PSA: This is Thanksgiving week, and so this week's DOOM will be stepped down a bit. Less DOOM per day, and no DOOM on Thursday as well as Friday. (Well, the DOOM will still be there...this column will simply remain silent on it until the following Monday.)

ItÂ’s an interesting question: what if you had to choose between political freedom and financial stability? Democracy is often messy and chaotic, and markets hate uncertainty. Yet robust markets really canÂ’t develop anywhere but in a representative political system (though rarely in pure democracies; a representative republic is generally the most fertile political system, economically speaking).

The Super CommitteeÂ’s failure was pre-ordained. In fact, it was part of the Democrat plan right from the start, which is why they packed it with far-left ideologues. It was never intended to succeed -- it was an election-year prop. Even if the group scrambles to put some last-minute "agreement" together, it will obviously be a thin layer of face-saving political blather over a vast ocean of disagreement over the shape, responsibilites, and size of the Federal Government. These are not trivial issues, so perhaps it is not surprising that consensus is so hard to reach: the goals of the makers and the takers are completely at odds. The only way to get consensus is to have the voters speak and give the lawmakers a mandate, one way or another, and that won't happen until next year. Markets will hate it, and we may well be in for another credit downgrade...which would be richly deserved.

I've said it many times before: the notion of "retirement" is a modern fiction based on some flawed assumptions. The idea that you can take the last 20 or 30 years of your life as an extended vacation turns out not to be sustainable. This is not the result of a broken societal or cultural model; this is reality re-asserting itself, as it always does.

America before the entitlement state.

Reacting to calls for cuts in entitlement programs, House Democrat Henry Waxman fumed: “The Republicans want us to repeal the twentieth century.” Sound bites don’t get much better than that. After all, the world before the twentieth century–before the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society–was a dark, dangerous, heartless place where hordes of Americans starved in the streets.

Except it wasnÂ’t and they didnÂ’t. The actual history of America shows something else entirely: picking your neighborsÂ’ pockets is not a necessity of survival. Before AmericaÂ’s entitlement state, free individuals planned for and coped with tough times, taking responsibility for their own lives.

And the wind cries bankrupt.

Just a reminder: Illinois is still on a rocket-sled ride to insolvency.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:00 AM | Comments (60)
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She's also angry at Newt Gingrich for treating her commentary -- which included the assertion that Newt Gingrich is "not pop culturally relevant to my generation," because he stopped serving as Speaker of the House in 1999 -- as not terribly serious.

I don't know. How seriously are we supposed to take her? She is proudly ignorant anything that happened before the debut of One Tree Hill.

Posted by: Ace at 04:08 AM | Comments (99)
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This means the $1.2 trillion in automatic sequestration goes forward.

A weekend of talks among members of the congressional committee charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget cuts appeared to produce no last-minute compromise ahead of Monday's practical deadline.
Democratic and Republican aides told CNN on Sunday that discussions had turned to how to announce the failure to reach a deal.

A senior Democratic aide said talks are focused on a Monday announcement.
Another senior Democratic source said, "No decisions or agreement has been reached concerning any announcement or how this will end. But, yes, the likely outcome is no agreement will be reached."

The cut to defense is severe and cuts into muscle. The one thing Obama likes cutting is the military, and he already cut $450 billion from its (ten year) budget. With the additional $600 billion from the automatic sequestration, that brings the cuts to a trillion, imposed just over the past couple of years (though the full cuts are measured over ten years).

Because the cuts are so severe, I could see Republicans seeking to undo them -- and I can see Democrats demanding the Medicare cuts be undone as well, in exchange. Resulting in no cuts, which is, of course, what they wanted.

In fact, I think this was their plan all along. Engineer a crisis, make unreachable demands on Republicans as the cost of avoiding the crisis, and then run on that in 2012.

Actually that probably should have been foreseeable.

I don't know. There is going to be a lot of anger over this, but I really do not know if it's really possible to do the seriously revolutionary budget-cutting we need with one-half of one half of the elected political branches of government.

Those of you who predicted "designed collapse of the conservative negotiating position in stages," your bet is looking better.

More: Perspectives about this as Hot Air's quotes of the day.

It's possible, or likely, the US will see another credit rating cut. That sounds about right to me. In the current state of gridlock, the Democrats protect spending that no electorate ever voted in favor of financing, while Republicans protect a taxation level the public actually prefers.

