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Experts discuss the best way for America to throw money away:

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?[link]

No less than The Ludwig von Mises Institute Economic Blog has this up as “The TV Gasbag Version of the Broken Window Fallacy”.

The Onion, to its enormous credit, is a) Swimming against the tide, and b) Asking legitimate questions the mainstream press is ignoring, and may not even be capable of understanding anymore.

Bravo.

jim Treacher:

I heard Carl Cameron once answered his hotel room door in a full Wonder Woman costume

I’m not sayin’ it’s true, I’m not sayin’ it’s not. That’s just what I heard. And no, I won’t tell you who said it. Under the new standard of journalism, it’s plausible until proven otherwise. And I get to decide what constitutes proof.

Better get out in front of this one, Carl!

[My link, for those of you wondering what the hell this is about.]
Jim, if Carl wants to run around hotels in her Wonder Woman costume, that’s entirely her business, as long as she doesn’t start lassoing other guests.

Meanwhile, here’s the story I want tracked down:

Been hearing unattributable talk that to deflect from Obama’s inability to deliver on his promises, or do much of anything with the economy, Democrats will divert attention the old fashioned way. Moscow Trials. The machinery is supposedly in motion to drag the entire Bush administration before congressional inquisitions. If you think there’s raw feelings now between the Obama left and constitutional Americans, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It also looks like Democrats Dodd, Frank, et al, will escape scrutiny for their major role in the subprime disaster. Sweet being a Democrat these days. eh wot?

As one of Roger’s commenters says, “Thats the step that will end liberal democracy. When going out of power leads to personal jail time or execution - no one will go out of power freely.”

Spread this one far and wide. Demand President-Elect Hussein prove it wrong.

I mean, it’s not any worse than the charge that President Chimpy personally ordered airliners flown into the World Trade Center as a kind of Reichstag Fire maneuver, is it?

Moreover, if BO is even remotely thinking of this, maybe airing it out will kill the idea, like, oh, say, exposing his entire Transition “Platform”, the one where he proposes mandatory servitude for all teenagers, made it fall down the memory hole.

(No, no, that last is absolutely true. People have screen shots.

(That’s going to have to be the rule for reporting on Obama’s Presidency. Save screenshots and local copies, because whenever he’s caught out telling the truth about what he wants to do, the official copies will disappear. )

Michael Moore asks,

Who among us is not at a loss for words?

Not he, of course. Air sickness bag at ready, take a look at an email that appears to be going around:

Who among us is not at a loss for words? Tears pour out. Tears of joy. Tears of relief. A stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair.

In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity: Barack Obama, a good man, a black man, said he would bring change to Washington, and the majority of the country liked that idea. The racists were present throughout the campaign and in the voting booth. But they are no longer the majority, and we will see their flame of hate fizzle out in our lifetime.

There was another important “first” last night. Never before in our history has an avowed anti-war candidate been elected president during a time of war. I hope President-elect Obama remembers that as he considers expanding the war in Afghanistan. The faith we now have will be lost if he forgets the main issue on which he beat his fellow Dems in the primaries and then a great war hero in the general election: The people of America are tired of war. Sick and tired. And their voice was loud and clear yesterday.

It’s been an inexcusable 44 years since a Democrat running for president has received even just 51% of the vote. That’s because most Americans haven’t really liked the Democrats. They see them as rarely having the guts to get the job done or stand up for the working people they say they support. Well, here’s their chance. It has been handed to them, via the voting public, in the form of a man who is not a party hack, not a set-for-life Beltway bureaucrat. Will he now become one of them, or will he force them to be more like him? We pray for the latter.

But today we celebrate this triumph of decency over personal attack, of peace over war, of intelligence over a belief that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs just 6,000 years ago. What will it be like to have a smart president? Science, banished for eight years, will return. Imagine supporting our country’s greatest minds as they seek to cure illness, discover new forms of energy, and work to save the planet. I know, pinch me.

We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

An African American has been elected President of the United States! Anything is possible! We can wrestle our economy out of the hands of the reckless rich and return it to the people. Anything is possible! Every citizen can be guaranteed health care. Anything is possible! We can stop melting the polar ice caps. Anything is possible! Those who have committed war crimes will be brought to justice. Anything is possible.

We really don’t have much time. There is big work to do. But this is the week for all of us to revel in this great moment. Be humble about it. Do not treat the Republicans in your life the way they have treated you the past eight years. Show them the grace and goodness that Barack Obama exuded throughout the campaign. Though called every name in the book, he refused to lower himself to the gutter and sling the mud back. Can we follow his example? I know, it will be hard.

