"Don't Be Evil" Guy Commits Adultery by Banging Much Younger Work Subordinate

...and quite possibly workplace sexual harassment...

In the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Depressing

Just how low has Obama sunk this great nation?

This low.

Listen to the Generals!!!!!!!!!!

U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria

Where are the cries of "Listen to the Generals!"?

Just kidding, of course.  That sort of criticism is for Republican presidents.

Otherwise Known As "Lies"

Making up "composites" appears to now be a requirement for presidential aspirants, at least Democratic ones.  Which is why Cory Booker is doing it.

Striking Burger-Flippers Will Prompt Shallow, Incomplete Debate

Naturally, the issue that all these fast food employees are bringing up is far more complex than the MSM is portraying, and probably more complex than they themselves understand.  There is alot to discuss, but I can assure you that there are three major factors of why people can't make ends meet that definitely will NOT be discussed:

1)  Lack of Alternatives - in normal economic times, low wage workers typically move up the pay scale because higher wage opportunities abound.  Thanks to Obamanomics, those opportunities are thin on the ground.  Low-wage existence especially grates when there aren't enough paths out.

2) Wages Buy Less - part of the strain is caused not by what these people earn, but what they can buy with it.  Despite what the Fed tells us, inflation is somewhere between trending up and raging.  If you count hedonic adjustments, also known as the crapify, inflation is at the level where it is really biting.  There is inflation in food, healthcare, education, which hits these folks hard.  Inflation is largely the result of policy mistakes emanating from government, so the purchasing power hit these people are taking is not on the hands of their employers.

3)  Government Bloat Hurts the Poor Especially - One of the biggest bills these people pay is their bill for government.  Via taxes, tolls, and fees, the bill for bloated and inefficient government falls on them too.  Governments have been on a revenue grab to pay for their base level inefficiency as well as their profligacy, corruption, and utopian schemes, so the burdens have been going up even for the working poor (think NYC subway fares).  The burden of these costs fall on the poor and middle class hard - those McDonalds workers are paying for teachers' pensions and do-nothing jobs at the Bureau of EvironmentalHealthDiversityofPaperPushing just as much as the middle and class and rich. While Democrats would like to shift that burden, there simply aren't enough rich people around to fund all that waste and utopian ambition.  The answer is not burden shifting, but burden elimination.  The best solution for these people on strike is probably higher taxes on higher earners combined with massive down-sizing of government.

Naturally, this is the great source of our national debate and current polarization, and I have laid out my arguments before, but I see the act of striking for this cause and voting for Obama (and Democrats in general) as opposite and counter-balancing acts.  Most likely, the overwhelming percentage of these people voted for Obama, if they voted at all.  Vote for the policies that create the conditions over which you lament.  So my sympathy is not extensive.

Apotheosis of Leftism On Frightening Display

I can't think of a single better exposure of the frightening mind of a leftist than this (h/t Instapundit).

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person

Narrow-mindedness.  Elitist Arrogance.  Economic Illiteracy. Blind Devotion to Diversity.  Pie-in-the-Sky Idealism.  Indifference to the Welfare of Others. 

It's all there and more.

Just Spitballing Here...

I wonder if the Coptic Christians in Egypt would be having an easier time of it these days, wot with all the comparisons to Kristallnacht, if Egypt had something akin to the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.  I'm thinking these folks (who've been living there for thousands of years, so their neighbors ought to be used to them) are not necessarily in agreement with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the supremacy of Egyptian constitution.

ASIDE:  While I like Jacoby for his usually perspicacious commentary, the underlying assumption in the linked column is that history naturally progresses towards a more benevolent state of man, that the chronological passage of time and the accruing of more experience correlates to better behavior or some sort of increased nobility in the hearts of men.  This is not just a flawed analytical assumption, it is the single most erroneous interpretation one can take from the study of history.

