QE3

The Federal Reserve Bank announced a few days ago that it would begin implementing another round of pumping money into the economy, i.e. buying $40 billion of mortgage bonds per month till further notice. This is called Quantitative Easing, or QE. This particular round is called QE3, because the Fed has already tried QE1 and QE2. It's sort of like a doctor putting the paddles on a patient's chest and yelling "Clear!"

The implementation of QE3 suggests that QE1 and QE2 did not have the desired effect of pulling the economy out of the shitter. Isn't this an example of Einstein's dictum regarding insanity, i.e. repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result? Or is it simply an attempt by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to keep the economy on life support long enough to get Obama reelected?

Memo to Politicians: Stop Trying to Fix It

One of the reasons the economy is down the shitter is that government doesn't know when to leave things alone, and therefore repeats the same old mistakes. The usual cycle is as follows: 

 

1) Free (or relatively free) markets make a mistake, which happens from time to time.

 

2) Rather than let relatively free markets correct those mistakes and punish those who make them, which markets are uniquely qualified to do, politicians decide they must do something, presumably to justify their existence.

 

3) Politicians enact regulations which they claim will fix the problem that markets would have fixed anyway.

 

4) Politicians pat themselves on the back and tell voters they're looking out for the little guy.

 

5) Since regulatory bureaucrats are not smart enough to anticipate all the issues that may arise in a complex economy, and since regulations distort market signals, and since the regulated entities are usually pretty good at figuring out ways around the regulations, more problems arise.

 

6) Politicians then have to fix the problems that they essentially caused by not letting markets work in the first place.

 

7) Go back to step 1 and repeat.

 

 

The following is worth a read. Here's one nugget I especially like: "...capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell."

 

Dodd-Frank: Pimps for Fannie and Freddie 

Doing Nothing

What if we had a recession and no one did anything?

Thomas Sowell: An Economic 'Plan'?

How Soon We Forget

What do you get when you combine 1) a willing accomplice to revisionist history in the form of the mainstream media, and 2) the incredibly short memory and ignorance of the American public? Answer: the surreal specter of Bill Clinton posing as an economic policy genius. And getting away with it. The fact is that Clinton was a major architect of the 2008 economic collapse.

Housing arsonist Clinton now portrayed as heroic firefighter.

More on GM

More on the democrats' claims about Obama saving GM...

Although not mentioned in the article below, a new report is out which concludes that GM is losing as much as $49,000 for every Chevy Volt it sells. Only a government-run business could think that such a business model is sustainable.

The Democrats' GM Fiction

Saving Detroit

We have heard a lot from democrats, especially during their convention, about how Obama saved the auto industry from bankruptcy, which the evil Romney would have allowed to happen. This story has become perhaps the central theme in the narrative about Obama's successful stewardship of the economy. But as the article below points out, Americans have a remarkably short memory. Chrysler and GM did in fact go through managed bankruptcies, as Romney suggested they should. The difference is that Obama wasted a lot of taxpayer money before it happened, and screwed secured bondholders in the process so he could help out the unions.

I pass this along in case one of your liberal friends tells you that Obama is the auto industry savior he claims to be.

Obama DID let Detroit go bankrupt.

Section 1504

While the country was sleeping, Section 1504 of Dodd-Frank has been put into effect. It will come as no surprise that Section 1504 is a lousy deal.

I would wager that if you asked every friend you have if they know about 1504, not one would have a clue. This is not an indictment of your friends, because most of mine wouldn't know, either. I didn't know about it till today.

My point is that there is so much going on that gets little attention that even those of us who follow these things have a hard time keeping up with how thoroughly we're being screwed. Yet most voters would doubtless consider themselves to be well informed.

Question:  If Obama was merely stupid, wouldn't the law of averages dictate that some of his decisions were in the best interests of the country?

Obama's Oil & Gas Folly

Not His Brother's Keeper

After lecturing us about being our brother's keeper, this is not a story Obama wants people to hear.


I hope the Romney campaign produces an ad with George Obama saying, "Barack, my brother, why won't you help my sick son? Please, I beg you. By the way, I found your birth certificate. Should I just stick it in the mail?"

How I became George Obama's "brother."

Investor-in-Chief

Here's a quiz...

Under what circumstances would you not care if you owned 500,000,000 shares of stock where your break even point was $53 per share and it just closed at $20? Answer: when you bought the stock with other people's money.

Hell, you might even brag about what a good investment it was!

Is GM already on track to go bankrupt - again?

Common Sense on Outsourcing

It's too bad that the vast majority of voters will never read the following article. It's tougher for politicians to demagogue to a well-informed group of people.


