Sorry, was writing a longer post and so have to just borrow from Hot Air for fresh content that's ready to post.

[I]s this a cave or an escalation? Some lefties think itÂ’s the latter, which is arguably true. The whole reason that tea partiers now favor a short-term debt ceiling hike is because theyÂ’re worried that BoehnerÂ’s trying to engineer a big cave on ObamaCare by merging shutdown negotiations with debt-ceiling negotiations. The latter is supposed to be about entitlements and deficit reduction while the former began as a battle over defunding ObamaCare. If they merge, Paul Ryan will swoop in, Boehner will drop the O-Care demands, and the GOP and Democrats will try to strike a moderate bargain on entitlement reform and new revenue. By offering to punt on the debt ceiling now, BoehnerÂ’s basically committing to holding the line on ObamaCare. The shutdown will go on, possibly for another six weeks as we approach the new debt-ceiling deadline. From that perspective, itÂ’s an escalation. ThatÂ’s why some centrist Republicans hate this idea...

Yeah I have no idea. I think the contours of this are pretty convoluted now.

Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (436)
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Niall Ferguson is an influential historian. I just heard of him. I'm immediately a fanboi.

He railed on Paul Krugman yesterday on the useless Joe Scarborough show, which was interesting enough.

It's from that exchange that I learned of Ferguson's three part demolition of Paul Krugman, whom he tastelessly, childishly taunts as "KRUGTRON, the Invincible!"

Wait a minute, Ferguson didn't call Krugman that. Krugman calls himself that. Ferguson is just using Krugman's preferred styling.

I hate linking the Huffington Post, but that's where Ferguson writes (apart from writing history books on the Depression and such).

Here are some excerpts from this three part series.

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 1: Krugtron gets everything possible wrong about Europe's weathering of the financial crisis, and then... begins claiming himself to have gotten everything right.

These quotes are by no means the only good stuff here; I just have to be picky about excerpts. I do suggest you break down and Read the Whole Thing(s).

Krugman reserves a special contempt for people who, in his words, "take a position and refuse to alter that position no matter how strongly the evidence refutes it, who continue to insist that they have The Truth despite being wrong again and again." He calls this "derping." The awkward thing for Krugman is that "being wrong again and again" perfectly characterizes his own commentary on what proved to be one of the crucial issues of the financial crisis: whether or not Europe's monetary union would survive it.

To begin with, Krugman was blithely confident that Europe would weather the economic storm better than the United States. On January 11, 2008, he hailed it as "The Comeback Continent":

... Since 2000, employment has actually grown a bit faster in Europe than in the United States ... If you think Europe is a place where lots of able-bodied adults just sit at home collecting welfare checks, think again. ... Europe's economy looks a lot better now - both in absolute terms and compared with our economy - than it did a decade ago.

Krugman explained Europe's comeback in terms of "deregulation", a more competitive broadband market than the U.S., "strong social safety nets" and "very high taxes." On May 19, 2008, after a visit to Berlin, he even told his faithful readers: "I have seen the future, and it works ... in the heart of 'old Europe'." (Admittedly this column was a standard "peak oil" piece, exhorting to Americans to have German-style cars and public transport, as opposed to, say, developing new technology to unlock hitherto inaccessible domestic supplies of oil and natural gas.)

Finally, in December 2008, Krugman woke up to the fact that the "Comeback Continent" was in fact an "economic mess." But what kind of mess? No, not the mess of excessively leveraged and effectively insolvent banks that had maxed out on CDOs, bubbly real estate and Club Med government bonds. The mess Krugman discerned was the failure of the German government to see "the need for a large, pan-European fiscal stimulus." The main thing, he wrote in March 2009, was not to make the mistake of thinking that "big welfare states are ... the cause of Europe's current crisis. In fact ... they're actually a mitigating factor." It was a theme he returned to when he and I debated the crisis in New York three months later, when he argued that "the human suffering [was] going to be much greater on this side of the Atlantic" because of Europe's "strong social safety net." Even in January 2010 he was still insisting that:

The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works. ... taking the longer view, the European economy works; it grows; it's as dynamic, all in all, as our own.

All of this sheds (to say the least) interesting light on Krugman's boast in an interview in March of this year to have been one of the few commentators who had "predicted the unfolding economic disaster in Europe." This is by no means the only retrospective prediction Krugman has ever made, but it is surely the most shameless.

Incidentally -- I'm not sure if this disproves Krugtron the Invicible or not -- but the one country in Europe that really did weather the crisis is Germany, with its hateful devotion to balanced budgets.

I say I'm not sure it disproves Krugtron the Invincible because he seems to be talking about how Germany can help Europe, not how Germany can help itself. Nevertheless, it sure does seem interesting, to me at least, that the one country insisting on fiscal sanity is also the one Western country that's not doing too bad at all.

Krugtron the Invicible, Part 2: Krugman gets everything about the housing crisis wrong.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:14 AM | Comments (342)
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This is a huge story.

Or, rather, it should be a huge story.

