FAREWELL, MY WEINER: Excerpts from the new Inspector Dan Rather mystery.
I like it that I’m “smoothly villainous.” I’ve always aspired to that. Now where’s my smoking jacket . . . .? (Bumped).
Archive for 2011
June 3, 2011
UNEXPECTEDLY! Jobs Growth Slows to 54,000, May Unemployment Rate Up To 9.1 Percent.
UPDATE: Jeff Carter on what it means: “The effects of the crony capitalism economy are being seen in unemployment numbers. Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, huge unchecked runaway bureaucracy. It has created ‘The Great Uncertainty’. We are seeing people get frustrated and drop out of the work force. If you are a history major, check out charts from 1937-40. They might repeat themselves.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: “Chronic unemployment continues to rise, and continues to comprise a greater part of the unemployed as well.”
Plus this: “The number of unemployed in the workforce actually rose by almost 170,000, while the number of Americans not in the workforce fell by 105,000. That’s why the unemployment rate rose in this report. However, the workforce level in May 2011 is still more than 500,000 fewer people than a year ago, when the Obama administration tried selling its ‘Recovery Summer’ campaign.”
THOMAS LIFSON: “Mysteriously, the Office of the President has requested that a video of a Jewish singing group performing at the White House be removed from the web.”
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? Rush Limbaugh vs. Charles Krauthammer.
MICKEY KAUS: Occam never met @PatriotUSA76: “Will the MSM give Breitbart & Co. credit for gratuitously pursuing the truth here, even if it might come at the expense of a media narrative that Rep. Weiner is losing?” Nope.
On the other hand, Jim Treacher says that the obvious explanations just might be correct. “I know, it’s hard to believe a genius like Anthony Weiner could do something so dumb, but more and more he’s acting like a guy who accidentally published something embarrassing on the Internet that was meant to be a private communication, claimed he was hacked to cover for it, failed to pursue the legal remedies you’d expect such a prominent person to pursue as victim of such a crime, and then refused to answer simple yes/no questions about any of it. Except to say that yeah, maybe it really is his junk.”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Dems Refuse To Deal With Their Fiscal Mess. “It’s been over two years since the Democrat-led Senate last passed a budget, a fact that puts it squarely in violation of the law. . . . This hasn’t happened since the budget rules were changed in 1974. Though required by law to pass a budget, Democrats have just said no. Yet the media have largely given them a pass on this willful lawlessness. Why?”
MICKEY KAUS GETS INTO WEINER CONSPIRACY THEORIES, “including my favorite, the Presumed Innocent mix.”
MIKE RIGGS: Obama Administration Continues to Make a Mockery of FOIA. Transparency!
IT’S OBVIOUSLY THE MUCH WIDER AVAILABILITY OF PORN. DUH. Rapes Have Dropped More than 80% Since 1979.
WHAT? LIBYA? OH . . . RIGHT! Boehner drafting new resolution seeking Libya mission clarity. “Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is introducing his own resolution to rebuke President Obama’s handling of the Libya intervention in a bid to stave off House passage of a bill mandating a U.S. withdrawal. Boehner’s proposal, which he pitched to a restive House GOP conference Thursday, would forbid the deployment of U.S. ground troops and demand that Obama provide information on 21 separate items related to the mission within 14 days, including the mission’s goals and objectives, its costs and the president’s justification for not seeking congressional authorization.”
Bush got Congress to vote on Iraq, putting them on record. That didn’t stop some (er, rather a lot, really) of them from flipflopping later, but it gave him some breathing room that Obama — who didn’t bother to get Congressional authorization — doesn’t have.
SPENGLER: Humpty Obumpty And The Arab Spring:
What the IMF says, in effect, is that the oil-poor Arab economies – especially Egypt – are not only broke, but dysfunctional, incapable of earning more than a small fraction of their import bill. The disappearance of tourism is an important part of the problem, but shortages of fuel and other essentials have had cascading effects throughout these economies.
“In the next 18 months,” the IMF added, “a greater part of these financing needs will need to be met from the international community because of more cautious market sentiments during the uncertain transition.”
