We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
We all look for great deals when we buy things. Groupon has taken this concept and turned it into a phenomenon. Alas, it is an easy concept to mimic. Living Social, Facebook, and Google have all launched similar products.
Meanwhile, the Groupon idea is not always a winner for the small businessperson seeking to corral new or increased business. I recently utilized one of their offers at a local business. While it was a savings for me, it represented a loss to the business owner. This is the risk many people are willing to take to drive business, leading many to try Groupon once and abandon it. The Groupon story from a sales and income perspective is fraught with issues.
There was a time any dot com business could drive an IPO skyward. The new ideas coming out today are too easy to mimic and barriers to entry are low. Maybe someone can explain why Linked In is priced at $92, when it only earns $.07 per share and has competitors targeting it like mad?
These new businesses are not groundbreaking ideas and are being overvalued.
Groundbreaking ideas are what will drive the economy forward. Not IPOs for coupon books.
We can’t solve the problem easily because we still have too much debt. But we can move forward in being able to make the best of it. We can spread it out, we can keep orderly. We have a situation now in which we have a very severe situation, not only because we have a de-leveraging going on, but we have a situation in which monetary policy cannot work the way it worked in the past, that fiscal policy will not be stimulative.
He thinks we have a decade of economic doom in the US anyway. His biz is global.
Escaping the dysfunctional NCLB is certainly good news for many professional educators and parents, but like every other recent alleged panacea, Obama's fix will fail it since it ignores the one feature of American education that dares not speak its name in public: the intellectual quality of students. If reformers insisted on transforming all ordinary kids into world-class athletes, this would be a joke, since everybody would know the truth. But when it comes to upping academic performance, nothing is said about individual ability or motivation; the culprit is always something else, and this avoidance of reality applies across the entire ideological spectrum. Better to waste billions and fail than speak frankly
CBC running scared: State broadcaster's false attack ads demonstrate how financial probe is desperately needed
The Wild Ride of the 1% - The once-stable incomes of America's biggest earners now fluctuate dramatically from year to year. And as go the rich, so goes much of the economy.
If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future. Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.
Seems to me that most of it is about pols being in bed with government unions, and splitting the pie at the taxpayers' expense. In blue states, who represents the citizens against the union machines? My state government (CT) is owned, top to bottom, by the government unions and functions like a Mafia conspiracy preying on the taxpayers.
In the two years Reid and President Obama have controlled Washington, government jobs have increased 13.5 percent to 2.1 million.
During that same time, 2.5 million private-sector jobs were lost.
Perhaps the goal is to have everybody working for our government overlords. Feudalism.
Government jobs are a necessary evil and are functionally parasitic, not a basis for the real economy which is required to work and make a profit to pay those government bills. McConnell is right: These are local and state concerns, not federal concerns. The federal government has enough to deal with as it is with its constitutional duties, and is not doing a very good job with that. States and localities have to run themselves, or surrender their sovereignty to the feds. Like Greece. That is not a good idea.
Prelutsky: Shooting Holes Into Obama’s Campaign Strategy
I have to admit that I don’t understand the “I am the 99%” shtick coming out of OWS. If these people are saying that 99% of the country is poor, with only 1% holding the wealth, perhaps I don’t understand poverty as well as I should.
How ObamaCare Guts Medicare - The president's pledge that 'If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep it' clearly does not apply to America's seniors.
I was alive then, and I'm not that old. I remember life without an Education Department, for example. We somehow learned the times-table and how to diagram sentences without the "help" of the federal government, and also without mandatory teacher certification. The guys who put men on the moon all went to grade school before even the first New Math, much less the Education Department.
Normally I'd leave this link for the morning compendium, but this is too important to be mixed in with others.
After 9-years of US sacrifices, President Obama's rush for the exits in Iraq and the incompetence of his administration is seen again, with very probable bad consequences for Iraq's ability to withstand internal discord and external influence from Iran. The US is left with little but a likely buffer protecting Iranian interests and a sanctions evasion route that allows Iran greater freedom from Western pressure. Once again, each time over and over, Obama blows US interests into the crapper.
