Tag: Reset Button

Pitchforks, Torches, Dogs, Tar and Feathers

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So, I see the “Cap and Trade” bill “Pile of s–t” passed the House with the aid of eight “Republican” representatives even though 44 Democrats voted against it. Not surprising in and of itself, but The Washinton Examiner reported on Friday the really blood-boiling news:

On the House floor

By all appearances, the House is about to vote on a very long bill of which it has no completed official copy.

Texas Republican Reps. Joe Barton and Louie Gohmert have just asked the chair whether there exists a complete, updated copy of the Waxman-Markey carbon-cap bill.

“If a bill for which there is no copy were to actually pass this body,” Barton asked, “could the bill without a copy be sent to the Senate for its consideration?”

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers’ amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk’s desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: “Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)…” How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can’t even wait until members of Congress know what they’re voting on.

Our. Elected. “REPRESENTATIVES.” Voted. On. A. Bill. They. Could. Not. Possibly. Know. The. Contents. Of.

And they PASSED IT.

Oh, and don’t worry – if it passes the Senate you won’t get that promised 5-day “review and comment” period Obama promised during his “Sunlight before Signing” speech. (And is five days enough time to review an 1,100+ page document anyway? Oh, silly me, the House did it in less than 20 hours!)

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Quote of the Day – If the Foo Sh!ts Edition

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Quote of the Day – If the Foo Sh!ts Edition

Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

American Thinker, 9/28/08 – Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis by James Simpson

Interesting read. I am once again reminded of the warnings of Yuri Bezmenov from the 1980’s. And remember Rahm Emanuel‘s “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

Or that others would thwart, given the time.

(I can hear Markadelphia’s head explode from here!)

I Don’t Know Anything About Finance

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I Don’t Know Anything About Finance . . .

But I’m pretty sure this guy’s right:

I’m an attorney and CPA and I’ve spent my career in the world of investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity, etc. Tell your mother I’m almost certain a depression is on the way and many of my colleagues believe the same thing because the math has finally caught up with us. However, I believe this depression will be worse than the 30’s because, among other factors, Americans are no longer self-sufficient and we’re burdened with debt we can never repay. I don’t want to believe any of this, but I can’t ignore what I know and see. I really hope I’m wrong. I hope those in charge figure out a way to kick the can down the road one more time, but I don’t expect that because they would have to defy their Keynesian impulses. I fear it’s too late.

flyfisher on June 3, 2009 at 10:36 PM

A comment left at a Hot Air post yesterday on a proposed tax on employee health insurance benefits. It was prompted by this comment, a few minutes earlier:

I was on the phone with my mother today (a Baby Boomer, born 1955), and we were discussing the fact – not possibility, but fact – that our economy will sink into a depression if Cap-and-Trade or “Healthcare Reform” is passed before the end of the year like Obama wants. My mom said, “I just can’t believe that there’s actually going to be a depression in my lifetime. We did this once already and didn’t learn anything from it?”

I was born in 1984, so I’ve known nothing but prosperity in my lifetime. Even so, I just can’t believe that SO many Americans who remember the 70s learned NOTHING from the experience. I cannot believe that hardly a generation passes before socialism rears its ugly head again. I want the horrors I’ve read about to STAY in the history books – I don’t want to live them. For the first time, though I’m frightened. I can prepare to some extent for inflation or the loss of a job, but I really don’t know what I’ll do if the government takes over healthcare. I may be relatively healthy, but I know a lot of people (many elderly) who are not and if the government starts rationing as we KNOW they will, I hope that the wrath of the American people is finally awoken in defense of our countrymen.

Is this what it’s going to take, America? How much will be destroyed before you’ve had enough?

Animator Girl on June 3, 2009 at 10:06 PM

Good question.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Every nation has a number of founding myths. Britain’s principal myth is that it is the birthplace of modern democracy and a land where the law is supreme. The shocking realization that “the mother of parliaments” may have been acting as the rudest of street sluts is not easy to stomach. Some of the same politicians who go around the world lecturing others, especially in the “developing world”, against corruption, have been exposed as practioners(sic) of petty larceny. – Amir Taheri, Coming Soon: An English Revolution

Great. When do we get ours?

