As you may have heard, yesterday saw yet another Occupy Wall Street (OWS) confrontation with the cops.  This time the protestors attempted to storm the Smithsonian, of all places, to protest the use of unmanned drones by congregating in front of an exhibit in the museum.  The episode is quite comical, since attacking the Smithsonian is the absolute LAST thing you’d expect from groups which have been labelling the TEA Party as the “anti-science” group. 

Now, I’m a HUGE supporter of the public turning out and peacefully protesting the establishment’s mistakes, don’t get me wrong.  I love watching the massive, widespread exercise of the 1st Amendment as citizens rattle the bars on their cages,  BUT, as Glenn Reynolds said on Instapundit yesterday:  Bad Optics.  A movement needs the respect of the average voter, and getting arrested in confrontations with police in a museum full of families on vacation isn’t the way to go about gaining it.  I can promise you that actions like that are doing more to put the lie to the 99% claim as anything else.  No responsible, reasonable voter is going to want to associate with that sort of scene.

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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Remarks by The Speaker:

Americans, there is no doubt that we are in dire economic straits. It is sometimes hard to believe that everyone up here at the Capitol, although yes, we still have OUR jobs, for the moment, we all, everyone who sits in these Chambers, all our hearts go out to the nation. That is Republican and Democrat alike. I assume that both of the TEA Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements and of every citizen in between and outside of these groups that represent a very great fraction of the public. Of course this extends to the President as well. I say this to both Right and Left and Center and whatever politics you can imagine, there is no one up here trying to destroy or harm this country. Not me. Not Barney Frank. Not Senator Reid nor McConnell is trying to harm the economy either from spurious actions or malign neglect and most assuredly, no, neither is the President. What we have are different interpretations, different views of what is possible, what is wise and what is legal. Yes, these are wildly divergent views; these are certainly antagonistic views but what we try to avoid, with mixed success, is being antagonistic with each other and above all, antagonistic to the Constitution. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Tags: money, politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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From the producers of that whole “health care reform” thing that was going to save everyone money, and “green energy subsidies,” and the endless wars in the Middle East, and the policy of frisking children and cancer patients at the airport, and the program that sold guns to Mexican drug cartels, and attacks on medical marijuana patients, and the same people who haven’t passed a budget in two years, and, well, fill in whatever nonsense you want, comes an exciting new program!

The Kill List!

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Do you feel safer?

Not to be confused with this.

Tags: politics & government, terror & war by Ricky Sprague
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Like frogs on the Nile, yes, fools are always with us but they do not always rain from the sky. Now they do. Unlike Pharoah we have no excuse to be surprised. Self-employed fool and liar Michael Moore gave us probably the earliest warning when he appeared on the Rachel Maddow show just in March with a pair of handcuffs pledging to slap them on some generic Wall Streeter and/or the lucky krillionaires of the Forbes 400. Did he not know that his good friend and ideological playmate Oprah is on that list? Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett are as well. Yes, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are there but are we really going to raid the blimp-born fortress of everyone’s favorite currency trader, George Soros? Doubtful. Moore isn’t merely offering up his friends and financiers though. With Steve Jobs death yesterday there is a solid chance that Moore has moved onto the precious pecking order. So I suppose Moore could surrender his wealth to himself, to be administered for The Good of the People, but will he also then run Oprah’s Book Club or Buffett’s trading empire? It seems that what he means is that the offending assets will be auctioned and the cash doled out on demonstrated need. Who would be bidding in such an auction is mysterious but with his self-indicting and incoherent rant he manages to claim the intellectual high ground amongst his peers.

We haven’t heard from Roseanne Barr in many a moon but she has decided to howl yet again. From her sprawling macadamia ranch in Hawaii she swarms in, having traveled on solar aircraft, naturally, to declare a nostalgic fondness for the guillotine. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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A few months back I read about a truly mind-blowing scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco. Apparently the organization had been supplying guns to Mexican drug cartels which – unsurprisingly- had since been used to kill people.

Now in many parts of the world you would assume that corrupt members of the ATF were boosting their income by moonlighting as arms dealers. In Mexico the police, government and gangs are closely interlinked, and nobody is shocked.  In the 1990s some Russian soldiers sold weapons to the Chechen militants they were fighting. Why? Everybody knew: to supplement their miserable earnings.

