Dirty Lung organization takes taxpayer dollars from EPA to lobby against bills limiting the regulatory reach of the EPA.

Among the many wrongs that must be corrected should the Right regain power in '12 is a thorough investigation and rectifying of all such regulatory agencies' malfeasances against the governed.

One such method is via the REINS Act. Click here to read more about it and lend support.

Also: Open Thread. This means feel free to go OT without saying "OT". I swear, some of you people are just too nice. I look forward to you disproving that last statement with a variety of colorful invective involving my heritage, my relative intelligence, my sexuality and my choice in weaponry.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:01 AM | Comments (387)
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Jobless claims out - 400K. Down 1,000. Whoopee!! Recovery Summerpalooza!!

The left's working overtime to make us just like Europe. No thanks fellas, Italy's busily proving the old adage that PI(I)GS get fed and hogs get slaughtered.

Never ones to fear stating the obvious, JPMorgan shaved a point off its GDP growth estimate for the third quarter. Who could've seen that one coming?

Also on the GDP front, coblogger emeritus and all-around good guy Geoff has new a new post and DOOM!y chart over at Michael's obscure little website.

Read the whole post, but his main point is that assuming future GDP growth around 4%-5% is wildly optimistic given the history of the last few decades. I agree and would add that since GDP includes deficit spending by the government, the numbers are inflated as a measure of our ability to support the gargantuan government debt we have. In other words, we're boned.

The AP makes the case for more stimulus. Well, they don't make much of a case, they just lay out a laundry list of all our ills and lament that the government doesn't have any bullets left. Dear AP: see above.

Chartology: Head and Shoulders makes a reappearance. It could signal a huge market crash. Or not. (Dow futures indicate opening down about 100 points as I write this, btw)

There's a lot of DOOM! out there, people. Stay safe.

Update 1: Et tu Krugman? Notice how former Enron adviser Paul Krugman wraps in his continuing assertion that if only the spendulus had been bigger, everything would be a-ok.

Update 2: As of 11:00am, the Dow's off about 260 points and about 1,100 points lower than the July 21st close. Happy 57th birthday, Mr. President. more...

Posted by: andy at 04:53 AM | Comments (298)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:19 AM | Comments (121)
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Tonight's ABC World News had a bit about Pres. Obama post Debt Deal. Snagging burgers with his economic team and so forth. Then this:

... Still the President says he's now focusing like a LASER on job creation - by our count the 7th such pivot since the beginning of his presidency.

Ooooh! This type of comment about the many pivots has popped up a lot this week but it's rare to hear it in the MSM.

My research has discovered a short video of Obama's latest economic and job creation proposal.

(the blog doesn't want to load the picture so you'll have to click this link)

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:17 PM | Comments (85)
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Conservative Rock'n'Rollers?

I suspect there are more out there than we know of - well at least fiscally conservative that is.

Of course it's always a lot easier to talk up socialist pie-in-the-sky ideas when it'll be someone else's money paying for it. A 95% tax bracket however does tend to concentrate the mind on the benefits of private property and smaller, more limited government.

From Reuters: “New biography portrays Mick Jagger as closet conservative.”

...Come on, the man attended the London School of Economics, his band formed their own record company and they moved to France as tax exiles in the 1970s.

The Beatles, too, are fiscal conservatives. They, too, had their own record company and just try using “Imagine” without Yoko Ono’s approval. Imagine no possessions? You bought that crock of bull? Goodness, he was singing from his big mansion in the video.

Many other British rockers from the 1960s were fiscal conservatives thanks to a 95% marginal tax rate on the richest. You play guitar till your fingers bleed for years, suddenly get a hit and the Crown is there to take its 19 and for every 1 to you.

The Chevy Under-Volt Continues to Underwhelm
Number of Chevy Volts sold nationally last month: 125

The July sales numbers are out and the Chevy Volt continues to electrify (get it?) the country. GM sold Â… 125 Volts last month!

Way back in March I made fun of the Volt for selling 281 units in February. Turns out, February was a good month. But wait, thereÂ’s more! GM says theyÂ’re going to increase production to 5,000 Volts per month in order to keep up with demand.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:23 PM | Comments (788)
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To quote Princess Leia, "When you came in here, did you have a plan for getting out?"

And Moody's says that a downgrade is coming unless this ludicrous situation is corrected. They want it down to 73% by 2015.

It was just 32.5%

US debt shot up $238 billion to reach 100 percent of gross domestic project after the government's debt ceiling was lifted, Treasury figures showed Wednesday.

