July 2008 Archives

HAYEKIAN ECONOMISTS LARRY WHITE on the subprime lending fiasco (mp3) part 1 and part 2.

If you want to understand the scope of the subprime mess, consider the fact that only 3 years ago Countrywide loaned money to someone who paid $465,000 for this house in Vista:



The house is now on the market for $180,00.  Hat tip Calculated Risk.

STEVE FORBES ON HIGH OIL PRICES, the weak dollar, and Greenspan's enormous blunder.

Commodities like oil are priced in dollars. So when the dollar becomes weak, the dollar price of commodities goes up. And when the greenback is strong, the dollar price of commodities goes down.

In 2004 Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, made a fateful miscalculation. The maestro, as he was then affectionately called by an adoring media, miscalculated the strength of the U.S. economy. He thought it weak. He was fearful that prices would collapse in America as they did in Japan during the 1990s and the early part of this decade. So to goose the economy, Greenspan created excessive amounts of money. Interest rates were kept artificially low.

But the economy was not weak. In fact, between 2003 and the summer of 2007, the growth alone of the U.S. economy exceeded the entire size of the Chinese economy. In other words, we grew the equivalent of the economy of China in little more than four years.

Yet Greenspan made sure the Fed's printing presses worked overtime. Thus for the first time since the 1970s and early 1980s, we are faced with a serious inflation problem. Thanks to Greenspan's blunder, all commodities shot up -- oil, cooper, lumber, steel, even the price of mud.

While Greenspan begat the inflationary blunder, Ben Bernanke, the maestro's successor, perpetuated it. In 2003 the price of oil was around $25 a barrel. A year ago when the credit crisis hit, oil was around $70. Then Bernanke ginned up the printing presses again, this time to deal with the fallout of the busts of sub prime mortgages and other exotic financial instruments and the threats they posed to the banking system. The U.S. economy has crawled to a virtual halt since August 2007 and yet the price of oil has almost doubled. That's not supply and demand, that's classic inflation.

AND THIS INCOMPETENT and dishonest hack was the chief spokesman for the United States government during the darkest days of the war.  What a disgrace for George Bush and his Presidency.

UNDER PRESURE FROM THE OBAMA CAMPAING Lynn Sweet walks back her story about Obama and the canceled wounded soldier visit, and she does it in a most unprofessional and unconvincing way.  What's wrong with these reporters?  Don't they understand where trying to choice a President here, not Miss America?

IT'S GETTING HOT IN THE LEFTIST KITCHEN.

OBAMA'S YEARS AT THE U. OF CHICAGO -- A RECOMMENDED READ.

If you're interested in constitutional and civil rights law, you might enjoy reading Obama's class materials.

WASHINGTON CORRUPTION FANNIE MAE STYLE.  That, of course, only skims the surface of this corrupt FDR/LBJ institution.

60% AND MORE -- THE TAX RATE UNDER OBAMA. Obama's plan is to return us to pre-Reagan America, back to Jimmy Carter's America of the 1970s, were once again American's will be among the most heavily taxed people in the world.

Parents attempting to build families in the prime earning years of their lives here in super expensive Orange County are going to be killed.  It'll be interesting to see if folks still care about Obama's position on the war in Iraq when the come to realize Obama is about to declare war on them.

ANTI-MORMON BIGOTRY helped sink Mitt Romney in the primaries and now influential evangelicals hope to spike Romney's selection as the GOP VP pick.

OBAMA HAD A PLANE LOAD OF REPORTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS scheduled to come with him to his army hospital campaign stop in Germany.  No matter how hard the MSM tries to spin it, there's no doubting what the Obama campaign had in mind, or that Obama's campaign manager lied about who canceled the event and why.

NOW IT'S PETER WEHNER WHO CALLS BULLSHIT ON BARACK OBAMA.

Wehner misleads when he suggests that Obama is becoming something different from what he once was.  Any serious student of Obama is aware that this is who Obama has always been, a teacher of Saul Alinsky's politics of "the ends justify the means" and a practiced bullshitter since his days as a bullshitting child (as described in Obama's own memoir).  The non-partisan blather, all of what Obama "preaches against", all of the sucker bait rhetoric, is part of the Obama bullshit.  This buncombe is not the inner "good core" of the prior "good" Obama which the new "bad" Obama is suddenly not living up to, it's the actual cynically manipulative Obama as he always was, all of the sucker bait "idealistic" clap-trap included.

ALASKA WILL INVESTIGATE GOV. SARAH PALIN and her firing of the public safety commissioner.  This won't help in the competition to come up with a Republican VP candidate.

UPDATE:  Palin denies the charge made against her.

OBAMA HAS WELL EARNED the title "Captain Bullshit", as well as the fond description the "bullshit artist". 

In that spirit, on this blog, journalists and other ardent Obama supports will henceforth be called:

THE BULLSHIT EATERS

The name certainly fits the theme and conclusion of this analysis.

BARACK OBAMA -- AGAINST PRIVATE EDUCATION for your kid.  In favor of private education for his kid.  Quotable:

Everyone knows [fixing socialized education] is a long, hard slog, but Mr. Obama and his wife aren't waiting. Their daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school.

I was just looking it up, and it turns out the typical big city school district spends twice or three times as much money as does the school district which my own children attend.  The Chicago school district currently spends $10,555 per student, a sum much larger than that spent per student by the district my children attend.  40% of Chicago's public school teachers send their own kids to private schools, so Obama has massive company among fellow leftwing anti-choice hypocrites in Chicago.

