Demagogue in Chief

Obama humble-bragged last week that he’s focused so much on policy that he forgot to tell us stories. So he stole some urban lore from the Democrats’ favorite storyteller, Chief Spouting Bull, aka Elizabeth Warren.

We're all familiar with Il Douche's famous speech, but I'll provide the text as a reference:

look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (AEI)

Then his sneering attack became totally unhinged, worthy of a Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez tirade:

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. (AEI)

That's right.  In his world, government gave it to you, and left unsaid, as a hanging implicit threat, government can take it all away, so don't get too cocky.

He’s a smirking smartass

Look at the derision on his face and in his tone of voice at the 00:57 point when he says "You didn't get there on your own."  Keep watching as see how he says “so smart.”

Why the demeaning tone?

Because he resents the success of others, especially if they made it on their own and not through the corrupt cronyism of government payoffs or academic ass-kissing. Obama is one of those clueless ignoramuses who thinks he’s the smartest person in any room he walks in to, and that’s a dangerous person to have in the White House, especially when his staff is equally clueless and incompetent.

Why the attitude? 

Because in his egotistical mind, nobody is as smart as he is, which is why he mocks all those stupid business owners. After all, he’s president and they’re not. That proves it! How many of those big business owners have ever been president? Huh? Huh? Thought so…

This from a man whose only accomplishment was ingesting radical leftist propaganda and crapping BS, and doing it so well that he fooled enough sheeple into voting for him.

John Sunnunu said it best:

He said that Obama’s comments show three related things:

1) The President doesn’t understand how America and business work. No wonder his administration has failed to create jobs.

2) Obama’s crony capitalism: he thinks the way to create jobs is for the government to pick winners and losers, and slide money to Obama’s bundlers and allies.

3) Obama’s attitude toward small business also reflects where he comes from, the “murky political world” of Chicago where politicians and felons are interchangeable. (Powerline)

It’s clear Obama and his statist minions hold us all in contempt

I’ve upset some fellow Right Blogistanis by dismissing their conspiracy theories about Obama purposefully destroying this country, but I’m rethinking my skepticism. Nobody can be that dumb and that incompetent. Could this really be a calculated strategy to tear us down and build us back up in their own statist image?

Either way, as long as this bumbling fool is in the White House and being advised by political manipulators and academic eggheads who’ve never held a real job, we are in real danger.

James Pethokoukis
Business Leaders Strike Back

Obama's Immigration Decree: The Ugly Details

Obama’s Dream Act gambit is a bald-faced political ploy to make up for his immigration enforcement sins

Obama’s imperial Dream Act decree is fraught with danger and rife with loopholes, not to mention that it deals with a murky world where facts cannot be established and documentation fabrication is rife. This is a perfect example of why our government was not designed to be run by dictatorial fiat. Open hearings where experts for all sides can testify is how policies like this must be enacted in a democratic republic.

Mickey Kaus provides damning details on Obama’s immigration diktat:

It also would give work permits to those who snuck across the border by themselves as teenagers. “Through no fault of their own” is a talking point for DREAM proselytizers, not an actual legal requirement. (Kausfiles – Maddening Details)

He goes on to explain that “Continuous residence” doesn’t mean what we think it does. Even those who returned home (wait, I thought this place was their home?) and then came back are still eligible. Also, criminals are not excluded so long as their jail stay was less than 90 days.

Please go read Micky Kaus’s excellent blog post on this. He is a superb blogger who marshals his facts carefully, and most importantly, he links everything so you can go investigate it yourself. Follow the links in his post and you’ll understand why the President’s actions are so damnable.

The Obama Administration has done a pretty good job on immigration

I want to give President Obama credit. About 1/3 of jobs filled in the US now use e-verify, and under the Obama administration, government immigration audits of companies has increased. I applaud this approach. I don’t like workplace raids, with armed federales storming workplaces like this is some third-world dictatorship.

E-Verify cracks down on identity theft and reuse of dead people’s social security numbers, which is how illegal immigrants get “legal” documentation. The immigration audits do the same kind of checks on a company’s personnel data. When an auditor finds a discrepancy, he asks to interview the employee in question. If the employee is using bogus data, he takes a powder. If it is a mistake, the employee comes forward and the situation is resolved.

This two-pronged approach is the intelligent and efficient way to go about it. Add in some smart border control and we would have the problem of illegal immigration contained. I’m not so adamant on The Fence. An 11 foot ladder overcomes a 10 foot fence. What I am for is to stop spying on Americans with all those drones and instead press them into service on the border. Add in sensors on the ground, command and control networks, National Guard augmentation, and you have something much more effective than a fence.

Once people know that they cannot get a job or social services using bogus credentials, they will stop coming here illegally. With the border secured and our immigration situation under control, we can then allow in people who want to work or visit relatives. Most importantly, they can enter and travel freely with dignity, as befits this land of the free and home of the brave.

Kausfiles – Dream a Little Dream

A Government Inquisition

You can disobey your church, but just try disobeying your government...

Many of us conservatives who also happen to be of a libertarian bent are conflicted over the whole gay marriage thing. I would prefer my church stay out of politics and focus on the Gospel, but what are they to do when a street punk who hijacked the state gets in their face and taunts them?

An ignorant woman named Lisa Miller wrote an ignorant, condescending column about America's Catholic bishops and their legal battles with Obama's government.  She presumes to speak for all Catholics, whom she characterizes as children, with the priests and bishops playing mommy and daddy.

Mommy and daddy are fighting, and the anguished children don’t know where to turn. (Lisa Miller)

Her family analogy, complete with arguing parents and frightened children is cloying and tedious

The conservative fathers — whose motto is “Do what I say” — grew ever more enraged at the doubters and ever more punitive. They directed their ire at any and all rule-breakers: pro-choice Catholics who wanted to take Communion (Lisa Miller)

Has she ever read The Acts of the Apostles?  It's full of Peter and Paul telling people, "Do what I say, imitate us, because we are imitating Christ."

