Saturday, July 2, 2011

Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., July 2 & 3, 2011


Ah... the July 4th weekend...
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6 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/271007/fiats-chilling-ad-henry-payne

* FOLKS... YOU'LL NEED TO LINK TO THE ACTUAL ARTICLE - THE PICTURE IS KEY!

* IN FACT... SINCE YOU NEED TO LINK ANYWAY... YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST READ THE ACTUAL ARTICLE THERE IN ITS ENTIRETY.

July 2, 2011 at 11:59 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/577134/201107011811/TSA-Totally-Screwed-Up-Administration.aspx

What kind of politically correct security allows a Nigerian man without a valid boarding pass to get on an airplane and fly cross-country while we search the adult diaper of a 95-year-old cancer patient?

* CHANT IT WITH ME, FOLKS... T-S-A! T-S-A! T-S-A! T-S-A! T-S-A!

Perhaps after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, was able to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with explosives in his underwear for a Christmas Day 2009 mission he trained for in Yemen, the TSA concluded it would be prudent to strip-search 95-year-old cancer patients wearing adult diapers.

(*SMIRK*)

* AND YET...

The TSA did not consider it prudent to restrain Nigerian immigrant Noibi from boarding a flight from JFK to LAX using a stolen expired boarding pass not in his name. He was allowed to walk free, even after the flight crew discovered the breach and notified the FBI. After passengers complained that Noibi smelled bad, the flight crew noticed he was sitting in an unsold seat.

* WE INTERRUPT THIS NEWSBITE FOR A WITTY PUN: "THE NOSE KNOWS!"

TSA officials will argue that mistakes can happen and that as a rule the system deters terror attacks. But it does so by forcing us to prove our innocence each time we fly, even while it overlooks likely suspects because to do otherwise might be considered profiling. In the process we are subjected to body scanner radiation whose long-term health consequences are in dispute.

The Israelis manage to avoid disaster by checking the passenger lists, doing background checks on prospective fliers and personally interviewing those they deem suspicious. Granted, the Israelis have a smaller sample to deal with, but we can narrow ours down to those likeliest to kill us.

The Israelis do not disrobe their passengers, including young children, looking for the explosive device du jour. They focus on who might be carrying the explosives, not on the objects themselves. They profile.

(*CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

July 2, 2011 at 12:07 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://blogs.forbes.com/johntamny/2011/07/01/obama-released-the-spr-and-all-he-got-was-nothing/

* BY JOHN TAMNY

On Wednesday, June 22nd, the price of oil closed at $95.41. The following day President Obama announced to great fanfare the release of 30 million barrels of crude over the next 30 days from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) with an eye on reducing oil’s price.

Mildly sentient minds with a basic sense of oil-price history knew it wouldn’t work, and sure enough, one week later oil closed at $95.25.

As of yesterday oil was trending down to $94/barrel, but this can be chalked up to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s looming resignation. As this piece will make abundantly clear, the price of oil is a dollar phenomenon, and with a weak dollar Treasury Secretary getting ready to depart, gold is down $19/ounce in concert with increased dollar strength, thus helping to explain oil’s slight weakness relative to yesterday.

[W]e’ve never had an oil scarcity problem. We have, however, suffered periods of dollar weakness that have boosted the nominal cost of a barrel.

[C]ontrary to false signals wrought by a commodity priced in a floating dollar, the real price of oil has always been remarkably stable. Priced in gold, the most stable measure of value known to mankind, oil’s price has remained mostly the same over the last 40 years. An ounce of gold bought 15 barrels oil in 1971, 15 barrels in 1981, and it buys 15 barrels today.

[Consider] that in the twenty-four years leading up to 1971 (when President Nixon tragically severed the dollar’s link to gold) when the dollar had a gold definition of 1/35th of an ounce, the price of oil was cheap and stable. [O]nce that relationship was abolished, the dollar began floating, and with it, the nominal price of oil.

Considering the two decades of “oil shocks” in the 1970s and the last 10 years, we didn’t experience oil shocks as much as the dollar collapsed in value, and a commodity (oil) priced in dollars spiked.

The good news is that there’s an easy fix to our oil problem, which is a dollar problem. If we redefine and strengthen the dollar, the price of oil will fall substantially to a very stable level. In short, we don’t have a supply problem that can be fixed by more crude exploration, but we do have a weak dollar, and until its decline is arrested, oil will remain expensive no matter the amount of oil brought to market.

July 2, 2011 at 5:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/burning-down-the-house/2011/06/30/AGeRSGuH_story.html

* BECAUSE SOME FOLKS DON'T READ NEWSBITES DAILY... (*GRIN*) (*WINK*)

The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made.

Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. The book’s subtitle could be: "Cry Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity."

[The authors] will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.

* FIRST... A BIT OF HISTORY, FOLKS:

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards to dispense mortgages more broadly across communities.

* Hmm... 1977... WHO WAS PRESIDENT THEN...? WHICH PARTY CONTROLLED CONGRESS THEN...?

In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed increasing home ownership through a “partnership” between government and the private sector, principally orchestrated by Fannie Mae, a “government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE). It became a perfect specimen of what such “partnerships” (e.g., General Motors) usually involve: Profits are private, losses are socialized.

* 1994, HUH? Hmm... AGAIN... DIDN'T THE DEMS CONTROL THE HOUSE AND SENATE - AS WELL AS THE WHITE HOUSE - IN 1994? (RHETORICAL QUESTION, FOLKS; THE ANSWER IS "YES.")

There was a torrent of compassion-speak: “Special care should be taken to ensure that standards are appropriate to the economic culture of urban, lower-
income, and nontraditional consumers.”

* OH...! AND YOU'RE GONNA LOVE THIS ONE, FOLKS:

“Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor.”

(*HEADACHE*)

Government having decided to dictate behavior that markets discouraged, the traditional relationship between borrowers and lenders was revised. Lenders promoted reckless borrowing, knowing they could off­load risk to purchasers of bundled loans, and especially to Fannie Mae. In 1994, sub-prime lending was $40 billion. In 1995, almost one in five mortgages was sub-prime. Four years later such lending totaled $160 billion.

By 2003, the government was involved in financing almost half - $3.4 trillion - of the home-loan market. Not coincidentally, by the summer of 2005, almost 40% of new sub-prime loans were for amounts larger than the value of the properties.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

* To be continued...

July 3, 2011 at 12:24 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)

As housing prices soared, many giddy owners stopped thinking of homes as retirement wealth and started using them as sources of equity loans - up to $800 billion a year. This fueled incontinent consumption.

[Morgenson's and Rosner's] book’s subtitle could [also] be: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.”

Under Johnson - an important Democratic operative - Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.

Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.

* NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT, HUH?

Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating the homeownership mania, and spread “charitable” contributions to housing advocates across the congressional map.

“Reckless Endangerment” is a study of contemporary Washington, where showing “compassion” with other people’s money pays off in the currency of political power, and currency. Although Johnson left Fannie Mae years before his handiwork helped produce the 2008 bonfire of wealth, he may be more responsible for the debacle and its still-mounting devastation - of families, endowments, etc. - than any other individual. [H]e may be more culpable for the peacetime destruction of more wealth than any individual in history.

* IF THERE'S ONE BOOK YOU NEED TO BUY YOURSELVES MY FRIENDS... THIS IS IT.

July 3, 2011 at 12:25 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/07/2011-number-of-pages-in-us-tax-code.html

How many pages does it take for the CCH Standard Tax Reporter to fully document the U.S. tax code as it stands in 2011?

If you answered 72,536, you're right.

(*SIGH*)

July 3, 2011 at 12:53 PM

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