The NYT’s Lede describes the fiasco which the “Cash for Clunkers” program has become. The Lede’s story focuses mostly on the program participant’s difficulties in obtaining a reimbursement from the government. What the article doesn’t discuss is the wisdom of scrappage programs themselves. The scrappage program essentially takes a perfectly good machine and destroys it in the name of an environmental benefit.
The program requires that the clunkers be put out of service for good, so dealers must destroy the engines on cars that are traded in. We watched this process yesterday at the DCH Paramus Honda in Paramus, N.J. It is quite laborious and potentially dangerous. And it certainly is final.
Nick Clites, who is in charge of used cars for the dealership, was prepping a 1988 BMW 535IS, with 214,000 miles on the odometer, for its death. He drained the oil, then donned a silky blue protective suit, goggles and gloves and poured a sodium silicate solution into the engine. He revved the car, and within a few seconds, the solution hardened into a glass-like substance, the engine seized up and the car was dead.
So here is one question: With the program now on shaky ground, even with a new infusion of money, what consumer and what dealer will risk rendering an engine irretrievably unusable?
Without an environmental justification, why would it not be better to simply send or sell the 1988 BMW 535IS to Africa, where it might be used as a sedan, or converted into a delivery vehicle, instead of destroying it? Come to that, why not sell it as a used car to an American who can’t afford a new one?
The objective of a scrappage program is that: “of stimulating the automobile industry and removing inefficient, high emissions vehicles from the road. Many European countries have introduced large-scale scrappage programs as an economic stimulus to increase market demand in the industrial sector during the global recession.” While the “clunker” exists it implicitly competes with the newer models, in price at least. Destroying an older car removes the unit from the market while removing a source of ‘pollution’ from the books of the environmentalists.
The fact that the clunker must be physically removed from the market proves it still has some economic value. Why should something which still retains a value, even in America, be destroyed? The Specialty Equipment Marketer’s Association posed this very question when it wrote President Obama opposing the program. It argued that destroying the vehicles would hurt small businesses and the car business; it would penalize people who couldn’t afford a new car in any case, cash voucher notwithstanding. “Vehicles are frequently recycled down the economic chain as they age. Scrappage programs will disrupt the supply of used cars, raising prices further on the very vehicles most often purchased by low-income citizens.”
But even if one cared nothing for lower-income people or citizens of the Third World who would be glad to have a chance of owning a used car, one objection which environmentalists are obliged to take more seriously is that a scrappage program may artificially accelerates the car life cycle and does not take into account the “carbon footprint” of disposing of the dead cars. In which case the “cash for clunkers” scheme is not only destroying objects of economic value, it is actually polluting the environment. The Lede described the unease in the car industry.
“Oh my God, what a mess today,” Sally Ann Maggio, who co-owns Hackensack Auto Wreckers, also in New Jersey, said on Friday. We visited her car-crushing business on Thursday. She didn’t think much of the program to begin with.
Ms. Maggio said she generally makes her profit by reselling the engines, the most valuable parts of the cars she takes, but that’s not posible with the cars coming to her because of the cash for clunkers program, because they have been rendered unusable. That cuts down the salvage value of the cars — and the incentive for salvage yards and wreckers to take them — to almost nothing, considering the time and energy they must spend in going to the dealer, towing back the dead cars, removing the engines, crushing the bodies and shipping them to a metal scrap shredder and recycler.
And, of course, the process reduces the supply of used engines for people who can’t afford to buy a new car and come to the salvage yard looking to fix up old ones. In any case, Ms. Maggio said, dealers are “hitting the panic button” today.
One final problem is fiscal. A steady supply of tax dollars is required for government to keep distorting the market. On August 1st the White House announced it was “reviewing” the program.
Transportation Department officials called lawmakers’ offices earlier Thursday to alert them of plans to suspend the program as early as Friday. But a White House official said later the program had not been suspended and officials there were assessing their options.
“We are working tonight to assess the situation facing what is obviously an incredibly popular program,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said of the Car Allowance Rebate System. “Auto dealers and consumers should have confidence that all valid CARS transactions that have taken place to date will be honored.”
Gibbs said the administration was “evaluating all options” to keep the program funded. …
A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers Association found about 25,000 deals had not yet been approved by NHTSA, or nearly 13 trades per store. It raised concerns that with about 23,000 dealers taking part in the program, auto dealers may already have surpassed the 250,000 vehicle sales funded by the $1 billion program.
“There’s a significant backlog of ‘cash for clunkers’ deals that make us question how much funding is still available in the program,” said Bailey Wood, a spokesman for the dealers association.
Where’s the funding going to come from? But that’s another question.
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During the transition period before we are all on Obamacare, I can see “Cash for Terminally Ill”! If you or a loved one are currently on life support or in the final stages of a fatal illness, the Government will pay you a one time fee of $50,000 to terminate the life. There will be no allowances for organ harvesting. “Transplant specialists were upset that perfectly good hearts and lungs were rendered useless by this program”
It does stand as proof that putting money in the hands of individuals produces results.
To give it in the form of a tax-cut, leaving the decision for what to do with it to the taxpayer, would surely be asking too much.
Although mechanical clunkers leave a carbon footprint, their monetary footprint is relatively small compared to human clunkers.
A cash for human clunkers program could drastically reduce healthcare costs, incentivizing the kids to bring in gramps for treatment with a silica equivalent.
After all, as Ezekiel Emanuel points out:
““Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31). ”
We are all good communitarians, now.
I have a close friend who makes about $35,000 a year in a one-income family. Not enough to afford a new car, even with the subsidy, but enough to pay taxes. This friend finds himself in the position of sitting in his work break room, listening to co-workers in the $90,000/yr family income range plan their subsidized purchases.
Have we gone nuts?
This is, in the analysis, consistent with other program philosphies applied in the Obama Administration.
Destruction of capital for some non-objective and undefined “social good”.
Possible old used cars, still with some commercial value, are destroyed. Even the engines are not salvageable. And at the other end of the spectrum, only the purchase of certain cars that are deemed “green” will be approved as applicable for completing the deal. And many of those cars are not even made in the US.
Summarizing the symptoms emblematic of the smartest Presidential Administration in our lifetime:
1) Capital destruction
2) destruction of a commercial market
3) destruction of asset value
4) “The Europeans do it so it must be good!”; I’d wager that the Europeans only do it for cars made on the continent
5) over management, micro-management: the forms for executing one deal run to twenty pages
6) general mis-management
Next up: Health Care Management for All!! What could go wrong? They mean well.
What makes a grown man who is intelligent enough to win the presidency of the United States unable to understand the idiocy of Statism? We know that a person’s faith can be so strong as to enable them to have their feet cooked off and their shin bones fall out and yet they endure. Is Obama the Abraham of our age? He is willing to sacrifice his own country to satisfy his god!
The sad part is that there is a very fine difference between good and evil. Satan after all is an angel of GOD. And Hell is but a separated part of Heaven. And Obama may not be able to see that he is doing the work of the Devil. He may truly believe that his is the right path.
To watch all of these people rush to chain themselves further to the Credit master. As we know that when a person is in debt to another that he becomes his slave and literally has to perform to command. To see these people willingly commit themselves to slavery for nothing is sand in my eye.
A further problem is that it rewards bad behavior. Five years ago two people bought new cars. A bought a high mileage vehicle, B bought a gass guzzler. Ten years later, who does the government choose to subsidize?
These are the same folks who want to run your health care. Please proceed cautiously.
E Nigma,
I think there is something to your point #4. Germany started talking about this program at the end of last year. It was put into effect at the beginning of the year. It helped prevent a panic reaction to layoffs in the auto and parts branches. There are some big differences between the German and American car-buying cultures. In Germany you do not usually buy a new car off the lot; you order it and wait a month or so for delivery. Thus, the German program had the effect of keeping production lines moving and giving manufacturers a bit of flexibilty to weigh alternatives to massive layoffs. It did not simply clear out lots at dealerships. There has been very good response to the German plan, but it has been slower because the system is slower.
Another factor that affects the crushing of clunkers is the market in the East. With all the European interest in carbon footprints, Germany probably did not want to be seen as shipping its gas guzzlers to poor countries that would then be criticized for their high number of gas guzzlers. In 89, there was an enormous export of used cars to the East. Today such a massive export would disrupt distribution systems that have been established in Eastern countries. I suspect this could have negative economic side effects and that Germany would not want this.
I’m sharing this not to praise the German plan, but merely to say that the baseline situation was very different from America’s. I don’t much like “me too” programs that don’t take underlying differences into account. Comparing apples and oranges is just not cool.
Hutsul 1- “Cash for Terminally Ill”- Hilarious. If my wife is pregnant, can I trade in my grandma even if she’s not terminally ill and get a $100,000 voucher for education costs (a drop in the bucket to pay for the million dollar tuition fees that will be charged in 20 yrs)?
I’ll just tell my grandma that medicare is starting a new colon cleansing program and she can drink the same stuff as the “clunkers” program puts in car engines.
We got a promo flyer from a local dealer & thought, hmmm, our Impala is starting to show its age. Well after looking at the price of new ones forget it (even factoring in a cred. card rewards rebate) and even there would be little mileage improvement so little subsidy offered. We owe more on our Suburban and the truck is in fine shape yet and serves us well.
We got a promo flyer from a local dealer & thought, hmmm, our Impala is starting to show its age. Well after looking at the price of new ones forget it (even factoring in a cred. card rewards rebate) and even there would be little mileage improvement so little subsidy offered. We owe more on our Suburban and the truck is in fine shape yet and serves us well. My bro OTOH with an early 90s sbbrbn w/nearly a half megamile is very interested.
vb, yes it isn’t cool to do such comparisons and it sullies the orange’s reputation in the process. ( I am a Floridian) : )
We will see much more than the cash for clunkers fiasco unless TPTB in congress see their lock on reelection in doubt. At that point they will go back to a incrementalist approach. They won’t ever stop, until we figure out how to disable the ability of the parasitical class to participate in determining who gets to govern and those that govern are properly yoked to the Constitution and the Ten Commandments.
Richard, shoot me an email when PJM gets their site working again. I will check back in a week if I don’t get a note from you. THIS IS SO AGGRAVATING grrrrr.
Can we have a ‘cash for clunkers’ for the government? I propose we trade in the entire Congress, Executive Branch and federal beauracracy for a new, smaller government. Who’ll provide the sodium silicate?
I knew that the “Cash for the Terminally Ill” program would be too good for the People’s Cube to pass up: http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=3817
The destruction of real capital assets is an intellectual cousin, maybe a riff, on the practice of destroying functional weapons systems to purchase a non-good (it isn’t a “bad”) called “trust.” We destroy valuable and useable things such as ICBMs, CVs and LHAs and B-52s. We do these strategically and economically irrational acts without considering how these weapons could benefit our allies and stimulate new business for sub-contractors and refurbishers. We do this pursuant to treaties with countries that have a documented history of fraud and deception and indeed largely in accordance with treaties entered in to with a country that ceased to exist almost 20 years ago. Imagine how the strategic paradigms would shift if we transferred those systems to Australia.
