More "Wow" From Jim Lacey

From the same article, here's Jim Lacey on the cost of the left's war on DDT:

And malnutrition is not the only problem afflicting Africa and other poor regions of the world. Among the greatest scourges is malaria, which infects 250 million and kills 1 million every year. In fact, in Africa, one in every five childhood deaths is a result of malaria. If you are a reader of average speed, then consider that ten to twelve children will have died from malaria between the time you started this article and the time you finish it. None of this is necessary. Malaria was vanquished in the United States and Europe through the copious use of DDT. But this blessing has been denied poor African nations because Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring blamed DDT for killing eagles and other birds.

Fifty years later Carson’s discredited work remains a rallying cry for environmentalists who tirelessly work to ensure that poor nations do not have access to DDT, favoring instead a cocktail of methods that have been proven ineffective.

Interestingly, I was once accosted by an environmental zealot over that last statement. He wanted to know what proof I had that other methods were ineffective. I pointed out the continuing deaths of a million people and asked how long he had been involved in the environmental movement. When he told me he had been doing this for a dozen years I casually mentioned that during his activist years he had worked for a movement responsible for killing two times as many persons as perished in the Holocaust, and that was just from malaria-related deaths alone. Yet he thought, and probably still thinks, that he occupies the moral high ground.

In truth, almost all the harmful effects attributed to DDT have been proven not to exist. Moreover, the benefits of DDT use can be achieved using a fraction of the quantity used to eradicate malaria in the United States. Just what do leftists have against blacks, particularly blacks in Africa, that causes them to push policies that sicken and kill them by the tens of millions? And why do they get to claim they sing with the angels as they preside over this slaughter of innocents?

Again:  this needs to be said, and needs to be read.

Wow! Just.... wow!

Jim Lacey in NRO says something that I've been saying for years, but says it better and more forcefully.   Man, this needs to be read by everyone who cares about real people more than they care about political correctness:

The Left has fought the spread of genetically modified (GM) foods with every weapon in its arsenal. Leftists did this in the name of combatting a long list of “potential risks” that never materialized. They have been permitted to overlook the fact that their assaults on GM food were not cost free. For instance, they have greatly delayed and in some places stopped cold the use of rice modified to increase vitamin A content. For the Left this is cause for celebration. In fact, widespread use of this “golden rice” would have prevented a half-million cases of child blindness a year. So the next time someone talks to you about the evils of genetically modified foods, remind him of the millions of poor children this crusade has condemned to a lifetime of blindness. How do folks prepared to allow millions to needlessly go blind still command the respect of any truly moral person?

However, even looking the other way as children go blind pales in comparison to the needless starving of millions that has occurred because anti-GM-food groups have frightened and bullied the people and governments of Africa into forbidding the use of GM seeds. Such seeds, modified to resist the effects of drought and disease, would make Africa self-sufficient in foodstuffs. But for most African farmers they remain unavailable because of the successful efforts of American and European anti-GM-food groups. Even though every American consumes GM foods on an almost daily basis, with no ill effects, they remain off limits to those most in need.

There is no reason the Somali child pictured below needs to be hungry except for the fact that some groups are working overtime to prevent his country from growing the food needed to feed him. What do you call people who are willing to let millions starve to death rather than let them grow food that scientists long ago proved safe?Why the anti-GM groups are not condemned for crimes against humanity escapes me. For that matter, as these groups have made it their life mission to starve poor Africans, Asians, and other peoples of color, how come they have never been branded as racists?

Shame on us.

File This Under "If Obama's Lost X, He's A Goner" - Part IV

Seriously, if he's lost Maureen Dowd... who's left?    Here's Dowd (whose mincing, cutesy, self-aggrandizing look-at-me-I'm-Maureen-Dowd prose style is nearly unreadable) over the weekend, taking aim at Obama:

Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant
.
After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.

“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”

The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.

You don't care if they hate you.   You don't care if they vilify you.   You don't care if they disagree with everything you say.   But when they start laughing at you... that's when a politician has truly lost power.   People are starting to laugh at Obama, to not take him seriously.   Not sure how he digs out from that and, of course, he deserves all the ridicule, and then some.

VDH Shoots... and Scores!

A great article by Victor Davis Hanson in NRO today examining the "mysteries" that have followed after 9/11.   Here's an obvious one:

If one had collated everything candidate Obama declaimed about the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies from autumn of 2007 to November 2008, then one would have expected a President Obama to dismantle the entire Bush-Cheney national-security apparatus upon entering office, to pull out of Iraq (he originally said this should be done by March 2008, no less), and to keep our military out of the Middle East. Instead, Obama retained Secretary of Defense Gates, stuck to the Bush-Petraeus withdrawal plan in Iraq, expanded Predator-drone attacks in Waziristan, surged into Afghanistan, bombed Libya, and embraced everything from Guantanamo to renditions. That about-face, I think, was the most radical political development of the last quarter-century, and was treated with near silence by the media.

