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.

Eugene Volokh does what needs to be done.

To begin with, let me stress that I think that modern talk of secession is both foolish and pretty obviously empty posturing, whether it’s some liberals talking that way during the Bush Administration or some conservatives talking that way during the Obama Administration.

Read it.

Jihadists are becoming expert and posed atrocities that cater to simple-minded mainstream media folks, and sometimes the MSM folks are accomplices in the deception.

I wrote a knowledgeable observer to ask whether he could shed any light on the suspicions I express in “Jihad poses for the cameras.” In response he invited me to check out the footage that the BBC played over its interview with Jonathan Sacerdoti last night. He observes:

2:10 – guy being picked up “injured.”

2:40 – same guy wandering around scratching his bits and pieces.

UPDATE: Some screen-shots.

Check it out.

Unfortunately, you don’t get to pick the target.

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.

On Election Day, at a rally for Barack Obama in Fountain, Colorado, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar was being interviewed by Dave Phillips, a reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, about Salazar’s policies in dealing with America’s wild horse populations. When the interview was over, Salazar threatened Phillips, “If you set me up like this again, I’ll punch you out.”

That is quite the most intelligent thing I’ve ever known Ken Salazar to say. Perhaps Obama’s cabinet isn’t just left-wing drones, after all.

Read it.

Well, actually, they are. Like similar posturing on the left, with the Occupy Whatever crowd, this is receiving a lot more attention than it deserves. There is a greater chance of the Mayan end-of-the-world scenario actually happening than this one.

The White House has received petitions from all 50 states – signed by nearly 750,000 citizens asking permission to secede from the United States. A White House spokesman did not return calls seeking comment.

Going to show that there are silly people everywhere. But we knew that.

UPDATE: More silliness from Slate.

My home state is an odds-on favorite to stick it to the federal man in a secession battle in part because it’s been spoiling for such a fight since Reconstruction. But it’s not just the state’s vaunted independent streak that gives it a leg up: Thanks to a strange quirk of its original annexation agreement, Texas may actually be in a slightly better position than any of the other 49 states to back up its tough-guy talk.

This myth pops up every time ‘native Texans’ get together. The status of Texas within the United States is not governed by the original annexation agreements but by the Act that readmitted Texas to the Union in 1870, which puts it on the same footing as every other state. I suppose that it should surprise anyone that a ‘journalist’ would get this wrong; pretty much everyone else does.

Jehu is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 Is it just me, or are there ANY free trade arguments that could not also be made against income or sales taxes, usually without any rewording at all?  It is almost as if we’ve totally lost sight of the fact that tariffs were originally a revenue measure, and quite an effective one, requiring far less invasion into people’s lives and businesses than sales taxes or especially income taxes.  It is almost as if we have forgotten that belts hold one’s pants up and are a fashion accessory for the sartorially inclined and solely discuss them in the context of domestic discipline.

Let’s see—deadweight losses due to making transactions no longer profitable to both sides and thus not happening?  Check.
Interfering in patterns of specialization and comparative advantage?  Absolutely
Opportunities for rent-seeking and favored groups?  Yes, on steroids

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.

Read it.

And it would serve them right.

It’s actually a microfluidic chip that’s been coated with long strands of DNA, which dangle down into the bloodstream and bind to any cancerous proteins floating past — directly imitating the way a jellyfish scoops up grub in the ocean. If required, the chip can release these cells unharmed for later inspection.

Alex Tabarrok says what I’ve been saying for years.

    Productivity in education has lagged productivity in other sectors of the economy because teaching is so labor intensive. Where exactly in the typical classroom is there room for investment, let alone productivity improvement? More chalk? Prior to online education, the bottleneck though which productivity improvements had to pass was the teacher, and we know that improving teacher productivity is very difficult, which is why teaching methods haven’t changed in millennia. Online education vastly increases the potential for productivity increases because it greatly increases the size of the potential market. Bigger markets increase the incentive to research and develop new products (coincidentally the very topic of my TED talk.) A tool used to improve online education–an interface, an algorithm, a new teaching method–can be applied very widely, potentially world-wide, thus greatly increasing the incentive to invest in the education sector, perhaps the most important sector of the 21st century economy.

