect that freedom.” The audio features my friend, Boston talk-show host Michael Graham discussing the matter. (You can skip ahead to the sound bite; it appears at 1:17.) With Patrick unable to reach 40 percent in the polls in his reelection bid (he’s still up 8 points over his Republican rival Charles Baker in part because of a strong third-party candidate), this could be the gaffe of the year. Or it would be, if he were a Republican.

Of course, Patrick doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a free country. He just wishes, somewhere inside him, that it weren’t as free as it is for people he disagrees with. And have you ever noticed that when people use the phrase, “it’s a free country,” they usually use it to complain?

Now this is weird

An ex gonzo deejay who recovered from substance abuse through a Christian conversion has a better handle on the reality that is our culture than our genius Harvard Law educated President.  So the last shall be first and the first shall be last.  Matthew 20:16  More here.

Believe it or not, Glenn Beck gets it.

Whatever else Beck has right or wrong -- and I confess I have never watched or listened to him much -- it seems to me that he is correctly interpreting the present moment. Which is no small matter. And, as indicated by the "Restoring Honor" held before the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday, he might even be correctly responding to it.

What does he get? Beck gets that there is a deeply and urgently felt conviction emerging organically across a broad swath of the American populace that the spectacular economic and political collapses of recent years were made possible -- even inevitable -- by a much longer Great Moral Decline. Americans' commitment to Judeo-Christian principles, secured for most by a belief in biblical authority, long served to fuel the engine and fortify the rails of our government and economy. Yet now, it is feared, that commitment is no longer powerful and pervasive enough to propel the American marketplace and constrain the excesses and abuses in private and public sectors. In the words of Dr. Alveda King: "Our material gains seem to be going the way of our moral losses."

We really aren't a very 'normal' country, are we?  H/T Instapundit

On the Eve of the 2010 Football Season....

....a season pregnant with possibility, fraught with danger and filled with promise.  I have only one thing to say.  One simple concept, profound in it's implications but basic in its motivation.  A perspective driven by a commitment to the truth as I see it, by deep integrity and indeed by a love of that which is lovely.  To wit I speaketh the truth.  Verily I say unto you:

Boomer Sooner.  Go OU.

Alleluia, Amen.

Water around a star

God has made a strange and compelling universe, hasn't He?  H/t Instapundit.

LIFE: Hot Water Around Giant Carbon Star Creates Interstellar Mystery. “Hot water discovered around a giant carbon star requires a new theory for the chemistry around stars to be explained. The new theory could significantly alter our understanding of what materials exist in interstellar space, and where water and life could exist in the universe.”

Caddell: "We may be at a prerevolutionary moment"....W.O.W.

Caddell on the country's mood.  As they say, read the whole thing.

In 1979, as Carter’s poll numbers slid south amidst a sagging economy, Caddell drafted a memo to the president urging him to recognize that the nation was “deep in crisis.” Gazing upon today’s electoral landscape, Caddell paints an even bleaker picture. “We may be at a pre-revolutionary moment,” he says, unsmiling. “Everything is in motion.” This November, he predicts, “will be more of a national referendum than any [midterm election] since Watergate.”

Who knows?  But one thing is sure:  Caddell knows his Democrat disasters.

Okay, so we know why evil exists, why does good?

Mike Potemra and Dostoevsky brilliantly call the question in NRO:

In a forthcoming book of public letters exchanged by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq, I ran across this quote from The Brothers Karamazov: “People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

We often discuss the mystery of evil; this comment from Dostoevsky challenges us to investigate the even more profound mystery of good. I don’t think the author was indulging in our own age’s cloying romanticization of childhood; I think he was pointing to the striking fact that somewhere, deep in our memories, almost at the vanishing point, there is an image of things being as they should be. Examine the human condition — fear, hatred, envy, struggle, war, heartbreak, disease, death — and you will soon realize how unusual and counterintuitive this sense of the existence of good really is.  And yet, even in the condition the Calvinists unflinchingly describe as Total Depravity — the capital T in the Reformed TULIP — this sense persists.

It is the source of religion and love, and of the idea that transcending our state of war is not impossible.

Lighten up Francis

Sergeant Hulka was right:  our name is Francis and we need to lighten up.  Jimmy Geraghty keeps talking sense:

All right, I just offered a version of an argument I hate hearing from the left, which is "[Maniac/hated figure X] believes this idea, thus every adherent of this idea, despite all evidence, appearances and past behavior, shares all of the worst traits of that maniac/hated figure X." It's as if Hitler's defining characteristic was his vegetarianism.

