Cain Bumper Stickers

Sixth and fourteenth ones are my favorites:

Real Change

In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

Collected From Jay Leno

We had President Obama on the show last night. I think the president enjoys visiting NBC because we're the only place that has lower numbers than he does.

A man from India has become the first 100-year-old person to run a full marathon. He’s 100 years old, but to be fair, he was 94 when he started the race.

We had President Obama on the show last night. I think the president enjoys visiting NBC because we're the only place that has lower numbers than he does.

Puzzling Question

How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?

Two Classics, One Car: An Inspiration to All

101-Year-Old Driving a Classic 81-year-old Car

This is priceless. Notice at the very end when she steps on a little red towel to get into the car so she won't dirty the running board, then picks it up and puts it in the car so she can use it when she gets out!  This precious lady changes the oil and spark plugs herself!

For more of the story click here.

Happy Halloween

Take a break from the misery of politics and our dismal economic situation and enjoy a really great Halloween card by clicking here.

Appropriate Observations

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

. . . George Orwell

May 1945

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

 . . . Alexander Hamilton

Federalist No. 1, 1787

It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. [The Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect.

. . .Thomas Jefferson

Opinion on a National Bank

1791

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

. . . John Adams

An Essay on Man's Lust for Power

1763

[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

. . . James Madison

Federalist No. 10, 1787

Elegant and Insightful Question

If you think you have a right to force me to pay for your health care, then why don't you have a right to force me to pick your cotton?

. . . Picked up from the kindred Gunslingers Journal blog

A Not So Modest Proposal

Proposed Amendment XXVIII

to the

Constitution of the United States of America

 

            Section 1.  Any decision by the Supreme Court against a claim by a private party of governmental infringement of the private party’s rights under the Constitution or invalidating as unconstitutional any state law and any such decision by an inferior court that the Supreme Court refuses to review shall, if at least [twenty percent (20%) or thirty percent (30%)] of the judges of the Supreme Court dissent from such decision or refusal, be subject to further review by the people of the United States as provided in this Amendment.

            Section 2.   Decisions specified in Section 1 shall be submitted to, and affirmed or reversed by a majority vote of the people at the election of members of the House of Representatives next following the decision or refusal by not less than 180 days.

            Section 3.   Only the dissenting opinion or opinions in cases in which a court decision is reversed by a vote of the people may serve as precedents for any subsequent decision by the Supreme Court or any inferior court. 

            Section 4.  This Amendment shall become effective immediately upon its adoption; provided, however, that there also shall be subject to this Amendment and affirmation or reversal by a majority vote of the people at the election of members of the House of Representatives next following adoption of this Amendment by not less than 90 days the decisions of the Supreme Court in: Kelo v. City of New London, No. 04-108, decided June 23, 2005; Gonzales v. Raich, No. 03-1454, decided June 6, 2005; Roper v. Simmons, No. 03-633, decided March 1, 2005; McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, No. 02-1674, decided December 10, 2003; Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, decided June 26, 2003; and Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 02-241, decided June 23, 2003.

Warnings from Our Coal Mine Canaries

Unfortunately for Jewish people throughout recorded history, virulent antisemitism has become widespread time and time again when -- and as a warning sign that -- a society is disintegrating. Jews provide easy scapegoats to blame for ills so pervasive that they are causing a society to collapse. Thus, the popularization of the world's longest standing hatred serves the same purpose as the canaries in coal mines that die of toxic gases before the level of those gases reach levels dangerous to human beings. Unlike coal miners, most people usually ignore the warning signs.
 
We have become accustomed to the hostility to Israel that is based on and reflects hatred of the Jews in and by an ever increasing number of the world's nations. Now we're seeing the same thing in a significant number of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. We can expect demagogic opportunist to seek power by seeking to lead and further spread the scapegoating even though the temporary success of such would be leaders inevitably leads to disastrous destruction.

Nevertheless, antisemitism among the OWS  demonstrators is denied by the formerly mainstream media under the guidance and leadership of The New York Times, They also missed the same phenomena in Russia as the Bolsheviks were taking control and in German as the Nazis were rising there.

No Longer Prosperous, Powerful, or Free

Our pathetic congressional pygmies are running in circles and mewing about taking action to counter what they claim is China's manipulation of its currency to the disadvantage of the U.S.

