Maggie's Farm

Higher Education Fire Sale: Enroll Now and Save 66 Percent on Tuition!

Why Islam is in Desperate Need of a Reformation

Our Many Layers of Entitlement - The entitlement mindset includes much more than government benefits programs.

Via Driscoll:

“Do you believe in sin?” Cathleen Falsani, the religion correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked then Senator Obama. “Yes,” he replied. “What is sin?” “Being out of alignment with my values.” That’s one convenient religion: Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself.

Via Michelle:

After examining decades’ worth of failed subsidized solar efforts at home and around the world, the Institute for Energy Research concludes: “Although stand-alone solar power has a certain free-market niche and does not need government favor, using solar power for grid electricity has been and will be an economic loser for ratepayers and a burden to taxpayers.”

Top Obama Advisor Explains the Purpose of Government:

 Here she tells an ethnically homogeneous audience that the purpose of government is to “give people a livelihood.”

Let them eat cake?

Chris Christie seriously considering run for president in 2012

Don't do it, big guy

Man, I Like That Guy: Chris Christie's Dude Factor

A tingle, Mr. Breitbart?

How the US is importing poverty

Jonah: Centrists’ Are Abandoning Ship - The establishment solution to unpopular liberal policies is still more liberalism:

The establishment can’t bring itself to blame liberalism (or themselves). So instead they blame the system. Obama’s own reelection theme of running against “Washington” — a town he had near total control over for two years and in which he is still the most powerful figure — is a variant of the same argument. Obama can’t blame the party he leads, so he blames the “system.”

Michael Lewis: California and Bust

It is a major essay by Lewis. The corruption in the attitude towards public service, from service to mindless greed. A quote:

Over the past dec­ade the city of San Jose had repeatedly caved to the demands of its public-safety unions. In practice this meant that when the police or fire department of any neighboring city struck a better deal for itself, it became a fresh argument for improving the pay of San Jose police and fire. The effect was to make the sweetest deal cut by public-safety workers with any city in Northern California the starting point for the next round of negotiations for every other city. The departments also used each other to score debating points. For instance, back in 2002, the San Jose police union cut a three-year deal that raised police officers’ pay by 18 percent over the contract. Soon afterward, the San Jose firefighters cut a better deal for themselves, including a pay raise of more than 23 percent. The police felt robbed and complained mightily until the city council crafted a deal that handed them 5 percent more premium pay in exchange for training to fight terrorists. “We got famous for our anti-terrorist-training pay,” explains one city official. Eventually the anti-terrorist-training premium pay stopped; the police just kept the extra pay, with benefits. “Our police and firefighters will earn more in retirement than they did when they were working,” says Reed. “There used to be an argument that you have to give us money or we can’t afford to live in the city. Now the more you pay them the less likely they are to live in the city, because they can afford to leave. It’s staggering. When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working? There’s a corruption here. It’s not just a financial corruption. It’s a corruption of the attitude of public service.”

another:

I notice on his shelf a copy of Fortune magazine, with Meredith Whitney on the cover. And as he talked about the bankrupting of Vallejo, I realized that I had heard this story before, or a private-sector version of it. The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.

Plunder!

Gingrich on Obama’s healthcare law: ‘About 300 pages are pretty good’

He is possibly right about that.

Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election

Writing off Ohio - and maybe Florida

Woops: Obama now underwater in CT!

$737 Million Green Loan to Pelosi Kin Fuels Outrage

More plunder.

And more plunder: Benefit tourism in the UK

Buffet(t) Rules we all can agree upon