Read it.

That’s because ‘purchased’ e-books are not actually bought, they’re just licensed. (Read the terms of service for B&N — or Amazon, for that matter.) And B&N are stupid people, which is why they’re going broke.

This is why you need to download, jailbreak, and back up any e-books that you ‘purchase’ if you want to keep them.

Read it.

Traded the brown shirts for purple, they have.

Read it.

They always have before. Why break with tradition?

Read it.

 It is also no coincidence HR is once again dominated by women.  The skills women develop nitpicking minor infractions among romantic suitors is the precise exact same skills they use to nitpick infractions against job applicants.  Of course, it is no surprise their success in picking qualified romantic suitors is the same as picking qualified job applicants.  There is no data out there to prove it, but nearly EVERY HR lady I’ve personally know has been divorced, had dating problems, or at minimum had some kind of mental problem.  Sure there were a handful of relatively stable women, but the majority were not.  And I’m willing to bet their woefully inadequate ability to judge character when choosing men is equally woefully inadequate when judging job applicants (which we do have actual data for from MErcer, which shows a r-square of .14 between HR questions and actual job performance).

Tech companies are not immune to this stupidity. A lot of them are famous for asking questions that have very little relation to the position for which they’re hiring but a great deal of applicability to being on a College Bowl team.

 Not to belabor the HR angle, the larger point is that it is becoming very obvious corporations are developing a psychosis of their own.  It’s almost as if they’re becoming sentient even though they’re organizations.  An entitlement princess mentality is developing which makes the proposition of working for them not worth the risk of spending 20 years of your life getting educated, certified, qualified, licensed and CPE’d to death, only to have a job where your psychologically abused.

Probably a good idea to avoid such places. If you can.

Read it.

Hours after being sued by U.S. regulators for violating commodities laws, online prediction market Intrade told U.S. residents on Monday to immediately begin shutting down their accounts due to “legal and regulatory pressures.”

Your tax dollars at work.

When I was a kid, this was a free country … relatively speaking. It really hasn’t been a free country since Roosevelt (Teddy) was President.

Read it.

‘The team? Hell, they’re the team! We’re the equipment!’ — North Dallas Forty

Read it.

First and foremost, watch out for the reemergence of a “public option” likely marketed by Democrats as “Medicare for all”, as Democrats revive their already stated original goal of forging a single payer, wholly government-controlled system. We know that President Obama wants it. In June 2003, Obama said “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program … a single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see.” And we know that Senator Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee during crafting of the ACA and its ramming through Congress by Democrats, admitted in February 2009 that “There may come a time when we can push for single-payer. At this time, it’s not going to get to first base in Congress,” a sentiment echoed by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who said “For 30 years I have supported a single payer plan, but our next best choice is to support an exchange and a public option.” There is no secret about the ultimate goal of the president and leading Democrats.

Indeed, there is not.

Second, or perhaps in advance of single payer legislation, watch for the federal government to restrict doctors from practicing, or possibly even criminalize them, unless they accept all patients with insurance paying government-defined rates for medical tests and treatments.  We know that ObamaCare and its Independent Payment Advisory Board, IPAB, will force prices for medical services lower and lower by direct design, so that by 2019, payments for Medicare will be even lower than Medicaid. While some doctors will swallow government-dictated low reimbursements, undoubtedly more and more physicians will refuse to see patients under such health plans – easy to foresee, since this has already happened to Medicaid and Medicare patients across the country. But this presumably will not be tolerated by HHS Secretary Sebelius and our President. It is not at all unimaginable that the federal government will soon tie all medical licensure to accepting the new edicts, as has already been contemplated in Massachusetts by state legislators.

There will be doctors willing to operate under this regime, even as there were in Britain with the introduction of the National Health Service. But service will become as crappy as has already happened in Britain (and Canada), and there won’t be a U.S. for people to go to for high-quality care any more.

Read it.

Today, two Chicago men were shot outside a funeral home on the poverty-ridden South Side of the city. The two men were at a funeral for another man who was shot to death last week on the South Side; the police reported that that man was a gang member.

