The abysmal results of President Downgrade’s latest campaign speech. Of course, apologists will say that it would have dropped a thousand points if he hadn’t given the speech. Aren’t counterfactuals fun?
[Update a few minutes later]
Barack Obama’s horrifyingly bad speech. Only fifteen months to go.
Michael Moore says that the president should arrest the head of Standard and Poors. Well, at least he’s not blaming the Tea Party.
It’s what inevitably happens when Democrats run a place long enough. And unfortunately, it’s a microcosm of the state itself (and the country at large if we don’t vote out more of the leeches next year).
…support a socialist welfare state?
Not for long.
[Update a few minutes later]
“…everyone knows that when you’re using your MasterCard to pay your Visa bill, it’s the person who doesn’t want the limit raised who’s the real source of the problem.”
Yeah, let’s blame the Tea Party.
[Update Monday morning]
Greece could have used a Tea Party, no?
Hey, they blamed the Tea Party for Jared Loughner, too. They always blame the Tea Party, because they don’t like the Tea Party, and they want Americans to dislike it, too, so they can continue with business as usual until the last possible moment. And if Greece had had a Tea Party, all the apparatchiks would have called it crazy and destructive too, because it would have threatened their short-term interests, which, as has become clear, is all apparatchiks think about…
Well, not all, but certainly it’s the highest priority. To hell with the grandkids.
Plus, “Tea Party Downgrade”? They can’t possibly sell that:
Let’s take a walk down memory lane. What did the Democrats do with respect to federal debt during the four years they controlled both Houses of Congress? Here is a summary of the deficits the Democrats racked up during that time:
FY 2008 — $460 billion
FY 2009 — $1,410 billion ($1.4 trillion)
FY 2010 — $1,300 billion ($1.3 trillion)
FY 2011 — $1,600 (estimated) ($1.6 trillion)Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total – was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther.
But they will remain desperate to continue looking, or blame it on the only people who are actually interested in really reducing the deficit. Because the view in the mirror is far too ugly.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
“If the car is speeding off a cliff & you blame the passenger for wrestling with the wheel & trying to hit the brakes, #youmightbealiberal.”
It is a fundamental difference over the role and purpose of government:
Somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Cantor was in fact prepared to bargain on about $20 billion in higher taxes on “the shiny balls of the millionaires, billionaires, jet owners and oil companies” that Mr. Obama so often mentioned in public. “If they wanted to be able to claim the win on that,” Mr. Cantor says, he wanted net revenue neutrality in return, by lowering the corporate income tax rate or perhaps enacting an even larger tax reform. In effect, he was calling Mr. Obama’s bluff on “cheap politics.”
In private, however, the debate always returned to the status of the top marginal rate for individuals earning over $200,000 and $250,000 for couples—aka the Bush tax cuts for people who do not own private aircraft. Mr. Cantor argued that some large portion of the income that flows through the top bracket comes from “pass-through entities”—that is, businesses—and “to me, that strikes at the core of what I believe should be the policy, and that is to provide incentives for entrepreneurs to grow.”
By contrast, he says, “Never was there ever an underlying economic argument” from Democrats. “It was all about social justice. Honestly, one of them said to me, ‘Some people just make too much money.'”
We need at least one more election to remove enough of the Marxists from government to turn things around.
[Evening update]
Obama won’t escape part of the blame for the downgrade:
Defenders of Obama will attempt to pin the blame on his predecessor, President Bush, and on intransigent Tea Party radicals in the current Congress. But that would leave out the part in between. For his first two years in office, Obama’s party controlled both chambers of Congress – for part of that period, he had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. During that time period, he and his fellow Democrats could have passed his supposedly ideal, long-term, deficit-reduction package — one that represented a “balanced approach” between spending cuts and tax increases. It also could have delayed the deficit reduction for several years, so it wouldn’t have affected the current weak economy or the “investments” he considers crucial. Forget about actually accomplishing serious deficit reduction — he didn’t even attempt it.
Of course he didn’t. Despite all his demagoguery over the last few weeks, he’s never favored a “balanced approach,” if that meant cutting anything other than defense. He, and his Marxist attitude (along with that of the rest of his party) is certainly one of the main perps.
The differences between communism and fascism are pretty much transparent to the user, and yet while no one would be allowed to be a Nazi on campus, its perfectly acceptable, and even applauded, to be a Marxist.
“Paul Krugman is wrong and I am right.”
The world’s leaders have been on trial these last few months. In Europe, a long running currency crisis has tested the commitment of Europeans to the social ideals they so often speak of, and to the community of nations they have worked to build since the 1940s. TEKEL: weighed in the balance and found wanting.
In China they have been on trial as the accumulating evidence suggests that corruption, incompetence and malfeasance damaged the country’s vaunted high speed rail project and led to the deaths of dozens of passengers. TEKEL.
In Japan they have been on trial since the tsunami last spring. Would Japan’s bureaucracy tell the truth to the public? After a lost generation of stagnation would Japan’s government come up with an effective plan to reconstruct the north and rebuild the country’s economy? TEKEL.
And in the United States we have a stagnant economy, a mounting debt and no real idea of the way forward. Would Washington come up with a constructive, future-oriented program to move the economy forward and start the adjustments necessary to prepare us to live within our means – and to grow our means so it wouldn’t be hard? TEKEL again.
Europe, China, Japan, the United States: the leaders of the world’s four largest economies are nowhere near passing the tests that history has set them. In all four places the instincts of the politicians are the same: to dissemble, to delay, to disguise and to deny.
The problem is that we want them to lie to us, and want to see our hopes in them, even when there is nothing behind the curtain. It’s a failure of the political class, but they in turn are the result of a failure of the electorate. Perhaps the last elections was the beginning of a turn around. We’ll see next year.
The latest (and renewed) Afterburner from Bill Whittle.
…or does warming cause CO2?
Darn that pesky “correlation is not causation” thingie.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related — does iron-rich dust cause ice ages?
The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet’s orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms – particularly in central Asia – and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean.
The plankton that then bloom take the carbon they need from the water, causing the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate. This cools the atmosphere further, creating yet more dust-producing regions, and the cycle continues, sinking Earth into an ice age.
When the planetary wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, eventually choke off the cooling, the feedback goes into reverse: continents warm, dust storms subside, the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise again.
Emphasis mine.