From Marketwatch:

We all think it’s a panacea. If you don’t have enough money saved for retirement, you’ve got a few ways to close the gap between what you have and what you need in your nest egg: Save more, invest more aggressively, and/or work longer.

Well, it turns out that working longer is indeed an option, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute latest study. The only problem is that the latest research shows that you’ll have to work much longer than you anticipated. In fact, many Americans will have to keep on working well into their 70s and 80s to afford retirement, according to the study, titled “The Impact of Deferring Retirement Age on Retirement Income Adequacy.”…

Lots of reasons for this, but the primary reason is that we don’t produce enough wealth – we’re not making, mining and growing enough of our own stuff to build up the wealth necessary to allow the elderly to not work. Officially, I’ll get to retire at 67…but taking a look at one thing and another, it is looking more like 70 for me, and that is only if things go well.

Until we start producing more wealth, however, this condition will just get worse and worse. You really can’t sustain an economy if you are outsourcing all the hard, dirty work. An economy has to be geared towards the production of things of value – “innovation” and taking customer service calls over the phone just doesn’t cut it.

From the AP:

Amid increasing calls for Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says the decision should be up to the congressman and his New York constituents.

The former speaker said in San Francisco that she believes the decision should be made by “the individual member” and the people in his district…

Pelosi must have seen that Marist poll which states that 56% of Weiner’s constituents are opposed to his resignation. I haven’t seen the breakdown of the poll…but, it is Queens, so it might well be truly reflective of how mindlessly Democrat Weiner’s constituents are.

But shouldn’t Pelosi still call for his resignation, as a matter of principal? You forget who we’re dealing with – Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat leader. As Matt and I explained in Caucus of Corruption, no Democrat will call out a fellow Democrat unless there is a risk of electoral loss. If Weiner risked losing his seat next year, Pelosi would drop on him like a ton of bricks…but as long as he can win and will do as he’s told, Pelosi will never make a move against him.

So, Pelosi gets to keep her Weiner – and will continue to do so unless and until something comes up which might cost the Democrats Weiner’s seat.

It was reported and then vigorously denied – though I took the denials with a grain of salt because, well, the Clinton’s are inveterate liars and so anything they say, or authorize to say about them, must be taken with a grain of salt…if by “grain” we mean “mountainous pile of sodium”. So, no surprise that we’ve got the MSM sticking by the story:

…”Hillary Clinton wants the job,” said one source who knows the secretary well.

A second source also said Clinton wants the position.

A third source said Obama had already expressed support for the change in her role. It is unclear whether Obama has formally agreed to nominate her for the post, which would require approval by the 187 member countries of the World Bank.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied the discussions. “It’s totally wrong,” he told Reuters.

A spokesman for Clinton, Philippe Reines, denied Clinton wanted the job, had conversations with the White House about it or would accept it.

People familiar with the situation, told of the denials from the White House and State Department, reaffirmed the accuracy of the report…

It is a good fit for Hillary. The World Bank is just the sort of elitist, Ruling Class entity which appeals to liberals who want to shape the world to fit their ideology. Additionally, t will provide power and money without having to really answer to anyone…the corrupt deals the Clinton’s have engineered can keep going and whole, new worlds of sleazy deal making will open up. I can see her wanting this job – and wanting to bail out on Obama before the wheels completely come off the cart.

How’s that recovery thing working out for you?

…the current 6 week drop, which is the longest in the last 9 years, or since 2002, may just be the beginning. And while our prediction that 2011 is a replica of 2010 is now confirmed, the far scarier possibility is that the next comparison to 2011 is 2002 – if that year is any indication, the SPX will drop to ~1000 before rebounding: obviously at that point the Fed will have no choice but to proceed with QE3, or the downward momentum will accelerate in what may then become a repeat of October 2008, and all those predictions for an S&P 400 would promptly be validated.

As for me, I fully expect some financial hocus-pocus from both Treasury and the Federal Reserve to reverse this. In the end the hocus-pocus might not work even in the short term, but I bet they try…they just can’t go in to 2012 with a recession raging across Obama’s polling numbers (and that is all they care about – not you, not me, not the country…just getting Obama re-elected, so that the bankster/bureaucrat gravy train can keep rolling).

They are certainly trying their best – from the Wall Street Journal:

Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, dropped by our offices this week and relayed a remarkable fact: Some 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas…

Texans, all told, don’t even make up 10% of the American population, yet they have created 37% of the new jobs in America. That is a remarkable achievement. How has it been done? By conservative, Republican economic policies – low taxes, low regulations, business friendly. Additionally, tough on crime; tort reform; being pro-family. In other words, Texas is governed in a manner best suited to meet the needs of average, everyday people who just want to work and get on with their lives – it isn’t a plaything for liberal crackpots.

As an aside, this is just about the best sort of news the Texas governor can have, if he’s really thinking of running for President…

Forget about the Dow, the economy, the wars – we’ve got bigger fish to fry! Sarah Palin’s gubernatorial e-mails have just been released! The cracker-jack MSM is on the case – and is calling on you, regular Americans, to help them sift through the data.

Here is a quote from this trove of vital information:

I just read the article…Sheeeesh, Harris is saying some very foolish things in there.

Please discuss the terrible implications of this.

Keep pace with this hyper-important story on the Twitter feed.

var VideoID = “15271”; var Width = 425; var Height = 344;

People are angry – as I’ve been saying for a while, disgust for what is going on is rising. And it cuts across party lines – to be sure, people in the center and right tend to be more angry than people on the left, but even a lot of leftists are getting frustrated…after all, The One was supposed to do so much, and has done nothing, really. Its not that anyone wants a riot or a civil war, but if genuine reforms to help average Americans are not swiftly forthcoming, then it will get dicey, to say the least.

