What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[IrezumiKiss]

Yet you do waste it. Have fun lawn jockey.

I will, dipshit.

 

[trysail]

How do you fellows feel about natural gas and fracking?

I'm all for heat in the winter, light in the dark and abundant and affordable domestic energy supplies.


When natural gas-bearing shale layers such as the Marcellus, Utica, Barnett or Woodford are 3-4,000' below ground level, sealed off by several layers of impenetrable geological strata ( including the very cap rock that forms the seal that permitted the gas accumulation in the first place ) and steel well casing only the ignorant, the uninformed, the incredibly gullible or the illiterate would have any objections.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I'm all for heat in the winter, light in the dark and abundant and affordable domestic energy supplies.


When natural gas-bearing shale layers such as the Marcellus, Utica, Barnett or Woodford are 3-4,000' below ground level, sealed off by several layers of impenetrable geological strata ( including the very cap rock that forms the seal that permitted the gas accumulation in the first place ) and steel well casing only the ignorant, the uninformed, the incredibly gullible or the illiterate would have any objections.

Good, cuz I just put a bunch of $$ into it.

 

[eyer]

Back on topic...

The Economy Is Worse Than You Think

Expect more bad news until someone enacts a plan to bring deficits under control without raising taxes..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576363984173620692.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Next Financial Crisis Will Be Hellish And It’s On Its Way

http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspecul...al-crisis-will-be-hellish-and-its-on-its-way/

 

[trysail]

Good, cuz I just put a bunch of $$ into it.

You're late to the game. People have known about this for a long time.

 

[koalabear]

Glenn Beck warned you all...............hahahahahahahaha

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

JUNE 9, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Europe Is Warning Us
Socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before Europeans’ eyes.

Rome — If Americans think fuel and food prices are high, they should try Europe, where both can be nearly double those in the United States, while salaries are often lower.

Italy, like most of the now-broke southern-European countries, is desperate to privatize bloated public-owned utilities. Politicians are trying to curb pensions and encourage the private sector to hire workers and buy equipment, as a way of attracting wary northern Europeans, acting in loco parentis, to lend such perpetual adolescents more bailout money.

In theory, Italians accept that they are going to have to be a lot more like the Germans, and less like the Irish, Portuguese, and Spaniards. In reality, they may end up like the Greeks, who are still striking and occasionally rioting because too few foreigners wish to continue subsidizing their socialist paradise. Red graffiti on Italian streets still speak of socialist solidarity, while Italian politicians talk capitalism to foreign lenders.

The European Union, like the 19th-century Congress of Vienna, can point to one achievement: a general absence of war in Western Europe for more than 60 years. Otherwise, almost all the socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before Europeans’ eyes.

The higher taxes go, the more people cheat on them, and the less revenue comes in. There are sometimes two prices in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe) — the official price that the unwary pay, which includes a high value-added tax, and the negotiated, under-the-table, tax-free price that the haggling shopper obtains.

Europe is essentially defenseless, as governments further trim defense budgets to keep their shrinking spread-the-wealth entitlements alive. The French and British — the continent’s two premier military powers — have been trying for nearly three months to defeat Moammar Qaddafi’s ragtag nation of less than 7 million, itself rent by civil war. The descendants of Wellington and Napoleon so far seem no match for Qaddafi and the Taliban. Both nations will soon be leaving Afghanistan in frustration.

Subsidized wind and solar power have not led to much of an increase in European supplies of electricity, but have helped make power bills soar. Highly taxed gas runs about $10 a gallon, ensuring tiny cars and dependence on mass transit. Central planners love the resulting state-subsidized, high-density European apartment living, without garages, back yards, or third bedrooms. Yet the Japanese tsunami and accompanying nuclear contamination have reminded European governments that their similarly fragile models of highly urbanized, highly concentrated living make them equally vulnerable to such disasters.

Popular culture may praise the use of the subway and train, but about every minute or two, some government grandee in a motorized entourage rushes through the streets as an escort of horn-blaring police forces traffic off to the side. A European technocratic class in limousines that runs government bureaus and international organizations — the class that includes the disgraced former International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn — live like 18th-century aristocrats at Versailles as they mouth socialist platitudes.

