Roger Kimball on Mikawber and barack hussein obama’s fiscal incontinence…….

by Roger Kimball at Pajamas media……

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
— Wilkins Micawber

What do you reckon Mr. Micawber would think of Barack Hussein Obama, the soon-to-be one-term wonder?  The United States does not currently have a budget, because the people we elected to do the people’s business just laugh at that sort of thing these days, but we do know that BHO asked for $3.83 trillion and that the deficit is forecast to be $1.5 trillion.

There is no point in trying to imagine what a $1.5-trillion deficit means.  For most of us mortals, it is simply unimaginable.  All the more is a total federal debt of $14.3 trillion (and counting). And I haven’t even broached what I think of as the Williamson Warning (after Kevin Williamson, who gave prominence to the dour fact), namely that the real out-the-door, all-in price of U.S. debt is something closer to $130 trillion, a sum that, if you can bear to think about it, is Book-of-Revelations, Seventh-Seal, Four-Horsemen-of- the-Apocalypse scary.

I tend to think about Mr. Micawber when confronted, as we all are almost daily, with the realities of Obama’s fiscal incontinence (not, I hasten to acknowledge, that he has been the only one with bladder problems in recent memory, not by a long shot). Right now, today, the bad news (well, part of it) is that, unexpectedly!, unemployment once again ticked up, rising from 9.1 percent in May to 9.2 percent in June.

And this grim news comes as the August 2 deadline looms for raising the current U.S. debt ceiling of $14.9 trillion. Republicans, God bless them, are playing hard to get. (Prediction: they will eventually cave.) That lovable curmudgeon, Warren Buffett, said that Congress, by not raising the debt ceiling, was playing “Russian Roulette” with the economy. (Well, maybe, but why is the gun always pointed at us?) Buffet also said he could fix the deficit problem “in five minutes.” “You just pass a law,” he said,  “that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.” I don’t know whether that would fix the problem, but, hey, I think we should give it a try!

It is the bullet-in-the-chamber image that is getting all the ink, though.  There’s something about the phrase “Russian Roulette,” I suppose. CNBC ran a segment featuring two of its financial commentators, Michael Farr (speaking up for the Buffet warning) and Rick Santelli, the man who who gave the tea party its name and whose mantra is “stop spending, stop spending, stop spending.”

Mr. Farr kept warning viewers that “we’re running out of time” and that there may be “a bullet in the gun.” We’ve got bills in August of some 362 billion, likely cash receipts of about 203 billion. Unless we go further into hock (that’s plain English for “raise the debt ceiling”), what are we going to do? It’s Wilkins Micawber’s problem all over again.

Mr. Santelli didn’t think Russian Roulette was the game we were playing.  (He didn’t say what we were playing: my own suspicion is that it’s some bizarre version of Monopoly.) There’s “plenty of money,” he observed, “to pay people who are owed interest payments.” This will avoid unpleasant action by entities like Standard and Poors and Moody’s. (How do you spell “Portugal,” “Greece,” “Ireland,” or “Spain”?) How about all the other stuff? Tough luck: it won’t get paid. But wait:

Who created the obligations? Congress. Let them figure it out. The answer is easy: spend less. . . .

Stop spending. Live within your means. I think what we need to do is live within the revenue intake, . . .  end of story and do not ask taxpayers for more money or increase the debt ceiling until you give us a budget. . . .

There are plenty of people that won’t get program money. I understand that. But maybe the programs need less money, need to be streamlined.

There you have it folks: the solution, at least a large part of it, in just a couple of sentences.”

In the meantime, the chief source of entertainment  to be had from Joe’s little exercise in innuendo are the sniffy bits about journalistic maturity and knowing about those “lines that ought not to be crossed” and those “stories that ought not to be pursued.” How has the Times itself done with respect to those desiderata?  Remember Jason (oops, that’s Jayson) Blair? Remember the Times’s despicable coverage of Clarence Thomas? Its malevolent obsession with George W. Bush? Its breathless front-page story claiming that veterans of the Iraq war returned as murderous psychopaths (“Across America,” the headline screamed, “Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles”)?  Or how about the paper’s disgusting coverage of the Duke Lacrosse “rape-that-wasn’t” case? When it comes to the New York Times and irresponsible stories, one feels like Koko with his list.

Let’s pause to consider how the Times treated that case of the Duke lacrosse players and the accusations made against them.

You remember the case: three Duke lacrosse players had been indicted for kidnapping and raping a black stripper in March 2006. It was the perfect morality tale. Those white jocks at “the Harvard of the South” just had to be guilty. And what a good time we were all going to have lacerating the malefactors while at the same time preening ourselves on our own superior virtue!

