Whistling Past the Graveyard
Fascinating how the media is trying to twist today’s poor consumer price index report (-1% growth) into a sign the worst depression since the Great Depression is almost over.
From Reuters:
The deepest U.S. recession since the Great Depression showed signs of easing in the second quarter, buttressing hopes for a second-half recovery, though it may be anemic as consumers are still strapped for cash.
Gross domestic product, which measures total goods and services output within U.S. borders, fell at a 1.0 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said on Friday, after tumbling 6.4 percent in the January-March quarter, the biggest decline since early 1982.
Analysts who had expected a decline in second-quarter GDP of around 1.5 percent said the report, which showed a moderating pace of decline in key areas such as business investment and exports, provided the clearest evidence yet that the 19-month-old recession was almost over.
“The recession is entering its final hours. Today’s report shows those green shoots are starting to grow again, and the economy is finally moving down the road to recovery,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi UFJ in New York.
The smart folks at High Frequency Economics are still expecting negative growth throughout the rest of 2009. So while we may have seen the bottom, there’s little to indicate we’ve begun the slow climb toward positive GDP growth.
The home remodeling and other construction contractors I’ve talked to say they have work, but not a lot. They’re keeping busy, and some have even begun limited hiring. But everyone is being cautious, keeping a pretty tight grip on expenses.
At the big box retailer where I work, we’re just making our sales plan for the quarter. Sales in my department were strong the first half of the month, but have slowed a bit the last week to 10 days. We’ll have a block buster couple days and then go bust for another day or two.
Don’t know what to make of it, other than that we’ve got a long way to go before a recovery kicks in.
We’re Running Out of Time!!
YIKES!!
From IMAO:
…we are doomed!
Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy is predicted to collide with our galaxy in 2.5 billion years? No one told me this! That has to be disastrous! All the stars and other bodies will be thrown out of their regular obits! What the hell are we going to do?
I always thought we had 5 billion years to get off this planet before our sun dies. That hardly seems worthy of rushing. But instead we have 2.5 billions years to get out of this galaxy. Intergalactic travel? How can we manage that? And most of the nearest galaxies are satellites of the Milky Way or Andromeda. I assume they’re not safe either. We need a plan to get millions of light years away from here. And we need one yesterday.
Where the hell is the space program?!
Hardly time to pack…
Another Win on the Diversity Front
A Muslim PUBLIC school principal fires a Christian high school wrestling coach after one of the coach’s wrestlers abandons the slavery of Islam for Christ.
The principle considers the PUBLIC school a Muslim school. One wonders where the ACLU is on this? Oh and did I mention this is happening in Dearbornistan?
From World Net Daily:
A high school hall-of-fame and Christian wrestling coach in Dearborn, Mich., claims he was muscled out of his long-tenured coaching job by the school’s principal, a devout Muslim, because the administrator was furious over a student wrestler who had converted to Christianity from Islam.
Gerald Marsazalek has coached wrestling for 35 years at Dearborn Public Schools, amassing more than 450 wins and, in addition to being added to the Michigan High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame, was named “Sportsman of the Year” by the All-American Athletic Association.
Despite Marsazalek’s success, however, Principal Imad Fadlallah of Dearborn’s Fordson High School ordered the administration not to renew the coach’s contract, allegedly in retaliation over the student’s conversion and to continue a campaign of flushing Christianity out of the school.
“We are getting a glimpse of what happens when Muslims who refuse to accept American values and principles gain political power in an American community,” said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which is representing Marsazalek. “Failure to renew coach Marszalek’s contract had nothing to do with wrestling and everything to do with religion.”
The principal has apparently been on his on personal jihad against Christians at the school.
According to lawsuit documents, Principal Fadlallah’s retribution against the Christian coaches serving Fordson High began in 2005, after Marsazalek’s volunteer assistant coach, Trey Hancock, led a non-school sanctioned and independent summer wrestling camp. Hancock, who is also pastor of the Dearborn Assembly of God and parent to one of the wrestlers, reportedly shared his beliefs at the camp and baptized a Muslim Fordson student into the Christian faith.
