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Media Infiltrations: Republicans and the Populist Temptation  Wall Street Journal February 9, 2010 Why Taxing Stock Trades Is a Really Bad Idea Wall Street Journal January 6, 2010
"What has been your worst blogging experience? "That's a guy who actually stalks me on the Web and once stalked me personally." "I'm saying this...guy's a jerk."
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Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Join us as we discover, document, expose and challenge the bad people, the bad institutions and the bad ideas that stand in the way of wealth creation -- and show you how to fight back!
Saturday, October 03, 2009
IF THEY CAN HUNT OBAMA DOWN LIKE THIS... ...then catching Osama Bid Laden should be easy.
Thanks to William Heasley.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 3:07 PM |
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IS THERE A NAME FOR THIS SEXUAL PERVERSION? What do you call it when a man presses a bra to his nose and mouth and inhales deeply -- in public? I don't know, but we've caught Paul Krugman doing it. That's him on the right, below.
Okay, here's the real story about this, from Gizmodo.
Yes, that's Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman there with half a brassiere clamped tightly over his nose and mouth. That said, this is not some scandalous spy shot that will bequeath Bill O'Reilly's next wet dream. It's actually this:Thanks to Perry Eidelbus for the link.The brassiere is one of the award-winning bits of science and invention from this year's quirky, eccentric and downright entertaining Ig Nobel Awards...
This year at Harvard's Sanders Theater the awards show didn't let up, with the aforementioned brassiere winning in the Public Health category. Why public health? Well, aside from providing support, the bra doubles as a life-saving gas mask; one that could be handy should a biological attack strike somewhere soon, like the unmentionables department at Macy's.
I kid, but this brassiere seriously works. Those D cups are the brainchild of the voluptuous Dr. Elena Bodnar of Illinois (by way of the Ukraine, backside pictured, above); and Raphael Lee and Sandra Marijan, both of Chicago. Bodnar passed on giving a big speech, and instead gave the audience a live demo. Her "volunteers" were a handful of Nobel laureates assembled on the stage, including Krugman. By the end of the demo, she had removed multiple bra gas masks from under her shirt and no fewer than four Nobel laureates were protected from chemical attack thanks to a hot pink layer of satin.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 3:01 PM |
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Friday, October 02, 2009
NOBEL FATIGUE It's that time of year, when the Nobel Prize in Economics is announced. The Motley Fool notes,I have grown quite weary of the Nobel Prize... Enter Paul Krugman, whose selection for the prize diminishes the legacy of the award itself.Now, I know he was selected for his contribution to the understanding of trade, rather than for his ruminations on the broader state of the economy and the role of debt in the context of our present crisis. As it becomes clearer and clearer just how incredibly wide of the mark this guy is in terms of grasping the true nature of our present predicament, I suspect that the Nobel selection committee will wish they had not empowered him with this mystique-building title.
What is our venerable Nobel-winning economist saying this week? More stimulus! Nothing new here ... he's been bullish on stimulus for some time. We haven't come close to spending stimulus package #2, and already Krugman is clamouring for more debt to solve our debt crisis. The incongruous logic behind such a call is truly baffling. The dollar is perched on the edge of cavernous ravine, driven by an international crisis of confidence in our national fiscal solvency, and this guy wants to be one more hand pushing the greenback over the edge. If he were the genius that his prized award suggests, then he would understand how completely wrong-headed his entire approach to the crisis remains.
If you're betting the family farm on an economic paradigm that's aligned with this guy's thinking, then you are in grave need of a paradigm shift. If you think that further stimulus will create anything but a more viscious degree of market dislocation, quantitative easing, and an eventual rush to the exits by foreign central banks, then you'd be ignoring the observable impacts of the first two stimulus packages and their ilk of bottomless bailouts. If you think that it's possible to prevent the delevering of the global derivatives market with the printing press, then you'd better be prepared for the hyperinflationary consequences of the strategy.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:02 AM |
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Thursday, October 01, 2009
PART OF THE SOCIALIST'S "FATAL CONCEIT"... ...is to think that achievement grows on trees. Surely Edward Rothstein, a New York Times reporter covering the opening of the new Disney Family Museum, could have easily done everything Walt did. He just didn't want to....it can hardly be said that Disney’s career is the stuff of adventure stories: he knew how to make cartoons and amusement parks, and he created companies that could do both.He just "knew how" -- the way ants "know how" to dig little tunnels. Nothing to see here folks. Seize the means of production and move along quietly...
