Happy Independence Day, everyone. I hope that everyone is having a good time celebrating the birth of our nation. Be safe, have fun and don’t burn the burgers and dogs.
Isn’t Helen Thomas having a serious argument with a Democratic White House administration one of the Signs of the Apocalypse?
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the White House would “screen” submissions — and pick some for the president to answer at his town hall in Virginia. But at least two reporters told Gibbs this amounted to choosing questions, which would just make Obama look good.
“This is an open forum for the public to ask question,” said Chip Reid of CBS News. “But it’s not really open?”
“Based on what?” responded Gibbs.
“Based on the information … on how the audience and the questions are being selected,” said Reid.
“How about this: I promise we will interrupt the AP’s tradition of asking the first question. I’ll let you ask me a question tomorrow on whether you thought the questions at the town hall meeting that the President conducted at Annandale….”
“That’s not his point,” interrupted Helen Thomas, correspondent for Hearst Newspapers. “That’s, that’s not his point. His point is the control from here. We have never had that in the White House. I’m amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency and control.
“You have left open the suggestion that you are pumping the answers,” Thomas continued. “It’s shocking. It’s really shocking.”
“Let’s have this discussion at the conclusion of the town hall meeting,” Gibbs said.
“No, no, no. We are having it now.” claimed Thomas. “It’s a pattern. It’s a pattern. It isn’t the question. It’s a pattern of controlling the press.”
There was nearly an actual journalistic undertaking happening there for a minute. Who would have imagined that happening in the White House press room?
You know what’s really driving me nuts? It’s all this screaming ecstasy over how some things are turning out “Less Bad” than people had predicted.
They’re still bad, mind you, but when something turns out to be “Less Worse” than some bureaucrat had jotted down on a post-it note in Washington, the press, markets and politicians all go into slavering elation over how instead of 473,000 jobs being shed by U.S. employers, only 467,000 jobs were lost.
Oh, the joy.
The administration is still yammering about the wonders of Porkulus and the ‘Green Shoots’…never mind that unemployment is at a 26 year high of 9.5%, with new data out yesterday showing that in every metropolitan area of the United States unemployment rose, with some areas showing unemployment rates as high as 26.8%.
Yippie! Everything’s great!
In my opinion, this is all akin to someone coming in and shooting you in the leg. Yeah, it’s not as bad as it could have been. You could have been shot in the head, after all…but you’re still going to need a trip to the hospital and a set of crutches for a month.
Oh, and it’s going to hurt. A lot.
Personally, I would simply prefer not to get shot, but the government has decided otherwise. Not that I’m saying they want to shoot me in the leg, but give them enough time and I’m sure they’ll get around to wanting that or some other pound of flesh they deem necessary to further some blatantly facist goal.
Either way, I’m sure they will tell me that it’s less worse than they had predicted it would be.
The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Federal Agents are going door to door without warrants, searching for firearms that purportedly were sold to Mexican drug cartels.
First off, the whole concept of buying weapons for retail prices in the U.S. and smuggling them into Mexico is absurd. Any decent third-world arms dealer can get you the same hardware at half the price and with the massive coastline that Mexico has, getting them in by ship would be far easier than loading SUV’s with weapons while hoping that one law enforcement agency or another doesn’t stop you while your rear fender is grinding on the pavement.
And even if a few are coming in from the U.S., maybe if the Feds worked harder at sealing the border (in both directions), this alleged U.S. arms smuggling problem might solve itself, along with a few other problems with folks breaking the laws of this country.
Meanwhile, I’m betting that a lot of people will be getting a knock on the door from the Feds.
Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.
-James Madison
Markets: Down
Oil: Down
Gold: Down
Treasuries: Down
Employment outlook: Down
Computers at O’Hare: Down
There’s a blues song somewhere in all this.
It looks like GM gets to sell its assets to…well, GM. That’s right, Government Motors will sell itself to itself using taxpayer money after they get done letting the government restructure it so that the big financial institutions (many of which the government controls), the union fat-cats and the government itself can make off with the goods. Meanwhile, the people (many of whom I know) holding GM stock (that’s the first GM, not the second), take it up the rear.
Makes sense to me. Not.
Freddie Mac is doing so well after the billions in taxpayer money the government gave them, that they are now getting another $6.1 billion to keep them from going under. Or should I say, going under again. They’re going to need more on top of that as they posted a $9.9 billion dollar loss for the first quarter and with mortgage applications plummeting and defaults back on the rise, it’s not looking great for the next one.