Like so much that takes place in the clown house atop Capitol Hill, this is a charade for the gullible.

The hard reality is that the Chinese will do exactly as they please and the U.S. is incapable of any effective action to prevent them from doing so.

That is the case because for all practical purposes the Chinese own us, They hold the whip hand and easily can cause us far more distress than anything we could conceivably do to them. They hold the debt that our government has incurred. They could dump their position, the ownership of our country's debt obligations onto the world market any time they choose to do so. Not only are we, as a nation, indebted to them, but our government is dependent on, and could not function without China's willingness to continuing to finance the U.S. government's ongoing deficit spending.

As a debtor, the U.S. is no more capable of influencing China than a slave is capable of influencing the conduct of its master. Our military might notwithstanding, our government's profligacy has transformed the nation into a pitiful helpless giant no longer sufficiently prosperous, powerful, or free to act as it chooses. For all practical purposes the U.S. today is an economic colony and dependent of China.

China to date has graciously permitted us to maintain the illusion that this is not the case. We ought not try their patience.

Real Plan for Restoring America

GOP presidential candidate has a wonderful plan entitled "Restore America," He aims to cut $1 trillion in spending during his first year in office, in part by "eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels."

Some other elements include using block grants for states to solve their own problems with Medicaid and other welfare programs; cutting the federal workforce by 10 percent, as well as the pay of congressional members and the president; lowering the corporate tax rate from a crippling 35 percent to a more competitive 15 percent; eliminating the death tax; and repealing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank financial regulations.

Thus, Mr. Paul in one year would cut federal spending by about the same amount that the woeful and misnamed congressional super-committee supposedly is struggling to cut in a decade. More importantly, the Paul plan would make a significant start on cutting the federal government back to the size and scope provided for by the Constitution. 

Because he has no hope of winning the presidency or even his party's nomination for election to that office, the admirably Quixotic congressman is free to propose and promote an ideal program that would eliminate multitudes of sacred cows that none of his party's viable candidates are willing to take on . . . or even to discuss or mention. Accordingly, the best we are going to get is a bit of trimming at the fringes.

All this is spelled out in greater detail, along with a description of the magnitude of the federal government's still expanding expenditures and the pathetic efforts that pass for, and are bragged about as belt tightening in Washington, D.C. in this essay.

Credit the Prez

The Chosen One unabashedly continues to claim credit for having "created or saved _____ jobs." The president and his minions can and do fill in the blank with any number they choose. You and everyone else can do the same. There's no way that it can be proved or disproved that the job of any employed American was or was not saved by the world's greatest teleprompter reader.

By the same token our glorious leader can claim credit for having warded off nuclear war, an infectious plague and a deadly meteor strike, none of which occurred on his watch . . . and therefore, as was noted in today's Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column, you can go ahead and applaud those accomplishments. Further praise will become due each and every day in the future that the earth continues to rotate on its axis and the sun therefore does not fail to rise.  

On the other hand, don't ever entertain the notion that any job loss or other misfortune may be due to any action or lack of action by the administration.

Liberal Hypocrites: Ungenerous to a Fault

According to Who Really Cares? by Arthur Brooks, conservatives give at least 30 percent more than liberals to charity; other sources put the figure as high as 100 percent. It appears that liberalism is a hypocrite's religion that, while preaching altruism, encourages its practitioners to outsource their personal obligations to taxpayers and, more effectively, to conservatives who really do practice the altruistic gospel.

Another Way To View the Debt Ceiling and the 2012 Choice

Let's say you come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your home and you have sewage up to your ceilings.

What do you think you should do, raise the ceilings, or pump out the crap?

Where Greek Banking Crisis Is Headed

. . . From Stratfor.com

Unbelievably Naive

A former law practice colleague who follows this blog reports having encountered an individual who apparently actually believes (i) that the government's half billion dollar plus Solyndra loan guarantee never was discussed or even mentioned during all of George Kaiser's many visits to the White House, and (ii) that the government's even larger investment in Tonopah Solar also is just fine and dandy and has nothing to do with Nancy Pelosi's brother-in-law having an interest in the venture.