Morning Postscript: Carl Cannon makes the case that "The Obama Doctrine, Made Plain at Last in Libya, Iraq": The administration "They preferred to frame the events of the week in ways that play into a domestic, election-season narrative: Namely, Barack Obama made promises regarding foreign policy, and kept them....Distilled to its essence, this approach envisioned an American foreign policy that was less militaristic, less confrontational, and less-unilateral than that of his predecessor."
Fred and Kimberly Kagan, however, call it "Retreat With Our Heads Held High", as the Obama administration's veil for failure to meet even newly President Obama's criteria for US goals in Iraq, citing his speech of February 2009. I'll quote them at length to see how Obama or his defenders should hang their heads in shame:
The humiliation of this retreat is compounded by the dishonesty of its presentation....
Have any of these conditions been met? Such sovereignty as Iraq has is gravely marred by the continuous efforts of Iran to direct the course of its internal politics through armed means and otherwise. Iraq is not stable. The Iraqi government has still not been completely formed, and the parties contesting the parliamentary election of early 2010 have not yet come to an agreement on how the state will be run or who will run it. Iraq is not self-reliant. In fact, it will not be able to protect its territory or its airspace. Its government is not “just, representative, and accountable,” but rather heading toward a new authoritarian structure at a time when many Arab states are convulsed by resistance to authoritarianism. The U.S. has not helped Iraq build ties of trade or commerce. Above all, today’s announcement is the definitive renunciation of any attempt to “forge a partnership with the people and government of Iraq.” In other words, the president has failed to achieve any of the objectives that he established as his own policy in February 2009—apart, of course, from withdrawing U.S. military forces.
This failure was not inevitable. When President Obama took office, the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops in Iraq who had just completed, together with the Iraqi Security Forces, driving off Iranian militias and clearing the last bastions of al Qaeda in Iraq and Sunni resistance forces. As he noted in that February 2009 speech, Iraq had just completed provincial elections that were, in fact, “just, representative, and accountable,” and that laid a solid foundation for the transition to a successful Iraqi parliamentary democracy. And, in fact, the parliamentary elections of early 2010 were also in many respects remarkably successful—they were peaceful, heavily-contested, with high participation, and produced the potential for a new political balance in which forces of secularism and cross-sectarianism might well have succeeded. Had the U.S. pursued a determined strategy, using all of the considerable leverage at our disposal, to support the formation of an Iraqi government harnessing that potential, then Iraq’s path could have been very different.
But the Obama administration did not focus on helping Iraq move forward to seize this opportunity, but rather focused on prodding the Iraqis to form a coalition government as rapidly as possible—in order to negotiate a new agreement that would allow American forces to remain in Iraq after the end of this year. In other words, the administration threw away the chance of political progress in Iraq in pursuit of something it has now decided it never wanted to begin with.
Observers of U.S. policy could have been excused for finding all of this rather confusing, but today’s speech resolves any lack of clarity. The president has enunciated the Obama Doctrine: American retreat.
If there's any multilateralism buried in the manure, it is that of widespread burying heads in it to avoid facing the reality of a contra-Western interests Middle East that we will see in Iraq and Libya, as we've seen in Egypt, while Iran and its proxies are encouraged as was al-Quaeda by prior US weaknesses and excuses.
This rabble of self-important losers is even a bigger joke than SDS was. Do they know how to do anything useful in this world besides beg for my money? I doubt it.
Alinsky, Cloward-Piven, the whole of the Community Organizing movement, in which flak catchers are mau-maued — these are all intellectual blue prints for bringing about the desired social upheaval that is to lead to the fall of the capitalist system as we know it, to be replaced (in theory) by the democratic socialism Obama and his left-wing academic cohert desire. Even as this very same cohort knows that liberal fascism and corporatism — a centralized command and control economy run by government in partnership with those big businesses they hold regulatory control over — is the real end point, one in which a new class system is drawn up, with the masses returned to their place as masses, and the government class taking exclusive control over wealth and power, creating a permanent relationship between citizen and government wherein the citizen is dependent exclusively upon the government for survival.