It's tiring to keep noticing all of the double standards that operate on a daily basis to protect Obama's presidency.   They're so obvious that the neglect of the mainstream liberal media to point them out can only be viewed as a cynical conspiracy.

File This Under "If Obama's Lost X, He's A Goner" - Part III

The hits just keep on coming.   Here's Matt Taibbi, senior lefty at Rolling Stone:

I was in an airport in Florida yesterday and was forced into a terrible, Sophie's Choice-type choice.

I was hours early for a flight and stuck in a relatively small terminal crammed with people. Only one area in the whole wing had empty seats; an unused gate that contained a TV blaring the CNN broadcast of Obama's Labor Day speech at full volume.

So it was either sit underneath a full-volume broadcast of our fearless president bellowing out his latest hollow promises, or the hellish alternative: retreat to gates full of screaming five year-old children, all of them jacked up on sugar and bawling their eyes out because it was the end of Labor Day weekend and their cruel parents were dragging them home from Disneyworld.

I ended up choosing the screaming children. The one open seat in a nearby gate was next to an extended family of Indian tourists. A four year-old boy from that group wearing a cape and brandishing a plastic light saber thought it was funny when he kept saber-swiping at my knees. But sitting through that was better than having to listen to Obama drape himself in Harry Trumanisms and talk about "shared prosperity."...

I just don't believe this guy anymore, and it's become almost painful to listen to him.

Rats.   Ship.   Sinking.    Get the picture?

File This Under "If Obama's Lost X, He's A Goner" - Part II

Richard Cohen went to the Hamptons.   No surprise there that an elitist writer for the Washington Post might go there over a holiday weekend.   But here's what he came back with:

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.

Let me call the roll. I am talking about are writers and editors, lawyers and shrinks, Wall Street tycoons and freelance photographers, hedge funders and academics, run-of-the-mill Democrats and Democratic activists. They were all politically sophisticated, and just a year ago some of them were still vociferous Obama supporters. No more.

I said something similar weeks ago.   I haven't heard anyone in my law firm (large, AmLaw 100 type place) defend Obama for months.   But a lot of secretaries on my floor are vociferous conservatives who have grown more vocal and open about their antipathy for the President.   It's not even close:  conservatives are fired up to get him out, liberals are depressed and silent.  

Birthday Today - Saxophone Colossus (Sonny Rollins)

Today is the 81st birthday of the one and only "Saxophone Colossus," Sonny Rollins.   He was the Big Man before Clarence Clemons knew who Bruce Springsteen was.   Here's Sonny Rollins doing his most famous number, "St. Thomas":

Girl of the Day - Bye, Bye Summer Edition (Esti Ginzburg)

It was below 50 the past two nights in Milwaukee.   Summer is going, like a thief in the night, and the Wisconsin winter that lasts forever is on the way.   Until April or so, we'll be strapping on our snowshoes and wrapping up in blankets.   So, until then, a little more Esti Ginzburg might serve as an antidote.

More on Gunwalker aka "Fast and Furious"

Bob Owens at Pajamas Media has a chilling article about a scheme by the FBI in Indiana that sounds very, very similar to the Gunwalker program in the Southwest, suggesting that someone higher up in Justice was likely coordinating both programs:

It has long been suggested Gunwalker — which sent at least 2,020 guns to the Sinaloa cartel — was never a legitimate law enforcement operation, because there was no possible way for the program to succeed.

U.S.  law enforcement does not have the jurisdiction to make arrests in Mexico where they claimed their targets resided, and the senior level cartel members they claimed to be targeting are not even involved with low-level criminal enterprises such as getting guns for their foot soldiers, an idea as absurd as plotting to catch executives of a billion-dollar corporation buying toner and copy paper at an office supply store.

Operation Fast and Furious only made logical sense if the goal of the operation was first and foremost to put U.S. guns in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel, and at Mexican crime scenes.

There was never any mechanism within Fast and Furious to intercept the thousands of Gunwalker weapons once they left the gun shops, and the multi-agency team (DOJ, ATF, FBI, DEA, IRS, DHS) acted as nothing more or less than a shield to prevent straw purchasers and smugglers from being intercepted by local or state law enforcement.

The apparent purpose of the operation was to lend the thinnest veneer of truth to the 90-percent lie spread by Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Hillary Clinton from the very beginning of the Obama administration. It makes sense only as a plot to manufacture evidence for the punitive gun control laws that Obama has championed his entire political career. Indeed, even after Gunwalker was exposed, the number of U.S. guns in Mexico, many of which were put there by the actions of the government itself, was still brazenly used as the excuse for ATF long gun reporting requirements currently being challenged in courts.

Likewise, what Codrea has dubbed as “Gangwalker” [the Indiana program] appears to be another attempt to provide guns to criminals in order to generate more gun crime and then more calls for gun control.


The biggest difference between the two operations at this early date only seems to be that Gangwalker is a purposeful attempt to create the deaths of American citizens in order to pursue the administration’s fanatical anti-gun agenda.

