It's a heck of a world that we're leaving our kids. The amount of debt we're saddling them with amounts to child-abuse, but you'll never hear anyone admit it.

Long live the Limited Liability Corporation (LLC)!

Empire State Fed's General Business Conditions index misses even the gloomy expectations of economists. It's yet another indicator that the economy is trending down rather than up.

Another reason why Europe is doomed.

You took a big pay cut this decade and probably weren't even aware of it.

Reality always wins. Always.

Has the dreaded double-dip begun? Things do seem to be getting worse rather than better.

What Schumpeter (of "Creative Destruction" fame) would say about the Occupy Wall Street people.

The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite. Â… They swell the host of intellectuals Â… whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment Â… righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism Â… Capitalism inevitably Â… educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Obama goes all in for the OWS socialists, but we shouldn't be surprised: he's an academic liberal who's never actually held a private-sector job. His antipathy to the business world is driven as much by ignorance as it is by ideological hostility.

Laying off tenured faculty? The horror! The horror!

Germany informs the rest of the world that the the check won't work unless they sign it, and they haven't signed it yet.

A certain smart military blog has some interesting stuff to say about the stinky hippies now infesting certain parts of Wall Street and points beyond -- specifically, that they happen to be overloaded with socialists, communists, and other unsavory types. Wall Street Communists. I hate Wall Street Communists!

The municipal bond meltdown predicted by Meredit Whitney has not yet come to pass, but I personally think that the financial pressures on American cities are only just beginning. Harrisburg, PA isn't an outlier; it's simply the vanguard.

Ending the discussion of "fair share".

Consider also that the Framers of the Constitution, with their views on the role of government, didnÂ’t even include an income tax. The 16th Amendment came 125 years later. What would they say about a system thatÂ’s capable of taking over half of a citizenÂ’s wages? Much is made about the Framers not abolishing slavery from the start, but we finally got it right. How many years will it take to abolish slavery to The State?

http://www.businessweek.com/finance/hope-for-american-manufacturingmdashand-maybe-jobs-10142011.html

This is a DOOM-oriented column, so stories that show the strengths of American manufacturing may seem to be out of place. However, do note: an strong American manufacturing sector does not necessarily equate to more jobs in that sector. Automation is the key, not more expensive labor.

Ireland is not Greece. Ireland isn't out of the woods yet by any means, but the Irish are showing a firmness of spirit and a willingness to sacrifice that their erstwhile Greek compatriots have not shown so far.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The Jobs economy. The Steve Jobs economy, that is.

Speaking of the death of Steve Jobs, the anguish at his death sometimes seems rather overdone. Might it be that we fear that men like him will not come our way again any time soon?

Did feminism kill nursing? In Britain, perhaps, though there are other issues at play there. The socialized medicine model has proven to be quite adept at killing the tenderness and solicitude that many caregivers feel for their patients -- State-run healthcare systems do not reward the "human touch" in any meaningful way, so the caregivers gradually lose it.

Dorian Electra: My date with Keynes.

More "green shoots": Lowes and Gap to close US stores, Best Buy to cut square footage in use. This is very grim news going into the holiday season.

Deadbeat state: Illinois owes billions in unpaid bills. Which in turn is putting the hurt on many small businesses in that state. At some point the long-suffering businesses in that benighted state will simply haul stakes and head out for greener pastures, and then the corrupt Illinois Democrat machine can explain the resulting economic crash to the voters.

Economist explains to Californians why it's unwise to allow collective bargaining for public employees. Californians shrug, say "Whatever, dude," and take another long bong hit.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:00 AM | Comments (131)
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You knew it was coming. Cain was flying under the radar for a while, but now that he's moving up in the polls, the knives are coming out:

These ideas are a long way from becoming law, but they are generating, as intended, much discussion about the merits of each idea. The worst idea is a proposed national sales tax, which is a disguised VAT (value added tax) ...

... In every country that has established a VAT with the promise of reducing its national debt, the VAT has eventually gone up or expanded on top of the existing tax structure.

We caught a lot of crap around here when we pointed out the Cain's "business flat tax" was a real (if slightly modified) VAT, but this guy's going further by calling the proposed national sales tax a VAT too.