Would Peter or Paul grant communion to an open abortion supporter, to avowed homosexuals? Has this unserious Obama girl read the New Testament epistles? There's a whole lot of “Do what I say” in there. That is what Christ commanded them to do!  Teach!

Bishops are teachers and moral guides. It’s their job to sort out right from wrong and lead the flock. You may disagree with the content of their message, and you are free to, but to criticize them for defending Church teaching is like criticizing the president for speaking for the US government.

It's a Liberty Thing...  Progressives Wouldn't Understand

She makes the common error of mixing two unrelated issues: The Bishops are standing for religious liberty, the ability to run their church as they see fit without government telling them what to do, and her response is to say that over 80% of Catholics see nothing wrong with birth control. Apples and oranges.  Churches are free to hold and act on their beliefs, no matter how “out of touch” a hierarchy may be with the flock. It is a matter between the leadership and the congregation, and the state had no standing in such an internal dispute.

Unlike Obama, the bishops can’t make you comply

Go ahead, disobey the bishops, get an abortion, go to Vermont and get married to your gay lover.  Torquemada is not going to drag you out of your house and twist your tits with red hot pincers. For you Protestants out there who disobey your conservative church leadership, stern puritan fathers are not going to whip you in the town square like it's 1648 and put you in the stocks for your sinfulness.

Unlike the bishops, President Obama has the full coercive force of the federal government behind his peremptory commands; you better obey!  Or you'll have a cloud of regulatory gnats swarming you, and the IRS climbing up your wazoo with 1000 watt searchlights.  Comply or die.

The bishops must rely solely on moral suasion. That is the crux of this religious liberty argument, be it gay marriage or birth control. The Church can preach against it and refuse to participate in it, but it can’t stop the state conducting gay marriages and handing out birth control. By the same 1st Amendment token, the state may not compel the church to sanction or participate in such activities.

If you can't see both sides of that constitutional coin, you are one-eye blind.

Obama's Vampire Socialism

Obama's propagandists are making much of Mitt Romney's venture capitalist days, blaming him for something that happened two years after he left the firm.  The press also doesn't like to talk about the fact that the people at Bain Capital who did fire all those workers are Obama campaign contributors!

President Obama refuses to return the campaign contributions from Bain Capital, and he spent an intimate evening in the black heart of evil, Wall Street, with millionaire investors of the private equity firm Blackstone.

President Obama last night spent time at the Park Avenue apartment of Blackstone Group (BX) president Tony James, to press the Wall Street flesh and collect $35,800 per plate. It came just hours after his campaign launched its first formal attack on Mitt Romney's record running Bain Capital -- a private equity firm not terribly dissimilar from Blackstone. Talk about awkward! (CNN)

Blatant hypocrisy aside (politics runs on BS and hypocrisy, so we shouldn't be shocked by it), Marc Thiessen points out that Obama has a scandalous Public Equity Problem:

Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions. (WaPo)

The author goes on to total up the billions in failed government investments, all on the backs of We The Taxpayers. Were these merit-based loans, as the president says, or were they political payoffs?

But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, “Throw Them All Out,” fully 71 percent of the Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to “individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.” Collectively, these Obama cronies raised $457,834 for his campaign, and they were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.35 billion. 

Obama said this week it’s not the president’s job “to make a lot of money for investors.” Well, he sure seems to have made a lot of (taxpayer) money for investors in his political machine. (WaPo)

Obama's Presidency in Pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Here's three thousand and some...

Even by European PIIG standards, our spending is out of control...

Weekly Standard

Obama Beats Bush! Racks up same amount of debt as Bush, but in half the time!

CBS News

(CBS News) The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama's three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.

The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.

The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush's last day in office, which coincided with President Obama's first day.

Obama's "recovery" is the worst on record.  He is still over a million jobs short of just breaking even...

CNN

From the labor market's height in January 2008 to its bottom in February 2010, 8.8 million jobs were cut, and the unemployment rate soared as high as 10% in October 2009.

But only about half of those job losses -- or 4.3 million -- happened under his watch. (CNN)

The only reason unemployment isn't in double digits is because the dismal Obama economy has discouraged over 3.5 million Americans, leading them to completely abandon the job market.

The percentage of Americans 16 and older who are working or looking for work fell to 63.6 percent, the lowest since 1981. For men, the so-called "labor force participation rate" is at 70 percent. That's the lowest since the government started keeping records in 1948. (Yahoo)

And for a bonus, here's a reminder of what a big loser GM was for the taxpayer. Jeffrey Dimon's got nothing on Obama.  The Car Czar in Chief spent $100 billion to save a $34 Billion car company.  And GM still hasn't paid us back.

Obama Pushes False GM Success Story
WSJ - The Other GM Bailout

Government: No Common Sense & No Compassion

¡Adelante Comandante!

"We can't go back to the same policies that got us into this mess. We've got to move forward," -- President Obama

Amen to that! President Obama is right: We can’t go back to his old, failed way of doing things. Government must stop backstopping crony crapitalists that take our money and blow it. GM still owes us tens of billions and will never pay it back, Solyndra and all those green companies and battery makers going belly-up, all at taxpayer expense, banks writing bad loans because the government promised to underwrite them...

State-sponsored crony crapitalism has failed. Time to try free-market capitalism, and it starts with government getting the hell out of the marketplace.  Picking winners and losers with our tax dollars is a thinly disguised reward for the politically well-connected.

Capitalism made us prosperous, not government. Yes, government provided the infrastructure and the legal framework necessary for free markets to flourish, and we need government for that. But government has not made one poor person rich. Government programs are a palliative at best; a disincentive at worst.

"Standard Procedures"

A TSA victim, describing that agency bravely stamping out a terror threat from her 4 year old granddaughter, summed it up perfectly:

"There was no common sense and there was no compassion" (TSA Defends Patdown of 4-Year-Old)

That describes government: No compassion and no common sense. It is a machine; a clanking soulless beast with claws and hooks where it’s hands should be, and wrecking balls for feet, smashing all in its path. Government statements after the latest rape and grope outrage stating that the incident was reviewed and the agents were following “standard procedure” only indicts our government further.  I'll leave aside the obvious comparisons to Lt Calley and "just following orders."

