Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed. - George Burns

Monday, August 30, 2010

One of the problems I’m having with so-called green technologies (which are often not so green) is that we seem to be going backward in terms of progress. Many of them are simply not up to the technologies they are replacing in terms of performance.  A perfect example would be the time I spent in Australia stumbling around half-lit rooms because the government has mandated the use of CFC bulbs.  They’ve come a long way but they still do not light up completely for some time.  And maybe it’s just me, but I think having well-lit rooms is a hallmark of civilization.

The same is true of other technologies.  My wife has a new Apple laptop and it’s far less stable and reliable than our old one.  Does this have something to do with the “greening” of the apple brand and the banishment of nasty evil chemicals like lead (see here for one of the drawbacks of the lead ban)?

Now we find out that one of the hallmarks of civilization—pest-free bedding, may be being sacrificed on the alter of environmentalism:

While worst in the Northeast and especially New York City, blood-sucking bed bugs are making a remarkably rapid resurgence worldwide.

....

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

I know you’re thinking about the DDT ban, but the DDT ban is a little overblown since many insects have developed a tolerance for it. However, malathion and propoxur do work. The EPA-approved chemicals don’t kill bedbugs; they simply stun the little bastards.  Environmental groups complain that the effective pesticides have known health concerns.  But there’s a tradeoff here.  Most people will accept a little health risk if it means they don’t spend their nights being attacked by vermin.

And therein lies the problem.  To the radical environmentalists, there are no tradeoffs.  Anything dangerous or icky has to be banned, whether we have a replacement for it or not.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

I am a huge baseball fan.  I have been since my dad took me to my first Braves game back in 1977 or 1978.  There’s little better than watching a game in one of the new beautiful stadiums. I can’t wait until SAL 11000 Beta is old enough to go.

That doesn’t mean I’m down with this bullshit:

The swindlers who run the Florida Marlins got exposed Monday. They are as bad as anyone on Wall Street, scheming, misleading and ultimately sticking taxpayers with a multibillion-dollar tab. Corporate fraud is alive and well in Major League Baseball.

A look at the leak of the Marlins’ financial information to Deadspin confirmed the long-held belief that the team takes a healthy chunk of MLB-distributed money for profit. Owner Jeffrey Loria and president David Samson for years have contended the Marlins break even financially, the centerpiece fiscal argument that resulted in local governments gifting them a new stadium that will cost generations of taxpayers an estimated $2.4 billion. They said they had no money to do it alone and intimated they would have to move the team without public assistance.

In fact, documents show, the Marlins could have paid for a significant amount of the new stadium’s construction themselves and still turned an annual operating profit. Instead, they cried poor to con feckless politicians that sold out their constituents.

I didn’t post this just because of my outrage against the duplicitous vile league division rivals of my Braves (whose stadium was mostly paid for by private contributions from Olympic interests*).  I link to this because it is an example of how our money-starved decrepit cities are victims of their own stupidity.  Check this out:

It is enough to stink. In the annals of bad stadium deals, it’s among the most odious, right alongside the Washington Nationals’ extraction of $611 million from the D.C. city council to get Nationals Park built. The team spent $20 million on a parking garage and pays $5.5 million a year in rent. So desperate was Washington to become the landing spot for the Montreal Expos, it ignored reality – there were no other legitimate options for MLB – and vastly overpaid.

Such sentiments are echoed when looking at the Marlins’ deal. One of the county’s loans is particularly egregious. According to the Miami Herald, J.P. Morgan gave a $91 million note – $80 million of which will go toward construction – that from 2041-47 will cost $118 million per year. In all, the county will spend $1.2 billion to pay off $91 million.

You know, I’m no financial whiz.  But it seems to me that spending $1.2 billion to borrow $91 million is a bit much.

There’s pork within pork here, including multi-million dollar “art” displays within the stadium.  Meanwhile, the arguments that stadiums stimulate the economy—Hey! We’re back on stimulus again!—have turned out to be bogus.  Right now, the Devil Rays are trying out this scam, claiming poverty to justify a public stadium.  In their case, it’s not quite as egregious since they have been spending some money since they became competitive.