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

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts.

Given the state of historical knowledge – abysmal – stretching from the White House and Cabinet through many level of University scholars and down into the public school system, even I am not at all convinced that it is absurd to explain to young American people how terrible cold and hunger can be. We have immigrant children who know these truths in their bones, but the middle class American teen agers who watch the National Geographic Channel are not likely to have experienced such things at first hand. More, concentration on battles and military history cannot be a bad thing. I suspect that “Mankind” will not show the crucial scene in the education of Alexander of Macedon (not yet The Great) who as a teenager was sent with one of Phillip’s marshals with a small force to deal with insurgents and raids on the frontier. On the way they encountered a stream of refugees, young people, women well raped, carrying everything they had as the fled toward the order represented by King Phillip. The old marshal pointed to the stream of misery and said “That is defeat. Avoid it.” Alexander remembered that all his life. It is a lesson every free person should learn.

Read it.

Having the government offer hefty prizes for entrepreneurs to devise ways to make our lives better, rather than wasting taxpayer cash year after year in inefficient attempts to do the same, is an idea that Jerry Pournelle has been championing for decades.

Read it.

Most people believe that businesses abhor regulations and would love to do away with them entirely. This belief is often wrong. Many regulations make it harder for startups to enter the market, and can hobble smaller competitors. That’s why incumbent firms in many industries regularly welcome new regulations with open arms, and will spend millions on lobbying to pass them. It’s a way to keep the competition out.

The same logic applies to taxes. Really rich people love high tax rates, because they’re in a better position to avoid them, and it keeps out the almost-rich people who would otherwise compete for luxury-lifestyle goods, such as fancy houses in Aspen and Malibu and limited seating in fancy restaurants and top-tier schools for the kiddies.

Read it.

Read it.

In the olden days, scientists knew that money didn’t noticeably matter for incumbents: If incumbents won or lost it wasn’t because of differences in campaign spending.  But in crude regressions, it looked like money mattered for challengers. Now, with fancier regressions, it appears money matters little for challengers as well, especially in well-studied, data-heavy House elections.

The old results were driven by omitted variables: Weak incumbents drew in stronger challengers, and hence more challenger cash.  The challenger cash was a sign of the challenger’s relative strength, not much of a cause of her relative strength.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Currently it is an alliance of several quite different  factions, united mostly by the desire to elect candidates. It is possible that that situation will continue—but less likely as a result of the recent defeat in the presidential election. If not, there will either be a civil war within the party, with different factions trying to take over, or a new compromise, probably brokered by the professionals at the top and sold to as much of the existing membership as possible.

What are the factions, what policies are important to them, where are there irresolvable conflicts?

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.

(n) An ‘accident’ that wouldn’t have happened if the perpetrator hadn’t been such an ass in the first place.

Read it.

The Los Angeles City Council has declared every Monday to be a so-called ‘meatless Monday,’ and is urging all residents to participate in the weekly day of vegetarianism.

Gee, if they became Orthodox Christians, they could have meatless Wednesdays and Fridays, as well as 40 meatless days before Easter and Christmas and a goodly stretch in the summer. But that would mean that whole religion thing, and they just couldn’t get into that. Pity.

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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.

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I guess this is the right-wing version of the standard Hollywood-blowhard threat to leave the country if [insert Republican candidate] is elected President … with about as little practical effect.

Read it.

 In a report released on Monday, the world’s foremost energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA), said the US will benefit from so-called unconventional sources of oil and gas, including shale gas and shale oil, derived from blasting dense rocks apart to release the fossil fuels trapped within.

Watch enviro-nazi heads explode. This could get very entertaining.

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Two days ago, Karen Hughes, communications director for the Bush White House, announced, “If any Republican man makes a comment about rape other than it’s a heinous act, I’ll personally cut out his tongue.” Her comment was made, of course, in the aftermath of the disastrous 2012 election cycle, in which failed Republican Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock made controversial comments about abortions in the aftermath of rape.

Now that’s the kind of leadership that has been sorely lacking in the GOP since Teddy Roosevelt.

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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.

Like Obama? Hey, there are more where he came from….

