Excellent, but...

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: Three Years Under Obama

Yes, Bill, but it's probably already too late to avoid the crash-and-burn.

Politically, socialism vs. capitalism is never a fair fight -- simple-minded and wrong will always win over complicated and correct, the pure fantasy over the impure reality. Eventually, the "morally entitled" outnumber the producers, which is always the socialist political goal from Day One. Economic growth is then gutted by the demand for redistribution, and societal wealth crashes downward and social inequality actually increases.

Count on it. 
  
Down we go. 

Merry Christmas.

Byron

Electric car fiasco

Did the Obama administration delay report on Volt fires?

See the article for the depressing story.

But it's not just electric cars.  Obama's entire subsidy push for green energy is a massively expensive and wasteful disaster from beginning to end.  It's government overreach of the worst kind, with entirely predictable results. New energy technologies will enter the marketplace, the great majority will fail, but some of them will eventually succeed.  But none of that happens, or ever will happen, the way Obama thinks, no matter how much borrowed money he flushes down the toilet trying to have government create or pick winners.  His approach will only succeed in crippling the development of green energy technologies, or keep it from occurring at all.

His Cash-for-Clunkers debacle showed he knew nothing about how markets work, and he hasn't learned a thing since. Obama seems like a bright enough guy, but at some point a refusal to learn from experience begins to suggest otherwise.

GM has been touting its production numbers on the Volt, but that's not the same as sales which, even with big taxpayer subsidies to artificially knock down the price, are very poor. What GM has been doing is pumping its supply pipeline full of unsold vehicles. Pretty soon, there won't be room for any more, and then what?

Obama's instinct, of course, will be to double down -- to further increase the government subsidy to entice more buyers.  That will further distort the market by making the Volt competitive with superior alternatives, which therefore will fail or won't get developed at all. Technological development squeezed out by the dead hand of government: It's exactly how the Soviets ended up with tractors and consumer products that were fifty years behind the times.

Watching Obama operate around markets is like watching a retarded child play with matches around a gas can:  He's worse than clueless, because every action that has predictably bad consequences seems to him like a really great idea.

Byron

The horror

Kermit Gosnell’s wife pleads guilty to assisting at his abortion shop of horrors

I'd forgotten about the awful Gosnell story, which has been grinding through the legal system, free of national media attention as you might predict.

I'm pro-choice, but I'm not pro-this.  Nobody is, because nobody but a monster could be.

A moral system is never self-sustaining, it has to have external supports. If the limitations of conscience could be counted on, we wouldn't need a legal system.  This was a failure of morality, a fact that different people will explain in various ways.  But that these were ghastly crimes against the most innocent and helpless is beyond doubt or interpretation.  This is about as bad as it gets.  If 'evil' can't be used as the descriptor in this case, then it's time to drop the word from our language.

From a purely instrumental point of view, the operating assumption from the git-go had to be that, given the temptations of money and the weakness of human beings, this kind of gruesome enterprise would come into existence, sooner or later.  And so it did.  But the continued existence of the Gosnell slaughterhouse was enabled by a massive, long-running, and inexcusable failure of oversight and legal enforcement.  The Gosnells are not the only people, by far, who should take the fall for what went on there.

Byron

Riding the Moonbeam Express

An outbreak of fiscal sanity in California?

Supporters of the project warn that shutting down the project now would mean having to return $3 billion in federal grants — but that’s a rather poor argument for committing to a project whose predicted cost has now risen to $99 billion, and the same projection warns that it could run an additional $19 billion more depending on route options.

$118 billion.  All aboard!  I'll be astonished if this monstrosity is cancelled.  Enough union contributions to Democrats are involved in a project like this that I'm betting we can count on Gov. Moonbeam to bravely lead his people a bit deeper into Never-Never Land.

He's no doubt counting on a Greece-style bailout by the nation's taxpayers when the Promised Land formally admits it's hopelessly bankrupt.  Then we'll all be passengers on the Moonbeam Express, like it or not.

And, really, could there be a finer example of social justice than collecting tax money from some miserable schlub freezing his n*ts off in a doublewide on the outskirts of Akron or Wheeling -- and then sending it to Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and Monterey?

Byron

Arab Sprung

Disaster: Early returns show Islamists on track to win “dominant majority” in Egypt elections

In another triumph for Obama's "smart power" foreign policy, Mubarak is replaced by an Islamist government loaded with extremist Salafis.  Golly, nobody saw this coming, right? Obie will probably find it a perfect time to throw a few rhetorical brickbats at Israel, just because that's what the Left does, and anyway everybody knows Israel will quietly accept annihilation without unleashing its nuclear weapons. Everybody knows that much...

You might hope that every once in a while this bewildered administration would do something right, just by random luck. But luck can't help somebody as purposefully and systematically wrong-headed as the arrogant fool that currently occupies the White House.  Plus, Obie is really busy right now running around fomenting and encouraging a nasty class divide among the American people so he can get re-elected and wreck what's left of the economy and make everyone equally poor.  A righteous quest if there ever was one.  Think Gilbert & Sullivan, only not funny.

Byron