Syria: What An Absolute Clusterfuck

So, we drew a red line a year ago, let Assad go on killing.  We finally think, but we don't know, he crossed it.  We come up with a meaningless attack, reveal it to the world.  Then our allies dither and dissemble.  Then the UN says no, and we announce we haven't made up our minds, but we are still, like, really serious.

Any fallout from this clusterfuck - much of which is bound to be embarassment - is our own damn fault.  When you elect a bozo, this is what you get.

Good and Hard Update: Yes, We Are Getting It

Here's what I said the morning after Election Day 2012:

We deserve everything we get - depression, chaos, war, inflation, loss of liberty, social strife. It's coming and we deserve every last ounce. We have voted and we will get what we deserve...good and hard, I might add.

We don't have exactly that list, but we have economic malaise, impending war (even if only a phony war), rising interest rates, a frighteningly expansive and expanding surveillance state, IRS political targeting scandal, Benghazi stone-walling, and racial tensions aplenty after the fomenting of the Trayvonesty and the Chris Lane thrill killing in Oklahoma (which, I might add, is already down the MSM memory hole).  Add to that executive branch lawlessness, and I'd say I was dead on.

Was as easy a call I have ever made.  Enjoy it America!

Meet the F**kers

Bryan Preston is uncovering some interesting tidbits in re the Chris Lane killing in Duncan, Oklahoma.

How does this no-doubt underfunded, rank amateur "journalist" (not just sitting around in his pajamas, but actually working for a company called Pajamas!) come up with all this relevant information surrounding a story when the mainstream media can't find the same information with all their abundant resources and years of experience????

UPDATE:  More.

That Rainbow-PUSH Guy Is a Moral Dwarf

Frowned upon?

AMEN!  Boldly stake out that moral high ground Revrun'  !!!!!

Creating "New Slaves"

"But can people be fabulously wealthy and still be blind as fuck? Yes...they can."

Actually, it encourages it.  

That is, the fabulous wealth eases the path to blind-as-fuckness.  

I believe the term of art among people like me is "limosine liberal."

Same concept, just expressed differently.

The Guy Who Shopped Around for Hernia Surgery

Here is the opening thought in a Ezra Klein column that I had to read so that you don't have to, dear reader.

 Health care and education pose the same basic threat to the economy: How do you keep costs down for a product that consumers must purchase? Saying “no,” after all, is how consumers typically restrain costs. If Best Buy Co. wants to charge you too much for a television, you can walk out. You might want a television, but you don’t actually need one. That gives you the upper hand. When push comes to shove, producers need to meet the demands of consumers. But you can’t walk out on medical care for your spouse or education for your child.

There is so much wrong here that I could blog all day about it, but I'll just tackle this one small piece. Klein is overtly wrong.  Actually, you can walk out, and it just so happens that the WSJ carries an op-ed today that recounts the story of someone who did just that, literally just walked out, and got the needed medical care at a fraction of the original proposed cost.  This could be replicated on a massive scale to drive down the cost of healthcare across the board.  But that would require unshackling consumers and providers to contract together, and that would make the central planners and the noblesse oblige left go bonkers.

Let Them Eat Wind

Wow, today is rich with blogging possibilities.

First up, if you want to read a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist at his best, check out Dan Henninger today.  He frames Obama's presidency in a remarkable way - the phony and/or impotent focus on the middle class, the overt liberal elitism of it all, and the embarassingly off-point policy details.  This one line should have been the title:  "Let them eat wind."  Four words.  Four words which sum up and encapsulate the Obama presidency - elitist, off-the-mark, empty.

Still, one has to credit the steely fanaticism of the noblesse-oblige left. Here last week was Mr. Obama's new EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, speaking in Boulder, Colo., about her intention to impose the president's anti-carbon goals through executive order: "We're going to do this this year, next year, the following year, until people understand these are not scary things to do." Let them eat wind. 

Bonus tidbit: news out today that Obama is tackling yet another one of America's non-priorities, college financial aid.  Add this to the list of things that Americans are not really concerned about that Obama is all over.