"Standard Procedure" is stupid procedure and it's legal cover for unthinking government slugs to practice all manner of predations upon us.

H/T: Obama’s New Economy is the Problem

Obama: Destroyer of Jobs and Wealth

Obama & Dimon:  Only one knows what he's doing

People are howling over JP Morgan’s Egregious loss, blowing two billion last quarter.  Has anyone thought to check how much the federal government loses every day?  JP Morgan is profitable.  When was the last time government (any government!) made a profit?

JP Morgan's small investment failure was a private enterprise losing private money. I wonder if everyone understands that? Has collectivism so seeped into our consciousness that people see private money as government’s, or as the collective “ours?”

There is a government tie-in. Ben Bernanke encourages this irresponsibility by shoveling free government money to these bigtime gamblers:

Until Uncle Sam’s CEO, President Obama, and its CFO, Ben Bernanke, realize that the policies they have put into place have juiced the financials while doing very, very little for the rest of the economy, no amount of regulation will keep bankers from taking out-size risks in hopes of outsize rewards, with taxpayers as the safety net. (NY Post)

This is what smart people do with cheap money; they play like there’s no downside, because there isn’t. If Dimon, the whiz kid trader who did this, and the leadership of JP Morgan had to make up the loss personally, this kind of recklessness would end immediately.

Obama’s Losses are Much Bigger

Also, at least JP Morgan fired fired somebody over it. When does that happen in government? Obama has lost over $2.5 billion on “green energy” “investments,” and we have nothing to show for all that stimulus money besides better armed Mexican drug gangs.  Instead of focusing on taxpayer money being flushed down the toilet so Obama can reward his crony crapitalist campaign contributors, people instead choose to focus on a private bank losing private money.

To add to the ridiculousness of it all, Obama now attacks Romney for failure to save a steel mill and losing 700 jobs, when Obama threw tens of thousands out of work when he appropriated the auto industry. The pathetic attack on Romney is easily refuted:

According to the US Labor Department, there were almost 17.3 million jobs in manufacturing in December 2000. [...]  When Obama took office in 2009, there were slightly over 13.4 million. As of December 2011, there were about 11.8 million. (Truth Out)

So the liberal bottom line here seems to be that when capitalism causes a loss, it’s an evil, greedy bastardy; but when government does it is just an innocent “oopsy!”

But what do you expect from a party that confers minority status on a rich white Ivy League professor? They also jumped the gun in deeming Bill Clinton the first black president. Since that title was already taken, Obama has to resign himself to being the First Gay President.

Liberalism in action folks! You just can’t make this stuff up…

Byron York – Romney Response
What Jamie Dimon Didn’t Tell You

Why Romney Could Beat Obama

When conservatives march out old, stale issues like Obama and his family sitting in Reverend Wright’s Church of God Damn America for two decades, the liberal cognoscenti in the press quickly bat them down as trafficking in stale, trifling irrelevancies.

But when Obama’s Ploofian Axlerods dust off old stories about Mitt Romney strapping the family pooch to the top of the old station wagon, the left treats it as pure gold.

Here’s the Chicago way...

In January Obama adviser David Axelrod--not to be confused with Axelrod, the Flying A Dog--blew a dog whistle. He tweeted a photo of the president with Bo, the White House canine, in what appears to be the back seat of a limousine. Axelrod's comment: "How loving owners transport their dogs." (WSJ)

Just as the anti-Mitt meme was gaining steam for the 2012 campaign season, alert conservative pundit Jim Treacher pointed out that a young Barry Obama had eaten dog meat (Obama mentions it in his book). Well, the Romney Death Star swooped down and cast a giant shadow over the shaken Obamunists, firing this photon shot over the bow…

Romney aide Erich Fehrnstrom got into the act last night, retweeting Axelrod's Obama-Bo snapshot from January with the comment: "In retrospect, a chilling photo." (WSJ)

Even better, Obama’s mutt munching has spawned some funny jokes (all from WSJ)

#ObamaDogRecipes: Yorkshire terrier pudding, mutt chop, Pekingese duck, bichon frisee salad, beagle with cream cheese, pure bread.

"So, Mr. President, where shall we go to eat?" "I know a great Spot."

If you want a friend in Washington, don't eat him (credit to Jim Geraghty).

Happiness is a warm puppy, with a side of fries.

The Chicago gang brought a gun to the fight, and the Romney brigade shot them in the face with a cannon. Tee hee hee…

This comes on the heels of the left shooting themselves in the face fighting the phony “War on Women.” Vinegar-laced harridan Hilary Rosen declared that Ann Romney, a mother of five, had never worked a day in her life, touching off a very unwelcomed “War on Mommies.” Obama’s minions quickly threw her under the campaign bus, giving Romney another notch in his gunbelt.

A charitable reading of Rosen’s comments mostly exonerates her of intentional malice, but the left never cuts such slack to the hated rightwingers, so what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The Romney campaign has stuffed the Obama-bots twice in the past two weeks, and the main event hasn’t even kicked off yet.

I’m looking forward to Campaign 2012.

(R) “Romney” or “Ryan?”

Paul Ryan has unveiled his latest budget, and he’s the only adult in the room, bringing little Barry, Nancy, Harry and their fellow whining naifs in the press to tears by telling them No. Money doesn’t grow on trees.

Democrats, incoherent and out of ideas, hate Ryan because he proposes to dismantle their progressive machinery that has destroyed tens of trillions in wealth and produced $15 trillion in debt and over $50 trillion in future unfunded liabilities. The Buffett Millionaire Tax they propose as a panacea would only raise $31 billion, one-tenth of 1% of the federal budget (if we could get the rich to stand still while government ... taxes them). There ain’t enough tax money to pay for all of this. 100% taxation won’t cover it.

