Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category
Barack Obama Didn’t Even Wait Two Days To Be Two Faced
Friday, January 29th, 2010Remember when President Obama ripped lobbyists in the State of the Union Speech? Well, a day later The Hill reports:
A day after bashing lobbyists, President Barack Obama’s administration has invited K Street insiders to join private briefings on a range of topics addressed in Wednesday’s State of the Union.
The Treasury Department on Thursday morning invited selected individuals to “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”
The invitation, which went to a variety of stakeholders, was sent by Fred Baldassaro, a senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Office of Business Affairs and Public Liaison.
The invitation stated, “The White House is encouraging you to participate in these calls and will have a question and answer session at the end of each call. As a reminder, these calls are not intended for press purposes.”
Go read the whole thing. After bashing lobbyists, the lobbyists report getting calls from Democrats wanting donations.
I’d feel worse for some of these folks, if they didn’t jump on the Obama bandwagon so early and so vigorously. Anyone watching his campaigning knew he wasn’t going to be a friend to business and yet business bought him.
Also, this should be a warning to Insurance Companies and Pharma. Newsflash morons: when this is all over, you’ll be cast aside, put out of business. You’re being used to create a “framework” for Single Payer.
Hayek V. Keynes Rap: Learn Your Kidz About Economix
Monday, January 25th, 2010Great video watch it:
NASA: No Increase In CO2, Global Warming A Sham
Friday, January 22nd, 2010AJ Strata has made an amazing find and I want to share it with you:
The email is from Reto Ruedy at GISS, one of Hansen’s top analysts. It is a headline worthy admission. There is no evidence of CO2 driven global warming in any of the US temp data – even though we are accused of being the CO2 generating capitol of the world. What’s more, they do not expect to see any evidence of AGW in the US for 2-4 more decades! I think we could afford to wait a little longer to see if this theory holds up.
And yet, without ANY evidence of AGW active in the US, Americans are supposed to cripple our economy and shell out billions in tax dollars? How could AGW be evident everywhere else but not here in the great CO2 producing center of all human kind? These “NASA” scientists are admitting they have never yet measured any global warming in the US outside natural causes.
Go read the whole thing. Global Warming is utter b.s. The evidence keeps piling up and yet we hear nothing in the press.
How A Brown Win Could Help The Economy
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010The economy stinks. It’s not getting better. The recovery is being hampered by mixed messages and downright hostility toward the private sector.
Business owners have been holding. They haven’t upped production. If business is good, they’ve cautiously hired, if at all. If business is fair, they’ve resisted increasing overhead for fear they’ll need the extra cash for stupid taxes and government programs.
Right now, the stock market is up.
Should Brown win, there will be a collective sigh of relief. Americans will relax just a wee bit and know that the Dems can’t just jam any old stupid idea down Americans’ throats.
The economy could rebound. Hiring could begin again. Maybe things would get better.
Should Coakley win, I predict a double-dip recession. We might get one anyway, but this will make it worse.
The American people will know that the Democrats have no governor and no way to be stopped. The American people have seen one year of bad decision after bad decision. They’ll be disheartened should Coakley win.
Valerie Jarrett On Double Dipping The Tax Payer By Way Of Bank Fees
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Does it make sense to give banks fees when the consumer will ultimately pay? No. But that’s exactly what President Obama is doing. His best friend Valerie Jarrett explains why this makes sense:
Obama Administration officials estimate that losses from the TARP program are around $120 billion, and argue this new tax will pay for those losses.
However, much of the estimated loss from TARP comes from the auto industry bailout.
So what appears to happening here is that the Obama Administration and congressional Democrats are attempting to levy a tax on financial institutions — some of which never received TARP funds, some which have already paid them back — in large part to pay for the bailout of the auto industry, a bailout which greatly favored the autoworkers’ unions, a Democratic Party constituency.
Michelle Malkin calls it “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee” = The Cover Tim Geithner’ A** Tax and says:
2. The tax won’t apply to non-banks, black holes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the bailed-out auto companies.
3. This isn’t about getting “our money” back. It’s about redistributing it again under the guise of faux populism.
More to the point, this is what I call the Cover Tim Geithner’s A** Tax. Making banks the whipping boys takes the heat off Geithner for his incompetent, complicit, and transparency-subverting tenure as New York Federal Reserve chair.
Team Obama wants you to keep your eyes on its fatcat barbecue charade.