The editorials, the op-eds, the comments, the analyses poured forth non-stop, demonstrating that one of the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous pontification. The novelist Allan Gurganus epitomized the tone in an op-ed for — hey, it was the New York Times in April 2006: “The children of privilege,” he thundered, “feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing.” You don’t say? Even sports writers got into the act. Selena Roberts, in another column for the Times, located Duke University “at the intersection of entitlement and enablement [meaning what, pray tell?], . . . virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside.” By August 2006, as the case against the lacrosse players was betraying worrisome fissures, the Times published a 6,000-word article arguing — “praying” might be a more apposite term — that, whatever weaknesses there might be in the prosecution’s case, “there is also a body of evidence to support [taking] the matter to a jury.” As the Times columnist David Brooks ruefully noted, after the tide had begun to turn, the campaign against the athletes had the lineaments of a “witch hunt.” How’s that, Joe,  for journalistic ethics, for knowing about when not to cross a moral line, for recognizing that there are some stories  that “ought not to be pursued”?

This story had a relatively happy ending. Those three young men went through hell by the media as well as a corrupt prosecutor. (The process, as Mark Steyn has put it about our out-of-control prosecutorial state, is the punishment.) But they were eventually vindicated. In April 2007, Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general, announced that he was dropping the case not because there was insufficient evidence — often a euphemism for “probably guilty, but we can’t prove it” — but because the three players were completely innocent of the charges that had recklessly been brought against them. Mr. Cooper went further: not only had there been “a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” but the case also showed “the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor.” By a prosecutor — the wretched Mike Nifong, now disbarred and bankrupt — and also a reckless media, conspicuously including the New York Times.

Joe Nocera’s emetic piece is characteristic of the sanctimonious but hypocritical moralizing that debases the Times these days. “Say what you like about the News of the World,” wrote the London Telegraph, a competitor, “but their allegations were always backed up with evidence.”

You can’t say that of the New York Times.”

 

 

Again, the fast mouth of Obama Sleeze….(The Citizen Voter Doesn’t Understand $15,000,000,000,000 in National Debt)

Obama: Maybe you should pay more attention

 

 by Ed Morrissey   at HotAir

Via Greg Hengler, Barack Obama had a message for the 69% who oppose an increase in the debt ceiling: pay attention.  In response to a question from CBS’ Chip Reid, Obama said that those Americans aren’t paying attention, and insinuated that pollsters may be bamboozling survey respondents by asking trick questions anyway.  Obama then puts on his Pollster in Chief hat and shows how he would have asked the question:

Please check out this video, where the Nation’s top Dishonest Politician is recorded talking  bait and shitch:

Does Democracy Breed Ingratitude?

Ingratitude, Thy Name Is South Korea

by Dennis Prager   at   Dennis Prager.com:

 

“South Korea has joined with only two other countries in the world in dropping the name of the forthcoming film “Captain America” and using the subtitle, “The First Avenger.” The other two countries are Russia and Ukraine. According to the New York Times report, “Although that country (South Korea) is one of Hollywood’s top-performing territories, resentment about the continued presence of the United States military runs deep.” For years now, I have intended to write a column about the most glaring case of international ingratitude of which I am aware. The “Captain America” story has finally pushed me over the edge.

For decades, there have been anti-U.S. demonstrations in South Korea. And each time I wonder the same thing: Do these people have any idea what the living hell known as North Korea is like? Do these people understand that the United States is the reason they are so free and prosperous, completely unlike their fellow North Koreans who had the horrible luck not to be liberated by America? Do these people know how many Americans died to enable them to be free?

Whenever I confront someone who claims that America’s wars abroad were fought for economic gain or to extend its alleged imperialist empire, I ask the person about the Korean War: What imperialist or economic reasons were there to fight in that country?

The answer I most often receive is, “Frankly I don’t know too much about the Korean War.” And it’s a good thing for the critics of America’s wars that they don’t know much about the Korean War. If they did, they would either experience cognitive dissonance or have to severely modify their position on America’s wars.

Just five years after a war-weary America celebrated the end of World War II, Americans were asked to fight the successor-evil to Nazism, communism, in Korea, a country most Americans could not identify on a map or did not know anything about. In an earlier version of what happened in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China backed a communist attempt to take over the southern half of the Korean peninsula — the northern half had been communist since the end of World War II — and install a Stalinist tyranny over the non-communist southern half.

Over 36,000 Americans died in America’s successful attempt to keep South Korea from becoming communist. And another 92,000 were wounded.

So, forgive me for the contempt I feel for South Koreans who demonstrate against the United States and for the two-thirds of South Koreans who, according to a 2002 Gallup-Korea poll, view the United States unfavorably. Whenever I see those anti-American demonstrators or read such polls, all I can think about are the tens of thousands of Americans who died so that South Koreans would not live in the communist hell their fellow Koreans live in.

Younger South Koreans want American troops to leave their country? Do these young people not know that on planet Earth no other country suffers the mass enslavement, mass incarceration, mass death or the deadening of the mind and soul that North Koreans endure because of the psychopaths who run that country?

And if they do know all this about North Korea, how do they explain why South Korea is so different?

Here is a suggestion: The South Korean government should conduct a national plebiscite on whether America should withdraw its troops from that country. Before the South Korean people vote, the United States should make it clear that if it withdraws its troops and North Korea later invades the South, we will send no troops to die again for South Korea — but we will vote to condemn North Korea’s aggression at the United Nations.

