Author: Mark Noonan

The Growing “Gunwalker” Scandal

Mark Noonan7 Comments

From Katie Pavlich at Townhall:

Yesterday, Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson answered questions from Rep. Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley surrounding Operation Fast and Furious…

…Melson revealed the scope of Operation Fast and Furious reaches far beyond ATF and the Justice Department. He said the FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and other agencies were heavily involved…

Do read the whole thing – it shows that this scandal may reach not only very high in the Justice Department, but across many of our law enforcement agencies.  It is quite a tangled web – and we should have a special prosecutor appointed and/or form a Congressional committee to air the whole, sorry mess.

Holder’s Justice Department has routinely ignored the law since Obama appointed him in 2009 – just in the fact that he refused to prosecuted the Panthers over 2008 voter intimidation demonstrated Holder’s unfitness to be our senior law enforcement official…the Gunwalker scandal is ample justification to demand Holder’s resignation as well as the resignation of any other agency head who knew of this idiotic plan and failed to stop it.

To me, this is likely just the tip of a large, nasty ice berg and we must get to the bottom of it.  I don’t trust Holder and while he’s in charge of Justice I don’t trust our federal law enforcement agencies.  A clean sweep has to be made and we need to find who who knew what and when.

Obamunism! What Has Happened to the Dollar?

Mark Noonan37 Comments

Read the chart, and weep:

 

If you look back to 2009, you can see that the dollar was worth about 1.15 Swiss Francs…now it is worth about 0.84 Swiss Francs.  This is what happens to your money when your government goes massively in to debt and prints up bags of money…the value of the money goes down.

This really needs to be driven home – the Obama/Bernanke economic polices have amounted to the stealing of our money.  Those dollars you carefully saved in 2009 for a rainy day?  They are now worth less than they were in 2009…think of it like putting a dollar in the piggy bank on January 1st, 2009 and then checking piggy today and finding about 90 cents in there.  What happened to your dime?  Well it, and a dime out of all your dollars, was taken way…and given to banksters and well-connected, Democrat special interests.  And this didn’t happen just to your dollars, but to everyone’s.  This is the most massive heist in human history…and it was carried out right under our noses by men who claimed they were doing it for our own good.

This is why you’re paying more for a gallon of gas and for a loaf of bread – it isn’t that gasoline and bread have actually gone up in price, but that the value of your dollar has gone down…and gown down at a time when almost all of us are earning either just the same number of dollars as before, or even less for those who lost their jobs and/or were forced to take a pay cut.  Remember it, remember it, remember it:  in order that Bernanke’s bankster buddies and Obama’s union cash cows could be protected you had your money stolen from you.

It is, indeed, time for a change – the Ruling Class is robbing us blind, selling us out to foreigners and working not just to deprive us of our rights, but of our own country.  Fight hard and never give up – remember what sort of people we’re dealing with and use it to steel your heart to ever greater efforts in 2012.  We must get rid of these people if we want to save our nation.

 

DeMint Explains How to Fight Democrats

Mark Noonan2 Comments

First off, by having no illusions – from NRO’s The Corner:

…“The Democrats will not give us anything that will not humiliate and shame us, unless we make them,” he warns. “It’s a stare down, and a lot of Republicans don’t have a taste for it.” Yet DeMint sees no other choice: “If Democrats won’t cut public broadcasting, if they won’t cut Planned Parenthood, how do we expect them to really cut anything that means anything?”

He reminds Republicans that Democrats walked into “a public-opinion buzz saw” to pass Obamacare. And he predicts, “If we don’t pass anything, then we’re on defense the whole time.”…

And in light of that, DeMint is urging House passage of “cut, cap and balance”:  Cut spending by $700 billion next year, cap spending at no more than 18% of GDP and pass a balanced budget amendment which includes a requirement for a 2/3 vote to raise taxes.  With that, we can tell Obama and his Democrats that we agree to raising the debt ceiling – just as soon as “cut, cap and balance” passes out of the Senate.

This is a winning strategy – the people are on the side of real budget cuts; the people are on the side of a balanced budget amendment; the people are opposed to tax increases…but people are and will remain wary of default, and so the Democrats do have some leverage in the debt ceiling debate (the majority are wrong to view it thus – but a generally held opinion, whether well- or ill-founded cannot lightly be set aside).  This strategy gives us the whip hand – and the people will wonder why Democrats don’t allow it and thus also get the debt ceiling increase they claim is vital.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the Democrats do or don’t – if they do, it works to our advantage because we will have put America’s fiscal house in order.  If they don’t, then they get to carry their profligate spending in to 2012.  I hope that the rest of the Congressional GOP pays heed to DeMint.