A BRILLIANT KEYNESIAN SOLUTION to the "crisis" of ever more affordable home prices, and ever lower profits for the corrupt mega-millionaire financiers -- Pimco's Bill Gross advocates destroying 1,000,000 homes to reduce the housing stock and driving up home prices. 

I guess those thrown out of their homes for the benefit of Bill Gross will be forced into tents and put to work treading bicycles to produce "clean" energy and help pay for massive Federal handouts to the financial industry.  I'm sure it all makes perfect sense in the idiot savant math world of the Keynesian macro-economists and the intellectually corrupt fantasy land of the political establishment.

INTEREST ON THE NATIONAL DEBT COST AMERICAN TAXPAYERS $377 BILLION IN 2008, and will cost billions more in 2009.  Fortunately, the government plans on borrowing $490 billion in 2009 to cover the costs of current borrowing and the latest increases in spending. 

It'll certainly be interesting when we smash into Stein's Law going 20,000 miles an hour.

MISH GETS A LOAD OFF HIS CHEST IN A LETTER ON THE ECONOMY TO OBAMA.  It's sad that Mish thinks McCain is so closed minded that it's better to write a letter to a life long leftist.  Good luck with that.  In any case, the content of the letter is dead on target, and not heard enough.

BUSH DECIDES TO BACK THE STARBUCKS BAILOUT.

IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT THE NEXT FREDDIE MAE, THE NEXT INDYMAC?

THE TOP TEN FINDINGS OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE.

BLACKWATER PROTECTED OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN.  When his own life is on the line, Obama puts aside his imbecilic leftist talking points. When the life of American service members are on the line, not so much.

LOANS TO BUSINESS DROP 3% over last year.  Anyone who has read the work of Hayek can't be surprised by any of this.

PALIN'S EX-BRO-IN LAW  -- not such a nice guy.

THE AVERAGE PRICE OF A HOME IN DETROIT IS $19,448.  The seller of the average house in Orange County could take his money to Detroit and buy 25 homes, with money to spare.

Just hope you aren't buying one of these homes.

Quotable:

if you search for $0 - $5,000 price range in Detroit, MI, you will find 1,397 properties in that range, out of 20,881 properties for sale.

That was six months ago.

The city is swamped with people attempting to cut their property taxes to match their loss in property value. And meanwhile, tens of thousands simply refuse to pay their taxes:

Detroit collects 87 percent of its property taxes on average -- one of the lowest collection rates among large cities in the United States. Most cities collect 98 percent.

Detroit estimates it loses $60 million in uncollected property taxes every year, with more than $1 billion lost in the past 20 years .. Records indicate that one-third of all properties in the city are tax delinquent, and more than $165 million is owed.

Yet in many cases, city officials have no idea who owns -- or owes -- what. Records are shoddy and rife with inaccuracies.

Of the 389,000 tax bills mailed this summer, as many as 40,000 will return stamped "undeliverable," says City Treasurer Clarence Williams.

70,000 properties in the city are eligible for foreclosure, the city takes only 1,500 parcels a year ..

Some 130,000 of the city's 400,000 parcels are listed as tax delinquent.

THE STREET OF NIGHTMARES -- West Camile Street in Santa Ana.   This is the same street the OC Register reported on in 2007 as having one of the highest rates of subprime mortgages of any street in America.

View the PDF graphic of homes and mortgage histories.

It looks like Wells Fargo and WaMu are still making very stupid loans in Southern California:

A year ago, the house at 920 W. Camile St. in Santa Ana was bank-owned, deserted and tagged with gang graffiti, a symbol of how the subprime lending bonanza had blighted a city block.

In October, the house sold at auction for $304,500, little more than half what a buyer using 100-percent subprime financing paid in 2006.

Today, 920 W. Camile has been renovated, repainted and floored with faux marble. It resold in January for $625,000, according to county records - a $125,000 down payment and a $500,000 mortgage from Wells Fargo Bank.

Note well that Wells Fargo also made the loan on the $304,500 sale:

In November, Wells Fargo issued a $289,275 mortgage for 920 W. Camile to an investor who had purchased the home at a foreclosure auction. In January, after the house was spruced up, Wells Fargo issued a $500,000 mortgage to the new owners, the Gomezes.

The Congress, the Fed, the President and the finance industry are creating ghastly nightmares for countless American families, all in the name of "spreading" the American dream to own a home.  When it comes to government, beware what you wish.

THE NATIONAL DEBT IS $10 TRILLION, not $5 trillion -- William Poole explains.

OBAMA'S HALF WHITE / HALF BLACK BROTHER DECLINES to confirm the story Obama tells in his memoir of their relationship and conversations.  In any case, the man has been tracked down in China.

JOHN McCAIN DROPS A BOMB ON BARACK OBAMA



I've just made up my mind. I will be voting for John McCain in November. UPDATE: John Bolton calls bullshit on Barack Obama.

FORGOTTEN SCANDAL ROCKS PALIN GOVERNMENT IN ALASKA.  This looks like an unforced error on Gov. Palin's part, a case of failing to follow up on a clear red flag in the vetting process.  On the up side, Palin had the good sense to quickly push the guy out the door.

Unfortunately, the not unrelated scandal which might keep Palin off the Republican ticket is this mess.

