Saturday, February 28, 2009

Obama Declares War On Investors, Entrepreneurs, Businesses, And More

Larry Kudlow at NRO:

"Let me be very clear on the economics of President Obama’s address to Congress and budget. He is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds. That is the meaning of his anti-growth tax-hike proposals, which make absolutely no sense at all — either for this recession or from the standpoint of expanding our economy’s long-run potential to grow.

Raising the marginal tax rate on successful earners, capital, dividends, and all the private funds is a function of Obama’s left-wing social vision, and a repudiation of his economic-recovery statements. Ditto for his sweeping government-planning-and-spending program, which will wind up raising federal outlays as a share of GDP to at least 30 percent, if not more, over the next ten years.

This is nearly double the government-spending low-point reached during the late 1990s by the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton administration. While not quite as high as spending levels in Western Europe, we regrettably will be gaining on this statist-planning approach.

Study after study over the past several decades has shown how countries that spend more produce less, while nations that tax less produce more. Obama is doing it wrong on both counts."

Hey - These Are The Folks I Use!


Shredding The Constitution Pelosi Style

From TigerHawk:

"With the ridiculous granting of a vote to the District of Columbia's representative in the House, let us not hear any more about the Bushies "shredding the Constitution." If it is lawful to do this by statute, then why not just decide that Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam should each get a seat or two? Indeed, why stop there? Why not give Americans living in France their own seat? What about each Indian Tribe? In fact, what does geography have to do with it? I think we need to give each disadvantaged minority group their own seat, broken down by skin pigmentation, accent, quantity of vowels in last name, and type of mental and physical handicap. Oh, and each NFL city should have its own representative, and each college football team that gets screwed because we do not have a post-season playoff system in lieu of the BCS. And why not give General Motors and Chrysler their own actual vote, instead of making them grovel for the votes of others? And school teachers. Don't forget them.

Goddamn. What a bunch of clowns."

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Monday, February 23, 2009

The 10th Amendment In Action

Human Events:

"Every conservative should relish the call for the federal government to “cease and desist all mandates that are beyond the scope of [its] constitutionally delegated powers.” In this way, we honor the Constitution that enumerates a number of our liberties yet also guarantees us other liberties that are neither enumerated nor denied in the document.

Liberals don’t respect the Constitution, and liberals in Congress don’t hesitate to propose legislation that would clearly violate it. The current push to give Washington, D.C. a voting representative in the House of Representatives is a good example; even liberal Prof. Jonathan Turley told a Congressional hearing that this bill is patently unconstitutional. But they press on with it.

Our Constitutional system of checks and balances is always thought of as enabling two of the three branches of the federal government to keep the third within its constitutional bounds. But there is a fourth check, the states, which also have a Constitutional function. It is to them this burden now falls. The states can choose between allowing the federal government to impose untenable conditions on them if they accept the stimulus money, or to reject it.

These eleven states have the right to reject the stimulus plan. And they must.

There is no other option. For this federal expansion will not stop unless we stand in its way with courage in our hearts and the Constitution in our hands."

Sunday, February 22, 2009

I Knew The Beatles Were Great, But...

CWCID: Sippican Cottage

Quote Of The Day

Tax Increases and the Deficit.......
California wants to start taxing marijuana sales, Oregon wants to increase the tax on beer, while New York wants to tax Internet porn.You know what this means? By the end of spring break, this whole thing could be paid for.

-Theo Spark

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Obama Tops Jesus In Harris Poll Of "Heros"

You. Just. Can't. Make. This. Stuff. Up.

Apparently a large number of Americans have completely lost their minds. The richest part of this poll is when these maroons explain what makes a hero "heroic":

• “Doing what’s right regardless of personal consequences” (89%);
• “Not giving up until the goal is accomplished” (83%)
• “Doing more than what other people expect of them” (82%)
• “Overcoming adversity” (81%), and
• “Staying level-headed in a crisis” (81%).

These traits are definitely heroic but how they apply to Barack Obama is beyond me.

"I'm From The Government And I'm Here To Help."


Liberal Of The Month

"In some ways Barack Obama is the first president since George Washington to be taking a step down into the oval office. From visionary leader of a giant movement, now he's got an executive position that he has to perform in, in a way, and I think the coverage reflects that,"
- Terry Moran ABC News

The arrogance of the media elites is simply breathtaking.