Obamunism! America Has to Rely on Russia to Get in to Space

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From Spaceflight Now:

…reliance on NASA’s former Cold War rival has been a particularly bitter pill to swallow for many at NASA, forced to retire the most sophisticated manned spacecraft ever built before a U.S. replacement is available. Equally devastating, in the eyes of many, is the loss of manned spaceflight experience as thousands of highly skilled aerospace jobs are eliminated…

It is a dereliction of duty on the part of President Obama that the shuttle program is being shut down with no replacement in hand, or even coming along in the next few years.  President Obama has abandoned the position in space America won in 1969 – and he’s done it because rather than develope America’s potential, he’d rather use the relatively small NASA budget to fund paybacks to his special interest supporters.  Once again we are being shown that Obama doesn’t really care what happens to America…he only cares about himself and keeping himself in office after 2012.

Just a disgrace – and we Republicans should make a priority to resume manned space flight by 2015, and return to the Moon by 2020.  We shall not allow the Russians, Europeans and Chinese to capture space while liberal Democrats keep making America a small place, a place of no dreams.

Stylish Wife of Syrian Reformer Returns Home

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Which is how a combination of Vogue and Hillary Clinton would describe this bit from the PJ Tatler:

Sources tell PJ Media that Vogue-favorite Asma al-Assad is headed back to Syria for a week of homage or possible fence-mending (we don’t know) with husband/slaughterer Bashar and the extended Assad family. Normally Asma resides in London with her children (she’s not taking them with her) in a large estate still owned by the Assad family.

One wonders – why does the British government allow the wife of the dictator of Syria to reside in Britain while someone like Michael Savage is barred?  I realize that Savage is a bit hard to take…to me, he’s a bit of a whiner (and really has it in for Rush and O’Reilly) and talks about himself too much…but its not like he’s massacring people, as Mrs Assad’s husband is.  The Brit excuse is that Savage promotes hate, which is absurd…but even if it were true, how hateful can it be?  Not like anyone has been killed by it.

Such is the way of the world – if you are harmless, our liberals will go right after you.  If you have power and show yourself willing to use it to murder, liberals will lick your boots.  Its why they find fault with Israel, but not with the Palestinians; why they condemn American actions, but not Iranian; why they always find excuses for evil, while routinely condemning those who are trying to do the right thing.

Democrats Playing the Race Card, Again

Mark Noonan14 Comments

From Legal Insurrection:

Democrats must be in trouble if The Daily Beast is running a headline White Supremacist Stampede, with this opening line:

“Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.”

Ah yes, the David Duke card gets played.

Duke is an anti-Semitic kook who is far more likely in recent years to be hobnobbing with anti-Israel European leftists and Islamists than with anyone associated with the Republican Party or the Tea Party movement.

Yet The Daily Beast trots out a possible (inevitable?) Duke run for President to try to back up a false meme, that there is a “stampede” of Neo-Nazi candidates running in elections as Republicans…

Hadn’t heard much of David Duke lately – last I heard of him he was at some Holocaust-denial conference in Iran, or some such.  But as Democrat desperation grows about 2012, I guess they are really going to leave no stone unturned – wouldn’t surprise me if some liberal Democrats were trying to egg Duke on…get him to declare for the GOP nomination and then put him in the MSM over and over and over again (naturally with some TEA Party emblems in the background).  The fact that Duke is no Republican and has been entirely and absolutely rejected by the GOP makes no matter – we GOPers are racist in the liberal/MSM view, Duke is a racist and thus must be a Republican…and if he can be used to scare up minority voters for Obama, so much the better.

In 2012, this will not work – I think that far too many people are on to the Democrat scam on racial matters.   The Democrats have shouted “racist” far too many times for it to be an effective scare tactic and, anyways, having people like Presidential candidate Cain, Representative West, Representative Scott, Senator Rubio, Governor Jindal, Governor Haley, Justice Thomas, Governor Martinez, former Representative Watts, Representative Ros-Lehtinen, activist Connerly, former Secretary of State Rice, economist Sowell, Florida attorney Bush (yes, the son of the former governor…his mother is Mexican and that makes him Latino; we’re becoming racially integrated in our families) and a host of others gives lie to any concept that we are racist.  People are tired of this nasty sort of politics and will reject it.