Throughout Western Europe, a subordinate class of unassimilated North African, sub-Saharan African, and Pakistani immigrants hawk wares and do menial labor — and are increasingly despised by Europeans as times get rougher. A growing proportion of the working class is getting fed up that the welfare state means sky-high fuel and food costs, small and expensive apartments, and limited disposable income for the masses — but lots of aristocratic perks for the technocrats who oversee the redistributive mess. The notion of a large and esteemed class of self-made, independent-thinking business people and empowered upper-middle-class entrepreneurs is a concept that seems foreign, if not downright subversive.

An acknowledged despair now seems to permeate Western Europe. A glorious past is associated with tourist dollars, not appreciation of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Majestic churches are more moneymaking museums and tourist stops than honored hallmarks of past culture and current faith. Christendom often helped to preserve humanity through horrific crises, but you would never learn that from the average cynical European, who appears either indifferent to or apologetic about both his religion and the hallowed European origins of Western civilization, responsible for much of what is good in the world today.

All this European turmoil raises a paradox. If dispirited Europeans are conceding that something is terribly wrong with their half-century-long experiment with socialism, unassimilated immigrants, cultural apologies, defense cuts, and post-nationalism, why in the world is the Obama administration intent on adopting what Europeans are rejecting?

Victor Davis Hanson
NRO

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Twilight of the Educated Gods

It seems only yesterday that we saw our liberal masters, the educated gods, crossing their rainbow bridge into liberal Valhalla in part one of Das Ring der Obamalungen. And very stirring it was. It's a little shocking to wake up now and realize that we've run lickety split right through Die Walküre and Siegfried, with all the fun of incest, girls on horses, and dragon-slayers. Here we are already with the Three Norns on stage prophesying the end of the gods. To think that 20 hours of Wagner opera could go by so fast!

Look out, wails First Norn Paul Krugman, looking in horror at the thread of Fate. We are in danger of repeating the mistake of 1937, when the Fed put on the brakes and pitched us into the recession-within-a-depression of 1937-38. Don't slow the printing press: not yet!

What the singing prophetess cannot bear to admit is that in 2011, just as in 1937, we are seeing the bankruptcy of Keynesian economics and inflationism. In 1933 to 1936 the New Dealers cartelized business, devalued the dollar, bailed out banks and homeowners, passed the Wagner Act that caused union wages to skyrocket, passed Social Security with its payroll tax, and increased federal spending from $4.27 in 1932 to $9.17 billion in 1936. Golly, fellahs. If all that stuff won't fix a Depression, I wonder what will!

And even if we knew, how could we get liberals to listen?

That's why I believe that conservatives must master the liberal canon. We must argue against liberals using their own thinkers. The fatal flaw in the New Deal, ending in the misery of 1937-38, was the same as the Obamanomics of 2009-11. It is the idea that you can plan the future with a rational plan, treating people like mechanical wind-up dolls. And liberals were arguing against that in the 1940s.
I am talking about lefties Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their 1944 book The Dialectics of Enlightenment. All rational bourgeois business ends up as bourgeois domination, and this is already encoded in the very idea of Enlightenment, they wrote. "Enlightenment behaves toward things as dictators toward men." The Enlightenment was a celebration of "instrumental reason," using science and reason to do things in the world. That means treating everything as an instrument, a means to an end. When you get to using humans purely as a means you start moving down the road to slavery, for a slave is a person that has a status merely of a factor of production in, say, the business of producing cotton.

Horkheimer and Adorno are right about capitalism and domination....

But what about protection from governmental domination? Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the domination of fascism was a logical consequence of their beloved Enlightenment and its instrumental reason. But it is pretty obvious that their analysis applies in spades to post World War II communism and socialism, and even social democracy. Social democrats experience their programs as practical applications of settled social science -- instrumental reason -- so their government programs are just as problematical and just as likely to lead to domination as the notorious factories of the early industrial revolution and the infernal speed-up of Taylorism. That includes the power politics of Obamism and the 2,000 page bills of the center-left policy analysts. It does no good for liberals to insist that they are different because they are evolved and educated and they care. Domination is domination.

