THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D BE SHOVING IN TROOPS ALL OVER THE ARAB WORLD — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! General: U.S. may consider troops in Libya.
Archive for 2011
April 8, 2011
WISCONSIN: Democratic vice-chair of Waukesha County: We’re satisfied the numbers are correct. The important part is at about 13:00 into the video. A reader emails: “Here you have a Democrat County Vice Chair…with, I must point out, no hesitation or obvious animus…testify to the validity of the mistake. Watch the entire presser…note the sincerity of the participants.”
UPDATE: “Whoever wins the judicial election, I think we can at this point declare Althouse a winner.”
THE NEW CIVILITY: Lefty Facebook Event: Let’s Dump Our Trash At John Boehner’s House.
WE ARE THE CHANGE WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR: The UN air strikes in Ivory Coast suggest Libya was no fluke: the West’s appetite for military action has recovered robustly from the diplomatic trauma of the Iraq war.
MEGAN MCARDLE IS UNIMPRESSED WITH THE PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS’S “PEOPLE’S BUDGET:” “No, if you want to get the budget under control without meaningfully cutting into entitlements, you’re going to need to hike taxes substantially on the middle class. I’m waiting for the first politician to say this out loud.”
THE BUDGET BATTLE: Democrats fighting to retain access to taxpayer dollars.
PROFESSOR JACOBSON: WISCONSIN DOJ OPEN MEETINGS EXPERT SECRETLY ADVISED FLEEBAGGER SENATORS:
In Wisconsin government, there seems to be a problem with pro-union politics interfering with job responsibilities as public servants.
First it was police union members urging protesters to defy the Governor and legislature when it came to the takeover of the State Capitol. Then it was the Dane County Sheriff declaring that his officers would not act as “palace guards” at the Capitol.
Now it turns out that an Assistant Attorney General in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, who was considered an expert on the Open Meetings Law which is at issue in the lawsuit challenging the budget repair bill, secretly was offering legal advice to the 14 Democratic Senators who fled the state.
Read the whole thing. It’s almost like there’s a state within a state: A good-government public facade, with a lot of machine guys hiding behind it and doing deals. Scott Walker seems to have smoked things out.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Attack Of The Cash Register.
President Obama’s support among blacks and Hispanics has fallen to new lows according to a Gallup poll. Black support declined by 7% and among Hispanics by 11%, farther than at any point since his inauguration. Gallup says “it is not clear what is behind blacks’ and Hispanics’ less positive evaluations in March than in prior months. The major events of the month were the U.S. involvement in military action in Libya and the negotiations over the federal budget.”
But there’s another possible reason besides Libya and the deficit: inflation, starting with energy prices. . . . The poor, the elderly, and minorities are being hurt, not just by energy prices, but across the board.
Read the whole thing.
ECONOMIST: U.S. Going Same Route As Greece, Portugal:
The US is going down a similar road as that taken by Greece and Portugal with regard to its budget decisions, John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo, said on Wednesday. . . . As the deadline for a budget agreement looms in Congress, Silvia told CNBC that the US must recognize that the moderate economic growth forecast by most economists for the country will fail to generate the tax revenue necessary to fund long-running government entitlement spending.
“We have to make some arrangements in terms of cutting back the promises that were made by prior politicians for these entitlements,” Silvia said.
“(We’ve had) forty years of political promises to give people certain entitlements, certain benefits. And we’ve now come to understand that the United States is in a very difficult position than it was in the early post-World War II period. We’re not the dominant economy. And our pace of growth has moderated. Our ability to finance this is all limited.”
Indeed.
April 7, 2011
CHARLIE MARTIN: “At this point, whether or not the government shuts down tomorrow night is almost entirely in the hands of the Democrats in the Senate and of the skinny guy with the ears. This suggests that the decision will be determined principally by the Democrats’ calculation: will it, or won’t it, pay off politically?”
UPDATE: Reader Jason Muckenthaler emails:
It seems to me that whenever there is a threat of a government shutdown, it’s portrayed as just this side of a tsunami-level disaster. When government workers – teachers, sanitation workers, etc – go on strike, it’s portrayed as the middle-class worker sticking up for himself. Why is it that a government shut-down caused by a desire to spend less money is different than a government shutdown caused by workers failing to do their jobs – isn’t the effect the same?
Indeed.
IS IT TIME FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION? “It would take 34 states to approve such a convention, so it remains more of a theoretical exercise than a real threat to the Constitution. Yet at least 30 state legislatures, including Texas, Missouri and Virginia, are mulling over resolutions either calling for a national Article V convention or urging Congress to propose changes to the Constitution.” Well, if they have one, the forthcoming Tennessee Law Review symposium issue on constitutional convention substance and procedure will come in handy!
MARKDOWNS ON men’s shirts.
SO IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? Malls Face Surge in Vacancies. “Mall vacancies hit their highest level in at least 11 years in the first quarter, new figures from real-estate research company Reis Inc. showed. In the top 80 U.S. markets, the average vacancy rate was 9.1%, up from 8.7%. The outlook is especially bad for strip malls and other neighborhood shopping centers. Their vacancy rate is expected to top 11.1% later this year, up from 10.9%, Reis predicts. That would be the highest level since 1990.” That’s pretty much how things look around here.
AT AMAZON, top deals on groceries.
STRATEGERY: Obama: I’ll veto funding for the troops.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH TV COP SHOWS: “On TV, professional courtesy is rarely mentioned. In reality, cops who don’t follow the rules of professional courtesy are often punished harsher than ones that have infringed on citizens’ rights.”
ANDREW KLAVAN HAS A LOVELY FAIRY TALE:
FASTER, PLEASE: Stem Cells Coaxed Into Forming Partial Eyeball.
AMERICA’S MOST STUBBORN HOME SELLERS: “Despite the fact that rents are now higher in many cities than monthly mortgage payments, the latest report on the health of the housing market offers a dismal picture, showing little sign that home prices are hitting bottom.” One reason is that sellers don’t want to cut the price. Sometimes they can’t afford to.
The Insta-Wife and I caught an episode of Real Estate Intervention on HGTV the other night. The couple had bought a house for $200,000, done a series of cash-out refinances until they owed about $450,000 on it, and didn’t want to sell it for less than $480,000 because they didn’t have any money to bring to the table to cover real estate commissions, etc. They blamed the bank.
There’s plenty of blame for the banks in some of these deals, but it was fun watching host Mike Aubrey digest their story and try not to grab them by the collar and scream You’re idiots! In the end, they wound up getting a mortgage adjustment, renting the house to cover the payments, and moving in with the husband’s parents. What happened to the quarter-million or so that they took out of the house? That wasn’t clear, but they had apparently squandered it somehow.
THESE SENNHEISER TRAVEL HEADPHONES get a good review, but they’re awfully pricey. Maybe if you spend a lot of time on airplanes . . . .
MAKE A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY by having sex with your wife. But it’s not as much fun as that makes it sound. . . .