Well, I’m certainly glad that Chicago has such strict gun control regulations, or who know what might have happened.

Read it.

From a political standpoint, it’s hard to imagine a better formula for sparking a taxpayer revolt than to impose a large, unexpected tax increase with little or no warning.

Well, we can’t have a nasty old taxpayer revolt, can we? That would never do. Maybe if we warm up the KY jelly it will make them feel better about it.

The impact would be concentrated in more affluent and urbanized states, particularly those with high state and local taxes (the federal deduction for state and local taxes is one of the breaks that frequently pushes people into the AMT). California’s number of AMT filers would go from 685,000 to more than 5.5 million, according to the Congressional Research Service. New York would go from 477,000 to about 3.9 million. New Jersey would go from 265,000 to almost 2.2 million.

Eventually Democrats will discover that they’re stepping on their own dicks base with this class-warfare tax legislation, since most Really Rich People are Democrats. (George Soros, are ya listenin’?)

Not that I’m going to cry much of a river for tax laws that soak places like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, D.C., ….

Read it.

Step 1: Be a lovely California seaside town with gorgeous bluffs and rocks that everybody (this author included) loves walking and sitting on.

Step 2: Ban people from walking and sitting on the bluffside rocks, “partly because of safety concerns.”

Step 3: Discover that when you remove the presence of humans, those bluffside rocks swell up with sea gulls and cormorants, and predictably begin to smell like like shit.

Step 4: Discover that hosing down the guano is verboten because of state environmental regulations, to the extent that “multiple state regulatory agencies would have to issue permits before the [cleaning] agents could be used, a process that regulators have indicated would probably take at least two years.”

Step 5: Enjoy the smell of regulatory success!

“We need to consider a range of alternatives for cleaning the rocks, and one of those could be no project, just sit and wait for rain,” said Kanani Brown, an analyst for the California Coastal Commission, one of the regulatory agencies. “I know that’s not ideal for local businesses, but that’s historically been the approach.”

Read it.

This is the fun part:

As a side note, want to see something scary?

In 2008, the least wanted candidates for bloggers were…John McCain and Ron Paul.

In 2012, the least wanted candidates for bloggers were…Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

So, going by those results, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush would have to be considered the early favorites for 2016 based on the fact that conservative bloggers don’t want either of them as a nominee.

Read it.

Though why the Turks should have any claim on it is beyond belief — they didn’t get to the area until a thousand years later. But I suppose it makes as much sense as pretending that the Arabs now ruling Egypt have a claim on the pyramids and their contents.

The Turkish culture minister, Ertugrul Günay, has announced that German officials have agreed to return the missing artefact, a brooch in the form of a winged seahorse, possibly as early as this year.

There’s an oxymoron for you — ‘Turkish Culture Minister’.

After an investigation the director of the museum, Kazim Akbiyikoglu, who had been instrumental in recovering the artefacts from the US, was arrested with 10 others. Akbiyikoglu admitted selling museum treasures to pay off gambling debts and was jailed for 13 years. He blamed his misfortune on an ancient curse said to afflict those who handle the treasure.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Critics argue that foreign museums helped to preserve countless historical treasures from destruction or theft.

Oh, ya think? After all, it wasn’t the British who stored gunpowder in the Parthenon before it blew up — It was (wait for it) … the Turks! Yeah, really great defenders of cultural tradition in the areas they stole from the natives. But I guess Ward Churchill’s busy right now.

Read it.

Not that that’s really news.

Read it.

One caveat: Rates go up as income goes up — but only to a point. Once you hit a certain magic number among super-high earners, your tax rates start to fall slightly.

…

So the millionaires who pay the highest average tax rates in America are those who make between $1.5 million and $2 million. That $2 million could be called the “Top Turning Point” on the income ladder, where rates reverse.

Which just demonstrates what I’ve always said: Really rich people just love high tax rates on income, because it doesn’t bother them all that much; the people whose face it stomps are the semi-rich who they want to keep off of the top shelf.

