Category Archives: Business

Fact Checking The President

The strangest thing about this is the source. Even the WaPo says that he’s full of it on the auto bailout

We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.

What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.

Of course, if the Times did it, it would mean the End Times.

“Bone-Headed Beliefs”

Res ipsa loquitur:

Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.

Not necessarily on the forehead; I’m a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ”Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?”

On second thoughts, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy. So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness?

Yes, that’s much more reasonable.

Strange Bedfellows

Tea Party In Space praises Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein.

Hey, it’s the best thing they’ve ever done for the space program (a low bar for them, or California Democrats in general), though they’re certainly doing it at the behest of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park and Aerojet in Sacramento, not because they care about space. I hope this throws a mighty wrench in the Senate Launch System works.

Going Galt

Obama tunes out, and business goes on a hiring strike:

After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.

They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.

The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.

I’m hoping for not more than another year and a half, until January, 2013. We’ll probably survive that long, though there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering. I don’t want to think about another five years of it.