This isn’t confined to sports stadiums, of course.  While their cities crumble around them, most city councils are interested in landing big projects with rich developers—be they stadiums, office parks, malls or rich condos.  The hum-drum business of keeping a city going just isn’t terribly exciting to politicians.  Bankrupting your people to finance rich guys’ playthings while abusing eminent domain is.  The problem really isn’t the sports team owners, who are just human.  It’s hard to pass up a $2 billion gift.  It’s the city councils and, by extension, the voters, who allow themselves to get bamboozled this way.

And frankly, I have a hard time believing that the authorities in Miami were completely ignorant of the financial state of the Marlins.  I mean, when we took out a home loan, my wife and I had to provide the bank with every piece of information about us except her bra size.  How on Earth does a $1 billion deal go down without the city knowing about the Marlins’ lack of cash problems?

My guess—it doesn’t.  The city just didn’t care.  It wanted its big project and was fine if the Marlins lied their asses of to the media and, more importantly, the voters, to make it happen.

One of the few exceptions to the starry-eyed “big project” mentality was my former hometown of San Antonio.  Thanks to strict term limits, the San Antonio city government was mostly interested in maintaining the city infrastructure, not engaging in big stupid expensive “projects”.  The special interests campaigned relentlessly against term limits—sometimes with the fairly naked rhetoric that SA needed to invest in big projects.  In 2008, the succeeded and I expect SA to promptly go downhill, probably after the drop a few hundred million on a new stadium for the Jacksonville Jaguars or something.

The usual Lame Stream Media propagandists must be desperate to try and defend the close to $1 trillion dollar stimulus patronage bill known as the “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” as this desperate and transparently vain attempt by Time tries to make this pig pretty proves.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus — has been marketed as a jobs bill, and that’s how it’s been judged. The White House says it has saved or created about 3 million jobs, helping avoid a depression and end a recession. Republicans mock it as a Big Government boondoggle that has failed to prevent rampant unemployment despite a massive expansion of the deficit. Liberals complain that it wasn’t massive enough.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Institute for Justice is one of the evil libertarian organizations partially funded by the evil evil Koch brothers (see below).  You may remember them from two prominent lawsuits—on eminent domain (Kelo) and interstate wine sales (Granholm).  They lost the former, but have spurred numerous legislatures to pass laws restricting the process (although they need to get involved in the disgusting blight scandal in Montgomery).  The won the latter, which allowed interstate wine shipping.  However, Congress is trying to restore the wine cartels through the back door.

They’ve now found a new enemy—Death, Inc.:

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina gave the Benedictine monks at St. Joseph Abbey a new calling.

After the storm pummeled much of a pine forest they had long relied on for timber and income, the monks hatched a fresh plan: They would hand-craft and sell caskets.

But now, local funeral directors are trying to put a lid on the monks’ activities. The state funeral regulatory board, dominated by industry members, is enforcing a Louisiana law that makes it a crime for anyone but a licensed parlor to sell “funeral merchandise.” The morticians are serious. Violators such as the monks can land in jail for up to 180 days.

“I don’t relish that thought,” said Abbot Justin Brown, head of the 107-year-old abbey, as he sipped coffee in the monastery on a recent misty morning.

St. Joseph’s 36 monks, whose pastimes include baking raisin bread for the homeless, are putting up a fight. On Aug. 12, they filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Orleans to try to overturn the state edict. In the filing, the monks argue that the state law violates their right to pursue a gainful occupation. “We’re not just going to sit back and let these guys bulldoze us,” says Deacon Mark Coudrain.

