Economic desperation is on the rise. Our government's policy of "ignore, delay, deny, lie, and obfuscate" isn't working. The welfare state is killing us -- that's becoming so obvious that even many liberals can't deny it.

Democrats, the NLRB, Boeing, and jobs. Even liberals are beginning to notice the stink.

No long-term case for equities? Even IÂ’m not that much of a bear (yet), but there is a case to be made. But Treasuries are worse, so if the choice is between a pig and a turd, IÂ’ll take the pig. (See this for why stocks might still be a better bet long-term than bonds.)

Bob “The Bear” Janjuah: Hope is for suckers! We’re doomed!

Brazil has been “the country of the future” for my entire lifetime, but they never quite seem to get there.

It wasnÂ’t just the Philly Fed. The Richmond Fed agrees that the economy really, really sucks.

Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein lawyers up. Re the regulation problem: it wasnÂ’t that banks were under-regulated. ItÂ’s that the regulators werenÂ’t doing their jobs.

Alan Greenspan: The Euro is breaking down. Greenspan's credibility isn't what it used to be (what with him totally missing the call on the downturn and all), but it doesn't take a Maestro to see what's going down in Europe. Also, he says that gold is not in a bubble:

The major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. ItÂ’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.

IÂ’m a fan of the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) as an indicator of world economic health, and this article may mean that fears of a recession may be overblown. I'm one of the people who think we're already in a recession, so this BDI number seems like pretty good news to me.

VDH: “Surreal Logic”.

‘The public finally elected a bad Congress to stop me from doing more of what I wanted and which did not work’ is not a rationale for a second term.

Central Falls, RI: The canary in the coal mine.

Brea, California, population 38,000 (give or take). Pension burden? $2963 for every man, woman, and child.

Barack Obama, supply-sider.

This doesn't exactly come as shocking news to me: many bankers do not take their own investment advice. They rarely look out for their clients' interests in the way that they should, but you can count on them to look after their own interests. If you want to know what a banker, broker, or investment adviser really thinks, ask him how he invests his own money.

California is doomed to the tune of $1 Trillion (and counting!).

UPDATE 1: Slower business spending spells trouble.

Economists expect [the durable-goods report from the Commerce Department] to rise about 0.5% in July. Any disappointment would point to a loss of momentum even before the debt-ceiling debacle and stock-market selloff. There have been other cautionary signs, including a slowdown in global demand. Exports peaked in April and have since slid by about 3%.

UPDATE 2: New Jersey, senior member of the LOTB. The Soprano state gets downgraded. Hey, even Chris Christie can't turn a turd into a tea-rose overnight.

UPDATE 3: "Washington needs to wake up to the jobs crisis." Somehow I doubt anything is going to happen until after the 2012 elections. That's bad because the situation is going to deteriorate, but the political parties are just too far apart -- it's going to take another election, and a voter mandate one way or the other, to break up the logjam.

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Posted by: Monty at 04:50 AM | Comments (303)
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They really think you're that stupid. Guy Benson asked the White House if it had any comment on Biden's casual approval for China's monstrous population control policies, which require forced abortions, coercive (and occasionally forced) sterilizations, fines, and economic deprivations.

The White House responded with a statement from BizarroWorld. It's written in English and it mentions Biden. It is otherwise unresponsive in the way that liars typically are: rather than reject or clarify the content of Biden's comment it just ignores the content of Biden's comment.

The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of ChinaÂ’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization. The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant. He also pointed out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable. He was arguing against the One Child Policy to a Chinese audience."

In this universe, Biden suggested that the problem with China's population control policies is that it results in a debt problem, not that it is repugnant for its violations of human dignity. Here's what he said:

But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar [debt] concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- IÂ’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family. The result being that youÂ’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable."

Biden's phrase, "I'm not second-guessing" is simply ignored by the White House. What wasn't he second-guessing? The morality of forcible abortions? The medical ethics of surgeons who sterilize patients against their will? The angst and fear of young Chinese women who go into hiding to keep their neighbors from alerting the authorities when they become pregnant?

The Obama Administration thinks you're stupid. The Obama Administration thinks that through slick economies of phrasing it can blot out Biden's moral bankruptcy.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:18 AM | Comments (139)
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I think I'll try extra hard to remember today's events and conversations, in case I someday want to recall them verbatim.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (37)
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Been traveling all day and just got off da plane. So tonight's ONT has 43% less effort put into it. Enjoy.

