Every sane person in the country aka most people outside of the DC beltway, is asking the million dollar question of the immigration debate: why don’t we just implement the enforcement measures that actually work before risking another wave of illegal immigration by granting amnesty now? The issue would largely dissipate if they would merely begin enforcing the laws on the books. But when you | Read More »
If you have based your hope for prosperity on what Globalization Guru Thomas Friedman referred to as The Electronic Herd, this morning you probably feel like one of the pigs that Christ sent over the cliff when he exorcised “Legion.” For today, at least, there is no hiding from the stupid. The Nikkei 225 crashed and burned yesterday and Business Insider describesjust what traders in American Equities markets woke up to this morning.
Markets around the world are deep in the red. England’s FTSE is down. 1.7%. France’s CAC 40 is down 2.3%. Germany’s DAX is down 2.4%. Spain’s IBEX is down 1.4%. Italy’s FTSE MIB is down 2.5%. In the U.S., the S&P 500 is down 0.8%. This follows sell-offs across Asia. Japan’s Nikkei fell by a stunning 7.3%.
I’m sure the parrots at CNBC Squawk Box are remarkably charming this fine and wonderful morning. And Jim Cramer has probably exploded and totally made a mess all over the set at “Mad Money.” However, you can get the same level of news content and far more entertainment by watching this Alien’s clip linked here. What staggers the mind is that all of this is caused by US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dropping hints that he might choose to reduce the rate at which he hands out free money to banking institutions via QE.
Read More »After 4 years of endless scandals sliding off Obama’s Teflon back, it appears his luck is finally coming to an end. Why would Republicans want to bail him out by bestowing him with an amnesty bill? We all know that Obamacare was the crown jewel of Obama’s first term. With passage of that monstrosity, Obama effectively nationalized the largest sector of the economy and created | Read More »
With farm incomes on the rise in recent years, what is Big Ag supposed to do? How can they justify more subsidies? Well, for one thing, they can spend more time demanding an endless flow of cheap labor to which they can pay below market wages. But that would require the passage of an amnesty bill, something that many House members are not excited to | Read More »
I would argue Baltimore is not a statistical outlier, but rather a predictable precursor – a canary in the coalmine if you will that indicates what American cities will increasingly degenerate towards going forward if our nation does not significantly reform how we handle them. Cities in Post-Modern Amerika suffer from an interlocking directory of failure modes which retard their economic and social development. This scares many productive and worthwhile people out of setting foot on one of their streets unless necessity brooks no other course of action. A typical American City will usually be worse than the surrounding countryside in crime, illegitimacy, educational outcomes, and economic opportunity. This is precisely opposite of how it was originally intended to work.
So just what does America do about murder as lifestyle in Baltimorgue, bankruptcy in Detroit, or the perception at least of deliberate Apartheid in new Haven, CT? Here’s what I think should be a reasonable to-do list.
Read More »Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee began its markup of the gang of 8 immigration deform bill (s.744). The striking thing about the markup is that any casual observer would think we were living in 1965 or 1986, when there was either relatively low legal immigration or no failed amnesty to look back upon. To most of the senators sitting around the table, the border is more secure than ever (despite the sharp rise in crossings), our record levels of immigration don’t exist, and there is no reason to implement the enforcement before the legalization.
Read More »To make American Secondary Schools worth a monkey’s butt-wipe again, we are just going to have to leave some children behind. Right now, they are yet another precursor of the impending Big Government Chernobyl that could very well destroy American Society as we now enjoy living in it. Implementing a new Common Core of unenforceable and utterly ignored standards is not going to fix this difficulty. While the Obama Administration’s ideal of “fewer, higher and clearer” standards sounds like one of the smarter ideas that this man’s administration has come up with, it will not do the job because it addresses the wrong problem. It is not the content of the standards that is the biggest problem with our schools. The problem is that we lack the institutional courage to actually enforce any standards at all.