We have had legislation to curb the power of instrumental reason in business for over a century. How long must we wait to curb the power of instrumental reason in government?

But let's get back to Obamadämmerung. After all the grand plans and heroics, the tricks and betrayals, and endless TelePrompTing, all the educated gods are swallowed up in the collapse of their citadel, Valhalla, and the Eternal Female, Brünnhilde, the proverbial Fat Lady, is left alone with her love and her grief.

Like they say. It ain't over till the Fat Lady sings. But I wonder who will get to play the Fat Lady when the liberal Valhalla collapses on the heads of the educated gods.

Christopher Chantrill
The American Thinker

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

This has been demonstrated by two events within the past week. The first was in Portugal where the traditionally left-wing nation has abandoned socialism and has overwhelmingly elected a center-right government into power under the leadership of Pedro Passos Coelho. Coelho is expected to form a coalition between his center-right party and the free-market CDS -- a party that has drawn its highest share of the vote in its party's history. The Socialist Party that was in power until last week (and who would be the closest to Obama's economic policies) managed a meager 28% of the vote. It is expected that Portugal will now aggressively cut public spending, divest itself of state-owned assets, and significantly reduce corporate contributions to social security; almost the exact opposite of Obamanomics.

The second event was the IMF judgement of the economic policies of Great Britain. Since the election of the center-right conservative-led Coalition government in May 2010, significant spending cuts have been announced, causing howls of derision amongst left-wing activists, public-sector unions, and special interests, leading to full-scale riots in the capital in recent months. Additionally, in the latest budget the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced a cut in corporation tax and a raising of the threshold at which an earner pays tax, which will benefit all who earn a wage. Further income tax cuts are expected, possibly in the next budget in 2012.

Consequently, many left-wing activists were hoping for the IMF's latest report to support their Keynesian economic outlook -- the same outlook that Obama and the Democrats believe in -- and condemn the new approach of cutting spending, shrinking government, and reducing taxes. Yet no condemnation came. In fact, not only did the IMF support the new approach to deficit reduction, but their one suggestion for future growth was yet more tax cuts, specifically for job creators -- all while across the Atlantic, Obama wishes to increase taxes on the very group the IMF singles out.

These two examples demonstrate what is now a trend across Europe. Yes, there is still the largely unelected European Union trying to force their hard-left agenda down the throats of nations, and the socialist systems set up in individual nations will take a long time to deconstruct; but voters across Europe have made it clear that they want socialism to be their history, not their future. Of the 27 EU states, only five now have center-left governments: Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Slovenia, and Spain. Daniel Hannan MEP has calculated that if Spain swings to the right in its next election (as is predicted) then 96% of the EU's population would be living under center-right governments.

Europe is still a socialist continent, but the tide is turning, and most countries are now actively working to end socialism, not to establish or expand upon it like the current President of the United State is trying to do. It is therefore inaccurate for Mitt Romney to imply that Obama is following European policies, for even Europe has realized that such policies lead only to destruction, and has consequently abandoned them.

High-spend, high-tax Keynesian economics do not work, and such policies have been destroying European nations for decades now. Should Americans not get rid of Obama and Obamanomics in 2012, then Europe's failed past will be America's failed future.

Adam Shaw
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/europes_shift_to_the_right_of_obama.html

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Glenn Beck warned you all...............hahahahahahahaha

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahshahahahhahahhasgyhahahaha

 

[hiddenn00b]

Adam Shaw
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/europes_shift_to_the_right_of_obama.html

Umm Adam... I hate to break it to you but I think your getting confused between economic socialism and political socialism or at least the article your quote is.

You do realize that, historically speaking, those are not only two different things right?

-_-;


Anyways, I would like to point out that I still think that all this economic down turn can be pinned more on America's realization that it has a problem called Affluenza, which created Home Equitity loan debt that lead to the economic crash.

