Author: Mark Noonan

Out and About on a Monday Morning

Mark Noonan36 Comments

If we had to lose the World Cup, better to lose it to Japan than any other nation – they really need the tonic right now.

Just as discretion is the better part of valor, so is cowardice the better part of discretion – so, Obama bravely hid the Dalai Lama when he came to visit.  Come on, Barry – you get a thousand points for meeting with the Dalai Lama in spite of Chinese whines about it, but you lose a million by keeping it low key.  Show some guts, for crying out loud.

Turns out that it’s not illegal to peacefully demonstrate in favor of life.  Who knew?  This whole personal freedom thing could spread like wild fire if this gets out…

Just how dumb is the President?  Mark Steyn takes note:

For the Most Gifted Orator in Human History, the president these days speaks largely in clichés, most of which he doesn’t seem to be quite on top of. “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” he sternly reprimanded the GOP’s Eric Cantor. Usually, if you’re bluffing, the trick is not to announce it upfront.

One wonders:  Did Obama ever live in the real world?  I mean, did he ever have a true friend?  Someone who would rake him over the coals when he was being an idiot?

As Governor Perry is all but in the Presidential race, anyone still thinking that Palin will get in?  They’d both be going after the same constituency along with Bachmann, Cain and Pawlenty.  If I were Palin, I’d stay out of it now – victory over liberalism is more important than any personal ambition, and TEA Party/social conservatives are well represented in the race.

Islamic fashion festival in Milan.  Question:  how would any one know they’re not guys in drag?

Obamunism!  Banks continue to fail.  But now that the economy is all better, the worst is behind us.  Oh, wait…

Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez, sought the Catholic sacrament of Anointing the Sick.  Yes, that used to be called “last rites”, but it was always just about helping the ill. But, odd that this man who has so ardently fought the Church should run home to it when he hears God calling…or, not so odd.  And hopefully it will cause him to reflect.

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama:

So Obamism did not work, and now is the politically opportune time, before the 2012 election, to follow the famed Obama reinvention stratagem: Cite straw men and extremists on both sides, and put St. Obama plop in the middle as the sober, great dragon slayer, who blames both his contemporaries and his predecessor. Hard to do, I know, when you wasted $5 trillion, but do it nonetheless he has. In the word of Obama, wasted borrowed money is “stimulus,” not so shovel ready jobs are “investments,” and hiking taxes on someone else is “revenue enhancement.”

Yep.

 

 

Gold to $1,600.00

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Geesh – from MSNBC:

Gold prices rallied to record highs above $1,600 an ounce in Europe on Monday, as investors spooked by the euro zone debt crisis and the threat of a U.S. default bought into the metal as a haven from risk…

First off, really wish I had listened to the old man when he wanted to buy gold at $400 or so an ounce.  Secondly, this is the world of investment giving a vote of no confidence to all governments and central banks…this is a flight to safety, and a bet that things will get even worse.

Can’t Keep Their Story Straight

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Two headlines, both from Bloomberg:

Crude Oil Trades Near Two-Day High on U.S. Economy, European Debt Optimism

Asian Stocks Decline on U.S. Economic Concern

And I generally have a lot of respect for Bloomberg’s economic reporting – but, come on!  Which is it?  Are people optimistic or pessimistic?

Honestly, I think it is ultimately a matter of no one really knowing for sure – theories say it should be this, reality is starting to show that it is quite different.   We’re all just waiting at this point – will they pull a rabbit out of the European hat?  Will China manage a soft landing?  Will the US debt be brought under control?  Or does it even matter at this point?  Have things got to a point where no matter what we do, pain is in our future?

I’m of that last view – I don’t think we can avoid some really rough times.  The best we can do with some wisdom and grit is make them bearable while we clear out the mess.  Maybe I’m wrong, but when you get a respected news source with headlines at such variance – and posted just 31 minutes apart – you can be sure that something is screwed up somewhere.

Mmmmm, Toasted Obama: My Favorite!