American deaths, for political gain.


Think about that claim for a minute, and what that would mean.

 Like I said.... chilling.

Nancy Pelosi Does Not Like Stimulus

Believe me, I hate using the words "Nancy Pelosi" and "stimulus" in the same sentence.   It sends a shudder down my spine.   Revulsion.   But Pelosi is apparently indulging in the Orwellian practice of calling war peace, black white, good evil.   She's now trying to find a different word for "stimulus" (what the President will be proposing on Thursday when he speaks to Congress and hawks another "jobs program" filled with goodies for unions and "shovel ready" make-work schemes).   Apparently "stimulus" doesn't poll too well anymore, not after Obama blew $1 trillion on the last one and unemployment went up, not down.

Anyway, I was looking up the word "stimulus" to try to help her out, and I happened across an economics website that contained the following quote from Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury Secretary, from 1940, eight years into the New Deal:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot.”

Nothing ever changes.    It didn't work then; it won't work now.   The only thing that will happen is government will get bigger, and more tax dollars will flow to constituencies of the Democratic Party.  

Two Stories About Blue States

Blue states -- those parts of America that have been run by a liberal Democratic Party for as long as anyone can remember -- provide almost laboratory-like conditions for studying the effects of liberalism.   The evidence is in; as they say, the science is now pretty near settled.   Here are two stories about how liberalism has ruined states.  

First, Rhode Island, where public employee pensions are starving the state's coffers:

Rhode Island is one of the bluest states in the country, and one where public sector unions have long worked with sympathetic politicians to create a true blue system of well paid public employees retiring comfortably on generous pensions with cost of living raises automatically thrown in.

The only problem is that the state could never afford the beautiful utopia it was crafting, and so politicians and union leaders chose the path of systemic deceit.  Taxpayers weren’t told what the bill for the system would be; public service workers weren’t told that the pension guarantees they’d been sold were worthless because taxpayers would not and could not foot the bill.

An economic crisis is nature’s revenge on those who make and those who accept false promises; it is a holocaust of lies when the dross is burned away and only what is real and true remains. Think of cotton candy melting and charring in the flame of a blowtorch; that is what is happening to the secure retirements that “caring” blue politicians and “committed” blue union leaders promised gullible state workers.

Next, California, where environmental regulation is in the process of destroying the greatest agricultural machine the world has ever known:
And we're starving our future when we let bureaucrats tell us we have to pay taxes so that they can have "secure" retirements we can only dream about.

Nowhere was California's old technological ethos more pronounced than in agriculture, where great Californians such as William Mulholland, creator of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Pat Brown, who forged the state water project, created the greatest water-delivery system since the Roman Empire. Their effort brought water from the ice-bound Sierra Nevada mountains down to the state's dry but fertile valleys and to the great desert metropolis of Southern California. Now, largely at the behest of greens, California agriculture is being systematically cut down by regulation. In an attempt to protect a small fish called the Delta smelt, upward of 200,000 acres of prime farmland have been idled, according to the state's Department of Conservation. Even in the current "wet" cycle, California's agricultural industry, which exports roughly $14 billion annually, is slowly being decimated. Unemployment in some Central Valley towns tops 30 percent, and in cases even 40 percent.

And now, notes my friend, Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue, green regulators are imposing new groundwater regulations that may force the shutdown of production even in areas like his that have their own ample water supplies.

Salinas was the home town of John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and great chronicler of Depression-era California. Today for many in hardscrabble, majority-Latino Salinas, home to 150,000 people, The Grapes of Wrath is less lyrical than real. "California," notes Donohue, a lifelong Democrat, "remains intent on job destruction and continued hyper-regulation."

We're killing our own future every day that we let bureaucrats tell us what to do.  

Hammersmith

The Regular Son is way, way into Bruce Springsteen, so we had a blast this week when we got the DVD for Springsteen's famous 1975 concert in London at the Hammersmith Odeon.   Here's the Boss doing "Backstreets" with the great Roy Bittan on piano:

File This Under "If Obama's Lost X, He's A Goner"

X in this case equals Robert Redford, staunch environmentalist and lefty (who I nonetheless have always loved as an actor and movie-maker):

“One reason I supported President Obama is because he said we must protect clean air, water and lands. But what good is it to say the right thing unless you act on it?” Redford writes. “Since early August, three administration decisions -- on Arctic drilling, the Keystone XL pipeline and the ozone that causes smog -- have all favored dirty industry over public health and a clean environment. Like so many others, I'm beginning to wonder just where the man stands.”

Well, that pretty much sums up the Luddite Left:   here we have a multimillionaire celebrity with an estate in Sundance, Utah and (I suspect) multiple homes elsewhere around the world, drawing a third-grade contrast between "dirty industry" and "clean environment."   Good caribou!   Bad oil pipeline!   Good pristine scenery!   Bad manufacturing!   Good rich people!   Touch shit, working people!   Get the picture?  