IF McCAIN CAN KEEP THROWING PUNCHES LIKE THIS, I just might vote for him.  What I don't want is another Bush who won't fight for what's right, or even for what's true.  Enough with Republicans rolling over and exposing their bellies to the Dems in the press and in the Congress.

OBAMA LIES ABOUT WHY HE DIDN'T VISIT wounded American soldiers.  Obama insisted on making the stop a campaign event, in violation of long standing military rules.  When the military insisted on the rule, Obama bailed on the injured troops, then lied about it.  This has become routine stuff with Obama.  Every day I'm spotting multiple lies coming from Obama and his campaign, more than any single individual can track and follow up.  It's a virtual blizzard of bullshit.

THE LIBERTARIAN ROAD TO SERFDOM

Here's my new equation:

Unrestricted mergers in the financial sector + to big to fail = The Libertarian Road to Serfdom.

I've often argued that "libertarians" fail to see the big picture when they avert their eyes from the overall political process when they think about anti-trust law.  Essentially these libertarians are stuck in a pretend blackboard economics equation, and they fail to see how the emergence of the mega banks has transformed the political process, creating a system where the mega firms control the politicians, and the politicians shift risk and losses from these firms to the taxpayers, under the theory of "To Big To Fail."  It does no good to argue that as "libertarians" these blinded economists don't support "to big to fail" legislation.  What matters is the reality on the ground -- the mega institutions and their supporting interest groups own the politicians, and when "libertarian" anti-trust law allows the formation of "to big to fail" mega institutions, risks will be socialized and taxpayer inflated profits will be privatized.

So remember this equation:

LIBERTARIAN ANTI-TRUST LAW + TO BIG TO FAIL = THE LIBERTARIAN ROAD TO SERFDOM

THIS IS TIMELY -- HAYEK'S WORKS ON BUSINESS CYCLES and monetary theory are now back in print.

If the current generation of monetary economists had been familiar with Hayek's work, and followed it's precepts, the current financial crisis simply would not have occurred.  The banking crisis and housing bubble were only made possible by the ignorance of the economists.

And you can quote me on that.

AND NOW FEDERALLY MANDATED INFLATION.

Bush is also going to sign the taxpayer bailout for people who took out loans they couldn't afford, and for banks who loaned money to people who were in no position to pay:

The bill will add at least $42 billion in new expenses to the federal budget, including $16.8 billion in new taxes for taxpayers, and new deficit spending, It will include billions of dollars in new pork for "community development" and "mortgage counseling," enriching groups like the scandal-plagued ACORN, which engages in vote fraud, and La Raza.

The Bush presidency is really going out in style.

45% OF BLACK WOMEN HAVE NEVER BEEN MARRIED. That's a statistic I'd never seen before.  That's twice the percentage of white women.

POWERLINE: OBAMA ISN'T A MERE BULLSHITTER, HE'S A BULLSHIT ARTIST:

Some day it may begin to dawn on attentive observers that Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he's not giving it up now.

Powerline is echoing the comments of a poster at Patterico:

When I was going to college, there was a dude, a B.M.O.C., who was the best at everything to hear him tell it. He was always hitting on the coeds, or lying about his accomplishments both to facultiy and fellow students. Barrack was, without doubt this sort of person. Bullshit is bullshit. This idiot will say anything and then deny he said it.

I remember the type.  We used to speak of getting out the shovel when these guys talked.  A not unusual type was something of an outsider who thought he was imitating what everyone else was doing and saying.  If you read Obama's memoir, you find Obama directly stating that this is what he found himself doing during his young life, imitating what he thinks others are doing . So this life as a bullshit artist is a lifelong behavior patter for Obama.

BONUS:  Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" -- the Power Point presentation. (google html with link to PPT document).

IS IT PANDERING? IS IT LYING? Powerline attempts to make sense of Obama's titanic bullshitting.

GEORGE BUSH BRINGS SOCIALISM TO WALL STREET. Hayekian economist Gerald O'Driscoll, Jr. on Henry Paulson's plan to take your money and give it to the Fannie Mae mega rich. 

Sen. Jim Bunning asks, what are we, in France?

"WE DON'T LOOK TO ARSONISTS to help put out fires but we do look to politicians to help solve financial crises that they played a major role in creating." -- Thomas Sowell

It's not uncommon to find out that an arsonist is also a firemen, which serves as an informative parallel to the careers of most macroeconomists working today. What we have among macroeconomists is a group of professionals who were there lighting the fire of the Fed created artificial boom, folks who are now eager to rush to our rescue now that they've set the house of our economy in flames.  The difference between macroeconomists and arsonist/firemen is that arsonists/firemen understand a lot about how fires work, e.g. how to start them and how to bring them to an end.  Macroeconomists, not so much.

But there are exceptions.

NEWT ENDORSES SARAH PALIN FOR THE VP SLOT.  In other news, Bobby Jindal has pulled himself out of consideration as McCain's VP.

TIME MAGAZINE HAS JUMPED ON BOARD THE ROAD TO SERFDOM MOVEMENT.

OBAMA. THIS TIME FULL OF BULLSHIT ABOUT ISRAEL.  Worth quoting:

we all know by now that Obama has the ugly habit of repeating lefty tropes, blithely unconcerned about their accuracy or lack thereof.