The guy can't spell his way out of a wet paper bag, but I think he is right
As the Left leads America deeper and deeper into a welfare state in which we take money from our neighbors to pay for our personal responsibilities and to cover our losing risks (after government takes its hefty cut, of course), I found this proposal amusing: Free Diapers
At the risk of pissing off most of our readers, I would assert that anyone benefiting from unemployment, mortgage interest deductions, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, government pensions, Social Security, welfare checks, disability, SSI, etc etc is in diapers.
I am sick of that old "I paid into it" line. Maybe you were fooled into thinking you did, but you did not. I never hear any gratitude from the recipients, just endless demands for more money to be extracted from the shrinking pool of taxpayers - who I term "neighbors" because that is who they are.
They told you that you did, that you did pay into it and deserve it, and they told you that fiction so you would feel entitled to it and eternally grateful to "government" - not to your neighbor - for supplying it. However, you did not pay into "it." There is no "it" there, to distort Gertrude Stein. There is no money there, waiting to be used. It's just all borrowed from the Chinese, who will soon own the USA as a semi-dysfunctional subsidiary - a "distressed asset."
We Americans should be ashamed of ourselves, or at least own up to our condition in which dependency has become socially and politically acceptable instead of being viewed as charity. It's not the way our tough ancestors lived, and mine led fine, honorable, sacrificial, difficult lives as far as I know, without expecting anything from anybody except spouse, family, and neighborly helping. Good lives, no mooching.
In America, they put you into diapers, sooner or later, whether you want the freebies or not. Most people welcome the freebies, because, however undignified, it's human nature and we want to convince ourselves that we are entitled to it, somehow, to rationalize our sponging off of others and to reduce the shame of dependency in adulthood. I suppose I would accept the money too were I in dire straights, but I would not feel good about it because I would know that it is taken from my neighbor - not voluntarily, but by force. That's the plan - a nation of dependents. It might be the European Way, the Serfdom Way, but I do not think of it as the American Way.
All of this weakens our people, our nation, our spirit, and our backbone. It is designed to do that. It is a political strategy.
It's a shame Ron Paul is such a (partial) nutjob. A shame that Cain doesn't know what he is talking about, compared with your average Maggie's reader.
The idea that we need more entrepreneurs to help improve the economy (a theme I've been thumping) is not lost on the government. However, their solution is to use taxpayer money to invest in areas they deem worthy. Most venture capitalists look for profitable businesses with a high potential return. Or at least some kind of return. The government has the luxury of being able to borrow as much as it wants from the Fed, or taxing the citizenry to death to pursue its dreams of a greener world...and is not seeking any return.
This is not entrepreneurial behavior. This is not venture capitalist behavior. It is the kind of behavior we should all be wary of - the government picking winners and losers. It's a precarious game, particularly if you choose a market that is so small your money isn't likely to have any kind of decent return. This administration claims the GM and Chrysler bailouts "made money" (though I am sure a careful accounting will prove otherwise). Assuming this is true, and politicians are astute enough to put taxpayer money to a profitable end - why the hell are we investing in this?
At its very core, it's just wealth redistribution. They just slapped a different label on it.
Ed: A quote from that piece:
Politicians write the press releases first and worry about the taxpayer losses later.
"Wait a sec. Did he say 'levitation'?? Oh, come on! What's next, ESP? UFOs? Boy, the crap you see on blog sites these day, huh?"
Yeah, well...
Hat tip Theo. Home site is here, although there didn't appear to be any more vids or info on the above. Pretty amazing, though. You know that fun old literary theme of going back in time and appearing real smart compared to everybody else? If I'm going back in time, I'm bringing along one of these babies.
Exit question: How long would it spin in a vacuum with no air resistance to slow it down?
Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
Desperately Seeking Talent - Employers worry more about the effects of a bad hire than about the problems of hiring someone who is competent but not exceptional.
Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data...