But it's not, because it paints government in a rather bad light. An incompetent light.

People might get the wrong right idea were they to read the facts about Detroit government workers' pension fund.

And therefore: they won't be permitted to read about them.

Let me give you the short version: Whenever Detroit's pension fund performed better than expected (as far as investments), rather than keeping that extra money in the fund, where it could grow due to compounding interest, the trustees sent out "bonus" checks to workers.

In other words, they paid them bits and pieces of their pension before, you know, retirement.

They also -- and I don't even understand this -- paid "bonuses" to the City of Detroit itself, to, you know, waste.

Even worse (as if that's not bad enough)... they also paid out "bonuses" when the fund did worse than expected.

Why I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan, except for Everything.

Net effect? Well, the pension fund is now absurdly underfunded, because of all the money sucked out of it before actually getting to the pension years. Of the fund's $2 billion shortfall, it is estimated that half of that, a cool $1 billion daddyo, went out the door through "bonuses."

Why would the people administering the system do this?

Well, several reasons, I think.

First, they were completely incompetent, of course. They apparently didn't realize that depleting a pension of funding on the front end (the accumulation phase) would have dire effects on the back end (the disbursement phase).

It's incredible that pension administrators would not realize something so basic and obvious, but there you go.

And that is on the city workers themselves -- in a democratic system, we cannot completely ignore your freely-made choices of who to put in charge of a pension fund, even if you're destroying your future. We have to treat adults as Capable of Exercising Rationally Self-Interested Decision-Making, even if they're actually not.

Second, they officials who did this were probably protecting their jobs. Because I'm sure that people receiving "bonus" checks were pretty darned happy about that.

Happy, that is, because they didn't realize that the "bonus" checks were actually depleting the pension fund and that when they retired they'd have a very meager pension indeed.

So the officials probably were getting the benefit of job security... by completely and utterly failing to perform their jobs in any kind of responsible matter.

Now here's the kicker, of course: The workers of Detroit will now come to taxpayers to "make them whole," to pour in billions into their pension fund.

Even though they actually got a lot of this pension money once already in the form of wildly-premature "bonus" checks.

This is Democratic governance in action. This is the ultimate effect of a State which wishes to infantilize its citizens -- it ultimately will succeed in doing so.

And then the infantilized citizens, unable to provide for themselves, will, like children, seek support and shelter from the adults.

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 AM | Comments (351)
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John Sexton is Just a Blogger (TM), and not a Real Reporter (TM), and yet somehow he's been able to scoop the rest of the media by simply asking questions of officials and reading documents posted in the public record. (Well, until they were deleted -- but he saved them.)

First of all, for those of you who don't want to read a detailed exposé, here's a visual that gets to the heart of it. This graphic accompanied a September 16, 2013 report -- just two weeks before ObamaCare was supposed to go live.

Spoiler alert: Red is bad.

Then there's the typical Obamanaut response to free inquiry:

A spokesman for the Nevada exchange did not respond to phone requests in time to be included in this story. Thursday morning the documents mentioned above--which have been available online for weeks--were taken down.

The overall article depicts a chaotic, undermanaged and underthought scramble. Pretty much SOP for the Obama Administration, but the trouble is, computer code doesn't have a friendly media to spin for it. It's either logical, and it fits together, and it obeys the rules of mathematics, or it fails.

And so:

The Nevada exchange site has been taken down at least twice--October 3rd and October 8th--to apply software patches to fix various bugs. One site security consultant with extensive experience on major government IT projects, but who asked to remain anonymous, summed it up this way, "They are building the airplane the same time they are flying it."

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (347)
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This is a very long report, and you should spend some time to read it all. There's a LOT more than just this juicy snip.

...“There is no access to the daily business in the Oval Office, who the president meets with, who he gets advice from,” said ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton, who has been covering presidents since Gerald Ford. She said many of Obama’s important meetings with major figures from outside the administration on issues like health care, immigration, or the economy are not even listed on Obama’s public schedule. This makes it more difficult for the news media to inform citizens about how the president makes decisions and who is influencing them.

“In the past,” Compton told me, “we would often be called into the Roosevelt Room at the beginning of meetings to hear the president’s opening remarks and see who’s in the meeting, and then we could talk to some of them outside on the driveway afterward. This president has wiped all that coverage off the map. He’s the least transparent of the seven presidents I’ve covered in terms of how he does his daily business.”...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:00 PM | Comments (124)
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And actually it's pretty damn funny. I rate it three LOLs, one WTF, and two WINs.

So BuzzFeed puts aside its usual Democratic leanings to admit the ridiculousness of this, but the rest of the media is still embargoing the story?

I guess it's that old observation in effect: You can say in a joke what Social Codes forbid you to say seriously.

And so I guess I'd ask what kind of "truth-seeking" media is it that imposes a Social Code upon itself from ever criticizing The One's policies.