This is like the people who are always yammering on that they don't want "chemicals" used in growing their food.   Putting aside the fact that food (and everything else in the natural world) consist of nothing but chemicals... the enviro-leftist who wants her "natural food" grown without "chemicals" that she can buy from her whole foods co-op in Madison, Wisconsin or Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Berkeley, California must take responsibility for the inevitable millions of deaths from starvation around the world if we actually chose on any mass basis not to use pesticides and herbicides in growing food.   (The libs who didn't like DDT have the same responsibility for the return of malaria in Africa.)    Like those simps, Redford wants a "clean environment" that he can get to in his private jet, leaving everyone else who has to work for a living picking over the scraps of a post-industrial society.

By the way, Redford's looking pretty old nowadays.   On the other hand, I sure hope I look that half that good when I'm 75.  

Girl of the Day - Jessica Chastain

The Regular Wife and I saw The Debt on Sunday.   It's a very good movie that might have been a great movie -- the ending when a sixty-ish Helen Mirren goes to Kiev to murder a ninety-ish Nazi war criminal living anonymously there went a little bit off the tracks (the movie became a marginally plausible thriller rather than the morality tale about good and evil it tried to be).   But the best thing in the movie (other than Mirren, who is always wonderful) was the performance of Jessica Chastain as Mirren's younger self, a 25 year-old Mossad agent who has to seek gynecological care from the Nazi "Surgeon of Birkenau" in order to entrap him and kidnap him.

Anyway, Chastain is this year's "It Girl" apparently, and I'd look forward to seeing what she's doing next.

Polls, Polls, Polls

I'd be smoking too, if I were Barack Obama.   Three new polls are out this morning, and none of them are good for the President.

First, Rasmussen continues to show Obama's approval index holding steadily below -20%.    Today, 22% strongly approve of Obama (up a little over the weekend, perhaps because liberals liked his pro-union thuggery on Labor Day), but 44% strongly disapprove, for an approval index of -22%.   It's been below -20% for 27 of the last 29 days.   That's a solid trend.   Only ultra-liberals strongly approve of Obama now; moderate Democrats, independents and Republicans are all moving the opposite direction.

Second, the ABC News/Washington Post poll has more bad news for Obama:

Nonetheless, current trends are highly unfavorable for the president. By 2 to 1, more Americans now say the administration’s economic policies are making the economy worse rather than better. The number who say those policies have helped has been chopped in half since the start of the year. The percentage of Americans disapproving of how Obama is doing when it comes to creating jobs spiked 10 percentage points higher since July.

Of the more than six in 10 who now disapprove of Obama’s work on jobs and the economy, nearly half of all Americans “strongly” disapprove.

Not good for a liberal Democratic President.   Notwithstanding Obama "getting" Osama bin Laden, a liberal Democrat will never be able to overcome poor performance on economic issues, because he'll never be able to overcome the perception of weakness on military/foreign policy issues created by 50 years of liberal Democratic anti-war, anti-military and anti-American positions and policies and imagery.   A party filled with people who have "Give Peace a Chance" bumper stickers isn't going to win a national election running on foreign policy.

Finally, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll:

After the bruising debt-ceiling fight — as well as Standard & Poor's subsequent downgrade of the nation's credit rating — Obama's job approval rating has sunk to a low of 44 percent, a 3-point drop since July. His handling of the economy stands at a low of 37 percent. And only 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction, the lowest mark for this president.

Perhaps most ominously for Obama, a majority of poll takers — 54 percent — think he's facing a longer-term setback from which he's unlikely to recover. Back in January, just 39 percent agreed with that assessment.

Indeed, that 54 percent is virtually identical to George W. Bush's score on the same question in the Nov. 2005 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which was released just months after Bush's widely criticized handling of Hurricane Katrina.

The article about the poll on MSNBC does try to carry a little water for the President, as you might expect:

If there's a silver lining for Obama, it's that a combined 70 percent of respondents still find him likeable (though nearly six in 10 say they disapprove of many of his policies).

Watch this "silver lining" number start plummeting as the campaign gets going.

First, Obama really isn't that likeable as a person... he's actually quite dislikeable.   He's arrogant, a blowhard, a know-it-all, an elitist.   These are all qualities that Americans generally dislike.   That's why a patrician George W. Bush had to create a new persona of the Texas rancher, and why John Kerry never connected (remember the picture of him wind-surfing, the very image of the elite at play).  

Second, the only reason why the likeable number is still so high, given Obama's personality defects, is that he's black, and people are still trained by the media and schools and culture generally to be afraid of saying that they dislike a black President, for fear of being called a racist.   But wait until these same people, who have been so careful to say that "I only disagree with his policies, I like him personally," get called a racist by Obama and his campaign simply because they disagree with those policies.   If you don't want more Keynesian stimulus, you're a racist.   If you don't want more "green jobs" program, you're a racist.   If you don't support lavish public employee pensions, you're a racist. 