But don’t be distracted. Geithner will be on the hot seat next week in Congress. And that’s where the real scrutiny of “financial crisis responsibility” lies.
Yup. Man, the Obama administration has the faux-populism schtick down. The words are like honey, but they give a terrible case of indigestion once you eat them.
They count on people being stupid. They hope people are distracted by their sweet words. And people have been in the short term, but when people get deeper in, they feel taken. Over and over again.
It’s the utter contempt for the American people that’s so disgusting.
No, I Don’t Want To Be Like Europe, Paul Krugman
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010No, I don’t want to learn from Europe. And this is why:
5. Although Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are among Europe’s wealthiest countries, as U.S. states they would be between 14.5% and 18% below the U.S. average.
Go read the whole thing. Also this.
These are just financial, quality of life reasons I don’t want to learn from Europe. There are also cultural reasons I don’t want to learn from Europe.
When I visited Washington, D.C. and saw the mind of Thomas Jefferson writ large in the Library of Congress, I knew that I would never be embarrassed about American culture ever again. The Library, along with the D.C. architecture holds knowledge and learning and ideas that vestiges of European monarchies can only dream about.
Go to any major American city and take in the opera or the orchestra. Hell, go to any church in America. You’ll hear the sounds that make up the music of a free life.
Visit New York City and see what upward mobility means. Travel through the rolling, vast plains of the midwest and see the neat farmers fields that feed the world.
I’m not knocking Europe. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, bar none. Britain has history going back thousands of years. I get it.
Still, America’s elites need to stop foisting this b.s. about what America can learn from Europe. The only thing America should be learning is what happens when socialism comes knocking at the door. Europe should be a warning about what NOT to do when you have wealth and prosperity.
Are you sick of being lectured by these guys yet?
America Is Now A Dependent Society–UPDATED
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010People don’t vote against their own interests. At least, that’s the theory. So, when their own interests involve keeping their government job, they’ll vote Democrat. They want a politician who is interested in expanding the government, i.e. their paychecks.
That’s why this chart worries me:
Lavishly paid government workers means less money going to the private sector actually producing something. These people won’t want to lose their benefits and lifestyle. If Republicans want smaller government and less money in the government, that will mean cutting bureaucracy. That will mean cutting government workers.
People don’t vote against their own self interest.
UPDATE:
Only 85,000 private sector jobs lost last month! During the Christmas rush. When companies add staff.
Only. Happy days must be here again.
Gas Prices Up, Economy Stinks Worse, Elites Wish We’d Listen To Them More
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010This sort of news would be front page under a Bush administration with Democrats demanding subsidies for the poor:
The cost of filling up the car is rising in the wake of soaring crude and by this weekend, pump prices may race past the highs for all of 2009.
Tracing the ascension of crude, up 14 percent since mid-December, energy prices across the board are catching up.
It’s part economic and part meteorologic.
Vicious pockets of cold stretched from the Northeast to the South, where farmers in the Florida panhandle tried to save tomato and strawberry crops. Four deaths in Tennessee were blamed on low temperatures.
The frigid blast has squeezed heating oil supplies in some areas during a year when demand had been very weak.
Falling supplies in recent weeks have contributed to prices driven higher by the falling dollar. When the dollar falls, investors holding stronger currency can essentially buy more dollar-based crude and they have, doubling oil prices last year.
Yeah, the economy stinks. It will get worse.
Meanwhile, we’ll be lectured by the dumbasses who got us in this mess why we should listen to them. Will Collier destroys David Brookes and his better-than brethren:
Brooks does actually stumble into a correct point by associating the current Washington crew with the word “pragmatic,” but he fails utterly to note the intended end of that pragmatism: extending their own power. Like their spiritual forefathers in the New Deal, the Obami quickly abandoned most of their ideological goals (although not the demagogic language of that ideology) when reality failed to comply with theory. In their place came the much more politically pragmatic mantra of “tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.” That’s what Obama’s trillions in “Monopoly money”–other people’s Monopoly money, of course–are all about.
That’s what the “stimulus,” serving mostly to funnel federal pork to favored politicians and government employee unions, was all about. That’s what nationalization of GM and Chrysler to the benefit of the UAW was all about. That’s what nationalizing the banks to extend Federal power over their operations was all about. The current “health care” bills are only peripherally about patients and doctors; their real purpose is to put as many voters as possible under Federal medical Welfare. After all, almost everybody on Welfare votes Democratic, and that’s what Brooks’ “educated class” wants to see more than anything else.
