Thursday, April 24. 2008
 The Patton of counterinsurgency. Wkly Standard
Big-city pundits turn bitter. Will they now turn to God and guns? Banking woes are easing. CSM The coming revolution in Africa. Let's hope so The war between Murdoch and the NYT heats up Finally, scientists begin to talk about the coming Ice Age
Wednesday, April 23. 2008
Above stolen from an IowaHawk entry. State Dept. eliminates Jihad. Problem solved! The dangers of second-hand drinking. It's about power. Dr. Sanity Economic crisis? The sky is not falling Who is really to blame for New Orleans' flooding problems? Unintended consequences of government policies. Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome. Thompson My Weather Underground, and Obama. Five great cigars and why (and when) I smoke them. Mike Adams Please come to Denver. It'll be groovy, dude. The Second Coming of George McGovern. VDH Black and Progressive Sociologists for Obama. Blair. Hey, that is one compelling endorsement. Global Warming update. The list of consequences, to date. (h/t, Englishman) Why I quit Greenpeace The friends of Barack Obama. Powerline
Tuesday, April 22. 2008
Bitterness oozing out of them, in photo above: small-town Americans on April 19 The songs of past Earth Days Bill Cosby: This is how we lost to the white man St. George gets the ax News should neither be fair nor balanced Obama's plan for NASA A moron speaks: "No-one told us" that we bought at the top. Tiger The new Willy Horton ad
An intercepted Al Qaida strategy letter, in Iraq (h/t, Belmont) We have Pallywood - now Lhasawood Watch how this NYT writer slips global warming into the article - with no evidence Adidas vs. Puma: A story of two brothers (h/t, Wall St. Fighter) Deck of Weasels playing cards Chicago: Ban guns once again? The rich and their taxes. (h/t, Flares) Yo ho ho. Pirates as a victim class Mookie mocked by a girl Obama is the media's man. John Fund Al Gore: The wealthy don't need to save the planet. Just the "little people," I guess. Poll presented as if it were data. Idiotic. Not a soul on earth can say how much oil we have. I always liked Michael Pollan, but this morally-agonized piece in the NYT just fills me with pity for him. He's a putz. The Ayers story gathers steam. As it should. Help! I'm a snob like Obama. Micky Kaus
Monday, April 21. 2008
 Has Al Gore failed? Tiger
Coyote loves his Squeezebox Mankiw on income inequality Why plants are green Borneo Pigmy Elephant update The "Why bother?" societies, via Blue Crab: A British think tank has issued a report that shows that high taxes, an entitlement mentality and poor education are sapping the British populace and turning the nation into a "why bother" culture.
In memoriam: Tibet Is this for real? Why am I skeptical? Driscoll begins: Mark Steyn notes that, pace Obama, guns and God, and proper respect for both, are what make Red State America a much healthier--and sustainable--place than the Biggest Blue State of 'em all: Europe. Steyn writes, "In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God’n’guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion":
WSJ: Gun owners are happier people Brussels commands Scots to pipe down Straight talk about casual sex. Am Thinker Virtue by default. David Thompson Woman turns 115 Carnival of the Insanities at Dr. Sanity
Sunday, April 20. 2008
(Thanks, Buddy)
Saturday, April 19. 2008
Barone: The rules change for Obama "The descent of civilization into the fluffy totalitarianism of PC tyranny is accelerating." Privacy and Property Rights
If Obama were a white Republican, and... Powerline To John McCain: Embrace your inner Teddy Roosevelt Noted theologian Pelosi reinvents meaning of Communion Sorry, Portuguese. You aren't Hispanic enough. Huh? David Brooks as quoted at Betsy, re the debate: Obama and Clinton were completely irresponsible. As the first President Bush discovered, it is simply irresponsible statesmanship (and stupid politics) to make blanket pledges to win votes. Both candidates did that on vital issues.
Both promised to not raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 or $250,000 a year. They both just emasculated their domestic programs. Returning the rich to their Clinton-era tax rates will yield, at best, $40 billion a year in revenue. It’s impossible to fund a health care plan, let alone anything else, with that kind of money. The consequences are clear: if elected they will have to break their pledge, and thus destroy their credibility, or run a minimalist administration.
