So precious

NY TIMES COLUMNIST: KANSAS, MISSOURI ‘MIDDLE PLACES’ LAND OF ‘LOW SLOPING FOREHEADS’

This is very funny, on one level; unintentional self-satire always is. It's the result of living your life inside the liberal media bubble. But even so it's surprising somebody can be this stupid in public.

People like David Carr need not wonder why they and their "newspaper" continue on a long slide down the toilet.

Immigration

Krauthammer: This is outright lawlessness from Obama admin

Krauthammer is excellent here, and Myra Eliason's question about "deporting 11 million people" is startlingly foolish (and surprising, because she is not an otherwise stupid person). One has to admire Charles's patience in responding.

Nobody is talking about deporting any large number of people. But the idea of legalizing current illegals while the borders are still not controlled is a terrible idea, no matter how many new Democrat voters such a scheme would bring in.

Control the borders. Once the borders are controlled, then many paths to legalization for those already here will be on the table.

Anyone who still does not understand this two-step process simply does not want to understand it, and that has to be for political reasons because it ain't rocket surgery.

Byron

Squandering their future

Study: Cost high to fix public pensions — (CNN) — American taxpayers would have to pay anywhere from $329 to $2,475 annually per household for 30 years, depending on what state they live in, to remedy the crises in their public employee pensions, a new study said Wednesday.

The study calculated the tax increases needed for the full funding of state and local pension systems in the United States over the next 30 years, according to authors Joshua Rauh of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester.

Nationally, the average increase for households would be $1,398 annually for 30 years, said Rauh, an associate professor of finance.

That business described above is the mere tip of an iceberg. What a crushing legacy of public debt our generation has left for our children and grandchildren. Outrageously selfish and irresponsible don't begin to describe it. And, even so, the Obama Democrats' continuing systematic attack on the productive base of the economy continues unabated, which will make it very, very difficult for those generations to dig themselves out.

The political temptation of redistribution, of buying political power by encouraging the idea that everyone has a moral right to other people's money, is the worm in the apple that eventually poisons the tree. It took a while, but here we are, trying to figure out how to redistribute massive, compounding debt. Nobody, you may have noticed, steps up and claims a moral right to that.

At best, decades of sacrifice and diminished prospects will be required of people who did nothing to create the mess that is being left for them to clean up. I'm surprised that there isn't already more anger about this, but it would certainly be justified, and I fully expect it is coming. We can only stand in the dock and plead guilty; there can be no defense or excuse for what has been done on our watch. Blame won't be redistributed, either.

Byron

The left edge of the road...

...is not the center line. That's true, and it seems to be the thesis of the book Liberal Media Distorts News Bias. But what doesn't seem to be acknowledged is that the location of the center line can change with time and experience. For example, approval of gay marriage is pretty rapidly becoming the center-line opinion. For an opposite example, the demand for control of the Mexican border is becoming more and more widely shared.

Most people carry around a mixed bag of political opinions that are not consistently left or right, or even completely consistent with each other. The legacy media, though, doesn't operate that way; it's highly committed to promoting a consistently leftwing agenda, straight across the board. They pose as news organizations, but they have a deeper commitment to pushing public opinion, and therefore the country, to the left. Their desire to re-position the center line has become more and more blatantly obvious. As a result, they have gradually squandered whatever credibility they once had. Fortunately, they are of rapidly declining importance as sources of information, as their viewer and readership numbers clearly show. I doubt they will ever again be able to push a presidential election like they did in getting Obama into office.

Byron

78 per cent

via Instapundit:

SO IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE?

Gallup: U.S. Satisfaction Dips To 20% In June.“Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the country fell to 20% in early June from 26% at the start of May. Seventy-eight percent of Americans are now dissatisfied with the nation’s direction, according to a June 9-12 Gallup poll.”

The satisfied 20%?

That group was made up of (1) People who were unable to read the question; (2) People who could read it but were unable figure out what it meant; and (3) Michelle Obama.

Byron

Debate reviews

The entire event was an embarrassment.