I am sure that of the 20some to 30some percent of Americans who support the construction of the mosque, that there are probably . . . dozens and dozens of folks who are not ticking time bombs waiting to explode in a rage. Maybe even a hundred!

We live in an era where prominent figures on both sides of the aisle spend a lot of time demonizing the rank-and-file of the other side. (Er, like I just did for the sake of a cheap laugh.) If you start to believe that the other side has no scruples, that they lie, cheat, and steal every day in the pursuit of power, that their motives are malicious and they seek to impose a vision of this country that would tear apart the national characteristics that you love best and transform it into some twisted, ideological dystopia . . . well then, the idea that some of their grassroots might blow off steam by hacking away at a hack doesn't seem so farfetched. I'm not saying you should have these cynical thoughts about the other side; I'm just saying I understand where they come from. We're gradually being conditioned to expect the worst from the opposition; when a few facts point to a preconceived narrative, we fill in the blanks ourselves. It's bad enough when you or I do it. But when that mentality becomes standard operating procedure for large swaths of the mainstream media, nobody's inclined to give the opposition the benefit of the doubt. 

The Gathering Storm

Hat tip Al Colby.

Sulu: Arm Phasers!

US Military has a successful laser weapon test.  Shoots down a drone!   Smokin!  Check it out here.  Hat tip Albertodude.

This is a fascinating argument

Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz (great blog btw) makes a fascinating assertion about Glen Beck's objective in DC last weekend.  I reprint it in full because it is so damn interesting.  But here's the money point:  He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence
I love that:  nuking out their moral foundations....wild.  Read the whole thing!

The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.

Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.

Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.

See, simple.

Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.

As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.

God bless America.

 

They're Ba-ack! Return of the Reagan Democrats

Union bosses on their employees' experiences when campaigning for Democrats.

“When our canvassers call on our members on their doorsteps, they hear Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly in the background,” says Dan Heck, who heads a massive union-sponsored program in Ohio devoted to persuading its members to vote this November for candidates who would mightily displease Beck and O’Reilly.

H/T Instapundit

Another Drug Raid Gone Bad

Remember:  the police are not your friends.  They are just bureaucrats with guns.  From Reason.

Two years ago the Chesapeake, Virginia, police made some decisions that led to an officer’s death, then tried to convict a scapegoat of capital murder. In April, following an outcry, the police department announced a change in how it will conduct drug raids. But it wasn’t the change you might have expected.

In January 2008 Chesapeake cops raided the home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick. Days earlier, an informant had broken into Frederick’s house. He spotted several marijuana plants and stole some of them, giving police the probable cause they needed to obtain a search warrant. During the raid, police put a battering ram through part of Frederick’s door. Frederick says he awoke, saw someone breaking into his home, remembered the burglary of several days earlier, panicked, and fired his gun through the broken door. His bullet struck and killed one of the police officers, Det. Jarrod Shivers.

Police and prosecutors claimed that the cops announced themselves and that Frederick killed Shivers intentionally. The state sought to convict him of capital murder. A year later, Frederick was convicted of manslaughter instead and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The case spurred a flurry of discussion in the Chesapeake-Hampton Roads area about the use of informants and of SWAT-like forced-entry tactics to serve marijuana warrants. Readers’ comments on a local newspaper’s website, initially pro-police, soured against the department as details about the shoddy investigation came to light. The police, for example, had done almost no investigation to corroborate their informant’s tip.

So what did the Chesapeake Police Department announce in April? It won’t be reconsidering its policy of sending cops on volatile, forced-entry raids into the homes of low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. Nor will it change the way its narcotics officers deal with drug informants. Instead, the department announced, Chesapeake narcotics officers will be using a new and improved battering ram.   

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Another RINO bites the dust

It's official:  Miller beats Murkowski in Alaska.  Lets see:

Murkowski, RINO, AK
Bennett, RINO, UT
Specter, RINO turned traitor, PA
McCain would have been on this list had Heyward not turned out to be a total twerp.

Next!

All it takes is confidence: India Grows 8.8%

And all confidence takes is leadership.  H/T Carpe Deim
Financial Times (free subscription required) -- "India’s economy grew a brisk 8.8 per cent from April to June, its fastest pace in two-and-a-half years, highlighting the strength of India’s economic recovery despite high inflation now acting as a drag on consumer spending.