“I think we’ve seen pretty clearly that what this proposal does not do is take the serious approach to getting our fiscal house in order that everyone who’s serious about this issue says you have to take,” spokesman Jay Carney said. (Real Clear Politics)

The White House’s carnie barker in horn-rimmed eyeglasses should be shouting that at his own party. They’ve been on an unbudgeted free-wheeling spending binge for the past three years

We can fix this on our terms, while we still control our destiny, or we can wait until we are like the decrepit Soviet Union or today’s Greece, sold into penury and helplessly prostrate before the international bankers and enemy nations eager for our humiliating comeuppance.

Ryan shows a way out. Not the only way, but he’s the only one with a detailed plan that has been scored and analyzed. The Democrats are intellectually bereft; still hawking last century’s snake oil. Banking regulations failed? Pile on more regulations! Too much debt? We’ll spend our way out! It’s madness.

Democrats Protest Reality

Ryan’s gimlet-eyed analysis of the numbers sends fantasy land liberals into spasmodic paroxysms, leaving Democrat apparatchiks like Gene Sperling raging about “the tyranny of math.” Yes Gene, reality can be a tyrant to little children who stamp their feet demanding that unicorns poop rainbow-colored marshmallows from heaven.

All the left has left is scare tactics, while using “look over here!” tactics to keep our focus off of the looming debt-induced crash. Kevin Drum harps weakly on Ryan’s attempt to hold spending to 19% of GDP, but even that is not a big enough cut. We historically collect around 17% in good time and bad, high tax rates or low tax rates, so government budgeting should revolve around that iron law reality.

Dana Milbank makes the bald-faced case of government as a giant teat, and God forbid we try to wean anyone off of it. The children in the candy store never stop to contemplate that mommy and daddy are borrowing from China to pay for it all, and that it can’t go on forever. They love preaching environmental sustainability, which is a chimera because all natural resources are finite, while simultaneously believing in an eternal fountain of money to pay for their dreams and schemes.

Putting aside all the sturm und drang, here is the cold reality of Ryans “draconian” Plan…

By 2022, under the Ryan Path, debt as a share of GDP would be 62.3% vs. a projected 73.2% in 2012. Under the Obama budget, debt as a share of GDP would be 76.3% in 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Over that period, the Ryan Path would spend $5.3 trillion less than the Obama budget.

Longer term, the differences between the Ryan Path and the Obama budget are even starker. By 2030, debt-to-GDP would be 53% under Ryan, 128% under Obama. By 2040, debt-to-GDP would be 38% under Ryan, 194% under Obama. By 2050, debt-to-GDP would be 10% under Ryan, over 200% under Obama—assuming that under the Obama scenario, the economy hasn’t collapsed. (Pethokoukis)

Meanwhile, Obama and Pelosicrats have offered...  Nothing.

Breitbart's Obama Expose'

Lefties like Ducky are gleefully hiking their skirts, squatting down and tinkling on Andrew Breitbart’s grave. Don’t blame them, they are just following Commandante O’s exhortation to “punish your enemies.”

The left is all giddy and mocking because Breitbart's Obama Expose dropped no bombshells. I must agree, but two things stood out for me.





Imagine a President with a Neo-Nazi Past...

First, the young Obama belonged to Harvard’s Whitey Haters Club, sponsored by guilty white liberals. That helps put Michelle’s “For the first time in my life I'm proud of my country” comment into context, doesn’t it?

Secondly, The President remained an acolyte of a man who believes in a conspiracy of white people to sell black people into slavery to martians in exchange for space gold which will pay off the national debt. OK, it’s just an allegory, but the neo-Marxist theory it is founded upon is very real, and it ties in nicely with Minister Loogie Farrakhan’s white devil theories.

So yeah, there’s nothing damning in there, and I wish it had come four years ago. I think it is useful for voters to see the Marxist sewer our president has voluntarily marinated himself in. From Harvard to Chicago, it was radical racial resentment politics.

Critical Race Cultist

This was not a youthful infatuation with radicalism. Barack Obama was 30 years old in that video of him at Harvard Law School. Much too old to naively fall under the spell of a charismatic professor. He went willingly to ingest all that crap Professor Derrick Bell and fellow travelers were spewing.

The question remains, did Barack Hussein Obama really believe all that stuff, or did he just use it to gain street cred?  Either way, like sitting in Reverend Wright's Church of God Damn America for 20 years, it doesn't speak well of him.

I was much younger than that when I found myself stationed in Central America, and even at a tender age I knew communism was no good. I also unconsciously realized that although we still have racists among us, we are not a racist country.  I looked around and I saw colonels, generals and senior enlisted people of all races and colors in charge of important stuff and issuing orders to white people. I also inherently realized that if "The System" was rigged, the Powers That Be did a piss poor job of keeping the minorities from jumping the turnstiles...

Obama Shoots Crony Capitalism Craps

The FCC’s bungling of the Lightsquared fiasco is exhibit A of what can happen when government is so fat and sloppy and braindead that one flabby arm doesn’t know what the other one is doing. They can't even get the crony crapitalist corruption right.

For those who haven’t been following it, the FCC greenlighted Lightsquared’s wireless broadband plan, which ended up stepping on the GPS signals that are fundamental to orderly operation of our society, to include airline navigation.

How did this happen?

How one U.S. government agency could approve a business plan that jeopardizes a public utility other government entities consider vital to safety and security, not to mention the economy, is the key question that has lurked behind the battle between LightSquared and the GPS industry since it ignited in earnest a year ago. (Aviation Week)

Here’s how!

The answer emerging from countless legal filings and Congressional hearings is that the government itself is the villain of the piece, the absence of collaboration between agencies allowing one to act without consulting the others. In bypassing its normal processes to expedite approval of LightSquared’s plan to use its mobile satellite service frequencies for a terrestrial broadband wireless network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) left its fellow Defense and Transportation Departments, Homeland Security and others, scrambling to protect GPS signals on which they now depend. (Aviation Week)

And why did the FCC move so quickly and stupidly?