I Have Something for All Who Voted for Obama

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I Have Something for All Who Voted for Obama

Granted, I didn’t think his victory would be quite as bad as it’s so rapidly turned out to be, myself, but now that the fringe left is disowing the Obamessiah, here’s something I’d like to give to those who saw a Chicago machine politician as the beacon of HopenChange:


And I’d like to give it to you good and hard.

I’d also like to give it to the people who thought that John McCain was the best we could do on the Republican side, and every bit as hard.

STOP SCREWING UP OUR INVESTMENTS!

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STOP SCREWING UP OUR INVESTMENTS!

China warns Federal Reserve over ‘printing money’

China has warned a top member of the US Federal Reserve that it is increasingly disturbed by the Fed’s direct purchase of US Treasury bonds.

As we all should be.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature.”

“I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, “We’ve bought a lot of your bonds, and we expect them to be worth more than toilet paper.”

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia’s “Confucian” culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

Mr Fisher, the Fed’s leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of the original decision to buy Treasury debt, fearing that it would lead to a blurring of the line between fiscal and monetary policy – and could all too easily degenerate into Argentine-style financing of uncontrolled spending.

Degenerate into uncontrolled spending? Since when have we had controlled spending? But I guess it was this chart that finally grabbed their attention:


It scares the hell out of me.

However, he agreed that the Fed was forced to take emergency action after the financial system “literally fell apart”.

Nor, he added was there much risk of inflation taking off yet. The Dallas Fed uses a “trim mean” method based on 180 prices that excludes extreme moves and is widely admired for accuracy.

“You’ve got some mild deflation here,” he said.

Time to buy, buy, BUY! Before the inevitable hyper-inflation.

The Oxford-educated Mr Fisher, an outspoken free-marketer and believer in the Schumpeterian process of “creative destruction”, has been running a fervent campaign to alert Americans to the “very big hole” in unfunded pension and health-care liabilities built up by a careless political class over the years.

“We at the Dallas Fed believe the total is over $99 trillion,” he said in February.

Ninety-nine trillion dollars. That’s a number I don’t think anyone can really get their heads around. Certainly not 535 Congresscritters.

“This situation is of your own creation. When you berate your representatives or senators or presidents for the mess we are in, you are really berating yourself. You elect them,” he said.

Which, again, explains why our education system and our media are the messes that they are. Who wants an intelligent, informed and engaged electorate? What is there in that for anybody? It’s much easier to promise the ignorant, apathetic masses bread and circuses for their votes.

(Via Glenn.)

Quote of the Day

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With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.

The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.

At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is “relative,” but that’s not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her — except when you’re in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that “special circumstances” have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.

It’s going to get much worse, fast.

American Thinker, Revolution by Herbert Meyer

Via Mostly Cajun.

As always, RTWT.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

I’ve occasionally thought to myself that I could keep the thing going on major news stories, rather like skipping a stone across a pond. The day-to-day cop hemocides and venal corruption in every goddamned spot on the map doesn’t do it, though. Another 9/11 would naturally strike sparks, but look: the Obama regime is the story, but it needs depths of treatment that only very few are up to.

We are now in the fait accompli of American socialist revolution. Most peoples’ ignorance of history doesn’t allow them to really grasp how rapidly this is happening now, but this wheel is turning like never before.

I have no illusions that I can change any of it . . . . – Billy Beck, Dealing with the Imperative

Part II, Billy Beck from “Hell Is The Impossibility Of Reason”:

A great deal of of the crisis of the age is in the scale of it: it’s so big that many people are flatly intellectually incompetent to even get started on seeing it. There are enormous chains of cause & effect running over generations, compounded by general ignorance of history cultivated with conceptual infirmity and general anti-thought.

It’s all part of what constitutes Endarkenment, a unique event in human history, coming as it does in the wake of The Age of Reason. It’s an amazing thing to consider: that human beings are un-thinking their way down from heights that thousands of generations of their forebears could not have hoped to have dreamed.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Quietly, but not surrepitiously, the numbers of dissatisfied American individuals is growing, and many of them are armed, but not offensively dangerous. Meaning these American individuals have come to the conclusion that America is heading down a path it should not be on, trespassing so to speak, pillaging along the way, and armed resistance may, unfortunately, be required. They’ve had all they can stand, and they can’t stand any more. – John Venlet, Improved Clinch – Quietly on my Mind