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.
Americans' confident belief in the uniqueness, yes the exceptionalism, of their country, rested on an essential faith in liberty, and individualism and anti-statism at home, and in the power of our example, and muscle now and then, in foreign lands. Mr. Obama is ill-at-ease with that worldview. Our country has had pessimism on offer and has invariably rejected it. At crucial points in its history, it has remained unshaken in the belief that tomorrow can be better.
Obama suffers from the typically American condescending elite view of life: "America sucks because our retarded citizenry sucks."
The deal between the Congressional leadership and the President is much ado about nothing, in that – contrary to the kudos, rationalizations or moans – it actually does and will do little to affect the rapidly rising federal deficits and debts. It is less than trivial in the next year that it actually affects and almost entirely a lie over the next decade as future Congresses and presidents work around or ignore it.
The deal will cause increased demoralization among the citizenry both over its lack of real content and as politicians wrangle vigorously over scraps treated like whole cloth. It will also cause a new sobriety, already in painful motion, among the citizenry who have lesser prospects than before this deep recession and little reason to believe the future will personally be much better. Consumption will be restrained.
It is clear that the status quo is continued, for now at least and likely into the foreseeable future.
Spending is not reduced. It only promises a reduction in the present trendline of forecast spending, a fraction of the increases that will actually occur. And, there is little reason to believe that either Medicare or defense spending will be more than trimmed slightly in 2012. Part of that trendline, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a $multi-trillion increase in taxes as the Bush tax-cuts are allowed to expire right after the 2012 elections. There is little reason to believe that such a drastic increase in taxes will be allowed to occur. Longer term, even if a trillion$ or three-$trillion dollars of spending were most optimistically avoided over the next decade, that’s a hundred to three-hundred $billion per year, a small fraction of federal spending.
If, as seems likely, the 2012 elections result in a Republican president and both houses of Congress, there will be more trims to spending, a good thing surely but likely to increase the howls of real and defensive pains and hardly likely to actually reduce the deficits significantly. The Cut, Cap and Balance that the Republican House passed is likely, and decidedly a better thing, yet as tides and lobbies weigh in will be weakened and end-run over time.
Fears about the crash of the dollar are overblown, as there is no viable alternative in a euro-myth euro or speciously corrupt Chinese renminbi. Lenders will demand higher interest rates and that will increase the deficits worldwide. Fears about more global conflict are not overblown. Enemies of order or Western civilization will continue to probe and attack. Reducing mental and defense preparedness by the US will encourage such foes and increase the needs to confront, which will be less successful and more costly to servicemembers and foregone goals.
So, long story short, the status quo will continue. It will be perceived as or really be painful for all, even under the best of circumstances.
One can argue that far more severe governmental actions or changes would reverse this. They are unlikely to occur. There will be more restraints on deepening the hole, but the hole remains. We’ve already dug it by a generation or two of profligacy and excuses. Only a generation or two of serious reduction in personal and government spending, plus economic recovery that must depend upon lessened government regulation and interference, will begin to maybe return us to realistic optimism.
I predict that the demoralization will be temporary and the new sobriety will ultimately triumph and set us right. The path will be long and hard to dig out of several generations of delusions that we could spend our seed-corn, requiring perseverance and sacrifice of self and illusions, but it is well marked.
BTW, I'm encoraged that the cautious and knowledgeable Mitt Romney is opposed to the debt deal, both as an economic realist and political positioner. The debt deal will pass anyway but he will be demonstrated as correct during the coming election season. That may not win him enough points to score, but does indicate a will among Republican moderates that together with the more conservative and Independent centrists -- as polls presently show -- will lead to the next vital step up with a Republican White House and Congress. The road of a thousand steps begins with the first. We've taken the first and 999 remain.
[T]he cure for: a) the budget deficit = more taxes; b) unemployment = more taxes; c) recession = more taxes; d) environmental problems = more taxes; e) illiteracy = more taxes; f) L.A. riots = more taxes. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the problem is.
Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power.
"Rep. Barney Frank of Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac fame told Neil Cavuto this morning that if Moody’s downgrades the US debt, “We just don’t pay much attention to them… Don’t sell.” He then went on to blame the ratings agencies for ignoring the mortgage crisis… that he helped create. Unreal."
I am weary. After nearly 30 years in private practice, I am not sure which straw broke the camel’s back, but it is most surely broken. It is a weariness born of 14 hour days; of dictating charts and finishing paperwork until 8 or 9 pm each night, after starting the day at 7 am; of endless audits by the insurance industry and Medicare; of the constant threat of litigation; of the crushing burden of one more federal requirement mandated but never recompensed; of a host of ever-expanding administrative burdens having nothing to do with patient care, and everything to do with bureaucratic micromanagement of the profession. And this before we have even begun to see the nightmare which Obamacare will inflict. Camels weren’t designed to carry such a load.