Which “Great Books” Ain’t All That Great?

Joe Carter over at First Things talks about 'must read' classics that aren't all that great:

Slate.com asked several authors, critics, and editors to confess their least favorite “must read” book. The selections aren’t all that surprising (Ulysses and The Catcher in the Rye are named twice; Gravity’s Rainbow three times), but I appreciated this insight by novelist Elif Batuman:

Like many people, I enjoy learning which canonical books are unbeloved by which contemporary writers. However, I don’t think participants in such surveys ought to blame either themselves (“I’m so lazy/uneducated”) or the canonical books (“Ulysses is so overrated”). My view is that the right book has to reach you at the right time, and no person can be reached by every book.

And this is true - having gone back and re-read some assigned books from high school I can say that I do enjoy them much more as a mature adult - but only up to a point.

I still find anything by Melville a tedious bore and don't get me started on Edith Wharton and the dreaded Ethan Frome. In high school I liked Steinbeck a lot but now I find his books mostly preachy and manipulative - much like the later MASH seasons.

And I have to add Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land to the list. I only got around to reading it maybe ten years ago and I was distinctly underwhelmed. My feeling were pretty much the same as this commenter's:

…. as a big scifi fan I eagerly looked forward to finally reading Stranger in a Strange Land, one of the few scifi novels said to transcend its genre and actually be a great book. What a letdown!… boring, preachy, and filled with a bunch of unsympathetic cardboard characters that only a 13 year old nerd could love (apologies, 13 year old nerds). And Heinlein does the impossible – he makes Tom Clancy look like a masterful writer of dialogue. Sheesh.

And then we have poetry. Long time readers know my feelings on poetry: I'm agin it. Nuff said. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:14 PM | Comments (701)
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I actually didn't expect it so early. There are fourteen months to go. Do they really think this can carry that long?

We already had "big black cloud" turned into a nebulous code word (see what I did?) for Obama.

Now the lesser lights of the Democratic Venom Caucus try more of the same.

"The real enemy is the tea party –- let's remember that," said Rep. Frederica Wilson of Miami Gardens, host of the meeting and jobs fair. "The tea party holds Congress hostage…They have one goal in mind, and that's to make President Obama a one-term president."

And then there is the corrupt Maxine Waters.

Rep. Maxine Waters of California... recently said the tea party should "Go straight to hell."

"I'm in church. I'm not going to repeat that," Waters said Monday.

She also said: "We have to stand up and fight. It's fight time...We're not afraid of the tea partyÂ…In this struggle, we have to define who we are, what the president is doing and not let our voices be overshadowed by the tea party."

You have probably read that Obama and the Democrats have no cards other than these to play. Obama and the Democrats cannot run on their record -- it is the worst in 80 years, and we're not done tabulating the damage yet -- and they cannot run on their plans -- they have none, or at least none they can openly admit to the public.

That leaves this.

But this is desperation, flop sweat, and will be seen as such.

Concerns about the made-up crisis we call "global warming" (or "climate change, when it's cold) tend to diminish when people are confronted with the real, tangible fact of a jobless economy.

Similarly, this "racial dog-whistle" bullshit goes by the wayside, too. Rich liberals who are still gainfully employed -- or, at least, who draw an undeserved paycheck -- can afford to fret their silly little heads with crap like this. Unemployed people, and those who are concerned about their employment, have more important things to worry about.

I think, in the end, Obama will have turned out to have done something for race relations after all. I think it will be realized that November 2008 was the month the Race Card expired, forever.

Reps. Waters and Wilson don't care about that -- they are playing to a constituency which wants to hear who is to blame for their plight, and they do not want to hear it is the Great Hope called Barack Obama.

But these remarks are going to be heard outside of the audiences for whom they are intended, and they are going to hurt the Democratic Party.

Bonus: Rubio speaking at the Reagan Library right now, in streaming video.

Posted by: Ace at 05:25 PM | Comments (292)
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As Dave in Texas wonders, "Couldn't he have at least gone to the club house to get a briefing?"

And yes, it turns out Obama was in fact on the golf course when the earthquake struck.

But don't read too much into that, as the President is on the golf course an average of 9.4 hours per day, so the odds of him being on the golf course for any particular event are about 36%.

This SCOAMF doesn't know shit about jack, but when it comes to me-time, I admit, the guy is a past-master.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (440)
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NRO's The Corner is having an informal caption/photoshop contest with this picture.

A typical entry.