At some point, people who get called racist simply for having reasonable viewpoints based on the evidence before them are going to turn off (or, if already turned off, are going to feel liberated to say that they don't like Obama).

Obama '12:  I'm Likeable!   (But You're a Racist.)

Girl of the Day - Racquel Welch

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the name Racquel Welch was ubiquitous.   Funny:  I have no memory of ever seeing her in a  movie, yet she was a "movie star."   Or, more precisely, she was the leading pin-up poster of the era, the queen of the bikini era, with the curvaciousness of the 1950s (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Loren, etc.) coupled with an athletic beach vibe that was more contemporary, once getting down to having practically nothing on became the norm.   

Anyway, to steal from Jack Paar (why not from the best?), ladies and gentleman, here they are, Racquel Welch:

Still More on Solyndra

A longtime solar power analyst, Ed Lynch, had this to say about Solyndra, the government-funded "green jobs" boondoggle:

"Here's the bottom line," Lynch said. "It costs them $6 to make a unit. They're selling it for $3. In order to be competitive today, they have to sell it for between $1.5 and $2. That is not a viable business plan."

Like I said the other day, "this was never a real 'business' to begin with.   It was just, on one side of the transaction, a front for fraud; on the other side of the transaction, a Potemkin village/Hollywood sound stage for the permanent campaign of Barack Hussein Obama."  

But, then again, what do you expect with a President who's never had a real job?

Hat tip: Ace.  

The Worms Turn on Prezidizzle O'Bizzle

OK, I don't like Obama, that's a given.   And conservatives in general don't like him.   Again:  given.   Moderates and independents (meaning people who most days don't think very long or very deeply about politics) are starting to turn against him, mostly about the debt.  

But when a liberal like Michael Tomasky, writing in The Daily Beast, turns on him, you know that the jig may be up for Prezidizzle O'Bizzle:

More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term.

Exactly so.   Now, if only the country can survive until then.

Girl of the Day - Mitzi Gaynor

It's Mitzi Gaynor's 80th birthday today.   Gaynor is best known for her role as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, but she was later a mainstay as a singer-dancer in her own Las Vegas shows.   Here she is in South Pacific:

"Hunkering Down"

I talked with a client this week who runs investments for a private investor (read: really rich guy) and he said that they are "hunkering down" until after 2012.   Funny that:  I've heard the phrase "hunkering down" a lot lately, usually from businessmen-types or investors who have skin in the game.

Now comes Victor Davis Hanson, who has noticed the same thing when he talks to businessmen around the country:

Here is the lament I heard: the near $5 trillion in borrowing in just three years, the radical growth in the size of the federal government and its regulatory zeal, ObamaCare, the Boeing plant closure threat, the green jobs sweet-heart deals and Van Jones-like “Millions of Green Jobs” nonsense, the vast expansion in food stamps and unemployment pay-outs, the reversal of the Chrysler creditors, politically driven interference in the car industry, the failed efforts to get card check and cap and trade, the moratoria on new drilling in the Gulf, the general antipathy to new fossil fuel exploitation coupled with new finds of vast new reserves, the new financial regulations, an aggressive EPA oblivious to the effects of its advocacy on jobs, the threatened close-down of energy plants, the support for idling thousands of acres of irrigated farmland due to environmental regulations, the constant talk of higher taxes, the needlessly provocative rhetoric of “fat cat”, “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” etc. juxtaposed, in hypocritical fashion, to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail First Family getaways — all of these isolated strains finally are becoming a harrowing opera to business people.

Despite enormous opportunity for many cash-rich firms to take advantage of the down cycles (low interest, plentiful potential employees, discounted prices, etc.), they are taking a pass, almost as if to collectively sigh, “This bunch doesn’t like me much and I’m going to hunker down, hoard my cash, and sit out the next year and a half until they are gone.”

There's that phrase again:  "hunkering down."

Forget about polls and projections and all the political consultant mumbo jumbo.   The people who make the American economy work are already voting, and they have come to the conclusion that Obama has been a disaster for business, and will continue to be a disaster for business until we get rid of him in 2012.   The last thing on earth they want to hear is another "soaring" speech from President Just Words.   The next political speech they'll tune in for is the Inaugural Address of somebody else, anybody else.

What the New TV Shows for This Season Say About Us (Hint: It Isn't Good.)

I accidentally happened onto this listing of the new TV series for the 2011-12 season.   So I read through it over lunch and what jumped out at me is the sheer lack of realistic, meaningful, adult jobs that the main characters hold.  To be sure, I suspect that they'll all live in nice apartments or nice houses, but where exactly does the money come from?

Of the 41 shows, ten have no suggestion that any of the characters hold down real world jobs.   The shows appear to be simply about relationships.   Is this the natural outgrowth of a relationship obsessed culture where people know how to "hook up" on Facebook, but don't know how to fix their own cars?   Probably a little.

