Nader: There Will be an Obama Primary Challenger

Mark Noonan39 Comments

From The Daily Caller:

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and perennial third-party presidential candidate, announced last month that he would work to find a Democrat to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.

Nader now says that a primary challenge is a near certainty.

“What [Obama] did this week is just going to energize that effort,” Nader promised in an interview with The Daily Caller. “I would guess that the chances of there being a challenge to Obama in the primary are almost 100 percent.”

The only question, he said, is the stature of that opponent and whether it will be either “an ex-senator or an ex-governor” or “an intellectual leader or an environmental leader.”…

While one must never forget the way Nader helped fasten upon the American people the greedy and corrupt tribe of trial lawyers, you do have to hand it to him on his convictions:  he’s a pinko right down to the ground, and Obama hasn’t been commie enough for him.  Which, once again, does make you wonder just how ultra-leftist Obama would have to be to please people like Nader.  At all events, it appears that anger over Obama’s failures on the left side are starting to bite.

While there was some lip service on the left about Afghanistan being a “good” war, the reality is that the left dislikes any use of American power…so, the fact that we’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan and have also launched a war in Libya has to be causing problems.  In addition to this, Obama has kept in place almost all of the Bush anti-terrorism policies…this is simple common sense on the part of Obama, but our leftists talked themselves in to really believing that Gitmo was a horror and that the Patriot Act was undermining American liberty.  To keep the American Gulag open has to be a shock to the left…and a source of anger the longer it stays open (here’s a clue for you liberals…it will remain open at least until after election day…Obama simply will not risk releasing one of the terrorists there for fear that someone will be killed by the former inmate…in your liberal mind those men might be innocents cruelly arrested and tortured by Chimpy McSmirk BusHitler, but the realty is that they are killers who want to kill again).  Add in things like the failure to terminate the Bush tax cuts, failure to raise taxes on “the rich” some more, failure to get a single-payer health plan and it all adds up to a grand disappointment to the left.

And so a possible primary challenger…if Nader can dredge one up.  Given Nader’s statement, he’s likely to find someone…but unless he finds someone with real stature, it will just be a joke candidacy, easily crushed by the Democrat machine.  Nader will have to find someone who is both willing to ship out with the craziest denizens of the liberal nuthouse while also being someone with a credible political record.  This will not be easy to do.  But always fun to watch…stay tuned.

John Kerry, Liberal Fascist

Mark Noonan34 Comments

From Pajamas Media:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Hanoi) must be really worried about how badly the Democrats are losing the argument on government spending. He took to MSNBC to goad the media into censoring the opinions and statements of people with whom he disagrees (and who happen to have the facts on their side). The irony of his having made such an argument on an openly ideological network seems to have been lost on Sen. Kerry.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: “And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.”…

Translation – if you MSMers know what’s good for you, you’ll stop allowing any dissenting voices to appear.  We can’t have those hicks and bitter clingers out there getting their views across.  Don’t you realize that we Democrats could be crushed next year if the truth keeps coming out?

Its not like Kerry has been a tribune of truth, you know?  He is the guy, after all, who did say our brave men and women in Vietnam were acting like Genghis Khan…so, slanders have fallen easily from his lips.  And, at any event, shouldn’t it be up to the people to listen to all voices and decide for themselves who is right?

Not to our liberals, it would seem…because if the people hear differing opinions, then they are sure to reject the liberal view.

Behind the Unemployment Numbers

Mark Noonan65 Comments

Mish gathered the details:

  • US Payrolls +117,000
  • US Unemployment Rate -.1 to 9.1%
  • Participation Rate -.2 to 63.9% accounting for drop in unemployment rate
  • Actual number of Employed (by Household Survey) fell by 38,000
  • Unemployment rose by 156,000
  • Those dropping out of the labor force rose by 374,000
  • Civilian population rose by 182,000, Labor Force declined by 193,000
  • Average Weekly Workweek was unchanged at 34.3 hours
  • Average Private Hourly Earnings Increased by 10 Cents
  • Government employment decreased by 37,000 – a genuine bright-spot

Without that drop in the labor force, unemployment would have risen – as soon as I saw the headline number of +117,000 and a drop in unemployment I knew, without even checking, that something was wrong.  If we gained 250,000 jobs a month, unemployment would remain high for years.  A plus 117K just wasn’t enough to lower the unemployment rate unless someone decided that fewer people were in the labor force.  Presto!, that is what we got.  Amazing, huh?  Great how that works out when we’ve got a President desperately seeking re-election…

UPDATE:  The headline that says it all, from Bloomberg:

