Sunday, January 31, 2010

Stimulus II: A Sequel America Can't Afford



Dan Mitchell with another great video. Is stimulus #2 on it's way?

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Thomas Sowell - Intellectuals and Society



I received a Kindle, a fantastic device, for my birthday and I will be downloading Sowell's new book: "Intellectuals and Society." The above is a small snipet of Sowell discussing the book.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Depressing Charts

From the Dallas Federal Reserve. Not for the faint of heart.

HT: Cafe Hayek

Oh, that crazy Chavez!

From the Associated Press:

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez says there's too much capitalism on Venezuelan TV. So he's urging producers to start making films and TV shows that stress socialist values.

Chavez says producers should be making "socialist soap operas."

He said Sunday he recently visited Cuba "and they have soaps there. But they're not capitalist soap operas."

LOL!!!

"I forgot he was black"

Chris Matthews inserts foot in mouth.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Being "compassionate" with someone else's money

From Carpe Diem: Watching Obama and Biden on TV and hearing Obama talk proudly about their "leadership," I can't help but remember how relatively uncharitable and uncaring they have been in the past when it comes to spending their own money.

VH: This is not an unfair criticism of an administration that wants to take one group's money (usually groups that are branded as bad) to give to another group in an attempt to "spread the wealth" and which is supposed to then mean that government is therefore being "fair" or "compassionate." They want to be "compassionate" with other people's money. Ah, government.

Will ObamaCare pass?

The prediction market at Intrade is bearish.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

UAW meeting goes wrong



"Teamsters, so surly and lazy."---Homer Simpson

Super Mall!!

The largest mall in the world is in China. It looks more like a theme park to me. Can you imagine how much carbon is emitted from this place?

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

It burns cleanly and there is a lot of it...

My question today is this: Why aren't we allowing energy companies tap into our vast natural gas resources? It's clean burning and abundant.

Every few weeks, it seems, fresh news arrives telling of impressive discoveries of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that, until recently, was viewed as well worked over and unlikely to yield any new bonanzas.

Last September brought word of a giant Gulf oil field reeled in by British Petroleum. And the latest Gulf headline-maker is a potentially major gas play offshore Louisiana that appears likely to add new trillions of cubic feet of gas to growing domestic reserves of the cleanest-burning carbon fuel.

Drill, drill, drill!!!

Around The Horn

Posts of worth and note!

From Shaving Leviathan: Ted Kennedy Dies, Saves Country Five Months Later.

From A Disgruntled Republican: Dear global warming scientist, I am not as smart as a global warming scientist but I think that I am as smart as a fifth grader.

From Watts Up With That: The scandal deepens-IPCC AR4 riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Here we go again

Hold on to your recycling bins, Global Warming causes methane gas to increase! Alert Al Gore!

Cut federal spending?

What are the odds that Democrats would actually adopt Republican Senator Tom Coburn's amendment? I won't be holding my breath:

The Senate is debating a $1.9 trillion increase in the nation's debt limit that would lift Treasury's legal borrowing ceiling to $14.3 trillion. After a $290 billion debt-limit raise last month, this giant new increase is intended to get Democrats past November's election without another reminder to voters of how much debt their spending is piling up.

Mr. Coburn has a better idea: Cut spending to a level that would allow the government to stay beneath the current debt ceiling for a few more months. President Obama promised in his campaign to eliminate "unnecessary redundancy" in government, so Mr. Coburn is calling for at least $20 billion in spending cuts on programs that are duplicated across federal agencies. That's about 4% of nondefense discretionary spending, and Mr. Coburn's amendment identifies at least 640 programs that could be consolidated.

A few examples: A 2009 Government Accountability Office report found 69 early education programs, administered by nine different agencies. A 2003 GAO report found 44 job training programs, also administered by nine agencies. The Department of Education runs 14 separate programs for foreign study exchanges. Taxpayers spend more than $300 million annually on at least nine Agriculture Department programs to develop biofuels. Too bad we can't pay for all this with wood chips.

Another Climate Panel Problem

After a week down with the flu, I'm back.

Here's an interesting piece I found in this week's issue of The Economist. Once again we see how fallible the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) really is:

The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC.

And shameful news for publications (like the once vaunted Economist) that parroted the IPCC warning without proper due diligence. What has happened to healthy skepticism? It seems that with the subject of Global Warming any pretense to question the science is seen as sheer heresy or a mark of stupidity. But again we see another example of where the IPCC, supposedly an authority on this matter, fails to properly carry out a simple review process. Quite frankly, no government should put any trust into anything the IPCC publishes.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Simply odd

Everyone has heard about Pat Robertson's comment on Haiti, but I think that the strangest comment comes from actor Danny Glover. Yesterday, Mr. Glover uttered the following bit of stupid:

Actor Danny Glover says the earthquake in Haiti is a result of global warming. Glover told GRITtv that it could have happened to any of the Caribbean island nations: "They are all in peril because of global warming."

Then, he lamented the failure of the climate summit in Copenhagen. As a result of that failure, he says, "this is what happened."

Wow. What a nutcase.

In other strangeness, it seems that Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector that is somewhat of an iconic fiqure for anti-Bush types has been charged in an online child-sex case. This is the second time and this time he was caught on camera!

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Friday, January 8, 2010

Californians will foot the bill

I am not a big fan of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger but his latest statement on national health care reform accentuates what I and other fiscal conservatives have been saying for months now. Gov. Schwarzenegger, who had endorsed national reform, now says the following:

"You've heard of the bridge to nowhere? This is health care to nowhere...the current structure and the proposed expansion of Medicaid under health care reform are unsustainable for California."

Many Liberals in California thought that national health care "reform" was going to be free! If you just tax the rich guys and the insurance companies, we'll be just like France. Little did they know that they were footing the bill for everyone else...including the hated RED states. You see, because wages and earnings tend to be higher in California than the rest of the country, the "rich guy" is them. I guess unicorns don't exist after all.

Progressive Utopia: Detroit



Coming to a city near you.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Milton Friedman - Case Against Equal Pay for Equal Work



Milton Friedman was a master in being able to explain difficult concepts in a breezy, easily understood manner. In this video he tackles a subject that is still being discussed today--equal pay for equal work.

HT: Liberty Pen

Saturday, January 2, 2010

More than you bargined for...



Government programs tend to slowly evolve and grow beyond their original intention and mandates. Will ObamaCare be any different?

HT: Life, Liberty, and Property