What we saw that day was just the stage zero of the economic impact of Affluenza Apocalypse. The cancerous cells of society's mindset have already reached stage one. If we don't cure ourselves and cure ourselves fast, we risk dieing.

 

[rosco rathbone]

You're late to the game. People have known about this for a long time.

Story of my life....

 

[rosco rathbone]

AJ posted:

I am talking about lefties Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their 1944 book The Dialectics of Enlightenment. All rational bourgeois business ends up as bourgeois domination, and this is already encoded in the very idea of Enlightenment, they wrote. "Enlightenment behaves toward things as dictators toward men." The Enlightenment was a celebration of "instrumental reason,

This is very interesting. The first time I heard about the far-right getting in bed with Marxist critical-theory guys was in a book about the history of the Intelligent Design movement. These anti-Darwin folks had decided to enlist Feyerabend and other leftist philosophers of science in their quest to prove that evolutionary biology was "just another religion". Talk about strange bedfellows.

 

[rosco rathbone]

double post

 

[onemadvagabond]

Yeah he came into office during a time when the economy was shedding -20,000 jobs PER DAY. -600,000 per month.


Yes per day. Your "WHAAAAA *sobs* Obama should have fixed that IMMEDIATELY.... WHAAAA" just proves what stupid babies you are. Grow up, stop your bullshit spin, and get Glenn Beck's semen off your breath.

It's been 2 and a half years and well over a trillion bucks. That argument no longer holds water. It's Obama's economy now.

How long do you guys think you can keep grasping at that line. Say Obama got re-elected. Seven years into his prisidency and the economy would still be fucked up because of his socialist economic policies and all of you would still be blaming Bush.

It's time for those people to accept responsibility for their own actions. Not to mention the fact that it was the far left libs in Washington presuring banks to give loans to people that couldn't give a down payment or didn't make enough money for the house they were buying that started the whole fucking thing anyway. So that right there says it was never Bush's falt anyway.

You want to blame someone for the original disaster. Go find Frank and Dodd genius. They are more to blame for it than anyone. Those two should be in fucking prison.

 

[onemadvagabond]

After Obama named dropped Chet's restaurant as being a beneficiary of the auto bail-out, it goes out of business due to bad economy. Time magazine and other's are now starting to state the truth. It's Obama's economy.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Umm Adam... I hate to break it to you but I think your getting confused between economic socialism and political socialism or at least the article your quote is.

You do realize that, historically speaking, those are not only two different things right?

-_-;


Anyways, I would like to point out that I still think that all this economic down turn can be pinned more on America's realization that it has a problem called Affluenza, which created Home Equitity loan debt that lead to the economic crash.

What we saw that day was just the stage zero of the economic impact of Affluenza Apocalypse. The cancerous cells of society's mindset have already reached stage one. If we don't cure ourselves and cure ourselves fast, we risk dieing.

I think the confusion lies in trying to separate the two...

It reminds me of people who adopt that line, I'm a FISCAL conservative, but a social Liberal...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

June 10, 2011
Is Permanent Recession the New Normal?
By James G. Wiles

It really is a Great Recession now.

You have to be around 90 to even remember an economy like this. The United States has not experienced two straight years of 9% unemployment since before the Second World War.

As Amity Shales wrote in The Forgotten Man, it was the duration of the economic collapse which began in 1929, not its severity, which created the Great Depression. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has now had unemployment of 9%, give or take a couple tenths of a point, since May, 2009.
The most recent figure, for May, 2011, is 9.1%.

In a speech on Tuesday, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke essentially threw up his hands. He's right. The Keynesian economic toolbox is empty. So is monetary policy -- unless you want to radically inflate the economy and depreciate the dollar.
China and other nations are already challenging the dollar's status as the world's sole reserve currency. Revving up the printing presses at the Bureau of Currency will only make that result inevitable.