What A Bummer This Guy Is

From American Digest:

"Soothing's what we'd like a little bit of right now, dude. Not more bring-downs and bummers. You are just not being the mellow dude we thought you'd be in those real sharp suits. Instead, you are harshing the mellow every time you open your mouth.

So just take a break for a bit and let the country catch its breath. Dig it. What ever you think you're doing, it. is. not. helping. It. is. bumming. us. out.

Enough with the endless billion/trillion bills and the fat fear mongering. Enough with the angry school marm lecturing. Enough with the big daddy warnings of stiffer punishment to come if we don't shape up like right now.

Face it, man, every time you talk about saving and creating jobs thousands of people get ejected out of their jobs with a JATO assist from whatever policy you seem to be whipping out at the moment. Every time you speak of the future it gets grimmer.

Lately it seems that all you have to do is glance away from the teleprompter and hesitate and, boom!, there goes another 100 point drop in the Dow. And then, when you find the next sentence and say it, whap! there's goes another 100 points. I'm not sure if the Dow can sink beneath absolute zero, but I'm not curious to find out."

Ear Worm

Friday, February 20, 2009

Monday, February 16, 2009

How Much Is The Spending Bill?

$787 billion is the agreed upon number today, but do you really have any concept of how much money that is? If you spent $1,000,000.00 per day from the birth of Jesus Christ to now you still would not have spent $787 billion.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

The Final Word On The Spending Bill

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress." - John Adams

Welcome To The Land Of Milk And Honey AKA Mama Weer All Crazee Now

The Spending Bill has passed.

It must be time to re-read "The Road To Serfdom".


Friday, February 13, 2009

On The Eve Of Destruction - A Light

"So there you have it: Obama and the Democrats, by ramming the 'stimulus' bill through on a party-line basis and bulldozing Republican opposition, have taken ownership of old-time Big Government liberalism; they have surrendered to Republicans the very issues that divided the GOP and attracted moderate swing voters to the Democratic banner; they have energized and galvanized their opponents; they have discarded the pretense of bipartisanship; and they have, in the end, lashed themselves to the mast of policies that are proven not to work. The only thing the stimulus bill will stimulate is conservatism."
- Baseball Crank

Quote Of The Day

"You get the argument, well, 'this is not a stimulus bill, it's a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? That's the whole point.... No seriously, that's the point."
- President Obama

Thursday, February 12, 2009

News You Can Use

Numbers in the News
MATHEMATICIANS DISCOVER LARGEST NUMBER

PALO ALTO, CA - An international mathematics research team announced today that they had discovered a new integer that surpasses any previously known value "by a totally mindblowing shitload." Project director Yujin Xiao of Stanford University said the theoretical number, dubbed a "stimulus," could lead to breakthroughs in fields as diverse as astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Chicago asphalt contracting.

"Unlike previous large numbers like the Googleplex or the Bazillionty, the Stimulus has no static numerical definition," said Xiao. "It keeps growing and growing, compounding factorially, eating up all zeros in its path. It moves freely across Cartesian dimensions and has the power to make any other number irrational."

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Telling One On Myself

MY LIVING WILL.......

Last night, my friend and I were sitting in the living room and I said to her, 'I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug.'

She got up, unplugged the Computer, and threw out my wine.

She's such a bitch...

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Quote Of The Day

"If cooking is art then baking is magic."
- Country Squire

Stimulis

Friday, February 06, 2009

The Spending Bill Made Simple

I have said before that Charles Krauthammer is one of the few wise men writing about politics today - and this is a perfect example:

The Fierce Urgency of Pork

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 6, 2009

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Be Careful What You Wish For....


The Black Cab Sessions

A friend recently e-mailed me about The Black Cab Sessions. The tag line of this unique project is "One song. One take. One cab." and they have managed to get the likes of Brian Wilson and Richard Thompson to play music in the back seat of their cab. Besides, anyone that films Death Cab For Cutie performing in a cab obviously has a wicked sense of humor.

BDS Withdrawal


Bush Derangement Syndrome Withdrawal will be very painful for some, though I predict George Bush will be blamed for everything for quite sometime to come.