The danger in those years [2011/2012] will be that Ben Bernanke will attempt yet again to refloat the U.S. economy through inflation, buying government debt to fund the deficit and forcing short term rates well below the inflation rate. This danger is exacerbated by the Obama administration’s insouciance about deficits. Ben Bernanke on his own (and his predecessor Alan Greenspan) bears a large share of responsibility for the 2008 crash, but the Bernanke/Obama combination is potentially even more dangerous. If expansionary monetary and fiscal policies are pursued regardless of market signals, the U.S. will head towards Weimar-style trillion-percent inflation. That would make the government’s position easier as its mountain of Treasury debt became worthless, but devastate everybody else’s savings and impoverish the American people as Weimar impoverished 1920s Germany.
As I said, a train wreck. Probability of arrival: close to 100%. Time of arrival: around the end of 2010, or possibly a bit earlier. And at this stage, there’s very little anyone can do about it; the definitive rise of gold above $1,000 marked the point of no return.
They say C-SPAN will last forever. Naked Emperor News posted a flashback YouTube video showing then minority house speaker Pelosi proclaiming ‘absolute outrage’ over the Republican leadership not allowing members of Congress three days to read a bill.
Money Quote from Pelosi: “A vote for the motion to recommit, is a vote for members to be able to read a bill before they vote on it. IS THAT ASKING TOO MUCH?”
Unemployment is now higher in the U.S. than in Europe, reports the Washington Post. “The official U.S. unemployment rate, reported last Friday, now stands at 10.2 percent,” compared to “9.7 percent” in Europe. This is the highest rate in more than 26 years, and marks a huge change from the recent past, in which unemployment was double the American rate in much of Europe.
Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus package, and only 7.6 percent in Germany, which adopted a stimulus package that was smaller relative to its economy than ours was. (Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated President Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)
Tom Blumer from BizzyBlog has updated his map of the ObamaCare/PelosiCare behemoth and what it creates. Namely 111 agencies, regulators, committees, boards and offices: (click on picture to enlarge)
Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee today commented on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) more detailed cost estimate of the manager’s amendment to the House health reform bill.
Senator Gregg stated, “The CBO estimate released last night finally sheds light on the smoke and mirrors game the majority has been playing with the cost of their health care reform proposal. Over the first 10 years, this legislation builds in gross new spending of $1.7 trillion – and most of the new spending doesn’t even start until 2014. Once that spending is fully phased in, the House Democratic bill rings up at more than $3 trillion over ten years.
“Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense – we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit. Read the rest of this entry »
The left will try their best to minimize the damage done but the bluedog Democrats are now on notice….pass fiscally irresponsible bills like ObamaCare and your toast. As for NY-23, a few good articles…first from Roger Simon:
Now I realize that the surprise loser there, Doug Hoffman, ran as a Conservative, not a Republican. But I submit in this case that was a distinction without a significant difference because virtually all the Republican establishment had lined up behind Hoffman by the day of the election.
So why – in what was clearly a Republican year – did Hoffman lose? Well, there are several reasons and, yes, the Democratic victory was narrow, thinner than the five or so percent that went to withdrawn Republican nominee Scozzafava who herself endorsed the Democratic candidate. Still, the 23rd is a safely Republican, even conservative, district. In a year where the GOP racked up a 20% margin in Virginia and coasted easily in Jersey, a state in which Obama romped in ‘08 by 16%, what was the problem?
Well… I might as well say it… social conservatism. America is a fiscally conservative country – now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification – but not a socially conservative one. No, I don’t mean to say it’s socially liberal. It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets. Read the rest of this entry »
The proven liar, Senator Chris Dodd, who is in a tough reelection race, has the gall to sick his Democrat’s after his challenger about some kind of supposed help from the WWE: (h/t Doug Ross)
Asserting that World Wrestling Entertainment has made illegal in-kind campaign contributions to the U.S. Senate campaign of its former CEO Linda McMahon, state Democratic party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
DiNardo says WWE staffers ordered YouTube to remove sexually-provocative WWE videos from its website after those videos became campaign fodder.
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The videos, which depict simulated rape and necrophilia, were the subject of an Oct. 16 press release from state Democrats. Almost immediately after the political news website Talking Points Memo and other blogs published items about the videos, they were removed from YouTube.
“In sum, WWE has selectively enforced its rights only insofar as they benefit Ms. McMahon’s candidacy,” DiNardo’s complaint states. “The facts demonstrate that WWE made expenditures in connection with an election, in clear violation of FECA. WWE expended its corporate resources – including the time of Zimmerman and other corporate personnel, and its attorneys – all used in the service of Ms. McMahon’s campaign to force YouTube to remove only the videos that reflected poorly on Ms. McMahon, while ignoring the multitude of other WWE-owned material still hosted on YouTube.”