More government stimulus -- which is what Democratic economists like Paul Krugman are advocating -- is also politically impossible. It's also not clear it would work. Yet Professor Krugman is correct when he says that the Great Recession is caused by a lack of demand. He's also absolutely correct to point out -- as he did on Charlie Rose last Friday night -- that the current situation is unacceptable.

Continuation of these levels of unemployment will cause us to lose an entire generation. The Great Recession is creating a fundamental change in the nature of unemployment, careers, family life, and economic prospects in this country. In the last two years, Bob Herbert of the New York Times and Don Peck of the Atlantic Monthly have both written powerfully on this topic.

Mr. Peck's piece, which appeared in March, 2010, has turned out to be especially prophetic. Fifteen months ago, he wrote: "[t]he economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep -- that's the number required to get back to 5% unemployment, the rate we had before the recession started, and the one that's been more or less typical for a generation."

That hole is still there. And we need to create about 1.5 million new jobs every year -- about 125,000 new jobs every month -- just to keep the unemployment rate from climbing farther.

Those of us who have children and grandchildren now entering the employment market are rightly concerned.

Can anything be done?

President Obama's only defense -- it's Bush's fault! -- is ludicrous. And its rejection by most voters is reflected in the latest polls. With this week's sudden resignation of the President's top economic advisor Austun Goolsbee, most senior members of the Obama economic team -- except Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner and chairman Bernanke -- have left government. So have Mr. Obama's Secretary of Commerce and his first White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

They know a bad thing when they see it. But to repeat: can anything be done?

No. The problem with the economy is one of politics, not economics. The economic solution is known, but it cannot be implemented until there's a Republican president and a Republican Congress. The reason is the ideology of the Man in the White House.

The stimulus which will turn this economy around has to come from the private sector, not the government. President Obama and the Democrats who control the Senate will never agree to take the actions necessary to jump-start private business investment. And that's even though the private-sector money for such a turn-around is readily available.

The American Thinker

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Now the World Bank is forecasting 2.6% growth for 2011 and continued sluggishness through 2012 if not beyond. Whatever happened to the "green shoots," "recovery summer," and "temporary bump in the road" (after he gets us "out of the ditch") that Obama has promised? If the economic slumber continues much longer, the administration is going to run out of metaphors.

According to the Federal Reserve's Beige Book released on June 8, only one region of the country -- Texas and surrounding states -- is experiencing significant economic growth. The free-market reforms carried out by Texas's Gov. Rick Perry, including tort reforms that protect businesses and physicians against frivolous litigation and excessive claims, have resulted in strong growth. Among major corporations that have relocated to Texas is Comerica, which moved its headquarters from Detroit to Dallas in 2007. As for the rest of the country, jobs are scarce, home prices continue to fall, retail sales are down, and industrial plants sit idle.

This is especially the case in the Northeast and Midwest, regions that for decades have burdened their businesses with increased taxes and regulations, including the imposition of prevailing wage laws and collective bargaining rights for public employees. Obama's home town of Chicago is routinely ranked among the least business-friendly cities in America. It's no surprise that businesses are leaving Chicago and taking their jobs with them.

What the Beige Book is telling us is that Obama's economic policies have failed, and that Obama's promises of "millions of green jobs" are nothing but a lie. Perhaps at one time the President actually believed his own promise of creating "five million green jobs" during his first year in office. If so, this only reveals his lack of foresight. The fact is that only a handful of green jobs, or jobs of any kind, have been created during the past two and a half years. As of September 2010, according the Energy Department's own figures, only 82,000 green jobs had been created, and many of these have since disappeared as alternative energy firms funded by subsidies have gone belly up.

There is now a consensus among economists that the way out of the Obama malaise is lower taxes, reduced regulation, and the promotion of free and open markets. This view was outlined by Edward P. Lazear, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed of May 16, "Why the Job Market Feels So Dismal." It has been echoed by dozens of other leading economists. Lazear's plan is a simple and straightforward prescription for growth that would encourage business spending, lower costs, increase exports, and create far more than five million jobs.
So why has the President done nothing but call for higher taxes, increased regulation, and continued trade restrictions?