Read it.

ARISTOMENIS, Greece—For decades, Panagiotis Triantafyllopoulos worked in Athens as a printer and graphic designer, most recently making slick packaging for multinational drug companies.

Now the 54-year-old spends his days gathering firewood, tending chickens and preparing for the olive harvest in this hillside village in southwestern Greece.

Unable to find a job more than two years after he was laid off, Mr. Triantafyllopoulos felt he had little choice but to return to his birthplace here this past summer and try to survive on what he can glean from his family’s small plot of land.

“I’m a nouveau poor,” said Mr. Triantafyllopoulos, who went to Athens as a teenager in 1975, part of a wave of young people moving from Greece’s agricultural hinterland to its cities. “It was a difficult decision to come back. We had dreams of something bigger.”

The future of Detroit, perhaps? Maybe Los Angeles?

Read it.

Not bad for a congenital liar and sexual predator. Who says crime doesn’t pay? You just have to be slick enough.

Read it. And watch the video.

Goodness, that didn’t take long.

Read it.

Six years ago, we wrote about Andy Kessler’s fascinating book, The End of Medicine, which got me to totally rethink how nearly every society approaches healthcare today. Even though the book is years old, I recommend it frequently. The key issue is that we still tend to treat healthcare as something driven by two key industries: pharmaceuticals and insurance. However, the book is based around the idea that, in pretty much every other industry, technology tends to (1) get better and (2) get cheaper. But that doesn’t happen much with healthcare — and that’s because it’s all about insurance and drugs. That means it’s really about treating the symptoms, rather than actually trying to prevent problems.

Drugs are incredibly expensive. The reason drugs are incredibly expensive is that government regulations make sure the it costs big bucks and takes a long time before a drug can be sold lawfully. So thank the government.

The reason insurance pays a major role in health care is because during WWII, when there were wage controls imposed by the government, companies had to bid for workers based on fringe benefits — a major one of which was employer-paid medical insurance. This was compounded by the fact that health insurance is a business expense for a business, and hence deductible on its taxes, but not for an individual. So thank the government.

And of course the government is wringing its hands and pissing and moaning that the incredible cost of health care (which it caused) means that we need government-provided health care. So thank the government.

Or maybe not….

Read it.

Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is slashing the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare.

“It’s kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said adjunct biology professor Adam Davis.

Guess they ought to have thought about that before they passed the law, huh? (Nah, that trick never works….)

These guys pass these stupid laws, and they assume that everybody will just suck it up and shell out more money without changing their behavior. Our government is stocked with morons.

Read  it.

I think I have just watched the Church of England commit suicide. It was a very long and very boring process. But at the end of nine hours’ rehearsal of stale arguments made in bad faith the General Synod took a decisive turn into fantasy, or stumbled over its own rules, and failed, by a very small margin, to gain the complicated majorities required to make women bishops.

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, as it eventually will to all ‘Protestant’ bodies. Really, when people 1500 years after the fact decide that they know better than the Apostles and those taught by the Apostles what Christianity is all about, it is inevitable that they will wander off into their own fantasy world and wind up sharing nothing with historical Christianity except the label.

Kinda like ‘gay marriage’ that way. Sorry, folks; terms have histories, and you aren’t allowed to just up and re-do what they mean to fit what’s Hip And Trendy.

Read it.

The Service International Employees Union – the same union that will be shutting down traffic around Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving Eve – has admitted that a staffer requested that union members stack a legal petition with fake names to sink it. The petition is the brainchild of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who wants to put a measure revising public service employee union pensions on the ballot.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Every person in this phot0 except the geek from Canada is entitled to check the ‘black’ box on every form, every application, every place where Affirmative Action reigns.

Oh, Colin Powell’s son Michael? He’s Officially Black too.