Treasury borrowing jumped Tuesday, the data showed, immediately after President Barack Obama signed into law an increase in the debt ceiling as the country's spending commitments reached a breaking point and it threatened to default on its debt.

The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.

Obama's claim is always that this is Bush's fault.

Let's stipulate big chunks of it are Bush's fault.

But Obama did not run on a platform of "Bush's Third Term."

He ran on a platform of correcting Bush's mistake.

Instead, he's compounded them, tripled them.

Posted by: Ace at 04:36 PM | Comments (198)
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We've all been there. It's been a long day at the hobo hunt office, you get home, grab a drink and sit on the couch to watch television. Your body is telling you it needs food, but just the thought of getting up and cooking is exhausting. Just as you resign yourself to the thought of having to actually make an effort to feed yourself, you remember.

Cereal. In the pantry. A box of sugary love from a cardboard box. Apple Jacks, Cocoa Crispies, Frosted Flakes...heaven in a bowl. You know where this is going, right? Where you see something beautiful bureaucrats see...an opportunity to take it away from you.

The Obama administration is after your Lucky Charms, or at least your children’s. The public comment period closed on July 14 for a set of “voluntary” guidelines for the marketing of food to children. If adopted, these rules will transform the advertising of breakfast cereals.

Put forward by an interagency working group, the guidelines will establish nutritional standards that most cereals flunk—and not just those of the “Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs” variety. Corn Flakes will not be advertisable to children, along with Raisin Bran, Special K, Rice Krispies, and Wheaties. Plain Cheerios squeak by the proposed 2016 rules but fall foul of the “ultimate goal” for sodium effective in 2021.

These Cheerios? The bland yet delicious little circles that have placated toddlers for decades? That nutrition data, by the way, is for a 28 gram serving size. Sometimes, food manufacturers set the serving size low to keep the numbers down. This is not one of those times.

I did a little experiment to demonstrate what 28 grams of Cheerios looked like. Here's what 28 grams of Cheerios looks like, weighed on a food scale: more...

Posted by: Slublog at 02:53 PM | Comments (255)
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Walter Russell Meade has another long piece, this one examining Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg's assertion that while the majority of the public supports Democratic policies, they don't trust Democrats to actually put those policies into place; Greenberg claims the public agrees with the public on the Democratic liberal agenda, but is merely cynical about the liberal Democrats' execution and implementation of the approved agenda.

Is that it? It is true that if you ask the public if they want more free stuff, they say yes.

But that has always been a rather stupid way to ask the question. During the ObamaCare debate, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) always pointed at polling results for smaller bits of ObamaCare: The public wants some more options, like a public one. The public wants young adults covered on their parents' policies until they are 30 or 40 or who knows, 50. The public wants an end to pre-existing conditions.

What the Democrats and the media refused to pay attention to was the public's disapproval of ObamaCare. When asked about the full package of ObamaCare, they said no.

In other words, asked about elements of ObamaCare out of context, the public wanted such things; but asked the critical in-context question of "Do you want ObamaCare?," i.e., the benefits as well as the costs, they said no.

Consider this analogy: Ask me if I'd like a very top-line sportscar. I'd say yes. Ask me if I'd like to do 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds. Yes again. Ask me if I'd like road-gripping $3,000 racing tires. Yes, I do. Ask me if I'd like that turbo charged. Yup.

Okay, I said yes to all of those things. So, if I want all of those things, why do I not own a Ferarri, or a Corvette?

Answer: Because you didn't ask me if I'd be willing to pay $150,000 or at least $70,000 for them. You didn't ask me about all elements of the bargain at once -- including price.

Because no car dealer is actually offering me these things for free. He's offering me a car in exchange for $70,000 or $150,000, and I may wish to keep that money for other purposes. (In fact, I might not even have that money at all.)

So to just ask this laundry list of "Do you want...?" is as absurd as the conclusion that every man in the country must own a Corvette or Mustang or refurbished Jaguar Mk. II simply because he agreed, in the abstract, that the things you were talking about sounded nice.

They did sound nice. I genuinely want those things. But I don't have the money, and if I did, I'd spend that money on other things which I want more.

This is actually an age-old sales technique. Wouldn't you like to provide for your children in the case of your death? Wouldn't you like the peace of mind of knowing that your children's welfare is assured? Etc.

But just because you answer yes to each of those questions does not mean you want the product being offered (life insurance, in this example). Because the salesman keeps delaying asking the highly relevant question of "Would you like to spend $150 a month for this product?"

I mean, that's the actual sell here. That's actually closing the deal, if you get a yes to that question. All the other questions were bullshit, intended to put the potential customer in a positive frame of mind.