But the change (ie the change Dr. Bob is making) is nevertheless much anticipated in a host of other ways, with its reduced administrative and regulatory burdens, and substantial increase in free time. For me, the war is over: I have fought the good fight, and no longer see it as profitable to battle the inexorable forces which threaten to crush a beloved profession.
In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.
Computer models are not reality. They are virtual realities. How did all the fancy computer modeling work out for the economy? Computer models are toys for grown-ups.
I'm mostly white (if you ignore a little American Injun blood), and yet cops keep pulling me over because they are profiling me and my red Lamborghini. Is it my ride, or are they detecting my inner Injun?
A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.
So I understand that my country is about to become an insolvent failed state, plunging over the cliff into abject bankruptcy. On the other hand, I just discovered a great video of the Josie and the Pussycats theme song rendered in a mash-up of different musical styles. Fellow Americans, we face great challenges; but we must never lose sight of what made us a great nation.
The Democratic party loves taking credit for the social safety net, but they have proven to be completely irresponsible trustees, squandering the trust by borrowing against the sum, and then borrowing against the debt to fund an entirely separate agenda. What began as security for workers mutated into a bureaucracy that existed for its own sake expanding benefits and spending to bulk up its power and influence.
The old worker centered universe was turned upside down. Private sector unions gave way to public sector unions. A non-union public was suddenly forced to subsidize the municipal crony unions of Democratic politicians. Corporate health insurance became mandatory. Illegal aliens showed up for the free health insurance. And the taxpayer kept picking up the tab. Now the system is on the brink, and the trustees have no answer except more spending and a few cuts.
The New Deal had always been rotten with wealth redistribution calculations, but it wasn't unfeasible until fiscal responsibility went completely out the window. The Potemkin Village economics had been there in the 1930's, the unconstitutional mandates, the overreaching regulations and the share the wealth platform. But they had at least used a nation with a solid industrial base and birth rate as their base. Both of those have been sinking for decades, even as spending has been growing...
No rational person can look at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare and actually believe that these programs can be funded for 50 more years. Yet there isn’t a substantive movement from either political party’s leadership to stop them.
At a critical time in its history, the country has as its president a man unqualified and unable to lead. Even the left has begun to finally question their allegiance to Barack Obama, and more importantly, his allegiance to them. More Americans, some in the media, are openly asking if the president is a liar, with the word mendacity frequently used in describing his actions. (snip) For the first time in Barack Obama's life, he is accountable, and upon his shoulders rest the lives and fortunes of millions in the United States and the world.
It seems like a waste of Maggie's Farm's precious paper and ink to simply forward the efforts of tediously brilliant folks like Mead, Steyn, and VDH. Even had I the time, I could not do what they do. From VDH's Our Ten-Trillion-Dollar Man:
So we have what we have always had — the most partisan and the least experienced man in the U.S. Senate as president, elected by a perfect storm of events (e.g., the 2008 meltdown, the media adulation, the anemic McCain candidacy, the furor over Bush and the Iraq war, the orphaned election without a single incumbent, etc.), in which no one was allowed to ask “Who is this stranger?” and “What has he ever done?”, in which the media finally gave up its last shred of impartiality and became a megaphone, as we were assured that Mr. Obama’s most intimate associates were really total strangers, his once praised avid church-going was merely sporadic, his most partisan voting record was in truth bipartisan, and his bad habits of saying disturbing things were simply a symptom of racialist, raise-the-bar nitpicking on behalf of his Neanderthal critics.
In short, Obama came into office with all the Carteresque assumptions on how to take over a private-sector economy and outsource foreign policy to international bodies. He now finds to his utter amazement — as Carter discovered in late 1979 after Teheran, Afghanistan, and Central America — that in the real world none of what worked in word worked in deed. Those who assured Obama that his Harvard lounge fantasies were real have either quit, are now offering new advice, or are criticizing him for once taking them at their word.
and
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.
In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.
An overwhelming majority of those polled would not want to be 20 again. The question: “Knowing no more than you did then, would you want to be 20 again?” The key is in making the choice knowing what the respondents do now.
This wasn’t a scientific poll but was random across almost anyone I met and had a conversation with during the past month, successful in whatever field from business to arts to teaching; economically stressed from illegal immigrants to trades people to clerks to unemployed; politically conservative, liberal, somewhere in between, indifferent; married, single, happy, sad.
About 20% said they’d choose to be 20 again, about half confident and about half wanting to feel free like when they were 20. About 30% didn’t want to repeat the same or similar early errors, feeling their personalities would be the same. Then, half of the respondents just believe that it would be far tougher to get ahead now than whenever then was when they were 20. Those with grown children went on about how difficult it is for their sons and daughters to even get a toehold, and those with young children remarked about what they are seeing around them and deeply worry about their children’s future prospects.