I want to thank everyone who gave of their time and resources to make this victory happen. It’s been a long road, and huge damage has been done to this great country, not to mention to many of you who have lost your jobs, gone bankrupt from medical bills, or suffered through a loved one being shipped off to Iraq. We will now work to repair this damage, and it won’t be easy.

But what a way to start! Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Wow. Seriously, wow.

I’d love to pick this apart, line by line, but…I’m at a loss for words.

So, here we go:

The amazing thing is, that although reporting has been overwhelmingly favorable for Obama, although even comics are profoundly pro-O and anti-America, although Obama has enormously outspent McCain, the polling is still running neck and neck.

That means two things:

First, a huge chunk of the American people are not buying the hype, and are deeply suspicious of The One, because many of the folks who will be voting for McCain regard him as a left-wing Democrat. They (we) long for a real small-government Republican. I mean, our rallying cry has been “McCain -08: because I love my Country more than I hate John McCain.” If there were a real SGR candidate, and a real open press, Obama would have already conceded.

Second, the other huge chunk of the American people are, in Stalin’s immortal phrase, “useful idiots”. The worst thing is, the very worst thing, is that many of them are well educated, well-meaning people whom I deeply respect and even count as friends in other ways.

I’m sorry, folks, but even if McCain wins, this last indicates that the American body politic is rotten. There is no way, no way in hell, that Obama should ever have made it to the national stage. One of Daley’s Congresspuppets, yes. Beyond that — The American people have shown, conclusively, that they bloody well deserve whatever happens next.

TruePunk delivers the worst curse I have ever heard:

If your name is Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Rangel, Durbin, Frank, Leahy, Kennedy, Hoyer, Harkin, Dodd, Kucinich, Biden, Jefferson, Feingold, Hastings, Dingel, Murtha, McDermott, McCaskill, Byrd, or Waters, I very much want you to wake up in the middle of the night in a severe existential crisis and confront your faces and eyes in the mirror.

Before I tell you how bad I hope that experience is, let me add some other names to my hate list: Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Katie Couric, Punch Sulzberger, Andrew Sullivan, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, Larry King, Glenn Greenwald, Dan Rather, Charles Gibson, Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, David Gergen, Jan Wenner, Bill Maher, David Letterman, Craig Ferguson (deport him!), and all the editors of Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The New Republic, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, all the hosts of Air America, and all the vicious, foul-mouthed left-wing bloggers and commenters who commit mental crimes of violence against their enemies.

Now. Here’s what I hope happens when you confront yourselves in the mirror. Annihilation. I want you to see yourselves as you are — intellectually and morally corrupt, dishonest, selfish, narcissistic, shallow, more devoted to pornography than philosophy, contemptuous of your betters, servile to superiors, alienated from all worthwhile pursuits, poisonous to the happiness of your own children, and dead-ended on a down-the-drain pursuit of wealth and fame.

Then he gets ugly.

By the way, B. Hussein Obama is exempt:

I’m fairly sure that in his heart of hearts he’s a radical left-wing Marxist racist, but that’s not a crime in and of itself. In the ordinary course of things, he would be a splinter party of one, self-righteous and (inevitably) rich by virtue of the rewards his adoring constituents would lavish on him.

Yup. Moreover, I don’t hate robots or puppets — I understand the difference between the tool and the hand that wields it.

So, Donk Congresscritters call a meeting on the financial crisis they created, don’t invite but a handful of Republicans, pack the meeting with their own rabidly partisan firebrands — and then Pelosi stands up in front of the DNC’s propaganda machine (a.k.a., The News Media) and calls the Republicans unpatriotic for not showing up in larger numbers.

Not, mind, that the Donks are playing politics or anything….

Details and video at Gateway Pundit.

I’m fine, the house is fine, the kitties are fine.

Mom and Dad are fine, although getting pretty tired of not having any power, which also deprives them of water. (They have a well pump in the back.)

My sister and her brood are fine, and got power last night. I’m typing this on her computer now.

I was jonesing for media pretty badly there, so much so I actually stooped to reading a newspaper a couple of times. Gah. Limp, lifeless, utterly without any wit or even comprehension.  The comics, I mean. The news and editorial pages were simply…well:

I just spent the last couple of hours going through my bookmarks.

It was like…pulling the plastic bag from over my head and breathing again.

I hope to get power back at my house by the end of the day Monday. It may even be on as I write.

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Thanks very much to Pat aka licketysplit for posting my status immediately after the storm.

I was completely tickled by the nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain’s running mate, simply because it so obviously threw both the press and the Obamessiah campaign into such a tizzy. I have not laughed so hard and so long in a long time, as I did watching CNN “cover” the announcement last Thursday.

