Wow. I thought that only happened to famous people.
You’ll notice at the bottom of each post, there are several buttons allowing you to share the posts on various sharing and bookmark sites. You’ll notice that one of them is a Facebook button.
You’ll further notice that if you click the Facebook button and try to share the content, Facebook will block you.
I’m abusive or spammy. Nice.
I’ve contacted Facebook in an attempt to resolve this issue. I can’t wait to see their response.
Here’s a hint, AP. When you start actively scrubbing details that might be embarrassing to the politicians you favor, you cross the line from bias and into propaganda.
If you follow this link, you’ll read a nice little AP story about President Barack Obama (D-USA) speaking about budget talks and high gas prices. Nowhere will you see this line:
Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.
“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”
But that line was in the original version of the article, as Glenn Reynolds shows with a nice screenshot:
Oh, good. He has the video now too.
As Ed Morrissey at HotAir points out, this is more than a little reminiscent of Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake”.
Regardless, Obama fills the role of clueless aristocrat by telling a man who explains that he can’t afford to fill his gas tank at current prices that he should instead buy a new car.
I don’t want to hear another person try to tell me that the MSM doesn’t have a bias problem. They are now actively covering up mistakes made by The One.
I also don’t want to hear another person complain about bias from Fox News either. Neal Boortz has issued a challenge to all his listeners to call in and show ONE example of bias in the news reporting on Fox News. He issued this challenge in 2003! It’s been over 7 years, and not one single person has managed to do so.
However, I can find it in places like NBC, CBS, Reuters, and now AP, nearly every day.
More Faux News.
Today, in 1917, the United States entered World War I, officially declaring war on Germany. 16 months later, the war would be over.
That was when we fought wars to win.
Thank you, American service men and women and veterans, wherever you are.
Brings government spending to below 20 percent of the economy, a sharp contrast to the President’s budget, in which spending never falls below 23 percent of GDP over the next decade.This is a necessity. Play all the games with taxes you want. We know from history that we can’t consistently get tax revenue over 20% of GDP for any extended period of time. President Barack Obama (D-USA) and the rest of the Dems ignore the problem. If you never get anywhere near 20%, you’re being criminally irresponsible.
Corporate Tax Reform: Improves incentives for job creators to work, invest, and innovate in the United States by lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent, which is the highest in the industrialized world, to a more competitive 25 percent.Well, if you’ve ever read this blog before, you know how I feel about that. It doesn’t go nearly far enough. Still, if you want to get the economy going and consistently moving forward, this is a necessity. It’s the minimum we can do, and we should do much more, but it’s a good first step.
At a time when the free-market foundations of the American economy were in desperate need of restoration and repair, the last Congress took actions that further undermined them. The President and his party’s leaders embarked on a stimulus spending spree that added hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt, yet failed to deliver on its promises to create jobs. Acute economic hardship was exploited to enact unprecedented expansions of government power.Ryan remembers last November. I hope the rest of Congress does also. Yes, I’m talking to you too, GOP.
This did not sit well with the American people. Citizens stood up and demanded that their leaders reacquaint themselves with America’s founding ideals of liberty, limited government, and equality under the rule of law.
In recent years, both political parties have squandered the public’s trust. The American people ended a unified Republican majority in 2006, just as they ended a unified Democratic majority last fall. Americans reject leaders who focus on the pursuit of power at the expense of principle. They reject empty promises from a government that cannot live within its means. They deserve the truth about the
nation’s fiscal and economic challenges. They deserve – and demand – honest leaders willing to stand for solutions.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” Will this be remembered as the Congress that did nothing as the nation slouched toward a preventable debt crisis and irreversible decline? Or will it instead be remembered as the Congress that did the hard work of preventing that crisis – the one that chose the path to prosperity?Call me skeptical. I still believe that this Congress will be remembered as the Congress that did nothing.
Defense spending as a share of the budget has fallen from around 25 percent thirty years ago to around 20 percent today. Like all categories of government spending, defense spending should be executed with greater efficiency and accountability.Ryan plays a game with the numbers here. Sorry, but I’m not going to let him get away with it. Defense spending has fallen as a share of the budget, but that doesn’t mean that there have been defense spending cuts. There haven’t. Defense just hasn’t grown as fast as other parts of the budget. He should be comparing defense spending to GDP here, as he does with other things. In terms of GDP, defense spending has grown, so it’s still part of the problem. It’s just not as much a part of the problem as other areas of the budget.
[It is] very clear that, absent action, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will soon grow to consume every dollar of revenue that the government raises in taxes. At that point, policymakers would be left with no good options. Making do without any federal government departments, including the military, is not really an option at all, and neither is raising taxes to a level that no free and prosperingBingo.
economy could sustain.
Of course, if Congress continues to delay, it will lose even the ability to make such choices on its own terms.