Actually, I think a lot of people aren't much aware of this, because they don't much follow the blatherings of the academics or the NY Times, and aren't aware of where these lies and idiocies come from.  And a big slice of other folks have soaked up this stuff at college and from the media and they're utterly oblivious to dishonesty and falsehood of it all.  So, no, we don't "all know" about this ugly habit.

DEATH SPIRAL AT WaMu, MERRILL LYNCH & Citigroup? Mish weighs in.

PAUL GIGOT DEFENDS THE WSJ against the lies of Paul Krugman, who's been spreading all sorts nonsense about Democrat run Fannie Mae.  Quotable:

[Contrary to the BS of Paul Krugman] Fannie Mae and Mr. Mozilo [at Counrywide] weren't competitors; they were partners. Fannie helped to make Countrywide as profitable as it once was by buying its mortgages in bulk. Mr. Raines -- following predecessor Jim Johnson -- and Mr. Mozilo made each other rich. Which explains why Mr. Johnson could feel so comfortable asking Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) to discuss a sweetheart mortgage with Mr. Mozilo, and also explains the Mozilo-Raines tag team [attacking Gigot] in 2003. I recount all this now because it illustrates the perverse nature of Fannie and Freddie that has made them such a relentless and untouchable political force. Their unique clout derives from a combination of liberal ideology and private profit. Fannie has been able to purchase political immunity for decades by disguising its vast profit-making machine in the cloak of "affordable housing." To be more precise, Fan and Fred have been protected by an alliance of Capitol Hill and Wall Street, of Barney Frank and Angelo Mozilo.

I know this because for more than six years I've been one of their antagonists. Any editor worth his expense account makes enemies, and complaints from CEOs, politicians and World Bank presidents are common. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are unique in their thuggery, and their response to critics may help readers appreciate why taxpayers are now explicitly on the hook to rescue companies that some of us have spent years warning about ..

Also this:

Fan and Fred also couldn't prosper for as long as they have without the support of the political left, both in Congress and the intellectual class. This includes Mr. Frank and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Capitol Hill, as well as Mr. Krugman and the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein in the press. Their claim is that the companies are essential for homeownership. Yet as studies have shown, about half of the implicit taxpayer subsidy for Fan and Fred is pocketed by shareholders and management ..

And that's about all you need to know about the left today.  It's a twisted, corrupt cover for a massive plundering of wealth and grasping of power, and academics like Krugman are simply the most intellectually dishonest of the bunch.

UPDATE:  Thomas Sowell on the Democrats and the banks.

And this from Jim Lindgren:

Some people thought that I was too hard on the former managers of Fannie Mae, whose greed and misconduct in their Enron-style accounting scandal of 2003-4 helped to destroy the soundness of a huge quasi-government agency.

Now comes Paul Gigot recounting just how thuggish their behavior was. The Fannie Mae officials at the time made millions in unearned profits from phony accounting to maximize their bonuses while trying to intimidate -- and when that didn't work, to destroy -- any politician who dared to stand up to their corruption.

DON'T CALL IT BULLSHIT. Call it bafflegab and Obamafuscation.

And note this bit of comedy gold:  "The policy hadn't changed - people just had to understand to ignore the words coming out of his mouth!"

"WALL STREET GOT DRUNK" -- so says George Bush.  Is George Bush too stupid to know that the Federal Reserve got it drunk, and the President and the Congress were spiking the punch bowl with GHB?

A SHELBY STEELE CLASSIC. Jesse Jackson passes the torch to Barack Obama.

Worth thinking about:

So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit -- presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.)

The complication here is that from the point of view of what is best for America, most of Obama's policies will be incompetent.  But from the point of view of America's leftist elite, Obama's policies will be understood as successful, competent policies.  And the elite will willfully see the causes of any bad consequences for America where ever is most convenient to themselves and their ideology, rather than were those causes actually lie.   So America will likely be torn by Obama the way America was torn by FDR -- whose gross incompetence during the Great Depression is only now being revealed for anyone who cares to study the matter, were as at the time FDR's ideological partisans could only see brilliance and success, even in the midst of endless economic stagnation and massive unemployment.

So I see Obama as continuing to tear apart the country the way the country has been torn apart by the left during the Roosevelt years, and continuing on into the Lyndon Johnson years.  If there wasn't built in incompetence in the very policies and ideology of Barack Obama, I'd see thing differently.  But unless Obama reads some books by Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Friedrich Hayek, and completely rethinks public policy in the next six months, I see inevitable bad consequences and more division on the horizon for America, no matter how "competent" Obama is in implementing his leftist vision.

Bonus quote from Steele:

Already [Obama] has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste.

THE MOON CIRCLING THE EARTH. A don't miss video.  Somehow this video makes you rethink the cosmos as much as any still picture of the Earth or the moon from space.

UPDATE:  Better video here.

ONE IN FOUR VOTERS BELIEVE THAT MOST REPORTERS  will try to offer unbiased coverage of the Presidential campaign.  The rest are actually paying attention.  From Rasmussen.

UPDATE:  The NY Times spikes a John McCain op-ed just days after publishing an Obama op-ed.  What do you expect from a newspaper published by a man who would have liked to have seen John McCain shot dead in Vietnam?

"RIDING OUT THE WANING DAYS OF A DEFEATED PRESIDENCY" -- Powerline on George Bush.

UPDATE:  More evidence that George Bush is riding out the last days of his presidency with his head under the desk.  But then, Bush never did do very much to defend his presidency or his side of the aisle.

