You Know What, Jon Stewart?

Eat me.

I will elaborate.

Muni's Are Going to Fail. So Let's Buy!

Over at Ace this morning, a warning that states and munis are going to go busto:

Unfunded liabilities to state and municipal pensions are over a trillion dollars -- promises unbacked by any real coin -- and both states and municipalities rely on issuing debt to fund their increasingly unsustainable spending. They're approaching junk status now on that front, and will soon approach "joke," so very soon the market is going to impose some extremely serious austerity measures on these bodies, as they simply will no longer be able to borrow at all.

A dire situation, to which CNBC responds in careful, measured tones:

Kaminsky's Call: Muni Market May Be Great Buy Opportunity - CNBC

Remember, we are living in the golden era of "Too Big To Fail," a time when Uncle Sam is ready, willing and able to bailout any institution is deems systemically important. If Citigroup is too big to fail, logic would dictate that so too is the State of California.

Moreover, state and local issuers can do something corporations can't: raise your taxes and cut your services, something that is happening right now across the country.

All of this is bullish for the muni market.

Don't worry! The Man's gonna pay for his mismanagement with your money! Buy, people! Please?

How Do You Separate the Writers From the Children at HuffPo?

With a crowbar.

So when did proggy intellectuals become all about the jailbait?

Selling Nothing

Warren Buffett, Robber Baron?


Insurance is basically a swindle, a hedged bet. We all buy it because we figure it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. But the insurance industry essentially exists to take your money and then come up with reasons to not give it back to you. No one who has ever dealt with an insurance company can say otherwise.

All of which is fine and good, until the following:

Did you know that the life insurance lobby is actively lobbying to restore the estate tax?


Why would the life insurance industry care about that? It turns out that ten percent of life insurance industry revenue is related to the estate tax. Wealthy people take out life insurance in order to reduce estate taxes because when you die, your life insurance payout doesn't count as part of your estate.

So the estate tax is essentially a benefice distributed to one of America's largest and most rapacious industries.

Way to level that playing field, Democrats

Rape-Rape Rapity Rape

Other McCain takes a shot at Feministe's opining on Julian Assange's sexual assault charges and ends up making the wrong point:

In an era when some 40% of U.S. births are to unmarried women, in a culture where “Girls Gone Wild” and “hook-ups” are normative, where threesomes, bisexual experimentation and amateur video-porn orgies have become a virtual rite of passage for many young Americans, where chlamydia and herpes are pandemic — in this era of rampant sexual decadence, I say, does Jill Filipovic (J.D., NYU) seriously expect horny strangers to negotiate consent calmly on an act-by-act basis while they’re knocking boots, making the beast with two backs, in flagrante delicto? 

Listen up, sweetheart: You buy the ticket, you take the ride.

If you will forgive the puns, I take his thrust, but not his point.

Sex does not submit well to legalese. It is the animal in us, acting on non-rational desire, creating an experience that our bodies ride but do not fully control. Contracts made in such a state lend themselves easily to misunderstanding.

And yes, women would do well not to shag impressive-seeming strangers just because their goddamn names are in the paper. That's stupid, and no one should be subject to a harpy-bomb of dull denunciations ("slut-shaming!") because they point out that it's stupid. Sex should come from a well-ground of mutual respect and commitment. You can't have that with someone you don't know, and it's stupid to assume otherwise, and it's irresponsible to teach young people the contrary.

So yes, so-called "sexual liberation" has made it easier for cads like Assange to behave caddishly.

That said, just because a gentleman is hip-deep into a lady does not prevent her from applying the breaks, however foolish her actions up until that point. I don't accept the idea that once the pants are off, she's obligated to cut him a slice of trim. No man could walk into any court of law and say "Hey, she took my pants off. She owes me at least an old-fashioned." Life just doesn't work that way.

So yes, when she says "STOP," he's obligated to stop.

Whether his failure to do so meets the legal definition of rape is another question. The circumstances would play an enormous role. Say, for example, he doesn't hear her, because he's climaxing, and her protests aren't loud enough. Say she tells him to stop, and she does, because of some sudden thing he did/said that kicked her completely out of mood. But then they talk some more, and he moves in again, and she doesn't say "no"? Tacit consent? Not? Murky?

I don't know, myself. But I suspect that yelling the louder will not illuminate the issue.