Steve Sailer reacts:

 Think of it from the point of view of a college admissions office or an HR Department. They have rules and guidelines about who they can take, but they also know perfectly well that even if Susan Rice’s kids are lazy nimrods, they still want them because they are plugged into the highest levels of the Global Power Elite. They’re connected. Affirmative action gives admissions offices and HR departments an excuse to favor Susan Rice’s children — in the name of Diversity and Fighting Racism — over the children of random unconnected losers.

Lots of people assume that just because it’s absurd and unfair for Susan Rice’s children to get special racial privileges, somebody will organize to take those privileges away. But, the more power quasi-non-whites like Susan Rice get, the harder it will be to take their racial privileges away from them and their descendants unto the seventh generation.

Read it.

Last spring, my wife and youngest daughter and I spent a week in California. We were reminded of the extraordinary natural wealth and beauty that were showered on that uniquely blessed state. For a century or so, guided by brilliant private sector leadership, California was a beacon to the world, a land of opportunity such as never had existed in human history. Unimaginable wealth was created. Yet it required only 40 years of liberal governance to bring the whole thing crashing down.

Today, California is the most spectacular failure of our time. Its government is broke. Productive citizens have been fleeing for some years now, selling their homes at inflated prices (until recently) and moving to Colorado, Arizona, Texas and even Minnesota, like one of my neighbors. The results of California’s improvident liberalism have been tragically easy to predict: absurd public sector wage and benefit packages, a declining tax base, surging welfare enrollment, falling economic production, ever-increasing deficits. Soon, California politicians will be looking to less glamorous states for bailout money. Things have now devolved to the point where California leads the nation in poverty….

Read it.

Federal law prohibits the admission of aliens to this country who are “likely at any time to become a public charge.” This is one of many statutes that the scofflaw Obama administration brazenly flouts. Rather than ensuring that immigrants will not become liabilities to the public purse, the Obama administration explicitly lures them to the U.S. with promises of lavish welfare benefits–a policy that is both illegal and perverse. This web site promoting federal welfare benefits, now the largest item in the federal budget, mirrors information that is included in packets given to new arrivals in the U.S.:

From the web page: ‘Government assistance programs can be critically important to the well-being of some immigrants and their families.’

Message: ‘It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!’

Steve Sailer looks at some correlations.

 This suggests a refinement to my basic theory that voting Republican rather than Democratic correlates with belonging to the core rather than to the fringes of American life.

…

In contrast, elite groups who vote less heavily Republican, such as Episcopalians and Jews, tend to find aspiring to belong to the core of America déclassé.

Read it.

It’s not just millionaires and billionaires who are fleeing the economic madness in California. Even cows are starting to depart for greener pastures. That’s right, 400 bovine refugees shuffled off to Kansas just this month, with more expected to follow as over 100 dairy farms in California close their doors.

As we watch the Left Coast economy slide slowly into the sea….

It’s hard to find a government program as insane as the complex web of price supports, market orders, direct payments, diversion programs, herd reductions, import barriers, export subsidies, and stacked-to-the-rafters cheese warehouses that characterize Uncle Sam’s efforts to “rationally manage” the dairy market. If you really want to understand how crony capitalism works to create market conditions only a Soviet commissar could love, take a look at what happens when byzantine federal regulations collide with state interventions.

Can you say ‘Obamacare’? I’m sure you can. Hey, let’s put these guys in charge of our health care system. What could go wrong?

George Will draws attention to one of Obama’s prot0-fascist setups.

There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress’s constitutional role.

The CFPB’s director, Richard Cordray, was installed by one of Barack Obama’s spurious recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess. Vitiating the Senate’s power to advise and consent to presidential appointments is congruent with the CFPB’s general lawlessness.

The CFPB nullifies Congress’s power to use the power of the purse to control bureaucracies because its funding — “determined by the director” — comes not from congressional appropriations but from the Federal Reserve. Untethered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789, the CFPB is uniquely sovereign: The president appoints the director for a five-year term — he can stay indefinitely, if no successor is confirmed — and the director can be removed, but not for policy reasons.