Mr. Kaiser was the Obama campaign contributor and bundler whose investment fund had a major interest in  the solar industry venture that recently went bankrupt, leaving 1,100 employees unemployed and the taxpayers on the hook and holding an empty bag in a position subordinate to private investors in the company.

Solyndra Redux

The solar thing keeps getting more interesting.

* The Tonopah Solar company in Harry Reid's Nevada is getting a $737 million loan from Obama's DOE.

* The project is supposed to produce a 110 megawatt power system and employ 45 permanent workers.

* That's comes to just over $16 million per job. 

* A partners in the endeavor is Pacific Corporate Group (PCG). 

* PCG executive director and number two guy is Ron Pelosi -- who just happens to be Nancy's brother-in-law. 

Just keep movin' along folks . . . .nuthin' goin on here.

Today's Wise Observation

Like so many people, in so many countries, who started out to "spread the wealth," BarackObama has ended up spreading poverty. 

. . .Random Thought from this Thomas Sowell column

Theft Almost Renders World's Greatest Orator Speechless

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — At least no one left the keys to Air Force One in the ignition.

In an egg-on-face moment for the government ahead of President Barack Obama's visit to Virginia, someone stole a Pentagon truck containing $200,000 worth of presidential seals, podiums, and sound equipment [and presumably including the essential ever present teleprompters] from outside a suburban hotel Monday, Richmond TV stations reported, citing unidentified police sources.

Authorities found the truck later in the day at another hotel near the Richmond airport, according to the news reports. But no one would say whether the items inside had been located.

Speech aids worth $200,000 plus cost of hauling them about ? ? ? ?

Seeing and Seizing Every Opportunity

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)– The following is a letter released today by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs: 

Dear Investor:

Up until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street.  That does not mean, however, that it has not been very much on our minds.  As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests.  And we have asked ourselves this question:

How can we make money off them?

The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund, whose investment objective is to monetize the Occupy Wall Street protests as they spread around the world.  At Goldman, we recognize that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain – but there’s still plenty of money to be made on the way down.

The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages.  Furthermore, as clashes between police and protesters turn ever more violent, we are making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.

It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say “Let them eat cake.”  But at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake futures.  We project that through our aggressive market manipulation, the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.

Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus.  As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy This.”  We haven’t felt so good about something since we sold our souls.

Sincerely,
Lloyd Blankfein
Chairman, Goldman Sachs

Necessary Vocabulary Addition

Ineptocracy (in-ept-o-cra-cy) - a system of  government where the least capable to lead are elected by the  least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

In Very Poor Taste

Australia's Channel 9 brings us a grisly story from the South Pacific:

Forensic experts fear a missing German yachtsman was "hacked to pieces and burned" by cannibals while visiting a remote island in French Polynesia on the trip of a lifetime.

Ash remains, believed to be those of 40-year-old Hamburg man Stefan Ramin, have been found in a valley in Nuku Hiva, the largest of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.

News you can use: If you ever dine at a French Polynesian restaurant, don't order the Hamburger.

 From The Wall Street Journal's

Best of the Web Column

Political Humor

*  The Republican candidates are still looking for ways to stop Romney. See, it's hard to disagree with his positions — because as you know, he's taken every position.

*  Joe Biden once again denied stories that he will be replaced on the ticket in 2012. He says he will continue to embarrass President Obama for another four years.

*  Warren Buffett’s company reportedly owes the IRS a billion dollars in back taxes. When he said he wasn't paying enough taxes, he wasn't kidding.  

 . . . Jay Leno

Presidential Tantrum ? ? ? ?

Don't know if this actually happened but it does capture the essence of The Chosen One we have put into the oval office.

The supposed but unverified story is that our ersatz president engaged in a bit of immature unpresidential behavior, picking up his toys and kicking a door open to storm out of a meeting with congressional leaders when Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, told him Republicans would not vote for the administration's proposed tax hikes.

On Our Veep

The babbling delusional moron currently serving as the nation's vice president has elevated the office that FDR's first veep, John Nance Garner, defined as "not worth a bucket of  warm spit*" into a wonderful ongoing comic act. 
______

* Spit was not the word that Cactus Jack, a true Texan, actually used.

