Friday, August 30, 2013

FASCINATING HISTORY OF PERUVIAN BANKING    How would it work without the Federal Reserve System?

OUT THERE BY HIMSELF: Many chickens are coming home to roost and Obama brought it all on himself

THIS WON'T END WELL:  It's all about credibility and he doesn't have much

Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Democrat Party pollutes the political discourse in this country making any real progress towards dealing with our economic and social conditions nearly impossible to deal with.  Witness:

POSTED ON AUGUST 28, 2013 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEBT-CEILING, DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY LIES FOR MONEY

I have documented many times the hysterical appeals and outrageous lies that the Democratic Party uses to raise money from its gullible followers. Today the Democrats sent out this fundraising email:

From: Democrats 2014 [mailto:dccc@dccc.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 11:43 AM
To: Hinderaker, John H.
Subject: Boehner just went ballistic.

Boehner Demands Medicare, Social Security And Medicaid Cuts To Raise Debt Limit

Sadly, that headline isn’t true.

John –

Boehner just went ballistic.

Speaking this week on the looming debt ceiling, Boehner vowed to put up a “whale of a fight” against President Obama. He’s actually threatening President Obama with this appalling choice: either agree to dismantle Medicare and Social Security — OR risk the full faith and credit of the United States.

Really? That doesn’t sound like the John Boehner we know. What Boehner actually said was reported by numerous news outlets; this is the New York Times’s account:

Speaker John A. Boehner says he is gearing up for “a whale of a fight” with President Obama over raising the federal debt ceiling, even though Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he has no plans to negotiate with Congressional Republicans over the nation’s debt limit and wants it lifted without a political showdown.

At an Idaho fund-raiser on Monday for Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican and a close ally, Mr. Boehner said he planned to use the need to raise the debt ceiling to gain political leverage and demand “cuts and reforms that are greater than the increase in the debt limit.”

Can you find the hidden demand that Medicare and Social Security be “dismantled”? No, I can’t either.

The Democrats continue:

President Obama won’t play Boehner’s games, and neither will we.

John — we’ve got 3 days left to raise the $400,000 we need to fight back. Will you help us show that Democrats nationwide are united and committed to taking on Boehner and his reckless threats to destroy Medicare and Social Security?

Huh? “Reckless threats to destroy Medicare and Social Security”? Where were they?

Chip in $3 or more to fight back against Boehner before the fundraising deadline >>

Republicans are willing to throw the full faith and credit of the United States government out the window — just to spite President Obama. And they certainly have no problem dismantling Medicare (just ask Paul Ryan).

One of the ironies here is that President Obama and the Democratic Congress cut $700 billion from Medicare as part of the Affordable Care Act. This fact goes entirely unremarked in the Democrats’ emails and, as far as I can tell, is entirely unknown to the party’s faithful.

As long as millionaires and billionaires keep their tax breaks, Republicans like Boehner could [sic] care less.

Every email from the Democratic Party contains a line like this. From which you might assume that President Obama and the Democrats have put another tax increase on the table, right? But they haven’t, as far as I know. Apparently this kind of verbiage is meant to communicate a yearning rather than an actual policy proposal.

It’s up to us to call out House Republicans for putting millionaire tax breaks before seniors’ health care benefits.

http://dccc.org/Fight-Boehner

Thanks,

Democrats 2014

Millions of voters get emails like this one every day. They are filled with misinformation and outright lies, but the vast majority of Democratic voters are low-information and don’t know any better. The party’s leaders know it, and they cynically prey upon their voters’ ignorance. Every leading Democrat, from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, knows what their party is up to, and condones it–as long as it raises lots and lots of money. The Democratic Party’s eagerness to lie for money is the great political scandal of our time, yet it goes almost entirely unremarked.

OBAMA'S POLITICAL SCREED ON MLK 50TH YEAR CELEBRATION: Ward politician at work.

NOW HISPANICS ARE SPEAKING OUT ON THE ECONOMY  Growing unemployment, disenchantment with Obama

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2013

Is it time to break up some of these big banks into more manageable and more readily regulated entities? Banks provide legal feast for litigators 

Part of the problem with these huge banking entities is the concept "too big to fail", an implicit FRS policy that promotes the moral hazard of risk-free loans to dubious enterprises that in turn leads to financial crises like the savings and loan industry of the late '80's, and the more recent mortgage industry collapse.  In both cases banks were financing independent investment banks as well as their own in riskier and riskier bets on mortgages with the blessing and support of the government.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

It's really a shame we can't replace the voice of the race hustlers with this accomplished black woman's voice: The cause, the effect, the solution.