Perpetual Party Obituaries

Among the more tedious aspects of politics is the rush to pen gleeful post-mortems of the losing party. But two years ago, the GOP was supposed to be doomed, a regional party on its way out like the Federalists of old. Now the Democrats are, in the eyes of the wingnut-sphere, swirling the drain. Here's Roger Simon, prognosticating a nervous breakdown for the donkeys:

the reasons for the Democratic breakdown are infinitely more serious, starting with this little tidbit — Keynesian economics is dead. Giving away money as the route to political success or attempted social justice just isn’t going to work anymore, because there isn’t any money to give away. And it’s only going to get worse as the population ages. The whole justification for the Democratic Party — the welfare state — is one giant Ponzi scheme that makes Madoff seem like a piker.
And everybody knows it. All across the world, from Portugal to Japan, the system is in free fall.

Now, I don't think he's wrong on the subject of Keynesian economics. I think it is "dead", inasmuch as the idea that it's reached its practical limits is becoming widely acceptable. But that doesn't mean dismantling the progressive Leviathan will be a task simple or assured. The beast still has many adherents, who will fight for their place at the public teat.

So no, the idea isn't dead, and it isn't pining for the fjords, either. It's just old, and sick, and in need of hip replacements to survive.

We're Poor! How Can You Think of Spending Less Money? A News Fisking RE-POST

[despite numerous attempts at editing, the original version of this post kept getting jumbled. So I'm trying again. Wish me luck.]

The Hill (h/t Protein Wisdom):

Representatives of three liberal advocacy groups on Monday blasted President Obama’s proposed two-year freeze on federal civilian worker pay.

And by "blasted" the gang at The Hill undoubtedly mean "made a series of fatuous and unsurprising comments about. Hey, you try making this shit interesting."

Tom Friedman: The Gorgias of National Greatness

Tom Friedman-bashing being apparently the sport of the day, The Other McCain demonstrates the distinction between himself and a sophist like Freidman:

The unfortunate fact that an argument may be both superficially persuasive and fundamentally wrong constitutes an eternal temptation to the minds of those people who permit their admiration of literary excellence to overcome their common sense.



Go read David Brooks’ infamous 1997 ode to “national greatness” and you will find no shortage of literary skill. Clear away the superficial eloquence, however, and you recognize that Brooks is arguing on behalf of the same sort of big-government, guns-and-butter, welfare/warfare state agenda that led LBJ into the political/policy debacle of the Great Society, the Dien Bien Phu of 20th-century American liberalism.

In Plato's dialogues, Socrates preaches against Gorgias and his ilk for exactly this reason: their ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger (that the Thirty Tyrants handed Socrates his cup of hemlock for a similar charge is a perfectly classical irony). For his part, Gorgias wrote of nothing as consistently as the power of language to distort the mind and enflame the heart. Whenever I read the Sophits, I am struck by how post-modern they sound, how easily their arguments work in an academic format.

The Reason post that McCain hangs his deconstruction on has great fun pointing and laughing at Friedman's endless repetition of himself, especially his current obsession with "nation-building at home" (because we don't have a nation at home now). It's tempting to ascribe this tedium to a) blundering stupidty, or b) sheer laziness. But more likely Friedman knows exactly what he's doing, and knows that if he says "nation-building at home" enough times, people will decide that it means something. And to Aristotle, persuading people to think or do something means the rhetorician has succeeded.

But Don't Call it "The Ground Zero Mosque"

The fact that they've applied for 9/11 rebuilding funds means nothing. NOTHING.

In the end, Park51’s application is likely to be unsuccessful financially while mobilizing a new round of opposition. It’s a lose-lose proposition put forward by a tone-deaf organization that seems determined to alienate allies and embolden opponents.

I think that the true source of the outrage: the complete gob-smacked dumbfoundedness that anyone would be offended. "What, we're just applying for public moneys set aside to aid redevelopment of the lands our co-religionists laid waste to, so we can spread the good word of Islam. What's the big?"

It's like trying to explain table manners to a fifteen-year-old.

Civility? I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think it Means...

Stop Shouting:

I remained stoic when your acolytes spit on my car and called my husband a “baby killer” when I crossed through your phalanx at Walter Reed to take my children for medical care. I refused to respond as you smashed your fists into the hood of my car, destroyed my mirrors with bottles and keyed my doors in California, my children mute and terrified as you screamed your hate and bile.

Just because they've managed to toss all this down the memory hole doesn't mean we have.