I find these things too excruciating to watch. My prediction is that the liberal moderators who run them will always steer televised GOP debates to spend far too much time on issues of concern to the religious right, with the purpose of making GOP candidates look like a pack of Bible-thumping wahoos.

After all, there is certainly no way that a focus on the economic growth, unemployment, deficit spending, energy, foreign/military policy, public employee unions, etc., can help Obama get re-elected, is there? So, instead, let's hear everybody talk about their views on same-sex marriage and reproductive choice, one more time. Media types generally don't know much about that other stuff anyway.

Byron

Obama brings US to its knees

Great news: Deficit set to blast past $1 trillion for third straight year

Almost $1.4 trillion by Sept 30, and that's for just this current fiscal year.

The debt ceiling will be raised to allow the insane spending to continue.

The article is too depressing and awful to excerpt; I can't do it.

Read it if you can stand to.

Byron

Freedom: State rankings

Freedom in the 50 States

This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. It updates, expands, and improves upon our inaugural 2009 Freedom in the 50 States study.

High-Speed Lunacy

The latest "high-speed" (45 mph) rail project

The latest in lunacy in high-speed rail lunacy: at Joel Kotkin’s newgeography.com Wendell Cox reports that the U.S. Transportation Department is dangling money before the government of Iowa seeking matching funds from the state for a high-speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago. The “high-speed” trains would average 45 miles per hour and take five hours to reach Chicago from Iowa City. One might wonder how big the market for this service is, since Iowa City and Johnson County have only 130,882 people; add in adjoining Linn County (Cedar Rapids) and you’re only up to 342,108—not really enough, one would think, to supply enough riders to cover operating costs much less construction costs.

Oh, one other thing. Cox reports that there is already luxury bus service, with plus for laptops and wireless Internet, from Iowa City to Chicago. It’s part of a larger trend for private companies to offer convenient and inexpensive bus service. A one-way ticket on the bus costs $18, compared to a likely train fare of more than $50. And the bus takes only three hours and 50 minutes to get from Iowa City to Chicago. That’s one hour and 10 minutes faster than the “high-speed” train.

So let’s get this straight. The progressive, modern, “win the future” high-speed rail, which would cost the taxpayers of Iowa millions, would be slower than existing bus service and would cost more. Why ever would Iowa want to spend one dime on this project?

Compact, densely-populated Europe and Japan have high-speed rail so Obama thinks it must be a good idea for the U.S. The man is such an awesomely deep thinker.

The idea is so obviously, blatantly bad there must be more to it. I suspect it's mostly about high-speed shoveling of money to construction unions. Borrowed money, of course, since it's all deficit spending.

Byron

Amazing

House Dems demand end of tax deal for debt-ceiling hike

A group of House Democrats is calling for any deal to raise the debt ceiling to bring about the end of the Bush tax rates for the wealthy.

The lawmakers, led by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), also say that, following last week’s weak job report, they are concerned that certain decreases in federal spending could hurt the economy’s recovery.

They added that allowing the Bush tax rates for the wealthiest to expire at the end of next year would by itself “stop the growth of the deficit over the next decade.”

Ed Morrissey:

Not only do Blumenauer and his cohorts demonstrate their political irrelevance, they’re also displaying astonishingly bad math skills as well. The projected revenue from hiking the top tax rate to its pre-Bush rate, even using static tax analysis, is around $700 billion over a decade. A $700 billion infusion would not eliminate the “growth of the deficit” over a decade, not at current rates of spending and growth in entitlement spending projected over that period; in fact, it wouldn’t even cut this year’s deficit in half.

Yes, they said there'd be no math. But these people lack even the most general, common sense conception of the situation; they fail to grasp it by orders of magnitude. The question is how dim bulbs like Blumenauer, et al., get elected in the first place. Their voters must be just as dumb as they are. No wonder the country's in the shape it's in.