Growth during the first quarter of India’s April to March financial year accelerated from the 8.6 per cent last quarter, driven by robust manufacturing and services growth, and a pick-up in farm production."

Another brick in an increasingly impenetrable wall

Young single women now make significantly more than young men.  This is going to turn out so well. H/T Carpe Deim
From Time Magazine:

"According to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., young women's median full-time salaries are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making around 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropoles. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small cities like Raleigh Durham, N.C., Charlotte, N.C., (both 14% more) and Jacksonville, Florida (6%). 

Here's the slightly deflating caveat: this reverse gender gap, as it's known, applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities."

MP: In other words, if you control for all of the important variables that contribute to wage differentials (age, marital status, having children, etc.), i.e. impose ceteris paribus conditions, there is no evidence of gender discrimnation, and either there is no statistically significant wage gap, or now there's a wage gap in favor of women. 

Memories.....

....may be beautiful but then..misty watercolored memories of the way we were.....

With absolutely no apologies to Barabara "America is Evil" Streisand.  H/T Instapundit

We’ll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there’s one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/bad-news-for-democrats-ohio-voters-long-for-bush-101901978.html#ixzz0yIsj4pn1

Fascist is as Fascist Does Education Style

How much did we pay to have the educrats go astroturfing?

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

The cause for concern, though, doesn’t end there. According to the Examiner, an Education Department spokeswoman tried to gloss over the boss’s out-of-bounds play by suggesting that Sharpton’s rally was but a mere “back-to-school event.” Sound familiar?

Charlie Munger Deconstructed

Ben Knoll sent me Charlie Munger quips from the Wesco annual meeting and asked me to comment.  Why?  I have no earthly idea, perhaps masochism on his part so I shall manfully comply.

So about Charlie:  Warren Buffet's long time confidant, major domo and lovable knucklehead side kick, while Charlie is not the Sage, he is perhaps the Oregano of Omaha.  And like Warren, the financial markets hang on and parse every grunt, gurgle or yelp that issues from this Spice Boy's mouth, looking for glimpses of the famed BH investing genius.  So how 'genius' are the grunts?

I've set up four assessment categories:  Cliche of the Ages, Deep Insight, Pander-Buffet, and Senility Watch.

On how serious our economic problems are: "I think it's deadly serious. You can never tell what's going to happen when people get as disappointed as they are now. "  I presume he is talking about the 'Tea Party', implying that a movement of people seeking to reduce the scope and scale of government and bring its budgets back in balance.  Clearly seeking to score points with our panicked press - Pander Buffet

On when we'll see significant economic improvement: "Japan provides a very interesting and threatening example of this type [of] problem. Japan cut interest rates to zero and pumped in all kinds of stimulus through deficit spending, and the result was stasis for 10 years. If that happened in America, it would be terrible. Whether it will happen or not, I don't know. It would be very awkward to go 10 years with zero economic growth."  He recycles the Japanese example, states an obvious truth, doesn't point out the immense differences between Japan's closed society and our open one or the fact that Japan free rides on our economic order while if we crap out all bets are off.  Cliche of the Ages.

On what caused the financial crisis: "It's been a lollapalooza effect -- a confluence of causes pushing in the same direction. Three main areas I'd say got us to where we are:

• Abusive practices in consumer credit. Banks did things because their competitors were doing them and wanted to keep up. This is crazy. There are times when you should let your competition do things and not want to follow. A lot of consumer lending was venal. It was bad morality that led to a horrible mess in due cause.  Bad Morality, Venal.  Now those are technical phrases.  Is le Munger suggesting that the quality of morality somehow changed one day?  People became more venal, less moral?  Or is he simply pointing out the nature of the business cycle?  Sounds like CNN boiler plate to me.  Insight free zone.  Cliche of the Ages.
• Wall Street. Wall Street found every which way to make money short of robbery. A lot of it was a bunch of sleazy crooks, but if it worked, no one cares.  And what else is new?  Mr. Oregano:  you were asked to explain causes of the flood and then immediately begin declaiming on average annual rainfall.  Please provide substance, sir.  Cliche of the Ages.
• Poor regulatory apparatus. Democrats wanted to give things to poor people, thinking it was pro-social activity. They urged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make really dumb loans. Some of it was just ghastly. And the Republicans overdosed on Ayn Rand. It was like they wanted legalized armed robbery. They wanted to create an ethos simply built on 'buyer beware,' which is all wrong."  Fannie and Freddie don't make loans, they buy and bundle them.  Congress told them to buy higher risk loans.  This is correct.  It is perhaps a semi insight.  To argue that the Republicans 'overdosed' on Ayn Rand is risible on its face.  After all, the most intrusive piece of financial regulation promulgated to date (SARBOX - the regulation to end all fraud) was promulgated on their watch.  This is a two fer:  Pander Buffet and Senility Watch.

