Tag: politics

Daniel Hannan explains:

According to the Commissioner for Enterprise, Gunther Verheugen, the benefits of the single market are worth around 180 billion euros a year, while the cost of complying with Brussels rules is 600 billion euros. In other words, by its own admission, the EU costs more than it’s worth.

Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to pitch you on an “economies of scale” argument for centralizing power. If it involves bureaucracies rather than economic activity, you can rest assured that the costs of the centralization will run 3x the purported savings.

I tend to suspect the reported “racial tensions” aren’t actually about race. There were certainly never serious problems of this sort at North, South, Washburn, or Roosevelt when I was in school and there was not exactly a shortage of brothers there:

Racial tension has been building at Owatonna High School this week after a fight broke out Monday between white and Somali students, prompting heightened police presence, backpack searches and widespread parental worries. Owatonna Police Chief Shaun LaDue said between six and 15 officers have been assigned this week to the school, which usually uses one liaison officer.

Principal Don Johnson said the problems began when two white students wrote papers in recent weeks that were “inflammatory and very disrespectful.” One student handed out copies of his paper to friends, while the other posted his on a class blog. Both were suspended from the school of 1,600 students — about 100 of whom are Somali.

Johnson said that before the second student returned to school Monday, the student sent text messages over the weekend to white and Somali students that were “unapologetic and in your face.” He then walked into a common area Monday where more than 20 Somali students were gathered and sat down. An altercation erupted that sent one of the white students to the hospital for observation.

Isn’t it lovely to see such vivid cultural vibrancy filling what was once a pallid and boring German-Scandinavian enclave! It’s such a pity that the Somali students can’t be left alone to prepare for their future jihads in peace. Of course, given the reported bomb threat, perhaps they won’t even bother returning to Somalia before detonating themselves.

UPDATE: The only reasonable answer is to deport the criminal aliens. If they are so desperate for excitement, there is plenty to be found in their homeland. Given Minnesota carry laws, it’s only a matter of time before one of the foreign idiots attacks the wrong individual and gets blown away. At which point, no doubt the Star & Sickle will run the usual sob story about the tragic end of the dead imported thugfine, upstanding example of foreign vibrancy just trying to live the American dream. And, of course, the need for gun control.

Chad the Elder writes of the new conservative critic-in-chief:

It might seem unlikely that a man who was born in Quebec, trained as a psychiatrist, once a speechwriter for Walter Mondale, and a writer for the New Republic would become one of the foremost conservative critics of the Age of Obama. But fate has worked in favor of conservatives in the case of Krauthammer and we’re fortunate to have his voice leading the resistance.

While I think Krauthammer is a less obtuse individual than most of the big op/ed names, I think the constant elevation of non-conservatives to positions of conservative leadership in the media is one reason that the conservative movement continues to find itself in such intellectual disarray. Why are they so reluctant to elevate those who are genuine conservatives and have always been genuine conservatives rather than liberals who belatedly claim to have seen the light?

But the fact that Krauthammer may be reliably correct in his analysis of Obama doesn’t mean that his ideology is reliably compatible with the conservative grass roots, and indeed, I note that he supported TARP even if he subsequently turned against the automotive bailouts. He has also been generally supportive of the neocon’s world democratic revolution, which is a profoundly non-conservative position of zero national interest to Americans. So, if Krauthammer does, in fact, become the chief voice of the ideological opposition, I suspect conservatives will once again find themselves regretting what was always more of a temporary alignment of anti-Obama interests rather than genuine ideological opinion leadership.

This isn’t a criticism of Krauthammer. He’s just doing his job and I’m merely pointing out what I think to be the obvious. Conservatives need actual conservative leadership and they need to stop settling for liberals, neocons, and nominally reformed liberals as their intellectual leaders. My feeling is that anyone who supported the banking bailouts, much less dismissed opposition to them as “know-nothingism” should be completely disqualified from any sort of conservative leadership, opinion or otherwise. If you’re capable of falling for demands for money from the cynical Chicken Littles of the world, you’re far too much of a naif to be a conservative leader.

The last of the open-minded liberals can see what’s coming:

That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we’re hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices….

It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.

Well, yeah, that last description sums it up accurately enough. I haven’t written much about Obamacare for much the same reason that I don’t write about driving into trees. There’s simply not much to say beyond the fact that it’s a really bad idea, it’s expensive, destructive, and runs high risk of getting people killed. As I told one radio interviewer today, the health care act and the cap-and-trade carbon emissions program are both likely to have a more negative effect on the U.S. economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff ever did.

And, of course, I can’t disagree with La Paglia’s characterization of Richard Dawkins as an overrated psychotic. One certainly does wonder “what drives obsessive denigrators of religion”, especially in light of the indisputable evidence that it is not and has never been a primary source of human conflict.

Anyway, it’s not as if California voters can claim they didn’t know about Ahnold’s predilection for this sort of crassness:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made American political discourse a little cruder – which is saying something. As California journalists noted, he sneaked an obscene acrostic into a veto message. The first letters of the middle paragraphs lined up to spell “F*** you.” A spokesperson for the governor half-heartedly suggested that it was a coincidence. Yeah, right. The odds against those seven letters appearing in that specific order by chance are 8,031,810,176 to one.

At least it wasn’t something like “All hail Obama, Devourer of Worlds!”