Delving a little deeper into my respondents’ concerns about their children’s futures: Our children’s future being heavily mortgaged is at the core of the current Washington wrangles, and that is recognized although feeling powerless to affect it or almost hopeless that real reforms will happen. Another core issue is, as one respondent commented, “even with a professional degree, my kid is going to have to be working for the government.” Directly or indirectly through burdensome, intrusive and nitpicking regulations.
I’d be interested in hearing your comments.
Meanwhile, here’s a video shot for PowerLine’s contest, called “Child Abuse.”
A house has been made so "energy-efficent" that it can't go two weeks without dehumidification, humidification, heating, cooling, mechanical ventilation, sump-pumping, and ten other things I'm too weary to write.
We were all better off before we "fixed" houses, and housing.
...we have a lot of independent evidence (including my own experience) that many small and middle sized companies have changed their hiring plans based on costs and uncertainties of Obamacare.
Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges—civic as well as economic—to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy.
Jeffrey Pelt in Hunt For Red October: "I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheater and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops." More memorable quotes from the wonderful film here.
... true to the concept, the Sunday Review section features a cover page boldly splashed with a proposal to move the burgeoning nanny state into further regulation of what we may and may not eat. Penned by Mark Bittman, an erstwhile Sunday writer of rabbit-food recipes, the article condemns Americans' food and drink choices and proposes to control them via the means of taxation -- picking winners and losers in the marketplace much in the way that regulation is attempting to control the winners and losers in the light bulb industry.
...appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn't matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they'll continue to sell the health-damaging food that's most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That "other force" should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.
We check in with Dinocrat almost daily. He seems as fond of Alison Krause and Keith Jarrett as I am, so I decided to check his profile. Not too shabby.
Pic is some of my young relatives, on Cape Cod. High tide on the ocean beaches keeps people mostly out of the water. Low tide is for swimming, body surfing, and lolling in the chilly water. The Cape Cod Bay side is sort of the opposite, and plenty warmer too, so it all works out.
Their ugliness seems to be escalating day by day, and with it the dishonesty, distortions, and bullying anger of their mainstream-media fellow travelers. There’s a reason for this, I think. It’s the increasingly apparent failure of Barack Obama. With the notable exception of Osama bin Laden’s execution, the Obama presidency has resembled nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Bean, one slapstick misadventure after another.
In contemporary America, poverty is not so much a material condition as a spiritual one, often characterized by drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness and illegitimacy. Until voters have a better understanding of what today’s poverty is and is not, it will not be possible to craft effective solutions to the very real problems–mostly behavioral–that afflict a significant portion of our population.
The End of the Growth Consensus - America added 44 million jobs in the 1980s and '90s, when both parties showed they had learned from past mistakes. The lessons have been forgotten.
Mix up a Martooni or two or a Gin and Tonic, and read and weep over the fecklessness of our political betters. As I have said before, I am worried about what the heck is going on and do not know anyone who is not.
The 70-Million-Check Constituency. It's about the delusion that "money happens." Money does not "happen" without people busting their asses in profitable work.
How to Contain the European Debt Crisis: Giavazzi and Kashyap. It is not a joke: the credit cards are at the limit, and the creditors are rightly concerned. If the big creditors blow up, we all blow up with them. Debtor nations are like suicide bombers, but at some point there is not enough money in the world to pay them off.
If Congress and President Obama, as well as the candidates who would like to succeed the president in 2013, maintain their silence, people should at least understand that the lousy jobs numbers are no mystery. They are the result of a policy that Washington has willfully chosen. As the Fed notes, the cost of this policy isn’t measured in dollars but in something more precious: time. Washington’s refusal to confront the debt problem is costing millions the most productive years of their lives.
That part is heart-breaking. But if you were or are an employer, would you be hiring now? We in CT are firing, not hiring, and not happy about it at all.
Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.
The Fear-Based Economy - Further tax increases could bring an already frightened, sputtering economy to a standstill.We are watching the dramatic and deliberate destruction of the economy, of jobs, and of enterprise, but you'd think, from the MSM, that it is business as usual. If you have kids, you should worry because crazy, ignorant people are running this thing and harming everybody who is not a government employee.
Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we'd tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It's become stifling.
So the utopians cannot accept the functionalist notion of government as a means of conducting vital functions on behalf of the people, rather than the utopian tool of transforming the people into a great society with seven academic degrees for everyone and recycling at every curb. Such a system is not a moral one to them and they are duty bound to resist it. And the functionalists similarly cannot accept a system that deprives them of agency by overlaying its political code over every aspect of their lives.