Bernanke Models Prove Faulty as Fed Forecasts Succumb to Downward Revision

How to Fix the Economy

Mark Noonan37 Comments

I’ve been yammering on about it for years, so maybe you’re tired of reading my views…so, here’s someone else to say it.  Victor Davis Hanson over at NRO’s The Corner:

…If the government were an individual household, the only way out would be to cut spending and find new sources of wealth. Given worldwide demand for food and fuel, and given recent quite astounding new finds of natural gas and oil in the Dakotas, the eastern seaboard, offshore, the American west, Alaska, and Canada, it seems that we should be hell-bent on recovering these high-value fuels through new drilling, refineries, and pipelines, including ways to power our heavy trucks and equipment on natural gas. We should be planting acre to acre and end nonsensical biofuel subsidies and artificial limitations on irrigation deliveries to California’s West Side and elsewhere in the West. We need a national manufacturing policy that prunes regulations and encourages investment here in the U.S., ceases talk of new taxes, repeals the trillion-dollar take-over of the health-care industry, and stops hectoring Boeing about opening a new facility or trying to shut down energy generation plants…

As I’ve been saying – make, mine and grow more of our own stuff.  That is the only way out of this…we have to start creating wealth again.  Of course, this does require hard work, does require getting a little dirty and doesn’t allow for nearly the current number of government bureaucrats, mid-level managers and diversity coordinators, but that is just some of the heavy sacrifices we’ll have to make.

I believe it was Reagan who once said there are no easy solutions, but there are simple ones.  Getting our nation back on track will not be easy, but it is quite simple.  Ditch the idiot liberalism of the past few decades, insist everyone pull their weight and just get to work.  It’ll all be ok, if we do that…no easily; not with out a lot of tears and sweat, but it’ll all be ok.

Asia-Pacific Markets Getting Hammered

Mark Noonan1 Comment

Mish has the details and a roundup of really, really lousy economic headlines.

My take:  if the employment report comes in better than expected tomorrow, then the sheep who run our financial system will some how, some way, hold it to be evidence that things aren’t as bad as they look…the market might surge by hundreds of points.  On the other hand, if it comes in worse than expected, then watch out.

The bottom line for the global economy is, as it has been for years, that there is way too much debt.  Each and every nation – yes, including China – is honeycombed with bad debt which cannot be repaid…in some cases never, in other cases just not in the contractual time frame.  We borrowed ourselves in to a global boom and now the piper has to be paid.  We might dodge this one more time but no matter how many times we pull back from the cliff, we are still ultimately heading for a crash.  Default is the only way out for some nations, while a quasi-default will be required of all other nations.

The lesson to be learned is that debt is poison…we’ve been hoodwinked; suckered by a classic, get-rich-quick ponzi scheme which held that we could borrow forever, live like kings and never have to repay.  Don’t get me wrong, here – we, the people, for the most part eagerly joined in the scam.  We lost our heads – and, more importantly, we lost our sense of moral rightness.  Once we pay this price, it is to be hoped that we’ll take our lesson to heart and build an economy based on hard work, savings and careful investment.

Liberal Fascists to Silence Pro-Life Voices

Mark Noonan9 Comments

From the Bay Citizen:

San Francisco leaders are launching a coordinated attack against what they call “one of the most serious threats to reproductive rights today” — so-called crisis pregnancy centers that advertise as though they provide abortions, but counsel against them.In a joint press conference with Supervisor Malia Cohen, City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the “right-wing, politically motivated centers” use false advertisements to target vulnerable populations and can cost women valuable time as they decide whether or not to end a pregnancy.

“Women’s reproductive rights are under assault,” Herrera said…

How dare they!  To think that someone might delay, even by a minute, the butchering of unborn children!  Thank goodness the government of San Francisco is up to the task…once they’re done, if you wind up pregnant in San Francisco, you’ll run no risk of someone offering an opinion that you shouldn’t kill your child.  Then, at last, all will be paradise in San Francisco, right?

A couple other cities under the iron grip of liberal fascism have also passed such laws.  They are very naturally being challenged in court and, if it gets there, the Supreme Court will strike down all such laws.  Free speech is free speech, even if liberals don’t like it.

But isn’t this just like our liberals?  They simply don’t want to hear us, at all…not even the slightest breath of non-liberal speech is to be allowed, if they had their way.  The fascism of the left grows apace (and is matched by the growth of liberal racism and anti-Semitism)…and I really do feel sorry for them.  To have so closed their minds and hearts to reason and mercy must make for a cold, lonely life.  They are screaming for relief, but all they do is keep lacerating themselves, and tightening their shackles a little more.

