HOW ABOUT YOU PAY YOUR F#@KING TAXES, TIMMY? Inspector General: Geithner dropped ‘f-bombs’ when I said he wasn’t transparent enough.
Archive for 2012
July 20, 2012
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student loan defaults mimic subprime woes, study shows.
Some of us have been saying this for a while.
POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM: CNN’s Piers Morgan, First to Use Colorado Tragedy to Assault Second Amendment Rights. I’m sure he won’t be the last.
Others may blame Hollywood. In both cases, it’s a mix of opportunism and a desire not to confront the existence of evil. Well, okay, in Piers Morgan’s case, it’s not much of a mix, really.
UPDATE: Left Blames Aurora Shooting On Rush Limbaugh. Of course they do. Hey, never let a tragedy go to waste, when you might use it to smear an opponent.
Every time something like this happens, they roll out the blood libels.
ROGER SIMON: Syria, Vogue Magazine, and Liberalism as a Fashion Statement. “Generalizations are dangerous, but Vogue magazine may be a better indicator of this liberal world view than the more predictable Newsweek, Huffington Post, or even the New York Times. It is, after all, an arbiter of taste — and modern liberalism is, more than anything, about style. It is largely a fashion statement. You are who you appear to be. Substance is of less importance. Hence, Asma al-Assad is chic, therefore good (well, at least until her family acts out and starts killing people right and left — not cool). On the other hand, conservatives are doughty. They do not dress well. Some of them even go to church in silly bonnets. Their ideas are of no importance because they have no style.”
THE DARK KNIGHT SPELUNKS: A Visual History of the Batcave. I think it’s cool that the Batcave was originally inspired by a Popular Mechanics article on underground hangars.
JOHN PODHORETZ: Why Obama’s Losing: W’s 2004 trick won’t work. “In 2004, the election was a referendum on the incumbent, and the incumbent convinced Americans he had done the right things. In 2012, what is the incumbent going to do — talk about somebody else’s tax returns for the next 109 days?”
JAMES TARANTO: Explaining Obama’s Ressentiment: Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.
The claim that Obama saved GM is fraudulent. What he did was use political muscle to intervene in a bankruptcy process in order to ensure a settlement on terms favorable to his supporters, the United Auto Workers union, at the expense of taxpayers (or “freeloaders,” in the president’s parlance) and bondholders. It would be more accurately characterized as an act of larceny than salvation.
Yesterday’s column discussed the philosophy behind Obama’s belittlement of the successful. Today we’d like to examine the psychology behind it. For it seems to us that Obama’s generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.
Indeed.
THE HILL: Sen. DeMint taps brakes on UN treaty as home-school opposition grows. “Parts of this treaty deal with abortion and the rights of children, issues that should be addressed by states, local governments and American parents not international bureaucrats.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loan Debt Sours Public Opinion On College Degrees’ Worth, Consumers Prioritize Retirement Savings Instead: Survey.
Gosh, who could have seen that coming?
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Acting ATF Director Threatens Future Whistleblowers, ‘There Will Be Consequences.’
A TRULY AWFUL mass shooting in Denver. At the Batman premiere.
UPDATE: More here.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): 80% of Consumers Believe Recession Will Last Three More Years.
BOEHNER: If We Have A Sequester, It’ll Be Obama’s Fault.
Meanwhile, if the Dems want tax increases, I say repeal the Eisenhower Tax Cuts! Some other ideas are here. Republicans would be well-advised to have a bunch of these ready to go. Let the Dems be the ones squawking about taxes for a change. It’ll be educational.
NITA GHEI: Crop Cronyism: Trillion-dollar farm bill is the latest example of what’s wrong with our economy. “Combine a Midwestern drought with pointless ethanol mandates, and the supplies of corn inevitably dwindle, driving prices sky high. Politicians like Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, are citing the crop crisis as an excuse to ram through a near-$1 trillion farm bill. While a bit of that cash might find its way to a small farmer, the bulk of the loot will be transferred to individuals who are anything but poor. Like the bank bailouts and TARP, the farm bill illustrates the capture of the legislative process by special interests.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How to defuse the student-loan crisis in three easy steps. For some values of the word “easy,” anyway.
