Did anyone stop to ask “by what right?” before going ahead with this:
The Obama administration has a plan to continue bailing out America’s banks without asking Congress for more money — by converting its loans to common stock, and in turn taking a large ownership stake in the companies.
Though such a move could stir fears of de facto nationalization, The New York Times reported Monday that President Obama’s advisers are floating the idea as way to extend the remainder of the $700 billion bank bailout fund.
Maybe we could call it the Happy Fun Eurotimes Game.
This week’s edition of PJM Political is a big, big, big show:
Ed Driscoll interviews Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute and City Journal magazine about his new article at Real Clear Politics, “Obama and the Reawakening of Corporatism.”
And boiled down from PJTV’s nine hours of live coverage of the Tax Day Tea Party Protests, interviews with PJ Media/PJTV CEO Roger L. Simon; PJTV co-hosts Allen Barton, Bill Whittle and Joe Hicks; Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com; and talk radio stars Tammy Bruce and Hugh Hewitt.
Finally, from the “Twitter-sphere”, Michael Patrick Leahy of Top Conservatives On Twitter, and beaming in from Planet Kruiser, a cameo from the man, the myth, the legend, comedian Stephen Kruiser.
And Ed and I talk about CNN’s now-infamous Susan Roesgan, and the CNN/MSNBC Alinsky teabagging technique. Fun!
Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame.
Forty-eight percent (48%) of all likely voters attribute climate change to long-term planetary trends, while seven percent (7%) blame some other reason. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.
Yet another reason why the White House doesn’t want to waste a perfectly good emergency — it lets them get away with things which otherwise might get a little more scrutiny.
Now that she’s finished her season of sucking the life out of any scene she’s in on “24,” Janeane Garofalo found the time to perform a complete psychological study on a quarter million Americans:
“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House,” she said on MSNBC’s “The Countdown” with Keith Olbermann Thursday evening. “This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. There is no way around that.”
I’m glad to see Janeane has made a full recovery after spending all those months taking money to be Jack Bauer’s biatch.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that threaten public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that for the first time in the United States will regulate the gases blamed for global warming.
The E.P.A. said the science supporting its so-called endangerment finding was “compelling and overwhelming.” The ruling triggers a 60-day comment period before any proposed regulations governing emissions of greenhouse gases are published.
Remember, this will involve no tax increases on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. But those five or six guys who’ll be left still earning that much, man, are we going to sock it to them.
Of course, if Sully quit trying to define the parameters of the debate on… well, everything, really… all he’d be left with is puppy talk and pictures taken out of other people’s windows.
Which, if you think about it, would make for a much-improved blog.
You’d think having $48 billion of cash on hand would be enough to get people to stop worrying that you might run out of it. The fact that, in GE’s case, it hasn’t highlights concerns about the ongoing deterioration of GE’s balance sheet.
…my first thought was that there must be a typo. Surely, Business Insider meant $48 billion wouldn’t be enough money to save GM (it isn’t). But, nope, General Electric could be in trouble, even with nearly 50 billion dollars in the kitty.
For countries with shrinking defense budgets, Boeing’s new F-15 “Silent Eagle” variant might be a better deal than Lockheed’s F-35. While not truly stealthy, the SE might be good enough to play defense against most likely opponents.
Let’s not quibble about little things like evidence. The Obama administration just knows that vets are all racist, Jew-hating crazies waiting to explode. Thank God, DHS has a fearless leader, Janet-from-another-planet Napolitano, who isn’t afraid to call white trash “white trash.”
In this administration’s published opinion, those who’ve served in our military are a menace to society and the state. And DHS’s racist, bigoted implication is that the only danger comes from white, Christian vets (there’s not a whisper about minority violence).
Politico’s Andy Barr says Texas Governor Rick Perry’s “star is rising” in the wake of his speeches for yesterday’s Tea Party protests:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s star is rising among a new constituency — the anti-tax “tea party” crowd — in the wake of his recent endorsement of a Texas state House resolution affirming the state’s sovereignty.
The resolution urges that “all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.”
Which is great, so far as it goes. But then there’s this:
Speaking to an energetic and angry tea party crowd in Austin Wednesday evening, the Lone Star State governor suggested secession may happen in the future should the federal government not change its fiscal polices.
“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”
Perry might one day make it to the Senate, but otherwise, this statement is — and should be — the end of any White House ambitions he might have entertained. The secession issue was settled, quite forcefully, in 1865 at a little place called Appomattox. And a good thing, too.
Over the past few months, short-term expectations for the economy have improved dramatically, but longer-term expectations have moved in the opposite direction.