What Politicians Don't Know About Outsourcing

How Obamacre Affects Jobs

More circumstantial evidence that Obama wants more people dependent on government...


Thanks to Obamacare, Small Businesses Plan on Eliminating Jobs Before 2014

Welfare Reform Reform

One of Bill Clinton's signature achievments was Welfare Reform, signed into law in 1996. Its success in getting people off welfare was so apparent that Clinton himself has crowed over the years about what a great thing it was. He neglects to mention that Republicans essentially dragged him into signing the Act, but why quibble.

One of the key provisions of the Act involved requirements that welfare recipients either be working, looking for work, or preparing for work. No longer. Obama has issued an edict that allows states to waive work requirements, basically taking the guts out of the Act. 

 

This is disturbing on two levels.  First, it would seem that Obama is actively trying to put more and more people on welfare. This apparent desire to create more dependence on government can also be seen in the administration's push to have more people sign up for food stamps, going so far as to recommend "food stamp parties," where people play games while being recruited to join the program. 

 

The second disturbing element is that the edict flagrantly ignores the language in the Act. Congress passed a law, Obama takes issue with some part of it, so he simply changes it.

 

I'm starting to wonder if the Cloward Piven strategy is alive and well at the White House.

 

For more on this...

 

Obama turns back the clock on welfare reform. 

Free Markets

“The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”  Adam Smith.

Rationing Health Care

With regard to Obamacare and the inevitable rationing of health care that will result, I have often thought that while free markets also ration health care, better for markets to do it than government. As the article below points out, that's the wrong way to look at it.

The Market Doesn't Ration Health Care

Fixing Problems That Don't Exist

Why is it that any numerical disparity is prima facie evidence of discrimination in the fevered imaginations of liberals?

Obama May Impose New Title IX Quota on Math and Science Students

Make That Two Branches

We're getting to the point where we might as well simply disband Congress. Just abolish that branch of government. With increasing power grabs by the regulatory apparatus of the executive branch and fiats from the White House, who needs Congress?


Oh great, yet another new EPA regulation making things more expensive for everyone.

Right Wing Terrorists

Are you  “suspicious of centralized federal authority” or “reverent of individual liberty.” I am. Which means that I, and perhaps you, may fit the profile of a domestic terrorist, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Good thing the DHS wasn't around in 1776. It would have had the Founders in its crosshairs.

Love Liberty? DHS may label you a terror suspect.

TWA Flight 800: 16 Years and Still No Questions

American Thinker

July 17, 2012

 By Jack Cashill

 I got involved in one of the two great media scandals of our time -- the Obama ascendancy being the other -- fully by happenstance.

In the year 2000, investigative reporter James Sanders came to Kansas City to talk about his research into the fate of TWA flight 800, the plane that crashed into the waters off Long Island on July 17, 1996, sixteen years ago today.

Sanders chose Kansas City because the town had historically been the headquarters for TWA.  As a result, many pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants still lived there.  The audience was filled with them.  Almost to a person, they believed what he was saying -- the plane had been shot out of the sky.

Afterwards, I went out to dinner with James and his wife, Elizabeth, and a dozen other people.  I sat next to Elizabeth, a sweet, unassuming former TWA flight attendant and trainer of Philippine descent.  She told me in painful detail how at one of the many memorials she attended after the crash -- 53 TWA employees were among the 230 killed -- she ran into an old friend, Captain Terrell Stacey.

Stacey had flown the 747 that would become TWA Flight 800 from Paris to New York the night before it was destroyed.  In fact, he was in charge of all TWA 747 pilot activity within the airline.  So it was logical that he would be among the first TWA employees assigned to the crash investigation.

Elizabeth thought of Stacey as "a straight arrow, go-by-the-rules kind of guy" and respected him for it.  After a phone introduction arranged by Elizabeth, James Sanders and Terrell Stacey agreed to meet.  "What he told me over those first hours," Sanders would later tell me, "was one thing: 'I know there's a cover-up in progress.'" 

As a result of that one introduction, the FBI arrested Elizabeth and oversaw her conviction on federal conspiracy charges.  James and Stacey had been arrested, too.  The crime?  Stacey had sent Sanders a tiny piece of foam rubber to have tested.  The Sanderses were still on probation when I met them.  When I heard this story from Elizabeth, I thought maybe there was something there worth pursuing.

As a video producer, I talked to the Sanders about creating a documentary, but, as I explained, I had no interest unless they could prove to me beyond a doubt that the plane was shot down.  They could, and they did.  The result was a documentary called Silenced, which has been inexplicably removed from YouTube.  It is still available, however, through my website.  To explain how I know the plane was shot down would take a book, which James Sanders and I proceeded to write.  The result, First Strike, is available through Amazon, including on the Kindle. 