My suspicion is that no one i the White House has ever taken a High School accounting class.
Has the problem been solved? I am still getting blank fields after I hit “submit” and my post goes into n-space.
Whatever has been the cause of these database problems it would be nice to get some feedback.
Was this a hack?
Why does this remind me of those galactically stupid gun buy-back programs?
You know the ones… where pieces of junk that can never be fired are traded for $ 25, $50, etc… which you just know has to be turned around into a used but functional street piece at least occasionally… or where a gun used in a crime is traded for $ 25, $ 50, etc… and disappears down the “rendered non-operational” hole thereby depriving law enforcement of a critical piece of evidence…
Oh well… at least these old, gas-guzzling offenders of all that is decent and holy can’t be carried to the dealers in the owner’s pocket… and the owner must turn that cash around into a new(er?) vehicle…
This is still stoopid on so many levels that I can’t even begin to list them all…
I sure could have used that 1988 BMW…
I understand that Japan has followed a draconian program designed to get older cars off the road for some years. They require older cars to be inspected to an absurd degree, to the point that it is much easier and ultimately less costly to buy a new one. I mean, if the government requires holes to be cut into your car in order to prove that it is not rusty inside, then why would you want to keep it anyway?
But the Japanese do not pay you to buy a new car, either. And many components for late model used Japanese cars – and even new, unused components that were rejected on the production lines due to flaws – are shipped to places like the Phillipines, where they are rebuilt and sold.
‘Clunkers’ is very much like the wacky edicts and directives inflicted on the Chinese people by communist party theorists during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Ordering people to ‘make steel’ in their backyards or kill sparrows made sense only if ideological purity — and not the laws of physics or economics — was the objective. The results were, of course, disastrous on a staggering scale.
With luck, we’ll put an end to the fairy-tale ‘leadership’ of Davos Man and his merry band of Ivy League dreamers before we find ourselves boiling grass to fill our stomachs and suffering from ailments not seen since our grandparents’ day.
Question:
I have a 1999 Suburban which I got primarily to take 6 grandchildren on vacations. They are now busy with summer jobs and sports teams, and so the Suburban no longer has that function. A smaller car would serve my wife and me quite well.
Although I am a skeptic about anthropogenic global warming and its dangers, suppose I were not. If I were concerned about nothing but my automobile carbon footprint, would it be greater if I kept my Suburban for another 10 years or if I scrapped it now (in a way that no one else could use it) and substituted its carbon footprint for that of a smaller car, which would have to include the carbon footprint of its entire manufacturing process.
Jim
I guess it’s only the pure irony of coincidence that last week, as the ‘cash for clunkers” scheme seemed to be imploding, I purchased (for the entirely reasonable price of $2,600) a lightly driven ’90 Honda Acura sedan to use for my personal transportation needs. And I took my even older ’74 Volvo sedan and put it on e-Bay, where I hope to see it appeal to a purchaser hankering to restore a classic automobile. Reuse, re-purpose, recycle… I could no more afford to buy a totally green new car than I could walk on the moon. Totally trashing perfectly usable automobiles seems … well, wasteful.
@ #21, RWE:
Yes, it is all done in the name of implicitly encouraging people to buy new cars in Japan. And since the Japan automarket is for all intents and purposes “closed” to imports, it is a form of mercantile corporatism in that the Japanese car buyer must buy a Nissan, Toyota, Honda, etc.
I think I read a few years ago that the average age of an automobile in Japan was slightly less than 4 years old. The average age of a car in the US is significantly higher.
With the Progressives in power, everything old is new again, I guess. Up with Corporatism!
Jim 23,
Now don’t you worry about all of that. You should be pleased in the knowledge that you’ll be doing your fair share to help Government Motors and the proud members of the UAW.
The Federales will make sure that some non-government owned sector, maybe like those sinister oil companies, will do their fair share also to reduce the emissions that would be too much of a burden for Government Motors to bear.
Don’t fret; we’ll take care of all of this for you.
This is indeed the beginning of America’s “great leap forward.” Did Obama really say “let a thousand flowers bloom” before he started this? F
Jim Nicholas,
Get with the spirit of the program. Don’t just scrap the old car, scrap your grandchildren. Think of the long term reduction in the “carbon footprint” that would give you. You could probably get a whole roll of green stamps or such from Al Gore for them that you could use to send ice to polar bears. Once you have sent the next generation to the People’s Recycling Center then you won’t need a car. In fact once there is no future then there won’t be any use for you. That should wrap everything up nice and tidy.
1. none of my three vehicles are considered clunkers not even the oldest which is 1986 P’uP from isuzu.
2. give me the price of a new car for my clunker and I’ll buy a new car.
Doug:
If anybody wonders why Jews will continue to support the Obama administration then look no further then Ezekiel Emanual. He designs a healthcare system the would make Heinrich Himmler proud and most of his co-religionists cheer him on. Why isn’t someone from the Jewish community confronting him and his brother, the Lazar Kaganovich of the Obama administration, on their rejection of the Jewish values.
“Renew! Renew!”
http://tinyurl.com/5u2nk7
Jim @ 23:
with my manager hat on: any difference is way, way too small to be detectable; this is not a decision factor
with my engineer hat on: almost certainly better to keep driving what you have, because the carbon footprint from manufacturing the new vehicle will outweigh any savings from improved mileage, but – you didn’t mention the Suburban MPG (12-15?), or how many miles you expect to drive over the next ten years, or the MPG you anticipate from the replacement vehicle, so one can’t really run the numbers.
One might also consider a third option – wait a couple of years and buy the likely even better vehicle available then, after getting full use out of your current Suburban. I suspect that is the optimum solution from a footprint perspective, and – amazingly – the solution that one would be pointed toward purely on the basis of personal economics.
There have also, I believe, been some studies that show that the total impact from electric vehicles (manufacturing, battery replacement, power generation) is pretty similar to modern internal combustion vehicles.
I have a 79 Caddy, 8 to 9 mpg. I drive it about 500 miles a yr. My neighbor builds/restores old trucks. None qualify for the program. But then we would not scrap them anyway. When will the gov’t force us and others with classic type cars scrap them?
I am also 62 so I guess my scrap time is comin too.
With regards to the comments section here at BC, in light of the problems over the past few days, and with apologies to Sir Laurence Olivier, I have just one question for my friends offering comments:
“Is it safe?”
Jamie Irons
“until we figure out how to disable the ability of the parasitical class to participate in determining who gets to govern and those that govern are properly yoked to the Constitution and the Ten Commandments”
—
One option still available sometimes is turnout:
A recent election in Los Angeles had 12 percent.
The LA Times and MSM in general colluded in this by not covering it much at all.
A couple of conservative talk shows did also.
I intend to see that that does not happen again.
Barack Hussein Strangelove
Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the Peter Sellers character in “Dr. Strangelove.” Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm—quite involuntarily—keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm—the good and decent arm—struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.
When I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free—into full salute—in the “acted stupidly” comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police’s handling of the matter. Here was the implication that whites were such clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry. It let white Americans see a president who doubted them.
Mr. Obama’s “post-racialism” was a promise to operate outside of tired cultural narratives. But he has a demon arm of reflexive racialism—identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Skip Gates. You can only put a demon like this to death by finding out what you really believe. We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it. As for the odd triad of Messrs. Gates, Crowley and Obama, only Mr. Crowley seems to have functioned outside his cultural narrative.
Jamie:
Dennis Miller is seriously interested in taking up birdwatching.
Perhaps you could contact him with some advice?
An evocative poem would no doubt be motivational!
Doug,
Don’t know about the poem but here would be my advice:
Go to Eagle Optics and get a decent pair of binoculars (amazing the quality you can get now for $300.00!, and go to Amazon to get Sibley’s guide for your part of the country.
Then step outide, look and listen…
Jamie Irons
I recently received a gushing email from my idiot Congressman about how great Cash for Clunkers is. So I responded, asking just where in the Constitution it authorizes the government to accept old cars from citizens and to pay them for them.
Needless to say, I got a form letter in response and, if said idiot ever read my email, he must have wondered “What’s the Constitution got to do with government?”
Reminds me of something P.J. O’Rourke once wrote about the early cans and cardboard recycling mania. You don’t need to set up a government program to recycle used Ferraris. They have intrinsic value and get recycled automatically via the magic of people thinking about their pocketbook.
There’s a guy who runs a small lumber mill in Humboldt County, CA (no, it isn’t a front for something else). Mostly mills replacement mouldings for old Victorians being renovated. He also runs classes for kids, teaching them hands-on skills. He was asked how he could participate in killing trees, and generally accused of crimes against the environment. His response was perfect.
If we cut down trees to build a house that lasts 200 years, that’s not a burden for the environment. 200 years later, we can go back to the forest and ask for more trees to replace the house and the forest can supply them. The problem is when we build crap that only lasts 20 years. If you have to keep going back to the forest for raw materials to replace a building that’s falling apart every 20 years, that’s too much and will exhaust the forest.
I’ve always thought that was one of the best statements of real environmental philosophy, one that’s based on a desire for a healthy environment instead of a desire to tell other people how to live or to engage in moral exhibitionism. Build stuff to last, take care of it, if you get tired of it, don’t throw it away, sell it to someone else who can enjoy it for a while longer.
I don’t think the cash for clunkers measures up very well. I’m not an expert in recovering components from a car that’s been scrapped, but I suspect it’s pretty toxic work. All these scrapped clunkers are either going to be cluttering up landfills, or they’re going to be spewing out real pollution in an effort to avoid bogus CO2 “pollution.”
I think we need a new program to replace “Cash for Clunkers.” Let’s call it “Exit for Idiots.” We’ll give current members of Congress – very wastefull of resources and a significant source of C02 if you ask me – a one-time opportunity to leave and retire to a peacful life of telling nasty jokes about Sarah Palin at cocktail parties. “Act now, Senator! Don’t take the risk this program will be discontinued due to economic necessity! Don’t wait until it’s too late to avoid the tar and feathers!”
“Ms. Maggio said she generally makes her profit by reselling the engines, the most valuable parts of the cars she takes, but that’s not posible with the cars coming to her because of the cash for clunkers program, because they have been rendered unusable.”
Wow, another triumph for the ecomonic acumen of the Obama Administration. So they’ve made it unprofitable to recycle dead cars, have they? And what do they expect the result to be? Here’s what I expect the result to be: that the Hudson River is going to start filling up really, really fast with the bodies of dead clunkers. Another triumph for Environmentalism! Go Green!! Hurrah!!