For goodness sake, liberals…do one small thing:  allow other people to talk some out of killing their children.  That is all…if you can just bring yourselves to tolerate that, you’ll be on the path to recovery.

Financial Crisis, Part 2: Welcome Back, 2008?

Mark Noonan17 Comments

Quite a slide in stocks today, huh?  As for me, I’m congratulating myself on shifting all my 401k funds from stocks to bonds just yesterday.  I’m not sure that this move, in the end, will really save my 401k, but I was seeking some means of avoiding the crash in value I had back in 2008.

So, what now?  Do we keep crashing, or does something happen to make it all go away, at least for a while?  I honestly don’t know – but over at Zero Hedge a dire warning that there is no way out:

…Nothing from 2008 has actually been fixed. Faith and trust do not exist in the financial system anymore. Everyone knows the deal… they just don’t want to admit it as it means GAME OVER for the system as we know it.

Which is why now that the next round of the Financial Crisis has hit, there’s really nothing the Fed or anyone can do about it. They had their big chance to fix things in 2008 and failed. This time around, no one will believe the Fed can fix anything. And what’s coming will make 2008 look like a joke….

Could be – but I still think that the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury can pull a couple more rabbits out of the hat.  They can’t fix it, but they may be able to juggle the financial balls until after election day, next year.  Which is, by the way, the primary aim of the Ruling Class…keeping things together until after the election and hoping that no TEA Party-backed candidate wins the White House.  Their ultimate nightmare is a President who will actually change the system…the corrupt system, that is, which benefits the Ruling Class.

As for me, I admit to a tremor of fear today … I work at a firm highly sensitive to things like stock market crashes; this recession could become a depression right quick (on the “a recession is when your neighbor looses his job, a depression is when you lose yours” theory).  But, with all that, things will be as they will.  We’re in one heck of a mess – the end of Big Government liberalism will not be easy and it won’t be pretty.  Decades of living by lies has to be paid for…and we who are in the work force today will just have to pay.  But, also, we must change things…so that the children and grandchildren have that better future the liberals of the 60’s told our parents we’d be living today.

Live for 150 Years? Goodness, Why Would You Want That?

Mark Noonan18 Comments

From Popular Science:

Bill Andrews has spent two decades unlocking the molecular mechanisms of aging. His mission: to extend the human life span to 150 years–or die trying…

…“I want to cure my aging,” Andrews tells me, “my friends’ and family’s aging, my investors’ aging, their friends’ and families’ aging, and make a ton of money. And I want to cure everybody else’s aging too—I put that probably equal to making a ton of money.”…

Andrews is clearly a smart man, and driven by a vision…and, who knows?, maybe he can eventually manage it and get human life spans up to 150.  I hope to be long dead by the time he figures that out.  Andrews is a bit extreme about it, but what he is doing is an apt symbol of our age:  a fear of dying so large that we both never really talk about death, and go about doing everything we can to avoid risk and extend our lives.

In this, I admire my late Uncle Mike – my godfather and a good man.  He was told he could have a surgery which would have extended his life.  His attitude was, “what for?”.  His beloved wife was long deceased, he had no children of his own and he was pushing 80.  He refused the surgery, came ’round to see my father (they got gloriously drunk and sang old songs together in a pub – and that is how you say goodby to those you love, if you get a chance), and then went off to die.  There is a time to live, and there is a time to die…and anyone who hangs too tightly to this world will find that he loses everything, including the next world, for his efforts.

Just the mere thought of living to 150 fills me with dread.  Figuring that I’ll live to my father’s age (general luck and genetics being about the same), I’ll make it until early 2047.   Am I supposed to want to live another 60 0r 7o years after that?  Do I want to live until 2107?  Work, pay taxes, deal with traffic for that long?  For another 96 years be faced with endless temptations to reject God and ruin myself for good?  No, thanks very much…I’ll take my 80 or so and be done with it.  Find me medicines which allow me to keep my eyesight and wits until the end, but don’t try to make me in to someone celebrating his 150th birthday.

And then there’s this – supposed you did find the elixir to make us live to 150 years, what sort of people would we be?  The saints among us wouldn’t avail themselves of it…the people most likely to claw desperately to such expedients are the greedy and the base…cowards and criminals.  Imagine if Stalin had such a medicine…he’d be 133 years old…and still have 17 more left to go under that plan.  Stalinism would still be ruling in Russia…and imagine just how bad that cruel, lunatic man would have become had he been able to live these past 58 years!

