It seems that during the divorce proceeding of Staples founder founder Tom Stemberg 20 years ago, Mitt Romney may have misvalued the profit potential for shares of Staples, with the result that the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo. While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events—
Oh wait, sorry, I accidentally spaced out for a moment and started channeling the opening crawl from The Phantom Menace, probably because it was the only thing I could think of less interesting than a stock valuation issue from a 20-year old divorce proceeding. Indeed, if the general public is given a choice between ancient divorce/stock value questions, or Jar Jar Binks reciting The Federalist Papers, then meesa thinksa yousa gonna be called ona to deliberate ona thisa newa Constitution!
This is a game-changer only if the game is “see if you can bore yourself to sleep.” A real game-changer would be something like “In Baghdad in 1990, Tom Stemberg, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and I all snorted blow off Fawn Hall’s ass.” That’s about as likely as Mila Kunis showing up on my doorstep asking to be my love slave. The whole reason Mitt is poised to win this thing (beside Obama’s mind-numbing incompetence and the senses-dulling numbness of the Liberal Reality Bubble) is because he’s no fun at parties. If he had any real baggage New Gingrich’s opposition people would have unpacked it a long time ago. He’s so clean he squeaks, which must infuriate Obama’s dirty tricks team to no end. “Damn your clean nose and upright moral values, you vile Mormon!”
Sure, illegally unsealing an opponent’s divorce records is Obama’s finishing move, but given the distinct lack of any prurient interest angle, even the most devoted Journolista will struggle to breath life into this pathetic non-scandal.
With the election less than two weeks away, time for a roundup of how the champions of their respective political models (Texas for Red States and California for Blue States) are doing:
Moody’s: “we expect…more bankruptcy filings and bond defaults among California cities, reflecting the increased risk to bondholders as investors are asked to contribute to plans for closing budget gaps.”
It’s all part of California’s Fifty Shades of Golden electoral masochism. “Not surprising, the most productive of California’s citizens are leaving in droves. For those who want to prosper, the safeword is “Texas.'”
The guy from California who under-reported unemployment to make the numbers look better? Obama donor. This is my shocked face.
California has actually carried out some pension reforms (like capping annual benefits at $132,000), but its pension plans are still underfunded by $165 billion.
California got $411 million in the National Mortgage Settlement. So how much of that actually went to help people with their mortgages? None of it. “Think of California’s persistent budget deficit as a great white shark devouring every source of cash in its path.”
The total personal income (TPI) in Texas reached $1.07 trillion dollars in the second quarter of this year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s an increase of 71 percent from the state’s corresponding total 10 years earlier, $626.7 billion.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Texas accounted for 8.02 percent of the nation’s TPI this year, up 1.10 percentage points from 6.92 percent in 2002.
That’s nearly five times larger than the runner-up, Florida, which increased its share of national TPI by 0.23 points in a decade. Just four other states registered gains better than a tenth of a point.
Texas has the best unemployment rate among the five biggest states, at 6.8%. California, at 10.2%, has the worst.
Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has a piece up laying the blame for Newsweek’son the economy. “This is an economic story, plain and simple. The print news business is grim and hardly needs a lengthy explication.” Well, I’m sure the economy didn’t help. But the story of Newsweek‘s demise is not that plain, nor that simple.
I was going to laboriously track down magazine circulation data, enter it into Excel, and create a chart. Then I found that State of the Media had done it for me:
Notice how Time, Newsweek‘s chief competitor, starts sucking wind before the recession hits full force, then stabilizes, while Newsweek goes into freefall, then continues? In fact, Newsweek‘s nosedive gets steeper in 2009, right about the time the recession was bottoming out around the New Obama Normal. What could have happened then?
They practically came out and said they weren’t interested in conservatives reading their magazine. The chart above tells you how well that decision worked out for them.
As I said yesterday, Newsweek‘s demise is a case of assisted suicide. They had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.
Mark Steyn’s comprehensive takedown of all the Obama Administration lies and incompetence in the Benghazi terrorist assault and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens is so righteous it deserves a link of its own.
“The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”
Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”
She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets.
Snip.
Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects.
Snip.
For most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12.
