Thursday, September 26, 2013
Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, September 26, 2013
So... did any of you hear any substantive soundbites from Ted Cruz's 21-hour Senate floor speech while watching network news last night?
How'bout you CNN watchers? Besides the obligatory references to Cruz's "Green Eggs and Ham" remarks, what did you hear?
MSNBC watchers...??? (Nah... just kidding...)
Folks... understand... the Democrats are (obviously) against Cruz and those ideals championed by "Tea Party" Americans. Therefore the media are against Cruz. But what you really need to understand is that the GOP - the establishment GOP - is also anti-Cruz.
Did you hear about John McCain's little "rejoinder" to Cruz's 21-hour presentation of the case against ObamaCare? (You heard of it I bet!)
How'bout Peter King's bull$hit as covered by Politico?
Folks... having been a participant at many "Tea Party" rallies and demonstrations and having been one of the hundreds of thousands who took part in Glenn Beck's 8/28/2010 "Restoring Honor," I can assure you that King is full of $hit. (The Left behaves as animals... just google "Occupy Wall Street.") Seriously, folks, those of you who have experience urban union actions or even Leftist university "demonstrations" know that by and large it's the Left that tends more towards the "insult, intimidation, and even violence" route when they "rally."
My friends... just consider the people who denounce Cruz and that should tell you that Cruz is the good guy!
Anyway, folks... another day... more newsbites! (Hey... did you folks happen to catch yesterday's newsbite #3 - the CNBC article on interest rates and federal spending? If not... please do!)
"See" ya in the comments section!
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http://freebeacon.com/russia-china-hold-large-scale-war-games/
Pentagon intelligence agencies are closely watching Russian and Chinese war games now taking place in Europe and Asia involving tens of thousands of troops.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/09/26/morning-bell-43000-per-household/
Did you know that since President Obama came into office, the debt limit has been raised seven times?
* ACCORDING TO WIKIPEDIA: Every President since Herbert Hoover has added to the national debt expressed in absolute dollars. The debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since March 1962, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, eight times under Bill Clinton, and seven times under George W. Bush.
* OF COURSE, IN ORDER TO PUT THE ABOVE IN TRUE CONTEXT ONE WOULD HAVE TO KNOW AMOUNTS... AMOUNTS AS PERCENTAGES OF GNP... AMOUNTS AS PERCENTAGES OF REVENUES... BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. (AND ALSO, WHAT WAS ACHIEVED VIA DEBT SHOULDERING? REAGAN WON THE COLD WAR!)
With those [latest "Obama"] increases, Congress has added $43,000 in debt for every American household in just the last four years.
* THIS IS WHAT I WAS SAYING ABOVE... "...IN JUST THE LAST FOUR YEARS." (COMPARE AND CONTRAST WITH PREVIOUS PRESIDENTS AND PREVIOUS CONGRESSES.)
And now the debt limit deadline is looming again. Treasury will run out of tricks to keep paying the bills on October 17, Secretary Jack Lew announced yesterday.
Instead of pursuing significant spending cuts and entitlement reforms that are desperately needed to get spending under control, House Republicans reportedly are proposing to suspend the debt ceiling for more than a year, which would add $1.1 trillion to the debt.
* YEP... HOUSE "REPUBLICANS." (*SIGH*) NOT THAT THE DEMS OPPOSE THIS! NO! THE DEMS IF THEY HAD THEIR WAY WOULD NO DOUBT PROPOSE ADDING FAR MORE THAN "A MERE" $1.1 TRILLION ($43,000 PER HOUSEHOLD) TO THE DEBT!
So, take that $43,000 per household that was added in the last four years and tack on another $8,800 per household.
* ANOTHER 8,800 PER HOUSEHOLD...
What happened the last time Congress raised the debt ceiling? Did they accomplish any meaningful spending cuts before increasing the debt limit? In a word, no: Congress and the President last suspended the debt ceiling from February 4, 2013, through May 18, 2013, adding $300 billion to the national debt in less than four months. Their only request was that the Senate produce a budget for the first time in four years, which it did. No savings were accomplished.