China is still clamoring for a new global reserve currency, as is Russia. The dollar keeps taking hits from all sides and with the U.S. government continuing to dilute the inherent value of the dollar by keeping the printing presses on warp ten, it’s a strong possibility that the next 18-24 months could be very hard on the greenback.
The $787 billion Porkulus package is looking more and more like an utter failure. Even the simple math doesn’t add up. The recession/depression has wiped out nearly $12 trillion in American citizens’ wealth, so tossing out $787 billion is a finger in the dike, especially when you consider how much is actually nothing but pork.
And there are whispers around the Washington campfire that the administration wants to push out Porkulus II, the Son of Porkulus, because wasting anything less than a few trillion dollars just isn’t Socialist American enough.
Eventually, this madness must come to an end. Exactly what form the end comes in…that is the truly forbidding scenario to ponder. Whether you see it as recession, depression, the next Dark Ages, the Fall of an Empire, The Endarkenment, The Fragmentation of America or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, I don’t believe that this one is going to be something that can be sidestepped by any of us.
Oh, yeah. And in case you hadn’t heard yet, Michael Jackson is still dead.
I’m trying to figure out when credit became a civil right.
I was taught that credit was something that one acquired after years of hard work, saving money and being financially responsible. When you had accomplished all that to the satisfaction of a bank, they would give you a credit card. If you didn’t screw that up after a while, them might give you a car loan. If you paid that off in good order, you might be able to qualify for a loan for a house.
Somewhere along the line, the government decided that everyone should have credit and dictated things like the Community Reinvestment Act, in which everyone could get loans for big ‘ol houses that, in the end, they couldn’t afford.
Which of course led to mountains of loans going bad. In what I consider to be an effort to cover their asses, the government rewrote the act no less than eight times and pressured the banks to toss out anything resembling sound financial practices, especially the Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie and Freddie.
In the end, it led to our current mess, which is still be exacerbated by the government belief that credit is a civil right and everyone, no matter how fiscally irresponsible, should not be denied.
Seriously. Despite the fact that subprime loans were the fuse to the economic bomb, the government still marches ahead saying that subprime loans are a wonderful thing to have in our economic system.
The lack of common sense that has been going on for decades is ghastly and recently the liberals have been all up in arms denying that the CRA was harmful and typically blaming everything on big business, Republicans or the rich. But you know what? The actual blame isn’t just on the government; it’s on the idiots who took out the loans that they couldn’t afford. It’s a simple formula:
- Your total bills are X a month
- The loan you want is Y a month
- You take home Z a month
- X+Y cannot exceed Z
Anyone who can’t figure that out is not only too stupid to get the loan, but probably too ignorant to have a bank account. Maybe they should have an IQ test on loan applications as well as everything else they make you fill out.
Getting a loan for something you can’t afford is not a right. Freedom from discrimination, freedom from injustice, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law, those are civil rights. Having a gold card or a jumbo mortgage is not.
The sooner the government stops wasting time on political boondoggles and gets around to protecting our actual civil rights, the better.
There’s nothing so typical in government than the suppression of facts.
Apparently there is a 98-page government report created by long time EPA analyst Alan Carlin, which debunks the whole global warming theory and reports from other sources, stating that information others have used was out of date and that global temperatures are actually going down.
The tricky bit is the batch of email that clearly show the report being covered up
National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland sent email to Carlin, stating, “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” he wrote, “I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”
Yep. Screw the truth, just drop it in the trash, threaten to reassign the author (which they are considering) and toe the line like a good little administration puppet.
Caesar has spoken and must be obeyed.
The EPA denies any wrongdoing, of course. The problem with that is the fact that the EPA is manned by a bunch of paper-pushers and they’re not used to lying to the American people like career politicians are. And because they’re not good at it, this is almost certainly going to be another circus unless the administration flexes ‘The Chicago Way’ and steps in to help them cover it up.
Meanwhile, the self-satisfied members of the House who voted on Cap and Tax without bothering to read the damn thing, let alone do any actual research into the facts, look like bigger boobs than usual.
Not that they care one bit about how they look. They’ve got the money and the power and the zombie plebs are certainly going to keep them all in office no matter how much they wreck the place.
Seeing any hope or change? All I see is business as usual in Washington, with the average American paying the price.
House Minority Leader John Boehner had a few choice words about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s landmark climate-change bill after its passage Friday. When asked why he read portions of the cap-and-trade bill on the floor Friday night, Boehner told The Hill, “Hey, people deserve to know what’s in this pile of shit.”
I believe that’s the first statement out of the House that I’ve agreed with in a long time.
