ILYA SOMIN: Munich And The Politics of the International Olympic Committee. I don’t care about the Olympics. They’re a sham and a scam, a mixture of corruptocrats and worse.
Archive for 2012
July 28, 2012
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? GM Ramps Up Risky Subprime Auto Loans To Drive Sales. “President Obama has touted General Motors (GM) as a successful example of his administration’s policies. Yet GM’s recovery is built, at least in part, on the increasing use of subprime loans. . . . Potential borrowers of car loans are rated on FICO scores that range from 300 to 850. Anything under 660 is generally deemed subprime. GM Financial auto loans to customers with FICO scores below 660 rose from 87% of total loans in Q4 2010 to 93% in Q1 2012. The worse the FICO score, the bigger the increase. From Q4 2010 to Q1 2012, GM Financial loans to customers with the worst FICO scores — below 540 — shot up 79% to more than $2.3 billion. The second worst category, 540-599, rose 28% from about $3.4 billion to $4.3 billion.”
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): White House projects $1.2T deficit, lower economic growth in 2012. Do you think Obama would have won in 2008 if he’d promised these sorts of economic numbers?
UPDATE: Reader Bryan Farris writes:
Remember the first of many economic graphs that scared the bejesus out of everyone and created the Tea Party? It was Obama’s projected deficits vs. Bush’s actual deficits.
Turns out that (unexpectedly!), the news was worse than forecast. With today’s news that the 2012 deficit will measure $1.2 Trillion, we can see it’s 50% larger than was originally projected. … Oh, and if you extrapolate that out, that means that should we be so fortunate as to re-lect the Nobel Prize winner, we can expect a deficit of approximately $2 trillion in 2016.
Unexpectedly, of course.
ED DRISCOLL: How Much Are Movies Themselves To Blame For The Aurora Massacre? After all, look at what slim evidence it took to produce blood libels against Sarah Palin. “Hasn’t the left boxed themselves into a corner a bit with their rhetoric in early 2011? If they truly believe that clip art can lead someone to kill — despite using the same imagery themselves, and even if the perpetrator very likely had never seen said clip art — and we must stop using gun and violence-related rhetoric in our language, then surely a nearly three hour visual treatise on ultraviolence can do so as well. If a university truly believes in its collective soul…”
I say, repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts! More on that here.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Sporting Goods.
Also, today only: Over 50% off Select PNY USB Drives.
MICKEY KAUS: Rattner Goes Off-Message. “Getting mighty crowded in that woodshed: Obama’s ex-semi-auto czar, Steve Rattner, goes off message and says he doesn’t ‘believe we can reverse’ the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. Apparently it is not Mitt Romney’s fault. Rather, the wage gap is just too great. Using GM as an example, Rattner says the company’s Michigan workers make $55/hour, its Mexican workers make a little more than $7/hour — while in China it’s $4.50 an hour and in India $1/hour.”
Plus: “Rattner himself could have done a lot to make the U.S. more competitive if he’d pushed Detroit’s unsustainable UAW wages in VW’s direction when he was coordinating Obama’s auto bailout. Too bad he didn’t. UAW autoworkers didn’t lose a penny in hourly wages, even as their employers were driven into bankruptcy — something Rattner himself has noted. You have to wonder if his comments are tainted by guilt over his failure.”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: California Court Allows Fraud Cases Against Golden Gate, USF Law Schools to Proceed.
CONN CARROLL: All Your Business Are Belong To Obama.
SOMEBODY TELL THIS GUY IT’S NOT 2004 ANYMORE: Ranting about “Sitting in one’s basement in pajamas, spewing out venom on a keyboard.”
Also, the name-calling and invidious comparisons in the piece don’t sit well with its call for civility.
PEGGY NOONAN: Hollywood And Our Poisonous Culture:
Did “The Dark Knight Rises” cause the Aurora shootings? No, of course not. One movie doesn’t have that kind of power, and we don’t even know if the shooter had seen it. But a million violent movies have the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize, to make things worse, and that’s what we’ve been seeing the past quarter century or so, the million movies. Each ups the ante in terms of carnage. Remember Jack Nicholson’s Joker, from 1989? He was a garish, comic figure and he made people laugh. He was a little like Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook in the old TV version of “Peter Pan.” You knew he wasn’t “real.” He was meant to amuse. . . .
Some of the sadness and frustration following Aurora has to do with the fact that no one thinks anyone can, or will, do anything to make our culture better. The film industry isn’t going to change, the genie is long out of the bottle. The genie has a cabana at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The movie market is increasingly international, and a major component is teenage boys and young men who want to see things explode, who want to see violence and sex. Political pressure has never worked. Politicians have been burned, and people who’ve started organizations have been spoofed and spurned as Puritans. When Tipper Gore came forward in 1985, as a responsible citizen protesting obscene rap lyrics, her senator husband felt he had to apologize to Democratic fund-raisers. If some dumb Republican congressman had a hearing to grill some filmmakers, it would look like the McCarthy hearings. There would be speeches about artistic freedom, and someone would have clever words about how Shakespeare, too, used violence. “Have you ever seen ‘Coriolanus?'”
The president won’t say anything—he too is Hollywood funded—and maybe that’s just as well, since he never seems sincere about anything anymore.
Well, how about saying this: Repeal The Hollywood Tax Cuts!
Especially in light of the other Joker-inspired copycats.
LEVIATHAN: George Will on an abusive Federal prosecution. This is why I think prosecutors need skin in the game.
ROGER KIMBALL: Obama’s War On The Suburbs. “Kurtz’s argument is depressing. It is also infuriating. No one who reads this passionate and well-argued book would even dream of voting for Barack Obama. Which is one reason why everyone who has the franchise should read it.”
SMALL BUSINESSES — AN ENDANGERED SPECIES? More than 200,000 small businesses lost, 2008-2010. Oh, well. You didn’t really build that business you lost anyway.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The 15 Hottest Female Olympians.
I HAVE TO AGREE WITH THE COMMENTER WHO SAYS THAT THIS PRO PUBLICA LISTING OF, PURPORTEDLY, “THE BEST REPORTING ON GUNS IN AMERICA,” looks like it was provided by the Brady Campaign.
The folks at Pro Publica insist that they don’t lean left.
WHICH MAKES IT A SUCCESS: Arms Trade Treaty conference ends without agreement. “The weeks-long conference at the United Nations to produce an Arms Trade Treaty is ending without the creation of a treaty. None of the draft treaties which have circulated in the past several days came remotely close to finding consensus support. The impossibility of achieving consensus involved a wide variety of issues and nations, far beyond the Second Amendment concerns that have been raised by many American citizens.”
OLYMPIC RACISM: Lebanese Olympic Team Demands Barrier Separation From Israel Squad. It’s a carnival of bigotry. Enjoy it.
July 27, 2012
PRIORITIES: CBS News: DNC Homepage Shows More Romney Attack Ads Than Obama Accomplishments. Well, it’s not like there are a lot of accomplishments to boast of.
A REVIEW of Brian Tamanaha’s Failing Law Schools.
AT AMAZON, late-summer markdowns in Patio, Lawn & Garden.
CHURCHILL BUSTS: I had two when I walked in here. “How did I figure out what was really going on? I never gave in. Never, never, never never. In nothing great or small, large or petty.”