We can’t stop people from trying, but we can stand aside and leave them to their own horrors…and hope that wisdom comes to them, including the wisdom which says that, eventually, its time to go.  Don’t stand there forever in the way of those who come after…move on and leave the future to those who will live in it.

Capitalism or Socialism?

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Donald Byrne over at Catholic Journal has an excellent look at both our horrid fiscal situation (yes, we really are going bankrupt) and points out that that in our most-desired goals (prosperity and equity), free market capitalism does much better than State socialism.  Essentially, the imposition of socialistic policies in the United States have exacerbated wealth disparities – if Obama’s goal was really to “spread the wealth around”, he’d be reading Hayek and changing course.  Byrne concludes:

…The goals that competitive free market capitalism brings society toward are efficiency and equity on the microeconomic level and high employment and a reasonable degree of price level stability as well as a consensus driven rate of economic growth.  The decisions of the many, NOT the few, dictate what an economy will produce in the way of goods and services, in what manner those goods will be produced and in distribution of income (the reward of the goods and services produced) with maximum freedom to the people as consumers and productive resources.  It is an economic system that is based on the principle of subsidiarity, again, where the decision-making is driven down to the lowest level possible…after all, who knows/understands better than the individual (in most cases) what is best for them?

And there’s that word I keep using – “subsidiarity”.  Remember, in the end all our fights are to secure for us “subsidiarity” – the right of individuals and localities to decide for themselves the best means of living their lives.  It is at the core of American political morality – it is why our Declaration asserts that government’s must rule by consent, and why the 9th and 10th amendments were added to the Constitution.  It is doubtful that many of the Founders had read deeply in to Catholic social teaching, but in this case they didn’t have to….anyone with a bit of wisdom will swiftly understand his inability to dictate to others, and others far away from his own community.

Obama’s crime against Americanism (because that is what is amounts to) is to suppose that he and those in power with him can determine what is best for everyone.  That they can justly “spread the wealth around” and come to a superior outcome than the individuals, themselves, could achieve.  Not only is this wrong philosophically, it is also wrong in strictly practical terms.  The erosion of the middle class, the destruction of America’s ability to make, mine and grow things, the bankrupting of our nation and the moral decline of the populace are directly traceable to socialistic attempts to decree an outcome, rather than allow things two work themselves out through the interplay of free people.

The only quibble I have with Byrne is over the use of the word “capitalism”.  We should more emphasize the term “free market” than the word “capitalism” because capitalism has come to mean in the public mind a collection of Ivy League educated board room trolls, and the government-subsidized crony-capitalist.  Our fight is not to make the world safe for GE; not to make smooth the path of Government Motors…but to free up the market so that average men and women can enter it, using their own means of production, to create wealth for themselves, their families and their communities.

In practical, political terms I think we’d do much better this way.  What we have growing in the United States is a populist revolt against the Ruling Class.  Sickened by the corruption of politics and the economy, the people are demanding that those who have ruined things be tossed out, while those who are willing to work obtain the greatest reward.  We’ll go further – obtain more power to reform, that is – if we hitch ourselves to this popular revolt, and we can best do that by clearly identifying ourselves in complete opposition to what is currently wrong.

As we enter the Great Debate of 2012, we’ll have Obama telling everyone that a victory for free markets means granny being thrown over the cliff.  Allied with Obama will be those crony capitalists who will warn that failure to support “too big to fail” corporations will be a disaster.  We must expose these lies – we must present a vision of America free and prosperous, and explain that all socialist plans (regardless of what label they are given) will lead to poverty, dependence and a divided, dysfunctional America sliding towards tyranny.  Our question must be – who do you trust:  Obama or yourself?  Make that the issue of 2012 and we’ll win so big a victory that liberalism will not trouble us again for 20 years.

Awwww, Poor Little Liberal is Offended

Mark Noonan54 Comments

About this:

 

From Knox News:

Breath mints packaged in a tin can poking fun at President Barack Obama have been pulled from the shelves at the University of Tennessee bookstore after local legislator Joe Armstrong told store officials he was offended by the mints.

Armstrong, D-Knoxville, said he got a call from a student who had seen the satirical mints in the bookstore and was bothered by the depiction of the president…

Which can be translated to read:  “fascist toady spies something offensive about Dear Leader, denounces it to fascist, who then leans on the offender, who caves in because a government official like that can cause all sorts of trouble”.

What I’d like to know is – since when to Democrats care about offensive depictions of the President?  For 8, long years back there I seem to recall that Democrats were ok with just about anything insulting to the President.  Heck, books and movies were produced fantasizing about killing President Bush with nary a peep out of Democrats about it. But now we have to be respectful…