In the way of summary, on the night of July 17, 1996, and into the early morning hours of the 18^th, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger huddled fretfully in the family quarters of the White House.

The election they thought was in the bag no longer was.  The air-traffic controllers had already reported in.  The radar data told a story of an unknown object striking the plane seconds before it exploded.  And now, eyewitness reports were flooding in.

The explosion had taken place right at sunset, just 10 miles off the coast, on a perfect night, with thousands of people looking out over the sea from Long Island's popular south shore.  FBI witness No. 73, an aviation buff, watched a "red streak" with a "light gray smoke trail" move up toward the airliner, and then go "past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing."  She even reported the actual breakup sequence before the authorities figured it out on their own.

High-school principal Joseph Delgado told the FBI that he had seen an object like "a firework" ascend "fairly quick," then "slow" and "wiggle," then "speed up" and get "lost."  Then he saw a second object that "glimmered" in the sky, higher than the first, then a red dot move up to that object, then a puff of smoke, then another puff, then a "firebox."  He drew a precise image of the same.

Mike Wire, a no-nonsense millwright and U.S. Army vet, watched events unfold from the Beach Lane Bridge in Westhampton on Long Island.  Wire had seen a white light traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40-degree angle, sparkling and zigzagging before culminating in a massive fireball.
To control the information flow, the White House hit upon a strategy that dazzled in its simplicity and in its sheer nerve.  The Clintons' trusted point person, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, took the investigation away from the professionals in the National Transportation Safety Board and gave it to the amateurs of the FBI.  There was one reason why.  The FBI reported to Gorelick.  The NTSB did not.

This was illegal, of course, but the media had a president to re-elect soon enough, and they were not about to scruple over details.  The second part of the strategy was as simple as the first.  The FBI would talk only to The New York Times.  This essentially made the Times Gorelick's Ministry of Truth.

Of the 270 eyewitnesses who told the FBI they saw what looked like a missile strike on TWA Flight 800, the Times would interview exactly none.  Fearing perhaps the loss of their privileged status and trusting the FBI more than they should have, the Times people followed the FBI lead.  The other media, some grudgingly, followed the Times.

Four weeks after the disaster, the Times would report, "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."  Likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI immediately shifted its storyline away from a missile to a bomb, and a month later, from a bomb to a center fuel tank explosion.

As each week passed, the Clintons had to be stunned that so obvious a truth remained so thoroughly ignored.  To sustain the lie, however, insiders had to tell more lies still.

The FBI would fabricate a second interview with Witness No. 73 that never took place.  The CIA -- the CIA? -- would fabricate a second interview with Mike Wire that also never took place.  NTSB insiders would lie outright about what Joseph Delgado saw, but the election came and went without anyone even knowing who these people were.

Gorelick could not have slept easily through all of this, but the lotto was around the corner, and she knew she had the winning ticket.  In May 1997, the White House called her number.  The Fannie Mae Board picked her, a lawyer with no relevant experience, to be its new vice chair.  Gorelick would earn more than $4 million a year for the next six years, and no one in the media asked why.

They did not even ask why when she stepped down.  Always the patriot, Gorelick resigned to take one of five Democratic seats on the Sept. 11 Commission.  Who knew where talk of aviation terrorism might lead?  Someone had to keep talk of TWA Flight 800 off the table, just as someone had kept it off from 1996 to 2001.

And lest some messy scraps of information find their way to the committee's Republicans, the Clintons dispatched their most trusted adviser to do a little cleanup work.  Alas, Sandy Berger got caught stuffing evidence in his underwear, but this proved much easier to bury than TWA 800.  Democrat staffers in the Bush Justice Department arranged for a wrist slap on a Friday, the day after Terry Schiavo died and the day before Pope John Paul II did.

The media did not want to know anyhow, and sixteen years later, they still do not want to know.  Not one mainstream journalist has ever bothered to ask why the CIA was recruited to make the preposterous video that would seemingly discredit all of the eyewitness testimony.  This is a shame, especially for the family members who have been left only with their grief and their unanswered questions.

Those questions, alas, will likely never be answered for the simple reason that they have never been asked.

Read more:  TWA Flight 800: 16 Years and Still No Questions

You Can't Make This Stuff Up.

For an example of government idiocy, this is hard to beat. Oil refiners are being forced by the EPA to use something called "cellulosic biofuel" in gasoline.

Just one problem: cellulosic biofuel does not exist. Apparently, this inconvenient fact does not bother the bureaucrats at the EPA.


 EPA blasted for requiring oil refineries to add type of fuel that's merely hypothetical.

Obamacare Ruling

Following is a very good analysis of the Obamcare ruling...

Wall Street Journal: A vast new taxing power