Mark Noonan39 Comments

From James Pethokoukis at Reuters in response to Goldman Sachs lowering GDP projections:

…Alarms bells must be ringing all over Obamaland today. Unemployment on Election Day about where it is right now? Sputtering — if not stalling — economic growth? To many Americans that would sound like the car is back in the ditch — if it was ever out. Maybe Goldman is wrong, but economists across Wall Street have been growing more bearish.

And recall that back in August of 2009, the White House — after having a half year to view the economy and its $800 billion stimulus response — made an astoundingly optimistic (PDF) forecast. Starting in 2011, with Obamanomics fully in gear and the recession over, growth would take off. GDP would rise 4.3 percent in 2011, followed by … 4.3 percent growth in 2012 and 2013, too!  And 2014? Another year of 4.0 percent growth. Off to the races, America…

Do take a look at that “astoundingly optimistic” White House forecast – as far as Obama and Co were concerned, the stimulus was going to get us rip roaring in to boom economic times.  It is all there – carefully laid our projections about how wonderful things were going to be.  I can only guess that they really believed it – after all, they were being rather arrogant in their assumptions of 2012 victory back there when questions first arose about the effects of the stimulus.  Only people who really believed in it could have looked at the 2010 data and assumed that 2011 would have 4.3% GDP growth (if we’re lucky – very lucky – we’ll see official growth at 2.5% for the year 2011; which is not nearly enough to get things rolling).  The big question:  do they still believe it?

As Pethokoukis notes at the end of his article, there is still a very short time left for Obama to change course and have a chance at a reasonably good economy for election day, 2012.  But I mean he’d really have to move fast – in the next few weeks we’d have to see serious proposals to cut the tax and regulatory burden on wealth creation for it to have a noticeable positive effect by election day.  Wait until the end of August and it will be too late – the good news would start to roll in around January of 2013, just as we’re swearing in President Bachmann.  But if they are still retaining their faith in the stimulus, then they’ll do nothing and just cross there fingers that some how, some way, what has thus-far failed will start to work in an astounding manner over the next 15 months.

And if that is the case, then the good news is that Obama won’t be re-elected – the bad news is that the economy will be very much worse before we get rid of him.

 

Race Card, Bottom of the Deck: Democrats as Usual

Mark Noonan31 Comments

We’re all just raaaaacists for arguing with Obama:

 

For 80 years we’ve watched liberalism slowly bankrupt our nation; now it is crunch time and we must cut spending to save ourselves.  This is just something that happens, and happened while our President happens to be black.  Wouldn’t matter if it was President Hillary up there (though I guess we’d be seeeeexist at that point).

This is a sad, desperate attempt to fire up the liberal base for 2012…poll after poll shows sagging support among the left for the President.  It isn’t that these people will vote GOP in 2012, but they might well decide to stay home…not only costing Obama the White House, but causing down-ballot Democrats to lose, as well.  Pulling out the race card is a sure-fire method of getting liberal foot soldiers back in to the battle…because, remember, your typical white liberal is wracked by guilt.  Figuring that “white privilege” is the source of their wealth and well-being, they are easily swayed by accusations of racism.  This may well help perk them up and get them donating and volunteering again, lest those evil, racist, sexist, homophobic Republicans win.

We can expect a lot more of this as 2012 comes in – and in rising hysteria if Obama’s poll numbers continue to crater.

Obama’s Fat Cat Donors Come Through

Mark Noonan15 Comments

The Billion Dollar Man is making his way – and selling himself completely.  From Politico:

About 40 percent of President Barack Obama’s record-breaking $86 million second-quarter fundraising haul came from big-money bundlers, according to a POLITICO analysis of donors listed on Obama’s campaign web site.

No fewer than 27 mega-bundlers managed to collect at least $500,000 for a joint account run by Obama’s 2012 campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

That exclusive circle included marquee fundraisers like Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, Hollywood titan Jeffrey Katzenberg, DNC treasurer/personal finance guru Andrew Tobias and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who was CEO of Goldman Sachs before entering politics.

