Just how is that whole hopey-changey thing working out for ya?

…Industrywide deliveries, to be released tomorrow, may have reached an annualized rate of 11.6 million vehicles this month, the average of eight analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That would be the slowest August since 1982, according to researcher Ward’s AutoInfoBank. The rate would be 18 percent below last year’s 14.2 million pace, when the U.S. government’s “cash for clunkers” incentive program boosted sales…

We’ll have to see what the real numbers are – after continually over-estimating, a lot of “experts” are now heading the other direction. Still, even if the numbers beat these expectations, we can be sure they numbers won’t be beating last years rather dismal figures.

The “cash for clunkers” scam didn’t “boost” sales – all it did was rob from future sales. A political gimmick to make things look good for a news cycle or two, and now the piper is being paid. Better to have had slow and steady sales than what we’re getting now – a little boost, then a complete collapse. How many auto dealers are going to be laying off sales and maintenance staff now? Staff which might have been able to keep working in a more steady-pace, though slow, sales environment.

Every last thing Obama has done has been a complete failure because everything done revolved around the government deciding what the money should be spent on. Until Obama wakes up from his socialist stupor and realizes that he’s not the smartest man in the world, we’re going to keep heading down the economic drain.

A great blogger and a great person is in a financial bind and is looking for some help – which you can do by buying her book, or flat out donating, if that appeals to you.

A community takes care of its own – and she’s one of us, good people.

This looks to be a devastating bit of truth against the Culture of Death:

The more people learn about abortion and those who advocate it, the more pro-life we become.

Just never seen anything like this:

Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters in Gallup weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP’s largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress…

There is no way to know if this level of support – and the incredible enthusiasm of GOP voters – will hold true until November, but generally what is happening around Labor Day holds true for the remainder of the election season. All signs point to significant GOP gains on November 2nd.

The only question, as noted below, is what the GOP will do with it?

Senator DeMint (R-SC) lays out the warning in the Wall Street Journal:

…I ask what so many voters are pondering: If Republicans win this fall, will they have learned the lessons from the overspending and corruption that got them tossed out in 2006 and 2008?

“In the House, John Boehner and the Republicans get it,” Mr. DeMint says. He’s not so sure about the Senate. “I think we’re in danger of doing the same thing we did before, where a lot of young conservatives come in who have been out there campaigning on the right issues, but then all the senior guys take control of the committees and it’s business as usual.”

He warns: “This may be our last chance with voters, because if we’re given the majority . . . and don’t reform Washington, everybody is going to say, ‘What’s wrong with these guys? We need a third party.'”…

The Senator may well be right about that. I’m a Republican and I’ve stood by the party through thick and thin – complaining when RINOs and/or corruption stained our honor, but holding that the party, itself, was still a force for good. I am still convinced of this – but if the GOP blows it in 2011, then it will be time to re-think just how we get from current state of government collapse to reformed government working for the people.

Like DeMint, I see that the House GOP seems to have learned its lesson – but in Senators like Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe I still see GOPers who will cut the party off at the knees for personal advancement. If we win in November, then it will be a mandate from the people to force Obama off his agenda – to make him change course to a more moderate, centrist policy. This doesn’t mean we have to insist upon 100%, down-the-line Reaganism (not possible while Obama is in the White House), but it does mean that taxes must not be raised, even if we can’t cut them; that spending must be reduced; corruption must be rooted out; that the government be responsive to the needs of the people, banksters and bureaucrats can go jump in a lake.

If the GOP does this, then we will have earned the trust of the people and we’ll be well positioned for a complete and smashing victory in 2012. If the GOP tries to cut deals to get pork or to continue to bail out failed banks or does anything which smacks of helping the Ruling Class rather than the people, then the GOP may very well be on the path to self-destruction as the people start looking for a new party and a new set of leaders.

The warning has been given – and I hope the GOP leadership is listening.

Faced with a global economic collapse, China’s government has massively increased support for State-run enterprises – from the New York Times:

…whether in the coal-rich regions of Shanxi Province, the steel mills of the northern industrial heartland, or the airlines flying overhead, it is often China’s state-run companies that are on the march.