CHANGE: Corn and soybeans hit record highs, stir food crisis fear. “Corn prices crossed into uncharted territory above $8 per bushel — about three-and-a-half times the average price 10 years ago of $2.28. Soybeans punched past $17 for the first time — also three-and-a-half times the 2002 average. Analysts said that while forecasts for continued dry weather are expected to sustain the rally, corn prices could be vulnerable to any move by the government to lower the amount of corn-based ethanol blenders are required to mix with gasoline. Even as chatter about a possible revision of the ethanol mandate has escalated, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of top farm state Iowa, has ruled out such a move.”
Related: World Braced for New Food Crisis.
The drought in the US, which supplies nearly half the world’s exports of corn and much of its soyabeans and wheat, will reverberate well beyond its borders, affecting consumers from Egypt to China.
“I’ve been in the business more than 30 years and this is by far and away the most serious weather issue and supply and demand problem that I have seen by a mile,” said a senior executive at a trading house. “It’s not even comparable to 2007-08.”
David Nelson, global strategist at Rabobank, added: “Today the [US crop] disaster is real, whereas to some degree the big run-up in prices in 2008 was speculatively driven.”
Oh, goody.
WELCOME TO CRONY NATION. Some thoughts from Prof. F.H. Buckley.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Blue Civil War Hits Universities.
What’s going on here, however, is less about quality than it is about money and the outmoded foundations of American institutions and practices built in the post World War Two era. The baroque inefficiency of the academic enterprise—and especially the research model university, which transposes a vision of the intellectual life from the hard sciences and engineering into the social sciences and the humanities—has built a system that demands enormous outside resources to continue to function.
In a handful of cases, notably the best endowed private universities, there is enough money on hand to make this system work. But less affluent private universities and virtually all public universities face a harsher climate. And as state governments in particular face claims on their tight revenues from more powerful constituencies than university faculty and staff, the public universities are being systematically starved of cash.What’s going on here, however, is less about quality than it is about money and the outmoded foundations of American institutions and practices built in the post World War Two era.
What’s funny is that those faculty and staff have traditionally provided support to those “more powerful constituencies,” like public employee unions and pensioners when — if they’d been thinking more clearly about their own interests — they’d have regarded them as dangerous rivals. “As the blue system implodes, politicians are going to come after universities the way Henry VIII went after the monks. The blue meltdown pits the universities against the public service unions, against the public schools, against families and students struggling under student loan burdens, against everyone else who wants or needs a share of the state budget. Academics are among the weakest and most vulnerable of those who depend on the state; the universities are fated to lose badly in the money wars.”
As Mead says, state university folk need to be thinking hard about how to respond, rather than engaging in denial.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ten Pieces of Bad Economic News the Media’s Not Covering.
July 19, 2012
BUT MIKEY BLOOMBERG IS CRUSADING AGAINST BIG GULPS: NYC’s jobless rate hits 10 pct in June.
MICHAEL WALSH: Takers And Makers. “Now that President Obama is out of the closet and stands revealed as a petulant and resentful socialist, who values the collective over the individual and sees the productive class as vampires feeding on the weak and the downtrodden, let’s give equal time to Ayn Rand, via her architect, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead. . . . So there it is, Election 2012 in a nutshell: the individual vs. the collective. We know which side the president is on. Which side are you on?”
AT AMAZON, bestsellers on Blu-Ray.
I MISSED THIS UNEXPECTED EVENT: U.S. Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Drop To Eight-Month Low. “NAR said existing home sales fell 5.4 percent to an annual rate of 4.37 million in June from an upwardly revised 4.62 million in May. The drop surprised economists, who had expected existing home sales to climb to 4.65 million from the 4.55 million originally reported for the previous month.”