But it gets worse, particularly for men.   In shows where women are the leads, the jobs the women hold down are: 

detectives
bail bond collector
1960s stewardesses (this show, Pan Am, looks like a Mad Men rip-off)
explorer
professional crisis manager
waitresses
detective
doctor
detective
bartender
lawyer
public relations executive (twice... but in my whole life I've never met one!) Playboy playmates
detective
Broadway songwriter

Now for the men, here's the list:

marketing director (but his wife has a better job and just got promoted)
insurance salesman (but he hates his job)
pharmaceutical rep (but the men have to dress up like women to get the jobs)
a "brilliant, charismatic surgeon" (but the ghost of his dead wife convinces him to quit and work for a free clinic)
writer (but he's described as effeminate)
personal trainer
rogue CIA agent (OK, so at least there are male fantasies left)
detective
bartender
detective
home remodeler (but he's a failure at it and he's also a gambling addict)
attorney (but it's Grisham, so it's really a male fantasy thriller)
public relations executive (but his girlfriend works at the same job)
detective
Broadway songwriter (but he teams with his girlfriend)

Notice anything?  

Here's what I noticed:

1.   The women in our popular culture seem to always be depicted as being able to do any job men can do, and to do it better.   They're successful, they're "tough"  (the word recurs a couple of times in the article), they love their jobs, but they're still beautiful and sexy.

2.   Meanwhile, the men in our popular culture don't like their jobs (the surgeon who leaves to work in the free clinic, or the insurance salesman who hates his job) or aren't very good at them due to personal flaws (the failing home remodeler who's a gambling addict).

3.   Most importantly, no one, male or female, works in a job that makes anything.   No one manufactures a product.   No one builds anything (with the exception of the failing home remodeler, and even that's not the same as being an engineer or a manufacturer).   They all do these vague administrative jobs (public relations executive, marketing director, pharmaceutical rep, lawyer), or else do fantasy work (detective, CIA agent), or else, in comedies, work in service industries (waitresses, bartenders, personal trainers).

Now maybe this is just a sign that the people who write for TV don't know much about the real world.   After all, they are people who have chosen to write for TV.   Viewed in its worst light, I could make the point that our supposed cultural elites are people who don't know any people who work in manufacturing or who run small businesses that actually have to make and sell real products.    And that that's bad for the country.   Barack Obama would fit this profile... that's why he likes "green jobs" so much... they would be the type of jobs you would write for yourself if you were a writer who didn't know much about the real world and didn't care whether there was a market for your fictitious product.

But I think it's worse... I think our "real world" is actually too much like this.   We live in a place and time, 21st Century America, where too many of us, including too many American men, don't make anything real.   At best, we push paper (as a lawyer, I'd fit into this).   But that ends up being unsatisfying at least on some level, so we retreat into our "relationships," which is what these shows tend to reflect too.

On the other hand, fewer and fewer people are watching network TV, and I'm sure that I won't watch any of these shows, so it may just be that the people who watch TV are a lowest common denominator population, and we shouldn't care too much that their brains are being addled with this nonsense.

Fast and Furious aka "Gun Walker"

I haven't blogged about the "Gun Walker" scandal, a/k/a "Fast and Furious."   But it's been percolating out there.   A quick summary:  federal ATF and DOJ officials apparently wanted to set up a sting whereby American firearms could be tracked to Mexican drug cartels.   The problem:  in executing the sting, ATF agents reportedly not only turned a blind eye toward illegal gun sales, but field agents were forced by superiors to actively facilitate the transfers. And in at least one case, that of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, the cartels used those “gun walked” weapons to murder U.S. officers.

Now there's this: 

Newly obtained emails show that the White House was better informed about a failed gun-tracking operation on the border with Mexico than was previously known.

Three White House national security officials were given some details about the operation, dubbed Fast and Furious. The operation allowed firearms to be illegally purchased, with the goal of tracking them to Mexican drug cartels. But the effort went out of control after agents lost track of many of the weapons.

The supervisor of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation in Phoenix specifically mentioned Fast and Furious in at least one email to a White House national security official, and two other White House colleagues were briefed on reports from the supervisor, according to White House emails and a senior administration official.

What did Attorney General Eric Holder know and when did he know it?   What did President Barack Obama know and when did he know it?   Inquiring minds want to know.

And inquiring minds might also wonder.... what would have happened to the Bush Administration if a $535 million "loan" to a connected campaign contributor went "poof"?   What would have happened if a law enforcement program vetted at the highest levels of the Bush Administration resulted in a federal agent being murdered by Mexican drug cartels with guns provided by the U.S. government?   Nuclear armageddon in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, etc., that's what.   

 

On a Happier Note

There's apparently a new Civil War miniseries in the works called "To Appomattox," which stars none other than Michael C. Hall (of Dexter) as Ulysses S. Grant.   Now that's must see TV!