Wall St. is overwhelmingly Democratic, esp in the upper echelons
The AFL-CIO is making headlines by running ads promoting “Occupy Wall Street.” One seriously doubts that members of the working class have much in common with the left-wing professional agitators running these protests and the tent cities they are erecting illegally in private and public parks in New York, Washington, D.C. and other cities. The most interesting part of this story, however, is that one of the AFL-CIO affiliates behind the campaign, the Working America group, is headed by a veteran of the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba, a progressive activist by the name of Karen Nussbaum. Equally significant, her husband works for the public relations firm that represented billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros.
Liberalism has been unable to decide whether it is for or against more democracy for nearly a century now, ever since it underwent a radical transformation from a creed believing that advancing the cause of individual liberty meant limiting government power and protecting individual rights into the creed we know today of believing that larger and more powerful government is the primary means of securing the realization of individual liberty. None of the liberal complaints about “gridlock” are new; Progressives like Woodrow Wilson deplored the separation of powers and other limiting features of the Founding as obsolete years before he tried to ignore them as president.
To paraphrase Insty the other day, the message is "Government is corrupted by power and money, and we need more government with more money to run more things."
The St. Paul speech only made manifest what is implicit in much of Obama’s presentation of himself. How could Obama have brought himself to utter such laughable pap? This is either one politician who takes himself way too seriously, or who holds his supporters in incredibly low esteem, or both.
If you’ve lived through the past four decades, does it really seem like America is no better off today? It doesn’t to Jason Furman, the deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Here is Furman back in 2006: “Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?”
No doubt the past few years have been terrible. But the past few decades have been pretty good—for everybody
“Again, if you can’t cut back the government bureaucracy in good times (because there is enough tax money and we have ‘unmet needs,’ etc.) and you can’t cut it in bad times (because we have to preserve those jobs as ‘stimulus’) when does the government stop growing? Has Obama even attempted to answer this concern?”
This is an oldie, but still good for a chuckle for me:
AVI gave us a free mini-post in his comment, here:
Journalism at present involves a great deal of believing that you know other people's motives. We are told that OWS has some legitimate complaints. Not because very many of them are actually clearly articulating legitimate complaints, but because journalists can think of reasons that people might be upset that sell better. This is common in the type of anti-American rhetoric we get explained to us: "Well can you blame them? America has done blah, blah, blah..." Those are not, in fact, the reasons why foreigners hate us. They are the reasons liberals hate us. They project this crap onto others all the time, because they really are that narcissistic and tribal.
So helping out OWS is just a natural extension of that. They are "giving voice to the voiceless, to the inarticulate rage of the disenfranchised, who deeply resent the inequitable distribution of wealth that allows people with unapproved attitudes to...oops, I mean, 'that saddles future generations...' no wait, I'm looking for the right words here... 'that finds a way to make a fortune even in hard times...' damn, this is hard..."
Because they see it as Us vs. Them, zero-sum, for cultural hegemony and prestige. That is the subtext.
Hegemony, prestige... and cash, AVI. OPM. That's what they really want.
Consider romantic Lord Byron, who had spent the previous Summer in a villa in Switzerland ruminating with other literaries about the issues of advancing science (which led to cohabiter Shelley’s Frankenstein), writing this drivel poetry the following December, Christmas eve 1816, in support of the Luddites:
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding-sheet
O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!
Today’s self-declared intellectuals and media wannabes, similarly, extol the stand-against-the-machine OWSers in the parks. An essay from novelist Thomas Pynchon, maybe appropriately written in 1984, expresses the hope, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” Pynchon traces Ludditism to belief in miracles against the “machine,” of modern life, then steps forward to today.
Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible.
But, garbage in, garbage out. Now as then, retreat to fantasies misstate and contradict realities of how machines free labor to be more productive and remunerative, not only to investors but to the daily lives and liberties of workers. Now as then, it takes capitalists to exert practical imagination, risk capital, and bring to fruition and everyone’s table the produce. Not fairies.
See Polling the OWSers: "...the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people." And with reality. They are miracle fairies for President Obama who will make disappear from consciousness all his abject failures and misdirections. Dream on as you drive into the wall of reality, President Obama. But, please spare the rest of us being further injured by your reckless driving.
