Yesterday was the day wished forgotten by that misbegotten collection of pseudo-economists we elected to congress and the Presidency.

Yes, in 2003,  Bush signed the bill overwhelmingly passed by Congress.

Greenspan cut interest rates to 1% to stimulate home ownership.

Amazing! That worked so well in the past five years, we’re going to do it again.

Whorehouse Harry Reid and his House Madam, Pelosi just pimped up another massive Viagra Bill for housing and Bush, on his spavined nag, signed it, as he rides off to Crawford.

Bernanke dropped rates to 1% again.

On Tuesday, we have an avowed communist (in his own words, he redistributed candy in first grade) who doesn’t know the difference between a dividend and a doughnut and someone who wasn’t smart enough to steer clear of the S&L debacle.

Did someone forget to change the reel in this movie?

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”

Robert Heinlein

Lede in today’s NYT trumpets the flight of investors into “safe” places for parking money.
Like T-bills, which were paying about 1.5%, but now in demand, pay under 1%. Revisiting the golden age of the Weimar Republic, our fearless leaders busily reproduce history by fabricating the “Weimar T-bill” just in time to crush the economy ending 232 years of successful existence. After this last round of bailouts, the inflationary spiral will start.

As soon as these idiots realize they aren’t making any money in T-bills, out of the “safe” place the money comes and back into the market it goes where it is at risk.
NOW, where does the government get the money it is using to pay off the incurred debt? Remember no T-bills; does the government jack up the interest rate, which slows down the housing market or does it default on the debt?
Neither, the Treasury just prints more money, boosting inflation.
Oil is back over $100 a barrel. Food is not coming down in price, thanks to the clowns putting corn in gas tanks. Now the government is giving the taxpayer all the toxic debt and the fat cats their money back. We are the proud owners of some where north of a half trillion dollars of crap.
Personally, I rather see the fat bastards jump out windows after they lost everything.

Excerpt from Paper Money by “Adam Smith,” (George J.W. Goodman), pp. 57-62.

Before World War I Germany was a prosperous country, with a gold-backed currency, expanding industry, and world leadership in optics, chemicals, and machinery. The German Mark, the British shilling, the French franc and the Italian lira all had about equal value, and all were exchanged four or five to the dollar. That was in 1914.[snip]

Germany abandoned the gold backing of its currency in 1914. The war was expected to be short, so it was financed by government borrowing, not by savings and taxation. In Germany prices doubled between 1914 and 1919. [snip]

America is off the gold standard too since 1971. We’re on a system of fiat money. So much for full faith and credit, since that change, we too have become a debtor nation,

But the bourgeois habits were very strong. Ordinary citizens worked at their jobs, sent their children to school and worried about their grades, maneuvered for promotions and rejoiced when they got them, and generally expected things to get better. But the prices that had doubled from 1914 to 1919 doubled again during just five months in 1922. Milk went from 7 Marks per liter to 16; beer from 5.6 to 18. There were complaints about the high cost of living. Professors and civil servants complained of getting squeezed. Factory workers pressed for wage increases. An underground economy developed, aided by a desire to beat the tax collector. [snip]

The nervous citizens of the Ruhr were already getting their money out of the currency and into real goods — diamonds, works of art, safe real estate. Now ordinary Germans began to get out of Marks and into real goods. [snip]

The flight from currency that had begun with the buying of diamonds, gold, country houses, and antiques now extended to minor and almost useless items — bric-a-brac, soap, hairpins. The law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery. Copper pipes and brass armatures weren’t safe. Gasoline was siphoned from cars. People bought things they didn’t need and used them to barter — a pair of shoes for a shirt, some crockery for coffee. Berlin had a “witches’ Sabbath” atmosphere. Prostitutes of both sexes roamed the streets. Cocaine was the fashionable drug. In the cabarets the newly rich and their foreign friends could dance and spend money. Other reports noted that not all the young people had a bad time. Their parents had taught them to work and save, and that was clearly wrong, so they could spend money, enjoy themselves, and flout the old. [snip]

Sound familiar? Put it on plastic, live for now. In debt to the eyeballs and no hope of paying it off.

Barack Obama has said he considered joining the United States military when he left school but decided not to because the Vietnam war was over and “we weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point”.

Mr Obama was asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s “This Week” programme whether he’d ever thought about military service and replied: “You know, I actually did. [snip]

“And I actually always thought of the military as an ennobling and, you know, honourable option. But keep in mind that I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue.”