Penn and Teller have a great episode on the funeral industry and how they treat consumers.  So I’m not surprised by the reaction.  I think the IJ has a great chance here.  To enforce licensed markets, the industry has to show a need for licensing—think of amateurs doing surgery in the absence of medical licensing.  Unfortunately for them, the funeral industry’s attempts to justify their licensing is becoming laughable:

The regulatory board, naturally, “has nine members, eight of whom are funeral industry professionals”.  And the explanations of why the monks should not be able to sell caskets are embarassingly bad; the best the Journal could come up with, apparently, is this:

Boyd Mothe Jr., a member of the fifth generation of his family to run Mothe Funeral Homes outside New Orleans, says Louisiana’s law should remain on the books because licensed directors have the training to sell caskets--transactions he calls “complicated.” For instance, he says, “a quarter of America is oversized. I don’t even know if the monks know how to make an oversized casket.”

Because, you know, changing the dimensions on a box is really complicated.  Presumably it took the funeral directors years and years to learn the advanced technical skills--multiplication--involved.

Caskets are a high-margin items, turning over gigantic profits for their purveyors.  But you can’t got to court and say that.

The IJ is fighting the good fight, again.  Too bad their an evil shady organization funded by the evil shady Koch brothers.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Eeek:

Existing-home sales were sharply lower in July following expiration of the home buyer tax credit but home prices continued to gain, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

Existing-home sales1, which are completed transactions that include single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, dropped 27.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million units in July from a downwardly revised 5.26 million in June, and are 25.5 percent below the 5.14 million-unit level in July 2009.

Sales are at the lowest level since the total existing-home sales series launched in 1999, and single family sales – accounting for the bulk of transactions – are at the lowest level since May of 1995.

OK, not so eeek.  What has happened here is that the latest government housing stimulus program—the home buyer tax credit—expired.  So we went from the insane market in the tax credit regime back to a sane market.  It’s exactly like Cash for Clunkers—the program moved sales around rather than generating new ones.  Net economic benefit?  Minimal at best.

Yesterday, I got into a conservation with an Australian on the Gold Coast, who asked me if the American recession was really as bad as they say.  Australia’s recession has been comparatively minor.  Other countries, like Germany, are already booming sans stimulus.  So why is America lagging?

If you’ll put with my armchair economics, I think there are numerous reasons why the “Summer of Recovery” has been a dud.  A “stimulus” that poured money into political projects rather than broad economic gains.  The successive shocks of healthcare reform and financial reform—shocks that are still being felt as we find out what’s in those laws and various regulatory agencies have their say. I also think that much of the problem is structural—badly run industries like the automotive have been propped up for a long time, creating an ossified part of the economy.  For educated people, the unemployment rate is actually quite low.  It’s the less-educated Americans who are hurting the most because they are heavily employed in the government-pestered industries like steel and cars.  And our massive debt is making investment money pour into government bonds rather than industry stocks.

However, the biggest reason our economy is being slow to recover, in my opinion, is that we were at the epicenter with our housing market implosion. Much of the wealth the last decade supposedly generated was in housing.  It takes time to retrench the economy—think of us as experiencing a really giant hangover.  The problem is that the bullshit like mortgage adjustments and homebuyer tax credits have simply dragged out the pain.  They’ve been the hair of the dog in this economic hangover.  Thankfully, some of this is going away (although the Republicans, especially Isakson, are supporters of the homebuyer tax credit).

In the comments on Alex’s post below, I noted that while one might argue that the Iraq War didn’t cause the debt (although it certainly helped), you can’t consider it in a vacuum.  It’s the combination of various fiscal policies that were ruinous.  So it is true, even more so, of Obama and the economy.  A number of Obama’s decisions could be defended in a vacuum (although they were still wrong).  For example, Obama defended the auto bailout by saying we couldn’t let such a big industry collapse during a recession.  I didn’t agree, but at least it’s an argument.  And on it’s own, the auto bailout wouldn’t have hurt our economy that badly.  But it’s the combination of all these things that has kept the economy moribund.

Now that the housing sector shows signs of finally being allowed to unravel, now that the stimulus is winding down, now that further shocks to healthcare and finance may be behind us, it’s possible the economy could pick up.  This is especially true if the GOP retakes Congress and our businesses can relax knowing that sweet sweet gridlock has returned.

