Interesting bit of news from the G-20:

Finance ministers from the world’s leading economies ripped up their support for fiscal stimulus on Saturday, recognising that financial market concerns over sovereign debt had forced a much greater focus on deficit reduction.

The meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Busan, South Korea, also dropped proposals for a global banking levy, instead giving countries leeway to do what they thought best for their domestic circumstances…

The harsh reality is that Europe is bankrupt – any attempt to “stimulus” their way out of what is rapidly shaping up as a “double dip” recession will be severely punished in global financial markets. They don’t want to do it and they’ll fudge the numbers as much as they can, but the governments of Europe know that financial sanity is a requirement.

This will spread to the United States, China and Japan as our fiscal chickens come home to roost – though when, exactly, this will happen is unknown. For us, we might not be able to get a handle on it as long as Obama is President – he seems utterly clueless about what is happening and is entirely enthralled to the banksters who want to keep the money flowing…at least until they’ve got all their personal assets out of the way and safe from the crash.

As Mish points out, the end of “stimulus” will be used by the left as the reason for the end of the so-called “recovery”. If only we’d kept spending, all would have been well. Such stupidity is just par for the course from the left and should be calmly ignored – if we don’t balance our budget by 2015, at the latest, there will be a very high price to pay.

Yep, just a bunch of humanitarian activists trying to help:

“Go back to Auschwitz” as 2:07 in the audio…and with the Turks suggesting the need for a “Final Solution”.

You want to be on the side of these “humanitarians”, liberals?

Today is the anniversary of D-Day – take a moment to remember those men set aside their own lives in order to liberate a continent from a monstrous tyrant.

The story of the Longest Day.

Its a State so liberal that a proven liar leads in the polls simply because he’s a Democrat. Its a State so liberal that it went for Obama by 22 points over McCain. Its a State so liberal that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 114-37 in the House and 24-12 in the Senate. Its a liberal State, boys and girls – and it just got its bond rating downgraded:

Connecticut is preparing to borrow $956 million to close a budget gap in the fiscal year beginning July 1, after borrowing money last year to cover a deficit of $947.6 million. Not good. Fitch has reduced the states credit rating from AA+ to AA.

“The downgrade reflects the state’s reduced financial flexibility, illustrated by its reliance on sizable debt issuances during the current biennium to close operating gaps in the context of already high liabilities,” Fitch said.

Connecticut is the wealthiest state on a per capita basis with personal income of $54,397 in 2009, according to Department of Commerce.

The richest State in the nation is bankrupt – thanks to liberalism. Why? Well, it could be because they have an African-American Affairs Commission, Blue Ribbon Commission on Housing and Economic Development, Office of the Child Advocate, Department of Children and Families, Commission on Children, Children’s Trust Fund (none of which, of course, can be combined in to one agency), Office of the Consumer Council, Department of Consumer Protection, Office of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities, Board of Firearms Permit Examiners, Office of Health Care Access, Office of the Health Care Advocate, Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, Commission on Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs, Military Department, Office of Military Affairs (these in addition to the department looking after Connecticut’s National Guard), Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, Racial and Ethnic Disparity Commission in the Criminal Justice System….and on and on and on.

All of that has to be staffed – naturally with very well paid union workers who’s dues are used to perpetuate the government which keeps the money flowing. But now Connecticut is broke – only massive cuts can save them and so what do they do? Just borrow more money – can’t contemplate any cuts, at all.

The liberal nightmare continues.

Back on July 25th, 2009, I had this to say:

As I’ve said for some time now, we need what amounts to a bankruptcy reorganization of our national housing market. It will take some primo number crunchers to work it out, but mortgage amounts – by zip code – will have to be reduced to match current market values, and then the loans re-worked based upon the current value of the house. Its a lose/lose situation for everyone (for instance, I’d lose the approximately $130,000 I’ve paid for this house to date, the bank would lose a great deal of future interest as my mortgage amount would have to drop by 50% or so to bring it in line with current market values). Its lousy, but I can’t think of any way to really get us out of this mess – we have so many millions of houses “upside down” in relation of loan balance to house value that the temptation will become massive for people in that situation to just walk away…in which case, the banks would get even less than they’d get with a “cram down” on existing loans.

And now there’s this report:

…BofA’s credit loss mitigation executive, Jack Schakett, said the amount of strategic defaulters (those who can pay their loans but opt not to) are “more than we have ever experienced before.” He went on to say, “there is a huge incentive for customers to walk away because getting free rent and waiting out foreclosure can be very appealing to customers.”

Schakett says the foreclosure process is still taking 13 to 14 months (and by my estimates that’s an optimistic assessment), and so there’s over a year of free rent. While the banks are trying to improve the time, they’re just not there yet.

31 percent of foreclosures in March were deemed to be “strategic default” by researchers at University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

That’s up from 22 percent in March of 2009.

Business is business, folks. I know that some people are still following the bankster’s meme on this and calling such defaults “deadbeats”, but the fact of the matter is that a bank will default in a heartbeat if that is the most logical business decision to make. When you are in a financial jam, you add up the numbers, figure out what will hurt you least, and then do it.

There are also those who think that a person should still pay even on a massively “underwater” house because the price will eventually come back. Even supposing it will, I calculated that it would be approximately 2038 before my house came back to purchase price. Anyone with a calculator can do the same thing – and I’m sure a lot of people are. But, the prices won’t come back – not ever. There simply aren’t enough people in the rising generation to create the demand necessary for substantial price increases – unless we manage to get ourselves in to hyperinflation (which, of course, would only change the nominal rather than the real price of the house).

Cramming down people’s mortgage amounts will be a difficult business, but it still commends itself to me as the best means of curing the housing industry. Everyone would lose – but, also, everyone would gain. Houses would be priced to reality, they would be affordable and people would no longer view their houses as piggy banks from which to withdraw vacation cruises and other such nonsense.

