Now its Obama’s “Manufacturing Czar” – telling us that the free market is nonsense and that he agrees with Mao about power growing out of the barrel of a gun. Do any of these twits have even a cursory understanding of what they’re saying? Or are they just regurgitating what professors shoved down their throats in school?

We’re not at the bottom of the housing crisis:

If you thought home prices were bottoming out, you may be wrong. They’re expected to head a lot lower.

Home values are predicted to drop in 342 out of 381 markets during the next year, according to a new forecast of real estate prices.

Overall, the national median home price is predicted to drop 11.3% by June 30, 2010, according to Fiserv, a financial information and analysis firm. For the following year, the firm anticipates some stabilization with prices rising 3.6%.

We can hope and pray for that 3.6% increase in 2011 – but if my house drops by 11.3% in 2010 and gains 3.6% in 2011, it still works out to about $15,000.00 drop between now and December of 2011 in the value of my house…on top of the approximately $210,000.00 drop since 2006. Not a pretty picture, and I’m just one of millions. The really bad news: Las Vegas will actually do worse than most areas, and so I can probably expect much more than an 11.3% drop next year, and I wouldn’t bet a nickel on a 2011 increase out here.

This is why the stories of a strengthening economy are so much moonshine – housing prices are dropping, wages are dropping, unemployment is rising…with this sour brew of economic collapse, the bankers and their buddy, Obama, are telling use we’re going to get a nice, cold beer out of it. Its just not possible – all we can hope to do is ameliorate the suffering and, if we’re smart, lay down the foundation of a reborn economy by encouraging savings, providing sound money and balancing the federal budget (with a preference for lower taxes, but that might not be possible for a few years – certainly, however, any tax increase will be the work of an insane person).

Hard work and adversity have never daunted Americans and they won’t now – the only thing which can stop us from fixing this is government attempts to fix it.

Read it and weep, liberals:

THE National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.

More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling — all widely available on the NHS.

You see, liberals, the problem with government health care is that it doesn’t work. Its not that it can be done better than it has, but that it never can be any good, at all. Even the much-hyped French health service is going broke and waiting times are rising. It just can’t be done – you can’t de-couple the cost of health care from the consumption of health care and have a good system. If its “free”, it will be used more than it should – and if its government controlled, there is less incentive for supply to increase (supplies normally increase when there is additional profit to be made, you see? Or am I speaking in terms too difficult for you liberals to grasp). Unless you can staff the entire health system with self-sacrificing saints, it just won’t work.

Give up your insane dream – work to provide health care for the poor (it is ok if you, personally, go out and volunteer your time and money….seriously: you’ll feel great when you do it), but don’t try and make perfection out of imperfect human beings. Leave the salvation of Mankind to Our Lord – you just work on trying to make the day a little better for those around you.

It was a match made in heaven…for them:

Guess which two Wall Street banks were acting as informal agents of the government in order to support the bond and stock markets and reinflate them?

Two big banks that are showing record trading profits, and a small group of enablers and assistants.

Its a near layup when the US fronts you the money and then works with you to take the markets higher via its Working Group on Financial Markets. Especially when it is on thin volumes based on ‘news’ which you help to create and control via frequent calls to young Tim who is your coordinator, in addition to all your other well-placed backchannel sources. You get a heads up, you use the futures to prop the markets. You need some good news, some can be arranged. Just like the good old days when Timmy was riding herd on the NY Fed desk.

Proof? No. But I was wondering just who was doing it – who was taking the stock market up on thin overall volume but massive volume on the most beat down financial stocks? Who was buying all these stocks when the Wall Street insiders were bailing out of stocks at a record pace? Well, it seems it was you, taxpayer – it was your money being used to play the stock market, artificially inflate it, give favored banks some big (and entirely illusory) profits. Why? Because the big banks and the big government need you to feel that things are getting better – so that you’ll go out and spend, so that revenues to big corporations and big government will rise, thus allowing them to carry the toxic assets for one more year, or so. To call this smoke and mirrors is to be nice about it – outright fraud is a better description.

Think about it – we’ve been bombarded by “good” news for months now. What is the good news? Well, when you dig in to the numbers, its all about how things aren’t as bad as some people predicted, while profits are better than some other people predicted. That less-bad doesn’t actually work out to good and beating the street after your expectations have been massively lowered doesn’t mean squat isn’t at issue – because along with this “good” news was the rapid rise in the DOW. The latest bit of “good” news I’ve heard is a story being floated in financial circles that consumer spending is expected to pick up for Christmas. With millions more out of work than last Christmas – which was a miserably bad season for sales – we’re being told that things will perk up this Christmas? Yes, we are.

The big question: How long can they sustain this?