“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”…
Lieberman did say he’s “strongly inclined” to vote to proceed to the debate, but that he’ll ultimately vote to block a floor vote on the bill if it isn’t changed first…
“I can’t see a way in which I could vote for cloture on any bill that contained a creation of a government-operated-run insurance company,” Lieberman added. “It’s just asking for trouble – in the end, the taxpayers are going to pay and probably all people will have health insurance are going to see their premiums go up because there’s going to be cost shifting as there has been for Medicare and Medicaid.”
Since that statement came out earlier today the Reid camp…or cheerleaders….have tried to spin it so it doesn’t sound as bad as it really is. I mean how can it be bad if Joe will vote to open floor debate on Reid’s bill? Of course they are leaving out the other vote…the one that closes debate and moves the bill to a vote. Joe says he will NOT vote for that if the public option is there.
Lord Christopher Monckton has been making the rounds, warning against the December Copenhagen climate change conference and their proposed legislation to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Treaty. Monckton – not only known as Margaret Thatcher’s advisor, but as a clarion skeptic on the global warming propaganda machine – appeared on Fox News Happy Hour a couple of days ago. It ended with co-host, Rebecca Diamond, subtly expressing her disbelief at the end of the interview that Obama and the world leaders could possibly be involved in such nefarious doin’s.
President Obama is on a path toward establishing a one-world government. This is the warning of Christopher Monckton, a former major policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In December, world leaders will descend upon Copenhagen to sign a United Nations climate change treaty that will succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and set to expire in 2012. An agreement has been drafted.
When you get the AP doing fact checking, you have to know something’s amiss in Obama fantasyland. In the POTUS’s desperate attempt to simplify his demand for remaking America’s health care system, he reverts to the proven Alinsky techniques of finding a demon, targeting that demon and isolating it to stir up public discontent.
His latest mantras have been focused on portraying those evil health insurers in the same light as Wall Street CEO’s.
Trouble is, facts get in the way of the rhetoric.
Per AP’s Calvin Woodward today, health insurers’ profits have barely exceeded 2% in the latest annual measures. With a traditional measure of a private enterprise’s financial health and growth potential generally hovering between 25-33% profit structure, one wonders how the heck they are surviving.
During consideration of H.R. 3126, legislation to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee voted to pass an amendment offered by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that will make ACORN eligible to play a role in setting regulations for financial institutions.
The Waters amendment adds to the CFPA Oversight Board 5 representatives from the fields of “consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgages” to join Federal banking regulators in advising the Director on the consistency of proposed regulations, and strategies and policies that the Director should undertake to enforce its rules.
By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest. ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements. These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market.
Two Democrats buck Rep. Towns, call for Countrywide probe
-Ask a Dem what caused the Great Recession, and they’ll tell you the DNC talking points (presented by NYT, DailyKOS, and MSNBC): Bush tax cuts for the wealthy investors and business leaders who create jobs, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ll ignore the entire Countrywide, homeloans, AIG mess, but….not all Dems will. They all know the reality, and some want it fixed. Read the rest of this entry »
The nation’s medical costs will keep spiraling upward even faster than they are now under Democratic legislation pending in the House, a report from government economic experts concluded Wednesday.
Republicans said the report is a warning sign that health care legislation is likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s goal of “bending the cost curve” by slowing torrid rates of medical inflation.
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Unlike previous estimates that have focused mainly on the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit, the actuaries’ report looked at total costs, public and private, over the next 10 years. It found that the nation’s health care tab would increase somewhat more rapidly with the legislation than if nothing is done. The main reason: Newly insured people will seek medical care.
The nation’s health care tab, now at about $2.5 trillion annually, is projected to approach $4.7 trillion in 2019 without the legislation. Read the rest of this entry »
Based upon that experience and my 40 years since then in and out of public life, I want to make what I hope will be taken as a friendly suggestion to President Obama and his White House, and it is this: Don’t create an enemies list.
Here the disconnect between Good’s op-ed, and the actual content of the study begin. Good has chosen to focus on race and racism… and dances around the study’s finding that the discontent of “weak” partisans… Republican and Independents… appears to have nothing to do with race.
According to most conservatives in South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has officially gone over to the dark side. Under the guise of ‘bipartisanship,’ Graham has signed on to one of the left’s most ambitious plans to impose a socialist agenda in America – government control of the formerly free market through implementation of cap-and trade, the 1,400 plus page Waxman-Markey bill approved earlier this year by the House.
The main (scientifically unproven) premise of cap and trade is that the earth is melting and government must step in to save the world. Of course, it will be expensive, but hey, this is Mother Earth we’re talking about. And its urgent and essential that the government immediately establish a $700 billion “market” for business to buy and sell “steadily declining number of permits for creating carbon emissions.”
In a New York Times Op-Ed Graham co-authored with Sen. John Kerry cutely entitled ‘Yes We Can’ (get it?) Sen Graham states “..we agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security.” Huh?
Conservatives disagree. Conservatives, real conservatives, believe the fact based studies based on science that stand in direct opposition to the dire reports issued by bureaucrats at the United Nations and embraced as fact by the left. Read the rest of this entry »
