konane's Blog

Back to my first love, metaphysical stuff.  Great article, excellent info ... hope you enjoy! 

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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/05/026373.php

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/05/026375.php

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"Imagine you are sitting at home on a peaceful Sunday when you hear buses pull up in front of your house and begin disgorging hundreds of angry people waving signs with threatening messages, shaking their fists and crowding onto your lawn. Soon, hundreds of screaming people are tromping on your flower beds, peering into your windows, and scaring neighbors who nervously begin placing calls to 911.

As the noise levels rise and demonstrators start banging on your front door, you begin to fear that something very bad is about to happen. Then you spot the police cars, and relief floods over you. "At least the cops will keep things under control," you tell yourself. But your relief is shattered when you realize the cops you thought were there to protect you are actually from another jurisdiction and they are there because they escorted the mob to your address.

Sound like a fantasy, something that could never happen here? Guess again, because that exact scenario played out last week in Bethesda. The demonstrators were from the Service Employees International Union, the target of their anger was the home of Bank of America Deputy General Counsel Greg Baer, and the cops escorting the SEIU-ers were from the Metropolitan District of Columbia Police Department, which, like departments across the country, is represented by the Fraternal Order of Police union.

Although it is standard procedure across the nation when officers from one jurisdiction cross into another to provide advance warning, that was not done in this case. The only person inside the Baer home when the demonstrators and D.C. cops arrived was one of Baer's young sons, who locked himself in the bathroom until his father arrived to rescue him after bravely forcing his way through the crowd. Eventually, the Montgomery County police appeared on the scene, and the demonstrators later departed.

There are multiple lessons to be gleaned from this highly disturbing situation. Such tactics are standard fare for SEIU, whose leaders think it's just fine to target the private homes and families of people associated with whatever company the union has decided to demonize. These assaults are clearly meant to shock and intimidate. Congress long ago banned secondary boycotts from union tactics. It's time to put a stop to all such assaults on private homes and families. And the conduct of the D.C. police highlights another critical question -- should law enforcement officers be pawns of union bosses? Collective bargaining should no longer have a place among those sworn to protect and serve the public."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/No-more-police-escorts-for-union-thugs-94701089.html

May 22, 2010 6:00 A.M.
"One of Those Moments
Mark Steyn  
Source National Review

"The president has become the latest Western liberal to try to hammer Daniel Pearl’s box into a round hole.

Barack Obama’s remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago’s Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley’s bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health-care “reform” and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Like a lot of guys who’ve been told they’re brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn’t always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the “Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act.”

Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.

This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”

Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

Even if Americans don’t get the message, the rest of the world does. This week’s pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity.

But what did the “loss” of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination.” Really? Evidently it never captured Obama’s imagination, because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: “one of those moments” — you know, like Princess Di’s wedding, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, whatever — “that captured the world’s imagination.”

Notice how reflexively Obama lapses into sentimental one-worldism: Despite our many zip codes, we are one people, with a single imagination. In fact, the murder of Daniel Pearl teaches just the opposite — that we are many worlds, and worlds within worlds. Some of them don’t even need an “imagination.” Across the planet, the video of an American getting his head sawed off did brisk business in the bazaars and madrassas and Internet downloads. Excited young men e-mailed it to friends, from cell phone to cell phone, from Karachi to Jakarta to Khartoum to London to Toronto to Falls Church, Va. In the old days, you needed an “imagination” to conjure the juicy bits of a distant victory over the Great Satan. But in an age of high-tech barbarism, the sight of Pearl’s severed head is a mere click away.

And the rest of “the world”? Most gave a shrug of indifference. And far too many found the reality of Pearl’s death too uncomfortable and chose to take refuge in the same kind of delusional pap as Obama. The president is only the latest Western liberal to try to hammer Daniel Pearl’s box into a round hole. Before him, it was Michael Winterbottom in his film A Mighty Heart: As Pearl’s longtime colleague Asra Nomani wrote, “Danny himself had been cut from his own story.” Or, as Paramount’s promotional department put it, “Nominate the most inspiring ordinary hero. Win a trip to the Bahamas!” Where you’re highly unlikely to be kidnapped and beheaded! (Although, in the event that you are, please check the liability-waiver box at the foot of the entry form.)