More on Solyndra

I wrote yesterday about the Solyndra scandal -- the bankrupcty of a "solar panel" company backed by $535 million in federal loan guarantees that just happened to be connected to a big cbundler for the Obama 2008 Presidential campaign.   It also turns out that the loans were at a ridiculously low interest rate, which further supports the inference of a fraudulent, insider deal.   Here's the key chart:

Anyway, I took a look at Solyndra's web-page, which hasn't shut down yet (the miracle of the Internet).   They have a timeline for the company that reads as follows:

History

2005	Founded by Dr. Christian Gronet
2006	Established headquarters in Fremont, California
2007	Began production in Fab 1
2008	Commenced commercial solar panel shipments Opened office in Germany
2009	Largest single Solyndra installation in U.S. 529kW Received $535 million DOE loan guarantee for construction of Fab 2 Groundbreaking for Fab 2 with Vice President Biden, Energy Secretary Chu, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Reached $100 million in annual revenues
2010	Shipped 65MW as of July, 16 million modules produced. Largest Solyndra project in Europe, 3 megawatts in Belgium Exceeded 1000 installations around the world Visit of President Barack Obama, May Brian Harrison joins as President and CEO Largest U.S. installation 1MW, Frito Lay Approximately $140 million in revenues
2011	Fab 2 in production, ramping to 300MW 3MW Belgium installation Launched greenhouse product Shipped 100th megawatt

Now, it seems weird to me that a company that was only founded in 2005, that only established offices in 2006, that only started production in 2007, and that only began shipping product in 2008, should suddenly get a $500 million + federal loan guarantee in 2009.  

But here's what really made me crazy:  apparently they received a $535 million DOE loan guarantee either the same year (2009) or maybe even before they reached $100 million in annual revenues.    Imagine this is a 30 year loan.   Even at a ridiculously low rate of interest (read: fraudulently low), Solyndra would still have something like $10 million just in interest payments per year.   On $100 million in revenue?   Really?

So, like everything else the federal government touches, this is a situation where (wink, wink) no one really ever expected that the money would be paid back.
  
An alternative theory is even more cynical:  this was never a real "business" to begin with.   It was just, on one side of the transaction, a front for fraud; on the other side of the transaction, a Potemkin village/Hollywood sound stage for the permanent campaign of Barack Hussein Obama.  

Speaking of which, here is Obama, just over a year ago, at the Solyndra plant:

Does this stuttering clusterf*** of a miserable failure ever go anywhere without his f***ing teleprompter?

Preference Cascade Update

Here's the month-by-month chart for Obama's "approval index" (strong approval minus strong disapproval) from Rasmussen:

Since the momentary bump upward when Osama bin Laden was killed in May, the trajectory for Obama's approval rating has been down, down, down, with the month of August showing a steep drop of 4%.   If September and October continue this trend, I would expect some rumblings from old-guard Democrats for a primary challenge.   I don't expect that ultimately they'll be a primary challenge -- the Democrats can't risk offending the black community by running against the first black President -- but there will at least be some serious talk.  

Man, I can't wait for the tell-all books coming out of this administration.

But mostly I just can't wait for November 2012.

The End of Civilization As We Know It - An Update

The Democrat-dominated state legislature in California has passed a bill that, not to be grandiose, signals THE END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT!

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

Really?   Really?   Am I missing something, or should the California legislature have better things to do with their time.   Oh, right:

The college dreams of thousands of students who are illegal immigrants moved closer to fulfillment Wednesday after the state Senate approved a bill that for the first time would give them access to public financial aid.

Part of a two-bill package known as the California Dream Act, the measure would allow undocumented students who qualify for reduced in-state tuition to apply for Cal Grants, community college waivers and other public aid programs. To be eligible, they must be California high school graduates who attended schools in the state at least three years, and demonstrate financial need and academic merit.

Once upon a time, to live in California was the American dream; now, California is everything that's wrong with the country wrapped up in an increasingly absurd nutshell.Usually it's been my assumption that admitting to breaking federal law is a problem in gaining admission to a university, much less getting financial aid.   Guess I was wrong. 

I Don't Think Another Speech From Obama Is Going To Fix This

The August jobs report is out on this, the first Friday of September.   It's not good.  There were zero net new jobs added in the US in August: 

Employers stopped adding jobs in August, an alarming setback for an economy that has struggled to grow and might be at risk of another recession.

It was the weakest jobs report since September 2010. The unemployment rate remained at 9.1 percent.

Stock futures plunged on the news. Dow futures fell nearly 100 points shortly before the market opened....

The weakness in employment was underscored by revisions to the jobs data for June and July. Collectively, those figures were lowered to show 58,000 fewer jobs added. The downward revisions were all in government jobs.

The average work week also declined and hourly earnings fell by 3 cents to $23.09.

I talked with a client yesterday who runs investments for a private investor (read: really rich guy) and he said that they are "hunkering down" until after 2012.   Funny that:  I've heard the phrase "hunkering down" a lot lately, usually from businessmen-types or investors who have skin in the game.