No savings.
* FRANKLY I'D HAVE TO VERIFY THIS. IT'S MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THIS YEAR'S FEDERAL SPENDING WILL BE LESS THAN LAST YEAR'S FEDERAL SPENDING. THE NUMBERS WILL COME OUT IN NOVEMBER. WE'LL KNOW THEN.
As Heritage’s Romina Boccia, the Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs, wrote yesterday: Congress should implement spending cuts and entitlement reforms before — or as part of — an increase in the debt ceiling. Lawmakers still have time to put forth a plan that puts the budget on a path to balance and avoids a debt crisis today and in the future. The clock is ticking.
* SORRY. I JUST DON'T BELIEVE THE HAPPY TALK. UNLESS I'M APPOINTED DICTATOR THEY'LL BE NO PLAN THAT "PUTS THE BUDGET ON A PATH TO BALANCE." AND AS TO AVOIDING A DEBT CRISIS... (*SIGH*)... I POINT YOU FOLKS AGAIN TO NEWSBITE #3 FROM YESTERDAY'S NEWSBITES.
(*SHRUG*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359556/ipcc-political-suicide-pill-patrick-j-michaels
On Friday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is going to release its much-anticipated fifth “scientific assessment” of global warming.
Like its 2007 predecessor, the document will be a ready poison pill for those contemplating political suicide.
Each iteration of this document becomes the reigning go-to document for climate pests, including legislatures and governments. (For example, the fourth version was cited repeatedly by the U.S. House of Representatives as the putative factual basis for its 2009 cap-and-trade legislation, which passed that body on June 26 of that year.)
Three days later, Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot switched from Democrat to Republican, and it remained there continuously through the Democrats’ electoral debacle of 2010, when they lost 65 seats and their majority. (Virtually every close race was lost by a Democrat who had voted for the legislation.)
* JUST ONE OF MANY FACTORS... BUT ONE NEVERTHELESS!
Meanwhile, U.S. Senate staffers noticed the polls and wisely counseled their bosses to make sincere noises but no law. In the fall, every close Senate race was won by a Democrat.
(*SHRUG*)
The carnage in Australia has been even more serious. In 2009, when the Labor party ran the country, Australia’s Liberal (i.e., conservative) party leader, Malcolm Turnbull, was thrown out on his ear because of his support for cap-and-trade, and he was replaced by Tony Abbott, who is now Oz’s new prime minister. Turnbull was fond of quoting the IPCC’s authoritative “consensus” on climate change.
Two years ago, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd was deposed for implementing his cap-and-trade program (pretty much the same one that cost Turnbull his Liberal leadership) and replaced by Labor’s Julia Gillard, who vowed to scrap his program and also to never impose the alternative, a tax on carbon-containing fuels.
When I asked Mr. Rudd, after running into him in the men’s room at Washington’s tony Café Milano, why he did what he did, he got all huffy, saying for all to hear: “My scientists told me, I say, my scientists told me that this is a terribly important problem.”
* MORON...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The IPCC is really in a pickle. Not only can it be blamed for the lack of any effective (unnecessary) national climate policy, but it is about to produce a report that is going to be obsolete the minute it is published.
Over the years, the IPCC has behaved like a treed cat. Instead of closing its eyes and scurrying to the ground, it climbs onto even higher and thinner branches, while yowling ever louder. How does it back down from a quarter-century of predicting a quarter of a degree (Celsius) of warming every decade, when there’s been none for 17 years now?
* ...WHEN THERE'S BEEN NONE FOR 17 YEARS NOW.
In fact, as I demonstrated in a recent presentation to the American Geophysical Union, the reigning suite of climate models has now officially failed, with the difference between them and reality now statistically significant at the 1-in-20 level.