The latest appropriation is that his “loss” “reminded us of how valuable a free press is.” It was nothing to do with “freedom of the press.” By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that some 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Sharia, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl’s murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists from Osama to the Pantybomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi.” But Obama’s not the kind to take “guilty” for an answer, so he’s arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.

Listen to his killer’s words: “The American Jew Daniel Pearl.” We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. Before the body was found, The Independent’s Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl’s kidnappers: Killing him would be “a major blunder . . . the best way of ensuring that the suffering” — of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians — “goes unrecorded.” Other journalists peddled a similar line: If you release Danny, he’ll be able to tell your story, get your message out, “bridge the misconceptions.” But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that’s a misconception.

Daniel Pearl was the prototype for a new kind of terror. In his wake came other victims from Kenneth Bigley, whose last words were that “Tony Blair has not done enough for me,” to Fabrizzio Quattrocchi, who yanked off his hood, yelled “I will show you how an Italian dies!” and ruined the movie for his jihadist videographers. By that time, both men understood what it meant to be in a windowless room with a camera and a man holding a scimitar. But Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words understood why he was there:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, U.S.A.”

He didn’t have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That’s all President Obama owed him — to do the same.

I mentioned last week the attorney general’s peculiar insistence that “radical Islam” was nothing to do with the Times Square bomber, the Pantybomber, the Fort Hood killer. Just a lot of moments “capturing the world’s imagination.” For now, the jihadists seem to have ceased cutting our heads off. Listening to Obama and Eric Holder, perhaps they’ve figured out there’s nothing much up there anyway."

http://article.nationalreview.com/434712/one-of-those-moments/mark-steyn

Posted by Karl Denninger in Editorial at 09:11

"So We Now Have "Financial Reform"?

http://market-ticker.org/archives/2338-So-We-Now-Have-Financial-Reform.html

Very strongly worded excellent read. 

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Posted by Karl Denninger in Editorial at 09:04

Source The Market Ticker

"The Roof Is On Fire

"The Euro Zone is in serious trouble, and Britain and we are next.

The game's up folks.

Many people talk about us "printing" money.  Indeed, there's a large brokerage that runs advertisements on CNBS with that exact claim, over and over and over.  Ron Paul and Peter Schiff have run this mantra for years.

This chart says something else entirely:

http://market-ticker.org/archives/2336-The-Roof-Is-On-Fire.html

THERE HAS BEEN NO PRINTING GOING ON!

No, what's been happening is worse. 

Worldwide governments have borrowed and spent huge percentages of their GDP in a puerile attempt to protect a criminal class that has looted the public and bribed the legislature - THE BANKS.

There was always a point where this would fail, but it is flatly impossible for anyone to know exactly where it was beforehand.

But mathematically, there was a point where it would fail.

The gamble that Bernanke, Trichet, Obama, Bush, Paulson, Geithner and everyone else in the world took is that we could do this for a short period of time and that in doing so private demand would pick up and return us to "stability."

THESE PEOPLE DID NOT STUDY THE ABOVE CHART, AND THEY'RE F^#KING IDIOTS FOR BELIEVING THAT WHICH WAS TRIED IN 2003-2007, WITH A HIGHER DEBT LOAD THAN WE HAD THEN, WOULD WORK NOW WHEN IT FAILED IN 2003.

Failed?

Yes, FAILED.

O'Neill was on Bloomberg the other day.  He was Bush's Treasury Secretary during part of his first term, until he resigned under pressure from the administration.  Why did he resign in 2002?

BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT WHAT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WAS DOING WOULD NOT WORK.

A study he ran in 2002 showed that the United States would be running budget deficits of more than $500 billion going forward, and that to fix it we would have to enact an across-the-board tax increase of more than 60% or radically cut entitlement spending.

