Archive for the ‘Show Me The Money’ Category
Obama: No More Mr. Nice Guy?
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Well, he was nice to the world tyrants (still is–note the silence on the hangings in Iran). He’s not so hip on America.
But meeting with the Dalai Lama is symbolic, I guess, of some new toughness. Meh.
On Friday the Obama administration signed off on a $6.4 billion (£4 billion) arms package for Taiwan. China, which claims the island, had repeatedly warned against the sale and retaliated by vowing to punish US companies.
Obama may butt heads with Beijing again in the coming weeks if he meets the Dalai Lama. The two nations also have a number of trade rows including Google’s threat to leave China over the hacking of political activists’ email accounts.
Officials and experts doubted that Obama was seeking to antagonise China. Rather, they said he had long planned to sell arms to Taiwan and meet the Dalai Lama but wanted first to develop a good rapport with Beijing.
Douglas H. Paal, a former top US policymaker on China and envoy to Taiwan, said that Obama had waited for the right time and saw an opportunity after Beijing balked in mid-January at backing tougher sanctions against Iran.
“It became clear that Beijing was not going to play on Iran and therefore there was nothing to hold up the arms sales anymore,” said Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
I’m thinking that Obama has figured out that we have enemies all over. And they aren’t cooperating just because of his magnificence. This is shocking. To him.
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.
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.
