To read Jay Cost lay into the individual mandate provision of Obamacare with a truncheon is to see the wrath of a forgotten, dissed and dismissed America in print. He inveighs in a Weekly Standard Piece entitled The Mandate Represents What’s Wrong With Democrats. There will be a mandatory 1/10 of a point deduction for leaving off the html rant tags, but he sure did | Read More »
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) appropriated $7.2 billion to subsidize broadband deployment, including $2.5 billion to the Rural Utilities Service (RUS). Prior investigations have shown that RUS’ broadband subsidy programs were not cost effective, and often funded duplicative coverage in areas already served by existing providers….The evidence indicates that RUS’ history of funding duplicative service has continued under BIP, and that the current | Read More »
What if what you knew was wrong? What if you had a set of political beliefs that you could translate into actionable policy? What if you acquired so much political power that you could actually put those policies into play – and then they failed? What if you believed that using public monies to mitigate the impact of economic recession would lead to higher employment | Read More »
King Louis XI was a hated man. His passing was not mourned by his subjects and his feudal vassals undoubtedly emitted a great sigh of relief upon his expiration. Louis XI schemed, tricked, back-knifed, bribed and practiced all the numerous black arts of political skullduggery. He had no great moral difficulty with killing his brothers or his dad. He did all this in service of | Read More »
““On a five-year contract worth $96 million — what he’d get from the Knicks or the Heat — LeBron would pay $12.34 million in New York taxes.” Florida has no state income tax.” – Business and Media Institute (8 July 2010). The circus has ended and the clowns can stop clogging Twitter. NBA Superstar and Twitter Phenom, Lebron James has signed with Miami and Cleveland | Read More »
“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens from A Tale of Two Cities. The current economic stimulus plan, as measured by budget execution, as of 2010 March, has been distributed in a non-equalitarian manner that does not favor the least wealthy cities of our nation. The patterns of Government expenditure by US urban area also strongly suggest | Read More »
From the diaries by Erick I probably have zero drops of Mayan blood in my veins. I do, however, admire their imaginative take on apocalyptic prophesy. I think they just about got 2012 dead-on. Even absent the bitter hatred accompanying a Presidential Election in our divided states of America, that year will require a little more than just Advil to take the edge off. People | Read More »
Believe it or not, there was actually some good news in yesterday’s meh employment report. Hourly earnings increased by 0.2 percent. Other than that, imagine you were rooting for UT last night – after Colt McCoy went down with the bum shoulder. In other words, you should have known how this was destined to turn out. However, expectations were not well pegged to reality. The | Read More »
John Maudlin confounds the best efforts of the Federal Government to lie about the current state of economic play. He measures not what the indicators say the economy is doing – but rather what happens to people who live and work in this economy. He elicits an accurate picture of this desert of the real by measuring statistics that are not easily cooked. Today he | Read More »
This explains the level of buy-in Barack Obama received in 2008. A lot of frightened and disillousioned people were convinced he could lead them somehow to safety. He can’t because he is unable and because he is also unwilling to do what this requires.
“Bail-outs” and “Stimulus Packages” dance around this question. They are a fraud in the same sense that James Kunstler spoke of swindles and frauds. If everyone can just keep holding on until one day after election 2012, everything will magically start to get better. Yet the veneer and the slickness where thin, and increasingly more Americans see that nothing is there underneath. What then? Our next two elections will be all about deciding that question.
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