The actual question, the only one that matters, is Are you willing to pay X amount of dollars for this Y product I want to sell? Everything before that is customer-greasing and bluster.

When Democrats and the media (but I yet again repeat myself) parse these smaller-item agenda points and ignore the larger, in-context question of whether the public wants these things enough to pay for them with forcible extraction of payment through taxation, they are deliberately fooling themselves, convincing themselves of a pleasant fiction because the actual reality ("the public doesn't want to pay for this crap") is too uncouth and uneducated for their liking.

Anyway, Meade considers Greenberg's various Community-Based Reality claims and rubbishes most of them in this excerpt:

Greenberg has not yet come to grips with the deepest and most difficult aspect of the crisis of liberal legitimacy. He roots the dangerous and corrupting special interests outside the state: with their money and their lobbying the corporations and the fat cats influence and pervert the state. But the state and its servants do not, in GreenbergÂ’s story, constitute a special interest of their own.

This is not how voters see it. For large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest. It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.

The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.

This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.

Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they arenÂ’t progressive enough. But itÂ’s impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators. They donÂ’t just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology.

Progressives scare off many voters most precisely when they are least restrained by special interests. Many voters feel that special interests can be a healthy restraint on the idealism and will to power of the upper middle class.
The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal. But in the conditions of late nineteenth and twentieth century America, the progressive vanguard fulfilled a vital and necessary social role.

The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role.

Another example of focusing on the sales pitch and not the sale itself.

You can ask your average person: Do you wish people would exercise more? Take more of an interest in their health? Stop eating too much? Stop smoking? Stop drinking so much? Stop gambling away their kids' college funds?

Of course the answer is "yes" to all of these (for most respondents).

But again that's just the sales pitch, not the actual offer.

Give them the actual offer and most will say No. Because the actual offer is:

Do you wish to empower a cadre of busybody bureaucrats, who frankly are largely mediocrities at best, but believe themselves to be chosen for greatness, to boss you around your whole life, in order to make sure some other people aren't eating french fries and having a cigarette?

The real answer is "NO!," because the real answer is, "Look, sure I want other people to live better lives, but frankly, I don't care very much about that and I'm sure not paying for my own personal censor to scold me for making "bad" choices."

See, that's the cost. And if you ignore the cost, you're not talking about business, or sales, or politics, or anything.

You're just talking about fantasy wish-lists with no connection to any physical reality.

And you're a fucking idiot.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (465)
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Who to believe, who to believe.

Genius economist Jay Carney sees no second recession:

Spokesman Jay Carney says there is no question that economic growth and job creation have slowed over the past half year.

But, Carney told a White House briefing, "We do not believe that there is a threat of a double-dip recession."

By the way, he again blamed the Japan Tsunami for doing all this damage to the economy. Act of God, you see.

Economics professor and former economic adviser to Obama, 2009-2010, Larry Summers,does see a threat.

On the current policy path, it would be surprising if growth were rapid enough to reduce unemployment even to 8.5 percent by the end of 2012. A substantial withdrawal of fiscal stimulus will occur when the payroll tax cuts expire at the end of the year. With growth at less than 1 percent in the first half of this year, the economy is effectively at a stall and facing the prospects of shocks from a European financial crisis that is decidedly not under control, spikes in oil prices and declines in business and household confidence. The indicators suggest that the economy has at least a 1-in-3 chance of falling back into recession if nothing new is done to raise demand and spur growth.

I'm not quoting that for his policy prescriptions or agitation to new government interventions. Just to note he does see a double-dip as pretty darn possible, and thinks even a 8.5% unemployment rate is best case scenario by the elections of 2012.

The old wisdom was that anything higher than 7.5% and you couldn't get reelected. Obama's Optimists tried to change that to 8.0%, to give their man a chance.

Now I guess they'll start spinning 8.5% as the threshold for success.

And I don't even think he'll make that.

Maybe Obama just has to get it back down to 9.0%... yeah, that's the right number. 9.0% feels right.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (219)
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Had a chat with a friend yesterday who asked an odd question. He wanted to know if I knew anybody who didn't support Obama in 2008 but who does support him for 2012.

Well, I don't. But he wanted me to go public with the question. And I think it's a good question.

Do You Know Anybody Who Voted Against Obama in 2008 But Has Been Converted and Will Vote For Him in 2012?

It's not likely that readers of this blog will be among the converts. But the Army of Morons know all sorts of people. Is there ANYBODY who thinks, "Hey, I didn't think much of this chap but now that I see what he's done - I want 4 more years of it"?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:06 AM | Comments (363)
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