“Ms. Maggio said she generally makes her profit by reselling the engines, the most valuable parts of the cars she takes, but that’s not posible with the cars coming to her because of the cash for clunkers program, because they have been rendered unusable.”
Wow, another example of the economic brilliance of the Obama Administration. So, they’ve made it unprofitable to recycle old cars, have they? And what do the expect the result of this policy to be? Here’s what I expect the result to be: that the Hudson River (or Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, the Everglades, the LA Aqueduct, take your pick of your favorite waterway) is going to start filling up really, really fast with the bodies of dead clunkers. Hah! Another Triumph for Environmentalism!!
“Ms. Maggio said she generally makes her profit by reselling the engines, the most valuable parts of the cars she takes, but that’s not posible with the cars coming to her because of the cash for clunkers program, because they have been rendered unusable.”
Wow, another example of the economic brilliance of the Obama Administration. So, they’ve made it unprofitable to recycle old cars, have they? And what do the expect they result of this policy to be? Here’s what I expect the result to be: that the Hudson River (or Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, the Everglades, the LA Aqueduct, take your pick of your favorite waterway) is going to start filling up really, really fast with the bodies of dead clunkers. Hah! Another Triumph for Environmentalism!!
I currently own, and proudly drive, a clunker. I am one of those people who prolong the useful lives of our cars, in this way making more efficient use of our resources. We are sometimes termed “The working poor” and this is but one useful function we provide society.
Not only is my current car a clunker, but my next car will be a clunker as well. So a program that scraps clunkers is not in my interest (hey, that’s my next car you are sending to the crusher). This program will cut the supply of used vehicles while doing little to affect demand. Those who put off buying a vehicle for a year might be lured into the new car market while those who buy high-end use cars might buy new. But those of us who buy ten year old cars, and keep them until they are “sweet sixteen,” can only be harmed.
Once again the Democrats sacrifice the poor in the name of political expediency (while starting a program that costs five times more than advertised).
Math @ 41,42,43: What are trying to do, man, choke the thread?!
Sorry for the triple post.
It’s a sacrifice to the validity of popularized environmentalism.
Nothing the government does makes economic sense, otherwise the government wouldn’t have to do it.
Jamie:
I’ll pass it on.
…and link to your poems.
(Dennis lives in Santa Barbara)
Doug,
Continued weird behavior of the BC comments section:
When I wrote the reply to your birding query, my comment “box” appeared as a narrow rectangle about seven letters wide, I got no opportunity to edit it, and it seemed to disappear from my (Firefox) browser page, only to appear much later after you had replied to my reply, and several others had commented on the thread.
???
Is it safe?
Jamie Irons
Welfare for, “Detroit Unions”…?
I’m getting tired of the “Rest of the World” with their greedy paws out and a perpetual “gimme gimme gimme” attitude. I think that destroying the cars is counterproductive, but surely they could be recycled here in the United States and given to welfare mothers and laid-off steel workers who need a ride to go on job interviews. I am *not* in favor of shipping them to Mexico, Africa or Russia.
Although with the way this administration works, if they were recycled within this country, they’d end up with ACORN workers and new Black Panthers.
I just talked to a guy who had taken advantage of the cash for clunkers program and bought a new Ford. He had owned an old Mercedes.
He said that not only are the engines destroyed, but nothing can be taken off the car. His car had new tires on it, and they will have to be destroyed, too.
The Old Guy #32 and JMH #40:
Back in the 70’s I was always bemused by the fact that a car with the “ecology” flag on it was always smoking badly and clearly had not been washed or waxed since forever.
The fact is, the “ecology” movement, (now fortunately called “environmentalism” – calling them Ecologists was like calling a hypochondriac an MD) also typically embodied a basic contempt for technology. That, in turn, inevitably led to the enthusiasts making the wrong decisions in both their personal lives and on a national scale when it came to the environment.
Jamie,
Ezekiel Emanuel has determined that at your current life stage, 7 characters is all you are allotted for your box.
You were 25 too, once, you know!
Try to accept your present circumstance with equanimity.
It’s the correct thing to do.
I’m a clunker driver myself… both of my cars are from ’97 and still provide daily driving duties. The Volvo 850 is getting a little long in the tooth so I’ll be looking out for my anti-obama car – a mid-80s Caprice/Impala with a carbed V8!
Kinda on subject:
I have not paid attention to it lately, but driving on US-59 south of Houston it was not unusual to see a caravan of used cars (rolling wrecks), usually a string of 5 or 6 pairs of one car pulling another. I figured these were being driven down to Mexico or points south.
I also remember when I was working in Venezuela in the ’90′s seeing more Pintos than I ever saw in the States. I haven’t been there lately, however.
This notion that the cash for clunkers program is doing more damage to the environment is nearly the same that during vehicle lifespans a prius does more damage than a suburban does.
Oh well, the UAW should be happy for this one.
The metapoint of the program is to close off another avenue to personal independence. So long as you can keep a clunker going and invest the difference, you are on the way to financial independence. You are also on the way to learning about maintenance, another way to keep your family out of the grip of experts. Close off enough of such avenues, and no lower or middle-class earner will be able to free themselves.
RHW,
If only the Pinto was evidence of a mad scientist plot by the CIA to destroy Chavez by flooding his country with self detonating cars. Bwhahahaaaaa
I’m lined up for CARS. It’s a ridiculously stupid program, for all the reasons noted above. But I’ll take the money, including the tax credit.
One for all and all for the UAW.
The Obama house, so to speak, has fires breaking out all over. The economic smouldering is going to reach the combustibles in the basement soon.
In the local uber-liberal fishwrap, the reader comment response to the suspending-restart of CARS was overwhelmingly negative, tracking the kind of comments one normally sees at Belmont Club. The only curve that Obama is bending is political opinion towards the middle, and the middle is getting ticked off. Even the Obama disciple neighbors are asking cost-benefit questions about Obama initiatives, especially if they (the neighbors) were not eligible for CARS! Mutinous thought-crime is breaking out from stern to bow.
On a drive today, in the countryside, I saw a new item. On a flagpole a rural resident was flying the US flag and the Israel flag. Hmmm.
Once read that the great thing about the Ford Model-T was that anyone could fix it with readily available tools, including baling wire and spit, and that it was guaranteed to break down every 100 miles. That car made America into a nation of engineers. The Good Old American Know How that won WW-II and built a foundation for global prosperity was founded on a jalopy.
Why would it not be better to send the clunker to Africa? While that might be the sensible thing to do in the abstract, I am thinking that might be difficult in practice. First there are likely WTC rules against dumping used cars in emerging markets. Then there are the import duties to consider, there has to be some. Finally there is the problem of the disruption caused to the local car market. Oh and I almost forgot, aren’t ‘those people’ supposed to forever use animal and human muscle for transport to retard the world’s carbon footprint?
I will take a chance on the comments. The box only showed previous commenters a couple of times yesterday, and everything “appears” to be ok. In pondering the odds of what is causing it, aside from a simple breakdown; the most likely guess is that the Federales are simply building their database of enemies of the State. Since I have not been quiet over the last few years, my name is already there.
#27 F
I’m afraid that you have the timeline wrong. It will be a while before we get to the “100 Flowers” stage. First there is the overt seizure of power and elimination of obvious enemies. Then there comes the fake openness to criticism and new ideas that draws out a percentage of those who were missed in the first sweep. I then expect the failures of the regime to be blamed on “Rightist Deviationists” and Kulaks. There is a certain proven method to imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Moving back to the lack of utility of the Cash for Clunkers; the destruction of the ability of future purchasers to buy cars in consonance with their economic status is a feature, not a bug.
To a statist, any form of frontier to which subjects can escape is anathema. While our physical frontier closed over a hundred years ago; the pick up and move to start over ethos still exists in our culture. If your life just is not working, it is possible to load your belongings into a car, drive across the entire country in a few days, and start afresh. While I do not see it as a guaranteed success [your problems frequently are within yourself] I have seen it work as many times as it has failed. The ability to move without internal passports and restrictions that tell the government where you are and what you are doing, along with the fact that we are a Federal and not a unitary government gives far more freedom to the individual than the regime wants.
I’m sure that Buraq and his minions are figuratively looking down the road. If all that you are allowed to buy is a vehicle that is a) hugely expensive, b) of minimal performance, and c) it can only be bought through the benificent intervention of big brother; if you are below upper middle class eventually you will be restricted to public transit, or means that can and will be restricted. I remember when it was possible to get an airline ticket without proof of who you are and your financial background. Trains and buses will probably be subject to more and more restrictions over time. Your physical and social mobility will be circumscribed, and you will have fewer opportunities to escape being a forced to be a good New Soviet Man.
The program also is economic suicide for the consumer. I drive older cars. I have never paid a new car price, watched my investment lose 1/3 of the value that I just financed as I drove it off the lot, and been faced with 3-5 years of monthly debt. We are in the end stage of a recession [fall in real GDP for 2 or more consecutive quarters]. We are in the beginning stages of a Depression [a recession where the GDP declines by 10% or more].
If you take part in the Cash for Clunkers program, you will receive at most a $4500 rebate. Most dealers have adjusted their prices to absorb that, so there is no real gain. In return, you assume a debt load of $20-40K, over a period of years. Unless your mileage difference is huge and gasoline goes to $10 a gallon; your monthly budget is far worse off. And this at a time when you might lose your job at any time. The smart response on a personal level is to reduce your debt load and payments as much as possible.
I noted that we drive older cars; albeit those with good mileage. Except for my truck which I only drive when I NEED a truck; our vehicles get >35 mpg highway. My wife’s car just had a catastrophic engine failure. For far, far, less than the “rebate”, we are getting a new engine put in that will keep the car running far longer than it would take to pay off a newer car with a relatively huge monthly payment.
I offer a prediction. Once a whole bunch of people are hooked into this program, and have added to their debt load and monthly outgo; the economy will continue to tank. A whole bunch of people will not be able to continue to make their payments. Buraq will make whatever institution financed the loan the villian of the piece, and ride to the rescue by taking over the financial institution. And once again, people will become property of the state.
Finally, those who are interested in the Cash for Clunkers program are hereby warned about their web site [cars.gov]. There are multiple reports that the “privacy policy” grants permanent access to your computer and its contents. I have not been able to check it out myself because the site will not come up; but in these days it is a risk that should be avoided. Do NOT click “yes” to that.
Subotai Bahadur
RWE,
Just to follow up. Exploding Ford Pinto
Milton Friedman discusses the Pinto and automotive economics.
Steeple @26, Leftofthemind @28, and The Old Guyi @32,
Thank you for your responses and suggestions.