As the Chinese government has grown richer — and more worried about sustaining its high-octane growth — it has pumped public money into companies that it expects to upgrade the industrial base and employ more people. The beneficiaries are state-owned interests that many analysts had assumed would gradually wither away in the face of private-sector competition…

Later in the article the Chinese Prime Minister is quoted as saying China’s socialist economy allows it to better allocate resources – it is as if the 20th century never happened. What is really going on here is two-fold:

1. With the private economy around the world suffering, China’s government is worried that the private sector will not be able to keep China’s people sufficiently employed, thus risking a rising tide of unemployment destabilizing to China’s oligarchic dictatorship.

2. China’s corrupt oligarchy likes being in charge and thus when really faced with assigning control to outsiders or keeping themselves on the gravy train, they did what comes natural to a corrupt oligarchy.

This will be an utter disaster for China. China’s State-run enterprises routinely operate at a loss and are already burdened with debts they cannot repay…and which no one really asks them to repay because to do so means going up against powerful figures in the Chinese government. They are throwing good money after bad – and incidentally starving China’s private economy of the funding it will need now that China’s stimulus is unwinding and global demand for Chinese goods remains flat.

China, like Stalin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany can get away with this for a while – and even convince outside observers that things are going swell (this is especially true for those outside observers heavily invested in China and thus determined to paint the brightest picture possible of Chinese prospects), but the price has to be paid. You can’t keep shoveling money in to a government black hole for ever. Eventually, the books have to balance. Unless China’s government does something no government has ever been able to do – run a major industrial enterprise at a profit over a sustained period of time – it will all collapse back on itself as mounting losses and bad loans take the Chinese treasury down.

Anyone who remains invested in China is a complete fool – they are heading for a fall, and no one knows what they will do when the crash comes.

UPDATE: Rumor Mill – Governor of the People’s Bank of China flees to the United States?

From The Hill:

Democrats are undercutting their campaign message by condemning Republican economic policies while calling for the extension of Bush-era tax cuts.

“It’s hard to say the Republican economic policies were bad, [and] then continue them,” Paul Begala, Democratic strategist and former advisor to President Clinton, told The Hill. “That is a bit of a mixed message.”…

But they also don’t want to have a huge tax increase looming on November 2nd. Some of them are also smart enough to realize that if the tax cuts of 2001 expire, it will kill of what remains of the economy, thereby killing the Democrats’ 2012 chances. Problem is, they spent the last 8 years saying they were “tax cuts for the wealthy” and promising to do away with them – and the left wing base is still insistent that those evil, wicked rich people (but not people like Jay Rockefeller and George Soros) get what’s coming to them.

It is quite a problem, isn’t it? What to do?

I suspect they’ll try to punt – some sort of cosmetic move to extend some tax cuts and allow others to expire and hope to goodness its enough to defuse the issue for November. I doubt it will work – any failure to extend the entire tax cut package will be painted (correctly) as voting for a tax increase. In the end, inability to finesse the issue will likely result in inaction – and so the GOP will still be able to paint the Democrats as tax-increasers.

Now, if the Democrats had only been honest about the tax cuts from the get go, they wouldn’t have this problem. Far from being tax cuts for the rich, they were tax cuts on the productive economy. Absent Democrat hate-mongering, the Democrats would be well placed to just extend the cuts…or, better yet, they cuts would never have had a sunset provision to begin with.

Ah, what tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!

A big donor to Democrats in the past:

…According to OpenSecrets.org, he’s donated about $15,000 to Democrats since 2000, including a $10,000 donation to the DNC in 2000, a $500 donation to Howard Dean in 2003, and a $1,000 donation to John Kerry in 2004. His only recent contribution to a Republican candidate was $250 in 2002 to retired Rep. Jim Kolbe, then lone openly gay Republican in Congress…

He – Bruce Majors – is a little bit of a kook, though it seems a harmless one – a bit of a libertarian, gay-rights advocate, anti-whatever-comes-to-mind sort of guy. The issue seems to be that he wrote a guide for out-of-towners attending Beck’s rally and apparently warned people off some neighborhoods which have large black populations…given the fact that DC has a huge black majority, I don’t know how you can warn someone off a DC neighborhood which isn’t black…except, I’m sure, some high end neighborhoods filled with white, liberal Democrats who love black people…as long as they don’t have to live next door to them.