We did neither, of course, and Bush pushed through a huge entitlement increase in an attempt to appease Democrats.  It did, but it also created a structural $500 billion budget deficit that we couldn't get rid of.

The remaining years of the "boom" from 2003-2007 were all fueled by fraud.  Unable to generate positive GDP through organic growth and productivity we instead imported 20 million illegal Mexicans (who our current President refuses to send home and seal the border against, even though Calderon, who wants us to legalize them all, arrests and deports more illegal immigrants a year from Mexico than we catch!) and blew a huge housing bubble, giving anyone with a pulse a loan to buy a house irrespective of their ability to pay.

These weren't even mortgages - they were virtually all balloon notes that were never intended to be paid, but instead designed and intended to force the "buyer" to come back in 2 or 3 years and refinance, so the banks could skim off yet another set of fees for themselves and steal any equity that the hapless owner had accumulated.  If there was excess "equity" the banks graciously let you have some of it during that refinance to buy a boat (with equity that didn't really exist, but for which you'd be obligated in the future.)

Three years ago I said we couldn't get away with the intervention.  Those who have been reading The Ticker since the beginning know that I have written several open letters, have faxed tens of thousands of pages to Congress, and have offered to get in a car or on a plane and come testify - under oath - as to the mathematical certainty of what we face and what we must do.

You also know that nobody wants to hear it and no such invitation has been forthcoming, that I was basically laughed off CNBS and that the "rah rah" crowd all got millions of Americans to pile back into the stock market.

Yeah, ok.

Folks, it's quite simple.  Accumulation of debt is inflationary.  It pulls forward demand from tomorrow.  Look at house prices from 2003-2007 for your best and finest example - they quadrupled in some areas and doubled in many more.  20%+ "appreciation" annually was common.

But when you take on debt to buy something you're buying today what you would otherwise consume tomorrow.  This is the Wimpy action: "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

But when Tuesday comes, you've already eaten the hamburger, you're hungry again, and if you pay the hamburger stand owner you now have no money with which to buy another hamburger. 

When debt loads rise to the point that you can no longer buy both today's hamburger and pay for the one you ate last week the impact is deflationary, because today's demand, having been pulled forward from yesterday, can no longer be sustained.  Without demand sales collapse and without sales there is no profit - and no employment.

Keynesian economic thought is fundamentally bankrupt, as it requires that treasuries be rebuilt during flush times so you can spend the money during bad times.  Keynesian economics does not include, and never did, borrowing to spend.  That's a corruption of Keynes beliefs but it is where attempting to apply Keynes economic "theories" to the real world always ends up, as government will always find a place to blow a surplus, thereby guaranteeing there won't be one to spend when the bad times come.

As such the best we can do is allow business cycle downturns to work themselves out.  Yes, this process will suck.  Yes, people will lose their jobs.  Yes, people will go bankrupt.  But we must never, ever backstop businesses - including banks.  We can (and should) backstop depositors (people) through a self-funded insurance fund (which is what the FDIC is supposed to be, and would be if run correctly) but even there we can't make people 100% whole, as it drives them to "reach for yield" and thus chase insolvent institutions.  Changing the FDIC to pay 80% of insured deposits (instead of 100%) would be sufficient to both prevent people from being bankrupted but also stop the "chase for yield" that winds up supporting those who have already gone bust.

I remain willing and able to get on that plane or in that car and come testify before any body of Congress, under oath, or lay it all out on any form of broadcast media. 

But Congress doesn't want to hear it, and "Tout TV" sure as hell doesn't want to broadcast it - especially not the above chart and what it means, even though that, properly explained, makes everything crystal-clear - and irrefutably so.

It sucks to have to say "See, I told you so!", because we had an opportunity to flush these banksters down the toilet in 2007 and 2008, and failed to take it.  Yes, we would have had to recognize the Depression we are in right now, but by now it would be over and employment would be truly recovering.  We would have been forced to put in place something like The Fair Tax to keep our government from imploding and that would have brought 70% or more of all the multinational corporations to our shores over the intervening couple of years, stabilizing our economy.  We would have broken the back of the bankster cartel, jailed a bunch of 'em and made <snip> sure it could not happen again by re-imposing Glass-Steagall.  Those who were not jailed would have fled to other nations, waving their fingers at us at how "those countries" would be better off.  Then they would have flushed in their excessive debt loads while we, in America, would have taken our medicine already.