I don’t know – its flabbergasting what they’ve already done. This is the biggest swindle in human history – Ponzi would be aghast that people could be this financially corrupt. But, if you’re going to be absolutely dishonest and use the taxpayers money as if it were free candy, then you might tap dance around catastrophe for a while, yet. I suspect it will be some months before it all comes home to roost – though it is certain that Timmy and Barry are hoping the collapse holds off until December of 2010 or, even better, until December of 2012.

Once we do get back in power, we’re really going to have to clean house, from top to bottom – and a lot of people simply must go to jail over all this.

From Powerline:

Iran Double-Crosses Obama

Iran isn’t going to ship its uranium – it wants France to ship enriched uranium to Iran, while Iran holds on to its current uranium stockpile, presumptively so that Iran can have both a civil and military nuclear program. Meanwhile, Iran’s government is telling its people that the United States has agreed to Iran’s continuing nuclear program.

This is the most monumentally obtuse government, ever. Next to Obama, Chamberlain looks like a brilliant negotiator.

Get a group of cops and soldiers who say they will obey their oath to defend the Constitution and the MSM and the left immediately see racists and Oklahoma City bombings:

…Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming “giant concentration camps,” a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years…

…”The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal…

…That type of rhetoric has caught the attention of groups that track extremist activity in the United States.

In a July report titled “Return of the Militias,” the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center singled out Oath Keepers as “a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival.”…

“Patriot” is liberalspeak for “racist”, by the way. Rhodes denounces racism and does not advocate armed resistance. All his group is doing is urging police and soldiers (active and retired) to refuse to obey any unlawful order – especially any order to suppress the American people. Not to open fire, but to merely stand down and refuse to obey – and Rhodes is trying to get together a legal defense fund to help any officer or soldier who does decide that an order should not be obeyed.

Hardly the stuff of racist hate-crimes, but you can’t tell that to the left – anyone who for any reason opposes anything Obama does or might do is a racist, a hate-monger and a guy just an inch away from blowing up a federal building.

The plain fact of the matter is that all of us who have worn our nation’s uniform have taken the oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. While our enlistments had an end date, the oath doesn’t. When I said, “so help me God” on that oath, I promised God that I would do just that – defend the Constitution against all enemies for the rest of my natural life. If I fail to do so, I’m breaking an oath – I would be breaking my word to God. Not going to do that.

What will come of all this? Almost certainly nothing – unless the left tries to use the powers of the federal government to suppress the right in the name of fighting “hate”.

Geesh:

The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece…

…White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox.”

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is “not a news organization.”

“Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way,” Axelrod counseled ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re not going to treat them that way.” …

…The White House stopped providing guests to “Fox News Sunday” after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August.

Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was “something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do.”

Perhaps, Ms, Dunn, if you and the rest of the merry band of Obamaniacs wouldn’t lie at every opportunity, there would be less need to fact check you? Maybe if, say, you had told the truth about what you said vis a vis Mao we’d have a bit more trust in your words? I dunno – call me strange, if you like, but some how or another, people who tell the truth tend to be trusted…

Anyways…

This is the most clear and alarming bit of liberal fascism we’ve seen out of the Obama Administration – they are trying to get the rest of the MSM to turn on Fox. The implied threat: if you don’t, you’ll lose access, too. And we’ve seen the lengths to which outfits like CNN will go to maintain access – they shilled for Saddam’s regime in order to keep access in Baghdad…what will they do in DC to maintain it there? There is a hope – slight though it is – that the MSM will awaken in horror to what is happening. This is an attempt by Obama to put the MSM entirely and directly under his control – to make it a mere tool for his propaganda.

Any MSMer who has a shred of self-respect will reject this out of hand…we’ll see how many there are.

UPDATE: And some are showing a bit of courage – heck, when our Crazy Aunt in the Attic is coming down against Obama, you know they’ve screwed up.

Lorraine Hunt-Bono over at Nevada News and Views explains:

Politicians would better serve the public in areas of fiscal policy if they owned and operated a small business before they ran for political office. Budgeting, prioritizing, and fiscal discipline would then be familiar to them. As an example, I would like to share a story with you:

In 1988, former United States Senator, George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee against Richard Nixon in 1972, decided to fulfill a lifelong dream- he purchased the Stratford Inn, a quaint bed-and-breakfast in Connecticut. Two years later, the hotel went out of business. In a subsequent article in the Wall Street Journal, Senator McGovern humbly admitted the well-intentioned laws he aggressively supported in Congress were the same laws that put him out of business, into bankruptcy, and his employees out a job. “Regrettably,” he said, “I should have been a businessman first and a congressman second.”

As we strive to make this a better country for our children and grandchildren, let us get back to basics and appreciate what made “America the Beautiful” so wonderful- freedom and opportunity for all, rights with responsibilities, and limited government intervention in our personal lives and in our businesses. Let’s not change that.