For a person losing their home there is something just flat wrong about seeing a bailed-out bankster make a huge bonus, or seeing the First Lady go on a lavish vacation, or seeing the President tell Brazil that he hopes they get a lot of oil jobs…things need to change: people who work hard and play by the rules need to be the winners…and if they aren’t, then we’re going to have some trouble.

From Pajamas Media:

…Right now all the action is in the U.S. House of Representatives, where The Hill newspaper recently reported that a majority of the House Republican Conference sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) “laying out conditions to be met before a higher debt ceiling is agreed to.”

The letter “called for discretionary and mandatory spending cuts to halve the budget deficit next year, spending caps to hold Washington’s spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product, and passage of a balanced-budget amendment.”

The strategy, which is known by its nickname “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” is expected to dominate the discussion surrounding the debt ceiling as events move forward.

Conservatives have embraced the plan, which is expected to be put forward in the Senate by the likes of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and freshman Utah Senator Mike Lee. They especially like the part about securing passage of a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but only if it includes a supermajority requirement to raise taxes and strict spending limitations pegged to U.S. GDP…

Doing all that would be the budgetary silver bullet – it would solve the fiscal problem, make it impossible for us to ever default and allow the United States, over time, to outgrow Big Government, entirely. There still would be a lot of difficulty in the nitty-gritty of what to cut and by how much, but the overall plan exactly matches the need.

The big risk, as usual, is in the GOP leadership – right now, there are efforts being made to spook the leadership in to really believing that a failure to raise the debt ceiling will cause problems. And, in fact, if the economy tanks – as I fully expect it to – then failure to raise the debt ceiling will be blamed by the Democrats for the collapse. The patent absurdity of such an assertion won’t matter – all that will matter is how much the Democrats can frighten the GOP leadership with the assertion.

By holding firm we can win it all. By caving, we’d lose our best chance in a generation. Let’s hope for a bit of back bone in the GOP leadership.

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters believe voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote. Just 18% disagree and oppose such a requirement…

This is yet another winning issue for us – and an issue which will cut right at the heart of Democrat party power: curbing voter fraud will cost the Democrats a lot of elections. Essentially, if a Democrat wins by 1% or less, you can rely on it that voter fraud played a role in the Democrat victory. Cheating is endemic in the Democrat party – and from what I can see, always has been.

Right now with Eric Holder’s “Justice” Department, cheating is being given a free pass – Holder simply will not enforce laws against voter fraud and will, indeed, facilitate it as much as possible (such as in trying to bar States from requiring voter ID…thus allowing Democrats to stuff the ballot boxes with illegal votes). But we simply cannot allow this to continue. Voting is the heart and soul of American governance. It is how we decide who should be in charge – and if there ever comes a time when the people are convinced that their our voting is worthless because of fraud, that is the end of democratic governance in the United States.

And, so, we should run on this. We should make it an issue in the 2012 campaign – using as our bedrock the Black Panther voter intimidation from 2008, Holder’s failure to prosecute and the host of voter fraud examples from 2010 we can take our case to the people. Our argument should be that voting should be as secure as possible and that it is no great burden for an honest man or woman to provide reasonable proof of eligibility to vote. This poll indicates that the vast majority agree with us – and we can either steamroller the Democrats in to agreeing, or hammer them endlessly as the party of electoral fraud.

From the Daily Beast:

…All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? “Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th,” she writes—”a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common.”

She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.)…

Yeah, that’s the ticket – don’t try. Don’t make an effort. If its easier to wallow in a sewer than to stay clean, then by all means: wallow away.

There is a reason why Jesus instructed us that to even look at a woman with lust in our hearts is adultery – because to travel even an inch down the road of sin is catastrophic. In a real sense there is no “small sin” – because that first step away from honor can prove decisive in a person’s life. From being a person keeping the marital vows you first become a person who will do a bit of “innocent” flirting on line…before too long, you’re sending pornographic pictures of yourself to women on the other side of the country. In response to the Weiner case we can do one of two things – learn that its best not to even start that sort of thing, or decide that we’d rather live in a world where vows are meaningless.

Ultimately, such disasters as this are a failure to love properly. We are further instructed that the most important commandment is to love God with all our heart and soul. This is not because God needs to be loved like that but because only if we fix our love on the one entity worthy of it will we be able to demonstrate proper love to the people around us. Weiner had a choice – in a split second moment he could have loved God, which would have gotten him immediately back to loving his wife…and the picture would never have been sent. But in that instant he decided to love himself to the exclusion of God and all else…and now his career is ruined. It really works as simply – and as swiftly – as that. And 10,000 times a day men and women make that same choice…and those who choose correctly wouldn’t change places with those who chose wrong for all the money in the world.

This is not to say that once you’ve chosen wrong you can’t later choose correctly. As long as we live, there is that chance for redemption. If the last 100 choices you made were bad, you can pretty much fix the problem by making the right choice, today. Not that the sin will be as if it had never been, but that you will have turned back from sin and towards God…and your cure will have commenced. But all too many among us want none of that – what they want is ease. It is much easier to deal with sin when you no longer consider it a sin…the mental process goes “well, its all just the way I am; and I’m being true to myself…and as long as I’m not doing what Rat Bastard X is doing, I’m a good person”…meanwhile, Rat Bastard X is considering himself to be ok because he’s not doing what Rat Bastard Y just did.

It is, though, better to try to be good. Really it is. I, too, fail. But commanded by God, when I do so I don’t try to justify it: I apologize for it and try to do better next time. And when the next time comes, I some times actually do better. It is just as much a step by step process to become a good person as it is to become a wicked person, you see? And the sooner we all start trying to be good rather than justifying being bad, the better the world will be.