Neither in good times nor in bad does the middle class have a narrative nearly as compelling as those between which it is sandwiched. And it suffers accordingly.
I wish the media would go down to Union Square and interview all the happy young people there. Here's my comment for these envious and hate-filled kids and their media-invented movement - self-important kids and superannuated kids who somehow have time to do street theater which I am sure must be fun and somewhat gratifying if you have no responsibilities in life:
The OWS people have a very minimal impact on NYC. We went down to the city yesterday afternoon with friends for matinee theater and dinner, had a little time to kill so wandered around Union Square Park and Broadway.
Happy parks filled with young happy people do not make the news. These are the people Obama should be celebrating. More people here enjoying a lovely October day than in Zucotti Park.
It was Sukkot, so there were plenty of Hassidim around with their citrons and palms. They ask you "Are you Jewish?" and if you are, they will wish you a good Sukkot.
Same as in Washington Square, these speed chess guys with their tables set up will play you for money.
Replacing the YUPPIES, AOL hits the irony jackpot today, naming the 2010s young generation the DUMPIES, downward mobile, unemployed, poor.
Of course, relatively few of last decade's young were Yuppies, and relatively few of today's are Dumpies. But the Dumpies appelation does seem to fit well the Occupy Wall Streeters. Besides the most common fecal meanings of "dump" as displayed by the photo of a protester defecating on a police car, there's more definitions found at the Urban Dictionary that fit their OWS scene:
*To refer to a place or setting that is in poor condition or standards.
*One who wallows in their own laziness.
*A very lazy, trashy person, often smelling of foul body odor and looking like an all-around ragamuffin.
*A word used to describe a person/object/situation that is definitely not even good. Often used in a situation where a boring person makes a boring statement or is just generally being a fail.
*To whine about one's problems and let out many emotions to any unfortunate person who has to listen.
*Noun; to be someone who's annoying or stupid and annoying.
In case you don't know what Wonkette is, it is — by far — a blog site full of the biggest Lefty fruitcakes in existence. "Frothing at the mouth" would be an adequate description. Following is a selection of their posts and links from just this past week.
Remember, folks, if you want the latest anti-right screed, then you want Wonkette!
Quite the list, eh? And that's just from one week! As I said, if you want the latest in hard-core right-wing defeatism, then you want Wonk-
Oh, wait a sec. Damn it!
Sorry, everyone. I've made a terrible mistake. Those were last week's links from Hot Air, the "leading conservative blog for breaking news and commentary."
And just why is the "leading conservative blog for breaking news and commentary" so incredibly defeatist? I have no idea. But hey, this was the blog site that had more anti-Palin links than pro-Palin links during the 2008 election, so who knows what's going on behind the scenes? If anyone out there has the scoop, please let us know in the comments. It's all quite the little mystery. After founder and ex-boss Michelle Malkin wrote her anti-Perry HPV article a month ago, Hot Air promptly ran twenty anti-Perry headlines in a row over the next two weeks. Twenty.
The kicker is that Hot Air is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the California-based Salem Communications Corporation, owner of over 1,650 sites, and the "bloggers" are actually compensated writers.
In other words, they were paid for the above.
Again, I apologize for my grievous blunder, and I promise to be more careful in the future.
A specter haunts America: downward mobility. Every generation, we believe, should live better than its predecessor. By and large, Americans still embrace that promise. A Pew survey earlier this year found that 48 percent of respondents felt that their children’s living standards would exceed their own. Although that’s down from 61 percent in 2002, it’s on a par with the mid-1990s. But these expectations could be dashed. For young Americans, the future could be dimmer.
Atlanta: Unlike the Tea Party these protestors do not seem to have jobs to attend or families to take care of. They have time on their hands. And they are becoming more emboldened.
10 
Major ALS Breakthrough – Common Cause of All Forms of ALS Discovered
After nearly 3,000 years, 
As the Left leads America deeper and deeper into a welfare state in which we take money from our neighbors to pay for our personal responsibilities and to cover our losing risks (after government takes its 
Mrs. BD likes 
115 year old electric car