One CFPB request for $94?million in Federal Reserve funds was made on a single sheet of paper. Its 2012 budget estimated $130?million for — this is the full explanation — “other services.” So it has been hiring promiscuously and paying its hires lavishly: As of three months ago, approximately 60?percent of its then 958 employees were making more than $100,000 a year. Five percent were making $200,000 or more. (A Cabinet secretary makes $199,700.)

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

And so is the Congressional Budget Office, which ‘scores’ financial legislation on a ‘static’ basis, as if it would have absolutely no impact on people’s behavior.

And so is Congress, which has this insane notion that it can raise and lower taxes like the water level in a swimming pool, as if it would have absolutely no impact on people’s behavior.

Read it.

Under the current Don’t Mess With The Mouse Copyright Law, the length of a copyright extends to the heat death of the universe. Under the prior law, however, stuff from 1955 (and before) would be coming into the public domain.

Can you imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln doing this? I can’t.

Read it.

Since the election, the stock market has fallen substantially. The S&P 500 has fallen over 5 percent. The prospect of “Taxmageddon” (massive tax increases scheduled for the beginning of 2013), coupled with rising government spending that will crowd out private investment over the long run, is not a good omen. “Welfare is now the largest item in the federal budget, and under Barack Obama’s budget – the one that didn’t get any votes, but may nevertheless be a blueprint for the next four years – it is slated to grow another 30% in Obama’s second term.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

A teacher in a 6th Grade “journalism” class at a public school in Southern California distributed the materials below to students. The materials are highly critical of ALEC, The American Legislative Exchange Council, a membership organization of conservative state legislators. The students were assigned to use the materials to write news articles critical of the organization.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Are these students simply recipients of whatever crazy left-wing conspiracies obsess this particular teacher?

Hint: Yes.

Moral: Don’t send your children to a government school.

Read it.

And so it starts. Time to watch Bladerunner again.

Read it.

How does a city of 200,000 people go bankrupt? In the case of San Bernardino, CA, the answer is unsustainable pension obligations pushed by union-backed politicians.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

In 2009, patrol lieutenant Richard Taack retired at the age of 59, after 37 years of service. He took home $389,727 that year, including $194,820 in unused sick time and $33,721 for unused vacation time, according to city payroll records. Shortly after Taack retired – on an annual lifetime pension of $128,000 – he was hired part-time by Penman’s city attorney’s office, at $32 an hour.

Damn, I’m in the wrong line of work.

Read it.

Every teacher and principal in the Hazel Park School District’s four elementary schools, junior high and high school were given “highly effective” ratings in 2011-12 by administrators despite district-wide failing grades for student achievement.

The state of Michigan gave Hazel Park High School an “F” for student achievement in 2011-12 in all four of the measured subjects — reading, science, social studies and math. Yet every teacher was given the highest rating in the new state-mandated evaluation of teachers.

The obvious question is ‘Effective at what?’

The obvious answer is ‘Hiring and paying government workers.’

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy raises its ugly head once again.

Or maybe it’s just something in the water in Michigan. That could be, too.

Read it.

It appears that Papa John’s Pizza, famed in song and story for being among the sanctimonious cowards who jerked their ads from the Rush Limbaugh show during the Sandra Fluke hubbub, is now in the path of the left-wing crowd for having the audacity to point out that under Obamacare they’re going to have to cut employment.

Six months from hero to zero. Well, then don’t call the crowd ‘fickle’ for nothing….

But wait! There’s more:

The hallmark of any successful boycott is the limitation of revenue for the company you are targeting. So, if somehow this boycott were to be successful, the logical result would be that Papa John’s would lose money forcing them to cut more jobs, and more hours. Fewer people will be employed, and still fewer will have quality health benefits.

In achieving their goal, the boycotters will have achieved the exact opposite of their goal.

CUT THAT NOSE! SPITE THAT FACE!

But the left has never been blessed with an overabundance of think-it-through — think unions shutting down a bordering-bankrupt company with a strike … like, say, Hostess — so it’s really no surprise.