What American Secondary Schools need to enact is what I’ll call the Tyler Durden reforms. This is based on the line from the novel Fight Club where Tyler Durden teaches his followers that they are not unique and beautiful snowflakes. If we continue to tell our children that they are special and immune from consequence, they will eventually become seduced into holding that ultimately self-defeating belief. This fatal conceit will lead these children to have an overweening sense of entitlement and a minimal skill-set of abilities that any logical employer would want to hire.
Here’s what my proposed Tyler Durden Standards would look like.
Read More »Don’t get me wrong. I like O-Care about as much as I like getting a prostate exam. The bill is typical of unthinking, boilerplate socialism’s response to the negative externalities that result from market failure. We should therefore trash Obamacare, but let’s just make that the warm-up set. The real heavy lifting required to fix our healthcare system involves addressing the causes of a market failure so catastrophic that something as obviously stupid as Obamacare seemed like a palatable solution.
Karl Denninger explains why poor people often can’t afford health insurance. The care provided is so badly overpriced that health plans are paying out more vastly more than the goods and services provided can possibly be worth. He describes the price mark-up of a common chemotherapy drug below.
Read More »There is nothing more odious in a free society than politicians using the boot of government to make the most basic goods and services unaffordable for the majority of the country, thereby engendering a need for subsidization. In one fell swoop, representatives who deviate from the Constitution have the ability to destroy the self-respect and quality of life for all but the top 1% – | Read More »
Sometimes the first step in building a thing of beauty is to dynamite the ugly, dying strip mall that occupies the real estate you want to build upon. We, the American Conservative Movement can rebuild once the junk gets cleared away. We just have to be ready, and we just have to avoid bailing the Progressives out of their own state-fueled death spiral of non-sustainability.
Brett Stevens of Amerika.org shows us how our society currently fulfills Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.
Currently, our society is chasing its own tail into the abyss. The books give us certain rules and facts, and we follow those; when that doesn’t work out, we redouble our efforts using the same rules and facts. Like robots, we cannot deviate from our programming because we’ve eliminated the people who can think outside the box.
When Jim DeMint delivered his farewell speech in the Senate, he touched on a salient point that is often lost in the raucous of political discourse. The entrenchment of political interests and allegiances has often made commonsense ideas that transcend political ideology impossible to implement. Nowhere is this more evident than with the push to hold national security hostage for mass amnesty. We have a | Read More »
On yesterday’s edition of “All In with Chris Hayes” we were greeted with narrative creation at its finest as host Chris Hayes attempted to define the arguments in favor of Voter Identification laws in North Carolina as merely the spoils of victory as opposed to any type of actual reasoned position. HAYES: If a skeptical person looks at what’s going on in north carolina and | Read More »
Our government, our media and the increasingly auto-beclowning supporters of our current national Zeitgeist strive manfully athwart ratiocination to rapidly disconnect the dots on The Boston Marathon Terror Bombing. Like the brilliant government bureaucrat who classified the Major Nidal Hasan’s Fort Hood Jihad Spray-Job as workplace violence, they aren’t lying per se. They’re just bull-(radio edit). Like the evil Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men, their operational assumption with respect to the American People is “You can’t handle the truth.”
The truth we supposedly can’t handle, quite simply is this.
Read More »State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home. In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state. The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money *
As the nation struggles to understand the attack at the Boston Marathon, the debate over background checks for gun buyers has received more attention from gun control advocates as a result. The left argues that stricter gun control laws might prevent tragedies such as the Boston bombings and the Newtown shooting. The right points out that criminals, including the Boston bombers, do not adhere to | Read More »
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
– Einstein
Oh Good. We have Comprehensive Immigration Reform being set before the US Senate. It’s the brainchild of a Gang of 8. Perhaps I can be forgiven for wondering if that means this bill will be twice as odious as the intellectual deep thoughts of Mao Tse Tung’s Gang of Four.
Now I understand that this was catty and mean, but I’m just getting really tired of these comprehensive master plans from the desks of our elected mental midgets. Attempting to do everything at once with regards to a difficult, complex issue leads us to the type of legislation where you have to pass it first to find out what’s in it. That, I fear is what will happen with the latest Comprehensive Immigration Reform proposal.
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