Friday, April 18. 2008
Vets rip Time magazine cover Dangerous expansion of the Fed's power. Boudreaux That sick Yale story was fiction. Still sick. Dissent is good, right? Kenneth Green on the global warming dissident scientists Dean Barnett on A Dash of Harvard Disease. A quote: Although hardly identical, Obama's and Frank's sentiments do share critical commonalities. Both evidence an unbecoming condescension to the American people. And both share modern liberalism's assumption that Americans are a bunch of dullards. Perhaps no other trait has so thoroughly harmed the left at the ballot box. Anyone who has ever walked by Harvard Yard has heard the kind of condescending comments that Obama offered in San Francisco. Heck, anyone who has listened to a Michelle Obama speech has heard the same kind of contempt for the American people expressed in unequivocal terms. If you want to find this kind of smug superiority on the left, you don't have to look very hard. If you're of a mind to do some field research, I recommend you tune into Bill Maher's show on HBO next Friday night. I predict you won't have to wait more than ten minutes before Maher and his panel of Hollywood philosophes agree on what a stupid and ignorant place America is.
Related, via Just One Minute (h/t, Insty) Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.
Thursday, April 17. 2008
 Habu needs to explain flag handling to this young lady
Sustenance from Maureen Dowd? Bruce? Bloomberg explains why NYC cannot hyper-tax the hedgies Progressives hate the poor. Climate Skeptic I never thought this book was literature. 65 years of LSD The search for the Phantom Subtext Photo: The popularity of the Bardot vs. Moslem story on the internet may be, in part, due to the opportunity to post a photo. Interesting story, too, though. Where's that link? Aw, never mind. Oh, here it is.
 Listening to the Pope. Several pieces at Anchoress
Not nautical: world's largest cruise ship The topic which always bugs me: "root causes" More execution of witches due to global warming DO NOT take vitamins! Sickest story I've seen today. At Yale, of course. Iran torches 7 ancient synagogues A cure for the airline industry. WSJ Corn prices and starvation. Austin Bay A nation of givers. h/t, AVI Like Adlai Stevenson, stylistically? Robo-soldier Photo of a Maggie's Farm staffer (via Theo)
It all started with Enron. The company was just too clever and set aside moral scruples in a feverish drive to maximize reported (as opposed to real economic) earnings.
The next step was auditors, who traditionally were employed by companies’ boards to check the math in the financial statements and ensure that balance sheets balanced.
Occasionally, under suspicious circumstances, they were instructed to conduct what were termed “fraud audits”, where they really took a close look at things like cash, receipts and bank accounts to see if someone was cheating or embezzling.
When Enron’s frauds came out, there was a frantic drive to find someone with significant economic resources - other than Enron’s crooked officers - who could be blamed. Enron’s auditors, Arthur Anderson, long reputed to be the toughest firm in the country, took the hit for not identifying the frauds they were not paid to investigate. Lawyers and frantically grandstanding officials declared Anderson to be guilty, and applied a pre-trial death penalty for the entire firm for the conduct of the partner on the Enron account. Not only was this in gross violation of the U.S. Constitutional requirement of a fair trial, it was enforcement of a notion of collective guilt previously unseen in Western democracies, and it put thousands of Anderson’s innocent employees out of work. As the gentle reader might recall, Anderson received a post-mortem judgment of “not guilty”.
Well, the accounting profession was not pleased, and began to look for a way to strike back.Next, the Securities and Exchange Commission got involved. The SEC had been established to ensure that securities offering documents and corporate reports to shareholders contained full disclosure. Accused by the press and Congress of lax enforcement, the SEC sought to find a way to co-opt the private sector as enforcers of Federal securities laws, and found lawyers and accountants an easy choice, declaring them responsible for finding and reporting any corporate hanky-panky that might be occurring, making corporate advisors into government snitches, and vastly increasing their risk of doing business.
Again, the accounting profession was not pleased, and its counter-attack came when accounting standards boards around the world invented (over corporate objections) a new system they thought was more theoretically pure, called “fair value accounting” with particular aim taken at the recent innovations in financial derivatives. These rules require assets to be valued at whatever someone will pay for them at any given moment.