That fall, Fadlallah fired Hancock and ordered the volunteer coach not to have further contact with the student wrestlers.
“Subsequently, in full view of students and faculty,” the lawsuit states, “Fadlallah approached the young Fordson student who had chosen to be baptized a Christian at Hancock’s summer wrestling camp, punched the student and advised the student he had ‘disgraced his family’ by converting to Christianity from Islam.”
Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges, Fadlallah then banned Hancock from entering the school, ordered Marszalek to “keep Hancock out of the building” and even banned the Hancock family from helping out at school concession stands, even though Hancock’s son was an All-State wrestler on Fordson’s team.
On or about Thanksgiving Day 2007, Hancock came to the school to register his son for an activity, an offense against Fadlallah’s orders, the lawsuit claims, which led to a vocal confrontation between the principal and Marszalek, who was allegedly accused of failing to enforce Hancock’s banishment.
When the 2007-2008 wrestling season concluded, the lawsuit states, Fadlallah instructed the school’s athletic director to be rid of Marszalek too, by refusing to even process the Christian’s yearly renewal application for the coaching position, saying, “Gone. I want him gone. No appeal.”
Another assistant coach, who had made no application for the head coaching position, was chosen by the school to take Marszalek’s place.
According to the lawsuit, however, Marszalek’s treatment by Fadlallah isn’t isolated, but part of an intentional eradication of Christianity from the school.
“Fadlallah, since assuming duties as Fordsons’ principal in 2005, has systematically weeded out Christian teachers, coaches and employees and has terminated, demoted or reassigned them because of their Christian beliefs,” the lawsuit continues. “Fadlallah has publicly stated ‘he sees Dearborn Fordson High School as a Muslim school, both in students and faculty, and is working to that end.’”
Islam is irreconcilable with freedom, with this nation, with Christian civilization. There really can be no compromise. No Muslim should be allowed to teach, let alone run a public school, or any other school.
Time we wake up before what’s happening in Dearbornistan spreads. Islam is a cancer that must be eradicated.
Hurray for Multiculturalism
Another positive impact of cultural diversity in the U.S.
From AZCentral:
Liberian refugees who have fled the war-torn nation say the rape of an 8-year-old girl in Phoenix is a horrifying case of families trying to escape violence in their own country only to find it again in their new home.
The attack, which police say was committed by four young Liberian boys, also exposed the darkest sides of the country’s long civil war. Boys were recruited to rape, kill and torture, and experts and government leaders said sexual violence remains a challenge as the West African country rebuilds.
The assault also has revealed cultural attitudes about women and assault victims that could take a generation to change. Rape wasn’t even outlawed in Liberia until 2006, and victims are still made to feel shameful and even complicit in the attacks on them, aid workers say.
Phoenix police say the local case, which has garnered international attention, is no different. After the girl was attacked on July 16 in a shed at a Phoenix apartment complex, her parents told police to take her away, saying she had brought shame on the family.
Nice.
Thugs Attack Man, Man Stabs Thug…
… Man gets arrested.
What utter nonsense.
From the UK Telegraph:
Mr Philpott, a 57-year-old company director, spent Friday night in police cells on suspicion of the attempted murder of a 16-year-old boy who suffered five stab wounds to the chest.
According to his wife, 51, he grabbed a letter opener and confronted a gang of youths who she said had threatened to kill her and were attacking her 25-year-old son Alex.
Mrs Philpott said the teenagers involved in the altercation on Friday were “visibly drunk” and threatened her.
“I took a digital camera with me and told them that if they vandalised anything else, I’d take pictures as evidence.
“It was then that one particularly drunk and rowdy teenager said that if I took a picture, he would kill me and burn down my house.”
She said her son intervened in a bid to calm the situation and gang attacked him, leaving him with a broken nose.