HAYEKIAN ECONOMISTS LARRY WHITE on the subprime lending fiasco (mp3) part 1 and part 2.

If you want to understand the scope of the subprime mess, consider the fact that only 3 years ago Countrywide loaned money to someone who paid $465,000 for this house in Vista:



The house is now on the market for $180,00.  Hat tip Calculated Risk.

STEVE FORBES ON HIGH OIL PRICES, the weak dollar, and Greenspan's enormous blunder.

Commodities like oil are priced in dollars. So when the dollar becomes weak, the dollar price of commodities goes up. And when the greenback is strong, the dollar price of commodities goes down.

In 2004 Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, made a fateful miscalculation. The maestro, as he was then affectionately called by an adoring media, miscalculated the strength of the U.S. economy. He thought it weak. He was fearful that prices would collapse in America as they did in Japan during the 1990s and the early part of this decade. So to goose the economy, Greenspan created excessive amounts of money. Interest rates were kept artificially low.

But the economy was not weak. In fact, between 2003 and the summer of 2007, the growth alone of the U.S. economy exceeded the entire size of the Chinese economy. In other words, we grew the equivalent of the economy of China in little more than four years.

Yet Greenspan made sure the Fed's printing presses worked overtime. Thus for the first time since the 1970s and early 1980s, we are faced with a serious inflation problem. Thanks to Greenspan's blunder, all commodities shot up -- oil, cooper, lumber, steel, even the price of mud.

While Greenspan begat the inflationary blunder, Ben Bernanke, the maestro's successor, perpetuated it. In 2003 the price of oil was around $25 a barrel. A year ago when the credit crisis hit, oil was around $70. Then Bernanke ginned up the printing presses again, this time to deal with the fallout of the busts of sub prime mortgages and other exotic financial instruments and the threats they posed to the banking system. The U.S. economy has crawled to a virtual halt since August 2007 and yet the price of oil has almost doubled. That's not supply and demand, that's classic inflation.

AND THIS INCOMPETENT and dishonest hack was the chief spokesman for the United States government during the darkest days of the war.  What a disgrace for George Bush and his Presidency.

UNDER PRESURE FROM THE OBAMA CAMPAING Lynn Sweet walks back her story about Obama and the canceled wounded soldier visit, and she does it in a most unprofessional and unconvincing way.  What's wrong with these reporters?  Don't they understand where trying to choice a President here, not Miss America?

IT'S GETTING HOT IN THE LEFTIST KITCHEN.

OBAMA'S YEARS AT THE U. OF CHICAGO -- A RECOMMENDED READ.

If you're interested in constitutional and civil rights law, you might enjoy reading Obama's class materials.

WASHINGTON CORRUPTION FANNIE MAE STYLE.  That, of course, only skims the surface of this corrupt FDR/LBJ institution.

60% AND MORE -- THE TAX RATE UNDER OBAMA. Obama's plan is to return us to pre-Reagan America, back to Jimmy Carter's America of the 1970s, were once again American's will be among the most heavily taxed people in the world.

Parents attempting to build families in the prime earning years of their lives here in super expensive Orange County are going to be killed.  It'll be interesting to see if folks still care about Obama's position on the war in Iraq when the come to realize Obama is about to declare war on them.

ANTI-MORMON BIGOTRY helped sink Mitt Romney in the primaries and now influential evangelicals hope to spike Romney's selection as the GOP VP pick.

OBAMA HAD A PLANE LOAD OF REPORTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS scheduled to come with him to his army hospital campaign stop in Germany.  No matter how hard the MSM tries to spin it, there's no doubting what the Obama campaign had in mind, or that Obama's campaign manager lied about who canceled the event and why.

NOW IT'S PETER WEHNER WHO CALLS BULLSHIT ON BARACK OBAMA.

Wehner misleads when he suggests that Obama is becoming something different from what he once was.  Any serious student of Obama is aware that this is who Obama has always been, a teacher of Saul Alinsky's politics of "the ends justify the means" and a practiced bullshitter since his days as a bullshitting child (as described in Obama's own memoir).  The non-partisan blather, all of what Obama "preaches against", all of the sucker bait rhetoric, is part of the Obama bullshit.  This buncombe is not the inner "good core" of the prior "good" Obama which the new "bad" Obama is suddenly not living up to, it's the actual cynically manipulative Obama as he always was, all of the sucker bait "idealistic" clap-trap included.

ALASKA WILL INVESTIGATE GOV. SARAH PALIN and her firing of the public safety commissioner.  This won't help in the competition to come up with a Republican VP candidate.

UPDATE:  Palin denies the charge made against her.

OBAMA HAS WELL EARNED the title "Captain Bullshit", as well as the fond description the "bullshit artist". 

In that spirit, on this blog, journalists and other ardent Obama supports will henceforth be called:

THE BULLSHIT EATERS

The name certainly fits the theme and conclusion of this analysis.

BARACK OBAMA -- AGAINST PRIVATE EDUCATION for your kid.  In favor of private education for his kid.  Quotable:

Everyone knows [fixing socialized education] is a long, hard slog, but Mr. Obama and his wife aren't waiting. Their daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school.

I was just looking it up, and it turns out the typical big city school district spends twice or three times as much money as does the school district which my own children attend.  The Chicago school district currently spends $10,555 per student, a sum much larger than that spent per student by the district my children attend.  40% of Chicago's public school teachers send their own kids to private schools, so Obama has massive company among fellow leftwing anti-choice hypocrites in Chicago.