An Example of Sloppily Inaccurate Labeling

Warren Buffett often is referred to by the media as a "businessman," which he is not.

A businessman is someone who produces or supplies goods and services for the public.

Mr. Buffett is an investor, and an extraordinarily successful one. He invests in businesses that produce or supply goods and services for the public but he himself is not and never has been engaged in doing so.

U.S. Economy In Three Lessons

Understanding the Progressive Crackup

The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons--but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown. 

That is one way to understand why so much of the liberal establishment is rallying behind [New York Slimes columnist Paul] Krugman's Army, as the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are known. Everything they believe in has failed, so they are turning nihilistic.

. . . From this Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column

Degrading the Presidency

It used to be chanted, almost as a mandatory mantra, by those expressing opposition to any president that although they disagreed with the president's political position they respected the office . . . the office of the president or the presidency.

That has changed with the office's current occupant. 

Delivering speeches was the former community organizer's strong suit. But as president, the nation's current chief magistrate has misused his speech making gifts by delivering words with no clear meaning and making endless promises that he had no ability to keep.

He and his wife have demonstrated wondrous and unprecedented talents for vacationing sumptuously and often, and for taking full advantage of, and relishing, the full range of the perquisites and trappings of the office.  

But lacking any administrative qualifications, he has been a disaster at actually governing. He has used the office to reward his political cronies and supporters at the expense of the general public. He has shown himself to be an economic ignoramus. On foreign policy he has followed in Jimmy Carter's disastrous footsteps by punishing America's friends and rewarding its enemies. And by making Chicago style thuggery a hallmark and instrument of his administration, he has created gangster government.

Finally, he has turned the bully pulpit that the presidency used to be into a platform for the dissemination of untruths. Even the quiescent and docile press has begun to question the accuracy of his public statements with even the formerly adoring and obedient Associate Press instituting a Spin Meter series in which this column notes a "disconnect" between the current president's rhetoric and reality.

Before the press became so sensitive that it bowdlerized the language to avoid offending anyone by clearly reporting news, the AP would have reported that "disconnect" as what it actually is: plain and simple lying.


The upshot of all this is that the current occupant of the oval office has degraded the presidency to the point that the office, the presidency itself, no longer commands or warrants respect. We can only hope that whoever succeeds the current occupant of the office will be able to restore it to its former stature.

Face the Facts No Matter How Unpleasant They May Be

Unemployment is a symptom of a stagnant or shrinking economy. Consequently, if the Obama administration were serious about trying to create jobs -- something government really cannot  effectively do permanently -- it would be treating only a recurring symptom and not the underlying causative  problem.

Obama inherited a bad economy, and like the preceding Bush administration, it has been endeavoring to stem the decline. Had our governmental geniuses left things alone, the economy would have plunged, hit bottom, and (at some unknown rate) bounced back. This has occurred time and time again as market forces have wrung out the results of bad business and financial decisions and economic excesses. The most recent example of this was the short lived downturn that resulted from the bursting of the dot com bubble about which the government did nothing. Efforts to artificially interfere with that process always exacerbate and extend the duration of the problem. The depth and persistence of the downturn always is proportional to politically motivated efforts to make it appear that the government is capable of, and is doing something beneficial about the problem.

All this is irrelevant as Obama's so-called American Jobs Act was created and is being promoted by the administration not to do anything about either jobs or the economy. It has no chance of being, and never was intended to be enacted into law. In fact, Obama ally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked a Republicon effort to bring the measure up for an immediate vote. The whole thing is a charade being staged to give the hapless Obama a campaign issue to bolster his fading chances to get reelected next year.

Focusing on campaigning is probably a wise course of action for the former community organizer. It's always a good idea to do what one does well and he is pretty good at giving speeches and campaigning. He is not anywhere near as good at the task of governing, and demonstrates mind boggling ineptitude whenever he tries his hand at such tasks as formulating or implementing public policies. 

Our Very Model of a Dishonorable Attorney General

Eric Holder is a reprehensible disgrace who has transformed the federal department that he heads into the Department of Just Us.

Even before being named to his present position, he disqualified himself for it by his having circumvented established procedures to grease through the pardon of the international financier and fugitive Marc Rich in the closing nighttime hours of the Clinton Administration. How his appointment came to be confirmed by the Senate is another story for another time.