As a commenter points out, $700 billion is $70 billion per year over 10 years. The annual deficit is running at about $1.4 trillion, so $70 billion is only 5%, a trivial amount. I have long suspected that these fools, Obama included, are essentially innumerate; they simply have no conception of large numbers. Million, billion, trillion, whatever. It's like somebody who can only count the fingers on one hand, so numbers larger than 5 are beyond his comprehension and all vaguely the same.

Byron

Paradise Lost

Long, but a very good read. A recent survey found that 84% of California companies would locate somewhere else if they could. California is the tragedy of a Promised Land destroyed by overweening, irresponsible Government. California is a deeply insolvent and completely unsustainable Potemkin facade, teetering precariously on a vast and growing mountain of unpayable public debt.

A native Californian tours the once-prosperous Central Valley: Two Californias

Goolsbee bails out

Obama Economics Advisor Austan Goolsbee Jumping Ship, White House Seeks Another ‘Academic’ to Replace Him

The top economics advisor to President Obama is jumping ship. He hasn’t been in the position very long, and obviously was an utter failure at his job. According the NYT’s The Caucus blog, Goolsbee is going back to world of academia, and the White House is searching for another academic to come down from the ivory tower.

With the recovery flagging, the White House is eager to name a successor to Mr. Goolsbee this summer and is considering several academic economists, an administration official said on Monday. The job requires Senate confirmation.

Oh yes, by all means, find another academic with little or no real world business experience to advise the president on the economy. That’s just been working so well for us.

Heckuva job, Goolsbee! (I wonder if he will forget to put "top economics advisor to President Obama" on his curriculum vita. Maybe the less said about that, the better.)

Question is, what economist of any stature wants to work under President Obysmal and be forever identified with his failed, incompetent administration? You have to wonder about anybody who'd be willing to step into that position, to tee himself up to be thrown under Obie's campaign bus as a scapegoat.

Byron

Medicare

Why we must end Medicare ‘as we know it’

Burdened by runaway spending, Medicare “as we know it” is going to end. The only questions are when and on whose terms.

Samuelson is always good. What will it take for Obama and the Democrats to stop the childish demagoguery and face reality? Where is their plan to deal with this? For that matter, where is their plan for anything besides destroying the private sector? Has any foreign power ever done as much damage to America as this bunch has done? It's incredible, and they aren't done yet.

Has Obama lost CBS?

Hotair.com:

CBS delved into the jobless numbers and discovered that the percentage of unemployed who have been out of work for more than six months now exceeds that of the 1930s economic collapse:

There is an unfortunate adage for the unemployed: The longer folks are out of a job, the longer it takes them to find a new one.

CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports that the chronically unemployed face the hardest road back to recovery, and that while the jobs picture may be improving statistically on a national level, it is not for them. …

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

There is a hard and fast rule for presidential politics: if your results have to be compared to the Great Depression in order to look good, you’re in serious trouble. If your results look worse than the Great Depression, you’re in deep trouble. And if the media starts to report that your results make the Great Depression look better, especially if you’re a Democrat, then you may want to plan for your retirement earlier than expected.

That last is key, the behavior of the liberal media. Until now, CBS has been a loyal Obama team player, which is what makes this report interesting. Have they finally run out of ways to cover for Obysmal's failures? Maybe the long overdue exit of journalist extraordinaire Katy Couric has something to do with this sudden blip of integrity. Is there finally some pang of conscience for having foisted this destructive fool on the America people? Not likely.

Byron

Palin was right?

About Paul Revere?

Like when she said " Let's party like it's 1773." The media airheads went berserk, hooting about her "stupidity" that time, too. But, of course, she was right -- the Boston Tea Party was in 1773, not 1776 like the media airheads thought.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/06/historians-agree-palin-was-right-about-revere/

Imagine what better shape we'd be in now if Barack Obysmal were only as stupid as Sarah Palin.

In his dreams. He's the one, remember, supposedly a former U. of Chicago teacher of Constitutional Law, who said the business about "all men created equal" was in the Constitution. No, Obie, it's in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The media blow-drys knew no better themselves, of course, and gave him a complete pass.

Byron