“He ended up on the ground with all five of those yobs on him – kicking him in the head and stomach,” she said.
“I was so frightened for him that I screamed for Colin, who until this point had been in bed.
“He came running out – still barefoot and half asleep – and saw the mess Alex was in so ran back in to the house.
“He grabbed the first thing he saw, which was a letter opener, and confronted the boys.
“In the blink of an eye, the lads attacked Colin and I saw one stumble into the road as Colin screamed for me to call the police and ambulance service.”
She said the police arrived shortly afterwards and she was “gobsmacked” when they arrested her husband.
“It was heartbreaking to see him handcuffed and carted off like a common criminal – he is a hardworking, honest family man and was only trying to protect us,” she said.
The father should have beaten the kid with a baseball bat, and gotten an accomodation from the police.
But instead, law enforcement anymore has devolved to arresting law-abiding citizens instead of the criminals and thugs who prey on society.
There’s a woman not too far from where I live who is a drug-dealing crack whore. Two of my kids have become entangled with this woman and gotten into some pretty heavy duty drugs from her. Now, of course, my kids are ultimately responsible for their drug abuse.
But still, the fact that this scumbag is not in jail, when every cop in the county knows she’s a drug dealing crack whore, just makes me insane angry.
Most recently my son has been hanging in her orbit and coming home with tracks in his arms. This makes be both heartbreakingly sad for and rage-filled at him, and homicidal toward her.
I would like nothing better than to burn her house down with her in it. But no, I won’t do that. I won’t do anything, not even take a baseball bat to her, because I know the consequences.
I’LL GO TO JAIL and she will, after a brief stay in the hospital, where she can get drugs for free, go scott free.
Such is the U.S. and U.K. criminal justice systems. Criminals face no real sanctions for the destruction they cause, while the rest of us have to watch as their poison infects and destroys those we love.
Dr The Obama
Politics imitates art…
Czar Crazy
Check out this entry on Wikipedia on The Obama’s czar mania. He’s got dozens of these appointees who report only to him and are outside the traditional government oversight process.
My question is who will be the Czar Czar. We needed somebody running herd over all these yobbos.
Verizon Sucks III
For the record: Verizon still sucks.
Richmond Tea Party Today
Join Us THIS SATURDAY for a Festival of Liberty and Celebration of Individual Rights!
Chesterfield County Fairgrounds, July 25th, from 1:00pm – 7:00pm
Dang! I have to work at noon.
Otherwise I’d be there.
More info here.
Government PR Weasel Attacks Blogger
Saw this on Instapundit. A Knoxville mayor’s office PR flak tried to shut down some blogger because he was critical of the good mayor.
Instead of going directly to the blogger or to the blogger’s publisher (the local newspaper), she tries some back door maneuvering only to get caught. Now everyone is playing nice-nice.
From the News Sentinel (the reporters account is a bit convoluted):
When his First Amendment right to post snarky commentary about her boss collided last week with her First Amendment right to complain to his boss, a News Sentinel blog wound up tangled in the wreckage.
Scott McNutt, a paid part-time blogger for the News Sentinel, put his “Snark Bites” blog on hiatus last Friday after Knox County mayoral spokeswoman Susanne Dupes complained to McNutt’s supervisor at his full-time job that he was posting his political satire on company time.
The day after the News Sentinel began an inquiry into the incident, McNutt’s boss at the Amputee Coalition of America deemed McNutt blameless of a “violation of company policy.” Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale’s chief administrative officer also absolved Dupes of allegations that she used her mayoral connections to try to silence a Ragsdale critic.
And the blog will see new life – as soon as McNutt clocks out of the Knoxville branch of the amputee advocacy group Friday evening.
“I will probably wait until the weekend,” McNutt said Thursday afternoon.
The blog brouhaha began after Dupes, whose husband also works at the ACA, phoned ACA supervisor Rick Bowers to complain that the timing of some of McNutt’s posts suggested he was penning his political prose when he was supposed to be working at his day job.