Snip.
Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.
Snip.
Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.
The Libyan embassy had repeatedly asked for additional security and were refused In fact, their security was reduced. “We couldn’t even keep what we had.”
Watching and listening to Romney now, who do you agree with more: Mitt Romney, or reporters sounding outraged at his criticisms of the Obama Administration?
Both the Obama Administration and their lapdog media surrogates seem far more interested in defeating Obama’s political opponent than America’s Jihadest enemies, or telling the American people the truth.
Iowahawk reports on a recent outbreak of scrutonium, “a deadly poll-eating supervirus that attacks the immuno-hope system, leaving victims vulnerable to material facts.”
Time for another Texas vs. California roundup. First up: The man who moved from one to the other:
Chuck DeVore examines the differences between California and Texas. Scariest takeaway? “With one-eighth of the nation’s population, California has one-third of America’s welfare recipients.”
A review of the book Crazifornia. Pay special attention to the California bridge tester who couldn’t test bridges because he was up on child sex crime charges.
“City College of San Francisco is perilously close to bankruptcy, in part because it employs nearly twice as many faculty as similar colleges and pays them better – yet educates no more students on average, says a new financial analysis of the state’s largest public school. The college got into trouble because, unlike other colleges, it failed to make the budget cuts necessary to keep up with reductions in state funding, never set aside money for its growing retirement obligations, and ‘has provided salary increases and generous benefits with no discernible means to pay for them.'” So it’s like the State of California in miniature. Bonus: Its current budge assumes the passage of Proposition 30.
And speaking of propositions, Prop 37, requiring the labeling of genetically modified food, will be a windfall for trial lawyers.
The city manager of Stockton explains why the city had to declare bankruptcy. It’s filled with special pleading for vested union interests: “Nor can we leave the CalPERS state pension system. CalPERS should be reformed, but if Stockton didn’t offer an industry-standard pension plan, we simply would not be able to staff an already challenged police department. It is unrealistic for creditors to posit that Stockton reject existing pension obligations.” Attention anyone thinking of buying California bonds: When it comes to paying you or paying union cronies, you’re going to get the short end of the stick, no matter what the law says.
I’ve got another Texas vs. California piece coming around on the guitar, but I thought there was enough here to warrant a separate post.
Hold on to your hats, but it seems that California voters might, just might, be catching on that the Democrats who run California’s state government are wasting their money.
I will now wait for the indignant shouts of incredulous outrage to die down.
Support for Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for billions of dollars in tax hikes on the November ballot is slipping amid public anxiety about how politicians spend money, but voters still favor the proposal, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll.
Well, I did say “might.”
The findings suggest that voters are leery of sending more cash to Sacramento in the wake of a financial scandal at the parks department, spiraling costs for a multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project to connect Northern and Southern California and ill-timed legislative pay raises.
If voters aren’t willing to stop spending for a $100 billion train to nowhere that everyone know will never be completed, and which would lose even more money every year if it was, when will they?
Brown’s measure would temporarily raise income tax rates on high earners for seven years and boost the state sales tax by a quarter-cent for four years in a bid to avoid steep cuts in funds for schools and other programs.
Note that word: “temporary.”
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the way politics actually works knows that there’s no such thing as a “temporary” tax hike. The only thing that prevents Democrats (and establishment Republicans) from spending every cent of every tax collected and more is booting them out of office. Raising taxes simply ensures that they’ll spend all the new revenue and additional money they don’t have on top of that. And with the fiscal tsunami California is facing from bloated government, spiraling debt, and gold-plated public employee union pensions that will bankrupt the state, those “temporary” taxes will never be repealed. Ever.
And two or four years down the line, the next Democratic governor will be asking the voters to approve another “temporary” tax hike…
As previously reported, the Texas 23rd Congressional District is one of the most closely watched races in the country. As such, it’s no surprise that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is rolling out attack ads against incumbent Republican Rep. Francisco “Quico” Canseco on behalf of Democratic challenger Pete Gallego.
And, much like the national Democratic attack ads, it’s filled with lies.
But don’t take my word for it. WOAI in San Antonio has done the heavy lifting in debunking team Gallego’s claims:
