David Cameron to Preside Over Britain's Collapse

Poor guy:

Tory leader David Cameron has entered Number 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time – and said: “This is going to be hard and difficult work.”

Uh, David, old buddy – its going to be impossible work. The only way to save Britain’s economy: massive spending cuts. Your coalition partners: Liberal Democrats who simply won’t go along in a serious way. What will happen: eventually double-dip for which you will get blamed. Long term result: Labour back in power, Tories disgraced and out of power for a generation.

I hope it works out differently, but I don’t see much hope.

Out and About on a Tuesday Afternoon

Socialism is evil. This video will make our liberals blow a gasket. T

Republicans retain lead in “generic” ballot – by 6 points, which is the narrowest GOP lead in 2010. Reason? Financial reform has hit us a bit – unfairly, but politics isn’t fair. But all the issues are on our side – I expect that we’ll maintain and perhaps expand our lead as we head in to the fall.

A Chinese TEA Party?

Brits still yammering on about whom shall preside over the final collapse of Britain’s economy.

Elena Kagan Open Thread

Discuss the Kagan appointment or anything related to the judiciary, Constitutional issues and such.

Kagan appointment: helping to bring social issues back to the center of politics. Thank you, Mr. Obama. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad – and Obama seems to be more and more of a raving lunatic.

UPDATE: She’s also already ordering waffles for her confirmation hearings.

UPDATE II: She seems to have some worrisome, liberal-fascist views on free speech.

Is Obamanomics Deliberate?

I’m of the opinion that Obama is a fool – a man without the requisite knowledge or character thrust in to office by a set of odd circumstances. For an alternative position, we go to Wayne Allen Root over at Nevada News and Views:

It’s time to stop mincing words. Obama is not a fool. He is not incompetent. He is not a madman. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis, and social chaos- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within. But the bonus is brilliant…as he destroys and taxes to death business owners, he also cripples his political opposition.

Rahm Emanuel cynically said, “You never want a crisis to go to waste.” It is now becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Obama’s Presidency. As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Obama’s Columbia University. In 1966, they outlined a plan to socialize America by OVERWHELMING the system with government spending and entitlement demands…

Root was the Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate in 2008. I don’t subscribe to this view that Obama is deliberately wrecking things – but one doesn’t have to in order to agree that Obama’s policies are immensely destructive. If one were setting out to bankrupt America, nothing worse could be done.

The varied expedients which have been used to keep things afloat in America are going to fail. There is just no way to back up all the debt we’re piling up – we can’t tax enough to pay what we owe; taxing at that level would kill economic activity, altogether, and thus make our problem worse.

And so, we’ll slip slide down this hill until we hit bottom – and hopefully learn our lesson both about electing liberals and trying to borrow and spend our way in to wealth.

The Death of the Welfare State

The bit of good we’ll pull out of the coming financial crash (temporarily delayed by European governments stealing from their people to cover the losses of gamblers dressed up as investors):

What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” The vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul de sac…

We’re not as deep in that cul de sac as Greece, but Obama is hustling us down the road as fast as he can. But, also, don’t work yourself up too much blaming him – he’s clueless about economics and is merely carrying out the socialist/Kenyesian instructions of others. It sounds like it should work, and so off Obama goes – keep in mind that a bit of the money being picked from pockets to pay off Greek bond holders is coming out of your pocket…Obama made no objection to IMF funding for Greece, and that means your tax dollars are now at work in Europe.

Fun, huh?

Anyways…

The whole concept of a welfare State was never workable. When it was first proposed, the idea was that if you gave everyone a middle class income it would spur such growth as to pay for itself. Ok, ok – stop laughing. Seriously, that is how it was sold…

Of course, what happened was lower productivity, increased dependence, vastly greater expenses than anticipated, and lower economic growth resultant upon higher taxes on productive enterprise. That didn’t stop it – in fact, it was just expanded more and more. Europe got even further in to it than anywhere else because they could gut their military spending and rely on the United States to pick up the slack.

But now the proverbial poop has hit the fan – there simply isn’t enough money in the entire world to cover all the debt and promises. Something has got to give – and it will have to be either sovereign default followed by financial collapse, or financial collapse followed by sovereign default. There is no easy way out of this – the piper must be paid.

Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court (Updated)

The breaking news:

President Barack Obama will nominate U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported late Sunday night.

Kagan, 50, served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009. Obama nominated her to serve in her current post as solicitor general early in 2009, and she won Senate confirmation by a vote of 61-31. She is the first woman to serve as solicitor general of the United States.

There will be a lot of hoopla, but in the end she’ll just be another mindless drone for the left on the Court.

UPDATE: Sessions says Kagan had a hand in banning military recruitment at Harvard Law. If this proves the case, then she is unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.

