Category: Uncategorized

Rahm Emanuel doesn’t bark so loudly these days. He’s just a average guy, doing average guy things. Why can’t they leave him alone, the poor fellow is just busy trying to be a father:

Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s new chief of staff, and Jesse Jackson Jr, the co-chairman of his presidential campaign, both faced new revelations about their possible involvement in the scandal…. The TV station said Mr Emanuel had “multiple conversations” with Mr Blagojevich, who is accused of trying to “sell” the open Senate seat for a cabinet post or lucrative top foundation job, and his chief of staff.

As I expected, the Obama administration is going to be extremely entertaining, a veritable parody of a presidency. Which, coming after the joint disasters of Clinton and Bush, is somewhat impressive. I mean, the guy hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already enmeshed in scandal.

I wonder how many Obama enthusiasts in the media are beginning to regret their “cover for the candidate” campaign already?

Republicans really should have broken with Bush back in 2004 at the very latest:

A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aid struggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute over union wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid before year’s end.

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit’s beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with Japanese carmakers.

None of the bailouts make sense or will do what they are nominally intended to do, so every failed bailout is a positive step. The longer the pain is postponed, the worse it will be. Trying to bailout boats with gaping holes in them simply isn’t going to work.

One wonders precisely how cold it will have to get before the science fetishists finally admit that they’re hopelessly wrong and that the “scientific consensus” is very nearly the exact opposite of the scientific method:

Falling snowflakes glimmered in streetlights, so wide that they billowed to the ground like parachutes, and so tantalizing that even awestruck adults reached out their hands or stuck out their tongues to catch one.

By Wednesday evening, the flakes were big enough to hold their shape for a moment on the street before melting into the pavement, and a dusting had collected on parked cars in some parts of town.

The flurries tied a record for Houston’s earliest snowfall ever…. Since 1895, records indicate, snow has fallen this early just once — on Dec. 10, 1944.

I’m quite confident that the “global warming” concept is a complete crock on both historical and anecdotal grounds. We have palm trees in our backyard, but already this winter, and last winter as well, we’ve had more snow than we’d seen in the previous ten years combined.

Now that presumed president-elect Obama has been safely elected, (barring, of course, any inconvenient eligibility issues surfacing in an untimely manner), the media is shocked, shocked, to discover that Chicago politicians are corrupt:

A 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich, a Democrat, was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps during the last month conspiring to sell or trade Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife. At various times, in exchange for the Senate appointment, Blagojevich discussed obtaining:

A substantial salary for himself at a either a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions;

Placing his wife on paid corporate boards where he speculated she might garner as much as $150,000 a year;

Now, I’m curious. How is it that no one seems to have looked into the way Michelle Obama was named to a $275k board position with the University of Chicago Hospitals and a $50k board position with Treehouse Foods right around the time her husband was elected to the Senate? And where, one wonders, could “Hot Rod” Blagojevich have gotten the idea of using his position to funnel corporate board income to his wife?

Treasuries rose, pushing rates on the three-month bill negative for the first time, as investors gravitate toward the safety of U.S. government debt amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Notice when they first started selling these “securities”.

Swap Washington DC for Chicago and I think we’ve got a deal:

How many Americans are willing to see New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles all disappear in nuclear mushroom clouds, rather than surrender to whatever outrageous demands the terrorists make?

I suspect Thomas Sowell has absolutely no idea how many Americans would be delighted to see certain cities vanish from history. Sowell hasn’t shed any tears over the bombing of Baghdad, so why should anyone who isn’t a New Yorker or Los Angelene mind if those central sources of American decline are flattened? In fact, if we accept the assertions of the mainstream economists, their destruction and reconstruction would be a most excellent thing given the apparent dearth of large-scale stimulus projects.

Austrian economics lessons taught in real time:

More than half of all homeowners who had their loans modified to make the payments more affordable in the first half of the year are already in default again, banking regulators said Monday.

This nicely illustrates the insanity of trying to prop up the credit expansion-caused malinvestments when they go bad. Because they are not fundamentally sound, injecting more liquidity into them will only delay the inevitable default. The important thing to understand is this: the default is not the problem! It is merely the obvious consequence and the actual problem was the boom-time decision to make the bad investments. Corrections and defaults must be permitted to take place since the alternative is not no correction or default, but larger corrections and more costly defaults occurring later.

One can very seldom make a bad investment sound by simply pouring more money into it.

For the second time in three years, the Mounds View Meerkats are the VPFL regular season champions:

74 Mounds View Meerkats (10-4-0)
67 Judean Peoples Front (6-8-0)

60 Silver Spooners (8-3-3)
42 Valders Valkyries (7-7-0)

87 Greenfield Grizzlies (6-7-1)
64 Alamo City Spartans (9-4-1)

88 Masonville Marauders (4-9-1)
74 Burns Redbeards (9-5-0)

85 Winston Reverends (5-9-0)
39 Black Mouth Curs (3-11-0)

The problem is that once more, it looks like the Piranha of the Serengeti are facing some possible matchup problems in the first round of the playoffs – yes, this is the point at which I’m seriously second-guessing the trade that swapped Peyton Manning, Frank Gore, and Marcus Colston for Kurt Warner, Clinton Portis, and DeSean Jackson. If Portis were healthy, I’d be looking great right now, but as it stands, I’m going to be dependent upon Green Bay beating up Jacksonville on the road. Which, given the 28th-ranked Jaguars defense, is hardly unthinkable, but I’d be a lot more comfortable if four of my eggs – QB, RB, WR, WR – weren’t all in that single basket.

I’m sorry about the two-day delay. Terrible job by me. No real excuse except some minor work distractions. The reading for next Saturday is Chapter 6.

Abandon hope, all ye who compare discount rates….

No doubt science fetishists will attempt to give science credit for this amazing scientific breakthrough too, since it involves saving lives:

The New Yorker is running a piece by Atul Gawande that starts by describing the everyday miracles that can be achieved in a modern medical intensive care unit, and ends by making a case for a simple and inexpensive way to save 28,000 lives per year in US ICUs, at a one-time cost of a few million dollars. This medical miracle is the checklist.

Note the category… who knew that Santa Claus was a scientist?