No Blank Checks For Obama

See: Speaker Boehner's Debt Ceiling Speech

Speaker Boehner tells President Obama to get stuffed.

The sad truth is that the president wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today. That is just not going to happen.

You see, there is no stalemate in Congress. The House has passed a bill to raise the debt limit with bipartisan support. And this week, while the Senate is struggling to pass a bill filled with phony accounting and Washington gimmicks, we will pass another bill - one that was developed with the support of the bipartisan leadership of the U.S. Senate.

Obviously, I expect that bill can and will pass the Senate, and be sent to the President for his signature. If the President signs it, the 'crisis' atmosphere he has created will simply disappear. The debt limit will be raised. Spending will be cut by more than one trillion dollars, and a serious, bipartisan committee of the Congress will begin the hard but necessary work of dealing with the tough challenges our nation faces.

The problem is not on the revenue side. It is on the spending side.

Raising taxes only robs the productive of the means and the reason to produce.

Raising spending only feeds the addiction of the looter's to other people's money.

Raising the Debt Limit only increases the already unmanageable levels of debt that are being passed on to future generations.

We might be better off to just shut it all down.

The BP Gulf Oil Spill, Regulatory Capture and Government Failure

As the BP Gulf Oil Spill crisis drags on, the calls and screams to have people criminally prosecuted will become ever more shrill and demanding.

Who and what is ultimately to blame?

Looking at BP's role and lobbying efforts in American politics reveals something very interesting about the nature of political systems and the human condition.

See: Feel the Rage

The liberals' fury at the President is almost as astounding as their outrage over the discovery that oil companies and their regulators might have grown too cozy. In economic literature, this behavior is known as "regulatory capture," and the current political irony is that this is a long-time conservative critique of the regulatory state.

The Nobel economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago was one of the concept's main developers, and it is a seminal plank of the "public choice" school of economics for which James Buchanan won the economics Nobel in 1986. Ronald Reagan warned about this in different words in one of his farewell speeches.

In the better economic textbooks, regulatory capture is described as a "government failure," as opposed to a market failure. It refers to the fact that individuals or companies with the highest interest or stake in a policy outcome will be able to focus their energies on politicians and bureaucracies to get the outcome they prefer.

See: Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool

While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.

Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.

Making government more powerful, makes it more corruptible.

Government is corruptible because people are corruptible. There is no getting around or away from that fact.

As government grows and is given more control over the details and minutia of our daily lives, the scope of corruptibility of the government grows with it.

When the government makes a law, a rule or a regulation regarding a behavior, it affects peoples lives. Laws, rules and regulations are created with the specific intent of affecting peoples lives. Since laws, rules and regulations affect peoples lives, they create an incentive for those most affected to be able to influence those that are making the laws, rules and regulations.

There is a give an take to this. Everyone has things that they want. Everything becomes negotiable. Anything can be bought if the price is right and a seller has something that a buyer wants.

The process that this all gets worked out in, where the negotiations are made, the horse trading is done and back room deals are dealt, we call politics.

People's property and lives are at stake. The costs and prices become greater as the scope and power of the laws, rules and regulations increase.

The end results can be disturbing and very predictable.

Public Employees Unions & Bankrupt Governments

We may soon see a wave of city and county governments file for bankruptcy in the near future. Bankruptcy gives the local municipal governments the means to deal with a significant source of their problems with their budgets.

See: Bankruptcy talk spreads among Calif. muni officials

Despite its stigma, bankruptcy has paid an important dividend for Vallejo: It has forced public employee unions to the negotiating table, providing city leaders an opportunity to rein in compensation, which city officials said accounts for more than three-quarters of Vallejo's general fund spending. City Councilwoman Stephanie Gomes said the effort has led to concessions from three of four city unions.

Like Vallejo, Los Angeles is suffering from weak revenue at the same time the cost of its pensions and other retirement benefits are rising. Former Mayor Richard Riordan said those factors put the government of the second largest U.S. city on track to declare bankruptcy between now and 2014.

Riordan sees bankruptcy as a necessary tactic for squeezing concessions from the city's public employee unions. It could also pave the way for 401(k) retirement accounts for new city workers instead of defined pension benefit plans with escalating costs, he said.