Critics were quick to point out close personal and political links between President Barack Obama, FCC chairman Julian Genachowski and hedge-fund manager Philip Falcone, LightSquared’s majority owner. (Aviation Week)

As another Obama scandal unfolds, the FCC is running from Lightsquared like a scalded dog and the company's CEO has resigned in disgrace.  Meanwhile, another Obama-Approved Solar company is going under, and GM's sales of Obama's Chevy Dolt are flatter than a pancake, causing layoffs:

General Motors Co. announced the temporary suspension of Chevrolet Volt production and the layoffs of 1300 employees, as the company is cutting Volt manufacturing to meet lower-than-expected demand for the electric cars.

The car company had hoped to sell 45,000 Chevy Volts in America this year, according to the Detrot News, but has only sold about 1,626 over the first two months of 2012. (Examiner)

Government Motors expected to sell 45,000 battery-powered crapboxes?  What are they smoking?

This on top of Obama shutting down drilling, closing over 100 coal-fired power plants, harassing the fossil fuels industry while flushing taxpayer money down the green energy toilet...  Add in devaluation of the dollar, and we have an energy crisis brewing, as the price for driving our cars and powering our homes keep climbing.  All thanks to government-induced scarcity.

Had enough of Obama's venture socialism yet?

US Government Moves to Protect GPS
No Practical Way to Fix Lightsquared GPS Problem

Obama Declares Jihad on the Catholic Church

Obama Cult "O Loko Haram"

Obama’s Holy War

Two years ago when Obamacare ordered the Catholic Church to include birth control and abortions in its health care plans, the nation’s Catholic Bishops threatened to shut down or sell off all hospitals, and it appeared that the threat had staved off our imperial government.

Catholic hospitals are an important component of our nation’s health care system, providing the only source of medical care in some areas, and only a fool would want to see them shut down.  That was the prevailing wisdom at the time.

Now, I believe that thinking was wrong, and it appears that the Obamistas do want them shut down, provoking a crisis and providing a pretext for more government intervention.  This is about the state breaking one more private institution to its will.  Progressivism is an inexorable march to absolute state control, and this is just the next step.

What’s Obama’s end game?

Employers that furnish health insurance have to cover it. But employers don't have to furnish health insurance -- and some of those with a religious mission may decide not to. When the District of Columbia passed a law that forced Catholic Charities to provide medical insurance to the same-sex partners of its employees, the agency elected to simply drop coverage for spouses.

Anyone left without health insurance under the administration's rule can go to new state-run health insurance exchanges to buy individual policies. But here again, the administration rejects freedom of conscience. The only policies available will include coverage for contraceptives -- including those the church regards as "abortion drugs" -- and sterilization. (Steve Chapman)

The end game is to herd more human cattle and sheeple into the Obamacare box canyon, while trampling our old fashioned morals and ushering in a new era of progressive utilitarianism, freed from fusty shibboleths like human dignity and sanctity of life.

And the Catholic Church, which snuggles up to big government at every opportunity instead of preaching the Catholic doctrine of Subsidiarity, should learn a lesson from all of this:

Get in bed with Uncle Sam and don't be surprised if you get more than a good night's sleep  -- Ronald Reagan

Contraception Mandate Outrages Religious Groups

With GOP Help, Obama Confident of Reelection

I'm not talking about the the president's STFU speech that kicked off his reelection campaign last night. Someone pulling a Joe Wilson by shouting "You Lie!" would have been gratuitously stating the obvious.

Yeah, he got off some good one-liners, like how he wants to create jobs, and his deadpanned "everyone plays by the same set of rules" jape had 'em rolling in the aisles.  Believe it or not, there still are some boobs on the left who actually believe that crap...

But critics believe he was serious when he rolled out his proposal to squeeze the nation's wealthy non-liberals in giant California wine presses until every last drop of filthy lucre is drained from their lifeless husks.

So far the GOP is on track to reelect Obama...

Newt’s now like one of those nuked Japanese film creatures that not only was not destroyed but is back, bigger, badder and more cheesed off than ever.

Gingrich alone finally figured out that if it’s red meat that’s wanted, you might as well rip chunks of it from the flesh of the unctuous moderators and throw it right at the ravenous studio audience. (Michael Walsh)

Many of my conservative friends are dying to see Newt take apart Obama face-to-face in a presidential debate but it aint.  gonna.  happen.

If Newt wins, which is what the press wants, and if Obama decides to debate him (No rule says he has to, and it's easy to invent a few crises as a dodge. Hell, Obama's entire administration has been one long crisis)... 

 OK, to start again, if there is a debate, the rules will be so gentlemen's kabuki, no looking at one another or addressing one another, it will be a big flop, a Newtus Interruptus that leaves rightwingers deflated, Newt looking his old churlish self, and Obama emerging more presidential than ever.

Newt is a volatile admixture of kooky ideas, phony conservative populism and outsize self-regard. He is a rambling, voluble mountain of operatic bloviating rhetoric, with hot steam and progressive demiurges straining just below the surface, building up pressure at the certainty of an eventual explosive escape.

Newt is an over-inflated hot air balloon, and the fire is raging.  Team Obama is just waiting for the opportune moment to needle him and enjoy the spectacular explosion.

Romney is a board-stiff middle manager full of platitudinous twaddle and Ron Paul's coalition of neo-nazis, dope smokers, AOW rabble and the curiously confused will never hold together. Oh, yeah, and then there's that Santorum guy, what's his name...?

But still...

We may end up saddled with a half-assed presidential candidate, but the dems’ problems are legion.  First and foremost, they are stuck with the worst president in the history of the United States. Having Gaffmaster Joe on his crew doesn’t help matters. Everybody hates Obamacare, and finally people are waking up to his using the constitution as toilet paper. Even legal scholars in his fan club think his recess appointments could be overturned by a judge.

So, we're facing a craptacular election year, and we'll all be sick of politics and we'll all hate each other by the time it's all over.  That's what politics does, and state-sponsored progressivism that confiscates it all, throws it in a public pot and encourages us to fight over it just makes the rancor extra spicy.

Biofuels Bomb

Supporting Obama Pays Off...