Yeah. And for a while, Americans thought that a smart guy would fix things. Now, they just want to be left alone. Unfortunately, Dems just can’t help meddling.
Is Larry Summers Doing For America What He Did For Harvard?
Friday, December 18th, 2009Bloomberg is reporting this troubling information:
As vanishing credit spurred the government-led rescue of dozens of financial institutions, Harvard was so strapped for cash that it asked Massachusetts for fast-track approval to borrow $2.5 billion. Almost $500 million was used within days to exit agreements known as interest-rate swaps that Harvard had entered to finance expansion in Allston, across the Charles River from its main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The swaps, which assumed that interest rates would rise, proved so toxic that the 373-year-old institution agreed to pay banks a total of almost $1 billion to terminate them. Most of the wrong-way bets were made in 2004, when Lawrence Summers, now President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, led the university. Cranes were recently removed from the construction site of a $1 billion science center that was to be the expansion’s centerpiece, a reminder of Summers’s ambition. The school suspended work on the building last week.
“For nonprofits, this is going to be written up as a case study of what not to do,” said Mark Williams, a finance professor at Boston University, who specializes in risk management and has studied Harvard’s finances. “Harvard throws itself out as a beacon of what to do in higher learning. Clearly, there have been major missteps.”
And here’s the conclusion:
Pennsylvania State Auditor General Jack Wagner said Nov. 18 that the state should ban local governments from entering into derivative contracts tied to bond issues, a practice he termed “gambling” with taxpayer funds.
Harvard might have considered it a conservative step to lock in rates when they were low, said Shapiro, the New Jersey- based swap adviser.
“You can be very big and very rich and very smart and still get things wrong,” Shapiro said.
We’re supposed to accept that this same guy along with Bernacke and a very few “smart people” will make things better for the economy.
Climategate: They Threw Away The Raw Data? Where Is The American Media? And Why Are Liberals Silent?–UPDATED
Sunday, November 29th, 2009The authors of the anthropogenic global warming theory threw away the original data upon which the theory was based. No one can reproduce non-existent data. No one can verify it. As horrendous as manipulating data or lying about the implications of the data might be, throwing out the original data is mortal scientific sin. [Background here.]
From the Times:
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
What in the world were these people thinking? Either they were malicious or lazy and neither bodes well for top level scientists. [More details from Climate Science Blog.]
People are smugly driving in smart cars because of this data and it can’t be verified? The government wants to control the thermostat in your home and the data can’t be verified. Nancy Pelosi stands to make millions on wind mills and this data can’t be verified. World leaders are about to sign economy killing agreements based on data that can’t be verified.
In short, the whole world has been turned inside out on a fear that may well be utterly baseless. And we’ll never know because the original data was destroyed?
And here’s my second concern: If you’re watching the news, do you know anything about this? If you read the newspaper, are you reading stories that reflect this knowledge? How much collusion is involved and at what point do major media become irrelevant–if they won’t report news such as this? Roger Simon says:
It was that UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as most of us recall, that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore. And they are the ones with the “structural tendency to politicize climate change”. From a scientist to his colleagues, that’s a powerful indictment. So it should be no surprise that Hulme also has some rather cynical things to say about the coming Copenhagen climate conference:
This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.
Indeed they will. And indeed it isn’t. No matter what our climate czar may insist, climate science and Copenhagen are now under a giant cloud. In fact, as Hume implies, the situation is far more serious than that, because what has been revealed is what strange bedfellows science and politics are in this era. The relationship between politicians and scientists today is not entirely unlike the relationship between scientists and the clergy during the days of Galileo. And the politicians of today know about as much about the science as the bishops of Galileo’s time did, although our politicians are perfectly willing to exploit the science of which they are ignorant and the scientists too often perfectly willing to be complicit in their own exploitation.
And just like in Galileo’s time, the government seems to control the media. Just look at any news aggregator. Are any American news sources breaking stories on Glimategate? No. Why? Because to them, Global Warming is their religion, too.
What’s interesting to me is that the elites are once again (hello Barack Obama) the true believers while the average folks are the ones still skeptical. Who keeps making emotion based political decisions?
UPDATES:
Via Memeorandum Climate Change “Denier” will represent EU at Copenhagen Summit.