Steve Sailer speculates.

 First, your workers now look poorer. That’s reassuring. That suggests they aren’t ripping you off by charging too much. In the old days, your workers were strapping big guys, and it gnawed away at you that you were paying them more than you had too. Sure, you could afford it, but, still … it bothered you.

Second, the new guys don’t speak English, so you can’t understand them when they talk to each other, so they don’t get on your nerves as much when they talk about whatever low class things yard workers talk to each other about.

Third, most of your new workers don’t try to talk to you because they don’t speak English. Remember the plumber with the biker sideburns who always wanted to talk to you about the Raiders? Well, he moved to Idaho. Good riddance.

Fourth, you can’t understand the lyrics to their songs. Granted, the newcomers’ musical tastes are pretty dire, but at least it’s not Country, with all those Blue Collar Pride lyrics crafted in Nashville by Vanderbilt English majors to annoy people like you.

Fifth, their bumper stickers aren’t as obnoxious as the American proles’ bumper stickers were. Remember the pickup truck with all the NRA bumper stickers? It just drove you crazy. Well, maybe if you could read the Spanish bumperstickers you’d be offended, but you can’t, so you’re not.

Sixth, now you aren’t worried anymore about your wife or daughter taking a shine to some guy with a tool belt. (Look what happened to Larry David. Let that be a lesson to us all.) But it’s not going to happen if the guy with the tool belt is 5’2″ and speaks Mixtec.

In summary, your service workers used to be real people to you, and that was a major hassle. Now, they are just The Other, and you like it like that.

UPDATE: Jehu has some corroborative evidence.

Read it.

Stryker Corporation has announced that it will close its facility in Orchard Park, New York, eliminating 96 jobs next month. It will also counter the medical device tax in Obamacare by eliminating 5% of their global workforce, an estimated 1,170 positions.

Jon Stryker is heir to the Stryker Corporation, one of the largest medical device and equipment manufacturers in the world. Stryker’s grandfather was the surgeon who invented the mobile hospital bed. The company now sells $8.3 billion worth of hospital beds, artificial joints, medical cameras, and medical software every year.

Stryker, a member of the Forbes 400 list, was one of the top five donors to the Obama campaign. Having donated $2 million to the Priorities USA Action super PAC, Stryker also gave $66,000 in contributions to Obama and the Democrat Party.

Tick … tick … tick….

‘The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’ — Lenin

Read it.

Not many Congressional districts can boast of three indictable Representatives in a row. Of course, that’s not unusual for Blue districts — I remember Adam Clayton Powell, and any district that can elect Sheila Jackson Lee or Maxine Waters deserves what it gets. And I can’t remember the last time Illinois had a governor that didn’t wind up in prison eventually. Ah, well, it’s all part of that Blue State magic.

Read it.

About 400 people, many from Newark, lost out on part-time jobs cleaning up storm damage this week when an Idaho-based employment agency pulled out of the project because of fears of violence.

‘You mean we have to WORK in order to get paid? What’s UP with that?’

Welcome to the Blue States, guys. Better luck back in Mormon country.

Read it.

New statistics show that around 149,000 Brits emigrated last year, leaving the UK for the United States, Australia, and Canada, among other destinations. Commentators, however, are more alarmed that almost half of Britons emigrating each year are professionals and company managers, “potentially threatening the country’s supply of highly skilled workers,” as one writer put it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it,

Dronestagram is the latest project from renowned “new aesthetic” pioneer James Bridle, an Instagram feed which posts satellite images corresponding to US drone strikes in the Middle-East and Asia. Much like Josh Begley’s Drones+, the Apple-banned smartphone app which sends alerts whenever drone strikes are reported, Bridle says Dronestagram is a way of “making these locations just a little bit more visible, a little closer. A little more real.”

Not coming soon: An equivalent app that tracks jihadist suicide bombings, honor killings, and Jew-beatings. Because, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is looking for someone to whom to surrender. And so is much of the Republican establishment, so desperate to hold onto positions of influence that they are willing to abandon the newly-confirmed House majority and a bedrock Republican principle for the last two decades.