Its hard to find Obama Administration people who have even spent significant time in the private sector, let alone any who have run a small business (are there any such?) – and those who worked in the private sector seem to have been heavily concentrated in big corporations…the very same corporations which have helped Big Government run the economy in to the ground. They simply don’t know – but, per Obama, they’re going to spread that wealth right around…whatever is left of it after Obama has paid off his cronies.

From NRO’s The Corner:

To be more precise, the iconic Obama HOPE poster/T-shirt was, as the AP charged, created by an artist who stole a copyrighted AP photo image. The case has gone on as long as it did because Shepard Fairey, the artist, lied about which photo he used for the picture, and destroyed the evidence. His pro-bono attorneys, who are members of Stanford Law School’s “Fair Use” project, dropped the case when it became clear that it was based on a fabric of lies. (Honest lawyer alert!)

Sorry be this obvious, and hit NRO readers over the head with such a big, fat, ripe metaphor, but there you are: Hope based on lies and theft — the Obama political brand in a nutshell.

And that is the truth – never in the course of human events has a government been based on quite so much mythology as Obama’s Administration. That, in fact, he’s pretty much a zero who lucked out is hidden under a blizzard fabrications and Hollywood hype – as I said a while back ago, Obama won because he was, in 2008, the “Unknown Democrat” who always polls better than the known GOPer. His handlers managed to keep the truth about Obama under wraps until he was safely elected – dodging a series of revelations which would have been career-ending, save for the fact that Obama had the most glowing, sycophantic press seen this side of a totalitarian dictatorship.

But the truth is coming out, now, and thus it is somehow very appropriate that the iconic poster is shown to be based on lies and theft…

Mark Steyn notes something we’ve seen here and everywhere – the assertion that, some how, Rush, Beck et al are just doing what they do for a paycheck and can’t really believe their own statements:

Our old friend David Frum has been doing his best for moderate conservatism with a broader appeal – the so-called “big tent”. If the tent seems bigger, that’s because he’s kicking so many people out of it. Each to his own. But his latest offering is unworthy of him – “Do Limbaugh And Beck Believe What They Say?”

Yes of course Limbaugh and Beck express the same views in private as in public. Consistent hypocrisy demands exorbitant levels of imagination, energy, and cynicism. Much less exhausting over time simply to bring your private views into alignment with what you are paid to say in public.

“What you are paid to say in public”? By whom? Rush and Glenn are both self-owned brands who license themselves to multiple clients in radio, TV, publishing, etc.

The assumption of bad faith is the first refuge of the lazy leftist: “Why, my position is so obviously the only rational one that yours can only be an act! You cannot possibly believe what you say about climate change/health care/Islamic terrorism! Clearly it can only be explained by the check from your puppetmaster!” Sad to see David Frum buying into this:

Suppose an agent arrived in the offices of Limbaugh/Beck/Hannity/O’Reilly etc. with an offer. “I can guarantee you a deal that will pay you twice as much – bring you twice as much fame – and extend your career twice as long – if you’d say the exact opposite of what you are saying now.” Which of them would sign?

My nominations: O’Reilly accepts for sure. Beck likewise almost certainly says yes…

Most of the big-time talkers have been entirely consistent in their political views since their first gig babbling away for 200 bucks a week on WZZZ-AM at two in the morning. By contrast, there would seem to be more discernible evolution in political outlook among, say, certain long-time writers for the conservative press who then find themselves offered a weekly column in The New York Times.

If Matt and I wanted to make a quick buck, all we’d have to do is – over a few month period – slowly shift our blogging to support for Obama and the left. All of a sudden we wouldn’t be hate-mongers shilling for Corporate America…we’d be wise, genuine conservatives whom the rest of the GOP should emulate. All we’d have to do to get this is lie – just pretend we’re coming ’round, and the left would start writing us checks out of one of Soros’ many accounts. But, we don’t – because we believe what we write. And Rush, etc believe what they say.

We don’t do this for money – we do it because we love it; we love America – we love defending America, and we love defending conservative ideals because they are the foundation stones of the America we love. Rush and Beck have found a way to do what they love and get paid a lot of money at the same time – I’d love to do that, too. But if I never make a dime at it, I’ll still keep plugging away, defending my views until the day I die. There isn’t enough money in the world to get me to alter my views for pay – because it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world, and yet lose his soul.

So, liberals, no: we’re not kidding. This is what we really believe. We believe in God, faith, family, country – we’re fighting for what we believe in and this means that we believe you are wrong. That with your whole force of MSM, entertainment, government and leftist pressure groups, you still haven’t convinced us. We believe you are pinheads who couldn’t find the balls on bull if given three chances at it. So, no, don’t expect us to ever stop – we’re going to keep coming right at you, until we’ve vanquished you for good.