The reason that they’re always paranoid about the right-wing wanting to oppress them is nothing more than classic psychological projection.  Jonah Goldberg highlights how it’s not only economics that has headed back to the 1930s, as progressive politics appear to be following suit:

No doubt the fact that neither climate models nor doomsday predictions have panned out (there has been no increase in global temperatures since 1998) is a big part of the story.  But my hunch is that the bigger reason for the shift is that Democrats are threatening to really do something about it, and the costs no longer seem hypothetical. Throw in a bad economy, and Americans simply balk. And that’s Americans — the notion that China, India, and Brazil are going to don carbon handcuffs is just silly. Those countries want to get rich, and they’ll gladly sell their carbon to do it.

But the anti-global-warming industry seems to be on autopilot, churning out books that only half-jokingly propose eating your pets. Others insist that Americans will have to restrict themselves to only one child, just like in authoritarian China. If those are the costs, free people will not pay them. In response to popular reluctance, the Jeremiahs are not only getting more shrill, they’re starting to resent democracy itself, sounding more and more like they want to make an end-run around the people.

I always found it totally absurd that anyone thought for five seconds that any society would voluntarily accept a lower standard of living in order to “save the planet”.  I mean, when you consider that Americans won’t accept the standard of living they can afford without debt even though it means future generations will be impoverished, it’s a little far-fetched to believe that they’re going to worry overmuch about how a few degrees of temperature over the next 100 years are going to affect the Western Spotted Frog.

And to be blunt, the world would be much better off without progressives than dogs.  If totalitarianism is on the table, I can think of a few better uses for it than the progressives appear to have in mind.

Yeah, not so much:

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players. The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

I can’t wait until they try to dress him in a leather motorcycle jacket and put him on a Harley. It will be Dukakis-in-a-tank times ten. Love him or loathe him, George W. Bush was a guy’s guy. I despised the man and his disastrous presidency, but I can’t honestly say that I’d object to him coming over to watch the game with the guys. Whereas you know Obama would prefer be in the kitchen drinking white zinfandel and exchanging arugula recipes with the women.

This piece tells you more about the alienation of the New York Times from all things masculine than it does about the Obama administration. It reminds me of the time that the Chilliette’s girlfriends from San Francisco were concerned that her Scandinavian computer programmer fiance was “too macho” If Obama was a real guy’s guy, he’d respond by inviting some of the women who have been critical of him to the next basketball game, then blowing them off the court. And then, in a month or two, hosting a game of tackle football in the snow.

NRO’s Editors acted like panicked little girls who knew nothing about economics, history, or politics when they endorsed the banking bailouts last November. Now that the government has spent hundreds of billions on the financial institutions and assorted other corporations, and in some cases owns them outright, they want to suddenly rediscover their long-lost principles in order to argue that limiting executive pay is somehow a sin against capitalism and small government:

Three things about the Obama administration’s publicity-seeking move to curb executives’ pay at bailed-out companies: It is inevitable, it is stupid, and it is inevitably stupid…. TARP was an emergency measure. The emergency has subsided, and the first order of business is restoring at least some separation between Washington and Wall Street, between political power and the private economy. The love of power can prove at least as corrupting as the love of money, and the American political class does not seem likely to resist either temptation, much less both at once.

Given that the “emergency measure” cop-out has been a known scam since Marius was scaring the Romans into throwing out their law against repeat consulships with the threat of a German invasion, that little bit of attempted posterior-covering isn’t convincing. The sell-outs supported the bailouts, which tells you all you need to know about the depth of their commitment to capitalism, small government, the Constitution, and American liberty. Obama’s decision to slash executive pay at bailed-out companies falls far short of what he should do – shut the corporations down and prosecute those guilty of committing fraud – but interrupting the executive feeding frenzy is far more justifiable than the original bail-outs ever were.

This column is a disgusting display of true colors by false conservatives who sold out whatever conservative principles they once held in service to Wall Street. Where on Earth do they think these “talented” executives are going to go if they are legally prevented from shoveling millions in taxpayer dollars to themselves? Move to Swaziland and utilize their highly refined lobbying “skills” there?

Speaking of bailed-out, government-owned banks, Karl Denninger notes something very fishy is going on at Citi and suspects another financial meltdown is in the works:

* Standard “purchase” interest rate is going to 29.99%.

* The “default rate” is also now 29.99%.

I have since confirmed that this letter is not just going to people who have had credit “challenges”. Indeed, this appears to be a blanket change on the part of Citibank. I now have multiple copies from people who assert that they have 750+ FICOs and have never missed a payment on this or any other obligation – the “paragon” of so-called “responsible” credit use. All of the letters are identical…. Perhaps what we’re really seeing is a business reacting to hidden deterioration of asset bases that are not known by investors and the public due to the legitimation of bogus accounting that happened this last March, but which is known by company executives!

Why do I believe this is a plausible, even likely explanation for this behavior by Citibank? That’s simple: This sort of “terms change”, which is an effective declaration of default even against those who haven’t defaulted (see above; the same 30% rate is being applied to defaulted and non-defaulted accounts!), will drive two consumer behaviors that could ultimately destroy Citibank’s credit card business and perhaps the bank as a whole:

1. Those who can transfer balances out somewhere else and/or pay them off will immediately do so. Nobody is going to pay a 30% interest rate and an imposition of default rates on non-defaulted balances willingly and on purpose unless they have no other choice.

2. A significant number of people, on receipt of this notice and understanding what it means (a declaration that non-defaulted accounts are being charged the same penalty rate as a defaulted account!) will immediately go out and charge up the entire unused balance on their card and then intentionally default.

This whole “recovery” theme and corresponding market rally has stink, stank, stunk like putrifying fish from the start. I don’t know how much longer the Fed will be able to prop it up, but I very much doubt it’s going to last another six months.