Since the beginning of 2011, at least 16 separate experiments published by nearly 50 researchers show that the “sensitivity” of temperature to carbon dioxide that is characteristic of the IPCC’s climate models is simply too high. (“Sensitivity” is the amount of temperature change expected for a nominal doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.)
The new IPCC assessment calls sensitivity “the single most important measure of climate response” because changes in global mean surface temperature are what drive other changes, like sea-level rise. If you blow the sensitivity, you also blow every forecast of what is supposed to happen because of climate change.
Historians tell us scientists are reluctant to abandon their overarching worldviews. The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin wrote in February that there is even greater than normal reluctance to admit to a lower sensitivity “because the recent work is trending towards the published low sensitivity findings from a decade ago from climate scientists best known for their relationships with libertarian groups.” (Call me nameless.)
* Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.
So the IPCC has three options:
1. Vote at week’s end to “not accept” the latest report and start over;
2. Note the recent findings and include a prominent disclaimer directing readers to substantially discount anything they say about the effects of future climate change; or
3. Do nothing and mislead the world. Again.
Bet on Door No. 3, with the corollary that whoever legislates or promulgates climate policies based upon the new report will be putting his political career in very serious jeopardy.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359535/schools-are-not-parents-charles-c-w-cooke
[A] pair of seventh-grade children, Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark, were suspended from school in Virginia Beach for the high crime of playing with an airsoft gun on their parents’ private property...
* YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT THIS, RIGHT, FOLKS? (THE STORY IS A COUPLE DAYS OLD...)
[J]ust another in the long line of the fringe skirmishes that make up America’s ongoing struggle over firearms? [No.] Insofar as guns are the issue at all in this case, they are but a secondary consideration; the detail, perhaps, but not the story.
In truth, the implications here are much wider and much more troubling, touching as they do on foundational questions about property rights, the remit of the public school system, and the nature of American civil society. Contrary to the now infamous beliefs of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Melissa Harris-Perry, children in America do not “belong” to the community — and nor would Americans be any better off if they did.
In free societies, schools are not designed to serve as a mandatory means by which the Bismarckian state may seek to shape the young, but instead to act merely as a service to which parents can choose to send their kids for basic education if they so wish. This is to say that schools may well act in loco parentis, but they may not act as ipsi parentes.
Had the two children in Virginia Beach actually brought real guns into school, in clear violation of both the school’s explicit policy and of federal law, it seems that administrators would have been thoroughly within their rights to punish them.
Likewise, if they had shown off in the classroom their airsoft guns, which, although basically toys, certainly do not belong in school.
But the children did no such thing. [T]hey played with them on their parents’ property before school and then dispensed with them before they reached the bus.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* OOPS! MAKE THIS PART 2 OF 3!
It really should not need saying that parents who choose to give their children legal toy weapons on their own property are entirely within their rights to do so, nor that those parents should not live in fear of repercussions from the educational arm of the state. As Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, complained after the expulsion, “my son is my private property, he does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”
* AS YOU FOLKS KNOW, I'M NOT A BIG FAN OF OUR CIVIL TORT REGIME... BUT THESE PARENTS SHOULD SUE NOT ONLY THE SCHOOLS BUT EVERYONE INVOLVED PERSONALLY!
[I]t remains wholly immaterial whether the pair was expelled for this incident alone or, as the school claimed in its defense, it was the last among a long train of grievances. They should not have been punished at all. Why? Because, whatever one thinks of children’s playing with airsoft guns, the events for which they were reproved did not take place within the school’s jurisdiction.
* DUH!
Indeed, even if the children involved had done something illegal outside of school — which they did not — we might ask if we honestly want schools getting involved in doling out secondary punishment for infractions that do not concern them. (Should a school put a child in detention if he gets a ticket for jaywalking, for example?)
Guns are relevant here inasmuch as they probably explain the degree of the hysteria, which one suspects would have been diminished had the two children been playing with something else. Axes and hatchets are also illegal in most schools, but I am struggling to imagine a faculty punishing a child for playing with a toy version of either in his own yard. Either way, the unlovely truth is that the children in this case were penalized publicly for refusing to behave in their private lives in a way of which the local government approves.