To be honest, I don't know. I suspect, however, that it is because the President has made a political calculation that has nothing to do with economic reality. Obama cannot win reelection without strong support from unions, environmentalists, and the welfare class, none of which have an interest in economic growth. Having hitched his wagon to the star of a slow-growth, regulated economy, the President cannot get off. He will have to accept continued high levels of unemployment and keep lecturing the public to "be patient" while he hauls the economy out of the ditch. But with this President, it's going to be a long, bumpy ride. More like driving in the Grand Canyon than in a ditch.

Jeffrey Folks
The American Thinker

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

ACORN never really went away...

The Dodd-Frank Act, passed last year revamping rules for financial institutions, directed all bank regulators to issue a joint regulation defining a reasonably safe, well-underwritten mortgage. Their recent proposed definition for such a “qualified residential mortgage” has created a stir because it has strict guidelines such as a 20 percent down payment requirement and tight limits on the collective debt of the borrower.

Rather than praising the definition of a good mortgage for ensuring borrower safety, consumer groups have criticized the regulation as being too strict, since banks would have to hold more capital against any loans that are riskier than qualified residential mortgages, meaning that financial institutions would charge more for mortgages with lower down payments.

“This is a civil rights issue,” John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said recently.

Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens echoed the sentiment: “We still need to be able to make affordable mortgages that don’t just go to the wealthy, who can afford the biggest down payments and who have the most positive credit ratings.” Such a kind heart from a man whose organization has lost significant business in the past few years as mortgages to less qualified borrowers have dried up.

Stevens, Taylor, and the leaders of other groups such as the Center for Responsible Lending and the National Council of La Raza (not to mention the realtors and homebuilders associations) have been teaming up to fight the qualified residential mortgage definition on the grounds that it will cause low-income households to spend more time saving up for a down payment while increasing the cost of mortgages.

But why is access to affordable homes equated with access to affordable mortgages, i.e. debt? They are not the same thing.

This coalition is nothing new. Such groups were also aligned in the late-1980s hawking a similar product. MLK’s wife even gave a speech in 1989 encouraging President George H.W. Bush to push for “affordable housing” as a part of her late husband’s dream for civil rights.

Ultimately, the Government Sponsored Enterprise Reform Act of 1992 was passed creating “affordable housing goals” targeted at increasing lending to low-income families. But the trade-off for access to cheaper mortgage debt—often through a subprime loan—was that housing prices increased.

Affordable mortgages replaced affordable housing.

As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expanded their purchases of subprime mortgages throughout the 2000s, the prices of homes kept growing and growing—requiring more and more federal subsidies to keep pace. That is partly because as mortgage prices fell, demand increased for homes, and prices rose. It was basic economics at work.

Sure, increased mortgage rates can be quite the deterrent to homebuyers, especially first-time homebuyers. But so can high housing prices.

Yet Janis Bowdler, a research project director at La Raza, still argues that the new Dodd-Frank authorized regulations will “so significantly deter the ability of first-time buyers to break into the market that we will see a real decline in home ownership.”

...

When the homeownership mob—to borrow a John Carneyism—won the day in 1992, the results were 1) government supported housing finance that put taxpayers on the line; 2) lower underwriting standards for housing finance supported by Fannie and Freddie; and 3) a bubble created by an artificial boost in housing prices. Ultimately, millions of low-income families were stuck with high and unsustainable debt, leading to the millions of foreclsoures we are wrestling with today.

The same thing will happen again if the consumer groups win again. Crippling overnment-subsidized debt is not a civil right.

Anthony Randazzo
Reason.com

__________________
How can you measure the value of knowing that company books are sounder than they were before? Of no more overnight bankruptcies with the employees and retirees left holding the bag? No more disruption to entire sectors of the economy?
Michael Oxley 2002
Co-Author of Sarbanes-Oxley Law

It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis.
Chris Dodd
Co-Author Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act
Friend of Angelo

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

What's wrong? Why the wrinkled brow, Mr. President? Do you no longer think that you can command the oceans to recede and the planet to heal?
Suddenly, it seems, we are witnessing a crisis of confidence -- the first outward sign of an inward glimmer of doubt in the mind of the most self-absorbed and self-congratulatory president in the history of the United States.