But America is more complex than that. [Read more →]

Tags: black helicopter watch, politics & government, terror & war, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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September ends the quarter. Many financial disclosures are made because of that. As we are heading into the Christmas season retailers are ramping up. We have to remember that the term Black Friday, meaning the Friday after Thanksgiving, is not called that because crowds of shoppers descend on poor little cashiers and blot out the sun. Black Friday is when the retailer, whether it is Nordstrom’s or Target, goes from debt for the year into surplus. Yes, for most sellers of paper towels, jewelry and Gameboys, their annual costs of payrolls, rents, medical, insurance, utilities, taxes, fuels and inventories are MORE than they are making until Christmas season begins in earnest and begins well. Those who earn their pay managing this delicate pivoting operation have made their sentiments known. The big retailers have announced their plans for the holiday shopping season just beginning and they will not, repeat not, be adding the usual part time and temporary jobs they need to handle the traditional Christmas rush. While their costs have all gone up the sales projections have all gone down and that is not all. What volume of sales they DO expect will be on much smaller margins, that is to say discounting will be extreme. You love that of course, but absent the profits, what is the point of opening the doors? Many many retailers are teetering on that fulcrum with only a massive spike in overall sales able to save them. Not likely. So Black Friday is destined to come and go leaving retailers AS A SEGMENT OF THE ECONOMY still in the red and mightily imperiled. I hate to be the one to inform the nation but as an economic event, friends, Christmas is canceled. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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The Obama administration claims to be concerned about the environment. One need only look at its commitment to green energy subsidies to understand how totally serious they are about taking care of the world in which we all live.

This commitment to the environment is one of the president’s most defining qualities. That’s why I was shocked to learn that the president is seeking to prop up an industry that is directly responsible for devastating environmental impact.

President Obama on Monday unveiled a plan to save the U.S. Postal Service and its employees from insolvency — a plan that includes the possible end of Saturday mail service.

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Tags: environment & nature, politics & government by Ricky Sprague
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Tags: politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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It’s every place I visit when I surf the net.  It’s the topic of conversations through the day.  People are not happy with Obama, but they don’t see anyone around the country whom they feel should be elected over him.  The current field of GOP candidates are boring, weak, useless, pandering idiots, just like all of the other popularity contest winners in DC, and yet people still, after years of experience to the contrary, expect one of these talking heads to have “all of the answers”.

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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Whether it was the blizzards of months ago or the hurricanes of weeks ago, we all know the drill. Head down to the supermarket and wipe them out of milk, eggs, bread and batteries. The FEMA types and Glenn Beck are in agreement. You should have three days of supplies for any emerging emergency and apparently the victuals of choice in a crisis is French toast made by flashlight (but you better have a gas stove). Three days of food. Three days of water. Some choose Evian. Some choose Wal-Wetter. In either case the retailer is pleased as water is always and everywhere the highest margin product on the shelves. Water amazingly carries an even higher added value than ice, the prime bill-payer of yesterday. We take water out of the faucet, add a bit of electricity and a couple hours of patience and voila! That will be $3.50, please. Sure, you could run your ice trays overtime before your cocktail party or killing spree, you’re running the freezer anyhow, but that smacks of effort. Not cool. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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We’re getting some funny reactions to the eclipse of Solyndra. One tactical dismissal is the old threatened filibuster; you want to talk about the money wasted on Solyndra? What about all the money wasted on coal, gas and oil? Hmmm? And it is a good question. The presumption is that while there may be ups and downs in the New Frontier of alt energy, we KNOW “fossil fuels” are obsolete or at least bad, so…. And all talk is smothered under a threat of a days long energy policy seminar for which you feel yourself ill-equipped. Underlying this threat is the certainty that nobody…. that would be NO body is going to simply say, okay, stop it all. Of course they are correct. If ethanol, which starves the world but enriches Iowa while costing the nation billions can yet hold together a coalition of granolas and agri-business, the Solyndroids have solid grounds for their conviction. Log-rolling is a most popular sport in political fields even if it is not yet in the Olympics. So the total Solyndra loss is not much at half a bil and is only 3.4% of the outstanding solar loan portfolio. Alright, we can wait on that point until losses are at 30% as it won’t be long. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Some pertinent facts seem to have been subsumed behind the New York Times pay wall, one wall I shall never breach, but my memory has not yet been degraded by the internets as badly as our ability to catch birds in flight has been dulled by the poultry industry. SkyNet Jr (Google) will not disgorge a story from 2004 about a team of mathematicians, two I recall, either at MIT or BU who eagerly participated in the race to develop statistical models that could predict elections. This is vital work as the one innovation that could solve all our problems; taking the citizen OUT of the electoral process, hangs on its perfection. These fellows had some pretty serious success as their program, held in utter secret, could reliably predict the two-party vote within two percent. At the time the question was, Will the fine, enlightened war hero, John Kerry, replace the drooling hand-puppet from Enroniburton? [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Tags: politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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The president of the United States, Barack Obama, has been telling me, specifically, that I have to start paying my fair share. Actually, he has been telling you to start paying your fair share, as well. None of us is off the hook, in fact. He wants everyone to pay their fair share:

“It’s only right we ask everyone to pay their fair share,” Obama said, later adding, “If we’re going to meet our responsibilities, we have to do it together.”