Leftofthemind, I reject your suggestion of scrapping my grandchildren. Guess that just shows I do not sufficiently love the goddess Gaia.
The Old Guy, your judgment corresponds to mine, that the CO2 footprint is probably a wash. However, it would be interesting to see an audit of the energy consumed in manufacturing a fuel-efficient car, from mining the metal to delivering it to the dealer’s show room. For economic reasons I shall probably drive the Suburban for another 10 years, at which point the BMV may retire me at age 90.
Steeple, your response is truly reassuring. And since I no longer need to consume energy in fretting, that will reduce greatly my brain’s CO2 footprint.
Best wishes to you all,
Jim
I have the ultimate Cashable Clunker (TM). It is the 1987 Ford Aerostar I got from my dad that leaks coolant, brake fluid, gas (when the tank is filled), and transmission fluid. The red squirrels that broke into my dad’s garage took out what was left of the heating or air conditioning system.
It has only 40K on the odometer, but it is a real lemon that got my parent’s stranded in French-speaking Canada with a busted transmission at the time of the Queen’s (yes, that Queen, you know, Mrs. Windsor-Mountbatten) visit for Dominion day.
A Francophone hotel clerk was deciding if my parents were worthy of the last remaining hotel room and queried, “So what is that you Americans are celebrating on the 4′th of July?” Without missing a beat, Mom in her thick immigrant Serb-German accent replied, “That is when weeee trew out dee Eeeenglisshh!” and got the room.
And yes, I have kept up to insurance and registration payments. I swear it is in “drivable condition” provided it is on a brake fluid IV drip.
Have I no shame to cash in on the taxpayer’s dime and get $3500 towards another minivan or SUV? You betcha! Trouble is, the closest thing Ford makes to the Aerostar is the Flex, and the mileage of the 2009 is 1 MPG short of qualifying for the new car, and the Flex has about half the cargo room as the Aerostar. I have a Ford employee/retiree family member purchase plan chit I was hoping to use.
I guess I didn’t act fast enough because I didn’t know what to buy. Even if the CARS is renewed, inventories of the qualifying cars are depleted.
The plan was already in place, but I am pleased to announce that I am building myself a clunker – 1981 Crew Cab one-ton four wheel drive with a 500 cubic inch Cadillac motor. I think 8-10 mpg is realistic.
Some of you may remember the bumper stickers from the first oil embargo: “Drive 80 and Freeze a Yankee”
Why? Just because I can….
subotai bahadur,
I offer a prediction. Once a whole bunch of people are hooked into this program, and have added to their debt load and monthly outgo; the economy will continue to tank. A whole bunch of people will not be able to continue to make their payments.
Brilliant connecting of the dots here. Are Barney Franks’, Chris Dodd’s and Jamie Gorelick’s fingerprints to be found on this?
Jim Nicholas,
I will appreciate it if you to either spell my nick correctly or use the common abbreviation of LoTM, calling me “Left” of anything is received as offensive.
Thank you
If PJM isn’t under a DDoS DNS attack then this will do until one comes along. Not just the BC but I tried reading Jennifer Rubin’s blog and the server is constantly blocked. If it is the worst case then we have no one now to turn to.
#69 Lifeofthemind
If such is the case, if necessary we fight on alone. However, as has been noted before; the creation of alternate forms of linkage is not a bad idea.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai Bahadur,
I’m easy to contact, my nic is blue.
Lifeofthemind @68
I tried to respond to your post earlier, but it did not go through.
You have every reason to complain. My apologies.
When I first misread your name a long time ago, I thought it clever: ‘left’ofthemind = left-brain = the rational side of our brain. I have been misreading it ever since, for which I am sorry.
Thank you for the correction.
Jim
Jim Nicholas,
Your servant Sir. We seem to be facing not so much exploding PIntos as Gremlins from the Kremlin.
As many above have hinted at, this program by our all merciful all compassionate Savior Buraq is in the end a disaster for poor and many of the middle class who will no longer be able to afford a car if this program continues for any length of time, because they cannot afford a new one at $20-40K even with the clunker rebate. This program will be removing from the market some of the cheapest cars available, and reducing the supply of affordable cars.
Subotai is right; in the end this becomes just another way of controlling the public, and pushing publicly controlled transportation.
There’s nothing wrong with a nice trade
That takes cars off the market
You get a nice car newly made
And have a place to park it
And even though some low class slob
Could use some transportation
To get him to his low class job
The government’s creation
Of this fine plan will lead to more
Clean air on this fine planet
And show those clunkers out the door
At least that’s how they plan it
Of course we know all guv’mint plans
Lead down to deep perdition
So I intend to keep my vans
Regardless of condition
Gremlins from the Kremlin, just because.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UzOUb_52SY
“Cash for Clunkers” is the sort of program you get after years of following a “Clunkers for Congress” program.
But mostly I’m just testing the comment functionality.
UPDATE: which seems to work – even Edit functionality. Horray!
Since the site now deletes my information after every reload or posting I am effectively unable to edit comments. If your info is not displayed when the page loads then the server does not know who you are and will not enable the edit feature.
Interesting it did give me the Edit feature but also cleared the Name, Email, URL boxes. My suspicion is that when I reload, even if I type in those boxes , I will lose the ability to edit. Perhaps adding another comment might work but then I think I will only be ably to edit either the latest comment or at best only one at a time.
No it kept my ability to edit this when I reloaded but it did not give me the ability to edit my last post even though I was within the 10 minute window.
16 out of 78 posts? I am abusing our host’s hospitality. Have a good day everyone.
By the way, Happy President Obama Birthday everyone! It was yesterday, 1 Aug.
I have no doubt that one day it will be observed as a National Holiday.
However, since it will only be celebrated by people who do not work, no one will really notice.
By the way, has anyone checked to see if we can get $4500 if we trade in Obama?
The cash for clunkers program seems to be a fine example of the “change we can believe in” promised to us last November. A product of our new style of governance, it was apparently rushed through Congress without debate or amendments, becoming law not on its own merits, but rather by being attached to an unrelated bill.
According to Transportation Secretary LaHood who appeared on Cspan this morning, the rationale for the program was a “bailout for car dealers.” Personally, I found that explanation comforting in an odd way – it was the least insane of the various alternatives I was considering.
I think we can all be proud of the level of bureaucratic wit on display – the official name for the program being the “Car Allowance Rebate System,” CARS, for short.
At first the haste and finality of the destruction of the clunker engine blocks was a puzzlement to me. But, examination of the theological doctrines of the new order has removed the confusion. In the new secular theology moral ambiguity has been overcome with mathematical precision. The dividing line between good and evil has been exactly defined. An engine block delivering 18 mpg or below represents such unspeakable evil that it must be immediately destroyed beyond redemption. One delivering 19 mpg is pronounced to be good, beyond the reach of the clunker program, while one rated at 22 mpg is at the threshold of sainthood or its equivalence for prime movers in our new green world.
As LaHood explained the commandments of the secular doctrines, they seem to be quite specific. Except for the engine blocks themselves, one is allowed, and perhaps even encouraged, to salvage parts from the clunkers. The evil lies only in the clunker’s prime mover, the engine block.
You can’t make this stuff up. Imagine how “1984” would read if George Orwell could have had a glimpse of the real future.
Along with Subotai, I see some parallels between Cash for Clunkers and the Carter/Clinton mortgage scam. My car may have 200,000 miles on it, but there are no funky loan schemes associated with it. Sure, its’ residual value is probably around $4,500, but I can’t replace it for that! Mr. Bother’s new-to-him truck suits him fine. We paid cash for it and sold the car with the note last month (happy, happy!). No car notes here, probably ever again in my life. So I’m not participating in Cars for Clunkers, but I’m paying for it.
Similarly, the house I bought seven years ago was priced significantly under what the realtor figured we could pay. She kept trying to steer us to much larger, more expensive houses, but Mr. Bother knows his way around a pizza buffet, and he’s hard to steer. I think she was offended when I told her we were putting 20% down on a 30 year, fixed mortgage, thankyouverymuch. At least, I hope so. I took those Carter/Clinton mortgage deals as an insult, as if I don’t know how to buy a house responsibly. So I didn’t take advantage of that, but I’m paying for it, too.
So here we are. The economy stinks. Unemployment is running around 10% and maybe higher, depending upon where you live. And how did we get here? By one of the more powerful demonstrations of the Law of Unintended Consequences I’ve ever seen. *Just last year* the economy went into a tailspin in part because too many people had signed up for too much government-incentivized house loan and couldn’t pay it. So who is prompted to sign up for a car note now because the government has incentivized it?
It must be someone with a lot more faith in the government’s management of the U.S. economy than I can muster at present.
What is the real unemployment rate? Officially I am no longer counted among the Unemployed for two reasons.
1) My one year window for Unemployment Insurance has closed, though there was still $3,645.00 in the account.
2) I am performing part time menial work for $250 to $300/wk. This will end within a few months.
Make no doubt about it, as far as I am concerned I am unemployed and I am competing with people half my age for entry level retail jobs. There must be over a million of well educated people in the same situation. As the year ends millions more will come to the end of the one year window in which they are counted among the officially unemployed. Come next year I expect to see children of the middle class getting yanked out of Colleges and a round of bankruptcies for travel agents, airlines, hotels and service providers who depend on discretionary spending.
I’ve been unemployed (technically disabled) fifteen months, so I doubly don’t count. Although I do still consider myself unemployed, the wretched disability complicates the job search — I have no idea whether I’ll ever be able to pursue my former career. I was told I couldn’t apply for both unemployment and disability: I couldn’t look for work so no unemployment, and I refused to apply for disability. Oh, and did I mention Mr. Bother works for a company that supports health insurance providers? So if ObamaCare goes through he’s out of a job in 12-24 months.
LoTM, I suspect (but can’t prove) there are well in excess of 10,000,000 of us out there. As I understand it after the first year of unemployment one is regarded as “out of the job market” and voluntarily unemployed. That’s us, except there’s nothing voluntary about our jobless condition and we’re still scrabbling. If anyone can explain that I’d love to understand the logic of assuming LoTM and I don’t want to work just because a year has gone by.
The heat of the obama birth certificate story just turned up a notch over the last two days. Friday, National Review online confirmed that obama was a kenyan citizen at one time and may have been an indonesian citizen. Today WND and FR have links to obama’s kenyan birth certificate
Oh, Bother writes: “I’m not participating in Cars for Clunkers, but I’m paying for it.”
ScenarioA writes: “The dividing line between good and evil has been exactly defined.”
Truth and parody. Those seem like the right approaches to dealing with a presidential clunker, who admittedly has been getting good mileage on next to nothing, even vapors, for quite some time.
By the way, Andrew Sullivan is now asking for Obama’s long form birth certificate.