Forget about polls and projections and all the political consultant mumbo jumbo.   The people who make the American economy work are already voting, and they have come to the conclusion that Obama has been a disaster for business, and will continue to be a disaster for business until we get rid of him in 2012.   The last thing on earth they want to hear is another "soaring" speech from President Just Words.   The next political speech they'll tune in for is the Inaugural Address of somebody else, anybody else.

Bobby Fischer

Thirty nine years ago today in 1972, Bobby Fischer defeated the Russian Boris Spassky for the world chess title.   Fischer was a certified chess genius, but he also was a certified lunatic, and his later years were made ugly with his paranoia and schizophrenic delusions, including extremely virulent anti-semitism.  He died in exile in Iceland in 2008 at the age of 65.   But for a time, in the early 1970s, Fischer managed to make chess cool, so cool that know-nothings like me and my friends ended up actually playing a good deal of chess in our early teens.  

Girl of the Day - More Tennis Skirts, Please! (Venus and Serena Williams)

I find it fascinating, that at a time when American tennis is terrible (other than the Williams sisters, there are no American women in the Top 30 in the world, and no American woman other that the Williams sisters has won a Grand Slam tournament since Jennifer Capriati in 2002), Serena and Venus Williams, sisters and African-Americans, have won 20 Grand Slam titles between them (13 for Serena, 7 for Venus).   Eschewing tennis "academies," they grew up in Compton, CA, with their dad as their coach.   Amazing!   And, of course, the most amazing thing is that they both made it to the very top in their sport.   I can't remember another pair of sisters or brothers who have done so in any sport.   Peyton and Eli Manning come close; so did Tony and Phil Esposito, going back aways.   But tennis is an individual sport... the Williams sisters' accomplishment would be the equivalent of Tiger Woods and, oh, Phil Mickelson, if Phil Mickelson were Tiger's long-lost white brother and if Phil had won 3-4 more majors.

Summing Up What's Wrong With Liberal Economics

This article, about the failure of a company that received $500 million from the federal government under Obama's "green jobs" program, sums up everything that's wrong with liberal (read:  socialist) economics:

President Obama faces political catastrophe in the form of Solyndra -- a San Francisco Bay area solar company that he touted as a gleaming example of green technology. It has announced it will declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than 1,100 people will lose their jobs.

During a visit to the Fremont facility in spring of 2010, the President said the factory "is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. "

It's not his statements the administration will regret; it's the loan guarantees. The President was celebrating $535 million in federal promises from the Department of Energy to the solar startup. The administration didn't do its due diligence, says the Government Accountability Office. "There's a consequence if you don't follow a rigorous process that's transparent," Franklin Rusco of GAO told the website iWatch News.

The President touted the federally back money as a way to create jobs. The President's opponents immediately jumped on the deal as Solyndra made its first layoffs.

Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns of Florida warned, "I am concerned that the DOE is providing loans and loan guarantees to firms that aren't capable of competing in the global market, even with government subsidies."

Another critic, Fred Upton of Michigan: "The unfortunate reality is that loan guarantee highlights many of the systemic flaws associated with the stimulus in the mad dash to spend hundreds of billions of dollars."

Sheesh!    The fundamental premise of free market, Austrian economics from Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek forward is that the the market, through the collective actions of individuals in the marketplace making decisions about what they want and need (and not what governments tell them what they ought to want or need) actually creates knowledge about what does and doesn't work, what is and isn't useful, what is and isn't productive.   Central planners, without this knowledge that only the collective action of individuals in the marketplace can create, who simply choose based on ideology this or that industry to support, inevitably fail.   You can't just by fiat demand that people by Chevy Volts, and you can't just by fiat demand that people use "green technology."  

This is not a matter of opinion, this is simply a scientific fact.   Central planning has and will everywhere fail, not because of bad intentions, but because of ontological truth -- that the central planners simply cannot know what the market has not as yet revealed.  

Putting aside economics, for a moment, however, consider this:  $535 million in federal loan guarantees for the stated purpose of "creating jobs."   Hmmmmm.... this plant had apparently a total of 1,100 jobs.    Maybe I'm just a silly right wing nut job, but $535 million divided by 1,100 is just shy of $500,000 per job!   The government would have done better giving $100,000 grants to 5,000 people who can show that they can match that investment with personal funds to start small businesses, and then gotten out of the way and let them go ahead and try.   If 1% make it, you've got 50 small businesses who might actually hire new employees.   But that common sense, "small ball" approach wouldn't allow Obama to line the pockets of his rich donors.

What?   What's that you say?   Oh, the article, from the NBC San Francisco affiliate, failes to tell you this information:

One of Solyndra's biggest stakeholders is Argonaut Ventures I. Its majority owner is Oklahoma oil billionaire George Kaiser, who was a "bundler"of campaign funds for the Obama-Biden campaign. This means he collected contributions and sent them en masse to the candidates....  

Well, isn't that cozy.  

Obamanomics... socialism mixed with corruption.   November 2012 can't come fast enough.