Navy's Big Biofuels Bet: 450,000 Gallons at Four Times the Price of Oil

The Navy just signed deals to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels — arguably the biggest purchase of its kind in U.S. government history. The purchase is a significant step for Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ plans to transform the service into an energy-efficient fleet. But at approximately $15 per gallon — nearly four times the price of traditional fuel — the new fuels won’t come cheap. (Wired)

There is so much wrong with that statement. First, if Bush and Rummy had handed a lucrative deal like this to Halliburton, liberals would be screaming "fraud, waste and abuse!"  Second, biofuels are less energy-efficient than fossil fuels, and this big purchase is not a "bet;" it is flushing taxpayer money down the toilet. Finally it is an expensive payoff to the FOOs (Friends of Obama).

This doesn't even rise to the level of Crony Crapitalism. It is bald-faced political patronage.  Chicago Democrat Machine politics practiced by the crooked politician from Crook Country, Barack Hussein Obama. He's an upscale Richard Nixon for the 21st century. Bebe Rebozo - Tony Rezko...

Obama does have one up on Nixon. Tricky Dick's corruption did not make him a millionaire.

But Wait!  There's More!

As they say on those cheesy tv commercials, "but wait, there's more!" Progressives are continually drooling over the prospect of grabbing other people's stuff. You can now add land grabbing to their long list of confiscatory lust that includes liberty limitation, money confiscation and gun grabbing...

Green Energy's Manifest Destiny

The rapacious Big Biofuels industry, world governments firmly in it's back pocket, is now taking direct aim at the little brown people standing in its way.

Covering a full decade of land deals from 2000 to 2010 in the global south and considering the acquisition of more than 200 million hectares of land over that period (equivalent to more than eight times the size of the UK), ILC’s new report suggests that 78 per cent of deals were for agricultural purposes, of which three-quarters were for biofuel production.

The new research also indicates that national elite firms play a greater role in the process of land-grabbing than previously indicated. While large land deals can create opportunities for developing countries , they are more likely to cause problems for the poorest members of society, who often lose access to land and resources that are essential to their livelihoods. (Biofuels Grab Half of Land Deals in Developed World)

So, you sanctimonious green progressives, consider this the next time you're tootling around in your green hybrid crapbox, all puffed up with satisfied self-righteousness...

“Under current conditions, large-scale land deals threaten the rights and livelihoods of poor rural communities and especially women,” says report lead author Dr Ward Anseeuw of the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development, CIRAD. (Biofuels Grab Half of Land Deals in Developed World)

All of this deforestation, destruction and theft of poor people's land is brought to you by your progressive federal government teamed with like-minded global progressives.  With progress like this, who needs enemies?

The King's "New Socialism" Speech

President Obama is a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen.*

In Kansas, Obama railed against nefarious forces …

“They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years,” Obama said of the GOP. “And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Just who are the people who believe this? I don’t know any. Playing by your own rules is perfectly ok in your own domain, but it has no place in a free marketplace. Free market capitalism is predicated upon a known set of rules that everyone must follow. You can’t steal from others or murder your opponents, for example. You can’t lie to your business partners or customers. And what specific policies “stack the deck against middle-class Americans?” Give us specifics!

Mickey Kaus (America's smartest liberal) homed in on Obama’s attempt to shame corporations into what Kaus calls patriotic charity: staying here and hiring people even if you have to lose money or forgo greater profits or productivity gains to do it:

A patriotic Charity Economy is a conveyor belt to corporatism!

After all, what happens when the factory of celebrated businessman X who recognizes his patriotic obligation to employ Americans at $20 an hour is faced with competition from uncelebrated, selfish businessman Y who employs Chinese ex-peasants at $2 an hour? Businessman X is going to need a “partnership” with government, sort of a pre-bailout bailout. Obama doesn’t seem to have a problem with this sort of cozy arrangment. (Kaus – Obama’s Charity Capitalism)

An Unfair Presidency

Obama compared capital gains tax apples to personal income tax oranges, excoriating greedy CEOs for paying less taxes than their secretaries (a blatant lie).

He decried a system of laws that does not treat everyone equally, as his administration favors certain companies (Solyndra, GM) over others.

He hectored companies for using modern technology like ATMs, digital phone switches and that newfangled contraption known as the internet, while his armed agents raid workplaces and he shuts down job-creating factories and pipelines.  And then he taunts his pornographic lover Big Biz for not hiring. The man is a walking, talking BS machine.

But by Obama's own measure, the country has gotten more "fair." The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels. (IBD)

Here’s the kicker:

the only winners since Obama took office have been corporations (profits are up 68%) and Wall Street investors (the Dow's up more than 45%). The rest of the country has gotten the shaft. (IBD)

I’d like to see him try to get reelected running on that...

As Socrates would say, let’s define our terms

Just what exactly is “fair?” Or a better question, what specifically is unfair here in the US? Wage disparity? Unequal outcomes? Can it be traced back to a root cause?

East coast Massachusetts kids named Kennedy have about a 100% chance of going to an Ivy League school, regardless of how dull they may be. Silverfiddle kids have about zero chance. Is that fair? Who knows? Who cares? It’s all a waste of time. We are individuals, our needs and wants are unique, and our efforts produce disparate and varied outcomes.

Now, if we find that a certain class of people is rounding up other people and kicking them and their progeny down a hole so as to keep them from pursuing their American dream, that would be unfair. I don’t see that happening in this country. We are not all born into identical circumstances, so equalization would be quite a task. Everywhere it’s been tried, those on top were dragged down, rather than those on the low end being elevated.

Rather than all this inflated fascistic rhetoric designed to whip the proles into a revolutionary frenzy, how about restoring the rule of law? Forcing Big Banking and Corporate America off of the government teat? How about getting the federal government’s snout out of every corner of our lives and allowing us to solve our problems at the lowest level?

Even the venerable bastion of corporate statism, The Washington Post, gave Obama’s Robespierre acid trip flashback in Kansas three Pinocchios for its bald-faced dishonesty.

