But Verum Serum notes he's also calling for increased spending, even back then, even when he was (don't giggle) a "moderate."

Hmmm... He wants to spend more and yet have less debt.

I wonder what sort of plan he might have had in mind.

Could it be... raising taxes on everybody? Sure would have been nice for the media to have asked about this. Informed consent of the public and all.

Posted by: Ace at 09:12 AM | Comments (48)
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Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:19 AM | Comments (201)
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Due to the usual chaos no one was in charge of tonight's ONT. So you'll get nothing and like it.

Lifespans

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:25 PM | Comments (586)
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I missed this earlier in the week, but I've been on vacation. According to unnamed sources, for which the usual caveats apply:

... unbeknown to the ATF, the target of their operation was a FBI confidential informant, a fact that only became known to them in April of this year after an 18-month investigation that cost millions of dollars of tax dollars.

"They were going after someone they could never have," a source in Washington told Fox News. "The Mr. Big they wanted was using government money to buy guns that went to the cartels. The FBI knew it and didn't tell them."

The confidential informant is a former high-level drug dealer who had been deported by the DEA. The FBI, however, recruited him as a counter-terrorism informant, providing information on potential dirty bombs or Al Qaeda suspects moving through the border region. (emphasis added)

Got that? The FBI was paying this CI, who was turning right around and buying guns with the green ... and a green light from ATF. I don't know if they were actually giving him the buy money, but, hey, dollars are fungible.

I've been vacillating on this thing wondering whether it was: (a) a plan to support gun control legislation by goosing the "X% of guns used in Mexico come from the US" stat or (b) a bureaucratic clusterfuck so massive that it could only be pulled off by the federal government.

The right answer, of course, is "yes."

Via Gun Owners of America. more...

Posted by: andy at 05:26 PM | Comments (124)
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Here's a quick and dirty fisking of this afternoon's AP version of DOOM! Stimulus isn't mentioned, Obama is only mentioned once.

The job market is defying history.

A dismal June employment report shows that employers are adding nowhere near as many jobs as they normally do this long after a recession has ended.

Unemployment has climbed for three straight months and is now at 9.2 percent. There's no precedent, in data going back to 1948, for such a high rate two years into what economists say is a recovery.

Picked the wrong time span. Try the 1930s and you'll have a similar "recovery" caused by a similar "president".

Sometimes disappointing economic reports look better on closer inspection. This one gets uglier.

One Term President.

And 16.2 percent of those who wanted to work were either unemployed, forced to settle for part-time jobs or had given up looking for work. That figure was up from 15.8 percent in May.

That U-6 number we just remembered. Up .4%! A lot bigger than the .1% unemployment rate bump.

Even if President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans agree to raise the borrowing limit, the deal will likely require deep cuts in government spending and possibly tax increases.

Ooooh. I like that conventional wisdom. Cuts = likely. Tax increases = only a possibility. Change the way people think you change the way things work out.

Heightening the uncertainty are Europe's debt crisis and the possibility that China's efforts to tame inflation will slow its booming economy.

China's a real time bomb.

The Conference Board business group said last week that its consumer confidence index fell to 58.5 in June. A healthy reading is 90. At this point after the previous three recessions, the index averaged 87.

Holy Moly.

"The policy cupboard is pretty bare, and we can see what the emperor looks like disrobed," Rosenberg says. "It's not a pretty picture."

My eyes!

I skipped some choice paragraphs worthy of sarcastic comment. Feel free to slip those in the comments.

-------------- update ---------------

Just thought of something relevant to that 1930s crack I made above. This country has had a lot of practice dealing with the bust part (recession) of the boom and bust cycle since the Great Depression. The interventionist way we've dealt with them may not have been ideal - it may not have been even good! - but it wasn't bad enough to wreck the country. Maybe we don't grow at +5% annual GDP but, overall, the economic performance of the US is one of the wonders of the world.