Europeans: Say, The Government's a Bit Big

My copy of The Communist Manifesto (it is wise to know the ways of one's adversary, tovarisch) has an introduction from a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist from the 1980's or so. The old comrade claims that the "flexible-response" of Western Democracies when confronted with Bolshevism (permitting unions, mandating the eight-hour-work day, the minimum wage) caught the Reds completely by surprise. They didn't expect that the kapitalists had such foresight in them.

Anne Applebaum, in Slate, traces the return of this democratic flexibility:

It's saying too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I'm sure there are plenty of European politicians who won't survive their next encounter with the voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big. They are about to discover that their public spending, which seemed justified in good economic times, has to be cut. The middle class knows in its heart of hearts that its subsidies, whether for mortgages, university tuition, or even health care, can't last. Some voters even know that their pay-as-you go pension systems aren't sustainable in the long term, either.

Facts are stubborn things, as a certain Founding Father put it. The state can only do so much, should only do so much. We are in the midst of discovering again where that line should be drawn. And our own President seems to be behind this learning curve:

Our recent foray into health care reform took us in the opposite direction from the rest of the developed world, too, not that we were really doing anything so different to start with. As Besharov and Call also note, Americans are wrong to think they currently enjoy "private" or "free-market" medicine. Even when it is not directly state-funded through Medicare or Medicaid, American health care is paid for by employers. And those employers, in turn, get a tax cut for providing health care to employees—in other words, a subsidy.

While I find the conflation of tax cuts and subsidies specious ("Because only taking ten dollars from people instead of fifteen is exactly the same as giving them five bucks. Dumbass." - Vodkapundit), basically, this is right: we don't have a free-market health care system. When Obama and the Democrats claimed that their "reform," far from being a takeover, was but the logical extension of current obligations, they were not lying. They had simply convinced themselves to extinguish a bonfire with gasoline.

Real health-care reform, on the other hand, will involve freeing health labor and capital, instead of funneling it into the insurance and legal industries. If we're not making it easier to build hospitals, we're not doing a thing to make health care more affordable.

We Can't Afford Illegal Immigrants.

Janet Daley, in the Telegraph:

If working people are to fend for themselves and support their own families without help, they cannot be under-bid for employment by migrants who, as often as not, have no dependants and no permanent obligations in the host country. The uncontrolled movement of peoples around the globe is problematic for welfare states – which can end up supporting them – but it may present even more dramatic difficulties for a country with a contracting state. The combination of reduced welfare and unlimited migration could produce ugly consequences which no responsible person wants to see.

The premise that immigration should never be limited is relatively modern and backed up by little besides an altruistic frisson. The libertarian responds that labor has the right to move where it wills. And it may indeed. But in a world where the supply of capital outweighs the supply of labor, the free movement of the latter penalizes the workers of nations that develop the former.

Too many promises have been made by altruists, promises based on faith that any good that could be imagined could be done without cost to other goods. Like an overextended credit card, we'll be paying for it for a long time.

GOP Should Seek Clarity

The DC Examiner:

Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Ultimately, it is the people who are going to have to decide what course we take in these troubled waters. Politicians do well when they give people a choice between competing options rather than obfuscate the differences. The question is, do politicians believe they will be rewarded for this?

One of the main reasons for the Democrats' defeat this year was voters' sense that they wouldn't listen -- that they rammed through a predetermined agenda without paying any attention to voters' misgivings, and that they, in fact, seemed to glory in their lack of accountability. (Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's parade-with-gavel through the throngs of anti-Obamacare protesters?)
By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

They represent us. They ought to give a damn what we think.

Read the whole thing.

Tommorrow.

I feel like Tommorrow means something, and I feel like it doesn't. It seems to me that we have but one final chance to pull back from the abyss, from the slow strangling descent into a New Class-managed Dark Age. On the other hand, even the forlorn hope of Dem-Plosion will result in nothing but the opportunity to slowly slip the Progressive Leviathan's grip. That crazed radical Paul Ryan, the man who's out of his mind, is planning on taking the next 75 years to restore us to fiscal sanity.

Given the high that the Democrats experienced 2 years ago, I don't know how the GOP can claim a mandate for their more radical (and necessary) plans. It might not at all be possible to forestall the utter and complete collapse of legitimacy.

The people are sick of Democrats. They're sick of Republicans, too. They're sick of "independents". They're bone-weary of Congress, the White House, the lobbyists, the activists, bureaucrats, the media. Everyone but the army can go to hell as far as most voters are concerned.

If that keeps up, then some tommorrow down the road, the other shoe will drop.