In 2012, the fight is not over the past, but about the future.  Democrats can raise the specter of racism and hope it brings a few more voters to the polls for Obama and his Democrats…but the overwhelming majority won’t be voting on that.  We’ll be voting on what kind of America we want – and there is no place for Obama, the Democrats or their foul, disgusting race card in that America.

Portugal’s Bonds Cut to Junk

Mark Noonan

From Reuters:

Moody’s became the first ratings agency to cut Portugal’s credit standing to junk, warning the country may need a second round of rescue funds before it can return to capital markets.

The downgrade on Tuesday was not entirely unexpected and served as a reminder that Europe’s debt troubles extend beyond Greece, which has dominated news headlines over its second financial bailout.

Some economists think Ireland may also need additional support, and investors worry Spain and Italy could be next in line for aid…

Which, as it turns out, is just what I’ve been saying.  But I’m no genius – all anyone has to do is total up the debt these countries owe, divide it by their (declining) population and you can easily see that they owe more than they can pay.  And I don’t mean “can pay this year” or “can pay in ten years” – I mean “can pay, ever”.  Even if these nations decided to dedicate themselves to debt payments – if they decided to live in poverty and work very hard, that is – they still couldn’t do it. Continue reading →

Obamunism! GM Failing, Again

Mark Noonan18 Comments

From Bloomberg:

General Motors Co. (GM) stocked Jim Ellis Chevrolet in Atlanta with plenty of Silverado full-size pickups in early 2011, part of a wager on a strong economic recovery. The strategy is backfiring.

“We thought that this year would bring back the kind of economic activity that would translate into us selling more trucks,” Mark Frost, the dealership’s general manager, said in a phone interview. “It’s not happening.”…

…After GM’s truck inventory swelled to 122 days worth of average sales, the company said 100 to 110 will be normal going forward for such a large and complex line of vehicles, compared with 60 to 70 days for most models. Peter Nesvold, a Jefferies & Co. analyst, isn’t convinced. Ford Motor Co. (F), which makes similar trucks, is running at 79 days, and Nesvold says GM averaged 78 days on hand at year end from 2002 to 2010…

That first bit is nonsense – GM didn’t pile vehicles in to the dealership in anticipation of an economic rebound, but merely to have vehicles “sold” on the books.  From what I understand, GM counts a vehicle as sold when it is sent to the dealership.  If you want to fake your numbers and make it look like your taxpayer bailed out corporation is recovering, this is how you do it…”stuff” the dealerships with vehicles, call them “sold” and allow President Obama to state that we’re heading in the right direction.  Zero Hedge, though, has been on this since last December, and had an update on July 1st – here’s the chart:

Up and up and up goes the inventory – more and more cars being produced, with taxpayer subsidies, which no one has any money to buy.  A very large amount of our GDP “growth” over the past two years has been this sort of thing – inventory build up. Part of this is just corruption – as in GM’s case where they are trying to make a major Obama policy look like a success – while another part is just idiocy – a blinding faith in Keynesian economics which infects our entire economy.  Including in corporate board rooms where economists have received the same sort of Keynesian indoctrination that government and academic economists have received:  if government spends money, it will fix the economy.

This is Obamunism, good people – the final test that Keynes was wrong; that spending doesn’t make you rich.  The only thing which can make us rich is a free market economy based upon hard work, savings and careful investment.  Government’s only functions are to ensure a sound money supply, a balanced budget and that no one is using fraud to get ahead.  Once we get to that happy state of affairs, we’ll have a real economic recovery…until then, we’ll just wallow in the doldrums with a complete collapse possibly literally at any time.

The Casey Anthony Verdict: Why is it Illegal to Lie to the Cops?

Mark Noonan13 Comments

I figured that the jury would come back with “not guilty” on the murder charge – though I thought there was a good chance they’d find her guilty of manslaughter; but that only because she’s clearly guilty of something in the death of her child…but I didn’t think guilty of murder; certainly not provably guilty of murder.  We don’t even know how the child died – so how can their be a murder charge?  For all we know the child really did die of an accident and then Ms. Anthony went in to panic mode…the rest is tragic history.

But now that the jury has ruled, I want to take issue with what she was found guilty of: lying to the police.  In my view, there is something just wrong about being found guilty of lying about a crime you didn’t commit.  Remember, she was ruled not guilty – the jury says she didn’t do it.  That is the end of it as far as the death of her child goes.  To now hold her responsible for lying to the police just doesn’t come across to me as an action of justice.

