…isn’t that interesting? When Bush declared his Christianity, the press felt a need to delve into his faith and explore the nuances of his belief. Was Bush a moderate Christian, or was he really just one of those crazy wingnut believers who use words like sin and redemption and stuff? Heck, those people are practically snake-handlers, right? But the real question was whether he was a real Christian at all.
So many questions to be explored. And explore them, the press did.
Then, I mean.
Well, Bush was one of those bitter clingers. One shouldn’t question a messiah’s religious beliefs.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think he’s either a Christian or a Muslim, because in order to do that, you have to believe in something bigger than yourself.
Why the bad economic news shouldn’t always (or ever, lately) be “unexpected“:
While our economy is enormously complicated, it seems reasonably clear that the current slump has turned into the “worst downturn since the Great Depression” precisely because of the ill-advised policies of the Obama administration. Those policies contradict the lessons of history, and there is no reason why their failure should be unexpected.
But “as any intelligent and informed person would have expected” doesn’t quite fit the media narrative.
I know it’s more exciting than the prosaic reality, but someone needs to tell the copy editor at MSNBC that there is nothing in this article to indicate that SpaceShipTwo is going into space this fall. All it says is that they may start drop tests.
Which raises the question again — do they have an engine yet?
It was canonical to this administration and its functionaries that they were handed a broken nation, that it was theirs to repair, that it was theirs to tax and reshape to their preferences. Yet there was, in 1980, after another landmark election, a leader who had stepped forth in a time of “malaise” at home and weakness abroad: Ronald Reagan. His program was different from Mr. Obama’s. His faith in the country was boundless. What he sought was to restore the nation’s faith in itself, in its political and economic vitality.
Big as Reagan’s mandate was, in two elections, the man was never bigger than his county. There was never narcissism or a bloated sense of personal destiny in him. He gloried in the country, and drew sustenance from its heroic deeds and its capacity for recovery. No political class rode with him to power anxious to lay its hands on the nation’s treasure, eager to supplant the forces of the market with its own economic preferences.
Obama never understood that the notion of a leftist or “progressive” Ronald Reagan was an oxymoron.
The flat truth is no one is going to hire new employees unless there is some reasonable promise that the additional cost of the employee will be recovered through increased profits resulting from the new employee’s work. That’s not “greed”, it is bare survival in tough economic times. And all the recent additions to per-employee costs aren’t alone. There is a seemingly endless well of new possible costs coming, including new environmental regulations, the possibility of a massive new “carbon tax”, and “card check” that promises to raise labor costs even further with exactly zero (at best) increase in productivity. Vague gestures towards a few thousand dollars of tax credits to stimulate job growth don’t even begin to cover the risks.
On top of it all, if you happen to be an oil worker on the Gulf Coast, your job is politically verboten. Sorry about that. Or not.
Only a crazy person would be eager to start large-scale hiring in this political environment. Yet many anti-corporation zealots profess themselves outraged that the Evil, Greedy Corporations won’t get with the business of economic recovery.