Oklahoma Thrill Kill

Barack Obama would not have had a son that looked like this kid, so nothing to see here...

...although, if you are interested, the details here are truly appalling compared to the Travesty Martin spectacle.

Also, I see that some Aussies are lamenting the role of guns here.  This is not a gun issue, this is an issue of a decrepit and amoral youth underclass.

UPDATE:  Yup.

UPPDATE:  The WSJ weighs in with exactly the right analysis - the story here is what is NOT happening.

There was no saturation cable TV coverage, no press conference featuring Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, and no statement from the Oval Office. The death of Christopher Lane, while as troubling as that of Trayvon Martin, will not become a national touchstone of racial and cultural debate or reflection.

Plus, there is the gun.  Here is the hard to swallow truth - it is easy to blame the gun, but it is difficult, painfully so, to confront a generation completely drained of any moral bearing.

...it would almost be a relief if we could blame such a murder on guns. Then we wouldn't have to focus on a culture that produces teenagers for whom the prospect of shooting an innocent man in the back on a Friday evening apparently raised not a scintilla of conscience. That is the deeper tragedy, and the real scandal, of too much of American life.

Difficult truths are hard to admit and easy answers are always more appealing.

Oil and Gas News

Production of shale oil out of the Eagle Ford shale play is rocking and natural gas production from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and West Virginia is blowing away expectations.  More job-creating, wealth-creating, tax-paying, Saudi/Russia petro-tyrant annoying economic activity that is a blessed rare bright spot in the age of Obama.

And yet the anti-fracking activists are still at it, still lying to put a stop to a great advance in modern technology that will alter the US economic landscape and geo-political landscape for the better for ages to come.

Obama Talks Out of His Ass (I Know, I Know)

As the Powerline guys point out, Obama appears not to know crap about basic facts concerning these United States.  To be fair, maybe when he said "Gulf Ports" he meant 'ports within, say, three or four states of the Gulf.'  Who knows.

Anyway, check out the video clip where he appears to sound like he knows what he is talking about, i.e. the ostensible need to invest in expanding and upgrading port infrastructure in places like Savannah to adjust to new economic realities like the widening of the Panama Canal.

Um, er, except that this is already being done.  The city fathers of Savannah and the state of Georgia is already on it, Mr. Lightworker.

Four massive new ship-to-shore cranes arrived at Georgia Ports Authority’s Garden City Terminal today, bringing the total number of electric-powered container cranes to 25 – the most of any single terminal in the U.S. 

“These new super-post Panamax cranes further enhance the cargo handling efficiency at the fourth-busiest container terminal in the nation,” said GPA Executive Director Curtis Foltz. “Combined with the largest single container terminal in North America and two Class I railroads on site, these cranes will make the customer experience even smoother.” 

Of the GPA’s current fleet of cranes, nine are post-Panamax (accommodating the largest vessels capable of transiting the Panama Canal) and 16 are super post-Panamax (for vessels too large to transit Panama). The cranes operate over a dock featuring 9,700 feet of contiguous berth space.

The arrival of the new super post-Panamax cranes fulfills an order the GPA placed with Konecranes in 2011. The crane purchase, along with the planned Savannah Harbor deepening, anticipates a move in the world fleet toward larger ships.

 What a doofus.

WSJ Op-Ed Page Revives Liberal Wednesday

For the longest time, Wednesday used to be Token Liberal Day on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.  The barely palatable Al Hunt held this post down for years before leaving to build Bloomberg News into the "Journolist" Hackfest that it is today.  Hunt ceded the Wednesday slot to the godawful Thomas Frank, who mercifully didn't last very long.  The slot seemed to go dormant for awhile with Gordon Crovitz filling in with no apparent ideological bent or real purpose.