Not exactly the sort of person one identifies with the TEA Party – but as he wrote something the is considering racist, he’ll do for the narrative. Its bit of a stretch to even consider his travel guide as actually racist, but even supposing it is and he’s racist, himself, it doesn’t mean that the TEA Party is, or tolerates it.

The left seems to be to be spiraling in upon itself – just again and again going back to the playbook of the past, thinking that the American people are in the same mood as 2008, or even earlier. The left doesn’t realize that things have changed – the Beck rally, regardless of what one thinks of Beck (and I have my doubts), is a manifestation of a popular desire for fundamental change. This change isn’t conservative or libertarian, Republican or Democrat…it is for America and the American people. Its open to new ideas and is seeking out the people who both understand it and have the courage to act.

Meanwhile, we can expect more of this from the left – endless attempts to replay the broken record. Just get used to it – and perhaps after November we’ll never have to hear it again.

Our AG Holder has decided that stopping people from praying in front of an abortuary is worthy of limited resources:

A West Palm Beach abortion counselor and prayer warrior is among six being sued nationwide by Attorney General Eric Holder, but a conservative group believes Holder is abusing his power.

Mary Susan Pine, who has been witnessing outside the clinic in West Palm Beach for 20 years, and her group F.A.C.E. Life face an injunction that would prevent Pine from entering any clinic driveway and would prevent her group from keeping women from entering the abortion facility…

Because we’ve just got all the money in the world and we’re not busy tracking terrorists, breaking up drug and human smuggling rings and organized crime has just gone entirely out of business. The crucial government task of preventing someone from praying within a country mile of an abortion clinic must move forward! The American people are demanding it – you’ve seen the polls showing that the economy takes a distant back seat to hammering at those ruthless bastards who try to talk women out of having an abortion, haven’t you?

The power of the US government directed towards protecting people who make money off of murdering children – just disgusting.

Then The Automatic Earth has an entry tailor made for you:

…However this may be, I urge you to take another look at the Consumer Metrics Institute data. Realize that their Growth Index is a leading indicator, and thus both the S&P 500 and the US GDP numbers, if we take the last five years as a measuring stick, will, over the next quarter, follow the Growth Index down. Way down.

As per this morning, the discrepancy between US GDP (official estimate still +2.45%) and CMI Growth Index (-5.25%) is a staggering 7.7%!. And then look at how closely the two are correlated in the graphs…

…If we get anywhere near what the CMI data (seem to) foresee, we’ll have drama, tragedy, mayhem and panic all wrapped in one neat package. The US economy cannot withstand anything even near that sort of fall and pretend the world is still the same…

Indeed. Do read the entire linked article – even if it doesn’t turn out quite that way, the data is still indicating some really rough sledding ahead for us.

As I’ve said before, we can’t avoid the crash. This crash, when it comes, will just be the completion of the crash which started in 2007 and which should have been allowed to continue. The banksters and bureaucrats – taking in former President Bush and President Obama, in turn – didn’t want that to happen because that would risk their own power and wealth. Having lived off (and progressively wrecked) the productive economy for 80 years, they saw now reason to stop now. What they did, however, was just store up a worse problem for the rest of us.

The crash can’t be stopped – prices inflated by fake money and financial wheeling and dealing are unsustainable. They simply must get in line with reality – and that is going to hurt. Its going to hurt worse, now, because the banksters and bureaucrats did what they did (shorthand: the piled more debt on a problem caused by too much debt – gasoline, fire; that sort of thing). All we can do at this point is endure it and then implement policies which will cut the banksters and bureaucrats out of the picture and allow regular Americans to work their way back to wealth.

It can be done and it will be done – it is just a pity the fools who ran us in to the ground got one more shot at it.