Will Specter be the Second Extinct Dinosaur?

Republicans got rid of Bennett in Utah – will Democrats in Pennsylvania get rid of Specter?

Not A Bad Weekend At All for Congressman Joe Sestak, who’s opened up a 4-point lead (46-42percent) over U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in the daily Morning Call/Muhlenberg College tracking poll.

With just about 10 days left until the primary, 12 percent of the 404 likely primary voters in the daily canvass are still undecided.

And as the poll, itself, has a margin of error of +/-5 percentage points, this is still a toss up race. But I think that even Democrats are getting a little tired of the party bosses deciding who gets to run. Who is Specter to life-long Democrats?

To be sure, he was a tolerable Republican who could pull in some Democrat votes from time to time, but he was obviously never near and dear to the hearts of Democrats. But then he had to switch or get blown out of the water in the GOP primary – and the Democrats, desperate to get their 60th Senate vote – snatched him and up and tried to suppress primary opposition.

Well, that 60th vote thing didn’t work out as well as they hoped – and now it seems that at least a lot of Pennsylvania Democrats would prefer to have a Democrat as their candidate. DINOs and RINOs both seem to be on the endangered species list.

(Ed. Note: please remember that I have no use for an uber-liberal like Sestak…but I am highly sympathetic to Democrats who don’t wan to be saddled with Specter; I still hope that Specter pulls it off, because that make our victory almost existentially certain…but we can beat Sestak, too.)

Banking Crunch Intensifies

From Bloomberg:

Europe’s government debt crisis is starting to infect the bank funding system, driving borrowing costs higher from Asia to the U.S. and threatening to slow the global economic recovery.

The interest rate that financial companies charge each other for three month loans in dollars is the highest since August, while traders are paying record amounts to hedge against losses in European bank bonds. Yields on all types of corporate bonds rose last week by the most relative to government debt since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy in September 2008, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes.

As I wrote here, my expectation is that they’ll once again, by sticking the taxpayer’s finger in the dyke, stave off utter catastrophe. For now. There is too much debt piled on top of too little wealth – and in Europe this is aggravated by demographic decline. Seems that you can’t continue on as a civilization without being part of the Culture of Life…some one has to have kids, ya know?

Anyways…

They can do what they like – print more money; have the government buy the worthless bonds; talk tough about financial speculators. It doesn’t matter. Until we get back on to a sound money economy and get rid of the tax and regulatory restrictions on wealth creation, we won’t get out of this. And, of course, the longer the banksters and bureaucrats stave off the crash, the worse it will be when it hits.

All that they’ve done now might hold it off for months – or it might only hold it off for a few days. We’ll have to see how the markets react not just on Monday, but all through the week. What it comes down to is whether or not money people think they’ll get paid if they buy Greek, Spanish, Italian, etc bonds. If people think they’ll get paid in three, five or ten years, then things will rattle along at least for a while…if people start to figure, correctly, that all the governments have done it kick the can down the road, then the crisis will renew with a vengeance.

As for me, I’m just going to sit back and watch; it’ll be fun and will go a long way towards making Distributism both understandable and desirable.

UPDATE: What the European bail out has really done.

Fire Napolitano

From Reason:

…The “one-off” attack line came from the highest official in the American government charged with preventing attacks exactly like Shahzad’s: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Napolitano’s rhetorical slip is a little too serious to be palmed off with some linguistic woolgathering. She has made clear repeatedly that she believes people with Gadsden flag bumper stickers are a greater threat to domestic tranquility than out-of-the-closet terrorists who receive training and material assistance in foreign terror centers. She has been wrong about this every time, and she will continue to be wrong until Americans actually die.

And it will, unfortunately, take more corpses before we can get Napolitano out. And even then it won’t be because of the dead, but because of her increasing political liability. Democrats don’t care about what happens except as it relates to electoral results – as long as you don’t risk a lost vote, you’re ok as far as Democrats go.

So far, we’ve lucked out incredibly since Obama took office – but we won’t luck out forever. Eventually, they’ll get through – and all of the “engagement” and glad handing of our enemies will be exposed for the fraud it is.

Obama Calls iPad and Other Technologies "Diversions"

Obama just seems to hate everything…

US President Barack Obama lamented Sunday that in the iPad and Xbox era, information had become a diversion that was imposing new strains on democracy, in his latest critique of modern media.

Obama, who often chides journalists and cable news outlets for obsessing with political horse race coverage rather than serious issues, told a class of graduating university students that education was the key to progress.

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

Kind of ironic, given that Obama last year was unable to give up his Blackberry.

It must still be a big diversion for him, as he apparently is playing on Blackberry more than he is paying attention to the economy, or national security threats.