Democrat party lies and propaganda vs. economic reality

Nancy Pelosi, after Democrats won back the House in 2006 (via):

The American people called for greater economic fairness, and we pledge to work for an economy that enables all Americans to participate in the economic success of our country.

While this statement might be accurate, the problem is that most Americans are “participating” in a crappy economy.

The economic reality:

The recovery is losing so much momentum that employers are unlikely to step up hiring anytime this year, and unemployment could return to double digits.

That was the bleak conclusion of analysts Friday after the government said economic growth crawled at a 2.4 percent pace in the spring. It was the economy’s weakest showing in nearly a year. And many economists think growth is even slower now.

Consumers spent less, companies slowed their restocking of shelves and the nation’s trade deficit exerted a stronger drag on the economy in the April-to-June quarter.

[…]

“We’re headed into the third quarter with little momentum, and most everything is tracking weaker,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Because of that, I expect unemployment to rise back to double digits, hitting 10 percent in December and staying there early next year.”

Businesses stepped up their spending last quarter, propelled in part by government stimulus. But those gains aren’t likely to be repeated, economists said.

Yeah, so the $787 million stimulus package failed miserably and the economy is swirling the drain.   After all these years, Democrats are still lousy at handling the economy.

But that doesn’t stop the administration and Democrats from travelling the country and  lying about its phantom success.

The real question is: will the American people use their power to vote these morons out of office?

Oh well…

Nine times out of ten, I’ll go to the local bookstore during my lunch break.

Most of the time it’s because I love to read, but also because it recharges my brain from the mental atrophy I undergo in the corporate hell-hole.

Today I went there during lunch, desperately looking for some inspiration.   Found none…

NV-Sen: Reid and Angle in dead heat

Democrats will be hard pressed to find a positive spin on this:

Sen. Harry Reid and Sharron Angle are locked in a dead heat, says a new poll for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and KLAS-TV, Channel 8 that shows the GOP challenger regaining ground after going on the offensive with a TV ad blaming Reid for Nevada’s deep economic troubles.

The high-profile contest with implications for President Barack Obama’s agenda promises to be a bare-knuckled fight to the finish as voters decide between Reid’s promise that the recovery is coming under Democrats and Angle’s call for a new conservative fiscal direction, analysts said.

[…]

The new survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research shows Reid and Angle neck and neck. The Senate majority leader would win 43 percent and Angle 42 percent of support from likely Nevada voters if the election were held now. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points on the statewide telephone survey of 625 registered voters taken Monday through Wednesday.

A July 12-14 Mason-Dixon poll showed Reid 7 points ahead of Angle, 44-37. It was the best showing for the four-term incumbent — and the worst for Angle — in a head-to-head matchup, according to a series of surveys for the Review-Journal since last year.

That Reid cannot get over that 50% mark as an incumbent, not to mention Senate majority leader, is really bad news for Democrats, and good news for the people of Nevada.

The Angle campaign needs to go on the offensive and establish the narrative of the midterm elections this campaign–it’s all about the economy:

Since the last poll, Nevada’s record high unemployment jumped to 14.2 percent, something Angle highlights in her first general election ad that notes it was 4.4 percent when Reid became Senate majority leader five years ago. The state also has record high bankruptcy and home foreclosure rates with one in every 15 homes in vote-rich Las Vegas in foreclosure.

[…]

Despite Reid’s efforts, a vast majority of Nevada voters remain unhappy with Democratic leaders and the direction of the country, the poll shows, which hurts his chances of winning come Nov. 2.

Six out of 10 voters think the country is on the wrong track, while more than half disapprove of the job Obama is doing. Four out of 10 think his actions to stabilize the economy are hurting, while three in 10 believe they are improving things.

The Angle campaign needs to drive home the point that Reid and the Democrats are bad news for their economic health.

The politics of SB 1070

Yesterday’s Federal court decision to strip the law of its key provisions is a blow to state’s rights and the will of the people of Arizona.

Governor Brewer has confirmed that Arizona is appealing the decision.

Doug Mataconis wonders how this will play out for the midterms:

…[I]t’s going to be interesting to see what impact this decision has across the country. Polls have shown repeatedly that a large majority of Americans support Arizona’s law and a new polls shows that similar majorities oppose the Justice Department’s decision to sue the State of Arizona.

One can imagine that these voters are going to react negatively to this decision, although, of course, there’s not really much they can do about it since the matter is in the hands of the Court.

Andy McCarthy thinks this decision means tough political seas ahead for Democrats:

…[T]he gleeful Left may want to put away the party hats. This decision is going to anger most of the country. The upshot of it is to tell Americans that if they want the immigration laws enforced, they are going to need a president willing to do it, a Congress willing to make clear that the federal government has no interest in preempting state enforcement, and the selection of judges who will not invent novel legal theories to frustrate enforcement. They are not going to get that from the Obama/Reid/Pelosi Democrats.

Elections have consequences.  The Federal judge who wrote the decision was an appointee of President Clinton, who has been out of office for a decade, yet his decisions and appointments have ramifications today.  And President Obama has made his opinions on judicial activism very clear.

These elections–midterms, the general election in 2012–have consequences.  Dire consequences.  Conservatives need to mobilize and step up to the plate.

Why do left-wingers hate the military so much? (Barbara Boxer edition)

The breaking news here is that some people are actually shocked that left-wing Democrats have no respect, appreciation or understanding of what our military does:

At a campaign event over the weekend in Inglewood, California, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer seemingly equated being a politician to serving in the military –- and an Iraq War veteran supporting Boxer’s November opponent is calling on her to apologize.