As an example of the impact of Fair Value rules, if the Kondratiev family were a public company and - like a lot of people - not able to sell our house right now, we would have to write its value way down and take an “accounting loss” for that entire amount, making us technically bankrupt even though we know the house will indeed sell this year or next. Fortunately as a family, we don’t have to follow those moronic rules, and can wait and live in our home until the housing market recovers.
What’s worse, if a public company owns some sophisticated assets like esoteric options that don’t trade often, the rules require that they value them in accordance with a black-box mathematical model – and isn’t that the greatest opportunity for fraud yet invented? Then, if it later happens that there are few buyers of those options, accountants will require around 55% write-off in their value, even if the underlying assets have not diminished in value. Remember when some banks were required to write down assets fully secured by US Treasuries?
Nevertheless, our ivory-tower CPAs hold that regardless of a notion of long-term real value, if you cannot sell something today it has little – or no – value. Just look at the ultimate market proof that that notion is intrinsically false – private equity funds are snapping up these securities by the armload as soon as the banks write them down, and Kondratiev confidently predicts that some Great Fortunes will be made by those funds over the next three years. Business Week will predictably have a cover feature on the brilliant investors who gambled on purchasing deeply-discounted, scorned securities and against all odds won big. Ja. Remember where you read it.
To make a long story short, between SEC rules and new accounting standards, company financial statements are now unreadable by almost everybody except a tiny group of trained professionals, and companies are now having to add annexes to their financial statements that say things like "our audited statements are presented in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but as such they are not useful in managing our business, so the following figures are the (unaudited) numbers we actually use to manage our business.”
Furthermore, and more importantly, the accounting deck has now been so stacked that every possible financial negative is emphasized and every possible financial positive is deferred. The result for us analysts and investors is that current financial statements are for most part presented in a way that grossly understate the real worth of companies.
“But,” you may well ask, “how did Bear Stearns so overvalue its assets?” Answer: it didn’t. Bear Stearns owned pools of residential mortgages, yours and mine, that might have a default rate of 5% in hard times, 15% in a depression, and was forced to write them down to nothing simply because, like our house, nobody was buying that day. As we wrote earlier this week, Bloomberg and everybody else (except the accounting rulers) knows that the foreclosure rate is expected to be 1.99%, which means that JPMorgan as purchaser of Bear will probably collect over 99% of the face amount of these mortgages, even if the foreclosed properties sell for half the loan balance. Only an accountant could insist that those mortgage pools had an accounting value of 40-45%.
Thousands of innocent people will be thrown out of work due to an intellectual ivory-tower artificiality perpetrated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the SEC.
The accountants’ revenge is complete.
Wednesday, April 16. 2008
McCain constantly makes himself available: he is the opposite of a managed candidate. Good on him. Interesting interview (transcript).
 The use and abuse of tax havens.
I thought this was satire, but it isn't. Hurricane Alert! It's not global warming Markets in kidneys. Make sense? Wouldn't you agree that I have led a sensational life? Ed Koch Decision-making is surprisingly unconscious McCain-omics needs a theme VA school bans tag. Too aggressive? Good grief. Minimal consequences for violent crime in the UK. Dalrymple Don't rescue me. Sipp
Tuesday, April 15. 2008
Our pub-crawling friend Kondratiev, seeking a high-paying job at Maggie's Farm, offers this submission: As Mark Twain said with attribution to Benjamin Disraeli, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Let’s look at U.S. foreclosure filings, which increased by 0.067 percentage points in March from a year earlier as adjustable mortgages increased and more owners gave up their homes to lenders. More than 0.186% of the 125,892,000 U.S. households (234,000 properties) were in some stage of foreclosure. Properties in foreclosure in March 2007 were 0.118% of U.S. households (149,045 properties). About 1.99% of US homes (or 2.5 million foreclosed properties) may be on the market this year and in 2009. This doesn’t sound too scary, moving from twelve hundredths of one percent to nineteen hundredths of one percent, with a maximum two-year potential of less than two percent of US homes. However, a liberal press agenda is to maximize the fear factor in the months preceding the election, so let’s see how the press maximizes the potential fear factor editor’s comments in [brackets]: U.S. Foreclosures Jump 57% as Homeowners Walk Away (Update2) By Dan Levy April 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. foreclosure filings jumped 57 percent and bank repossessions more than doubled in March from a year earlier as adjustable mortgages increased and more owners gave up their homes to lenders. [that’s the ratio between 0.118% and 0.186%] More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households[doesn’t one in 538 sound like a larger number than 0.186%?], Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5 percent from February. “We're not near the bottom of this at all,'' said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. “The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year.'' Rising foreclosures will add more inventory to an already glutted market, keep home prices down through at least next year and thwart efforts by Congress and President George W. Bush to help homeowners avoid default, Rosen said in an interview. ‘Drag' on Prices About 2.5 million foreclosed properties will be on the market this year and in 2009, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. analysts led by Michelle Meyer said in an April 10 report. U.S. home price declines will probably double to a national average of 20 percent by next year, with lower values most likely in metropolitan areas in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc. said last week in a report.