Translation: private investors aren’t stupid enough to throw money down a Middle Eastern rat-hole, and now that the revolutionary government has decided to make a horrible example of deposed president Hosni Mubarak, anyone who made any money under his regime is cutting and running. At its May 29 auction of treasury bills, Egypt paid about 12% for short-term money, to its own captive banking system. Its budget deficit in the next fiscal year, the government says, will exceed $30 billion.
And the IMF’s $160 billion number is only “external financing”; that is, maintaining imports into a busted economy. It doesn’t do a thing to repair busted economies that import half their caloric intake, as do the oil-poor Arab nations.
Egypt’s economy is in free fall. Its biggest foreign exchange earner was a tourist industry that won’t come back for a decade, if ever.
It could come back much faster than that, if Egypt credibly adopted a bourgeois democratic society. With the Muslim Brotherhood taking the reins, however, that seems quite unlikely. And I agree with Spengler that the G8 — and in particular the U.S. State Department — remains clueless and behind the curve.
CHANGE: Obama Administration Suddenly Likes Palin Wildlife-Management Strategy. Plus, a literary-historical note.
June 2, 2011
SO IF READING THE NEW YORK TIMES IS A RELIGION, then does that make Jill Abramson pope?
Trouble is, it’s more a cult these days than a religion. And James Taranto observes:
After the Times propagated the blood libel that conservative media figures were behind the murders in Tucson, we wrote that this campaign of vilification “is really about competition in the media industry–not commercial competition but competition for authority.” Abramson’s quote confirms that we were precisely on target in assessing the Times’s view of its own authority.
“If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” No. A newspaper is not a substitute for religion, and a lie is still a lie even if the New York Times says otherwise.
Ouch.
UPDATE: Scrub-a-dub-dub: An inauspicious start. “That’s a tiny bit strange, isn’t it? I mean, Abramson’s words were not exactly scrubbable, or scrub-worthy: Many thousands of people can say just what she did (really). I’m not sure what the etiquette, or protocol, is on these matters. When you send out a picture of yourself in your skivvies, I guess you recall it. But what if you merely say how your family felt about the Times?”
MATT BAI WONDERS IF RICK PERRY’S WEAKNESS IS REMINDING PEOPLE OF GEORGE W. BUSH: But the way things are going, by 2012 we may have moved from “Bush fatigue” to full-blown Bush nostalgia. . . .
LISTS: Father’s Day Gifts For The Dad Who Has It All.
I’ve been wanting one of these for a while, but I don’t think it’s in my future.
THE PRESS’S COVERING FOR HIM, ON THE OTHER HAND, WASN’T A FELONY: Charges Against Edwards Expected Friday.
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Silence, vagueness from Democrats on Weiner photo.
YOU COULD WIN A HUNDRED GRAND: An update on the Power Line Prize.
HMM: Sooner Tea Party’s Headquarters Burglarized: “One or more burglars bashed in a steel door at the Sooner Tea Party’s Oklahoma City headquarters over the Memorial Day weekend and escaped with donor records, photocopies of checks, blank checks and other items, the leader of the conservative political organization said Wednesday. ‘It was definitely political,’ said leader Al Gerhart, 53, noting that the burglars took a lot of Sooner Tea Party records, but passed over expensive tools and equipment in the west Oklahoma City carpentry shop where he kept the records.” Hope they were smart enough to put some fake-explosive information in the records to smoke out the thieves . . . .
A SALES INCENTIVE that’s not exactly Glengarry Glen Ross.
BYRON YORK: Amid media circus, Palin lays out policy positions. “One thing many viewers have probably missed in all the horse-race speculation is that Palin is perfectly willing to discuss her positions on key issues, if anyone wants to ask. In fact, in recent days, weeks, and months, we’ve seen a lot of policy commentary from the former Alaska governor.”
Related: “Palin uses Twitter to communicate. Romney uses PowerPoint.”
HOW DO YOU GET ANTHONY WEINER TO CALL THE CAPITOL POLICE? Try to interview him . . . .
HOW SMARTPHONES CHANGED POLICING: An excerpt from Brian Chen’s Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In.