Yes, all this would have been at the rest of the world's expense - that's what happens when you do it right and everyone else does it wrong.

But we didn't choose to do that.  We still can do the right thing, by the way, but now the damage is greater, because you can't unbreak an egg.  The $3 trillion+ that we borrowed and spent is gone. 

Our options remain as they were in 2007.  We can take our medicine and accept the damage that has already been done yet papered over and shoveled under the carpet or we can continue to lie and pray that we don't end up like Greece.

But prayer doesn't work when you're asking God to intervene against a mathematical reality that you created by your own hand, and thus what's coming - and you're asking for the divine to stop - is something you deserve."

http://market-ticker.org/archives/2336-The-Roof-Is-On-Fire.html

Son found this ad which I'm presuming is real.  It's a guy thing. 

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http://atlanta.craigslist.org/nat/bar/1753046629.html

May 21, 2010 Posted by John at 7:55 AM

Source Powerlineblog.com

"Repeated attacks on the citizens of Arizona by President Obama and many others have done nothing to dim Arizona's support for immigration law enforcement. On the contrary: a remarkable 71 percent of Arizona voters now support that state's new immigration law, up from 64 percent last month. And Governor Jan Brewer has jumped out to a 13-point lead over her likely Democratic opponent, which means that she is doing far better with the electorate than--to take just one example--Barack Obama. That's not surprising; voters like executives who actually support and defend the people who elected them."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/05/026347.php

Most disagreements and political posturing come down to money.  Looks like Neal nailed another one!

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Nealz Nuze on boortz.com

@ May 21, 2010 8:58 AM  

"Remember first that Mexico has even harsher laws dealing with illegal aliens than we do. Yes, Mexico does have a problem with illegals. Not heading south from the United States, but heading North out of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and other Central American countries. If these people are caught in Mexico illegally it's pretty much straight to jail ... and nobody screams about racial profiling.

But there is something flowing South into Mexico from the United States. Dollars. About one billion dollars every month, to be more precise. These dollars are being sent home to Mexico by illegals working in this country ... sent home to support families. This is the second biggest single source of income for the Mexican economy. Calderon is in trouble .. he's fighting a drug war and his economy isn't exactly on a roll. If America enforces it's immigration laws with anything close to the determination with which Mexico enforces theirs ... the money would dry up and Mexico would be in deep salsa."

http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2010/05/why-does-the-mexican-president.html

http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=175779

Source Boortz.com@ May 21, 2010 9:03 AM Permalink  

"Does the name Russell Pearce sound familiar to you? It should. That is the name of the Arizona state senator who wrote Arizona's immigration enforcement law, SB 1070. As you can imagine, Pearce has been getting his share of hate mail .. I can relate. But in his response to citizens, Pearce has revealed that his immigration law-writing days aren't over just yet. He intends to push for another bill that would enable Arizona to no longer grant automatic citizenship to children of illegal immigrants who are born on US soil. In an email to a constituent, he says, "I also intend to push for an Arizona bill that would refuse to accept or issue a birth certificate that recognizes citizenship to those born to illegal aliens, unless one parent is a citizen."

Pearce argues that his idea is legal, constitutional and common sense. He says, "You can't break into someone's country and then expect to be rewarded for that. You can't do it."

This absolutely the right step. They're called "anchor babies" because they're seen as anchoring the illegal parent in this country. As I understand it America may well be the only country .. or one of few .. that automatically confers citizenship upon children born to parents in this country to illegal. "

http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2010/05/things-could-get-even-uglier.html

"The fruits of weakness

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 21, 2010
Source The Washington Post

"It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.

It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.

They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).

They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the United States and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."

They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chávez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.

Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)

Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the United States retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/20/AR2010052003885.html