So today I was surprised to see a new occupant of the Wednesday slot that appears to return the WSJ long tradition of subjecting giving its readers a liberal viewpoint in the middle of the week.  The New Republic's and The Brookings Institution's William A. Galston kicks off his ostensible new role with a fairly anodyne and harmless musing about the plight of the middle class.  The column opens up with what might have been a howler if it was not passed over so quickly and ends with a point worthy of much discussion that Galston fails to give it, and in between we get alot of economist-type on-the-one-hand-while-on-the-other-hand musing about the plight of the middle class.

The not quite howler is this.

President Obama is working hard to refocus attention on the middle class, and rightly so.

You will have a hard time convincing me that Obama is working hard on anything except maybe getting more Democrats elected in 2014 by poisoning the well of electoral politics with the most despicable brand of scorched Earth politics.  It is amazing to me that liberals still harbor the fantasy that Obama is hunkered down thinking of ways to advance policies that help people, when what he is doing is mostly just occupying the office and trying to make whatever part of government he can conform to hoary faculty lounge wet dreams.

Then we get four full columns of middle class yadayadayada, and then Galston ends with this.

If we cannot restore a vigorously growing economy whose fruits are widely shared, the struggles of the middle class will persist, and our democratic distemper will deepen.

In this little nugget is a truth that needs to be talked about as liberals are desperately purveying gibberish regarding income inequality.  What Galston's concluding sentence hints at is that income inequality is a political problem, it is not an economic problem.  Too large and too persistent gaps between rich and poor can destabilize society politically, but income inequality is not a brake on economic activity as liberals on down the line, including the President keep telling us.  There is no accepted economic theory that states that reducing income inequality spurs economic well-being.  A relatively free economy characterized by innovation grows and results in income mobility and reduces income inequality.  It is not the other way around.  If income inequality is your beef, then you should be advocating all manner of growth policies focused on experimentation, innovation, and deregulation rather than the typical liberal playbook of unionism, regulation and crony-laden central planning.  But I digress.

Galston's first effort in the revered Wednesday Token Liberal seat...?  Safe, uninspiring, competent.

Mugabe Wastes No Time Stealing...Again.

At nearly 90 years old, Robert Mugabe has not lost his appetite for officially-sanctioned thievery, thus driving the Zimbabwean people further into an economic abyss.  He's already destroyed what was once the breadbasket of Africa, driven an industry that was the pride of Zimbabwe across the border, and wrecked the national currency; but, after pocketing another stolen election, he's back at it.

President Robert Mugabe’s government plans to seize control of foreign-owned mines without paying for them as part of a program to accumulate $7 billion of assets following his July 31 election victory, a minister said.

The government will compensate bank owners as it takes control of their companies, Saviour Kasukuwere, the minister in charge of the program to compel foreign companies to cede 51 percent of their assets to black investors or the government, said in an interview in Harare, the capital, today. His comments echo a suggestion made by Mugabe earlier this year.

“When it comes to natural resources, Zimbabwe will not pay for her resources,” Kasukuwere said. “If they don’t want to follow the law that’s their problem.” Non-compliant mine owners risk losing their licenses, he said.

As night follows day, investment will shrivel, government interests will intrude, employment will decrease and people will be poorer.  This is as predictable as it gets. 

A Discourse on Workplace Violence

From the workplace violence person himself.  Very interesting stuff.

Obama Has Turned Fed Succession Into a "Circus"

The reliably pro-Obama folks at Bloomberg News have labelled Obama's lack of clarity over who will succeed Ben Bernanke a "circus."  Just like the affaire Snowden.  Par for the course.

The most important economic policy-making role in the world, and inexpressibly important influence on US economic conditions...
...a circus.

And the media freaked out over binders of women and assorted other trivial nothings.

Enjoy it America!

The Future Is So Bright, I Gotta Pare Spades

The future looks so bright in the Obama economy that an industrial bellweather company is shrinking by 18%.

Illinois Tool Works Inc. (ITW) today announced that its board of directors approved a new share repurchase program that authorizes management to buy back up to $6 billion of the Company's common stock over an open ended period of time. The full authorization represents approximately 81 million shares based on ITW's closing share price on August 1, 2013.