The problem is, the public keeps electing Democratic spending with Republican tax-cutters.

The public needs to understand its let's-not-decide attitude is killing this country.

We are financing about two-thirds of what we're spending, and that is going up. Something has to give.

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 AM | Comments (109)
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Happy Monday. Some headlines to get you started:

1,700 injured and 20 dead in Egypt as protestors question their shiny new military dictatorship.

Mila Kunis kept her date with Marine Sergeant Scott Moore.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:54 AM | Comments (38)
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Welcome to the ONT party at the weekend's end.

Ultimate Survival Tool: The Crovel

It slices, it dices, it digs, hacks and even grapples.

The Crovel, short for Crowbar Shovel, is the must have tool for survival in most any situation. ItÂ’s a spade, machete, saw, crowbar, hammer, and can also be used as a grappling hook, basically an amazing wonder-tool for extreme conditions. Guaranteed to make surviving the zombie apocalypse a whole lot easier.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:30 PM | Comments (535)
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Above the post update:

Bloomberg says the suspect is "an Al Qaeda sympathizer" who planned to bomb police cars, Post Office and troops returning home.

Jose Pimental, 27 from Manhattan, is being described as a lone wolf and not connected to a larger plot.

Pimental is a native of the Dominican Republican who is a US citizen, and a Muslim convert.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly is talking about this guy. It sounds like he's been on their radar for awhile (years).

Original Post:
Mayor Bloomberg is going to be doing a presser in moments.

The case was "terror related" but there was no imminent threat because the suspect was under arrest, a law enforcement official said, declining to be identified before the official announcement at 7:30 p.m.

CNN said the man learned how to build a pipe bomb from the al Qaeda online magazine "Inspire" and planned to target soldiers returned from overseas, police and post offices.

The bomb would have worked if the suspect succeeded in assembling it properly, CNN said, citing unnamed sources.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:42 PM | Comments (223)
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Conservatives won 187 of 350 seats in the parliament. Socialists won 110, their worst evah. From the Washington Post:

Spanish conservatives won a historically large mandate at the polls Sunday, freeing them to make deep austerity cuts as they struggle to pull the countryÂ’s economy out of a tailspin.

In an election marked by bitter disappointment and desperation over the euro zoneÂ’s highest unemployment rate, the Socialists who have led the country since 2004 were cast out from office as many of their staunchest supporters turned elsewhere, according to a national TV exit poll released after the polls closed.

Left-leaning, high-tax, big-regulation, big-government states and countries are suffering the most. Maybe it's starting to dawn on these people that bureaucrats are not that smart, that they can't be trusted, and that putting them in charge of everything isn't such a good idea.

In related news, the EU bans claims water can prevent dehydration.

Follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by: rdbrewer at 02:27 PM | Comments (165)
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without additional comment:

Three years ago, Obama won blue-collar Macomb with 53% of the vote to Republican John McCain's 48%. At this point, a Free Press poll conducted last week by Lansing-based EPIC-MRA shows all three of the top Republican contenders -- Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain -- with a lead on Obama in the county.

The poll's sample of 600 likely voters statewide includes only a sliver from Macomb County, meaning any results there come with a whopping 14-percentage-point margin of error. But even controlling for that, the Republican contenders still lead the president. Romney, who grew up in Bloomfield Hills, would still lead by at least 20 points.

(h/t to Dave Ivers)

Posted by: CAC at 10:11 AM | Comments (235)
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Wow. Big surprise in Waco last night, huh?

Hope you're having a great weekend you goofballs.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:39 AM | Comments (198)
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Okay, so here it is: my review of the Amazon Kindle Fire.

I'll give you the conclusion first: I like it. I don't love it, but I like it. (You can jump to the end of the review for a fuller qualification of this judgement.)

This is a nicely built but very plain unit. It's meant to do one thing: access your digital content on Amazon. (And to surf the web a bit.) It's really just an electronic window into Amazon's store; it's not meant to be a fully-fledged tablet computing device.

I've had a few days to use the Fire, and one thing stands out above all -- I got exactly what I expected to get. The Fire is a dense little monolith of black plastic and glass (with a rubberized back) that is featureless except for three little indentations along the bottom edge that expose a headphone jack, a mini-USB port (for both data and power), and a power button. That's it. [EDIT: There are also two little speakers set into the top of the unit.]
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Posted by: Monty at 05:55 AM | Comments (109)
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