Posted by: Ace at 07:58 AM | Comments (283)
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• 404Care Website Cost Us 634 Million Dollars
  
• More Conservative, Less Republican
  
• Hawaii To Relaunch Website After Zero People Sign Up For Healthcare
  
• White House, IRS Exchanged Confidential Taxpayer Info
  
• Heritage's New Obamacare Ad(video)
  
• Jake Tapper: Yeah The Media Is Biased
  
• VDH: Obama Will Cut A Deal Sooner Rather Than Later
  
• Someone Made It Through The Healthcare.gov Signup Process
  
• The Bigger Battle Behind The Showdown
  
• Taranto: Why Should We Trust The Government?
  
• US No Longer World's Top Oil Importer
  
• The People Can Take Care Of The People's Monuments
  
• Storming The Barrycades
  
• How Federal Workers Became Obama's Private Army
  
• Poll:7% Of People Think Obamacare Rollout Has Gone Well
  
• Obamacare's Broken Promises Pile Up
  
• JFK And The Rise Of Punitive Liberalism
  
• Fraidy Cat Dog Needs Owner To Hold His Paw During Car Rides(video)
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:32 AM | Comments (146)
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Of course. How could it be any other way.

A public university has invited the owner of an “eco-friendly” sex toy shop to teach students about “fetish gear” and a pole dancer to teach students how to talk about what “turns [them] on.”

University of Maryland (UMD) is partnering with The Garden, a sex toy shop in Washington, DC, to host the workshops next Tuesday as part of its sex week, which runs from October 15-18...

...All events are sponsored by U of MD, which receives both federal and state tax dollars.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:14 AM | Comments (117)
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Day 10.

There was, briefly, a juicy story put out by Associated Press that Terry McAuliffe had lied to a postal inspector in a fraud case. Alas, AP withdrew it just a few hours after making the claim. Instead, it seems the story is that McAuliffe invested in the guy perpetrating the fraud. Oh, and then took campaign contributions from him. Yeah, still a story.

Also briefly, the Libyan prime minister was kidnapped by one of the militias and then later released. "In a sign of Libya's chaos, Zidan's seizure was depicted by various sources as either an 'arrest' or an abduction."

House GOP leadership is still considering a short-term debt limit extension. For the moment this plan still has the support of Heritage Action and FreedomWorks.

NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno probe is in trouble. Apparently, its software is only operating in "safe mode."

[ RSS]

[iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (293)
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More From Vaclav Havel's 1978 Essay, "The Power of the Powerless"

In which he lays out what it means to be a 'dissident', how to live 'within the truth' and ways to resist a totalitarian system even when you have no power at all.

In 1974, when I was employed in a brewery, my immediate superior was a certain S, a person well versed in the art of making beer. He was proud of his profession and he wanted our brewery to brew good beer. He spent almost all his time at work, continually thinking up improvements, and he frequently made the rest of us feel uncomfortable because he assumed that we loved brewing as much as he did. In the midst of the slovenly indifference to work that socialism encourages, a more constructive worker would be difficult to imagine.

The brewery itself was managed by people who understood their work less and were less fond of it, but who were politically more influential. They were bringing the brewery to ruin and not only did they fail to react to any of S's suggestions, but they actually became increasingly hostile toward him and tried in every way to thwart his efforts to do a good job. Eventually the situation became so bad that S felt compelled to write a lengthy letter to the managers superior, in which he attempted to analyze the brewery's difficulties. He explained why it was the worst in the district and pointed to those responsible.

His voice might have been heard. The manager, who was politically powerful but otherwise ignorant of beer, a man who loathed workers and was given to intrigue, might have been replaced and conditions in the brewery might have been improved on the basis of S's suggestions. Had this happened, it would have been a perfect example of small-scale work in action. Unfortunately, the precise opposite occurred: the manager of the brewery, who was a member of the Communist Party's district committee, had friends in higher places and he saw to it that the situation was resolved in his favor. S's analysis was described as a "defamatory document" and S himself was labeled a "political saboteur." He was thrown out of the brewery and shifted to another one where he was given a job requiring no skill. Here the notion of small-scale work had come up against the wall of the post-totalitarian system. By speaking the truth, S had stepped out of line, broken the rules, cast himself out, and he ended up as a sub-citizen, stigmatized as an enemy. He could now say anything he wanted, but he could never, as a matter of principle, expect to be heard. He had become the "dissident" of the Eastern Bohemian Brewery.

I think this is a model case which, from another point of view, illustrates what I have already said in the preceding section: you do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. This is why our situation is not comparable to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Czech nation, in the worst period of Bachs absolutism, had only one real "dissident," Karel Havlíček , who was imprisoned in Brixen. Today, if we are not to be snobbish about it, we must admit that "dissidents" can be found on every street corner.

And his essay secretly passed from hand to hand eventually helped lead to the rise of Solidarity in Poland and contributed to the crumbling of apparent internal support for other Eastern Bloc governments.

This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road...we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought that we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing...Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later - in August 1980 - it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement...[5]

   -- Zbigniew Bujak, Solidarity activist, recalling the effect that Havel's essay had upon the leaders of Poland's nascent Solidarity movement

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:44 PM | Comments (425)
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