* - William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith

Further Reading:
Harsanyi – Obama vs Capitalism
NY Times – Obama Tongue Bath
IBD - A Lesson in Fairness for Obama
Obama Urges Fair Play

Barry Plays Dress Up, Again

We're all laughing at Obama

First, Obama wanted to be Abraham Lincoln when he grew up. Then he laughably compared himself to Ronald Reagan. Now he’s playing dress-up again, this time as the Rough Rider, Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt was a tough, self-made man who was forever seeking out ways to challenge himself physically and mentally. He was a conservationist, a crime fighter and war veteran. Barack Obama is an effete metrosexual who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter.

A banker grandmother who funded his private schooling, an Ivy League education paid for by others, a political career in the corrupt Chicago sewer, where well-connected crooks took care of the competition for him…

Teddy Roosevelt, born into wealth, went out west to toughen himself up, fought in the Spanish American war, and once sparred with a professional prizefighter, damaging his eyesight in the process. The closest Obama has come to matching TR’s impressive tough guy record is occupying a bank lobby and fighting for more government money for the various agitation groups he was a community organizer for.

Obama’s only accomplishment is hoodwinking enough Americans to vote for him by promising billowy nebulae of Hope and Change and promising transformative leadership. He hasn’t led and he hasn’t been transformative. Those on the disappointed left will tell you he's George Bush without the flight suit.

Obama and the Pelosicrats serve up these absurd and ridiculous comparisons because it’s all they’ve got. No economic freedom, no hope, no change, no jobs; just more of the same with a corrupt Chicago spin. 

 

Further Reading:

Obama's no Lincoln

Barack Obama is no Harry Truman

Mr Obama, you're no Ronald Reagan

Mr Obama, You're No Reagan!

Deroy Murdoch, a most astute man, does us a favor by assembling a concise catalog of Obama's economic blunders...

"Under Obama, federal spending has risen from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product to 25.3 percent, Washington’s largest slice of apple pie since 1945."

"Obama’s spend-o-rama includes federally funded green jobs that Boskin dismisses as “the leprechaun economy.” The apotheosis of this blarney was last month’s $1.2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee to SunPower Corporation of Richmond, California. Its solar-equipment project promises 15 permanent positions. Cost per job-created: a staggering $80 million." (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

Reagan's Recovery vs. Obama's Sagging Non-Recovery

Boskin compared snapshots of Obama’s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recoveries, 27 months after each downturn hit bottom.

In September 2011, on Obama’s watch, non-farm payrolls had grown 0.6 percent, yielding 841,000 jobs since June 2009.

Under the tax-cutting, business-boosting Reagan, non-agricultural employment swelled 8.7 percent, generating 7.7 million new jobs. (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

How Mr. Volker Would Fix It

Reading that comparison reminded me how Obama, to much fanfare, brought the venerable Paul Volker on-board as a convenient counter-weight to his socialist advisers who were discomfiting those serious people not in a hopium-induced daze those first heady days of the Obama Presidency.

It calmed people down, and then Obama proceeded to completely ignore the former Fed Chair who tamed Carter's dreaded stagflation and ushered in the historically-unprecedented Reagan economic boom. Volker has offered his advice on how to fix this mess. It's too wonky to go into here, but it involved breaking up anyone too big to fail, no more government underwriting Wall Street gamblers, putting the different financial functions into their own boxes and jailing those who stray, among other things. You can read the whole thing here: Volker's Advice.

Free Market Ideas for Increasing Employment

For the libertarians among us, taking advice from a former Fed Chairman just won't do, so Reason Magazine has an article entitled Get a Job! that is chock full of free-market remedies sure to get people back to work.

The ideas are too simple-minded and timeless for the progressive eggheads powering Obama's economic failure: Less regulations, less government intervention in the marketplace, no more government bureaucrats picking winners and losers...

Free marketeers know that government cannot power the recovery.  The path to economic success begins with economic freedom. Bill Frezza explains:

Do you sometimes wonder why economists are accorded such respect and influence given the fact that they claim knowledge over the unknowable, promote theories that are untestable, and make forecasts for which they are never held accountable? Isn’t that the definition of a witch doctor?

If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid. But at least they would get to visit the White House.

This gets to the heart of why we should take all macro economic advice with a grain of salt.  It is a soft science, useful for gaining insight, but incapable of predicting market behavior.  Government-planned economies fail, free markets succeed. 

Have you ever watched engineers from different schools argue on Sunday morning talk shows about the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle or Ohm’s Law? No? Yet economists, like rival witch doctors, get red in the face promoting diametrically opposed economic remedies, sometimes sharing Nobel Prizes in the same year for theories that directly contradict each other. Take $2 trillion and call me in the morning. (Bill Frezza - Fundamental Fallacies of Macro Economics)

Obama's "Jobs" Program: Government Money is Stupid Money

Money taken out of the economy via taxation is a net negative.  Beyond infrastructure and the enumerated constitutional duties, government does not and cannot spend your money more efficiently that you can yourself.  

Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat trying to unseat Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, delivered a tart message with dictatorial undertones to the nation's greedy rich:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . -- Elizabeth Warren

Despite such lectures by Ivy League professors who enjoy burning strawmen, conservatives are not anti-government nor anti-tax. It's all about proportion. Famed economist Henry Hazlitt says it best:

A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much. The kind of government services then supplied in return, which among other things safeguard production itself, more than compensate for this. (Henry Hazlitt)

If government would limit itself to just funding that infrastructure liberals continually blather on about, we would not be having these arguments, and we would not be mired in this economic morass.

Elizabeth Warren's factory owners benefit not at all from the cawing aviary of special interest rent-seekers now roosting in thousands of government agencies and gobbling billions of dollars in taxpayer contributions.    Also, Warren's factory owner, along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and even famous tax dodger Warren Buffet, paid far more for those roads than did the other 99% of America.

Taxes Kill Economic Activity

we took a look at British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's still new (2011) program of increased taxes directed at oil and gas companies operating in the North Sea. Amazingly, the chancellor's tax hike took a 52% year-over-year chunk out of the area's second-quarter drilling activity. (The Fastest Way – David Lee Smith)

According to the author, Global consultant Woods Mackenzie estimates Obama’s proposed tax and regulation on the gas and oil industry “would lop off about 700,000 barrels a day of oil-equivalent production at a cost of some 170,000 industry jobs.”