(*NOD*)
This, without putting too fine a point on it, is tyranny...
* AGREED! PETTY TYRANNY PERHAPS... BUT TYRANNY NONE THE LESS!
...and the underlying principle is a rotten one.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
The British free-speech outrages that I have catalogued here over the past two years are a neat demonstration of what happens when a society begins to privilege the subjective “discomfort” of individual citizens over the universal principles of liberty and the rule of law.
The city code in Virginia Beach holds that it is in no way illegal for children in Virginia Beach to own or fire airsoft guns on private property, affirming that “no person shall use a pneumatic gun except at approved shooting ranges or within private property.” And yet according to the website of TV station WAVY in Portsmouth, Va., the 911 caller who sparked the incident evidently believed that her sensibilities trumped both the laws of the state and the sacred distinction between the public and the private.
The caller told the dispatcher that she knew that the airsoft gun Khalid was using was “not a real one.” Nevertheless, she continued, “it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me [uncomfortable], as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun.” In response to this brazen waste of the police’s time, the cops contacted the school and set the ball rolling on the suspensions.
* WHAT IN GOD'S NAME WERE THE COPS THINKING AND WHAT WERE SCHOOL OFFICIALS THINKING...?!?!
The caller is, naturally, entirely within her rights to feel uncomfortable — I imagine that I would experience a similar feeling were I ever to engage her in conversation — but she is not entitled to involve the public authorities and ask them to intervene.
This could have been, to use the president’s words, “a teachable moment.” Authorities could have used the woman’s behavior kindly to remind the public that the police are not there to prevent citizens from feeling uncomfortable and that the schools do not exist to impose upon children the prevailing views of the local education board. That authorities chose to follow the opposite course in both instances portends ill for the citizens of Virginia Beach and for other jurisdictions across the country.
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359515/late-great-middle-class-victor-davis-hanson
The American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low.
* YES, YES... WE KNOW...
Median household income is lower than it was five years ago.
* YEP... REGULAR READERS KNOW THIS...
Only the top 5% of households have seen their incomes rise under President Obama.
* DITTO...
Commuters are paying more than twice as much for gas as they were in 2008.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Federal payouts for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance have reached unprecedented levels.
* YEP...
Meanwhile, the country is still running near-record budget deficits and is burdened by $17 trillion in aggregate debt.
* WHICH DOESN'T ACCOUNT FOR UNFUNDED FUTURE LIABILITIES...
Yet the stock market is soaring.
* ALL HAIL THE OLIGARCHY!
Irony.
* NO. BUSINESS AS USUAL.
Obama promised to restore the middle class. In truth, he has enacted the very policies that have done it the most damage in years. That paradox may explain why his base of support remains the very rich and the very poor.
(*NOD*)
Goldman Sachs, federal bureaucrats, and aid recipients are helped in a way that the strapped hardware-store owner, Starbucks barista, and part-time welder are not.
* HOW'BOUT THE AVERAGE SECRETARY? THE AVERAGE LIMO DRIVER? THE AVERAGE WORKING STIFF WHO IS NEITHER A SMALL BUSINESS OWNER NOR A STARBUCKS BARISTA OR OTHER LOW-PAID SERVICE-SECTOR WORKER?
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
For all the talk of infrastructure or stimulus, the latest $6 trillion in federal borrowing seems to have been wasted on bailing out insider banks and green companies, growing the federal work force, regulating the private sector into stasis, and subsidizing those who are not working.
* WELL "YOU KNOW WHO?" (I'M ADDRESSING "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED...)
The Federal Reserve still keeps interest rates at near zero. That mostly helps Wall Street, where money flows madly in search of any sort of return.
* WALL STREET BANKERS AS WELL AS THE INVESTMENT SIDE!
Most real interest rates for consumer purchases somehow remain exorbitant.