The pundits at the Powerline usually managed to cut to the chase:

A TRULY GREAT PHONY

We’ve routinely documented Obama’s verbal and historical gaffes over the past five years. Of the historical gaffes, one of my favorites is Obama discoursing on Nuremberg during the 2008 campaign. I wrote about that one in the New York Post column “Anti-terror oops.”Another is Obama invoking Churchill’s opposition to “torture” in the course of his 100-day press conference in 2009. I wrote about that one in “Obama veers into the Daily Ditch.”John has done the honors on “the Maldives” and “the corpse-man,” to take two of Obama’s verbal gaffes that, along with his historical gaffes, suggest a larger point.

The gaffes are characteristic of a type we all met in college: the great BS artist. Obama represents the type with a twist. He combines the BS with an arrogance that is unlovely to behold. I think it is in part the combination that causes Thomas Sowell to declare Obama “A truly great phony” and to introduce the edge in his conclusion:

Like other truly talented phonies, Barack Obama concentrates his skills on the effect of his words on other people — most of whom do not have the time to become knowledgeable about the things he is talking about. Whether what he says bears any relationship to the facts is politically irrelevant.

A talented con man, or a slick politician, does not waste his time trying to convince knowledgeable skeptics. His job is to keep the true believers believing. He is not going to convince the others anyway.

Back during Barack Obama’s first year in office, he kept repeating, with great apparent earnestness, that there were “shovel-ready” projects that would quickly provide many much-needed jobs, if only his spending plans were approved by Congress.

He seemed very convincing — if you didn’t know how long it can take for any construction project to get started, after going through a bureaucratic maze of environmental impact studies, zoning commission rulings and other procedures that can delay even the smallest and simplest project for years.

Only about a year or so after his big spending programs were approved by Congress, Barack Obama himself laughed at how slowly everything was going on his supposedly “shovel-ready” projects.

One wonders how he will laugh when all his golden promises about ObamaCare turn out to be false and a medical disaster. Or when his foreign policy fiascoes in the Middle East are climaxed by a nuclear Iran.

Obama’s “golden promises about Obamacare” (a/k/a “lies”) are a subject close to my heart. On that subject, see, e.g., Paul Gregory’s “Airbrushing away the numerous false promises of Obamacare.”

Love him or hate him Ralph Peters is a strategic thinker and Obama would do well to listen to  him: Is doing something, anything, in Syria a good idea?


Motivating Children for college.  How much help is too much help?

How a lot of my generation feels about its school these days

A 1964 graduate reflects on the damage done to his school by relentless politicization. This is where just about all my friends are regarding our colleges today.

The frustration level to come to grips with this reality is growing exponentially.  It's going to take some enlightened leadership among blacks to deal with this.


Somewhere we've heard this before:

The reason for the county’s extravagant borrowing was prosaic: Nassau was spending far more than it took in. The county’s major taxes—property and sales—exactly tracked inflation between 1992 and 2000. But spending grew 13 percent after inflation, saddling the county’s $2.5 billion budget with chronic nine-figure deficits, including a deficit in 2000 that was nearly 7 percent of spending. The public-safety budget, for example, increased from $355 million in 1992 to $555 million, thanks to ballooning compensation costs. (Noting that the average cop’s salary had broken through the six-figure mark, Long Island Business News commented that “Nassau has more police officers who work fewer hours for higher pay than any other comparable department in the nation.”) Compensation costs in other departments, too, were rising. Raises and cost-of-living increases for public workers “pursuant to various collective bargaining agreements” were weighing the budget down, the county reported. Retroactive pay agreements, early-retirement costs, and health-care expenses were all becoming unaffordable.

Currently there are four California municipalities that have effectively declared bankruptcy. The worst is yet to come.

Ah yes, this story is why no thinking person trusts the government, even though they never should have in the first place. The revolving door is busier than ever despite Obama's promises to stop it.

Sunday August 25, 2013

To answer the question is Islam a religion of peace, one has to have a good idea of exactly what is in the Koran and the other teachings of the faith such as the Sunnah, Sharia law and the canons of the faith.  Clearly much violence against apostates is a part of the Islamic teachings.  There is simply no way around this fact as is made obvious in this deconstruction of a presentation by a Muslim apologist arguing that Islam is a religion of peace.  This is as clear a summary of the arguments that Islam is hardly a religion of peace as one is apt to find by a man, Robert Spencer who knows the subject well.

The ACA fiasco is upon us and one party will be the loser.  It's beginning to look like the Democrat Party will be the big loser, but don't discount the Republican Party's proclivity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Walter Russell Mead is eating crow right now because his man got it all wrong going back 4 years ago. 
I believe this is called doubling down on a loser.