It’s hard not to let that good humor spill over into outright approval, particularly since her acceptance speech said many things I agree with, particularly Palin’s attacks on her opponents.

Still:

I don’t want “an advocate in the White House”.

I just want you creeps to stay out of my way.

Billy Beck, helping me keep things in perspective.

And, in the midst of entirely-justified conservative and even libertarian howling about the hypocrisy of the Obama campaign, and the socialist/liberal camp generally, The Daily Show reminds us that politicians are all lying, hypocritical thugs who do not deserve the power to tell us how to live our lives:

Via The Agitator, and do read the comments there.

No Quarter, via Classical Values:

But there is a very strange air about Republican operatives. In the last three weeks, I’ve talked to real insiders in VA, GA, AL and here. They all remind me of a unit waiting to cross the line of departure on an attack. Quiet, determined, last cigarette, last “can of peaches out of the ration,” radio checks, confident. They all use the term “safely nominated” when referring to Obama.

Republican operatives want Obama “safely nominated”.

I am very, very shy of making predictions or gloating or any such thing this early in the game, particularly given my belief that the major news media are very much in the bag for Obama. There is no semblance of “fair and balanced”. They’re going to be doing their level best to get Obama elected.

The fact is, however, that McCain and the Republicans have pretty much stayed out of the fight so far. They’re rested and ready, or ought to be, while Obama will have just finished a hell of a fight with his own party.

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Here are the two Convention podiums:


Seriously, now. Which one of those looks like you’re supposed to pay attention to the Man and what he says, and which one looks like you’re supposed to pay attention to the dazzle, that the man will just be another prop?

Which one looks like it belongs in a serious campaign of ideas, and which one looks like it belongs in a Hollywood awards party, or a Red China international sports rally?

[disclosure: the lower picture is a computer-generated mockup; the actual stage is apparently not yet complete.]

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I have to reiterate, as I will often in the next few months, that I am not in McCain’s camp. He scares me for a lot of reasons that would make no sense at all to Obama supporters. (”McCain: the best Democrat in the race!”)

For the first time in my life, if I vote, it will be furtively. I will be ashamed to have cast a ballot, for anybody. This will very likely be the last national election I ever vote in, because I strongly suspect that whoever he is, the next President will prove that elections no longer matter, that The People are no longer in control of the political process.

I’ve been getting McCain campaign solicitations in the mail. They disgust me, they are so far off the mark. One of the early ones was done up to look like an official government document, and essentially ordered me to fill out the survey, and send McCain money. (Granted, it was immediately followed up by more ingratiating efforts.)

I’m pretty convinced that I will be voting for a guy who thinks my vote will give him permission to decide which of my rights I’ll be allowed to exercise, and by how much. Nuh-uh. I want to vote for the guy who will uphold his oath to defend my rights, as embodied in the Constitution, but that guy is not running.

However, Obama is the scariest candidate I’ve ever seen. He has virtually no experience. He’s Daley Machine Extruded Political Product, the embodiment of that Chicago slaughter-yard sausage you don’t want to see being made. His advisors and confidants are thugs and racist, anti-American Communists.

He’s a puppet, and the people pulling the strings are terrifying. They are not interested in letting me have any rights — they want to rule.

Joe Horn, the Pasadena, Texas man who shot two burglers leaving a neighbor’s home with a bag full of cash, was eventually cleared by a Grand Jury. (I wish I could link to an article from my local paper, the Houston Chronicle, but although they published several opinion pieces by goblin supporter Lisa Flakenberg, their archive did not return any articles about the Grand Jury’s decision. I did find such a link on another Horn story, but it returned a “file not found” error. Gosh, it’s almost as if the Chron doesn’t want you to know Horn was cleared….)

I just ran across video of the police interviewing Horn the night of the incident, as he walks them through his house and yard at Chris’ Simple Musings from a Guy with Guns. The Chron does have this video on their website, but I can’t find a way to link directly to it there.

Here’s a link if the embed doesn’t work for you.

Two things stand out for me:

• Horn is visibly upset as he describes the shooting. He is not proud of having taken lives.
• The goblins were right there in his yard as he came out his front door. He did not chase them down, nor did he shoot them on his neighbor’s property.

Falkenberg’s ignorant ranting aside, this is not a case of a bag full of cash being worth human lives. It’s a case of the people being safe and secure in their homes being worth lives. If anyone decided the stolen goods were worth lives, it was the goblins involved — they just didn’t expect that it would be their lives.

(Also, see Chris’ comments on keeping your mouth shut while talking to the police. I admit, though, that in this case it doesn’t seem to have hurt Horn’s case.)