That's $6 billion for which the company can't find anything productive to do with, so it's going to hand that money back to shareholders to figure out.  Rather than do the spade work of economic growth, ITW is giving up a chunk of their productive resources.  ITW is a $33 billion market capitalization company, so it is shrinking by 18%.

Remember folks, you heard it here first, way back in 2009 I might add, at the very dawn of the Era of Hopenchange.  Am I a genius?  Sometimes I flatter myself, but the truth is I am not - Obama's philosophy and his policies that emanate from it were so patently obvious for all to see and who weren't willfully blind.  Furthermore the implications of those policies were so thoroughly predictable, that I and many others predicted almost exactly how the Era of Hopenchange would result in stagnation, malaise and slow steady loss of dynamism in America.  It wasn't hard folks.  We get the government we deserve, good and hard I might add.  Enjoy it!

This Cracker Has a Question...

Just wondering, is this that constructive and enlightening "conversation on race" that we've been having or needing or something...?

Welcome to the Party, Powerline!

Some of the bigger and more prominent conservative blogs are noticing something that we've been noting and chronicling for some here at NBfPB - that Bloomberg News, under the auspices of Al Hunt, is a carnival of leftist hackery. Just search on "Hunt" or "Bloomberg News" (or even "unexpectedly") on this blog and you will get copious examples of the "journolist"-style tripe that emanates from that putative "news" source.

Here are the guys at Powerline expressing amazement at a typical instance:

I know Michael Bloomberg is a clown and an aspiring tyrant. I didn’t realize his news service had decided to compete with MSNBC for the title as the most ludicrous news organization on the planet (after Al Jazeera, of course). Check out this headline from yesterday:

House Republicans Set to Defy Obama Are Mostly White Men The core group of Republicans who are pushing the House toward a showdown with the White House over the debt ceiling and government spending is made up of 41 members — all white men except for two.

Except for two? I’m sure if Bloomberg tries hard enough, they’ll find those two are white African-Americans, just as George Zimmerman was a heretofore unknown category of “white Hispanic.” And then there’s this graph:

And about half of them, 19 of 41, have already received campaign donations this year from the political action committee of Wichita-based Koch Industries Inc., controlled by billionaire energy executives Charles Koch and David Koch, who spent millions trying to defeat Obama in 2012.

Seriously? Did a Bloomberg editor really sign off on this?

Welcome to the party Powerline!

BTW, this wasn't the only ridiculous "white people doing it = rank illegitimacy and loathesomeness" theme that Bloomberg News has foisted on us this week. Minor Bloomberg hack Francis Wilkinson picked up a few gun magazines (magazines as in printed publications), saw mostly white people, and declared guns that much more frightening.

Everybody's white. That's the conclusion from a survey of gun magazines I bought the other day. The survey, I admit, was not conducted in accord with the best research practices: I asked the guy at the subway kiosk for as many gun magazines as he could give me before the #4 train pulled in. He handed me three for $17.

All the magazines have ads for, well, guns, and loads of accessories (love the "Sneaky Pete" concealment holster). Naturally, they have stories on guns -- whether "intimidating, big-muzzle looks" or a "Tank-tough Recon Tactical with added strength and reliability for patrol." In addition, there are features on gun life, such as columns in Guns Magazine called "Campfire Tales" and "Odd Angry Shot."

There are pictures of guys with guns, gals with guns, animals with guns, ammo with guns and guns with guns. Curiously absent are pictures of black people with guns, brown people with guns or Asian people with guns. The good guys are white. The bad guys are white. In the Gunworld depicted in these pages, pretty much everyone is white.

 Um, OK.  I guess I could say the same thing about magazines on log cabin homes, woodworking, Irish poetry, quilting, or the wines of France.  So what?  And that about sums up the only logical response to much of the drivel that Al Hunt's minions spew at Bloomberg News's relatively new social commentary apparatus...so what.