Always be prepared for battle:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household. – Matthew 10:34-36
Because it was never really intended to work:
The best explanation I’ve found for why the stimulus didn’t work is this graph from the GAO analysis of the stimulus act. It shows pretty clearly that the 76 percent of stimulus spending through the first four months went to fill in the gaping holes in Medicaid and state budgets. In other words, the stimulus isn’t acting like a pole vault lifting job creation above the baseline. It’s been acting like a crutch to keep state budgets and payrolls from imploding tumbling.
And I warned you liberals of this – if you send money to a State, it won’t go where you want it to go, but where that State figures it needs it. Money, as they say, is fungible…you can send a billion to NY for highway improvements, but NY might very well plug their budget hole with it. And what will you do about it? Demand the money back? Its already spent. Given that the States in the worst shape are largely liberal-governed States, its almost a certainty that any money actually used for stimulus is just pure happenstance…after looting spendulus for their own purposes, there just happened to be a little left over (or, more likely, a construction firm or union which needed to be paid off).
It won’t work: the only way to get some government money to stimulate the economy is to provide grants to people who are willing to invest their own sweat equity in opening up mines, sowing fields or starting up factories. You give that money to government, and it will be wasted. You give it to large, failed firms and it will be wasted. You give it to people who are willing to work for a living, and it will be used…and they won’t need a trillion dollars.
Michael Yon’s latest:
…Word came that a British unit from 2 Rifles was in contact with the enemy, and that nine soldiers had been wounded. Two low-flying A-10s had roared over the base—a sure indicator that soldiers were in trouble. The snarling aircraft are meant to cause the enemy to think twice before continuing, which buys our folks a little time to defend or counterattack. Shortly after they swooped in, the A-10s fired their cannons. During a different firefight last week, one that I could hear from base but was not involved in, an American A-10 swooped in and was cleared hot. The fire support team soldiers explained to me that the A-10 pilot was lined up and preparing to squeeze the trigger when he saw a child emerge from the enemy position and so the pilot flew by with cold barrels…
We know from the news that July was the roughest month for our troops and our allies – and Yon is pointing out that things are far from well in Afghanistan. Read the whole thing, remember our troops, and kick in a little for Yon’s reporting as he’s entirely reader-supported.
Really, there’s no other way to characterize this:
Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, said today that Planned Parenthood of Alaska’s lawsuit to prevent a parental notification for abortion initiative from ever being voted upon reflects the group’s anti-parent mindset.
“Planned Parenthood doesn’t want parents to know what it’s doing to their daughters or their unborn grandchildren,” said Fr. Pavone, “because it thinks it knows better than parents what’s good for young girls. This lawsuit is one more example of Planned Parenthood’s anti-parent bias.”
If there’s parental notification, then men who have impregnated minor girls won’t be able to use PP to dispose of the evidence against them…and that means PP will rake in less money off abortion. PP simply can’t allow that to happen, can it? So, they’ll trot out the extreme rarity of a father who has impregnated his daughter and use that as cover for where the real money is – aborting rape evidence.
The nauseating aspects of abortion keep coming to the surface, no matter how hard the abortionists try to hide behind words like “choice” – and because the practice is disgusting and anti-human, we’re winning the public fight against the practice. Trouble this, this means that the abortionists will simply rely more and more on the courts to enforce a pro-abortion worldview – so, we’ll have to fight them on their chosen ground: in court, likely in front of liberal judges (the left does “judge shop” in these matters). But, even with that, we’ll have them – you can’t win defending a lie.
President Bush was considered a complete idiot by the left. After six months of Obama, I’m getting very concerned that we really do have an idiot in the White House. Takes a rather major bonehead to insult the cops for no reason at all, ya know?
What do you think? Is Obama an idiot, or crazy like a fox and just trying to lull us in to a sense of 2012 security by pretending to be a moron?
More video on You Tube about this wonderful expression of true American patriotism.
And Spankin’ Specter.
Getting more and more like it, every day:
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
And just where do you think Obama is going to get the money to pay not for this? Look in the mirror.
We may have had a worse time, but if we did, it was called the Great Depression:
…if the economy is about to begin growing again, it will be from a very low level. The recession has produced declines far greater than in previous downturns over the past half-century. As a result, the economy may seem to be depressed even after growth resumes.
One area where that can be seen is shipments of durable goods produced by American companies. The rate of such shipments fell by more than 20 percent during this recession, and would have declined further were it not for increased production of weapons.
In no previous downturn since 1958, when the figures began being recorded, had the decline been as much as 14 percent.
The drop is all the more remarkable because such shipments rose at a relatively restrained rate in the preceding period of economic growth, particularly when military sales were excluded.
We’re not making, mining and growing things – as I keep harping on like a broken record (hmmm…does anyone under 30 even understand the phrase “broken record”? Its terrible when you stop being hip). Anyways….
Do keep in mind that the linked report is from the New York Times. Mish’s has an excellent chart you can click on and see just how miserable it really is. The really bad news is that things got worse in the first quarter of 2009 as opposed to the first quarter of 2008. We’re not bottoming out or starting to rise – we’re still sliding down.
The sooner we all admit that we were suckered – for a century – on the notion of what makes wealth and start setting our minds on creating real wealth, the sooner we get out of this. If anyone is expecting Obama and various Ivy League-educated lawyers and money shufflers to fix the economy, he’s going to be waiting a very long time. It can’t be done – because it never could be done. We floated around on wealth we had built up over a century of hard work and tried to finesse things by moving money around…and it was all a waste of time. It is now time to get back to work.
Or, we can kneel before Obama and Hope and Change our way to nirvana…if you think that’s a good idea.
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