A BRILLIANT KEYNESIAN SOLUTION to the "crisis" of ever more affordable home prices, and ever lower profits for the corrupt mega-millionaire financiers -- Pimco's Bill Gross advocates destroying 1,000,000 homes to reduce the housing stock and driving up home prices. 

I guess those thrown out of their homes for the benefit of Bill Gross will be forced into tents and put to work treading bicycles to produce "clean" energy and help pay for massive Federal handouts to the financial industry.  I'm sure it all makes perfect sense in the idiot savant math world of the Keynesian macro-economists and the intellectually corrupt fantasy land of the political establishment.

INTEREST ON THE NATIONAL DEBT COST AMERICAN TAXPAYERS $377 BILLION IN 2008, and will cost billions more in 2009.  Fortunately, the government plans on borrowing $490 billion in 2009 to cover the costs of current borrowing and the latest increases in spending. 

It'll certainly be interesting when we smash into Stein's Law going 20,000 miles an hour.

MISH GETS A LOAD OFF HIS CHEST IN A LETTER ON THE ECONOMY TO OBAMA.  It's sad that Mish thinks McCain is so closed minded that it's better to write a letter to a life long leftist.  Good luck with that.  In any case, the content of the letter is dead on target, and not heard enough.

BUSH DECIDES TO BACK THE STARBUCKS BAILOUT.

IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT THE NEXT FREDDIE MAE, THE NEXT INDYMAC?

THE TOP TEN FINDINGS OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE.

BLACKWATER PROTECTED OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN.  When his own life is on the line, Obama puts aside his imbecilic leftist talking points. When the life of American service members are on the line, not so much.

LOANS TO BUSINESS DROP 3% over last year.  Anyone who has read the work of Hayek can't be surprised by any of this.

PALIN'S EX-BRO-IN LAW  -- not such a nice guy.

THE AVERAGE PRICE OF A HOME IN DETROIT IS $19,448.  The seller of the average house in Orange County could take his money to Detroit and buy 25 homes, with money to spare.

Just hope you aren't buying one of these homes.

Quotable:

if you search for $0 - $5,000 price range in Detroit, MI, you will find 1,397 properties in that range, out of 20,881 properties for sale.

That was six months ago.

The city is swamped with people attempting to cut their property taxes to match their loss in property value. And meanwhile, tens of thousands simply refuse to pay their taxes:

Detroit collects 87 percent of its property taxes on average -- one of the lowest collection rates among large cities in the United States. Most cities collect 98 percent.

Detroit estimates it loses $60 million in uncollected property taxes every year, with more than $1 billion lost in the past 20 years .. Records indicate that one-third of all properties in the city are tax delinquent, and more than $165 million is owed.

Yet in many cases, city officials have no idea who owns -- or owes -- what. Records are shoddy and rife with inaccuracies.

Of the 389,000 tax bills mailed this summer, as many as 40,000 will return stamped "undeliverable," says City Treasurer Clarence Williams.

70,000 properties in the city are eligible for foreclosure, the city takes only 1,500 parcels a year ..

Some 130,000 of the city's 400,000 parcels are listed as tax delinquent.

THE STREET OF NIGHTMARES -- West Camile Street in Santa Ana.   This is the same street the OC Register reported on in 2007 as having one of the highest rates of subprime mortgages of any street in America.

View the PDF graphic of homes and mortgage histories.

It looks like Wells Fargo and WaMu are still making very stupid loans in Southern California:

A year ago, the house at 920 W. Camile St. in Santa Ana was bank-owned, deserted and tagged with gang graffiti, a symbol of how the subprime lending bonanza had blighted a city block.

In October, the house sold at auction for $304,500, little more than half what a buyer using 100-percent subprime financing paid in 2006.

Today, 920 W. Camile has been renovated, repainted and floored with faux marble. It resold in January for $625,000, according to county records - a $125,000 down payment and a $500,000 mortgage from Wells Fargo Bank.

Note well that Wells Fargo also made the loan on the $304,500 sale:

In November, Wells Fargo issued a $289,275 mortgage for 920 W. Camile to an investor who had purchased the home at a foreclosure auction. In January, after the house was spruced up, Wells Fargo issued a $500,000 mortgage to the new owners, the Gomezes.

The Congress, the Fed, the President and the finance industry are creating ghastly nightmares for countless American families, all in the name of "spreading" the American dream to own a home.  When it comes to government, beware what you wish.

THE NATIONAL DEBT IS $10 TRILLION, not $5 trillion -- William Poole explains.

OBAMA'S HALF WHITE / HALF BLACK BROTHER DECLINES to confirm the story Obama tells in his memoir of their relationship and conversations.  In any case, the man has been tracked down in China.

JOHN McCAIN DROPS A BOMB ON BARACK OBAMA



I've just made up my mind. I will be voting for John McCain in November. UPDATE: John Bolton calls bullshit on Barack Obama.

FORGOTTEN SCANDAL ROCKS PALIN GOVERNMENT IN ALASKA.  This looks like an unforced error on Gov. Palin's part, a case of failing to follow up on a clear red flag in the vetting process.  On the up side, Palin had the good sense to quickly push the guy out the door.

Unfortunately, the not unrelated scandal which might keep Palin off the Republican ticket is this mess.