I have a 1999 Suburban which I got primarily to take 6 grandchildren on vacations. They are now busy with summer jobs and sports teams, and so the Suburban no longer has that function. A smaller car would serve my wife and me quite well.
Although I am a skeptic about anthropogenic global warming and its dangers, suppose I were not. If I were concerned about nothing but my automobile carbon footprint, would it be greater if I kept my Suburban for another 10 years or if I scrapped it now (in a way that no one else could use it) and substituted its carbon footprint for that of a smaller car, which would have to include the carbon footprint of its entire manufacturing process.
Jim your 99 will be worth more for parts than the so called discount in a couple of years. I have a 88 Blazer 4×4 6.2 diesel that is worth 4k just for parts.
Your carbon footprint won’t matter soon when all these domino’s collapse into a heap on DC.
For reasons that have been gone over before I think the birth certificate argument and any argument that involves Obama’s adoption or citizenship as a minor is a waste of time. If evidence can be produced that after his 18th birthday he claimed citizenship in another country, such as by traveling on a foreign passport or claiming a scholarship only offered to citizens of another country, then there could be a challenge to his status as a natural born citizen. All of the records at the Passport office and the three academic institutions he attended after his 18th birthday are sealed. Those are the only records that matter. Referencing these overseas forgeries is only embarrassing.
Obama’s own flacks deny that obama was born in Kenya but do acknowledge that he had a dual citizenship up until 1982
from obama’s own site factcheck.org(this is cached as the original was taken down) by way of fightthesmears on his dual citizenship at birth
“When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was
a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire.
As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose
citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948.
That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children.
Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn
an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically
expired on Aug. 4,1982.”(Someone will want to cache the above web page because it will be taken down eventually. Ah here is the cached version.) Here is a better cached versionHere’s a third Kindly cache these too.
Here is the problem with fighthesmears narrative:
We already have recorded that Obama’s wife michellle said Obama’s mother was “very young and very single” when obama was born.
British law at the time of obama’s birth only gave citizenship from the father to the son in the case that the father is married to the mother:ie the son is legitimate. See wikipedia 2.4.3Since obama’s parents were NOT married — how did obama get his British/Kenyancitizenship? Its not unreasonable to think that he got his British/Kenyan because he was born there–and not because of his parentage.
Be careful guys about taking the MSM’s word on the birth certificate story. There is good reason the story has legs. Here’s a very detailed backgroud on the story.
So far the kenyan birth certificate has held up better under scrutiny than the Obama COLB. But we’ll see.
This birth certificate thing is soooo dangerous –if it turns out the guy’s a fraud and he won’t resign, and he has to be escorted from the White House, cities will start burning a la late 60s summers, and all capital & labor mkts will crash & property values nose-dive and a real capital D Depression will be upon us, one with violence and civil disorder, and international war to follow in all liklihood.
What will be the object of ‘those who sent’ an imposter?
All that, but it’s not the end in itself –the end in itself is the Constitution, which after all that gets rolling will be cast as “that old piece of paper that started all this by attacking people of color again and it must be stopped from doing any of these terrible things ever again in the future”. Once suspended, we’ll have a civil war, or no more Constitution, one or other.
It’s the ultimate Cloward-Piven, first the middle class’s security, then the Dollar’s respectability, then the Constitution’s viability and reputation, then the military’s foundational mission & oath –and funding, then the actual geographical (not just psychological) borders. Next, welcome to the NWO, by then knee deep in blood.
Don’t bite, folks –don’t play your assigned role. Hold, hold, hold your ground, don’t force this thing in the way your enemy wants you to force it. Vote these sonzabitches out in 2010 and never ever let them anywhere near the levers of power again.
According to John Williams over at Shadow Govt Statistics the REAL rate is just over 20%. The U-3 rate is reported as just a hair under 10%. The U-6 is a bit over 16%.
Sorry Buddy, that ship has already sailed friend. Best to be ready when defecation hits the rotary oscillator.
You know, guys, this “Cash for Clunkers” program does fit the “creative destruction” template. Which makes a market-oriented critique of it politically difficult.
I guess it’s the mediator role that DC that has created for itself that offends me. These “clunkers” are just cars that would eventually expire in a slow, steady demolition of daily commutes, coastal drives and summer vacations…and whatever, anyway. And so, they eventually would have wound up contributing to the auto-recycling, manufacturing and dealer industries in their own time.
So, why the program? Is it really “fear of Global Warming?” Or is this akin to the “Flat Screen In Every House” campaign, wherein Congress “incentivized” Americans (with their own money, BTW) to line up like circus poodles and buy 4 and 5 thousand dollar flat-screens – TV’s that today sell for $700 at Walmart?
Me, I suspect it’s the latter.
“Just Say No”
***
JFS/93; you may be right.
But that Cloward-Piven sh*t works both ways and if the ship HAS sailed, then they ARE now the system –and every joker who should have known about this illegit candidate needs to be sued down to a tin cup full of pencils. Starting with that miserable little skunk Pinch Shultzberger or whatever the frik his name is.
You can imagine my surprise to find out that a program labeled “Cash for Clunkers” was not, in fact, a congressional fundraiser.
It’s an honest mistake that I believe many of you would understand.
Darren, you’re talking about the “Clunkers for Cash” program. Yep, it’s easy to get con-fused.
So, why the program? Is it really “fear of Global Warming?”
No-its to make cars more expensive for those at the lower income levels. And this is turn–they think, will increase the need and desire for government to create and promote “public transportation,” something that is totally inappropriate for anything other than cities with a high population density.
Cash for clunkers is not even good for the environment. A min. of 18mpg is really nothing. US gov’t should have waited if car manufacturer can make a 100mpg cars, then people could have a better deal.
Great comments here, esp #1 hutsul, #17 lotm. Can’t hardly improve on either.
92. buddy larsen:
Yes there are laws of unintended consequences.
Some liberals in an open acknowledgement of Obama’s problems are starting to call for a change in the constitution.Liberal defenders of Obama in full retreat on Birth CertificateNow The LA Times Wants To Amend the Constitution Rather Than Have Obama Show His Birth Certificate. (Translation: Yeah he’s not a Natural Born Citizen — As the Constitution Requires–but…)
Obama’s law firm has been working on this since at least 2006
An associate lawyer in a Chicago-based firm whose partner served on a finance committee for then-Sen. Barack Obama has advocated for the elimination of the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that a president be a “natural-born” citizen, calling the requirement “stupid” and asserting it discriminates, is outdated and undemocratic.
The paper was written in 2006 by Sarah Herlihy, just two years after Obama had won a landslide election in Illinois to the U.S. Senate. Herlihy is listed as an associate at the Chicago firm of Kirkland & Ellis. A partner in the same firm, Bruce I. Ettelson, cites his membership on the finance committees for both Obama and Sen. Richard Durbin on the corporate website.
The article by Herlihy is no longer online under law review articles from Kent University. However, parts of it can be found reprinted here.
According to Herlihy’s paper…
“Ultimately, the emotional reasons to oppose a constitutional amend-ment abolishing the natural born citizen requirement for presidential eligi-bility will prevail over the rational reasons because the rational reasons derive, in large part, from the increase in globalization.”
Perhaps. But that was written before O became president.
As you say: just say no.
TCobb/98; Stalin found he had to weaken the rural areas, too –the only way to cut down the power of the ”troublemakers”.
here’s two little bon mots:
1) On the O’reilly show Thursday nite, O’Reilly interviewed some guy –came in late & missed name –who was talking about Soros being both an O braintruster AND major short the US Dollar. Conflict of interest, but we knew that –why i mention is that the guy had the interview on video, and happened to be a good flirt, and got the famous ego excited, to the point that he said, on camera, in response to the question ‘do you have any idea where the Dollar is going?’ answered vehemently, with a broad grin and a raised face, “I know EXACTLY where the Dollar is going -but I just can’t say it right now!”
2) In association with the Obama CFTC moving to regulate oil futures speculation, turns out (dunno how i missed this all this time) that the specs who ran up the $150 last summer are becoming known, and as Ben Stein said over the weekend “most of them old Enron traders”. Recall what Gensler of the CFTC did for those same people in the late 90s via deregulation (oil futures speculation was legalized in 1999) as well as writing new regs to permit Enron’s electronic system. Enron’s board was also loaded up with names now in the Obama administration.
Do a search and wait for your scalp to crawl off the top of your head. These people are sacking Rome, and then are going to be the New Kommizars too good for all that money-grubbing –but not ’til they have a mountain of it squirreled away.
It’s actually demonic in its arrogance & hyper-ambition, to be so extreme on the abuse of a sysytem in order to ruin it so that they can install a new one –but only after having gotten fabulously wealthy in the abuse that so discredited the one they want to replace, that it became possible to do so.
It’s as if someone shot you in the forehead and you asked, with your last breath, “Why?” and they said “Because you didn’t stop me.” Free range evil –”Lucifer” means “Light -Bearer” y’know.
I think you guys are just faking surprise at the ramifications of cash-for-clunkers. Cash for Grandpa is inspired though, Doug at his best.
Destruction of capital for Obama and his minions ain’t a bug, it’s a feature!
Cash for Grandpa.
By all means.
That’s what we are coming to.
And, the earlier you cash grandpa in, the more cash you get.
Free the Giant Palouse Earthworm!
Send the farmers back to Europe!
“ My suspicion is that when I reload, even if I type in those boxes , I will lose the ability to edit.”
—
We ain’t got no use for paranoid whiners in these parts, LifeOf!
Thank you so much weSwinger!
My pleasure.
(also my demise:-(
—
“the engine seized up and the car was dead”
…the automotive equivalent of the massive coronary to come under Ezekiel’s Obamacare.
they’ll never take me –i’m wired in, if anyone comes over the wire, it’ll rattle all those bedpans full of dentures i hung out there. that’ll wake me up in time to load the flintlock
An excellent defensive posture, Buddy.
#96: That would be the “Cash for Contributors” program, also known as the stimulus bill, and it’s 200 times bigger.
Speaking of demonic:
This is the picture on the front page of the NY Times, presented without a caption, above the following lede:
—
Evidence Points to Venezuelan Aid to Rebels
Despite denials by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan officials have continued to help Colombia’s largest rebel group, according to new evidence. Above, a Colombian soldier inspected an area after an attack in July.
Here’s the nitty gritty…
http://minx.cc/?post=290415
buddy larsen,
My recommendation is to avoid spending any time or energy arguing the birth certificate angle. It is essentially “magical thinking” that expects a solution to appear because someone wants it to. Classic example, accepting the argument that he was a UK/Kenyan citizen from his birth father and then claiming that since his parents were not really legally married, true but irrelevant since his father was a polygamist/bigamist who would be denied US citizenship but not a student visa, he still had the Kenyan citizenship and therefore must have been born there. Nooooo it just means that he constructed a facade over the fact that he was probably born out of legal wedlock.