“We know that if you have veterans in one place where they can befriend each other and talk to each other. You know when you’ve gone through similar things you need to share it. I don’t care whether you are a policeman or a fireman or a veteran or by chance a member of Congress,” the California senator said. “[Democratic Rep.] Maxine [Waters] and I could look at each other and roll our eyes. We know what we are up against. And it is hard for people who are not there to understand the pressure and the great things that go along with it and the tough things that go along with it.”

Yes, there’s a lot of pressure involved in bankrupting the country, raising taxes, being incompetent and grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and dragging it into a progressive utopian nightmare.

It’s kind of  like ducking mortar attacks, snipers in Afghanistan and IEDs.   Can’t you see the similarities?

The Carly Fiorina campaign responds:

“Barbara Boxer’s disrespectful comments underscore just how out of touch she has become after her 28 years in Washington,“ Veterans for Carly Coalition Co-Chairman Lt. Commander Paul Chabot said in a press release, in response to Boxer’s comments. “Equating the experiences of members of Congress with those of brave soldiers who have fought to defend our country is just the latest example in a failed career marked by disrespect for our men and women in uniform.”

Chabot added, “Barbara Boxer owes an immediate apology to all members of America’s armed forces.”

Yes, I understand that Fiorina is not the ideal conservative candidate, and yes I know she’s running an underwhelming campaign, but seriously, Boxer needs to be shown the door and quick.

The people of California need a navel-gazing moment and muster enough willpower to put Boxer out of her political misery once and for all.  If they can’t do that, then the people there just get what they deserve from their elected officials.

The World Cup final on Twitter

Some eye-opening Twitter action during the World Cup:

In a post on the company’s blog, Matt Graves, a Twitter employee, said that the final match of the World Cup “represented the largest period of sustained activity” for a single event since Twitter started several years ago.

Mr. Graves also said that during the final 15 minutes of the game the company was seeing more than 2,000 World Cup-related tweets per second, being generated from over 170 countries in 27 languages. Once Spain scored its winning goal, that number passed 3,000 posts per second.

Pretty remarkable stuff considering that there was nearly a revolution in Iran tweeted on Twitter.

FinReg adds mountains of bureaucracy

This is what “reform” looks like:

Before the financial reform law, the SEC already had a full plate. It is working to implement or finalize nearly 20 new regulations covering areas ranging from money market funds to high-speed electronic trading. It is also conducting numerous investigations growing out of the financial crisis and is in the early stages of implementing many internal reforms in its enforcement and examination divisions.

The agency’s new tasks are just as onerous. Schapiro said at a congressional hearing Tuesday that the SEC will have to hire 800 new employees.

“The act requires the SEC to promulgate a large number of new rules, create five new offices, and conduct multiple studies, many within one year,” Schapiro told Congress in prepared testimony. “The importance and complexity of the rules coupled both with their timing and high volume and the rule writing agenda currently pending will make the upcoming rule writing process both logistically challenging and extremely labor intensive.”

Do Democrats have solutions to any issue that doesn’t require tax increases or increased bureaucracy?

The idea that multiplying the number of bodies in a federal office, or legislating reams of new regulations on existing regulatory bodies, will prevent these crises from happening is insane.

But it does provide a sense of accountability, right?

The next time a market bubble bursts or there is some sort of financial crisis to deal with, we’ll know who to call.  Just look up the number of your nearest Democratic representative or Senator and ask them to fix the mess with the massive, new layers of regulation they just dumped onto the financial system.

A tax by any other name…

Remember when Candidate Obama promised us no new taxes?  No?

Here’s a memory-refresher:

Yeah.  About that:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

[…]

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.

Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

So Candidate Obama, shockingly, was full of it.  Even during the healthcare negotiations, he was lying:

While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.

“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”

When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”

Here’s the clip:

Well, his name isn’t George Bush, and he has a “D” after his name, so I guess it’s ok for this particular politician to lie and continue squeezing the middle class.

Tea Party caucus getting tepid reception

Not surprising at all:

…[T]he  tea party movement is a loaded political weapon for Republicans heading into the midterm elections.

Until now, they have had the luxury of enjoying the benefits of tea party enthusiasm without having to actually declare membership. But now that Bachmann has brought the tea party inside the Capitol, House Republican leaders and rank-and-file members may have to choose whether to join the institutionalized movement.

The more I hear about this idea, the more I disagree with this move.

Heading into the midterms, Republicans have history and momentum on their side–for now.  I never underestimate the GOP’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Already, Eric Cantor has said that the caucus is not such a great idea, along with Tea Party favorite, Marco Rubio.  To the extent that the caucus is to represent the principles of the Tea Party, how does the movement interpret Rubio’s and Cantor’s decision? Is it less inclined to support these candidates and members?

But forget the distractions that are bound to come up with this idea.  My biggest issue is about credibility.

A Tea Party-backed candidate has yet to win a significant election.  It seems to me that having a caucus would mean the members of the caucus would have some clout in their representative body.  If the Tea Party movement shows that it has the push to swing elections overwhelmingly, then forming a caucus would make more sense.  After the fact.

If the Tea Party falls flat come election night, then the caucus will look pretty silly.

To be continued…

How did “$” come to represent US currency?

Christopher Beam writes an interesting piece on the origins of some world currencies.

The evolution of the US dollar’s “$” symbol is relatively complex compared to other well-known currency symbols:

We got the $ from the Spanish. In the late 18th century, merchants in the North American British colonies traded mainly with two currencies: the British pound and the Spanish dollar. When the United States adopted its own currency in 1785, it used Spanish money as its model—a deliberate “screw you” to the British.

Scholars have since theorized that the $ sign evolved out of an abbreviation for peso: The plural for pesos was “ps,” which eventually became “ps,” and then simply an “S” with a single stroke denoting the “p.”