Phew!

All male American citizens are legally required to register for Selective Service within 30 days of their 18th birthday.

Mrs Palin’s eldest son Track, 19, is due to leave for Iraq on Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the September 11^th attacks on America and exactly a year after he joined the US Army as an infantryman.

John McCain’s youngest son Jimmy, also 19, is a lance-corporal in the US marine corps who served in Ramadi, deep in Iraq’s Sunni triangle, last year. His other son Jack, 21, is currently training to be an officer at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Beau Biden, 39, elder son of Senator Joe Biden, Mr Obama’s running mate, is scheduled to go to Iraq early next year. Beau Biden is attorney general of Delaware and a captain in the legal corps of the US Army’s National Guard. [snip]

Biden’s job is to prosecute any trooper that locks and loads before coming under automatic weapons fire.

Voters often fault Democratic candidates on issues of patriotism and support for the military. Bill Clinton was vilified by Republicans as a Vietnam draft dodger, though he defeated two Second World War veterans, President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Senator Bob Dole in 1996.

But Al Gore, a US Army journalist in Vietnam, (Gore served in the Conex Corp) and John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran who won a Silver Star while serving in patrol craft on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, both lost to George W. Bush, who avoided active service in Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard.

Mr Obama is more vulnerable than most Democrats on the patriotism issue because of his exotic life story, his past radical associations, his previous refusal to wear an American flag pin - though he has since relented and is now seldom seen without one - and inaccurate smears that he is a Muslim. [snip]

(Obama speaking to Stephanopoulos) “Let’s not play games,” he said. “What I was suggesting — you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you’re absolutely right that that has not come.”

The Illinois senator’s maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham served in the US Army in Europe during the Second World War.

His maternal great uncle Charlie Payne helped liberate Ohrdruf, a part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network - though he was criticised for misstating this on the campaign trail as an uncle who liberated Auschwitz. [snip]

Note to Obama, this stuff doesn’t rub off, you got to do it yourself.

But these military connections pale in comparison with Mr McCain’s fabled biography as the son and grandson of admirals who spent more than five years in the Hanoi Hilton prison after his jet was shot down over Vietnam.

Mr McCain took as his Republican convention theme the slogan “Country First” and both Mrs Palin and Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York, mocked Mr Obama’s time as a “community organiser” in Chicago when he was in his twenties.

Hillary Clinton, who Mr Obama defeated in the Democratic primaries, was ridiculed in 1994 for stating that she tried to join the US marines in 1975, the year she married, but was rejected because she was too old and had poor eyesight. Her husband Bill said this year that she had tried to join the US Army.[snip]

Probably she did, in what country?

 ”Understand what I did as a community organiser. When I got out of a college as a young person, 24, 25 years old, I moved to Chicago and worked with churches, who were dealing with steel plants that had closed in their neighbourhoods, to set up job training programmes for the unemployed and after-school programmes for youth.”

He also tried to “deal with asbestos in homes with poor people - community service work - which John McCain has been talking about, putting country first and extolling the virtues of national service”.

According to Obama, he had to make a steep dive in, level out and zig-zag to the buildings while receiving fire from asbestos junkies in an armed ‘hood. “They had everything but tanks.” “This is why I believe in the 2^nd Amendment but only if no one has guns.”
The only salvation for these people is Elijah Muhammad in the guise of BLT.

All make sense doesn’t it? Reading the entire article just roils the mud.

A graphic difference between McCain and Obama.

Second part

Cheering for one side in a war is cheering against the other side. No getting around that simple fact!

Palin’s hubby and son not Republicans

Democrats may be blasting Sarah Palin as a doctrinaire conservative, and Republicans may be embracing her for the same reason, but her husband and oldest son are independents.

Or more precisely, their party affiliation is listed as ”undeclared” on voter registration records reteieved from the Alaska Division of Elections. [snip]

Leave it to the media to ask the wrong question, probably on purpose. Donk or GOP really have no meaning anymore. The question is, “Are they Conservatives or Liberals?” “Guess!”
Registering undeclared means you don’t get batches of garbage mail and solicitations for funds.

Here’s a photo of Palin welcoming PETA to Alaska.

Gotta love it!

This election is devolving to a choice between McCain’s experience or drycleaning. For me that’s a problem, since I’m not a fan of McCain. I think half the time there’s a “to let” sign posted on his forehead.