But it is the utopians and their economic policies who have forced their own moment to its crisis. Had Obama not won, they would have been able to comfortably sit back and blame Bush era policies for the mess. But their will to power also undid them. It gave them so much power that they are choking on it. With predictable blindness they exploited the crisis for all it was worth and are now left holding the bag. And their policies are now at the center of the debate.
But deeper still is the question of the place of government in the political and economic life of the American. This moment is a wake up call for a country that has been willing to avoid looking too closely at the fine print of the social programs and the total cost of the national debt. And the real question that drifts out of the debates is not about spending cuts, but about the role of government.
The utopian conception of government is not only a freedom deficit, but a functional deficit. The former is obvious, but the latter is often less obvious. The left is often dinged for its controlling ways, but less often for its incompetence.
Hearing that heat index makes you feel hotter, same as the wind chill factor makes you feel colder when you hear it. How about treating me like a reasonably intelligent person and just giving me the temp, the humidity, and the wind speed?
You don’t usually yearn for someone because of who they are, but because something about them triggers your needs. They’re rich or beautiful or make you feel very, very good. Friends, on the other hand, are usually great to be with because they don’t trigger strong needs, so you feel comfortable being yourself.
We are a smaller blog, for sure - but not exactly a political blog. I am not sure what we are, which is why I refer to us as a boutique site despite the lame sound of that. Do we want to be Big? Darn right we do, but our audience grows in fits and starts. I think we need an Asian office.
One of my friends voluntarily attended an event recently, one that I wouldn't go to for a million bucks (well, maybe a million bucks). It was called Erasing White Privilege.
WHAT IS THE "CORRECT" AVERAGE TEMPERATURE? Don’t we need to know this first before we can determine what deviance is detrimental?
This is a question that used to have been answered. There is a period known as the "Climate Optimum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum around 9,000 – 5,000 years ago. The temperature was up to 4 C warmer than now and the Sahara was fertile, supporting, if cave paintings in the central Sahara are to be believed, all sorts of animals including hippopotamus.
Holocene might be pleasant enough, but I don't even get the idea of a planetary average because, with so many climates on earth, and so many human-influenced microclimates, I would think an average would lack meaning.
Prof. Tim Groseclose tells the interesting story of his research on bias in American media, via Powerline. One quote:
At the University of Missouri, where my coauthor Jeff Milyo had just taken a job, the press office described our study in favorable terms and posted it on a prominent university web site.
Soon after the posting, the chairs of the humanities and social-science departments held a regular meeting with the dean. Although it was not supposed to be a topic for the meeting, our study soon became the focus of a heated discussion. The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it “offensive” and “scandalous.” One said “The study isn’t research. It’s agitprop for the conservative blogosphere.”
The truth hurts: the MSM is agitprop for the Left, and has been for a long time. The Prof's tale, however, has a happy ending.
Other corporations joined the plot, lobbying Congress to croak a product Americans overwhelmingly like and compel them to buy the more expensive substitute the industry was eager to sell them. The entire scheme, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association testified candidly in 2007, was “at the industry’s initiative.’’ Unable to convince consumers to voluntarily abandon Edison’s light bulb, Big Business got the government to force the issue. “Of such deals,’’ remarks Bloomberg columnist Virginia Postrel, “are Tea Parties born.’’
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”
Read the whole thing. America has become addicted to the Welfare State same as in Euroland. But if everybody is addicted to freebies, who is going to pay for it all? My favorite examples of Welfare, guaranteed to offend almost everybody who hates to think of it this way:
Government student loans Medicaid Medicare Social Security and Social Security Disability Government housing Home mortgage interest deductions Food stamps Federal Flood Insurance Farm subsidies and the ethanol program The entire VA medical system Federal Unemployment insurance and I did not even include ObamaCare, because I cannot understand it
With freebies - welfare - for all, you might almost think that America was a nation of incompetent leeches rather than a nation of proud, independent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves and their own problems (unlike the Euroweenies with their serf-like approach to life). I am in one of these programs (VA - but I do not use it. Also, I paid off my mortgage already, foolishly, but think I will take a home equity line so I can get some tax deductions for these Obama years). Interestingly but not surprisingly, most of such progams increase the cost of the "good" itself via market distortion.
What are your favorite welfare programs? And what do you want the government to do for you with your own, and your neighbor's, money which it is not doing yet?
Farewell, 
Some studies say coffee is good for you; others say it's bad. 
Good Yankee humor via
Mix up a Martooni or two or a Gin and Tonic, and read and weep over the fecklessness of our political betters. As I have said before, I am worried about what the heck is going on and do not know anyone who is not.
Home Depot founder Marcus: 