Or, we can just continue on as we are and have massive increases in defaults which will cram down the prices the hard way. Its our choice.

Dropping Meeks for Crist in Florida – because they know a spineless political hack like Crist will vote as he’s told…and, for Democrats, that is all that matters – from the New York Post:

Top Democratic strategists are abandoning their party’s frontrunner in the Florida Senate race in favor of Independent Charlie Crist, who bolted the Republican party over the state party’s rightward lurch toward the Tea Party.

SKDKnickerbocker, a leading Democratic political strategy and communications firm, has agreed to work on Crist’s up-hill campaign as an independent for the U.S. Senate.

The decision will be widely viewed as a slap at Democratic frontrunner Rep. Kendrick Meek, who is trailing badly in the polls and many Democrats believe is hopeless for winning in November.

Do any of you Democrats out there have the guts to stand up and say “no” to this? This is what the Democrat party has become – a corrupt and hidebound organization only interested in power and the wealth it brings.

Disgusting, that is all it is.

Wikipedia has a good account of the battle. Its good for us to pause and remember – and especially so for our battles of the Pacific War, most of which seem to have dropped out of the public mind.

Midway is especially worth remembering because it was a fight against long odds and we won it. Outnumbered and facing a much better trained and experienced force, the US Navy met the Japanese fleet toe to toe and administered a crushing defeat. Before Midway, there was no limit to Japanese conquest in the Pacific – after Midway, it was only a matter of time before Japan was beaten.

Had the battle gone the other way, Hawaii would have been open to invasion and the US west coast naked to raids and other destruction. It would have added years to the war, at the very least, and might have eventually forced a negotiated peace leaving Japan in control of a mighty empire.

So, remember those brave men – especially the hundreds of Navy pilots, some of them flying hopelessly obsolete aircraft thanks to pre-War idiocy about military spending, who threw themselves upon the Japanese fleet with no thought for their own safety.

Caught me by surprise – I expected the number of census hires to be much higher. Maybe with the heat rising, they decided not to fudge the numbers as much? At any rate:

After a relatively large expansion in private-sector employment in April of 224,000, the Obama administration led people to believe that the growth rate would continue in May. The White House leaked to several media sources that the number of new jobs would exceed a half-million positions, mainly through temporary Census Bureau expansion, and that the private sector would gain around 150,000 — somewhat less than April but still ahead of population growth. Instead, the actual BLS numbers missed both marks…

When you boil it down, about 20,000 private sector jobs are estimated (estimated! No one knows for sure, yet) to have been created in May. The only thing which kept the unemployment rate from shooting above 10% is the number of workers estimated (once again, estimated!) to have left the labor force. The numbers are still a bit bogus because a lot of guess work goes on with what is called the “birth/death model” – the means by which BLS throws darts at a wall and says “we say this many jobs were made ’cause the the stars aligned just right”.

Until we start creating new wealth, we cannot create new jobs in any sort of number necessary to improve overall employment. We can’t start creating wealth until we know how much wealth we have to begin with – and we can’t know that until the crash completes its process. All we did with TARP, stimulus and other such government boondoggle nonsense was prop up things which needed and still need to come down.

The question still remains – how long before the process completes? It is unknown because we simply don’t know how much longer our government and governments around the world can keep printing and borrowing money to shore up a dead economy. Eventually it must all come crashing down – but is that tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? I don’t know – but I didn’t think they’d keep it going as long as they have…it could happen at any time and when it does happen, there will be little advance notice in the MSM (while people in the know will see it a couple days in advance and act accordingly).

Welcome back, Carter:

…1979 followed two years of Carteresque utopian proclamations. Do we remember them all still? There was Cy Vance, in perfect aristocratic style, and in perpetual atonement for his earlier support of the Vietnam War, with his creased brow and sermonizing tone, bringing in the kinder, gentler order. He resigned over the failed hostage rescue, replaced by a stoic Ed Muskie. And there was Andrew Young at the UN trying to be a sort of proto-Barack Obama, reaching out to the radical Palestinians, and so on.

Remember the commandments? No more inordinate fear of communism; human rights governing U.S. foreign policy; no more nuclear weapons housed in South Korea which was to be free of U.S. troops; outreach to the terrorist/rebel/reformer Mugabe, and so on.

In other words, it took a flawed world about 24 months to size up the new idealistic administration, and to determine that it either could not or would not continue U.S. foreign policy of the previous three decades…

Its taken the world a bit less time to size up this President – our 1979 has arrived a bit sooner. The “Gaza flotilla” is a direct result of Obama’s foreign policy – it simply would not have happened while Bush was President and if Obama hadn’t started coddling our enemies, it wouldn’t have happened now. More and worse is to come.

I remember that terrible year – I turned 15 two weeks after the Islamists seized our embassy in Tehran. In my mind’s eye I still see that picture of the Islamists using Old Glory to haul out trash. Of thousands chanting “death to America”, while my President wrung his hands and stumbled from mistake to blunder and back again.

It is eerily familiar – Obama is just blindly repeating almost the exact errors of Carter. He’s just as old as I am – doesn’t he remember? Or does he just not care? Or was he just told in school that Carter’s programs were working and if only we American dummies had re-elected him, all would have come out ok? I don’t know – I can’t explain it.

We’re going to get it all, and likely worse than before. Its such a crying shame – and remember, Republicans, it is our fault. We failed the American people, and thus Obama was able to get elected. We’ll be a long time repairing the error, and this time around we simply must remember that waiting in the wings, if we lose are way, is Carter III…now being trained either directly in the Obama Administration, or immured in one of the same schools Obama came out of.