If a majority of the South Korean people wants us to leave, we should.

The beauty of such a plebiscite is that if a majority of the South Korean people wants American troops out, we have no moral obligation to stay there. And if a majority wants us to stay, the South Korean left and other ingrates in that country should shut up.

I have been to South Korea, and I live in a community with many Koreans. I have always admired their industriousness, work ethic and strong families. But South Korea is surely the most ungrateful country in the world.”

Comment:   Is the ingratitude celebrated  in South Korea toward the American struggles for liberty and the defense of liberty  more twisted or corrupted than the ingratitude of America’s largest citizenship minority, the American black?  Certainly today’s South Korean population has proved to be a far better student of the good of Americana that this vast American ‘colored’ subculture.

Is its culture as vulgar, repulsive in its art, criminal in its society, as drugged? ….. as rapacious,  as violent, and generally asocial?     Is it as murderous, as racist?

Why Have Democrats Become so Dishonest?

The ‘all cuts’ budget actually includes

quite a lot of new revenue

from the St. Paul Pioneer Press

Whether at the national level or  with Mark Dayton here at home, why have Demcrats turned to stealth and downright dishonesty  when communicating to the public through their mainstream media?   Are they that confident that the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post,  Mpls StarTribune, and the rest  ad infinitum and ad nauseum will ‘cover’ for their deceptions and lies, they can claim anything without anyone bothering  to  dig into the facts?

Yes, I believe so……but not always. 

Mark Waldeland has sent us the following article from  a recent  op-ed page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, usually known as Twin City Marxist Press, East Division:

“The boilerplate description of the current Minnesota state budget impasse is that one side is “all cuts” and includes “no new revenue.”

Actually there is quite a lot of new revenue in the Republican proposal. Their plan is based on $2 billion of new revenue generated by the current tax system. Comparing last biennium to this, that’s a 6 percent increase in revenue in a low-inflation environment. Inflation is projected to be a modest 1.7 percent and 1.8 percent per year in the upcoming biennium, according to projections from the Minnesota Management and Budget office. So the 6 percent revenue increase works out to twice the rate of inflation.

And here’s a tidbit you may not have heard. Not only is revenue up 6 percent, individual income tax revenue is projected to be up 17 percent.

Gov. Mark Dayton is focused on the very tax category that is already projected to be up 17 percent to the prior biennium. According to MMB, nearly two-thirds of this increase is due to capital-gains increases based on the “extension of the special 15 percent federal tax rate on capital gains.” Which means the “rich” – the folks who tend to pay capital gains taxes – are paying significantly more in income taxes as a result of their capital gains tax rate remaining low. The obvious irony being that the rich are paying more because their tax rate stayed low, which is the exact opposite of the Dayton approach.

Capital gains is a special kind of income, but it is also a case study in how people shape their income on the basis of tax policy. When you tax something, you get less of it. And when you tax millionaires there will magically be fewer of them.

The governor, on the other hand, proposes to spend an additional $1.8 billion above and beyond the already 6 percent increase in revenue, or four times the rate of inflation.

Yes, we know spending in the last biennium was well above what the state actually took in in general fund revenue. But it was artificially inflated by a federal bailout (borrowed money that the kids will have to repay) and an accounting gimmick. In a recession, we kicked the can down the road, and now we’ve caught up to it.

With spending ratcheting up significantly faster than inflation, it’s hard not to sympathize with the “it’s a spending problem” line of reasoning. It may be possible to make it through one biennium’s unsustainable spending growth with a tax on millionaires, but in future years we may run out of millionaires before we run out of things to spend money on. At which point we will be back to tax the so-called “wealthy,” who make $130,000 and may or may not have any wealth to speak of. Wealth and income being very different things.

Reasonable people can differ on how much spending and taxing should increase, if at all. But the “all cuts/no new revenue” label glosses over the reality of the Republicans’ position: 6 percent increased revenue should be plenty.”

Comment:   It is my conviction that today’s American Left is so certain of its superiority over us common folk, so arrogantly certain that their ‘intelligence’ and Marxist ideal of forced equality is so pure, so refined, and so touchy-feely sweet, all other messages are immoral.   The nation has bercome overfeminized.

This movement has caused and is continuing to cause deep wounds in the traditional American body, when not long ago both major Parties believed in certain indivisible American principles which made process as or more important than results……the democratic way.

The Democrat Party first and foremost on the national level with deceiver president Barack Obama, has totally abandoned ‘the American Way’…….the traditional  process in legislative action.  It has been Marxified whereby power gained and maintained is MOST important, no matter by what means.   Free enterrised must be destroyed.

The American Press is the primary villain in this plot and insures the destruction of the American way, by allying itself with the Marxist expansion of government power to the STATE, no matter how egregious the lie, destructive the legislation or dishonest the Obama claim…..no matter how much damage is done to traditional America.

We thank the Americans at the Pioneer Press who were able to publish this op-ed piece.   America cannot return to freedom of the press until the fourth estate restores some degree of integrity to its daily habits.

The above op-ed piece was sent to us by Mark Waldeland.