MoodyÂ’s to Italy: BAM!

Remember this about the Greek bailout by the ECB: it was always about European banks, not the Greek people.

Teh Bernank emerges from his cave, blinks in the sunlight, states the obvious, and then goes back into his hole.

Fanniegate just got worse.

Sin taxes on college sports?

You know, for all the nattering about a “bipartisan plan” in this op-ed, I don’t see anything that amounts to an actual plan. It’s more like a firm pledge to have a plan. Later on. Maybe.

When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Econ 101.

Monty dislikes getting fat, but likes bacon cheeseburgers. MontyÂ’s failure arises in not seeing the relationship between these two things.

When your argument has devolved to “you have nowhere else to go”, you’ve pretty much given up on rational argument altogether.

Fear ChinaÂ’s fall, not its rise. China is merely the (biggest) symptom of a terribly unbalanced global economy; to the extent that a Chinese fall hurts the global economy, it is because we have put too many of our eggs in the Chinese basket. The old advice is as relevant as ever: diversify, diversify, diversify.

More on the illusion of China’s economic “miracle”.

Just a reminder: that blended 8% rate-of-return calculation that so many retirement advisers use to help you plan your savings is probably wrong. If youÂ’re smart, youÂ’ll plan on a rate-of-return around 4-5%. You might get more if you can tolerate more risk, but thatÂ’s the key: the days of an 8% low-risk return profile are long gone. (This exact problem is why so many pension plans, public and private, are in very dire trouble. TheyÂ’re assuming rates of return that they are very unlikely to get in future years.)

Euro science.

Outsiders to the world of money who start to take an interest in it soon notice that most of the things that alarm and outrage the wider public are taken by insiders to be perfectly routine and unremarkable. Consider the sums that bankers get paid, or the disruptive impact of hot money zipping around the world at the click of a mouse, tearing up industries and whole economies at will. To moneymen, those are just givens of the way the world works, and have to be accepted, in the absence of a credible plan to go off to found a new system on another planet.

Once in a great while, though, something happens that reverses the loop, and has the moneymen more scared than the rest of us. That happened in late 2007, when the credit crunch began, and itÂ’s happening again now.

Is the loss of Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field" hurting Apple? Jobs could wrap the same old tech in a new white case and convince the fanboys they were getting a new product, and even make them pay more for it, but new CEO Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs.

Rather astonishingly, the NYT comes out against Schumer's China bill. If you want to punish China for their misdeeds, there is a simple solution: don't buy their stuff. They'll get the message.

Collateral damage in the muni market.

The Obama administration would like to keep upper income taxpayers paying higher rates on their income but limit the size of their deductions and exclusions. In the case of muni bond interest, the change would in effect install a 7 percent tax on municipal bond interest for households in the 35 percent tax bracket. If the Bush tax cuts were to expire and the top tax rate rise to the pre-Bush level of 39.6 percent, the tax on muni interest for those in the top bracket would increase to 11.6 percent.

When "stimulus" no longer stimulates. Keynesianism always was a fraud, but the failures used to be hidden behind explosive growth rates in the western nations' GDPs. But as the nations have greyed, they grow more slowly and become less dynamic. Red tape blocks progress like plaque clogs an elderly person's arteries.

Cities have historically been hives of initiative and new enterprise, but in the regulation dense thicket of modern American urban life, few jobs can grow. The nation’s major cities — where so many of our poorest communities with the highest rates of long term unemployment are found — were often shedding rather than creating jobs even before the recession. The Empire State Building, then the largest in the world and still an icon of design and serviceability around the world, was built in 13 months at the start of the Depression. It has taken the coop in which I live longer than that simply to find out from the city whether we can use a certain method to replace broken gutters along the side of my building. (We are still trying to find out. So is the company that wants to do the work.)

UPDATE 1: Layoff plans soar by 126% in September. Via Insty, who needles, "How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?" Answer: Not too good.

UPDATE 2: The end of "free stuff"? Ain't no such thing as "free". Somebody always pays, in one way or another. Always.

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Posted by: Monty at 05:12 AM | Comments (129)
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So Rick Perry’s been in the race eight weeks. He’s skyrocketed up and then come back to earth. Thanks to the compressed schedule for the Republican Primary, and following in the wake of the Washington Post smear, the next month or so constitutes the window that will determine Perry’s role in this election – as nominee or as Fred Thompson redux.