Your information on the criminal financial links to this administration is most interesting. Clear and unambiguous evidence of these stories, the web of sleaze and corruption linking Dodd, Franks, Gorelick, Rezco, Raines et. and Obama need to be produced and distributed and hammered home before the next election. This is the spadework we all need to be doing. Everything we say must be accurate and reliable.
JFSanders031,
Thank you for that link, The author should be cleared before we take his numbers as gospel but it goes with my gut instinct.
Tcobb,
You have the elitist Mass Transit for the Masses agenda well worked out. I frequently ride the electric sewer aka the People’s Urban Transit Zystem.
Josh,
Thank you for your kind words.
Doug,
In the NYT? Is there a lover’s quarrel in paradise?
We should be exchanging/collecting webmail addresses that should be on our Blogger IDs etc.
111. CPT. Charles:
No one could say it better.
Like watching a Michael Vick video.
(I skip over descriptions in text.)
“While the souls of these dead pups look down in disgust from Doggie Heaven, Vick’s apologists sing his undeserved praises.
Responding to reports that Vick faces a four-game suspension before resuming play, Buffalo Bills receiver Terrell Owens said: “The guy’s already suffered so much. And to add a four-game suspension on a two-year prison sentence, that’s ridiculous.” He later told ESPN: “The commissioner needs to go sit in jail for 23 months.”
As USA Today reported, Owens recruited other footballers to support Vick via Twitter. Their rampant errors of grammar, spelling, and syntax are preserved here for posterity:
“im in support of mike vick too man,” wrote Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald. “I wanna c him back in action being the human highlight file he is.Im with ya bro.”
“Never heard him complain or wine,” remarked Minnesota Vikings tight end Visanthe Shiancoe. “Let the man play.”
“He did time and lost his shoe deal,” pleaded Cardinals defensive end Darnell Dockett. “Dear Commissioner please reinstate mike vick.”
Having completed his prison sentence, Vick is even-steven with Uncle Sam. Now the private sector must address this man’s evil.
Vick does not deserve any prestigious position of visibility, glory, or adulation. Any team that hires this dog killer should be boycotted by dog lovers and decent people everywhere, as should that team’s sponsors. If he ever enters an athletic venue, he should be booed off the field, out of the stadium, and beyond the parking lot.
Rather than letting him resume his multi-million-dollar sports career, someone somewhere should hand Michael Vick a mop.”
Down with Dog-Killer Michael Vick
Hutsul @1 made a comment that has been ignored, but that I believe is only too accurate.
If the Obama Health Care Plan ever takes effect, we will eventually see financial incentives to folks who will opt for hospice over treatment or will select a visit to the “thanatorium” rather than to the sanatorium.
Just think of the financial benefits. If someone with cancer opts for early hospice over treatment, we can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if our aging seniors would only listen to their children’s plea, the children will get large government bonuses from the money the government health plan will save by the speedy deaths of those pesky old folks.
It will be just like the Cash for Clunkers program. Get those inefficient mpg cars off the road — and we’ll pay you to do so. Get those inefficient oldsters off the health roles and we will pay you to do that too.
O brave new world that hath such creatures in’t.
Obama world that hath such programs in’t.
Doug,
The NFL is a private business. There are no First Amendment issues here. The Commissioner should ban Vick for life and suspend everyone of his insubordinate supporters for 30 days, that is 4 games, without pay.
Buddy,
More of the same:
—
Alt-A Loans and Pesky Resistant Subprime Loans: The Lingering Mortgage Beast. $1.1 Trillion in Active Toxic Waste Mortgages. PennyMac Ready for Toxic Mortgages. What Happened to the Public-Private Investment Program?
One thing the happy cheerleaders in the financial circuit fail to have is basic logic.
Think of it this way.
Why would we need all those trillions in backstops if we are now officially out of the recession?
I’ll tell you why:
These are the same people who led us to financial Armageddon and here they are promising the public once again that all is well yet quietly, they are developing methods to unload the remaining toxic mortgage waste so they can effectively be absolved from their massive financial sins. Who better to know what crap is on their balance sheets than the mortgage manure producers?
This is certifiable insanity!
Now wouldn’t you think it would be prudent to at least call in folks who were whistle-blowing before the crisis to buy up some of these mortgages at the right price or at the very least, didn’t produce the actual junk?
Of course this isn’t going to happen because crony Wall Street knows that once we open up the books, we know what kind of toxic mortgage waste we are going to find in their Pandora ’s Box.
Their plan is to unload this mortgage chum to the U.S. taxpayer now that they are drunk on financial happy talk so once things sour again, the mortgages will now be fully on the taxpayer’s back.
Whoops!
Now it’s your problem.
Also, see:
The American Household Balance Sheet.
Lessons from the Great Depression Part XXVII:
Household Net Worth Drop in Great Depression 11 Percent.
Current Net Worth Drop of $13.8 Trillion Equivalent to 21 Percent Drop.
here is a pdf transcript of Kenyan National Assembly on Nov 5, 2008, the day after Obama was elected. Over and over again there are references
to Obama being a “son of the soil” of Kenya and a Kenyan. On page page 3275 there is this passage:
HOUSE SHOULD ADJOURN TO DISCUSS
ELECTION OF MR. BARRACK OBAMA
Ms. Odhiambo: On a point of order,
Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir. It is not on this issue.
I stand on a point of order under Standing
Order No.20 to seek leave for adjournment of
the House to discuss the American presidential
election results.
(Applause)\
Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the
President-elect, Mr. Obama, is a son of the soil
of this country. Every other country in this
continent is celebrating the Obama win. It is
only proper and fitting that the country which
he originates from should show the same
excitement, pomp and colour.
Doug,
While with one hand the politically connected, UAW and Wall Street insiders from Goldman Sachs, skim off billions from this administration the other hand sees the Congress capping Wall Street bonuses and compensation packages. The effect of these two forces will be to drive talent away from legal creative activity and into political manipulation, if young and ambitious, or into retirement. My expectation is that we will see or rather not see an accelerating flight of capital from the United States and within the US into a growing gray economy. When people are selling gasoline out of cans from the back of a truck the government will be amazed to discover that they won’t be collecting any tax revenue.
I agree with Buddy, not to argue the birth certificate business so much. There may be something there, but, the real issue is two citizen parents. Don’t you folks recall, in some high school government class, the teacher would ask, what’s the only office where you have to be a Natural Born Citizen, and, she’d ask, what’s that, and why.
We’d all answer, two citizen parents and the reason is, no divided loyaties in the Commander in Chief.
It was common understanding, back when I grew up.
Winston Churchill could not be President of the United States, for instance. Even though he had an American mom.
Its a fantasy–perhaps an evil and bad one–but how would it be if Congress-critters were required by law to travel to and from Congress by “public transportation?”
Subotai @ 62:
Yikes! Well, like you I am already on one or more of their lists already. No worries.
A few years ago when the Prius came out and the subject of ‘carbon footprint’ was bandied about, someone did the comparison of Prius vs ‘X’, where ‘X’ is a vehicle with the same or lesser ‘carbon footprint’. I think it came out that the Prius comares to the Hummer H3. So much for that ‘greener than thou’ crap.
Cash for clunkers has ‘unintended consequences’ you say? Who woulda’ thunk it?
In the SW around the holidays, we regularly see two cars strapped together and in convoy with otheres headed south for the border. Vans. Pick’em up trucks. Etc. Small O/T – one of the most stolen vehicles in NM is the Ford F-150 pickup. Guess where they end up? Almost none are ever recovered if they are stolen on the border.
The comments thing may have to do with corruption of the mother site db. Your fields for comments are tied into the db and cookies.
bob,
No, as nicely as I can say this, No. We had a President whose father was known not to be a citizen and the opposition tried desperately to get him disqualified on other grounds, Chester A. Arthur. Now please stop this. Your High School teacher was wrong. You are a good guy and not a troll and this is not my house but I am getting very tired of this. It is only a distraction from other more serious points that have been reviewed.
Charles,
You unlike bob are beyond hope. You are just banging away the same dull point that means absolutely nothing. Who cares what the legislature in Outer Matabeleland or such said? So they think he’s a Son of The Soil? BFD, how many politicians claim to be a Son of Ireland on St Patrick’s Day? Now please just go away and think about this. You are hurting the credibility of serious efforts to deal with Obama and you are undermining the credibility of your engineering arguments on your blog about desalinization, which would otherwise sound interesting.
Life of the Mind–go to Natural Born Citizen and scroll down till to you come to the issue of Chester Arthur. The writer there, who is very good, has researched this at length.
I think you are wrong.
I agree with Buddy, not to argue the birth certificate business so much. There may be something there, but, the real issue is two citizen parents.
Yeah—I am an army brat, born in Germany. Both my parents were born in Texas, both of them US citizens by birth. You cannot believe the trouble I had trying to get a US passport. The documents attesting to my birth and ancestry just weren’t quite good enough. It finally got cleared up, but I had to go through my local Congressman’s office to get the Federal Government to officially recognize that I was indeed one of their citizens.
Life of the Mind–
What is your definition of ‘Natural Born Citizen’ and how do you come to your definition?
It must mean something, it is in the document.
92. buddy larsen: This birth certificate thing is soooo dangerous
You are right; this is a very dangerous issue. But, not in the way you describe. It’s dangerous for conservatives, and immediately so.
Look at the bottom line: there is no court in this land which would not decide the case in Obama’s favor on the basis of Stare Decisis even if proof could be found that Obama was born in Kenya of an underage unwed mother and without American citizenship as Charles’ source suggests.
So, this issue is not at all dangerous for Obama. It is, however, quite dangerous for conservatives. It could help Obama turn the polls around and persuade Congress to pass his key bills in the coming sixty days.
If I recall the numbers correctly (I didn’t bookmark or record them), I have read that roughly 1000 articles appeared in the mainstream media on this issue in all of 2008, while half that number has appeared in the last two weeks (300+ last week, if I recall correctly.) MSM coverage of what they are calling the “birther” issue is not at all friendly to conservatives; rather it is shaping up as a major effort to discredit the credibility of essentially all conservatives who might be potential critics in the broader game in play. The size and intensity of the attacks, measured by the volume of articles in this recent cluster, suggests to me that they know they are vulnerable on the merits of the issues in the ongoing debates and in the spirit that a strong offense is the best defense, they are moving to discredit their critics.
Obama has had a bad couple of weeks. As of today, he is down in the polls and key elements of his agenda are at risk. I think that he thinks that he has, perhaps, 60 days to turn it around – to persuade Congress to pass his bills and to recover in the polls. I am sure that he will try.
90, 91. Charles: I agree with you that it is likely that Obama’s mother was unwed at his birth.