I don’t blame the jury in this – from what I can tell, she not only lied to the police, but lied a lot…and to a lot of people.  I further understand that lying under oath is a very serious crime (for which, incidentally, Bill Clinton should have been removed from office; so serious is the crime)…but I don’t think she was under oath in the interrogation room.  Sure, she should have just kept her mouth shut or told the absolute truth…but she is also a young, irresponsible girl who has a dead child to account for; in such a situation it can easily seem that lying is the best course (it never really is – this is no justification for lying; just a statement that lying, in and of itself, perhaps should not be prosecutable).  All such convictions do is ensure that anyone who watched the trial now knows what to do – shut up, shut up and shut up some more.

Quite simply, if you are ever arrested – even for something you absolutely know you didn’t do – you should just say nothing to the police.  Don’t even give your  name without your attorney present.  You might even make an honest mistake and wind up convicted for lying to the police over it.  How many of us, suddenly hauled in to a police station, could be certain we’d lay out a complete story with no inconsistencies or errors?  And once you’ve made an error, how do you convince the authorities that it was just an error and now you’d like to correct the record after you’ve had a chance to review in your mind the sequence of events?  The charge of lying to the police is a trap that only the most clear minded person completely familiar with the law can possibly avoid.

The police and prosecutors should not have this ability to convict us of lying to them – that should be taken away.  As long as you aren’t solemnly swearing to it, then it isn’t a lie in the legal sense.  At least, that is my view.

 

Banks Two Years, Trillions of Dollars Too Late

Mark Noonan3 Comments

From the New York Times:

As millions of Americans struggle in foreclosure with little hope of relief, big banks are going to borrowers who are not even in default and cutting their debt or easing the mortgage terms, sometimes with no questions asked.

Two of the nation’s biggest lenders, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are quietly modifying loans for tens of thousands of borrowers who have not asked for help but whom the banks deem to be at special risk…

Which is just swell for you if you’re at risk…if your risk has already come crashing down and you’ve lost your house (as millions of Americans have), then it is a bit late.

I figured as early as October of 2008 that we needed to do something to bring home mortgages in to line with home prices.  This isn’t rocket science – home prices ran up way too high and the crash instantly wiped out a gigantic amount of paper wealth but left tens of millions of Americans owing not just more than their house was worth, but likely more than it would ever be worth, again.   It was in 2009 that I figured we needed a program of “cramming down” home loans – which is essentially what the banks are doing in the linked article.  Trouble is, I think it is too late; prices have fallen so far and so fast – and look to continue declining – that even taking a “cram down” makes no sense.  By 2010 I was arguing we needed some means of just keeping people in their homes, even after they default…anything to keep houses off the market.  That is where I still stand.

The trouble with our banks – the reason they have got it so wrong both in the run up and in the crash down – is that they are run by people who haven’t the foggiest notion of economics.  Bankers think that government borrowing and printing can be a good thing – it is why they backed Bernanke’s “quantiative easing” (ie, money printing) and Obama’s “stimulus”.  If they knew anything about economics their would have first allowed “too big to fail” to fail, and then would have called for balanced budgets and sound money – counting on the native energy and drive of the American people to dig us out of the mess while they stood ready to lend money to solid enterprises.  In a real sense, we don’t have bankers…we have corporate, Ruling Class bosses who rose to the top based on connections rather than knowledge or skill.

They are even less schooled in morality (they teach “ethics” these days…which really works out to learning how to stay out of trouble with the EEOC and SEC).  The mix – people who don’t know what to do and are weak at identifying what is right and what is wrong – prove a strong poison…and let to things like Mortgage Backed Securities and the whole “sub prime” trigger of the collapse.  It doesn’t surprise me at all that the banks are now picking up on cram down, years late and after it is already clear it can’t solve the problem.

My advice right now, if anyone is interested, is:  don’t buy a house.  Wait a couple years.  It might be down 20% lower than now…and if I’m wrong, it won’t be more than 1 or 2% higher.  Housing should, also, not be seen as an investment bringing a monetary return – it might again, some day, have that quality (though, honestly, I hope it never does) – but, instead, as a home.  If you think of it that way, then it doesn’t matter what the market does – provided you’ve bought a house within your budget, if its worth a million dollars or one, it is all good for you.