ROGER SIMON: Cantor Rises as Obama Falls.
Plus, from Mickey Kaus, Tremors of Doom on Health Care. We can hope . . . .
Archive for 2009
July 11, 2009
TASER’S extended-range shock shotgun.
HOW TO CLEAN, WAX, AND DETAIL YOUR CAR. These tips are nice, but for me the key is motivation. That was supplied this week by a stack of law-review comments I had to read. Suddenly, the car really needed to be clean. Then there was the suddenly urgent dishwasher-repair . . . .
PROTEST IS PATRIOTIC! demonstrating against Obamacare in San Diego.
REX MURPHY ON THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: “We’ve seen him in action for a bit more than six months. What we can say with confidence, now that we have the evidence of his actions, is that had he run on (a) transforming the U.S. economy by massive federal government intervention, (b) taking an owner’s stake in the automobile industry, (c) transforming the rules of America’s energy economy, (d) instituting a national health-care system – all of these simultaneously and in the centre of a financial meltdown – Barack Obama wouldn’t merely have lost the election, he wouldn’t have got as many votes as gnarly old Ross Perot did in an election long past. . . . Mr. Obama has taken the real crisis of the U.S. (and world) economy and used it as the screen and lever for a massive agenda of transformation, a transformation that calls for expenditures on a scale never before seen in the history of government on this planet.”
REMEMBERING the original G.I. Joe.
CHARLTON HESTON: My cold, dead hands. People called that speech “extremist,” but now the views Heston championed are looking pretty mainstream . . . .
RADIO ADDRESSES: Obama still clearing wreckage; Cantor asks where are the jobs?
WASHINGTON POST: The stumbles that led to an ethics blunder.
If it were some other business, we’d be hearing about “greed,” not “stumbles.”
PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH:
No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves — (applause) — or if police — if police can be bought off by drug traffickers. (Applause.) No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top — (applause) — or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. (Applause.) That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there.
American businessmen, meanwhile, are exclaiming, only twenty percent?
Related item here.
WHY BUSINESSES ARE LEAVING L.A.
IN THE MAIL: From George Gilder, The Israel Test.
STUART TAYLOR: How the Ricci Case Almost Disappeared.
THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY IS HOSTING AN ONLINE DEBATE ON THE SOTOMAYOR NOMINATION, featuring Thomas C. Goldstein, Wendy Long, Louis Michael Seidman, David Stras, and M. Edward Whelan III.
THE POLITICS OF PERSONAL DESTRUCTION? McClatchy: Sotomayor backers urge reporters to probe New Haven firefighter. (Via NewsAlert).
Well, it’s not like they’re going to be busy looking into her tax problems.
A SWINE FLU STATUS REPORT. Plus, what’s happening in Argentina.
SO HOW’S THAT STIMULUS THING WORKING? (CONT’D): Stocks post 4th straight week of losses.
I’m beginning to feel that this business of shoveling money out to cronies isn’t really helping the economy as much as was promised.
MEGAN MCARDLE: “There’s a reason that most countries do not attempt to fund large welfare states with a very progressive income tax, the way we do*. The income of the wealthy is fungible, mobile, and volatile. These are not strengths from the vantage of the tax system.”
INDEED: “But people, even liberals, are starting to get unnerved by the cost of all this. We now talk of trillions the way, even a few months ago, we spoke of billions. In mid-June, the Senate health committee put out its version of reform and was horrified when the Congressional Budget Office figured that it would cost a trillion dollars over 10 years (over current spending) and would still leave millions uninsured.”
This is particularly true because — despite all the “line-by-line” promises — the money seems to just be being shoveled out to political interest groups.
BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS GROUP DIVIDED OVER GAY MARRIAGE.
Mr. Lee, the former pastor of In His Steps, an African-American Wesleyan church in Los Angeles that he described as “very conservative,” said he saw failures both in the leadership of the conference (“Dr. King would be turning over in his grave right now,” he said) and the largely white anti-Proposition 8 movement that did not more actively seek the support of church-going African-Americans.
“The black church played a significant role in Proposition 8 passing,” Mr. Lee said. “The failure of the campaign was to presume that African-Americans would see this as a civil rights issue.”
Hope and change.
VISUAL ECONOMICS: HOW AVERAGE U.S. CONSUMERS spend their paychecks.
HEH: It Would Have Been Nice to Hear This Before We Spent $787 Billion. “I understand Nouriel Roubini just told him to cheer up.”
SO HOW’S THAT STIMULUS THING GOING?
Fortune magazine recently reported that the number of U.S. companies in the world’s top 500 fell to the lowest level ever, while more Chinese firms than ever before made the list. Thirty-seven Chinese companies now rank in the top 500, including nine new entries. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. firms has fallen to 140, the lowest total since Fortune began the list in 1995. This is not good.
China also surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest automaker in the first half of 2009, with June sales soaring 36.5 percent from a year earlier. The Chinese registered 6.1 million car sales for the first half of the year. That way outpaced American sales, which were only 4.8 million. . . .
Here’s the clincher: Year-to-date, Dow Jones stocks are off 7 percent, while China stocks are up 71 percent. The world index is up 4 percent. Emerging markets are up 25 percent. They’re all beating us. None of this is good.
Hope and change!