That being the probable case (in his 1995 book Dreams, for example, Obama implied that he doubted that his parents had been legally married), why would an underage single mother fly half way around the world to have her baby delivered in Africa rather than in a modern hospital in Honolulu?
Kenya is half way around the world. The 707 of that era was not as comfortable for late term pregnant females as are today’s jetliners. And the trip would have been long: Honolulu to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to New York, New York to London with a stop for refueling at Gander Bay, London to Cairo, Cairo to Nairobi. That would be a very expensive trip in those days.
I would think that the cost and inconvenience would rule out such a journey even if she was sure she would be welcome in Kenya.
And, best evidence is that she would not have been welcomed at that time. Obama wrote in Dreams that his Kenyan grandfather had strongly opposed the proposed marriage – shocking his maternal grandparents with the intensity of his objections in a letter he had written to them. In that letter, he had made it very clear that he did definitely not want a mixed race grandchild.
So, for these reasons, I think it is most likely that Obama was born in Hawaii. But, even if not, and a case would get into the courts, Stare Decisis would provide the basis for the court’s decision going in Obama’s favor.
Hence, we need to focus our attention on the important issues on the table now, such as those raised by Hutsul and many others following him in this thread. We really cannot allow Obama’s people to use this issue to discredit us at this critical time.
And no, I don’t think Charles is ‘beyond hope’.
I too have gotten interested in the facts of Obama’s life. Almost all of it is some kind of weaving of a fantasy.
I, really, don’t know who his father was. I know his mother was a really really screwed up white girl, but his father? I’m not sure.
If his ghost written biography is correct, his father was an alcoholic Kenyan communist, whose bright idea to solve things was to take away people’s rights.
In other words, Zimbabwe. Kill off or exile the productive, and go back to no law and racialism, in their own style.
So yes, I think we should be looking into all of this any way we can.
bob,
I was trained in Immigration Law at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. US citizenship for persons born outside the territory of the United States is based on jus sanguinis, that is by the blood. Citizenship for persons born on US soil is based on jus soli, that is under the Sun. The only place today where someone can be born a US national and not be a US citizen is American Samoa. The definitions of who is a citizen under what circumstances has changed many times but most of those changes deal with people born outside the United States. At one time it was possible to be born a US national within the US and not be a Natural Born Citizen. Ever since the adoption of the 14th Amendment all persons born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” have been citizens and are considered “Natural Born.” All Native American Indians are now considered US citizens if born in the United States. Indians from Canada have freedom to enter the US but are not citizens.
It may be possible to argue that the child of an illegal immigrant, the so called “anchor babies” are in fact not entitled to citizenship. If there was such an argument it would be interesting to see if it would apply only to the children of illegal immigrant mothers or also to the children of a US citizen mother who conceived with an illegal immigrant father. The question of the citizenship of a child conceived through rape would also have to be considered. All of those arguments would not apply to Barack Obama. His father had a valid student visa when he entered the United States. However as I have noted at this time a man like Mr Obama Sr. would be ineligible for an immigrant visa that confers permanent resident status and leads to naturalization. That is because he was a polygamist. I do not know if that was a legal bar 47 years ago.
If you are concerned that everything that we know about this man, his secrecy and dishonesty, his putative father Obama Sr, his friends and associates, Frank Davis, Ayers etc. are a reason to work to spare our country further damage then I am with you. My argument is just don’t waste your time going down blind alleys.
Ever since the adoption of the 14th Amendment all persons born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” have been citizens and are considered “Natural Born.”
But, no, you are wrong. This has been talked about at length over at Natural Born Citizen.
You are arguably wrong. Go there, and read all the material.
And, reconsider your position.
bob,
Your argument is reduced to a logical fallacy of citing some off site authority, without a link I might note and without any reason to to accept its credibility. This is worse then walking in here and attempting to end an argument by saying “Wicki says so so I must be right.” This argument is over. I am done with you.
Hmmm. I just censored myself. wrote a really cynical thing about how a certain government is busy appointing people to positions of great power based on personal loyalty instead of loyalty to the laws and founding documents of that country. There was some further reckless prediction that the members of a certain grass-roots organization named for squirrel food are probably in line to be granted police powers and side arms.
But it’s just silly story telling. Fables. No anti-government murmurings going on here.
Nope.
But I do recommend people prepare themselves for extended periods of upheaval. Could be hurricane, tornado, earthquake, meteorites arriving without warning, or army ants.
or other stuff.
Well, the link is Natural Born Citizen, the writer is a lawyer, with I think a fine mind, and it is well researched, what can I say. If you don’t want to read his writings it’s your loss.
Should we start to call you Death of the Mind?
I think he makes some good well researched points.
Here, just start here, and read north and south LOTM–from Natural Born Citizen.
You must define in your own mind what the phrase means, or meant, and why it is there.
Otherwise you are not engaging in discussion.
jvn Says:
August 1, 2009 at 9:10 am
The key here is an extrapolation of the phrase “natural born citizen” in a manner that is not backed up by any plausible evidence.
Leo, you make the argument that NBC is somehow related to “natural law,”
[Ed. No, I don't do that. NBC is national law. Natural law? What's that got to do with being President?]
and have inserted the idea that “statutory citizenship” disqualifies someone from being President, and that is simply not true.
[Ed. I can't think of any class of statutory citizens who would be eligible to be President. Please elaborate. If a citizen is natural born he doesn't need a statute.]
Not that any of this applies to the President – he was born in the United States and is clearly a “natural born citizen,”
[Ed. The only thing clear about this is that your statement is wrong. There is no law or case which states that simply being born in the US makes one eligible to be President. What if Kim Jong Il were to get a North Korean woman pregnant in North Korea and then have the pregnant woman smuggled into the country to have the child on US soil? Do you honestly believe that child is eligible to be President? Answer this question before posting again.]
but the Founders DID NOT exclude anyone who was a citizen at birth from being President, in fact, given the travel restrictions at the time it is unlikely that they would deny the children of American diplomats the right to be President.
Can you show us your evidence for the exclusion of “citizens at birth?”
[Ed. Yes, read Wong Kim Ark. Justice Gray indicates quite clearly that WKA was not a natural born citizen despite having been born in the US.]
Obama Presidential Eligibility – An Introductory Primer
Bob and Charles,
Do either of you two disagree with THIS?
“ MSM coverage of what they are calling the “birther” issue is not at all friendly to conservatives;
rather it is shaping up as a major effort to discredit the credibility of essentially all conservatives who might be potential critics in the broader game in play.”
What’s so hard to understand about that and the rest of what ScenarioA has to say @128 ?
Here’s another question. I just watched a bunch of youtube videos of car dealers blowing up clunker engines. Each time, the video ends with the engine giving off an enormous cloud of white smoke.
Isn’t all that smoke saturated with the exact sort of ultra-fine ground silica dust that causes silicosis — untreatable fatal lung disease?
I think it’s a set-up. I think JJredfan/133 is talking about the goal of the people who have been setting this thing up in more or less high gear since the big 2006 congressional and statehouse victories, when they noted they had this perfect specimen, Obama, on whom to focus the myriad cultural and financial tools that have been sharpened over the decades since the Clinton election, and were ready and waiting for a catalyst.
Soros is one of the biggies in this deal –don’t tell me he didn’t understand O’s background and its interface with US law.
Now read Soros’ published ambition to see in his lifetime, and he’s getting old the Dollar brought down as world reserve currency.
Obama, with his race, brains, ambition, looks, voice and “amenable-to-a-temporary-gray-out” background, is so perfect that whatever disorganization and intent-leakage we are beginning to see, may well be due to the perfect candidate having come along a little before they were fully ready, but being so right for the job, spurred the jump-off when it did.
I think the 2006 election and complete prior capture of the MSM (and its unexpectedly wildly successful “BDS” campaign), and the Clinton era regulations and their protective moles at the tops of significant financial power centers and regulatory agencies, when hooked up to Mr. Perfect’s presence just offstage (in Chicago), just smelled too much like Marx’s “historical inevitability” to these people.
So long/short, my fear is that a push on the legitimacy issue is, on the evidence, precisely what they (the expert Constitutional technicians and deadly enemies of its intent) want to happen.
We bite at our deep peril.
I think it’s a set-up. I think JJredfan/133 is talking about the goal of the people who have been setting this thing up in more or less high gear since the big 2006 congressional and statehouse victories, when they noted they had this perfect specimen, Obama, on whom to focus the myriad cultural and financial tools that have been sharpened over the decades since the Clinton election, and were ready and waiting for a catalyst.
Soros is one of the biggies in this deal –don’t tell me he didn’t understand O’s background and the US law’s interface with it. Now read Soros’ published ambition to see in his lifetime, and he’s getting old the Dollar brought down as world reserve currency.
Obama, with his race, brains, ambition, looks, voice and “amenable-to-a-temporary-gray-out” background, is so perfect that whatever disorganization and intent-leakage we are beginning to see, may well be due to the perfect candidate having come along a little before they were fully ready, but being so right for the job, spurred the jump-off when it did.
I think the 2006 election and complete prior capture of the MSM (and its unexpectedly wildly successful “BDS” campaign), and the Clinton era regulations and their protective moles at the tops of significant financial power centers and regulatory agencies, when hooked up to Mr. Perfect’s presence just offstage (in Chicago), just smelled too much like Marx’s “historical inevitability” to these people.
So long/short, my fear is that a push on the legitimacy issue is, on the evidence, precisely what they (the expert Constitutional technicians and deadly enemies of its intent) want to happen.
We bite at our deep peril.
Let O be removed, even if there’s no civil upheaval, and the 2006 congress will be running the show –with Pelosi’s string-pullers in savage retaliatory mode. We’ll be castrating male children before you know it, in trade for a drink of estrogen-aide because it has some water in it.
Just kidding. Maybe.
141. buddy larsen:
ScenarioA has to say @128
Yeah I think there is merit to that argument. There are serious laws of unintended consequences at work here. That said the intended consequences of current activities are not better.
The first response is to make sure that at least one state house enacts legislation that requires someone running for president to make available all their birth related documentation. Seems to me I read somewhere that Texas was doing that.
That will cut off O’s second term and make him a lame duck early in his first term.
I don’t what the second move is.
However, the evidence keeps building that O has been a citizen of several countries including both Kenya and Indonesia. Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate posted yesterday is holding up pretty well under withering fire.
There’s now over 5000 comments and 100′s of thousands of page views on Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate over at FreeRepublic.
If your clunker doesn’t qualify for voucher, you can get a tax deduction instead if you donate car to charity. Your car donation will also help a worthy charity. Details at http://www.cars4charities.org.
I hear ya, Charles –and absolutely not should we want to look the other way and pretend not to care.