A few months ago, the Administration begin their “Summer of Recovery” campaign.  They thought the economy was going to bounce back and were prepared to claim full credit for it.  Now that it hasn’t happened, they are reverting back to to the “it’s Bush’s fault” line.  But Obama owns this economy now.  Every major decision affecting it has been his.  I suppose they’ll now fall back on the “it would be worse” line.  But I don’t see the American people biting.

Monday, August 23, 2010

I just got back from a week of vacation where I played US government - I spent way too much money on feel good stuff that yield no actual benefits - and am now because of the time off, busier than a one legged man at an arse kicking contest now at work. But I felt I had to address something that came up during a conversation I had, with a bunch of obvious liberal morons defending the disastrous collectivist policies of the last decade that have reached new limits under demcorat and Obama control, when they blamed Bush and the Iraqi war for anything from $3-$5 trillion in deficits spending. The numbers widely varied apparently even for them, but I was stumped as to why they would be pulling these ridiculous numbers up until I realized the left still wants to make believe that the deficit spending is because of the Iraq wars and defense spending, and not because of the massive growth in wasteful collectivist spending by government. 

Saturday, August 21, 2010

That’s what it says right on the label.  Just ignore the man behind the curtain:

For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured hundreds of requests for federal records to senior political advisers for highly unusual scrutiny, probing for information about the requesters and delaying disclosures deemed too politically sensitive, according to nearly 1,000 pages of internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.

The department abandoned the practice after AP investigated. Inspectors from the department’s Office of Inspector General quietly conducted interviews last week to determine whether political advisers acted improperly.

The Freedom of Information Act, the main tool forcing the government to be more open, is designed to be insulated from political considerations. Anyone who seeks information through the law is supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose confidential decision-making in certain areas.

But in July 2009, Homeland Security introduced a directive requiring a wide range of information to be vetted by political appointees for “awareness purposes,” no matter who requested it. The government on Wednesday estimated fewer than 500 requests underwent such political scrutiny; the Homeland Security Department received about 103,000 total requests for information last fiscal year.

Two things that came in for routine scrutiny were requests about the stimulus and request about Cabinet members’ schedules.  The latter was after a FOIA request showed that Geithner was talking to Wall Street execs a couple of times a day.  This, of course, comes after the financial reform bill exempted the SEC to make sure that we, the unwashed masses, don’t find out if the SEC ignores warnings about the next Bernie Madoff.

I’m predicting this scandal, assuming there is one, follows the template used when the Clinton Administration illegally obtained hundreds of confidential FBI files on their political foes.  There will be some hearings, especially if the GOP takes back Congress.  There may be a fall guy.  And in the end, no one will know how this happened.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Ever since financial reform moved into public view, conservative critics have been screaming, “What about Fannie and Freddie!” Looks like our voicing are being heard, if not yet responded to:

Top Obama administration officials opened a conference on the future of housing by making clear Tuesday they are considering a limited range of options that would reduce but not eliminate the government’s role as a provider of funding for home loans.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, while promising “fundamental reform,” said the government must continue to play a role in insuring new home loans. “There is a strong case to be made for a carefully designed guarantee in a reformed system, with the objective of providing a measure of stability in access to mortgages, even in future economic downturns,” he said.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said the current housing finance system—under which the government-backed mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration stand behind nine out of 10 new home loans—cannot continue. “The government’s footprint in the housing market needs to be smaller than it is today,” he said.

Just to be clear, they’re not talking about getting the government out of the housing market, which would be the sensible thing to do.  They’re shifting things away from Fannie and Freddie, but not completely eliminating them.  They want to move them into less risky situations, such as essentially providing insurance to big mortgage companies in return for a fee.  Even Barney Frank has gotten into the act, calling for Fannie and Freddie to be abolished and replaced with straight-up housing subsidies.

That’s ... an improvement, I guess.  But it’s not quite where we should be headed.