Read it.

Well, after all, they do call it the Princeton of the South….

Read it.

After President Barack Obama won reelection, a Las Vegas business owner fired 22 employees because he feared he could no longer keep up with the costs that would be imposed on his business due to regulations such as Obamacare.

Another rock in the avalanche.

Read it.

The day after President Obama was elected to a second term, Boeing announced a 30 percent cut in managerial positions in the company.

The first rock in the avalanche.

Boeing says the cuts are not part of the president’s $500 billion in defense cuts, set to take effect in January 2013. But this is hard to believe, particularly since other defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin, have been warning that the president’s military cuts were going to lead to job losses in defense.

John Hinderaker is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I don’t understand why anyone would vote for four more years of unemployment and poverty, but that is what the American people voted for, and that is what they are going to get.

After 50 years of left-wing teachers spending their time on left-wing indoctrination rather than actual education, I’m surprised that he’s surprised.

Obama will now have to reveal his agenda for a second term, heretofore a closely-guarded secret. In particular, what is he going to do about the nation’s $16 trillion debt? Obama’s answer during his first term was “nothing.” His budget, incorporating any number of optimistic assumptions, called for the debt to rise to $20 trillion. I don’t see how Obama can get through his second term without articulating some plan, however half-baked, for dealing with the debt.

I do. He’ll make a lot of mouth-noise but effectively ignore it, just as he did during his first term. So the country goes broke: What’s that to him? He’ll be making Clinton-level money as the Magic Negro, and there are a lot of golf courses he hasn’t hit yet. His daughters will go to Ivy League schools and marry well, like Chelsea Clinton, and he and Michelle will spend their ‘golden years’ in Aspen and Malibu and Martha’s Vinyard and Georgetown.

Tom Smith at The Right Coast has an interesting take:

I really feel that Obama has revealed a bug in our constitutional system. Some would say it’s a feature, but it’s a bug. The idea was (see Federalist Papers) to make it very unlikely that a demagogue could get himself elected by appealing the the lowest passions (e.g., “revenge”, free stuff) of the electorate. This elaborate system was supposed to protect individual rights, including property, among other things. Doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Turns out that by using, for example, the latest computationally driven techniques, you can micro target voters in very specific places, appeal to their specific desires (“factions” doesn’t even capture it — micro-factions maybe)and get yourself elected, while a whole bunch of other people don’t even vote. Then you spend out the credit of the country to all friends and sundry, and when the lemon is squeezed out, fly off to be an international celebrity. I believe our Framers would have called this a monarchical abuse and a form of corruption of course. It would not baffle them; they would recognize it. It just turns out our system has evolved into something that does not prevent it very well. I realize this account is comically crude but some more sophisticated version of it is, I think, essentially correct. I think what we probably need is some sort of constitutional reform, something that makes us not prone to fiscal implosion via massive rent seeking and benefits-for-votes systems.

Our system has been coming apart ever since the ‘progressives’ captured the government under Teddy Roosevelt. His ‘trust-busting’ created the demagogue-favorable atmosphere that allowed Wilson (with an assist from Teddy’s ego) to become President, and Wilson gave us the constitutional amendments that introduced the federal income tax (an ever-increasing spigot of money that made it profitable to hold federal office) and direct election of Senators (which destroyed a key bulwark of federalism). That power would become more and more concentrated in Washington, and that ‘States’ would become just a money-wasting intermediary layer of bureaucracy, became simply a matter of time.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any effective way of ‘turning the clock back’. Too many profit from the existing system, and too few understand and appreciate that correcting it requires undoing stuff they’ve learned in school were Milestones to Progress, to get it done. We may have to continue on through to the traditional fascist dictatorship and collapse before any opportunity arises to fix things.

Read it.

This is news?

I’m just glad that I don’t have any children to get stuck with the debt that this President and his cronies are going to rack up during the next four years.