On April 15, 25% of American adults said the economy was getting better. That’s up from 19% a month earlier and 10% at the beginning of the year. The number who believe the economy is getting worse declined from 67% at the beginning of the year to 57% in mid-March and 48% on April 15.
Similar trends were found in the attitudes of American investors. Thirty-one percent (31%) of investors now say the economy is getting better while 44% say it is getting worse.
However, the number of adults who believe the economy will be stronger in five years fell to 57% in April. That’s down seven points from 64% in March. At the beginning of 2009, 62% said the economy would be stronger in five years.
Another indication of growing long-term concern is the fact that 57% now say that today’s children will not be better off than their parents. That’s an eight-point jump since March when 49% offered that pessimistic assessment.
Those are the latest numbers from Rasmussen, and they indicate that folks are already sour on Washington’s plans to tax & spend & inflate-away-the-debt. People might also be tuning in to the fact that, although they might be getting a “tax cut,” the hidden tax of inflation is going to take it away — and then some.
It’s a pretty typical April here in Monument, Colorado. Which means that between about right now and midday Saturday, we’re expected to get between 19 and 31 inches of snow. The useless wet, heavy kind, just in case you were entertaining any thoughts of hitting the slopes.
So as a personal favor to me, I’d like to ask everyone to idle your cars for no good reason, release a bunch of CFC into the air, and leave your lights on, your fridge door open, and maybe turn on a bunch of hair dryers all at once.
Thank you for your cooperation. And could you aim all those hair dryers at my driveway?
Forrester Research has reversed its earlier position and is now recommending Apple’s iPhone for business use:
Using the web is a “chore” on a BlackBerry but intuitive on an iPhone, Schadler writes, and many workers are ultimately happier when they can pick their phones instead of having that choice dictated by IT.
Where Forrester had previously warned companies to avoid iPhones when possible due to the high phone prices and lack of security, it now says that many of these legacy worries have been softened significantly in the wake of Apple’s iPhone 2.x firmware and uses Amylin Pharmaceutical, Kraft Foods, and Oracle as examples of how permitting the phones ultimately helped their respective bottom lines.
Amylin’s senior IT director Todd Stewart describes iPhones as being easier to support than “other mobile platforms” and that iPhone 2.0′s hooks for Exchange calendaring and e-mail meant it only took three days to ready the 3,000-person firm to support iPhones. The relative strength of mobile Safari and the e-mail client has led many to treat their systems more like netbooks than mobile devices.
On a pure cost basis, the phones themselves are less expensive to run: their combined plans save about $360 per year, per phone. Stewart adds that individual ownership of devices, instead of handing them out from a corporate pool, has also trimmed costs by persuading workers they should be more careful with their smartphones.
The iPhone saves money? Must be that “Apple tax” Microsoft is always talking about. But I’ll be happy when the iPhone 3.0 firmware is released in a couple months and I can finally cut’n'paste on the thing.
But economic improvements do “not mean that hard times are over — 2009 will continue to be a difficult year for America’s economy. The severity of this recession will cause more job loss, more foreclosures and more pain before it ends.”
Obama also is expected to warn that “credit is still not flowing nearly as easily as it should” and that the ongoing process “for restructuring [insurance giant American International Group] and the auto companies will involve difficult and sometimes unpopular choices.”
That sounds about right, especially on jobs and foreclosures. And, yes, credit remains a sticking point. So here’s an idea: Why not reduce banks’ capital requirements a bit?
Boom — credit is created out of thin air, and the weaker banks get a little extra breathing room. If people and business are ready to assume some risk, they’ll have the opportunity, and without running up a bunch more federal debt.
During the Depression, we responded to a deflationary spiral by increasing capital requirements, and sucked even more money out of the system. That was a huge mistake. So why not reduce the required levels today?
A typically-professional hit job by the mainstream press on the blogosphere’s Stephen Bainbridge. Nope, I’m not being facetious — the kind of sloppiness on display here is so effective that it must be on purpose.
Amazon.com comes across as a socially-liberal company — a community, even. So what to make of this:
Amazon.com Inc. is facing criticism from authors of books with gay themes who say the e-commerce site deleted the sales rankings of their titles.
By midday Monday, the rankings of many books that had been missing in recent days, including titles by E. M. Forster and Gore Vidal, began to be restored.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The Associated Press on Sunday quoted a company spokeswoman blaming the problem on a technical “glitch” that it was fixing. But at least one author says Amazon told him the problem stemmed from a reclassification of the books as adult.
Weird. You have any theories? Because I’m stumped.
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