Keep reading to see which RINO in the herd made these comments. more...

Posted by: andy at 03:57 AM | Comments (260)
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It's all fun and games until someone shoots back.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:14 AM | Comments (104)
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Uh Oh: Jamie 'Mistress of Disaster' Gorelick joins Defense Policy Board

So I guess now we know the direction the next national disaster will come from.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright are among five new members of the Defense Policy Board, a panel advising top Pentagon officials on matters of defense policy.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also named Jamie Gorelick, former deputy attorney general and member of the 9/11 Commission, former U.S. congresswoman Jane Harman and retired Adm. Gary Roughead, former chief of naval operations.

Still you may want to start shorting all your defense stocks.

[And for those curious about how she got her moniker, go here.] more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:50 PM | Comments (894)
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Honestly, I don't know anything about football. But it's my turn to put up a football thread so here goes.

GO...uh...TEAM!!!

Oh no! It's coming right at us!

I just yelled downstairs to hubby (who is watching football) "what team wears black and yellow?" and he said "Pittsburgh." So that must be a guy from Pittsburgh. Don't know who the other guy is but he looks like he's trying to save the first guy. That might be his job on the team. Let me know what you think.

Just yelled downstairs to hubby "what do you call that job on the team where he goes around protecting other guys from the ball?" but he didn't reply. That's normal when he's watching football.

YAAAYYY! Oh my God I love football so much. Pretty much the only sound around the house these days is the TV, ice clinking in a glass of booze, and random outbursts of swearing. Reminds me of Mom.

Enthusiastic cheering women below the fold. more...

Posted by: LauraW at 05:42 PM | Comments (105)
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The "candidate" getting the most negative press? Obama, a study finds.

Overlooking the fact that Obama is not merely a candidate, but supposedly has a day job as President of the United States, and his performance in that job is of such a low level as to earn the nickname SCOAMFOTUS.

The media will now take this "study" as a pretext for being even easier on the Naked Emperor.

As a "corrective" to the anti-Obama bias they're demonstrating.

Despite these important caveats, media writers are already using Pew’s research to claim the media have an anti-Obama bias. “President Obama has received more negative press coverage in recent months than any of his prospective GOP challengers,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Donovan Slack.

CBSNews.com’s Brian Montopoli parroted: “President Obama ‘has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment’ of all presidential candidates over the past five months.” And Politico’s Hagey: “Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.”

Could that possibly be true? Well, here's what Pew did: They defined media to mean include blogs, and not only big blogs with some slight amount of influence, but apparently all of them:

[Pew also separately looked at “hundreds of thousands” of blogs, which again means that the few dozen top-ranked influential blogs are buried in a mass of data that includes vast numbers of low-trafficked and irrelevant sites.]

Ridiculous.

So all conservative blogs trash Obama. Fine. And then liberal blogs would like to trash Republican candidates, but there are 11 of them, so the bile gets spread thin around, between a near dozen contenders... and then Pew can write stupid things like "Obama's getting more negative coverage in 'the media' than any other candidate."

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (469)
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I double-posted the last item, so to keep them intact so that Andrew Breitbart can peruse them later, I'm turning this into an Open Thread.

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (37)
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Fake, as in, "Did he just sit in front of a Green Screen and add in a static image of a factory?"

A lot of industry experts confirm what seems obvious to the eye -- It looks fake.

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (338)
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Hiding the decline since 1999.

CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

As our FOIA request details, the UN informed participants that it was motivated by embarrassing releases of earlier discussions (“ClimateGate” key among them), and to circumvent the problem that national government transparency laws were posing the group.

CEI reminds OSTP that this practice was described as “creat[ing] non-governmental accounts for official business”, “using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications”, in a recent analogous situation involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. CEI expects similar congressional and media outrage at this similar practice to evade the applicable record-keeping laws.

This effort has apparently been conducted with participation — thereby direct assistance and enabling — by the Obama White House which, shortly after taking office, seized for Holdren’s office the lead role on IPCC work from the Department of Commerce. The plan to secretly create a FOIA-free zone was then implemented.

This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU and U.S. bureaucrats and political appointees avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (121)
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Because I swear I'm not slacking. I'm just thinking meh to everything I read.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (205)
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