The reason we all have to pay our fair share is because the government, which is run by members of the democrat and republican parties, is deep in debt. It is so in debt that it has actually forced the president to lecture me– me, of all people— about how I need to stop being so damned obstinate and start paying my fair share. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, trusted media & news by Ricky Sprague
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The President addressed the UN yesterday to weak applause. None would publicly declare their love. If only I had been successful in getting my bathroom recognized as an Observer State years ago; I could have been present and, in Venezuelan-style, banged a pot with a wooden spoon drowning out the sarcastic-polite golf-clap that is the international kleptocrats’ gravest insult. The gunslingers and AM burpers who make daily claims to Zionism are unified in their disdain for the United Nations and the President. The endemic assumption is that international bodies, the President and the Democrats generally are pillars of a monolithic, Israel-bashing Left, and generally this is so. Yet we must recognize that in this instance Obama, with his pledge to veto Palestinian statehood, is squarely on the Zionist side of the field as his cool reception indicates. He may not like it, we cannot say, but he is there. Oh yes. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, terror & war by Ken Watson
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Hardison: Oh, no. All this construction is goin’ on underground. Under, beneath the eyes. The eyes of the world, man. They don’t want you to see. Congress doesn’t know, governors don’t know, Red Cross, ACLU, National Geographic. Nobody knows, man. Nobody, man. They’re puttin’ terrorists in your backyard. Terrorists under your backyard. “Hey, little Billy, go outside. Dig in the sandbox. Ooh, klang. What’d ya find, little Billy? What’d ya find? It’s a terrorist. It’s a bunker full of terrorists, man.” Bunker, man.

Monica: What other sources do you have besides tin foil hat over here?

Hardison: Hey, hey, hey, man. Bein’ a tin foil hat, that’s better than bein’ a lap dog for the four corporations that control the global media, man.

Leverage–Three Days of the Hunter Job

I get emails. I get comments. At times that the Tin Hat Brigade of both left and right wing nuts and assorted loonies are out to amuse me. There’s really no other way for an adult to respond to some of this stuff. There is no answer sufficient, no proof adequate. The best response, the most telling one I’ve seen that illustrates this paranoid function in America — and anywhere else — was a comment to the effect that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forgeries by the Czarist Secret Police doesn’t matter, because if the elders had written down their protocols, this would be what they’d say… So getting this email in one of my professional accounts was interesting, amusing and kinda, sorta sad. It sums up in some ways the very nature of our debate today — between ideology, superstition, and ignorance fighting for the main tent in the three ring circus of the downfall of western Culture and the United States as we know it. (And, don’t get me started on the right…heh, heh.) [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by Mike Farrell
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Warren Buffett has a complaint. He pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary, or so he claims, and this is a scandal. One might counter that since he meticulously games his compensation taking only a cool $100k in “income”; and the balance in capital gains he complains against himself. The simplest thing might be to alter his affairs so he draws his lucre in straight salary plus bonuses, eschewing the dance of trust payments and carried interest his genius accountants set up for him long ago but simplicity is not Buffett’s bailiwick. He is more into snapping up distressed businesses that are distressed because of their tax bill; usually the estate tax bill, and flipping them for gorgeous profits. Hmm. Maybe that is simple. No, Buffett, contrary to well-honed opinions, is not the beating heart of capitalism. Rather he has crafted himself a nearly uniquely safe and prosperous niche in the fiscal ecosystem. He is a buzzard. Not only is he a buzzard but he is a lucky, lucky buzzard; luckier or craftier than other would-be buzzards as he has found a lumbering omnivore that stomps its way through field and street twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and every damned day of the year. Buffett is a carrion crow with no need even to lazily glide about sniffing for the waft of rotten flesh. He sits on the shoulder of Leviathan; picking through the crushed bodies in its footsteps, nibbling at the gooey bits in its stool and when not feasting, whispers in its ear; This way. Not that. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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New York 9 is all over but the whining. Weprin delivers. He is not too hard on Obama personally but he makes the conventional assertions that shift culpability for losing Weiner and Schumer’s seat to the heretofore invisible Republicans. You see, Weprin tried to make the election about himself and/or Turner but Turner, events and the electorate colluded to make it a national referendum on the Obama Presidency which is lately in deep ordure. Weprin played his part by basically pretending that there was no such thing as an Obama or a President or even a Democratic Party.  It is easy to see the poll-dancers’ art and philosophy here. Obama’s numbers are not good, sir. No, not even here. The pukes and punks who counseled every mother’s son to hang on tight to the speeding Obama Train right up until the Great Shellacking was dry, suddenly whisper; just let go and be sure to bend your knees. In their biz, electoral theory runs on mere tropisms like an insect drawn to a light or repelled by a sound. When the numbers are UP, draw near. When the numbers are DOWN, flee! Why such predictable and cliched advice is so richly rewarded is mysterious. What is not mysterious is the fate of these gunslinging genii. They have left the crumpled hulk of the Weprin Express, dusted off their jackets and wiped off their fingerprints as they limp to their new gig. As remunerative as the last gig. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, trusted media & news by Ken Watson
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Tags: environment & nature, money, politics & government, technology by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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