"The threat of bankruptcy is really the only way you're going to get them to make major changes," Riordan recently told Reuters.

The public employee's unions are the most powerful lobbies in existence. They own most (particularly the blue) local governments, lock, stock and barrel. They are an organized block of votes and campaign contributions that dominate local elections. They get their people out to vote. They control huge heaping gobs of money that get donated to (almost exclusively Democrat) campaigns. They are the deciding factor in blue districts. They own them.

The end result? The municipalities that have been generous with the compensation packages that they have given to their public employees unions are now broke. There is little or nothing left in the private sector to loot. Their economies are in the toilet, the rich are fleeing the state, and the low end private work force that remains earns next to nothing and pays next to nothing in taxes.

In such circumstances, filing bankruptcy can look like a good idea.

Too bad it won't work.

Dealing the unions a setback only leaves them in place to again manipulate elections so that they can again vote themselves ever larger portions of the public purse. So long as Public Employee Unions are able to influence local politicians, they will own those politicians. Nothing will really ever change.

~

See Also: Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.

See Also: Best and Worst States for Business 2010

How is it that the nation’s most populous state at 37 million, one that is the world’s eighth-largest economy and the country’s richest and most diverse agricultural producer, a state that had the fastest growth rate in the 1950s and 1960s during the tenures of Democratic Governor Pat Brown and Republican Governors Earl Warren and Ronald Reagan, should become the Venezuela of North America?

Californians pay among the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, the former exceeding 10 percent in the top brackets. Unemployment statewide is over 12.2 percent, higher than the national average. State politics seems consumed with how to divide a shrinking pie rather than how to expand it. Against national trend, union density is climbing from 16.1 percent of workers in 1998 to 17.8 percent in 2002. Organized labor has more political influence in California than in most other states. In addition, unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers top $500 billion and the annual pension contribution has climbed from $320 million to $7.3 billion in less than a decade. When state employees reach critical mass, they tend to become a permanent lobby for continual growth in government.

Are we having fun yet?

The Political Lesson Of The Massa Scandal

Pick your staff carefully, with loyalty being paramount.

Massa's sin was in choosing his staff poorly. One of them betrayed him.

See: Massa Details 'Salty' Comment That Led to Resignation, Slams Dem Leaders

But Massa said the staff member "never said to me that he felt uncomfortable" and "never went to anybody." 

Rather, he said "somebody went to another staff member who was uncomfortable for him. It was a third-party political correctness statement."

 

The cruel truth is that everyone has a price. For some, the price is so impossibly high that you can trust your life to them. Others will drool for a mere thirty pieces of silver.

You need to know your people's price. What are their limits? What are their concerns? What are their weaknesses? What can make them fold on you?

In politics, when you select your core and your support staff, you must know these things.

Especially if you are a Democrat going up against Rahm Emanuel and the Obama Administration.

Republicans are not safe. While it is very unlikely that any Republican would "Massa" another, the Democrats would do it to you in a heartbeat.

Know your staffers.

Know them better than Rahm knows them.

Bogus Claims Were Included In The IPCC Report To Advance Political Agendas

More proof that politics trumped science in the UN's IPCC report.

From MailOnline: Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

This is just the tip of the iceberg glacier.

The IPCC report and every other outrageous environmental claim will begin to be rightly challenged. Good science will stand. Politicized science will fail.

Can the New York Times Be Marketed Like Porn?

The New York Times will soon try a strategy that will reduce its readership and relevance, further accelerating its decline.

How?

They will try to charge you to read their articles.

This model does work for online porn. (It is pretty amazing that it does since so much Internet porn is available completely free of charge.)

The New York Times must think that their content will sell as well as porn. I think that they should keep their pants on.

News, for the most part, is not porn.

Most people will just begin to skip links to the NYT and to any other news organization that attempts this online subscription (Porn) model.

Display ads can still be seen in the off the rack "paper" newspapers. When people used to regularly read news printed on paper, display ads were profitable.

Then the Internet happened and print readership plummeted. Click-through ads were then touted and became the de facto norm for online advertising.

Click-through ads are stupid. Think about the long ago days of yore when you actually read a "paper" newspaper. There were ads all over the execrable thing were there not? Did you drop everything when you came across an advertisement about a product or service that interested you, pick up the phone and call or hop in your car to run out and buy it? No? No shit.