On free market financial systems: "People really thought that giving a predatory class of people the ability to do whatever they wanted was free market enterprise. It wasn't. It was legalized armed robbery. And it was incredibly stupid."  To argue that a free market is "giving a class of people the ability to do whatever they want" is perhaps forgivable hyperbole.  Arguing that the US financial system was a 'free market' system is Cliche, Pander and Senility all in one.  Isn't BH a part of this financial system and didn't  the other Spice Boy just defend the Goldies, the Capo di Tutti of the system in public?  Get your story straight boys.

On accounting standards: "Anyone with an engineering frame of mind will look at [accounting standards] and want to throw up in the aisle. And go ahead if you want to. It will be a memorable moment for all of us."  Yep, FASB is driven by legal rule making driven by what the SEC wants.  International standards are far looser and more flexible, focused not on rules but economic substance.  We could use the standards they have in London, but our Regulators won't let us.  Cliche garnished with insight but given everything he's said above, also a pander.

On bailing out the banks: "We had to save these people whether we wanted to or not. And [the Treasury and Federal Reserve] did a fantastic job."  Clear sick making pander.  So how many billions of your money did the Feds save Mr. Oregano?

On regulation: "Banks that are 'too big to fail' shouldn't be allowed to be anything but boring. And that's how it used to be. Investment banking used to be a consulting business. It was extremely boring. The partners didn't make nearly the kind of money they do today. They were very conservative businesses.

He's right that I banks used to be something else, primarily services driven.  But investment houses used to be something else too:  the notion of investors (speculators in left parlance) could end up worth upwards of a 100 billion dollars is rather new too.  

There's no reason to have a system where every young man has $8 billion to play with and buy whatever he wants. It's incredibly stupid. It's absolutely crazy. If I were in charge, I'd take away everything from banks that wasn't boring. Completely shut down [credit default swaps] 100%. What's the harm in this? The world worked just fine without them. We don't need an economy that resembles a vast poker tournament."

I think young man for Charlie means 48.  The world also worked fine without electric lights and with horses shitting in the streets but I don't want to talk about Charlie's childhood.  The guy that used to run McKinsey's (can't remember his name, sorry) banking practice argued for plain vanilla financial transaction houses that provided nothing more than payment services and were not allowed to lever money.  This is a wise idea.  I will give Charlie an Insight star.  However the argument that we should shut down CDS is a charming pander from a guy that owns insurance companies that essentially do the same sorts of things.  He's arguing to shut down the competition.  Clearly a "Reverse Insight/Reverse Senility" star.  BH shareholders should be proud of their Charlie.

On President Obama reining in Wall Street: "I admire Obama for wanting to reduce the power of New York City. It would have a constricting effect on the economy at first, but we need it."  Senility, pure and simple because reducing the influence of New York by radically increasing the power of Washington is simply driving deeper into an insane and poisonous swamp.

On Wall Street pay: "A man does not deserve huge amounts of pay for creating tiny spreads on huge amounts of money. Any idiot can do it. And, as a matter of fact, many idiots do do it."  A man does not deserve tens of billions of dollars for using other people's money to buy and hold companies for decades.  Any idiot can do it.  Clearly not true in either case.  Cliche.

On Wells Fargo's credit quality: "Warren [Buffett] and I think Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) is a better credit than most because of its low cost of capital."  Credit quality usually doesn't have anything to do with the originator's cost of capital, but I'll attributethat to the senility of the journalist.

On current stock prices: "Our best years were recession years. If you wait for the recovery, it's too late. Am I willing to invest long-term money at these prices? Sure. I'd invest long-term money in Wells Fargo. I'd invest long-term money in Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO). I don't know if it's right or not [in the short term] but you're all a bunch of cultists and you're entitled to hear my opinion."  Home spun insight.