“The concern I shared was very simple,” Dupes said in a statement Thursday. “We support the exceptional work of the Amputee Coalition. And, as I told the coalition, we appreciate the satire of ‘Snark Bites.’ Each has an important role to play in our community, just independent of one another.”
McNutt said Bowers told him that “the intimation was made the mayor would appreciate if I would stop writing about him.”
Bowers denied that, however, in an interview Thursday.
“She called about the blog, but she never said, ‘I’m representing the mayor.’ ” Bowers said. “But, of course, I knew she worked for the mayor. She just complained that it looked like one (of the posts) was sent on company time.”
Bowers said he asked McNutt to temporarily stop writing for the blog to give ACA higher-ups, both of whom were not then in Knoxville, time to investigate. McNutt said he agreed.
“It was not a violation of company policy,” Bowers said the ACA determined. “No disciplinary action was taken.”
Even if it was a violation of company policy, since when is the job of a government PR weasel to police company HR policies.
This is a clear example of a political hack trying to cover her butt after getting caught trying to suppress opinions she doesn’t like.
She should be fired.
Instead, her boss covers for her;
Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale’s chief administrative officer also absolved Dupes of allegations that she used her mayoral connections to try to silence a Ragsdale critic.
Of course she was using her position to silence a blogger. Who would have paid any attention to her otherwise?
She should be fired.
The Gates Affair
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates is a professional race hustler with a giant chip on his shoulders against white people.
The Cambridge cop who arrested him for “disorderly conduct” after confronting him for breaking into his own home is simply a bully like most cops.
The entire affair, if you haven’t heard of it by now Google it, is ridiculous. Had Gates acted like a sane person and simply produced some ID showing that he was indeed the owner/resident of the home he was seen by neighbors breaking into, the whole ordeal would have ended with out incident.
Instead, he adopts the black victim mantel and goes off on a racist rant, as is his wont.
The cop, to agree with The Obama, was stupid to escalate the confrontation to the point of arrest.
The whole thing is absurd. A pox on both houses.
To quote another famous knucklehead: “can’t we all get along.”
Verizon Sucks II
So here’s another day of lousy Internet connectivity on the crappy Verizon network, and another episode of truly shitty customer service from Verizon.
A week ago I upgraded to a faster DSL service from Verizon. The old service we’ve had since DSL became available in this area several years ago.
We have three computers and a gaming system that until sometime last week, all worked just fine together on our home network, which is linked by a Linksys router to the Westel modem from Verizon.
However, coincident with the upgraded service, we can now only have one computer connected at a time. To get another computer to connect we have to power down all computers, the router and the modem and then power up the computer we want to connect, along with the router and the modem and then that machine can connect. None of the others can connect at the same time.
I’ve spent a lot of time with the Verizon tech support folks who sound like they are in Mumbai. The guy tonight I could tell was trying very hard to speak English clearly, but it was still somewhat difficult to understand him.
He really had no clue as to why we can’t connect all machines at the same time. He tested our line and determined that we had service. Duh. I told him that I could connect to the Internet, so I knew we had service.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT ONLY ONE COMPUTER CAN CONNECT AT A TIME!
Well, he suggested I speak to one of their “experts” who could no doubt fathom the complexities of my problem.
After about 15 minutes on hold, a woman comes on and tries to sell Verizon’s premium support service. I don’t know how much it cost. I don’t care how much it cost. I don’t want to PAY for fixing something THAT I DID NOT SCREW UP.
So if I want Verizon to repair whatever they did that screwed up my perfectly good Internet connection I have to pay extra for the service, on top of what I pay for the DSL service in the first place.
I think I’ll just cancel Verizon all together, land line and DSL. I ditch Verizon cell phones years ago, because their lousy connections and dropped calls. I think maybe I’ll contact Comcast and get a cable modem and VOIP telephone service. I just don’t want cable television.
Anyway Verizon sucks.