All of this becomes academic come November, when the Republicans will most likely take over Congress.  But if the Democrats are willing to concede a little bit on this, there’s hope we can wind down, at least partially, the massive mistake that was Fannie/Freddie.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The jury trying corrupt slimeball Rod Blagojevich is back:

After deliberating for two weeks, a federal jury today convicted Rod Blagojevich of only one of the 24 counts against him—lying to the FBI—and announced it was deadlocked on the other 23 counts.

The jury also deadlocked on all four counts against the former governor’s brother, Robert.

Speaking about the messy conclusion to an often explosive legal proceeding that captivated the nation, federal prosecutors wasted no time announcing plans to retry both men. “It is absolutely our intent to retry this,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Reid Schar. “We could be here tomorrow.”

I have no idea what happened here, since we’re not privy to jury deliberations.  My guess is that a Los Angeles jury accidentally got swapped in.  They figured that if Blago was on tape and documented to be corrupt, it must be their duty to acquit him. Or maybe the case wasn’t that good, I don’t know.  I do know that Patrick Fitzgerald—you may remember him as the liberal RINO partisan who put Scooter Libby in jail for doing absolutely nothing no sir whatsover ... I mean apart from lying to investigators, perjury and obstructing justice—will bring these charges again.

So we can look forward to more of the Blago Circus.

Update: Early reports are that this was indeed a Dumb Juror situation.

Monday, August 16, 2010

The LA Times confirms what I and a lot of people have always thought:

In Los Angeles and across the country, education officials have long known of the often huge disparities among teachers. They’ve seen the indelible effects, for good and ill, on children. But rather than analyze and address these disparities, they have opted mostly to ignore them.

Most districts act as though one teacher is about as good as another. As a result, the most effective teachers often go unrecognized, the keys to their success rarely studied. Ineffective teachers often face no consequences and get no extra help.

...

Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.

The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.

This value-added analysis has become very popular lately.  It’s not bulletproof, but it is useful.  Michelle Rhee recently used it to fire 26 teachers from the Washington school district.  And even the Obama Administration is interested in using it.

This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available.

A few caveats apply.  This may be a better measurement of the ability to “teach to the test” than to teach kids.  I have become very dubious of standardizing testing in recent years because I’ve seen schools putting all their effort into educating the dumbest kids while the smartest spend their time preparing for the test so that they can ace it.  I’m concerned that the obsession with testing is hindering the progression of the brightest students—those we need to be the engineers, scientists and doctors of the future.  And I can’t find the article, but I read a recent study about how creativity scores—scores that measure the ability of the brain to invent new ideas—have been falling in recent years.

That caveat aside, what the Times has found here is amazing.  The difference between a good and a bad teacher can be 17-25 points of performance in a single year. The best teachers were not confined to the affluent areas but were spread throughout.  The also found that race, wealth and even previous learning were minor factors.  I find the latter point to be very counter-intuitive since I’ve also seen a stark difference in the performance of children whose parents care and the performance of those whose parents don’t give a shit.

Read the whole thing.  It jibes with my own experience in the education system—that the difference between a student who excels and one who fails can often be their teacher.  I was lucky.  I had good teachers.  Many others are not so lucky.

The effect of a bad teacher can be devastating to someone’s education because knowledge is built like a pyramid.  What is learned each year builds on what was learned before.  This is especially true in math and science, the subjects where US performance is the worst.  The last math class I took in college was on partial differential equations.  To get to that advanced level, I had to learn, going backward, ordinary differential equations, linear algebra, calculus, trigonometry, algebra, multiplication and division, adding and subtracting and counting.  Had any of those steps occurred under a bad teacher, I might never have gotten as a far as I did.  But from my first grade class to my mathematics prof, I had good teachers throughout.

This is why the low rate of teacher firings and the inability of districts to even identify bad teachers (the data the Times used was available to the district; they could not use it) is of such concern to conservatives and libertarians.  Because it represents a system that is uninterested in performance.  But honest teacher evaluation is the one thing that the unions (but not necessarily their members) are dead set against.  When this story came out, the union head responded by calling for a boycott of the LA Times.  Yeah, asshole.  Like a potential drop in circulation is going to scare a newspaper these days.

