Category: Politics

Sheer awesomeness…

I saw this Census survey referenced today, and one of the statistics that caught my eye was:

• The percentage of children living with two parents varied by race and origin. Eighty-five percent of Asian children lived with two parents, as did 78 percent of white non-Hispanic children, 70 percent of Hispanic children and 38 percent of black children.

Only 38%… The value of a father in a child’s life is so immeasurable. It makes me so utterly sad that nearly 2 out of every 3 black children are growing up in a broken home.

If you look at the President’s site for tracking the stimulus spending, you’ll notice $228 billion in tax cuts. That sounds good, right?

But click the link for details and you find that:

• Tax Relief – includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy.

And then you think, uhh, what? How is any of that a tax cut? Did the English language change somewhere and I wasn’t aware of it? How can the politicians do that with a straight face?

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation — worse even than Louisiana’s. It also has the nation’s fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).

Worse than Lousiana? Oh no!

Yeah, it’s amusing to me that little extra clause in the sentence. But look at the numbers. A 40% increase in five years! No wonder we’re flat broke as a state. And now all the Democrats and union are whining about restricting spending? What do their own households look like? Repeat after me, you can’t spend money you don’t have. You save money when you have extra.

But California doesn’t believe either of those statements.

From the Chicago Tribune:

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

Well, that’s unfortunate. Well done, Senator Feinstein.

To be fair, her spokesman later tries to insist she was quoting from a Washington Post story from last year. But that was never mentioned at anytime.

According to a news report, California may issue some sort of IOU instead of cash for state income tax refunds.

If you expect you’ll be getting a refund from California when you file your 2008 state income tax return, be prepared: you may instead receive a “registered warrant.” Translation: an IOU.

California is rapidly running out of money. Blame it on the state budget deficit that continues to bleed billions of dollars from California’s reserves. Facing inadequate credit to make up the difference, California’s Controller John Chiang warns that by the end of February, the nation’s most populous state may not be able to pay some of its debts, and instead be reduced to issuing those creditors IOUs.

That’s remarkable. The State Assembly has run this state into the ground, spending way too much and giving into the unions and special interests. It’s finally catching up, spending more than we have. The size of the state budget has increasing disproportionately to revenue and population for the last several years. The politicians are incompetent, and the eceonomic mess is unmasking their idiocy.

From Barry Ritholt, come some numbers calculated by Jim Bianco.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far. The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II:
Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion.

That’s incredible.

From the Telegraph comes a story of global warming that wasn’t.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

Yikes, but that is embarrassing. Climate change folks seem to shoot themselves in the foot rather often…

From some recent statistics on abortion:

Nearly half of all African American pregnancies end in abortion. Since 1973, the number of abortions by African American women has totaled more than twelve million. In some localities, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Maryland, and Georgia, more than half of all abortions are performed on black women.

That’s heart-breakingly sad. Half…

Quoting from a piece in the American Thinker

Senator Obama’s two tax promises: to limit tax increases to only those making over $250,000 a year, and to not raise taxes on 95% of “working Americans,” intrigued me. As a hard-working small business owner, over the past ten years I’ve earned from $50,000 to $100,000 per year. If Senator Obama is shooting straight with us, under his presidency I could look forward to paying no additional Federal taxes — I might even get a break — and as I struggle to support a family and pay for two boys in college, a reliable tax freeze is nearly as welcome as further tax cuts.

Jim Geraghty also makes the point that if Obama allows President Bush’s tax cuts to expire, that’s an effective tax increase for most middle-class families.

I’ve asked several people at work. All of us makes well under $250,000, but even the Obama supporters don’t actually expect to pay less in taxes under Obama’s plan. I certainly don’t. Something doesn’t add up.