What on earth would make anyone think that such a model would then work for news-sites on the Internet?

Display ads in the paper and even the ads on television and radio worked on the concept of impressions. The idea was to use the ads to put the product brand or service brand in your mind for when you were actually ready to buy that type of product or service. The impression concept focused on shaping your opinion of which brand you would buy when you were ready to buy. There was no expectancy of an immediate customer response while you were reading through the newspaper.

While the Internet changed the way the news was delivered to the reader, it did not change the way the reader responded to display advertisements.

Display ads can be profitable online. Keep them simple. Sell them by the old impression model. Human psychology has not changed even if the news delivery medium has.

Leave the click-through ads for the adult content websites.

The Price Of Obama's Weakness

Iran smells weakness in Washington. They have been playing Obama and the EU states for idiots and cowards over their Nuclear Weapons development. Obama and the rest of the West have done nothing but whimper and whine.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to up the stakes. Iranian troops have marched into Iraq and have siezed an Oil Well in Iraqi Territory.

This is an act of war.

The Iranians are betting that Obama has no balls.

An official of the state-owned South Oil Co in the southeastern city of Amara, and west of the field, said: "An Iranian force arrived at the field early this morning (Friday).

"It took control of Well 4 and raised the Iranian flag even though the well lies in Iraqi territory," the official added.

What will Obama do?

Will he do anything more than just whimper and whine?

Who wants to play the Iranian Nuclear Inspection Game?

The UN does.

TEHRAN, Iran - A team of U.N. inspectors prepared Sunday for their first look inside a formerly secret — though still unfinished — uranium enrichment facility that has raised Western suspicions about the extent of Iran's nuclear program.

The inspection tour will provide the world's first independent details of the heavily protected site, carved into a mountainside near the holy city of Qom south of Tehran. It also coincides with the countdown to Iran's expected decision on whether to accept a U.N.-brokered plan to process its nuclear fuel abroad.

Iran promised to respond later this week on the proposal, which seeks to ease international worries that Iranian labs could push the uranium enrichment to higher levels for weapons-grade material. Iran claims it only seeks peaceful reactors for research and energy.

What does the UN propose to do if they find that Iran is making nuclear weapons?

What do they think should be the consequences for the UN if the inspectors find nothing, only to discover that Iran has been playing a nuclear 3-card-monte game with them up to the day that Iran announces that they have the bomb?

I would like to be able to look at this inspections plan as a positive development that will help bring the Iranian crises to a peaceful resolution. I have some doubts.

Feds threaten to "fire" BofA Execs for balking at a bad deal.

The Washington Times reports on the strange dealings of the BofA/Merrill Lynch deal of 2008. There is something very rotten at the core of all of this.

Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch - and the government's role in the deal - are the subject of a hearing Thursday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Bank of America executives said they were told their top brass would be fired if they attempted to renegotiate their bid for Merrill by declaring what's known as a "material adverse change" (MAC) - a clause in their acquisition agreement that would allow them to walk away or renegotiate the price in light of Merrill's mounting losses.

"The Treasury and the Fed strongly stated that if we were to invoke the MAC clause and fail to close this transaction, they would remove the board and management due to the risk we would create in the system," according to draft talking points prepared by company attorneys for Mr. Lewis ahead of a Dec. 22, 2008, board meeting.

(Emphisis mine)

How does the Fed come to have the authority to fire the board and management of a private company?