One of the reasons is that in those eight weeks, he has largely allowed himself to be categorized and boxed in by his opponents; he has not articulated a clear vision to lead the country back to prosperity; and he has seemed unprepared for attacks he shouldÂ’ve expected from an audience unfamiliar with his Texas record. (For his staff: yes, the national media are idiots for not paying attention to literally anything youÂ’ve done or said on policy for ten-plus years. No, you canÂ’t correct that.) The combo of a lack of a coherent offensive strategy and getting stuck on defense in the debates brings us to the ABC/WaPo 16% tie for second with Herman Cain, which I think is an accurate depiction of where things stand.

HeÂ’s got roughly three months before voting starts. He's got several more debates, but they're spaced out a bit. The WaPo smear has pretty clearly backfired, and increasingly looks like a benefit to Perry in the primary, though IÂ’m sure itÂ’ll be blown up again in any general (though it's unlikely to bend anyone who didn't already hate his guts or view him as W. II). The early whispers are that he met his Q3 fundraising goals ($17 Million in seven weeks - Drudge is reporting this, thanks, comments - is pretty nice coin, frankly).

So there are as I see it three key questions about where he goes from here. more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 03:27 AM | Comments (202)
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Thank you, Mario...but our princess is in another castle!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:53 AM | Comments (91)
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Via Breitbart. Unhinged lunacy, or what I like to call mainstream liberalism. Can't figure out where all the hate for the elderly Jewish man is coming from. Maybe he was a janitor.

This crank calls himself The Lotion Man. Figure it out. more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 07:20 PM | Comments (129)
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Happy Tuesday, 'rons and 'ronnettes. I hope I've found enough stuff to keep you mildly amused for a bit.

First up, there's some excellent Star Wars toys photography over here. A taste, just because of the subject matter: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:49 PM | Comments (480)
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Busy busy day. So much to do, so little time to bask in the glory of the accomplishments of others. To wit:

Hank Williams Jr. Racists

MuleTrain2016 : 38
FMG: 38
Scott: 37
Pastafarian: 37
CountryBlumkins : 37
The Plague : 37

Filthy ZIONIST LIES

DrewM : 35
CDR M: 31
Gabe : 30
Andy : 30
rd brewer: 28
Russ from Winterset: 27
DiT : 25

At least I'm consistent. Ok consistency isn't really a virtue if you're an asshole.

Thanks to Ben and CDR M.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:10 PM | Comments (50)
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[Update: Earl Ray Tomblin, the Democrat, won.]

West Virginia held a special gubernatorial election today. The election is being held to fill the remaining 14 months on the term started by Democrat Joe Manchin, who resigned to become a U.S. senator last year.

The current Governor is Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin. His challenger is Republican businessman Bill Maloney. This is Maloney's first run for public office.

The election results can be found here.

The Democrats must be worried because people are getting mysterious calls informing them that their polling stations have changed or are closed.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:08 PM | Comments (195)
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Too on the nose? It was Ronald Reagan.

These are, quite honestly, amazing debate answers from George H.W. Bush and Reagan in 1980. This is a candidate debate in Houston. Bush and Reagan are asked whether illegals should have access to free K-12 public education (this was four years before the Supreme Court held that a public education must be provided for illegals).

Bush talks about being "sensitive and understanding" and then stumbles through a very Perry-esque examination of immigration issues, concluding that he doesn't want illegal aliens to be made to feel like they are stuck outside the law. Whoa.

Reagan then jumps in--not to rebut Bush's statement, but to add to it. Reagan also uses the word "sensitive" and, entirely unprompted, comes out against a border fence.

Surely we'd never tolerate such RINOs today.

(h/t to Guestblogger Ben Domenech.)

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:02 PM | Comments (492)
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We wanted to spread this thing around more, because it is so great.

Someone has put in a bit of work to here to recreate it in handy video form!

Thanks to Ace.

Posted by: LauraW at 12:47 PM | Comments (188)
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House Republicans today called for a special counsel to investigate the massive Fast & Furious scandal following the devastating revelations reported Monday by CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, one of the few in the "mainstream" media actually reporting on this.

Today Attkisson appeared on The Laura Ingraham Show and detailed the reaction of White House and DOJ spokesthings when she questioned them last Friday. more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 11:01 AM | Comments (322)
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