But in the end, they are hurting their own members.  Bad teachers need to know that they’re bad.  It’s the only way they can improve (or move on to something they’re good at).  The Times interviews two dedicated but poorly performing teachers who responded to their bad scores by saying they needed to re-evaluate their methods.

I’d prefer to leave teacher evaluation in the hands of principals, rather than standardized tests, as I noted before.  Give the local school districts more autonomy but more responsibility.  And I’m a big proponent of school choice, which might obviate a lot of the necessity for complex top-down solutions.  But the Times has done a great public service here, in unveiling the massive disparities in teacher ability and the impact that has on kids.  Well done.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

One of the more interesting stories to go on this week, and obviously completely ignored or misreported on by the Lame Stream Media, is the story of Omar Khadr, a terrorist that was captured in Afghanistan at the age of 15, and whom had murdered a US Special Forces servicemen with a grenade, amongst other things. This kid, now 23, was a media darling, and even juicier, one of the many cases of “inhumane treatment and torture” the left accused the Bush Administration and our servicemen of being involved with at Gitmo. Even now they are haranguing the Obama administration for the fact this poor an innocent torture victim ended up in a military tribunal!

Yep, this week Omar Khadr’s trial, a military one and not the much promised civilian ones from the campaign trail, started. Funny that. Evil Bush was demonized for holding military tribunals and the evils of Gitmo. Obama ran and won on evil Bush, and especially the wars we were fighting in 2008, and yet today we have Obama not just continuing those, but expanding them. Oh yeah, before the usual libtard brings it up, let me point out that you should not be fooled by the claims Obama is pulling troops out of Iraq. First off, this isn’t Obama’s doing because his pullout was part of the Bush Administration’s time table, and we are leaving some 50K troops behind. And we all know Obama, to his credit, has stepped stuff up in Afghanistan. Even more telling is the fact that Gitmo is still open and in business. Guess being a bunch of holier-than-thou leftist twits that accused the Bush Administration of being an evil bunch of torturers that only concocted Club Gitmo to avoid scrutiny and be able to torture at their leisure and demanded/promised its closure, completely ignoring the reality on the ground, suddenly isn’t so easy when you have to deal with the problems, huh libtards?

And now that we are on the subject of Gitmo and torture, let me give you a piece of information I doubt you will get from the MSM. Remember those torture charges filed by the usual scumbag lawyers – no, these lawyers aren’t just doing their jobs, they want to screw over the US and are hoping to demonize our troops and country, so they are scumbags - defending these evil bastards? Well, the attempt to use them to suppress Khadr’s confession because they were obtained through torture have they have been summarily dismissed:

The decision by army Colonel Patrick Parrish came shortly after Mr. Khadr pleaded not guilty through his Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer to the five war crimes charges he faces. The ruling is a major blow to Mr. Khadr, who claimed in a February 2008 affidavit he was abused during interrogations after his capture at the end of a 2002 firefight with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The judge ruled a video apparently showing the suspect making and planting land mines is admissible, rejecting the defence argument it was obtained based on information coerced from him.

Oh the evil military judge screwed Khadr over! Well, no, because the video is damning:

In a video shown at the hearing yesterday, Mr. Khadr was seen telling Guantanamo Bay guards trying to weigh him for the International Red Cross “God will take ... revenge” on the United States. “I am here in prison, but there are millions of people outside,” he says in the May 2006 clip. “What’s happening to you is not for nothing.” In the February 2008 affidavit, Mr. Khadr, 23, alleged guards mistreated him during the weighing session, claiming they “pressed on my pressure points.”

The clip appears to show the guards acting with restraint as they push him toward the scale and point out all his “brothers”—a reference to other detainees—had been weighed without protest. “Come on man, it’s not that bad,” says one after Mr. Khadr claimed the treatment was a “very small example of what’s really going on” at the facility. “We’re not doing this to hurt you, torture you,” adds another, amid explanations his weight was needed for his health records. Although Mr. Khadr spent about 20 minutes resisting the guards, the tape hinted he had been playing to the camera as he switched from the English he used to speak to the guards to Arabic to speak to fellow detainees in nearby cells.