Each year that Congress fails to act, the U.S. government gets closer to breaking promises to current retirees while adding to a growing pile of empty promises made to future generations. The government’s unfunded liabilities – promises theThis isn’t spin. It’s a fact. To deny facts is to stick your head in the sand like an ostrich. Dems today want you to be an ostrich.
government makes to current workers about their health and retirement security for which it has no means to pay – are growing by trillions of dollars a year.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the tax rates needed to sustain the nation’s current fiscal trajectory into the future would end up sinking the economy. That is one reason that the Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposed, as part of an overall effort to fix the nation’sActually, I disagree with part of that too. I don’t want to eliminate loopholes. I want the “loopholes” to apply to everyone. There’s been a lot in the papers recently about GE not paying enough in taxes. The problem isn’t that GE doesn’t pay enough. It’s that everyone else pays too much. But I digress.
unsustainable deficits, a fundamental tax reform plan that actually lowered income tax rates to promote growth, while eliminating tax loopholes to broaden the tax base.
The recent sovereign debt crises in Greece and other highly-indebted European countries provide a cautionary tale of the rough justice of the marketplace – lenders cannot and will not finance unsustainable deficits forever, and when they cut up the credit cards of profligate countries, severe economic turmoil ensues.We are on the exact same path as Greece, Italy, and others. And we’re not as many steps behind as you might think.
Over the past few years, Americans have seen just how quickly a severe financial crisis can create widespread pain and chaos. But the last crisis was foreseen only by a small number of perceptive individuals who recognized the implications of unwise decisions being made in Washington and on Wall Street.
By contrast, nearly every fiscal expert and advisor in Washington has warned that a major debt crisis is inevitable if the U.S. government remains on its current unsustainable path. The government’s failure to prevent this completely preventable crisis would rank among history’s most infamous episodes of political malpractice.
The first sign that a debt crisis has arrived is that bond investors lose confidence in a government’s ability to pay its debts – and by that point, it is usually too late to avoid severe disruption and economic pain. Right now, the U.S. government is able to borrow at historically low rates, partly because of the Fed’s interventions in the market, but also because the bonds of most foreign countries are looking even riskier. Neither of these conditions is going to last. Interest rates – and the burden of paying interest on the debt – have nowhere to go but up.We may be mere months from this. If it’s years, it’s not very many (think less than 5).
If foreign investors, especially foreign governments such as China, begin to lose confidence in the U.S. government’s ability to solve its most difficult fiscal challenges, they will demand higher compensation to offset the perceived risk of holding U.S. debt – meaning sharply higher interest rates.They may also demand payment in tender other than U.S. dollars. If China required that all future debt payments be made in gold, that would be catastrophic. At some point, that becomes not just a terrifying thought, but an destructive inevitability.
The economic effects of a debt crisis on the United States would be far worse than what the nation experienced during the financial crisis of 2008. For starters, no entity on the planet is large enough to bail out the U.S. government. Absent a bailout, the only solutions to a debt crisis would be truly painful: massive tax increases, sudden and disruptive cuts to vital programs, runaway inflation, or all three. This would create a huge hole in the economy that would be exacerbated by panic.Well, that’s a pleasant thought.
In the end, the debate about rising U.S. debt is not just about dollars and cents, but also about America’s status as a world power and its freedom to act in its own best interests. If the nation stays on its current path, interest payments on the national debt will begin to exceed yearly defense spending just 11 years from now. In just 16 years, yearly interest expenses will be double national defense spending.That’s where we are. The rest of the document lays out how to fix it. And it ain’t pretty. But overall, it could look much worse. The cuts aren’t extreme. They’re manageable. In fact, it’s easy to argue that in some places, they’re too small. Far too small.
If it stays on its current fiscal path, the United States will be unable to afford its role as an economic and military superpower. Other nations with very different interests will rush in to fill that role.
Last year in Foreign Affairs magazine, financial historian Niall Ferguson surveyed some of the great empire declines throughout history and observed that “most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. All the… cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt. Alarm bells should be ringing loudly… [for] the United States.”
Ending corporate welfare: There is a growing and pernicious trend of government overreach into sectors of the private economy – a trend that stacks the deck in favor of entrenched interests and stifles growth. This budget ends the taxpayer bailouts of failed financial institutions and stops Washington from picking the winners and losers across sectors of the economy.And:
Boosting American energy resources: Too great a percentage of America’s vast natural resources remain locked behind bureaucratic barriers and red tape. This budget removes moratoriums on safe, responsible energy exploration in the United States, ends Washington policies that drive up gas prices, and unlocks American energy production to help lower costs, create jobs, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
This budget puts an end to empty promises from a broke government, offering instead real security through real reforms. The framework established in this budget secures health and retirement benefit programs both for current beneficiaries, who will receive the benefits they’ve organized their retirements around, and for future generations, who will inherit stronger programs they can count on when they retire.As Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) said recently:
I went before the firefighters convention on Friday down here in Wildwood, New Jersey, and I said to them, you know, I understand why you're angry. For 20 years, governors have been coming here to your convention and lying to you about the kind of benefits they can provide to you. And you want to "boo' me, that's fine, but I'm the first guy who's telling you the truth, which is if we don't make these reforms, we are going to wind up with you not having a pension in 10 or 15 years, because the situation is so dire.I’ve seen a lot of booing and anger directed at the GOP lately. Especially the Tea Party wing. These aren’t the people you should be booing. You should be booing the people who have been promising you unicorns and rainbows for the last 50 years and telling you not to worry about how to pay for it because that’s a problem for the future. Guess what? The future is now.