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:21 AM |
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
WAVERING ON THE EDGE OF NEAR-INDECISION Obama seems to be discovering that you have to do more than "talk purty" to be effective as the most powerful leader in the world. DC-insider "Mick Danger" reports:The Washington Post lays it out well in an editorial today:PRESIDENT OBAMA'S very public wavering over whether to stick with the strategy for Afghanistan that he adopted six months ago is producing some unusual spectacles. One is the awkward gap that has opened between the president and the military commander he appointed in June, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who drew up a plan to implement the strategy -- only to learn he had been left out on a limb that might be sawn off. Another is the lobbying of the president by NATO allies who find themselves trying to keep the United States from abandoning the mission they joined. Their spokesman in Washington this week has been the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who in a diplomatic but direct way has been telling Mr. Obama that "we don't need a new strategy."“Wavering” is how a supporter describes an abject lack of leadership and purpose on a subject and at a time when both are necessary. Accelerated by Obama’s “wavering,” his supporters and fellow Democrats in Congress aren’t wavering. Each day, more and more of them are declaring that they will not vote for further funding of the Afghan War of Necessity.
The Post editorial is convincing, helped greatly by the quotes from NATO Secretary General Rasmussen, a man who probably knows that when a leader doesn’t lead, his followers start drifting away.
I wonder if Axelrod is noticing what the other Rasmussen has to say:
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:19 AM |
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Tuesday, September 29, 2009
JOKE OF THE DAYPosted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:40 AM |
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DEMOCRATS: DO YOU REALLY WANT TO REFORM HEALTH CARE, OR DON'T YOU? Philip K. Howard in the Wall Street Journal:
On Aug. 25, at a town-hall meeting in Reston, Va., Howard Dean, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, was asked why there is nothing in the health-care proposals about liability reform. Mr. Dean replied: "The reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers. . . . And that is the plain and simple truth."...A few thousand trial lawyers are blocking reform that would benefit 300 million Americans. This is not just your normal special-interest politics. It's a scandal—it is as if international-trade policy was being crafted in order to get fees for customs agents.
...Former Sen. John Edwards, for example, made a fortune bringing 16 cases against hospitals for babies born with cerebral palsy. Each of those tragic cases was worth millions in settlement. But according to a 2006 study at the National Institutes of Health, in nine out of 10 cases of cerebral palsy nothing done by a doctor could have caused the condition.
Unreliable justice is like pouring acid over the culture of health care. One in 10 obstetricians have stopped delivering babies, unable to pay malpractice premiums on the order of $1,000 per baby, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). Some hospitals, including Methodist Hospital and Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia, have stopped delivering babies altogether; and the number of unnecessary caesarian sections have increased to the detriment of the health of mothers, according to the ACOG.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:23 AM |
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Sunday, September 27, 2009
A MAN, A PLAN, BUT NOT AFGHANISTAN My DC-insider friend "Mick Danger" points to this commentary in the New York Post:Throughout last year’s presidential campaign, Barack Obama lambasted the Bush administration for fighting “the wrong war” in Iraq and ignoring the right one in Afghanistan. Iraq was a “war of choice,” Obama claimed, while Afghanistan was a “war of necessity.”Mick comments,...In March, in one of those solemn-looking occasions in which he excels, Obama said that the new strategy, which he did not elaborate, was already in place...and a few weeks later named a new commander for Afghanistan.
That commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, lost no time in revealing that the Obama administration had no specific strategy and that his first task was to work one out. By the end of August, he’d drafted a “new strategy” and submitted it to the Pentagon in the form of a 66-page report that included specific steps for moving ahead, as well as a request for still more troops.
Then, nothing happened — until someone leaked the report.
One can only imagine the general’s surprise when President Obama, asked to comment on the leaked report, said he wouldn’t allow himself to be rushed into sending more troops, as requested by McChrystal, pending the development of a “new strategy.”
One might say, Wait a minute! We thought you had a strategy before you were elected, when you castigated Bush’s performance in Afghanistan — or at least in March, when you announced “the new, smarter strategy,” or in June, when you appointed a commander to “carry out the new strategy.”
What of McChrystal’s proposed “new strategy” spelled out in his report? No, the president says he’s still looking for a strategy.
Obama has reportedly set up a special “situation room” to look for a strategy. One meeting has been held...
As on so many other issues with Obama, we have “on-the-job training” on grand scale.
Seems the O never had a strategy for Afghanistan.At the end, the writer of the Post piece (the rather controversial Amir Taheri) lists five advisers to Obama voicing five different opinions: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, General McChrystal and David Axelrod.
No, not five. Two, maybe. (Bob Woodward might add a sixth, General Jones, but others say he’s not a player inside the White House.)
President O doesn’t listen to or talk to Hillary, he is not involved with Gates and is shunning General McChrystal.
So, that leaves Biden and Axelrod. Biden these days is as busy as can be, visiting and debating with a swirl of “experts” and pretenders. Why it’s almost as if he were a college professor or a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman. Wonder if the Joe’s met with General McChrystal?
As an actual bright and well-educated man, I doubt the O would make time for the babblings of the Joe. Still, I suspect the Joe will be among those credited once a plan is announced as the Joe swoons over flattery aimed at him and it’s in the O’s interest to inflate, occasionally, the tires on his ole Veep.
That leaves Axelrod.
Is this how the White House treats the fate of American troops in the “war of necessity”?
Not good.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:09 PM |
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