So the “torture” these libtard accused our troops of committing under direction from evil Bush? Yeah, weighing this bastard - while he was threatening our troops with murder and our country with destruction - so we can have accurate medical records to please the libturds that will try to turn everything and anything into an argument about the evils of America and its military.

And surprise, surprise! This bastard is obviously been coached on how to play to the camera to help the libturds do the dirty job of helping the Jihadists and their cause. Don’t expect the left to admit they where used – my take is that it is more complicity than used despite the claims from the lot of them to the contrary – yet again, and that the facts bear out quite a different narrative than the rampant torture stories we constantly are subjected to by them, though.

What’s the odds we are going to continue to hear from the usual suspects that they are ignoring the torture or white washing it – and even more important that it is happening under Obama’s reign (are we no longer an evil empire?) – going forward, despite yet more evidence there was no torture, and that these people will rethink their stance on Gitmo or the Bush Administration’s efforts to fight a vile and evil murderous bunch? Yeah, I know. Zilch.

Monday, August 09, 2010

The GOP for his woes! Sure, Charlie. It wasn’t you know, the fact that you are a crook that has you in hot water, it was them evil republicans and their lack of support in cutting you a deal. I guess Rangel is at least smart enough to know Bush is gone, and blaming him wouldn’t fly well. So instead of blaming Bush he went for the next best thing: the GOP. Maybe he forgot that there was video to disprove his bullshit? I was fine until the evil right got me in trouble! Dang, you can’t make this stuff up.

The again, in the day and age where the Lame Stream Media is busy trying to convince us that their lame horse isn’t the first one, as even the Feds can’t lie about the effects of Obamanomics anymore, while our elite party like it was 1999, this should not come as a surprise. Heck, we even have desperate demcorats trying to rig the November elections by putting up faux Tea Party candidates to siphon votes from their oppositions. That bloodbath sure is looking like it will be fun.

My guess is Charlie is just setting up the stage so he can then still run in November, win that election because his district likes that he is a scumbag, and then hand that seat over to demcorats when he just plain resigns. After all, if he was to deal with that now, the democrats would have to worry about losing even that seat. These crooks - and by crooks I mean demcorats - do play for keeps, though. Maxine Waters, another legally challenged demcorat, was unavailable for comment. We are in great hands people. Hope & Change! I bet these elitists hate the fact they even have to put up the charade.

Friends, you simply can not make this stuff up:

What Do Prince and H.R. 1586 Have in Common?

...

Both have adopted highly unconventional names in their lifetimes. In Prince’s case, it was the adoption of a symbol to protest Warner Brothers’ artistic and financial control of his output.

Following suit, H.R. 1586 has adopted the name, the “______Act of____,” apparently because of the haste with which the Senate wanted to pass the bill last week.

The Senate’s substitute amendment on this $26 billion spending bill had a placeholder bill name, and it could not take time to replace the placeholder. The House is expected to return this week and pass the Senate amendment, sending it to the president.

As reported on the WashingtonWatch.com blog and cnet news, this highly unconventional name may be what goes into law. With the Senate out of town until September, there is no chance to pass a correcting amendment in both houses. The constitution requires both to pass identical bills, so the House must take up the “______Act of____” and pass it as such.

The lack of a label for this monstrosity is the least of our worries.  This is a $26 billion bailout of the states, with $10 billion going to Big Education alone. This is to supposedly save 300,000 of the estimated six million jobs in public education. And those jobs are disappearing mostly because the unions are refusing pay cuts or freezes, trying to bully the states into forking over money they simply don’t have (one of the few who refuses to be bullied? Chris Christie, of course.) This follow on decades where the number of education jobs has grown dramatically even though the number of students and their performance has been relatively flat.

We’ve been adding staff by the truckload for decades without improving achievement one bit. Since 1970 (see the charts below) public school employment has increased 10 times faster than enrollment, while test scores have stagnated.