* ASIDE FROM MORTGAGE RATES THAT'S A FAIR STATEMENT I'D SAY.
Banks obtain their money cheaply and lend it out expensively.
* AND EVEN WHEN THEY TAKE A RISK THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TENDS TO BAIL THEM OUT! AT OTHER TIMES THERE IS NO RISK BECAUSE THEY SIMPLY TURN AROUND AND "REINVEST" THEIR GOVERNMENT LOANS IN GOVERNMENT TREASURIES WHICH PAY HIGHER INTEREST THAN THE INTEREST THEY THEMSELVES ARE PAYING. IT'S A RIGGED GAME, FOLKS. THE FIX IS IN. INSIDERS FOR THEIR FELLOW INSIDERS. MERE CITIZENS NEED NOT APPLY.
No wonder that so many Wall Street and banking executives — Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Peter Orszag, Gene Sperling, Larry Summers — revolve in and out of the highest levels of this “no revolving door” administration.
* NO WONDER INDEED!
Middle-class workers see little chance of retiring when their meager savings earn almost no interest, so they are apt to stay on the job longer. Their continuance only makes unemployment rates for young entry-level workers even worse.
Obama always threatened higher taxes on the well-off. He achieved that goal with a new 39.6% federal rate on upper incomes, a rate paid on top of state and payroll taxes. Yet such steep taxes do not much affect the super-rich. Their income is often exempted through sophisticated tax avoidance or, more often, earned through lower-taxed capital gains.
* EXACTLY...!!!
Small employers in many states have no such recourse and now pay more than half their incomes in assorted federal, state, and local taxes. Naturally, they are hiring fewer people and making fewer capital investments.
* NATURALLY...
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
That greater tax hit might have been worth it had the new rates been part of a balanced-budget agreement like the Bill Clinton–Newt Gingrich deal of 1997, which froze spending levels and, for a time, stopped our ruinous borrowing. Not this time. We end up with the worst of all worlds: once again a 39% top tax rate, but now with out-of-control federal spending and more multibillion-dollar budget deficits.
* TO REPEAT:
We end up with the worst of all worlds: once again a 39% top tax rate, but now with out-of-control federal spending and more multibillion-dollar budget deficits.
By virtually shutting down gas and oil leases on federal lands, the administration has declined the chance to create millions of new energy jobs and to lower fuel prices. For now, lower power bills and gasoline prices - and the creation of more jobs in energy - depend entirely on those who drill on private lands... despite... not because of... federal efforts.
* ABSOLFRIGGINPOSITIVELY!
Even the many sires of ObamaCare now deny their paternity. Unions want out of it. Congress demands exclusion from it. Well-connected businesses won exemption from it.
* NOT "WON." BOUGHT. PURCHASED. POLITICAL CRONYISM. AND SINCE THE DEMOCRATS HELD ALL THE POWER...
(*SHRUG*)
The poor, who mostly do not pay federal income taxes, will get a largely free, bureaucratized federal health-care system. Many of the rich praise ObamaCare but will quietly use their own money to avoid it. The middle class will see their premiums soar and the quality of their coverage erode.
* YES. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WILL HAPPEN. HELL... IT'S BEEN HAPPENING TO ME AND MARY.
These are surreal times. Wealthy elites who help to shut down jobs in energy, timber, and mining are deemed liberal — but not always so the middle classes, who suffer the consequences in lost jobs and higher prices.
Universities voice progressive bromides, but they care mostly for the tenured and the technocrat, not the part-time lecturer and the indebted student.
Thanks to soaring tuition, campus is now the haunt of the very wealthy, who can afford it, and the very poor, who are often exempted from it. The less romantic middle class goes $1 trillion into debt for high-interest student loans.
Never has it been so good to be invested in a vastly expanding federal government — either to distribute or to receive federal subsidies.
Never has it been so lucrative to work in banking or on Wall Street.
And never has it been so bad to try to find a decent job making something real.
To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus, where we have made a desert of the middle class, we call it a recovery.
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