From Hot Air  Ed Morrissey writes:

Bobby Jindal hits back at whining from the Barack Obama campaign over his response to Obama’s attack on Randy Scheuneman. On ABC’s This Week, Jindal was asked about a sharp retort from John McCain after Obama said that McCain was unduly influenced towards our ally because of Scheuneman’s prior work for the Republic of Georgia. Instead of taking that bait, Jindal pressed the experience advantage McCain has over Obama and why it mattered in this crisis:

Tapper: “So you don’t think that Senator Obama is echoing the Kremlin and has views that are bizarrely in sync with Moscow? Is it fair to say you don’t share that?”

The simple non-cowardly answer is yes. Let Obama and his KGB wrestle with that.

Why attack Scheuneman for working on behalf of a democratic ally of the United States? It seems especially strange now, while the Russians drop bombs on civilian centers in Gori and Tbilisi, and most people understand Russian intent to keep Georgia from allying even closer with the West. Scheuneman certainly did nothing wrong in representing Georgia previous to his work for McCain, and Obama’s attack on McCain suggests that Obama doesn’t value Georgia’s friendship and doesn’t understand the strategic necessity of Georgian independence from Moscow.

Jindal uses that as subtext to explain everything wrong with Obama’s response over the last 48 hours. Instead of scolding Russians for attacking Georgia, he told Georgia to exercise restraint as Russian bombers attacked their civilians. Instead of supporting an ally, Obama attacked McCain’s adviser for his previous work for Georgia, an attack supported by current lobbyists for Russia.

Obama clearly has no idea of the issues or the consequences surrounding Putin’s South Ossetia adventure. He’s flailing for a policy, while McCain — who’s actually been to Georgia and studied the ongoing political conflict for a decade — understood immediately what the outbreak of war means, and what its motives are. Jindal does a good job here in driving that point home, while Obama continues to demonize lobbyists as his only response to every policy issue.

Politics of fear? That’s all Obama can sell.

Really Ed, might that not depend on which side one stands? Perhaps he truly is in sync with his side.

Perhaps the courts are a place to crush this bit of silliness. That cuts out the media and Hollyweird along with most of the pinkos in congress.
The destruction of the world’s economy through burning food as fuel combined with strangling fossil fuel production is here. Witness $4/gal gas, corn and wheat prices and a serious spike in stupidity in politicians.
This makes for interesting reading as well as enlightenment. Of course, there are some who prefer to sit in dark closets.

Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. [snip]

Most of the clowns running for office have this climate nonsense hook firmly in the gullet. Help them get it out by voting them out of office.

A bite from the reality dragon is lethal

Stephen Bainbridge believes John McCain will appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court if elected. He pledged to do so at CPAC last week, and presidents are easier to pressure these days. Remember Harriet Miers?

McCain pledged to uphold the Constitution too. How did that turn out?

[snip]
To be sure, Presidents all too often break campaign promises. Remember George Bush 41’s “read my lips” pledge on taxes?

In the new media environment, however, it’s getting easier to hold a President’s feet to the fire. Remember George Bush 43’s aborted nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court?

Those of us who waged war against Miers succeeded in part because in the 2000 campaign Bush had explicitly promised to nominate justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. We demanded that Bush keep that promise and, as it became clear that Miers was made from a different mold, we kept up a stead drum beat of criticism. In the end, we won. Miers was forced to withdraw and Samuel Alito became the newest member of the Supreme Court.

If a President McCain were to nominate a David Souter clone, the right’s netroots would have a collective conniption fit that would make the Miers fight look like pattycake. We might not win, but we’d at least bleed McCain of enough political capital to give even Warren Rudman second thoughts.

Remember McCain-Feingold? What was that bit of cheese for the conservative voices. Do you think he’ll flip-flop on that posture. At the first agitation from talk radio and the blogs, he’ll reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine to stifle any enmity. He may even do that beforehand to steal a march on the conservatives. Smart aggressive move, isn’t it?

How about the McCain-Kennedy fiasco, a highly destructive multicultural program packaged in a “We’re so diverse” wrapper. Call it another Mariel boatlift sans boats! It achieves the goal as well as the diversity agenda in the Balkan States, which has become a PC word for ethnic cleansing.

Who can overlook the McCain-Lieberman bill, the “Climate Stewardship Act of 2004” which was the most regressive tax on energy. All promoted by a person who never held a real job in business.

If you are buying McCain’s rhetoric, you’ll conclude Obama will join the Marines to get Osama.