If they can do this to BofA, who could resist them? (Calling Lord Acton . . .)


~~~

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.
- Lord Acton

Kremlin Chess versus White House Tiddlywinks

The Russians are playing a deep game. Secretary Clinton and President Obama are no match.

Iran helps Russia more than it hurts it. Any talk of placing sanctions on Iran has to be considered in light of why Iran has support in the Kremlin.

Boris Morozov explains in the JPOST.

This is because Russia stands to benefit greatly from Iran's opposition vis-a-vis the United States and the United Nations Security Council, for two reasons: First, Iran is primarily a threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. This will increase regional tensions and strengthen Russia's position there. Good relations with Iran could position Russia as a mediator between these countries and the Islamic republic. For example, the recent cancellation of the deal to sell Iran anti-aircraft complexes was used to leverage Russia-Israel relations.

Second, Russia can use its relations with Iran as a bargaining chip in opposing the United States. The latest events demonstrate how, by changing its position toward sanctions, Russia achieved its goal: canceling the AMD program, despite its having been approved by the previous US administration.

Further, Russia isn't willing to forgo its economic relations with Iran. It benefits from the construction of a nuclear power station as it competes for supplying the necessary raw materials and supplies Iran with different types of weapons (including anti-aircraft), not to mention regular trade. This is probably one of the main reasons Russia is interested in preserving good relations with Iran.

Another factor worth mentioning is the issue of religion. Iran traditionally opposes radical Salafi Sunni Islamic movements such as that practiced by the Taliban and the Wahabiyya, which have become a serious threat in Russia's northern Caucasus area, especially Dagestan. These common enemies unite Russia and Iran.

Finally, Russia and Iran are both significant suppliers of oil to the world market. Every increase of political tension in the region influences oil prices, from which Russia can only gain. This is especially true during times of military conflict.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will not help him here. The Russians are not about peace. They are about hegemony.

~~~

Consider the above with the following. (Hat tip The Correspondence Committee.)

Georgia is training and lending safe passage to Al-Qaeda agents planning terrorist acts in the Russian Caucasus, the head of Russia's FSB secret service charged Tuesday.
"Audio evidence seized from insurgents shows that, together with emissaries of Al-Qaeda, they had contacts with representatives of the Georgian secret services," Alexander Bortnikov said, quoted by Russian news agencies.

Through these links, Georgia "participated in the training and transfer of terrorists to the territory of Chechnya," the FSB chief said.

Bortnikov also accused Tbilisi of supplying arms and funding terrorist activities in the neighbouring Caucasus region of Dagestan.

"They perpetually undertake to deliver weapons, explosives and financing for subversive acts on high security sites in Dagestan -- first and foremost on oil and gas pipelines," he said.

Russia will now leverage its belligerence against Georgia as another consideration in any negations concerning Iran.

Russia's "audio evidence" against Georgia should be treated with suspicion.

Will it be used as a pretext for another Russian assault on Georgia? Probably.

In negotiations, everything is always on the table. Always. Now Georgia has been put up on the table.

The Russians are playing a deep game.

The Obama administration might as well be playing tiddlywinks.

Sometimes, you just have to be willing to kill your enemies.

Something from one of the best essayists on the web, Bill Whittle. (If you have not yet heard of him, you should sit down and read through his archives.)

When the subject of Obama as a “peacemaker” comes up, people like Mary seem to think that the answer is to be nice and talk to people and the problem will go away. This is known as “mirroring,” and it is the blind spot that most people bring to negotiations — the idea that our opponents want the same things we do. In Afghanistan we are dealing with an enemy who insists on praying to Allah multiple times a day, who believes that women are subhuman, that homosexuals be killed on sight (preferably by crushing them under falling walls — look it up) and that any criticism of Allah, his Prophet (PBOH) or his clerics is punishable by beating or death. That is their IRREDUCIBLE CORE BELIEF SYSTEM and for that they are willing to die. We, on the other hand, believe in fundamental human dignity for all, the right to worship or not as we see fit, the right of women and homosexuals to live lives as equal members of society, and the fundamental right to say whatever we damn well choose. Those in turn are OUR IRREDUCIBLE CORE BELIEF SYSTEMS for which SOME of us are willing to fight and die.

Read the whole thing.
Hat tip to Pi Guy over at the Correspondence Committee.

~~~

Long ago, a University Professor I knew enjoyed shocking many of his students by making the observation that "Sometimes, you just have to be willing to kill your enemies."

In a civilized society, it is perhaps too easy for many people to forget that sometimes, it really may be necessary to fight for what is right, that sometimes, your enemy is not reasonable and cannot be dealt with like a reasonable adult.

Sometimes, it is either you, or him. Sometimes, you just have to be willing to kill your enemy.

The world is not a nice place. There are some very bad people in it. Worse yet, they may think that they and those like them are the good people of the world, while you and I are the bad people that need to be corrected or done away with.

They are not like us. They do not want the same things that we want. We are not compatible. When we meet them and when they meet us, there will be conflict. One side will prevail. just one.

Life is an existential struggle. There is no getting away from that fact.