| Share this post : |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| Share this post : | | | | | | | |
| Share this post : | | | | | | | |
They beat up the Bulldogs and won the national championship tournament last night. In the end, Butler was the antithesis of the 1985 Villanova Wildcat team who shot 78.6% from the field, and only missed one shot in the second half to beat Georgetown by 2. Butler shot a mere 18.8% for the game last night.
And the final analysis of the season from the computer is complete. Here’s it’s top 10.
Other computers will no doubt have slightly different rankings. I’m sure you’ve noticed that neither Connecticut nor Butler appear at the top, or anywhere in the top 10. UConn finished the season ranked #13, and Butler #26.
A lot of the teams in that top 10 are pretty young, so it’s a good of a list as any for a preseason top 10 for next year.
And now my computer will sleep for a few months and pick up again when college football starts.
Congratulations again to both the Butler Bulldogs and the Connecticut Huskies.
President Barack Obama (D-USA) officially kicks off his 2012 campaign today. You can watch the video here. It’s rare for a sitting President to start campaigning so soon, but let’s face it, campaigning is the one and only thing he’s good at.
And he’s not even that good at that.
So, this blog is officially kicking off our campaign to add him to the unemployment lines.
So, let’s look at a couple of highlights from his first two years in office, shall we?
Well, there’s this from Moe Lane:
And this:
And more on unemployment from the 405 club, showing what the unemployment numbers look like assuming static levels in workforce participation.
But let’s move on from unemployment and general human misery. How about American public debt? The Heritage Foundation has us covered here.
But at least he ended all those wars that President George W. Bush started, right?
According to this site, the Obama death toll stands at 1,118.
Hey, but he promised to bring down gas prices. Let’s check GasBuddy.com.
And then there’s one of my personal favorites, the corporate tax rate from Cato@Liberty:
But he did lower our health care costs, right? Again, the Heritage Foundation sets us straight.
Really, with numbers like these, I can understand why he would want to start campaigning before his opponents.
And if you think these numbers are bad, imagine what he could do to America in a second term, when he doesn’t have to worry about trying to get re-elected.
Bend over, here he comes again, America.
Well, I already told you that UConn would be favored over Butler. You didn’t believe me?
Here’s the tail of the tape for the championship game, Butler vs. Connecticut.
| Team | % chance to win title | Projected Score |
| Connecticut | 54.58% | 75-66 |
| Butler | 45.42% | 74-66 |
The projected score is the projected score when that team wins. In other words, in the 54.58% of the time that UConn wins, they win 75-66. But in the 45.42% of the time that Butler wins, the score is nearly flipped, 74-66.
Given how well the computer has done through this tourney, Butler fans should be happy with the pick.
No, that’s the motto for NCAA football.
Well, it’s true for computer ratings of any sport. Even one with almost 6,000 games like NCAA basketball. In case you haven’t noticed (and judging by the TV ratings numbers, you haven’t), there were a few basketball games this week, in the NIT, CBI, and CIT tournaments.
Well, believe it or not, the outcomes of those games have affected the odd for our Four Finalists winning the championship, albeit slightly.
| Team | Final Four | Championship |
| Kentucky | 65.17% | 47.78% |
| Butler | 61.64% | 21.61% |
| Connecticut | 34.83% | 21.60% |
| VCU | 38.36% | 9.01% |
The folks in Indy will no doubt be happy to see that Butler is now the second favorite. Barely. However, this is as high as they will go. They will not be favored against either Kentucky or Connecticut. Their second favorite status is due primarily to how heavy UK is favored over UConn. Should the Huskies pull off the upset, they will leapfrog Butler for the top spot in the title game.
Assuming the Bulldogs win, that is. Which is not guaranteed. If I had to bet, I’d take VCU. No team has played better thus far in the tourney. But, they didn’t look like this in November, December, January, or February. Which team will show up this weekend? Your guess is as good as mine.
The first presidential cycle ad for 2012. Kind of an April Fool’s joke, but mostly some lighthearted truth, just from an unexpected source.
Yes, it’s from the NRSC. Bravo. But you’re still going to have to do better to get some of my money. And don’t even bother calling me until primary season is over.