Jim Treacher has a conversation
with the Global Warming Zealot in his head.
From Scott Graves on Twitter, “I did a Google search for news about “climate emails”… the American MSM should be ashamed of itself!”
More from Stacy McCain [MUST READ the whole thing] who discusses the religion of global warming and how reason and faith intermingle:
Right, Pete. While we await your Ph.D. dissertation on the physics of transubstantiation — zing! — let’s agree that there have always been religious overtones to environmentalism. One reason that abortion is such a sacred right to some Baby Boomers is that they were deceived by the “Population Bomb” hoax of the 1960s and ’70s, when neo-Malthusians warned that the alternative to draconian population control was a Soylent Green-style dystopia.
He continues:
These landmark Supreme Court decisions stigmatized religion as unconstitutionally subversive of the educational process, ensuring that future generations of American youth would be inculcated with a sort of neo-Manichean worldview, wherein traditional religious belief had nothing relevant to say about science, history, psychology or any other realm of human inquiry.
Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver famously observed, and this legally-certified declaration that there was no overlap between Faith and Reason has not merely marginalized Faith, it has also undermined Reason. When we behold the religious fanaticism of the Temple Cult in regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), we must understand this irrational fruit as a natural product of the poisoned tree of Scientism.
So, McCain asserts that the unreasonable fealty to science becomes religion because of the absence of the same. That makes sense to me. People will fill the holes in knowledge with something and if the plug in the hole of knowledge isn’t God, it’s often some theory that ends up either sounding conspiratorial, or, in this case, an actual conspiracy.
Further, the god becomes not truth but the nebulous “progress” which McCain fairly scorns:
This temptation to think that we are morally superior to our ancestors, you see, is the road to hell that Scientism paves. You need not be a Bible-thumping fundamentalist (like me) to notice how the adherents of Darwin tend to smuggle into their arguments a predisposition toward Whig history, wherein humankind is relentlessly struggling upward on the road of Progress. Here it is best to recall the brilliant aphorism of G.K. Chesterton:
“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
Exactly. If everything is Progress and Progress is everything, then decline becomes an ontological impossibility and — by logical extension — today’s Congress is morally superior to the Founders who gathered at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787.
How humorous, then, that global warming is, in fact, global cooling. That is, the last ten years refute the assertions of some very zealous and self-protective scientists. Literally, the progress of heating has been inverted to cooling. If heating was progressive, is cooling conservative?
This is all nonsense. The temperature is the temperature. What it all means is another question entirely and one the Global Warming alarmists believe is “settled”. It is by no means settled at all.
Maybe Global Warming theory will be brought back into the realm of science and reason rather than faith and religion. Maybe. People invest a lot of emotion in religion and the global warming zealots are no different.
UPDATED AGAIN:
AJ Strata has a look a the data and concludes this [His whole post is crunching numbers and well worth examination and comment, please check it out.]:
I have been working on this post for about a week now, testing a hypothesis I have regarding the raw temp data vs the overly processed CRU, GISS, NCDC, IPCC results (the processed data shows dramatic global warming in the last century). I have been of the opinion the raw temp data tells a different, cooler story than the processed data. My theory is alarmists’ results do not track well with the raw data, and require the merging of unproven and extremely inaccurate proxy data to open the error bars and move the trend lines to produce the desired result. We have a clear isolated example from New Zealand where cherry picked data and time windows have resulted in a ridiculous ‘data merging’ that completely obliterates the raw data.
To pull this deception off on a global scale, as I have mentioned before, requires the alarmists to deal with two inconvenient truths:
1. The warm periods in the 1930’s and 1940’s which were about the same as today
2. The current decline in temperature, just when the alarmists require a dramatic increase to match the rising CO2 levels.What is needed out the back end of this alarmist process is a graph like we have from NCDC, where the 1930’s-1940’s warm periods are pushed colder and the current temps are pushed higher.
So, if I understand AJ correctly, the CRU scientists used raw data mixed in with rigged data and the rigged data helped confirm the theory of global warming, but when taking away the rigged data, the temperatures are the same as usual.
Well. Whatever data is there to be examined, needs to be examined and thoroughly. AJ is doing the scientific thing and testing the data. Now, for the major media to get to work and for the skeptics to start producing their findings, too.
Tigerhawk has a Climategate video that goes through the cast of villains.