What PMI actually said was: “Given the drop in prices already the broad S&P/Case-Shiller house price index could decline by roughly 15-25 percent [from the 2006 peak]. The narrower OFHEO index could decline by a lesser 5-10 percent, because it excludes jumbo loans and the large portion of subprime and Alt-A loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t participate in. “The odds of the ultimate price decline being toward the lower end of these ranges (5 percent for OFHEO and 15 percent for S&P/Case-Shiller) has increased recently because of policy changes that have taken place in the past few weeks. . . . “We still expect the housing market to stabilize sometime in the second half of this year in response to expansionary monetary and fiscal policy, while builders continue to reduce the number of single-family housing starts into 2009. If this occurs, then the inventory of unsold homes should peak later this year and fall throughout next year. As a result, the downward pressure on national house prices should begin to abate in the second half of 2008. It is likely, however, that prices will continue declining well into 2009, as inventories will still be large (even if falling).”
Note that this directly contradicts the statements by the Berserkley guy Ken Rosen, but the writer chose to ignore that. Frightening the consumer is paramount in accomplishing regime change in the United States, and if we do indeed have a recession, it will be the first to have been entirely caused by the media – the underlying economics in the country are excellent!
As the Pope arrives in NYC, Anchoress looks at The Reality of Pope Benedict at Pajamas The Left goes down, in Italy Is the Ivy League a meritocracy now? Princeton's Flim Flam Man, in the NY Sun Why women should not rule the world. Big Lizard Turning around America's worst schools. The American The price of appeasement. Chesler
Monday, April 14. 2008
 Map of the world, as seen from America. Tiger
Brit Navy: Be nice to pirates. Maybe it was Be Nice To A Pirate Day. The normally calm Right Wing Prof blows a gasket over Obama. Related: A Category ll Kinsley Gaffe. Related: Allentown, at RWNH. Good piece, Rick First photograph ever taken. Jules takes a look at Marx Lite. From Blackjack to Wall Street: Gross and Thorpe "Natural" food doesn't mean safe. McCain's heart, at Villainous. Mo Udall was a good guy. I had this idea too. Complaint filed at the Canadian Human Rights Commission against a Montreal imam Mexico cracks down on illegal imigration - into Mexico Poor starving because of our "green" fuel. Related, at Boston Globe: Can't Eat Ethanol (h/t, Viking) Is Obama Cassius Clay? asks Scott at Powerline. He certainly acts like he can take the hits.
Photo: A cigar-lover at Mr. Free Market
 For the first time this Spring, the bird song chorus this morning at dawn had the volume turned all the way up, despite below-freezing temps. It always sounds new to me.
A bitter squirrel to swallow: A Pennsylvanian at Kos claims neighbors are bitter and live on squirrels San Francisco Democrats. The NY Sun Douglas Feith explains and defends Iraq war decision. Video Rev. Wright is back at it. That's what I call bitterness. Mandatory niceness: Human rights in Canada From McCain's electoral college math, at Am Thinker: ...John McCain is in very good shape for the general election run. The Republicans have landed on the one candidate in their party ideally suited for the race this year, with broad appeal among Democrats and independents, a veteran and war hero during a time of war, a candidate with a reputation for being a straight talker (and not talking down to voters, or outright lying to them), and with real strength in larger swing states. McCain is also benefiting from the fact that the Democrats continue to snipe at each other rather than at him, and each candidate has exposed weaknesses in the other, which become ammunition for McCain in the fall campaign. McCain opens up the map to a broader Electoral College victory than George Bush achieved in 2000 and 2004, particularly against Barack Obama.