On what to expect from the stock market: "To expect a lot is irrational. You're likely to be happier and gain felicity by aiming low."  Home spun insight.

On how to avoid 50% losses in the future: "It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go."  Can the late in the Interview Charlie go up and talk some sense into the early in the interview Charlie?  HSI.

On Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: "He's a very able person and will do a good job. The job is terribly constrained by politics. This is why I've never had any interest in government. Considering what he's facing, he's doing a great job."  In making sure that BH investments stayed whole.  If a bureaucrat made me a kajillion dollars I'd praise him to high heaven too regardless of his competence.  To do otherwise would be churlish and the Spice boys aren't churls.

On how inflation will impact investing: "I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum wage, so I've seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my lifetime. Did it ruin the investment climate? I think not."  HSI, however he isn't speaking to hyperinflation.

On investing in Goldman Sachs even as he and Buffett scolded Wall Street: "We invested in Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) because we felt their merits outweighed their defects. That was it. We don't expect perfection from anyone."  What? You mean the venal robbers with a license to steal he denounced to high heaven a few moments ago?  Well they're OUR robbers robbing for US so they're ok.  Reverse Cliche and Pander.  Good for shareholders.

On executive leadership: "Some people are more teachable than others. This is also true of dogs, however, so take it as you wish. [The executive level] should be a tough meritocracy. It shouldn't be easy. I look for people I can trust. Hiring people you can't trust is like starting off by dropping a spider in your bosom."  HSI

On AIG: These are sad days at AIG (NYSE: AIG), because they were once regarded as great. The news headlines certainly don't help when you're trying to sell trust. Most of the company has been very unlucky, but this happens when people make dumb decisions."  Yes, this is true.  HSI

On the trade deficit: "Warren [Buffett] is way more pessimistic on this topic than I am. He often talks about China buying up our little pieces of paper [Treasury notes]. I think China has become enormously prosperous by buying our little pieces of paper. It's a huge benefit to them."  HSI

On ethanol: "Ethanol is quite possibly the stupidest thing ever invented by rational people. The ultimate social safety net -- which is a very good idea, by the way -- is cheap food, and ethanol production is destroying this. It was a monstrously stupid idea like I haven't seen before."  Mega Dittos HSI

On cap and trade: "It's an absolutely insane idea. I mean a really, really stupid idea. If everything [global pollution] was contained to one country, it might work. But it isn't. Do they think China will stop polluting and go back to student labor? Of course they won't. It's insane. We're being distracted by stupid things that have been popular in the past."  Mega Dittos HSI, again can late Charlie go back up and talk to early Charlie.  He's hitting his stride.

On General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Ford (NYSE: F) : "If I can cheerfully die, any industry can cheerfully shrink. And they will."  HSI

On stockbrokers: "Most stockbrokers are a disaster waiting to happen. If anyone ever promises you miracles, show them the door."  Home Spun Insight

On adapting to peak oil: "The world will adapt to higher oil prices, because it has to. It won't be the end of the world. Even at $200 a barrel, we'd be fine. People would adapt [mentions smaller cars, electric cars, solar power]. We have an enormous power to adapt."  On adaptation:  HSI, On failing to laugh out loud at the concept of peak oil.  Cliche.

On Berkshire Hathaway's business model: "No one wants to try to copy us because they don't think it would work, and they're probably right. A lot of people think our model is nuts."   No opinion.

Asked whether Berkshire Hathaway will be more valuable in five years: [shrugs ...] "Sure." [crowd erupts with laughter.]  Aw shucks.

On corporate lawyers: "Law has become far too prosperous. It's way overrated. The cost is too high and the education [of lawyers] is wildly imperfect."  Mega Insight.

On newspapers: "Ordinary newspapers will come to perish. The microeconomics are too tough to overcome. It's not a place to invest your money."  HSI

On communism: "China has communist builders and communist engineers. That's my kind of communism."  Senility.  China's Commie builders and engineers are at the The Gorges fiasco, the capitalist ones are building China.  Either that or he is making a play on words then it is a clever insight.  Crazy like an Oregano Fox.

On books he'd recommend: "Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is a terrific book. It guides reason very well. By the way, I tend not to read self-help investment books. They're like soap operas: I know all the plots."

Anything by the great Hairball (have you seen a picture of Gladwell?  Yikes!) is a good choice. Home Spun Insight.