If the Republicans are an Eternally Barking Dog, Democrats are a Zombie Apocalypse

Frank Fleming rules:

It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck — but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart. Or, to use Obama’s favorite analogy, you have a car stuck in ditch, so you call the mechanic, but the only tool he brings with him is a sledgehammer. And then he smashes your car to pieces and charges you $100,000 for his service. Finally, he calls you racist for complaining.

 Read the whole thing.

The Once and Future Governor: Ehrlich Rally, Bel Air, MD

I am told that I live in a deeply blue state. The outward evidence for this abounds: our House of Delegates and State Senate has been dominated by Democrats for a long time, controlling almost 3/4 or the lower house and 2/3 of the Senate.

The Taxer we Raise, the Broker we Get

The Chinese have had this concept called the Dynastic Cycle for some time: a predictable rise and fall based on human nature and the inherent errors of monarchial government. A family rises to power, becomes corrupt, and falls. Time both seals later emperors in tradition and blocks them from the awareness of what they need to be. The result is the belief that they need do very little.

Monty, over at Ace of Spades:

Governments the world over are discovering that the river of money is not endless. That seemingly-inexhaustable mountain of wealth has been turned into an ocean of debt that will take decades to pay off. The spendthrift habits of the Western nations will put burdens on our children, and other generations not yet born, that should outrage us as a people. We are investing in the old rather than the young, and are punishing risk-taking and entrepreneurship rather than rewarding it. Our tax regimes seem to be deliberately crafted to kill innovation and long-term thinking. (What does "legacy" mean if the wealth I have accumulated in my life cannot be passed on to my children or heirs, but is instead eaten by the all-consuming government?) Young people -- young families -- are the foundation upon which Western Civilization is built. Neglect them, overburden them, cheat them, and you are committing societal suicide.

The premise of democracy is that the people, who live in the world and market, are far closer to reality than a prince sealed off by decorum and thick castle walls. That premise is about to be tested.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: "I need teens to be having more kids, pronto! Legitimate, illegitimate, I don’t care — somebody’s got to pay my Social Security."

Imaginary Benevolence

Ace notices a particular trend:

Liberals love to talk up their abstract obligations to the greater good -- a greater good of undefined, unknown "society at large."



And what happens? Because the are pursuing in their minds some greater good involving the abstract, in the tangible ethical decisions of everyday life, they cheat and behave more selfishly than conservatives -- because they feel they're already doing some moral thing like only buying local produce so that gives them some wiggle room to behave unethically in their personal lives. Papal indulgences again, in other words.


Conservatives believe the opposite. We think we have a high duty to perform ethically in our personal real lives and less of a duty to just generally give money or other support to people we don't know and never could know. We're sort of against alienation of the moral sense from its ultimate object.

Which, as a commenter points out, is pure Screwtape:

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malic to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real, and the benevolence largely imaginary

-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chp. 6

Now, a great many people suffer from hypocrisy. We all, to a degree more or less fail to keep the moral code we espouse (which is a point Lewis makes in Mere Christianity). But one of the peculiar aspects of revolutionary creeds is the way in which sacrificing the good of people around you for an imagined Golden Age becomes almost a moral duty. Progressivism overlows with this. One need not look long to find those on the left who think it absolutely essential to tax gasoline with the deliberate purpose of increasing the suffering of those who use it. This is needed, so that we can "save the Earth."

One of the questions I'd love to ask the greenies who want to rescue us all from the Industrial Revolution is "Who has to die?" Given that the current population of the Earth is 6 billion or so, and given that the pre-industrial earth had a population of about 1 billion or so, we're going to find ourselves in a Malthusian nightmare to get anywhere near a level that Greenpeace would be happy with. I don't suppose any sustainability advocates are going to be volunteering for euthanasia to Save the Earth.

Nah, they'll probably be Chinese.

Hippes = Tea Partiers

Zombie » The Electric Tea Party Acid Test

Come for the amusing premise, stay for the neat graphic and stipulation of the difference between bums and hobos.

Those Gosh-Darn Republicans Complain Too Much

So says David Halperin, in Time:

His opponents haven't put forth specifics of their own, nor offered genuine compromise, while the media have allowed the right's activists and gabbers to run wild with criticism without furnishing legitimate alternative solutions.

Right. Because back when the Democrats were running against Bush in 2002, 2004, and 2006, they were stuffed with legitimate alternative solutions. And the media certainly didn't let Democratic activists and gabbers run wild without holding their feet to the fire.

Hey, David. This garden slug I just stepped on called for you. He wants his self-awareness back.