Photo: A Song Sparrow
Sunday, April 13. 2008
The reason Obama's words keep getting so much attention is because they reveal so much of what we already know about how the self-ordained elite think about regular folks.  Our blog pal Theo sent me this image re Obama as an impostor but, in fact, he is not. Obama gets in trouble whenever he says what he thinks - and either he or his wife do it all the time. They don't hide it.
Do they think we all live in Berkeley or Cambridge among the bien pensant brie-eaters? (Disclaimer: I am known to eat brie.) Hillary is too "smart" and too lacking in conscience to make these sorts of errors of honesty. I think the story is that Obama's words have some legs because they expose the old story of the Left's condescension towards, and sense of superiority in relation to, regular folks. Rush has always contended that the Left refuses to run on their real beliefs, and I think that is true. Truth is, the hard working folks of America are doing fine as long as they live within their means. They have many concerns and interests beyond their bank accounts and whatever freebies they could be entitled to. And Americans are not babies: they neither long for a government mommy nor do they take politicians' promises or pandering seriously. They are used to government taking their earnings and offering little in return. Mostly, they want the nanny government to leave them the heck alone. They are, in fact, thinking, responsible, hard-working adults. I know lots of "them," including myself. As Mark Levin always says (approx.), "If things are as terrible and hopeless in America as Hillary and Obama say they are, then how come every ambitious and freedom-seeking person in the world wants to come here to pursue their dreams?" Obama's political problem is that he is not enough of an impostor to fool the savvy American middle class.
 What's the matter with Chicago? Stanley Kurtz at NRO
It's your mother's fault. Shrink Rap Viewing the 1960s from my 60s. Prelutsky Attack of the pre-school perverts. Steyn. The little devils are everywhere! 35 dozen oysters in 8 minutes. But did he fully appreciate every one? Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty. The economics of high-end prostitution A liberal (fascist?) "Fathead". Hillary is all over Obama's elitism. A quote: If we are striving to bring people together — and I believe we should be — I don't think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not.
Pot, kettle. However, now Hillary reinvents herself as a gun-totin' churchgoer. Heck, everybody brings a gun to church, don't they? It's the bitterness, ya know? I always bring spare ammo, just in case my bitterness builds up. Learned something useful about web searches from Dr. Mercury's post: using a - sign to rule out irrelevant searches. Photo: Our Forsythia is coming into bloom. The big fat tree is a Copper Beech.
Saturday, April 12. 2008
 Obama's elitism. Pajamas. Photo: Our effete Editor Bird Dog, who is not an Obama guy and who does not care for Chardonnay with the Big Macs on which he feeds. More on the topic via Insty here, and also here:
TOM MAGUIRE: A TYPICAL SORT OF FLARE-UP: "Hmm, how typical is it for a candidate to characterize a huge swath of his target voters as bigoted, gun waving religious fanatics?" And a big roundup from James Joyner, who observes: "Class bias works both ways. Urban elites tend to view rural America, especially Southerners, as a bunch of yahoos. Rural Americans, meanwhile, think big city types are elitist snobs who don’t love America. There are similar resentments between rich and poor, educated and not, and even Ivy League -State College. In private gatherings, where people think they are among the like-minded, one hears shocking bigotry along those lines." And sometimes it's recorded and circulated on the Internet.
Everybody at Maggie's is a gun-totin' Bible-thumpin' redneck hick who needs more from the government. More Coors Lite would be a good place to start. Later, we'll be needing the Chateau Margaux to accompany our government brie. All Opie wants is Grey Goose. A lesson on denial, at Dr. Sanity. A quote: • In the short-term, psychological denial can help a person maintain their sanity--which would be threatened by awareness of a painful truth or reality
• In the short-term, denial can help a person function day to day
• In the short-term, denial can prevent a person from having to acknowledge painful thoughts, feelings or behavior and help them maintain a world view threatened by an unacceptable reality or truth
Steyn on the nightly news, at Driscoll. A quote: (it's) actually the place for people who aren’t interested in news. And it’s pathetic in a time of war, and a time of great turbulence and great change, to switch on, and there’ll be the light item about the new fat pill, or whatever. I mean, it’s formulaic, it’s tired, it’s shallow, and it’s unwatchable.
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