That group chipped in a minimum of $13.5 million, according to records. In addition, $21.4 million was bundled in amounts of between $50,000 and $499,000…

Thank goodness Obama is fighting for the poor and middle class; if that weren’t the case, all this millionaire and billionaire money would be worrisome.  And we know he’s going after the millionaires and billionaires because he says so – whenever he talks taxes, he’s sure to mention that millionaires and billionaires must pay their fair share.  So, it is amazing that the millionaires and billionaires keep coming through for him…I mean, after all, Obama is promising to tax them more.  In fact, his proposals for taxation always call for hitting those millionaires and billionaires who make more than $250,000.00 per year….

Hey, wait a minute…how many years would you have to work to become a millionaire at $250,000.00 a year?  Four years…if you didn’t spend a dime on anything.  And how many to become a billionaire?  Four thousand years…  You know, now that I think about it, it seems kind of strange that Obama would say a millionaire makes $250,000.00 a year…and downright stupid to think that a billionaire makes that much.  Could it be…?  No!  It couldn’t be that!  It couldn’t be that all Obama is doing is talking about taxing the rich while really taxing the middle class and that is why the millionaires and billionaires are pouring money in to his campaign.  That couldn’t be the case, could it?

Guilty No Matter What

Mark Noonan8 Comments

That is our new legal principle, at least at the University of North Dakota:

In a stark demonstration of the failure of campus judicial procedures, the University of North Dakota (UND) has found a student guilty of sexual assault despite the fact that local police refused to charge him with a crime and instead charged his accuser for lying about the incident. Former student Caleb Warner has been banned by UND from stepping foot on any state public campus for three years. Meanwhile, his accuser has been wanted by the Grand Forks Sheriff’s Department for more than a year on the charge of making a false report to law enforcement…

It seems that Uncle Sam – carrying out the liberal mandate – has decided that all colleges receiving federal funds must use a “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for judging such cases.  In this case it does seem that an accusation is “preponderance of evidence” because if there was something beyond the accuser’s statement it is highly unlike that the regular law enforcement agencies would have charged the accuser with lying, even if they lacked sufficient evidence to convict the accused.  Beyond the outrage of what amounts to a kangaroo court convicting the accused there lies the double outrage in the college’s refusal to reopen the case in light of the charge of lying leveled against the accuser.

In the end, this is the result of all that liberal nonsense about political correctness, “hate crimes” and “zero tolerance”.  In their zeal to enforce liberal ideas, the very concepts of truth and justice have been jettisoned.  It will take extreme legal and political pressure to get the college to reverse course…and even if they are in this case, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll still go forward trying to enforce the liberal view.

How to fix this?  Simple:  prohibit the federal government from setting rules in colleges.  Go ahead and spend federal money if you like, but don’t go dictating how it is to be spent.  In other words, if money is to be spent it had better just be in the form of bloc grants (best calculated on a per-student basis) which is then dispensed to the colleges to use as they wish…scholarships, new facilities, slush funds for the faculty, what have you.  Better to have the money mis-allocated by some schools than to have all schools come under the thumb of liberal fascism.   Most places would use it properly and those which did would swiftly earn the better reputation and thus draw in more students…and thus more funding.  But get Uncle Sam out of it…all he can do is screw it up, as we see here in this case.

Obama: The People Want Tax Increases

Mark Noonan35 Comments

From The Hill:

President Obama on Friday kept up the pressure on Republicans to agree to revenue increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, claiming 80 percent of the public supports Democrats’ demand for tax increases.

“The American people are sold,” Obama said. “The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically.”…

Ok, Mr. President, then have Harry Reid pass a debt deal through the Senate which includes tax increases…get those 53 Democrat Senators on record as doing the will of the people.  After all, if the people are “sold” on it, then the Democrat majority in the Senate should be happy to oblige the people…there can’t be the slightest worry that a Democrat up for re-election in 2012 will vote against because, as you say, the people are “sold” on it.

Time to put up or shut up, Mr. President…don’t ask us GOPers to be the tax collectors for Big Government.  Do it yourself – if you can.

UPDATE:  From Gallup –

Might want to re-think that “sold” bit there, Mr. President.

UPDATE II:  We’re all raaaaacists for not raising the debt ceiling.