IF McCAIN CAN KEEP THROWING PUNCHES LIKE THIS, I just might vote for him.  What I don't want is another Bush who won't fight for what's right, or even for what's true.  Enough with Republicans rolling over and exposing their bellies to the Dems in the press and in the Congress.

OBAMA LIES ABOUT WHY HE DIDN'T VISIT wounded American soldiers.  Obama insisted on making the stop a campaign event, in violation of long standing military rules.  When the military insisted on the rule, Obama bailed on the injured troops, then lied about it.  This has become routine stuff with Obama.  Every day I'm spotting multiple lies coming from Obama and his campaign, more than any single individual can track and follow up.  It's a virtual blizzard of bullshit.

THE LIBERTARIAN ROAD TO SERFDOM

Here's my new equation:

Unrestricted mergers in the financial sector + to big to fail = The Libertarian Road to Serfdom.

I've often argued that "libertarians" fail to see the big picture when they avert their eyes from the overall political process when they think about anti-trust law.  Essentially these libertarians are stuck in a pretend blackboard economics equation, and they fail to see how the emergence of the mega banks has transformed the political process, creating a system where the mega firms control the politicians, and the politicians shift risk and losses from these firms to the taxpayers, under the theory of "To Big To Fail."  It does no good to argue that as "libertarians" these blinded economists don't support "to big to fail" legislation.  What matters is the reality on the ground -- the mega institutions and their supporting interest groups own the politicians, and when "libertarian" anti-trust law allows the formation of "to big to fail" mega institutions, risks will be socialized and taxpayer inflated profits will be privatized.

So remember this equation:

LIBERTARIAN ANTI-TRUST LAW + TO BIG TO FAIL = THE LIBERTARIAN ROAD TO SERFDOM

THIS IS TIMELY -- HAYEK'S WORKS ON BUSINESS CYCLES and monetary theory are now back in print.

If the current generation of monetary economists had been familiar with Hayek's work, and followed it's precepts, the current financial crisis simply would not have occurred.  The banking crisis and housing bubble were only made possible by the ignorance of the economists.

And you can quote me on that.

AND NOW FEDERALLY MANDATED INFLATION.

Bush is also going to sign the taxpayer bailout for people who took out loans they couldn't afford, and for banks who loaned money to people who were in no position to pay:

The bill will add at least $42 billion in new expenses to the federal budget, including $16.8 billion in new taxes for taxpayers, and new deficit spending, It will include billions of dollars in new pork for "community development" and "mortgage counseling," enriching groups like the scandal-plagued ACORN, which engages in vote fraud, and La Raza.

The Bush presidency is really going out in style.

45% OF BLACK WOMEN HAVE NEVER BEEN MARRIED. That's a statistic I'd never seen before.  That's twice the percentage of white women.

POWERLINE: OBAMA ISN'T A MERE BULLSHITTER, HE'S A BULLSHIT ARTIST:

Some day it may begin to dawn on attentive observers that Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he's not giving it up now.

Powerline is echoing the comments of a poster at Patterico:

When I was going to college, there was a dude, a B.M.O.C., who was the best at everything to hear him tell it. He was always hitting on the coeds, or lying about his accomplishments both to facultiy and fellow students. Barrack was, without doubt this sort of person. Bullshit is bullshit. This idiot will say anything and then deny he said it.

I remember the type.  We used to speak of getting out the shovel when these guys talked.  A not unusual type was something of an outsider who thought he was imitating what everyone else was doing and saying.  If you read Obama's memoir, you find Obama directly stating that this is what he found himself doing during his young life, imitating what he thinks others are doing . So this life as a bullshit artist is a lifelong behavior patter for Obama.

BONUS:  Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" -- the Power Point presentation. (google html with link to PPT document).

IS IT PANDERING? IS IT LYING? Powerline attempts to make sense of Obama's titanic bullshitting.

GEORGE BUSH BRINGS SOCIALISM TO WALL STREET. Hayekian economist Gerald O'Driscoll, Jr. on Henry Paulson's plan to take your money and give it to the Fannie Mae mega rich. 

Sen. Jim Bunning asks, what are we, in France?

"WE DON'T LOOK TO ARSONISTS to help put out fires but we do look to politicians to help solve financial crises that they played a major role in creating." -- Thomas Sowell

It's not uncommon to find out that an arsonist is also a firemen, which serves as an informative parallel to the careers of most macroeconomists working today. What we have among macroeconomists is a group of professionals who were there lighting the fire of the Fed created artificial boom, folks who are now eager to rush to our rescue now that they've set the house of our economy in flames.  The difference between macroeconomists and arsonist/firemen is that arsonists/firemen understand a lot about how fires work, e.g. how to start them and how to bring them to an end.  Macroeconomists, not so much.

But there are exceptions.

NEWT ENDORSES SARAH PALIN FOR THE VP SLOT.  In other news, Bobby Jindal has pulled himself out of consideration as McCain's VP.

TIME MAGAZINE HAS JUMPED ON BOARD THE ROAD TO SERFDOM MOVEMENT.

OBAMA. THIS TIME FULL OF BULLSHIT ABOUT ISRAEL.  Worth quoting:

we all know by now that Obama has the ugly habit of repeating lefty tropes, blithely unconcerned about their accuracy or lack thereof.