Let's Go All The Way

Obama wants to claw back the special exemptions, loopholes and tax breaks gas and oil lobbyists have cajoled and bribed out of congress.  Fine. But don't stop there. Do it across the board. Make GM, their union partners in crime, and Wall Street welfare queens give us back the tens and hundreds of billions in taxpayer money they've absconded with.

No loopholes, no special deals for any group. If the Obamacrats are not willing to do this, then they are not serious, but are instead demagoguing the issue for naked partisan gain.

It's a simple calculus:

When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only 60 cents of every dollar it gains, [...] its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson)

A better approach is to categorically and unapologetically remove all government loans, subsidies, tax breaks, loopholes and special exceptions. Period. Again, Henry Hazlitt explains:

Each private lender risks his own funds. [...] When people risk their own funds they are usually careful in their investigations to determine the adequacy of the assets pledged and the business acumen and honesty of the borrower.

But the government almost invariably operates by different standards. The whole argument for its entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders.

This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people's money (the taxpayers') that private lenders will not take with their own money. (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson)

And that is the crux of the problem, and that is why private sector spending is inherently more efficient than government spending.

Obama blew a trillion dollars and we've got nothing to show for it but more economic misery.  We would be stupid to give him one more dime, let alone another $500 billion.

Obama's Scorched Earth Campaign

President Obama took his classless act on the road, making political hay out of the catastrophic wildfires in Texas...

Without mentioning him by name Obama mocked Perry as "a governor whose state is on fire, denying climate change." (AP News)

A US president mocking a governor whose state is a disaster area because of wildfires (which also occurred before the “global warming” era) is unprecedented. President Obama is a low-class, disgusting Chicago machine pol.

Imagine President Bush mocking New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco after Hurricane Katrina:

"… a governor and a mayor who still believe in nanny-state liberalism, when it’s bred generations of people so benumbed by government assistance they no longer have the good sense to get out of the way of a hurricane! he he heh...”

This is not a man who is president of all Americans and unites us. This is a cornered, cracked-out street punk fearful of going down, wildly swinging iron bars at his enemies and dividing us so he and his gang can continue to dominate the government special interest trade.

It’s all about rescuing the progressive agenda

ATHERTON, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama charged Sunday that the GOP vision of government would "fundamentally cripple America," as he tried out his newly combative message on the liberal West Coast.

No, Mr. President, you’re confused...

 The “GOP vision” if guided by the tea parties, would fundamentally cripple the progressive feral beast that has wiped its ass with the constitution, suborned the federal government, and is now engorging itself on more and more of our tax dollars and our freedoms. That is what we set out to “fundamentally cripple,” and America will be much the better once we get it done.

Progressives make an arrogant mistake: Equating Government with America

Their doctrinaire religion inextricably entwines the two, conflating them into one pseudo-patriotic package. It's a neat trick that allows them to slap an American flag on their horrible statist creature and then damn to hell anyone who speaks heresy against it.

It's not working anymore. Americans are turning againt the soulless progressive beast.

The Lyin' King, Starring Barack Obama

Anyone who believes a plumber pays more in taxes than a billionaire is probably also dumb enough to vote for Barack Obama. 






It's going to get worse before it gets better...

Even Obama's people are saying unemployment will not go down before the 2012 election, and I believe them. Removing $1.5 trillion from the economy is not the way to grow jobs.  That's according to Reaganomics as well as John Maynard Keynes.  The president is economically illiterate and his policies are an incoherent clash of careening desperation and overheated class warfare populism, all fueled by crony crapitalism.

Obama Will Run in 2012

Don't believe the speculation that Obama may go quietly into that good night and make way for another Dem candidate.  He's young and America is not yet completely broken.

President Obama is an effete liberal metrosexual who's "down with the struggle" community organizer persona is just a pose.  He's never been in a fight in his entire life, other than the time he and  his gay Muslim "porn 'stash" roomate both discovered a roach under the sofa cushion, and the room broke out into a cocaine-frenzied pillow fight.

Regardless, he ain't giving up his current gig without a global-billionaire-funded fight (where others do the dirty work.)

But anyway...  Greece will default, and who's in and who's out of the Eurozone won't really matter; Germany will end up on top...  It's gonna be ugly.

We here in the US will continue sliding sideways, but I think we'll come out OK, even after the ten years or so of misery and chaos we are facing.  For the most part, we still know how to take care of ourselves, our kinfolk and our neighbors; Those who do not should probably partner up with that Spanish-speaking family down the street.  Where they came from, you had to have some basic survival skills or you'd end up dead.

Our fundamentals are better than Europe's, and I really do remain optimistic that no matter how bad it gets, riots and all the rest, we will make it through, if only because North America (thanks in no small part to Canada) will remain fertile ground for capital, especially when compared to the rest of the world.  

China?

Are you kidding?  Their one-child policy has made China a dead man walking.  And the men not dying will not be able to find a woman, because the poor little commies aborted way more little girls than little boys.

Their environment is a nightmarish catastrophe bubbling just below the surface.  Hundreds of millions are still mired in poverty.  Smaller countries chafe at their role as The Middle Kingdom's slave state, while other nations find ways to undercut them with cheaper labor, just as China did to the developed world.  China will get old before it gets rich.

The Collapse Won't be Pretty
 
The Chinese Communist Politburo still nurtures the illusion that they can ride the beast, doling out freedom with an eyedropper.  Good luck with that.  Gorbachev thought he could just crack the door open, and next thing he knew, freedom's hordes were storming the breach.  His Eastern European clients were hanging from lamp posts while Boris Yeltsen was blasting the walls of Parliament with hijacked tanks.  It's folly.  Once human beings get a whiff of liberty, it's all over.

China's Totalitarian-Capitalism chemistry set will blow up.  And it won't be a little ka-boom, it will be a roaring fireball seen and heard around the world.

Forget investing in the stock market.  Put your faith in God and your money in gold and lead.