Lots of teachers’ jobs could be saved without a bailout if unions would just accept pay concessions like millions of the Americans who fund their salaries. But all too often, they won’t.

It is also being paid out of a PAYGO flim-flam.  To somewhat comply with PAYGO, the Democrats are cutting future outlays on food stamps.  That cut is supposed to take place in 2014, not, you know, now.  Even worse, they are already promising to rescind it the second the bailout bill is passed.  Yes, they are using the healthcare playbook again—claiming a bill is balanced because of nebulous future spending cuts that will be rescinded the instant no one is looking.  And Paul Krugman has the nerve to call out Paul Ryan for shady numbers.

In any case, you can imagine how coming up with a name for the bill slipped their minds, what with so many interest groups to pay off.  Apparently the Screw Future Generations Act of 2010 didn’t poll terribly well.  (The Democrats are, of course, saying this bill is for “the children” since it’s about education and stuff.  Left unclear is how saddling our children with piles of debt to pay money into an education system that doesn’t teach them is good for the children.)

Actually, I suspect this happened because the Democrats don’t really write their own laws.  Somewhere in the basement of the Capitol, they have a machine that cranks out new spending initiatives.  They then fill it out with whatever interest group they’re funding at the moment, kind of like a Mad Lib, and send it on to committee.  In this case, they simply forgot to click a few boxes.  Hey, it happens.  I sometimes forget to fill out the “for” part when I write checks.  Of course, I’m not writing checks for $26 fucking billion dollars.

I’ve really had enough of these ___ with their ____ and their ____ and their ___ with ___ never concerned with ___.  We’d much better off if they were ___ their ___.  At least the mess would be easier to clean up.  It’s time for them to exit stage left. As I said, I’m not happy with the GOP being back in power after six years of bullshit non-governing followed by four years of bullshit screaming.  But if they can stop stuff like this while Obama blocks their most idiotic ideas, that may be trade-off we can take.

Update: My wife pointed out that this is apotheosis of Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass it to know what’s in it” logic on the healthcare bill. They’ve gone beyond not reading the bill to not reading even the title.  Now we have to pass it to know what it’s called.  Pretty soon, Congress will just be passing blank pieces of paper.

Friday, August 06, 2010

This news just galls me. They got caught in a huge scam, and their answer as their cause is abandoned by sane people, is to steal more of our wealth in order to keep the machine that is intended to steal all of our wealth alive. And the energy companies and people opposed to the dogma hawked by these cultists are the ones accused of greed and nefarious motives. A pox on their house!

Thursday, August 05, 2010

You hear about stuff like this. I mean, this is for now a rumor, but the scary thing is that I have no problem believing these collectivist opportunist would resort to something like this to keep power:

Main Street may be about to get its own gigantic bailout. Rumors are running wild from Washington to Wall Street that the Obama administration is about to order government-controlled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to forgive a portion of the mortgage debt of millions of Americans who owe more than what their homes are worth. An estimated 15 million U.S. mortgages – one in five – are underwater with negative equity of some $800 billion. Recall that on Christmas Eve 2009, the Treasury Department waived a $400 billion limit on financial assistance to Fannie and Freddie, pledging unlimited help. The actual vehicle for the bailout could be the Bush-era Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP, a sister program to Obama’s loan modification effort. HARP was just extended through June 30, 2011.

The move, if it happens, would be a stunning political and economic bombshell less than 100 days before a midterm election in which Democrats are currently expected to suffer massive, if not historic losses. The key date to watch is August 17 when the Treasury Department holds a much-hyped meeting on the future of Fannie and Freddie.

This is not government helping people: it is government encouraging bad behavior, rewarding those that engage in it at the expense of other, and most disgusting of all, government punishing those of us that did the right thing – practically always and without exception a side effect of bullshit liberal socio-economic policies intended “to help” people - and only serves to make things worse. I seriously hope this turns out to be a stupid rumor, and that these bastards are not going to, for the umpteenth time, screw those of us that have done the right thing and lived within our means, to buy votes and reward those that did not.