According to multiple news accounts, President Obama confessed that the alleged economic recovery is not progressing as fast as he expected. Speaking as always in the first person singular, he told reporters on Tuesday: "I am concerned that the recovery we're on is not producing jobs as quick as I want it to happen."

How could stubborn reality fail to conform to Obama's wishes? Only four days earlier, the president seemed to be perfectly fine. Indeed, in visiting a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, late last week, he seemed to be as full of himself as ever when he talked about the miracle that he had pulled off in putting the U.S. auto industry "back on its feet" and saving a million or so jobs. In lauding the results of 2009's $80 billion auto industry bail-out, Mr. Obama told a cheering UAW crowd:

So I placed my bet on you. I put my faith in the American worker. And I'll tell you what -- I'm going to do that every day of the week, because what you've done vindicates my faith.

Clearly, this is a president who loves to gamble. In speaking at colleges and universities around the country, he likes to say that he is prepared to "double down" on education and a clean energy future.

That means: easy money in the form of more low-interest college loans for young people and early forgiveness of those loans for students who forswear the private sector and go into the public sector. It means: billions of dollars in new taxpayer-funded bets on wind and solar power -- bets that fly in the face of reason, given that these new sources of energy are both extraordinarily expensive and wholly inadequate to the task of meeting more than a tiny fraction of our future energy needs.

No matter. Reason has nothing to do with it. It is simply an article of faith for the president and his fervent admirers that higher gasoline prices and reduced domestic production of fossil fuels are good for the planet. And if that is taken on faith, it is no less fanciful to imagine that pouring huge sums of money into heavily subsidized alternative energy schemes will help to "transform the economy" in producing hundreds of thousands of new jobs that "can't be outsourced," and in creating whole new technologies that will supposedly help to move Team USA ahead of China and India in science, math, and long-term economic growth.

Andrew B. Wilson
The American Spectator

HEY U_D!

How about that EPA? Picking up the dropped Cap'n Trade ball for Obama. Those electric cars are going to get awfully expensive to run; probably have to turn off the AC to get them charged up...


__________________
“I’m just going to be honest with you. There’s not much we can do next week or two weeks from now... If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know [laughingly], you might want to think about a trade-in.”
Barack Hussein Obama, the Green Pres__ent (with no id, uh)
April 2011

When I was asked earlier about, uh, the issue of coal. Uhhh, y'know, under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket....
We would put a cap-and-trade system in place, eh, that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else's out there. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're gonna be charged a huge sum for all that, uh, greenhouse gas that's being emitted.
Barack Hussein Obama
Editorial board meeting, San Francisco Chronicle
January 2008

"How about just tracking down every single person who said drill baby drill and putting them all in prison. Why don’t we do that?"
Alan Grayson

 

[JenAltArmy]

you are like a jackass, we can lead you to the water but can't make you drink. please list ALL the drugs you take (legal and the ones you steal)

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahshahahahhahahhasgyhahahaha

 

[JenAltArmy]

After Obama named dropped Chet's restaurant as being a beneficiary of the auto bail-out, it goes out of business due to bad economy. Time magazine and other's are now starting to state the truth. It's Obama's economy.

obama wants more government, he is anti private sector

 

[JenAltArmy]

So, just to be clear do you think the government is the only solution for the economy?

Do you think that obama should focus on adding more government sector jobs or private sector jobs?

What is the idea income tax rate?

Should we all pay a higher sales tax?

Should property taxes be higher?

I will, dipshit.

 

[koalabear]

under 1200!!!!!

Stocks tumble on signs of slowing growth

http://money.msn.com/market-news/post.aspx?post=d2fcddc0-3136-4091-96e1-e67eadd3f333

Stocks plunged into negative territory Friday, wiping out modest gains from yesterday's rebound, as concerns about slowing global growth came to the fore.