His next notable achievement was to give a free pass to truncheon  wielding New Black Panther Party thugs who had engaged in voter intimidation and to institute racist policies in his department to overlook similar transgressions -- black crimes against white victims -- throughout the United States in the future. Details of Mr. Holder's oversight of the current administration's reverse racism are spelled out by the estimable
economist and social scientist Thomas Sowell in this excellent column.

Most recently, he has engaged in a cover up of, and led efforts to thwart an investigation into his department having provided vast quantities of assault weapons to Mexico's drug cartels, members of which have used those weapons to murder American law enforcement officers. As is made clear by this letter from the head of the congressional investigation into this latest travesty, the only remaining question about Mr. Holder is whether he is (i) hopelessly incompetent, or (ii) a felonious perjurer.

Surfeit of Polished Fools

Many of America's problems stem from an overabundance of individuals who have been schooled in excess of their respective capacities to absorb or benefit from an education.

Beyond the 12th grade, and in many cases beyond the 7th or 8th grade, they gain a great deal of unjustified self esteem and confidence together with some superficial surface polish. Thus, even though they have acquired little knowledge and even less wisdom, they often possess the ability to talk and perhaps even to write glibly and smoothly.

This process has transformed many of the nation's colleges and universities or a good many portions of those institutions into something akin to the finishing schools that used to train girls from well to do families for places in society.

 Emerging from such schooling, many pretenders go on to careers as entertainers, and in academia, the media, and government. They dominate our legislative bodies at every level of government and even attain executive power in some cases -- such as that of the current occupant of the oval office or that of the moronic Carolina governor who would suspend elections so that the ruling elite could govern by diktat without fear of being ousted by citizens (whom her process would transform into subjects).

Journaloustic Inanity

Your not-so-humble blogger's mind was boggled by a report broadcast over the past weekend by the San Francisco Bay Area's self-proclaimed news station on the death of Oakland Raiders boss Al Davis.

After relating that Mr. Davis had died at his home at the age of 82 in the presence of members of his family, the mindless news reader advised listeners to remain tuned in for this breaking news.

Were they expecting Mr. Davis to become more dead? Or to be resurrected?

Just Humor

Two good ones from Jay Leno:

*  China is now expected to surpass Japan as the second richest country in the world. They could become the richest, but that’s only if we pay them the money we owe them, and that’s not going to happen.

*  There’s a proposal in Congress to allow rich people who feel they don’t pay enough income tax to voluntarily pay more. Economists say this could bring in as much as $75 a year.

Four More Years ? ? ? ?

Embarrassingly Out In the Open

The harlot that the formerly good gray lady has become finds another way to demonstrate that it has no shame. In an editorial in today's edition, The New York Times has come out against laws to curb voter fraud because -- no kidding -- voter fraud benefits Democrats. The journalice of course don't state the reason that baldly but that's the inescapable gist of the editorial, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Dead Horse Theory, or How Government Works

If you  don't understand this theory, you haven't lived long  enough. 
 

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from  generation to generation, is that when you discover you are riding a  dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

However, in government and throughout the public service sector more advanced strategies often are employed, such  as: 

1.  Buying a stronger whip.

2.  Changing riders. 

3.  Appointing a committee to study the horse.

4.  Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses -- politicians love this  one.

5.  Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included. 

6.  Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired. 

7.  Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse. 

8.  Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

9.  Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance. 

10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.

11. Declaring that, since the dead horse does not have to be  fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the  economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And, of course, this highly favored government tactic: 

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Deep in a Ditch and Still Digging

California is, without question, a state in decline. It is in deep trouble, mired in a ditch that it has dug for itself. Its political leadership pays lip service to attempts to avoid a catastrophic collapse and even makes a few easy and pain free reforming gestures.  But they so far are intent on digging the ditch even deeper, continuing business as usual, as is set forth in this analytical essay.

Used To Be Respected

Requiem for the U.S. Dollar

The dollar is faith-based . . . . There’s nothing behind it but Congress. And now the world is losing faith, as well it might. The greenback is a glorious old brand that’s looking more and more like General Motors.

 . . . James Grant

In The Wall Street Journal

For more on the end of the dollar standard and what it portends, click here.