Actually, I think a lot of people aren't much aware of this, because they don't much follow the blatherings of the academics or the NY Times, and aren't aware of where these lies and idiocies come from.  And a big slice of other folks have soaked up this stuff at college and from the media and they're utterly oblivious to dishonesty and falsehood of it all.  So, no, we don't "all know" about this ugly habit.

DEATH SPIRAL AT WaMu, MERRILL LYNCH & Citigroup? Mish weighs in.

PAUL GIGOT DEFENDS THE WSJ against the lies of Paul Krugman, who's been spreading all sorts nonsense about Democrat run Fannie Mae.  Quotable:

[Contrary to the BS of Paul Krugman] Fannie Mae and Mr. Mozilo [at Counrywide] weren't competitors; they were partners. Fannie helped to make Countrywide as profitable as it once was by buying its mortgages in bulk. Mr. Raines -- following predecessor Jim Johnson -- and Mr. Mozilo made each other rich. Which explains why Mr. Johnson could feel so comfortable asking Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) to discuss a sweetheart mortgage with Mr. Mozilo, and also explains the Mozilo-Raines tag team [attacking Gigot] in 2003. I recount all this now because it illustrates the perverse nature of Fannie and Freddie that has made them such a relentless and untouchable political force. Their unique clout derives from a combination of liberal ideology and private profit. Fannie has been able to purchase political immunity for decades by disguising its vast profit-making machine in the cloak of "affordable housing." To be more precise, Fan and Fred have been protected by an alliance of Capitol Hill and Wall Street, of Barney Frank and Angelo Mozilo.

I know this because for more than six years I've been one of their antagonists. Any editor worth his expense account makes enemies, and complaints from CEOs, politicians and World Bank presidents are common. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are unique in their thuggery, and their response to critics may help readers appreciate why taxpayers are now explicitly on the hook to rescue companies that some of us have spent years warning about ..

Also this:

Fan and Fred also couldn't prosper for as long as they have without the support of the political left, both in Congress and the intellectual class. This includes Mr. Frank and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Capitol Hill, as well as Mr. Krugman and the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein in the press. Their claim is that the companies are essential for homeownership. Yet as studies have shown, about half of the implicit taxpayer subsidy for Fan and Fred is pocketed by shareholders and management ..

And that's about all you need to know about the left today.  It's a twisted, corrupt cover for a massive plundering of wealth and grasping of power, and academics like Krugman are simply the most intellectually dishonest of the bunch.

UPDATE:  Thomas Sowell on the Democrats and the banks.

And this from Jim Lindgren:

Some people thought that I was too hard on the former managers of Fannie Mae, whose greed and misconduct in their Enron-style accounting scandal of 2003-4 helped to destroy the soundness of a huge quasi-government agency.

Now comes Paul Gigot recounting just how thuggish their behavior was. The Fannie Mae officials at the time made millions in unearned profits from phony accounting to maximize their bonuses while trying to intimidate -- and when that didn't work, to destroy -- any politician who dared to stand up to their corruption.

DON'T CALL IT BULLSHIT. Call it bafflegab and Obamafuscation.

And note this bit of comedy gold:  "The policy hadn't changed - people just had to understand to ignore the words coming out of his mouth!"

"WALL STREET GOT DRUNK" -- so says George Bush.  Is George Bush too stupid to know that the Federal Reserve got it drunk, and the President and the Congress were spiking the punch bowl with GHB?

A SHELBY STEELE CLASSIC. Jesse Jackson passes the torch to Barack Obama.

Worth thinking about:

So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit -- presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.)

The complication here is that from the point of view of what is best for America, most of Obama's policies will be incompetent.  But from the point of view of America's leftist elite, Obama's policies will be understood as successful, competent policies.  And the elite will willfully see the causes of any bad consequences for America where ever is most convenient to themselves and their ideology, rather than were those causes actually lie.   So America will likely be torn by Obama the way America was torn by FDR -- whose gross incompetence during the Great Depression is only now being revealed for anyone who cares to study the matter, were as at the time FDR's ideological partisans could only see brilliance and success, even in the midst of endless economic stagnation and massive unemployment.

So I see Obama as continuing to tear apart the country the way the country has been torn apart by the left during the Roosevelt years, and continuing on into the Lyndon Johnson years.  If there wasn't built in incompetence in the very policies and ideology of Barack Obama, I'd see thing differently.  But unless Obama reads some books by Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Friedrich Hayek, and completely rethinks public policy in the next six months, I see inevitable bad consequences and more division on the horizon for America, no matter how "competent" Obama is in implementing his leftist vision.

Bonus quote from Steele:

Already [Obama] has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste.

THE MOON CIRCLING THE EARTH. A don't miss video.  Somehow this video makes you rethink the cosmos as much as any still picture of the Earth or the moon from space.

UPDATE:  Better video here.

ONE IN FOUR VOTERS BELIEVE THAT MOST REPORTERS  will try to offer unbiased coverage of the Presidential campaign.  The rest are actually paying attention.  From Rasmussen.

UPDATE:  The NY Times spikes a John McCain op-ed just days after publishing an Obama op-ed.  What do you expect from a newspaper published by a man who would have liked to have seen John McCain shot dead in Vietnam?

"RIDING OUT THE WANING DAYS OF A DEFEATED PRESIDENCY" -- Powerline on George Bush.

UPDATE:  More evidence that George Bush is riding out the last days of his presidency with his head under the desk.  But then, Bush never did do very much to defend his presidency or his side of the aisle.