Now this professor cons his way into the White House and we're hanging on by our fingernails! What would have been a larger-than-average-but-not-unprecdented financial panic has, thanks to President Obama, morphed into the Great Recession with the best plausible outcome (barring the right person winning in 2012) a decade or two of stagflation.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:33 PM | Comments (165)
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But no one makes an issue of this refusal of extremists to negotiate and compromise, because they're liberals.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (190)
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Honestly, me either, and before you say "We don't want someone who goes to Washington to make deals and bring home pork!", well, that's a problem:

The federalist argument is also severely undercut by the fact that since joining the U.S. Congress in 2007, Bachmann has appropriated more than $3.7 million in earmarks. What is more, when Republicans sought an earmark moratorium, Bachmann pushed to exclude transportation projects from the ban.

I get that earmarks are part of the game here, and and I also get that earmarks only began to become politically poisonous around 2007-2008, and I also get that earmarks aren't the totally worst thing ever, and I also get that as a general matter politicians are not Simon Pure. As I always say, you can't act surprised to see some politics turning up in politics.

But I'm still scratching my head about the theory behind a Bachmann nomination. It seems odd to me that so many have gone so quickly from wanting some kind of executive experience to deciding that can be picked up entirely on the job.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (460)
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Swiped from Instapundit, who airs his own version of Countdown without commercial interruption on the Internet, is this photographic essay demonstrating that Obama is the funniest man in the entire universe.

Posted by: Ace at 12:58 PM | Comments (81)
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Although he had so-so ratings for his debut, they've fallen by more than 25%. And he's getting 1/4th the viewers he got at MSNBC, which wasn't a ratings bonanza either.

At this point, Olbermann is being paid $40 a year for every daily viewer he is attracting. Hard to imagine they are making any money off his show.

Best bang-for-the-buck since the Stimulus.

Here's Keith Olbermann's probem: Installed base. Like with video game platforms.

The bigger your installed base, the more units you'll sell, as there is a benefit to playing on the most popular platform out there -- a lot more opponents for multiplayer games. A lot more exclusives. A lot more titles to pick from, as everyone wants their game on the number one system.

A big part of political organization is the feeling that you're actually doing something when you gather. If those dunces at those Greenpeace concerts realized they weren't doing anything but listening to Sting play his stupid jazz compositions, they would be less likely to attend.

Because no one wants to hear that crap.

The idea that something is part of something bigger is important in this sort of thing.

Bigger bloggers benefit a little from this, from the idea that a relatively large (for a blog) platform may translate into actual tangible action, either by Mau-Mauing errant politicians on your side or being able to make your voice heard or the like.

So the point is a bigger platform will tend to become bigger, because audience size definitely matters.

Now, Keith Olbermann is just an archliberal Ted Baxter. He's a blowhard, and he's not funny. And oh, boy, does he think he is funny.

He's the modern day Murrow. You might have heard that. From Keith Olbermann.

But a major point in attracting viewers to his show (to the extent they were attracted; let me stress his ratings were really nothing brag-worthy) was the idea that what Olbermann said mattered.

And this is why Olbermann constantly made his ratings the story on his show. By claiming that he had beaten an O'Reilly repeat with lesbian dog-walker-business-owners aged 25-49 in Walla Walla Washington one Friday, he was telegraphing to his Pratorians (misspelling intended, smartasses) that they -- he and his dumb viewers -- were "winning" the battle.

That when he posted on Daily Kos it was like the King mixing with the commoners.

And the King, of course, had great sway in the nation.

But if Keith Olbermann isn't important anymore, then how can he be important anymore? If people are tuning in in much smaller numbers (down from a level that was already fairly inconsequential), how can people convince themselves that they're somehow engaging in the political process simply by tuning in to watch his histrionics and blogger-level snark?

When it comes to installed base, the bigger you are, the bigger you get; and, conversely, the smaller you are, the smaller you get.

Keith Olbermann is now getting tuned in by approximately 250,000 or so people a day. These are his "daily uniques."

This means he has the same pull as Hot Air.

And probably a fair amount less than Daily Kos.

Certainly far less than Drudge.

If the King has no followers, why follow the King? What makes him King but for his followers?

Keith Olbermann's Countdown

The world's first and only televised blog.

With no comments, alas.

Headline Help... From Arbalest.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Comments (129)
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Verum Serum's headline for the win.

Sweeney, by the way, looks exactly like I expect a machine pol to look. I could see him guest starring on Boardwalk Empire.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (57)
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