Is anybody else seeing this or is it just me again?

I think, no I KNOW the assembled morons can do better.

The winner will get nothing and like it.

(send photoshops to NRO or put a link in your comment. If there's an insanely brilliant photo-shop cobloggers are invited to hijack this post and insert the 'shop)

------------ Update ------------

The following captions are pretty good. I've looked at them up #190. If I didn't include yours it's because I'm racist.

Barack Obama is a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable failure.

Wrestler: Are those chopsticks in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

Hey Joe, my eyes are up here.

The Immovable Object meets the Irresistible Farce

The fuck you mean you're a Mongolian? You don't look anything like Alex Karras.

Moments later, the complimentary lap dance proved fatal.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:43 PM | Comments (241)
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It's important to distinguish from short-term deficits and the enormous structural deficits just five or so years off, as the Baby Boomers retire (and demand that younger people be taxed at higher rates to honor promises they made to themselves years ago).

Entitlements are causing part of the current deficit, but to the extent they'd already been predicted to cause to cause it.

And a big driver of the deficit is just the downturn -- Byron York does some calculation and finds that over $681 billion (in combined higher spending due to unemployment insurance and foodstamps, and lower tax receipts) was built in.

But the rest? All Obama, and all by his choosing.

There is no line in the federal budget that says "stimulus," but Obama's massive $814 billion stimulus increased spending in virtually every part of the federal government. "It's spread all through the budget," says former Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin. "It was essentially a down payment on the Obama domestic agenda." Green jobs, infrastructure, health information technology, aid to states -- it's all in there, billions in increased spending.

As for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP -- it has no specific line in the budget, either, but that is because it was anticipated to pay nearly all of its own cost, which it has.

Spending for Social Security and Medicare did go up in this period -- $162 billion and $119 billion, respectively -- but by incremental and predictable amounts that weren't big problems in previous years. "We're getting older one year at a time, and health care costs grow at 7 or 8 percent a year," says Holtz-Eakin. If Social Security and Medicare were the sole source of the current deficit, it would be a lot smaller than it is.

The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today's deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been maddeningly vague on how they'll do it.

This issue could be an important one in the coming presidential race. Should Republicans base their platform on entitlement reform, or should they focus on the here and now -- specifically, on undoing the damage done by Obama and his Democratic allies? In coming months, the answer will likely become clear: entitlements someday, but first things first.

Right, so true, and further, older people certainly will not agree to benefit reform when so much of federal spending is as far from reformed as conceivable.

We must push relentlessly for Obama himself to agree to repeal ObamaCare, for starters.

Of course Obama is going to break the all-time cumulative debt record, beating Bush's 8 year record in only 2 and a half years, and he still has eighteen months worth of damage yet to be done.

This Rich Lowry column isn't really related, but it's good.

It’s easy to pinpoint the moment when Pres. Barack Obama became a tireless advocate of compromise — when he no longer had the power to force whatever he wanted through Congress.

Then, he suddenly switched his pitch from “Hope and Change” to “Gee, I Hope We Can Work Something Out.”

Obama the Compromiser depends on short memories. The Jefferson-Jackson Day speech that fueled his rise in the 2008 Iowa caucuses was a ringing statement of principle and implicit rejection of compromise. He condemned “triangulation,” the dastardly word associated with Pres. Bill Clinton’s work with a Republican Congress in the 1990s.

Many of the same commentators who hailed Obama’s voice of righteous purity in 2008 now praise his call for splitting differences in 2011. To them, he’s equally thoughtful and brave whether he’s passionately extolling “principle” and “conviction,” or doggedly insisting that progress is possible only through “common ground and compromise.” By definition, whatever is Obama’s current tack deserves the support of all right-minded people.

Funny that.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (294)
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Thirty eight percent.

Disapproval ties (I think) his record, at 54%.

This doesn't feel like a blip.

Rasmussen has it even worse on the "passion index," subtracting strong disapproval from strong approval.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 19% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -26.

This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama. The previous low was -24 reached yesterday and also in September 2010.

Additionally, the level of Strong Approval matches the lowest yet recorded. By way of comparison, President Bush had ratings near the end of his second term in the minus 30s.

Yeah but that's because of the economy and do you know why the economy's bad? The 5.8 earthquake that hit Mineral, Virginia, fifteen minutes ago.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (478)
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I think that 5.8 is a low estimate. I'm down here now and that felt like more than a six.

Its epicenter was a place called Mineral, VA.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (383)
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