OTOH, it makes sense, in light of what is an undeniable power grab of breath-taking ambition and audacity, that one of the enemy fallbacks is, having made 100-day hay now to lock the nation into a ruinous debt death-spiral, to have the legitimacy issue boil over, and yes, lose the Obama presidency –but have it exit leaving the nation in a nasty racial situation that will validate what they have been saying all along about a “racist society”.
IOW, get the cabal at the top magnitudes richer and more powerful, and in overlordship of a nation morally confused, financially busted, militarily weak, deeply demoralized, authority dependent, and personally docile –well what’s not to like?
Even if a rump GOP manages to parlay the Obama legitimacy issue into another fling at taking control?
I’m not sure anybody really knows how to fight it at this point in time. I hope the Tea Party Nation will just surge forward without overthinking the thing (what was wretchard’s Tagalog word?) –but will not give the enemy (‘enemy as opposed to an old-timey ‘loyal oppo’ because that is how they see it and want it) a made-to-order gift issue of (here it is):
“a rightwing faction that is willing to break the nation into pieces over a technicality it found on a 230 year old piece of paper”.
If the enemy can sell this to the indie middle, already perhaps feeling sorry for the Obamas (photos of sobbing Michelle packing up in the White House, sad daughters with tears in their eyes, think Nixon’s and Gore’s farewell family shots, but far, far better staged), then hello fellow Whigs, Federalists, Know-Nothings, Graingers –or worse, fellow ‘enemies of the state’.
Assuming that we’re going to waste more money on this, why not reduce the amount from $4,500 per car to $3,000? Obviously, the current amount is pulling way more people than the program’s authors expected. Therefore you could lower the subsidy and get even more cars bought. If you lower it too far, you’d get only yawns, they came in too high in this round.
If you’re ideologically dedicated to building an entirely new system, then first you have to get the old one out of the way –and how you do that is really only a detail.
There’s the preferred way (for a ‘long enough’ time, make us want it or think we want it) or failing that there’s the range of ‘other’ ways, better and worse.
But the important thing is create the conditions for the installation of the new system. The further they get backed into a corner the more exotic the phenomena we may expect to see perpetrated. Even the red button. We have to really manage this defense –we’ve gotten our silly distracted asses in a major crack.
146. buddy larsen:
I’m not worried so much about the racial angle because the libs are already lawyering up.
Some liberals in an open acknowledgement of Obama’s problems are starting to call for a change in the constitution.Liberal defenders of Obama in full retreat on Birth CertificateNow The LA Times Wants To Amend the Constitution Rather Than Have Obama Show His Birth Certificate. (Translation: Yeah he’s not a Natural Born Citizen — As the Constitution Requires–so lets change the constitution to fit the facts.)
Well, if they lead the way, maybe we’re not gonna be in such a bad spot after all. yes, let’s let them hang that ‘amendment’ albatross around their necks! maybe you’re right to keep hammering …day by day issue, ain’t it !
…before any serious debate on an amendment could begin, tho, Obama will have to admit to a major transgression.
I’m thinking about the Rex problem. the dems rule all over the place. they are in the best possible authoritative position to get the constitution changed to fit the facts. The MSM could move overnight and without shame or self consciousness from the crazy meme to the lets change the constitution meme. easy no problem. even if obama is an illegal alien — even if 80% of the country wanted O tarred and feathered–the dems could still ignore everything.
really it happens all the time. 80% of the US population is on one side of a dozen issues or so and the elites are on the other side — so the 80% is ignored.
That wouldn’t surprise me. If they want trouble, if trouble is the hidden agenda, they’d have it right there –and could take the high road –a disingenuous high road to be sure, but for the purpose at hand it’d do: “trying to save the country”.
There is a “tertiary” market in Mexico for used American cars. Those clunkers would have found new buyers and owners. Oh, right, we’re supposed to worry about the carbon footprint.
How about we pile all the old junkers in Al Gore’s and Henry Waxman’s back yards?
Incidentally, the engines could have been salvaged to run emergency generators in 3rd World hospitals.
Which reminds me: when the SALT agreement was finalized, hundreds of ICBMs and other missiles were destroyed. All of those could have been used as relatively cheap launchers for scientific satellites instead. The Apollo program was completely dismantled, including the manufactirng facilities that could have been used to make reconfigured launch vehicles, and the list goes on and on. Why does government consider mass destruction of this kind to be a good thing?
“”"”I am *not* in favor of shipping them to Mexico, Africa or Russia.”"”"”
NahnCee, I assume you object if the govt. is doing this. This kind of thing has been done by the private sector for decades.
“I’m not participating in Cars for Clunkers, but I’m paying for it”. Oh, Bother@82
This sounds like how I feel about the UK.
For most of my working life, I regarded tax as something inevitable, not to be complained about nor too deeply looked into, but now I am becoming obsessive about it.
It is not so much Labour’s crack-addict pursuit of every last tax-penny that has driven me thus, but Labour’s Lady Bountiful pursuit of ways to spend it.
It seems that no spending idea is too clunking, wasteful, immoral, or just plain foolish. Worst of all, this bounty is presented as being “free”, which is exactly what it is not, unless received by someone who has never been a UK tax-payer.
I was going to say that Labour cannot stop spending, but is that really correct ? Is it cannot, or will not ? Is destructive spending actually an article of policy, a means to undermine the old order which the party detests so much ?
Someone said “all taxation is a form of social engineering”. The form of society Labour has tax-engineered is ugly, disfunctional, divided, and should serve as a warning to the US, not an example.
But perhaps there is a silver lining to this. Somewhere there must be a Pythonesque office with a “Ministry of Silly Ideas“ sign on the door, to which I could apply to get some tax-money to splash out on some silly ideas of my own…I just need to find it. Al_Batross
Personally it seems likely he was born here – – rather, that the alternative seems so unlikely. I will be satisfied if the issue is pressed just to see that he is a common bastard, either not knowing who his father is, or learning (ha) that it is not who we think it is. Or any other gossipy type dirt that a full cert can reveal.
If there were something really loopy, that would be a bonus.
Based on the photographic evidence I’m convinced that Frank Marshall Davis is the true father of the bastard.
In which case the sole reason for gaming the birth certificate is politics.
Being the child of two Americans is where any investigation is going to end up. DNA mapping will do the trick.
Davis’ blood relationship must have been made known to Barry when he was a teenager. Hence his politics and his connections to Chicago.
////
On the way outside possibility that he was born in Kenya: it makes no difference. Frank Marshall Davis was the true father — Stanley was a slut if you were black and Red enough.
/////
Obama’s AB blood type could finger Davis directly as it is not so common.
////
Any notion that Obama is going to be ejected from office over his bastardy is fantastical.
////
As much as I am against H’s politics I have to extend my sympathy.
I met both him and his grandmother ( aka tutu ) and she was a tyrant of the first water.
In the early eighties, when Obama visited her during the holidays, I had multiple opportunities to ride the elevator with them. Without exception she was ripping him a fresh one.
Such a sight is never to be forgotten — it was too odd. She was short, old, white and vicious. He was tall, young, mulatto and respectfully quiet. He never said a word.
As to what she was ranting about in a public setting — she was incoherent. Nothing made any sense.
Even back then I thought that he’d go into acting or politics: he was that good looking. Little did I know that AA would take this prince anywhere he wanted to go.
And we are stuck with him until January 2013. Imagine the pardons this radical is going to issue before stepping down! He might just about empty the prison system! Think of Gitmo on steroids.
The Honking Great Elephant in the parlor that the estupidos in the government and all the freaking ecoturds are ignoring is the incredible potential for usefulness that would follow from a trivial investment in the re-tooling of the engines of those so-called “clunkers” as suggested by Roderick Reilly in 153.
I’ve seen advertised short-block re-builds quoted at about $2200.00 for a typical passenger vehicle. That would make an engine essentially like new.
For something ranging from Zero dollars to the cost of a total rebuild, those engines could be cleaned up and tuned so as to provide power for any of ten thousand applications around the world.
IT’s INSANE to just destroy them.
This is Sharkey’s Scouring of the Shire.
blert, that’s just mind-blowing –really, info like that can swing a close election. It would’ve been abu-graibed above the NYT fold a hundred times –had it been McCain the brow-beaten pre-PST maternal-abuse sufferer.
Bravo Hutsul at 1 and Doug at 2 and most of the rest of you.
You all know where I stand.
Here’s my sad screed that attempts to combine the headlines.
God grant us the courage to face and strength to repel the horrors to come.
Doug and Buddy, pardon me if this information is redundant, but it does fit somehow with the discussion the two of you were having earlier on. The link comes by way of Tigerhawk a few days ago: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria
The entire article is informative, but this bit is especially illustrative of the coercively manipulative nature of today’s comingling of political and big-business interests:
“Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities.”
I take it as a matter of faith that the last sentence is meant as something of a wry joke.
Sirius/161; mind-boggling, ain’t it. The alarm should’ve started ringing when the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”, the notorious IPCC Rep rt, popped out of the United Nations so poorly-done that high-schoolers were taking it apart within hours. And this is STILL the “science” behind carbon trading! Un-frikken-belIEVable!
Like Dan Rather’s Bush coup –oops –typed on a machine that didn’t exist yet!
Incredible combo of greed and stupidity and arrogance and ambition and hatefulness.
Thanks for the link –i’m adding it to my liberry –already pretty huge –detailing from a hundred different directions this web –this Dunbar Number of aristocrats trying again to kill off the bourgeoisie.
***
Pascal Fervor, machine Manitou!
BTW the Dog Star Man’s link is to an anti-climate-hysteria monograph writ by none other than Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I was unaware of the Manitou as a formal conception Buddy. Thanks for the education.
Yes; that video at the link is an eye opener. The murderers laughed at the car’s cry. There is no mistaking that it was the human similarity that induced their giggles. Chilling.
they’re shame-laughing, aren’t they, PF.
Say, some good mind-stretching entries over there on your blog –i saved it –i’ll never read a hundred-thousandth of all that i want, but I have a lot of it lined it up waiting!
Edmunds says the marginal sales (vehicle sales over what would have been sold anyway) cost us between 20K and 43K per vehicle.
Plus the cost of creating and maintaining the program. What do planning sessions cost in vegas with GS 13′s conferencing with lawyers and industry executives to design this C4C disaster. Maybe another K per vehicle?
Are there no economists left in DC?
The discussions about birth certificates, transcripts and college applications that show kenyan or indonesian are entertaining and who knows might be accurate.
But how do conservatives get the word out about some of his Czars, advisers and maybe White House Fellows being self-disclosed communists, socialists, transnationalists or/and AGW cap and trade true believers??
167 posts here. How to get to 16 mill views?
Yes they are Buddy.
Thanks for your words of encouragement. Sometimes, all I hear are taunts from an awfully successful siren, some of whose boasts are featured top left.