Time
“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
Rasmussen: 46% Trust Network News Over Internet
From Rasmussen:
Forty-six percent (46%) of Americans say they still consider network television news programs a more reliable source of news than the Internet.
But a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 35% say the Internet is a more reliable news source than network TV news shows. Nearly one-out-of-five adults (19%) are not sure which they trust more.
I wonder what the age of the sample population is?
Also, how many of this 46% even know how to turn on a computer, let alone get news from the Internet.
The Immorality of Public-Funded Healthcare
There’s a good discussion of the relative morality of public-funded healthcare over at The Q and O blog, where the following example of the moral argument for taxing some people to pay for other people’s medical care:
I must remember to share this article with my friend Bryan. Bryan is a cancer survivor. I have had friends that have lost their battles with cancer so his continued presence on this earth is a great joy to me and a fact of which I am sure he is also no doubt ecstatic. Bryan is particularly interested in the current state of health care costs because his insurance paid for what he terms a “measly portion” of his treatment- he is currently burdened with the cost of what his insurance did not cover. He simply can’t afford the astronomical cost. His complaint is echoed by many clamoring for nationalized healthcare. What remains unclear is under what moral principle one man can demand that others pay for his healthcare and whether any policy not firmly grounded in a moral truth can be just.
Bryan’s story perfectly illustrates the truth that the rising cost of healthcare has coincided with the rising quality of healthcare. It is true that not too long ago he would have paid considerably less for his cancer treatment. The bad news is that he would not have been around long enough to spend his savings. New drugs and new technologies lengthened his life as it they have for hundreds of thousands of others. Progress comes with a price tag.
Bryan was not denied care. In fact no one in America is denied healthcare. He had insurance and he has an income with which to pay what the insurance didn’t cover. The fact is- he would much rather spend his money on something else other than hospital bills reaching into the thousands of dollars. What better solution than a system where cancer treatment is paid for by someone else?He may be interested to learn that the U.S. ranks first in the world in cancer survivor rates and that breast cancer survivors in Canada have filed a class action suit against several hospitals that forced them to wait 12 weeks for radiation therapy. Obviously neither Bryan nor other national healthcare advocates want to wait in lines or have others decide if they are to live or die. What they want is someone else to foot the bill even if children receiving a public education must suffer.
To which Q&O observes:
How, morally, do you demand others pay for your health care problems? We’d all scream and holler if we were required to help pay for our neighbor’s roof if it was damaged in a storm. Through no real fault of his own, his roof was damaged. And insurance only paid a portion of it. Would we accept the idea the government has a moral right to take our money to pay for his roof?
Of course not. We might help him voluntarily or we might not, figuring it was his responsibility to plan and save for such an eventuality. But we’d certainly never accept the premise that government had any moral right to demand we pay for our neighbor’s roof. Yet with health care, that premise remains front and center.
But all government funded entitlements–medicare, welfare, food stamps–are based on the premise that a just society doesn’t let it’s members starve or go without basic life essentials. The question comes down to who pays for it. Same with healthcare.
Using the power of government, which is ultimately the power to take an individual’s life in the extreme, or jail him for for failure to comply in the less extreme, to take from one citizen to give to another is immoral. No amount of “mau mauing the flak catchers” will get around that simple fact.
The same can be said for welfare and other government entitlements. By what right has anyone a claim on another’s pay check? Why is it just to take a third of someone’s income to give to another? How is “distributing the wealth” moral?
For that matter, how is it just to artificially prop up milk prices for dairy farmers? Think about it, poor people must pay higher prices for milk, so that relatively prosperous landowners/farmers can maintain their standard of living. Now that’s not to say the average dairy farmer lives the life of Park Avenue doyenne, but still, the farmer is more wealthy than the poor mother in the ghetto.
Now some would say, the poor mother can get AFDC free milk, which is true, but doesn’t really address the issue of who’s paying for the milk and why it’s moral for someone else to pay by compulsion?
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