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

Asians apparently voted overwhelmingly last Tuesday for the Party of Affirmative Action in Admissions.

How’s that working out for them?

So far, not so hot.

The Other McCain has some fun with the Petraeus affair (no pun intended).

Keep in mind that Paula Broadwell is a West Point graduate who met Petraeus when she was getting a graduate degree at Harvard and yet — and yet — she was so stupidly jealous that she accidentally destroyed Petraeus’s career because of her irrational (and apparently mistaken) suspicion that the CIA director was also shagging the “social liaison” at CentCom HQ in Tampa.

Remind me of this episode the next time some Ivy League egghead starts asserting the inherent superiority of the meritocratic elite.

I’ve seen pictures of Paula Broadwell, which makes the whole thing even more incomprehensible. ‘Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?’

Read it.

Do Democrats engage in soul-searching after they lose an election? Maybe I miss it because I’m not a Democrat, but it doesn’t seem that they do. After John Kerry lost in 2004, did Democrats agonize over whether they should stop opposing the war in Iraq, or become pro-abortion? When Democrats were “shellacked,” as President Obama put it, in 2010, did they debate whether they should come up with a coherent plan to deal with the debt and start adopting budgets? Not that I recall.

The problem is that there aren’t any DINOs to correspond to all the RINOs out there — a fundamental imbalance.

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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.

Ann Althouse speculates.

 Maybe you think it won’t happen, but what if it does? Can you picture the relocation that will be needed? Or do you picture storms or waves suddenly devouring whole populations before any full-scale relocation effort takes place? What does the island in your mental picture look like? Does it look like Manhattan?

Only in my dreams, lady, only in my dreams. Actually, my dreams are more comprehensive: They tend to run toward a 30-foot rise in the sea levels around the globe. Goodby, Left Coast. Goodby, Other Left Coast. Goodby, dystopian urban areas on the Great Lakes, where black administrations are corrupt and Democrats are lovin’ it.

Ah, well. Sometimes I wish that Global Warming wasn’t a left-wing fantasy; it would solve SO many problems.

Freeman makes sense, as many do not.

Over the years I have noticed something about Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers: They have shown a persistent tendency to think about things in binary terms. Something can be good, or if it is not, then it is bad. A person can be in, and if he is not, then he must be out. If some course of action has their approval, then they seem to lose track of the reason why; there is no risk involved in engaging it, no side effects to be anticipated, no liabilities involved in choosing it. From all I have been able to observe about them, they are living out their entire lives in the fallacy of the excluded middle. And this strikes me as strange since, thinking back to 2004, hey wasn’t that one of the biggest complaints they had about the man himself? Lack of “nuanced” thinking or some such? Eight years on, I never hear that word “nuance.” I mean, I knew at the time it was a campaign slogan, I just kind of figured there might be more to it than that. Guess I thought wrong, because the Bush haters are showing us lack-of-nuance better than anybody else I’ve seen…

Elected politicians do two types of things: sensible things and stupid things. All politicians are a mixture of the two. Republicans, on average, do fewer stupid things than Democrats; thus right-thinking people tend to support Republicans, all else being equal. This doesn’t mean that supporting any individual Republican means asserting that said Republican doesn’t ever do stupid things; it just means that they are less likely to (not ‘never going to’, but ‘less likely to’) do stupid things than any corresponding Democrat.

Do I wish that George W Bush were still President? Hell, yeah — not that he never did a stupid thing (the record is quite clear that he did plenty), but he tended to do fewer stupid things than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Would I prefer Bill Clinton to Barack Obama? Hell, yeah; Clinton would have liked to do stupid things, but tread more warily than Barack, because he’s a professional and Barack is a clueless amateur. As Joey the Hitman said about the Nixon-McGovern election, “I had a choice between a fool and a crook. Naturally I voted for the crook.” I feel the same way about Clinton-Obama, which is why I supported Hillary during the Democrat primaries in 2008.

One could make a long list of stupid things done by Republican Presidents: Nixon gave us the EPA, OSHA, and affirmative action; Bush the Elder gave us the Americans With Disabilities Act and caved on raising taxes and spending; Bush the Younger spent money like a drunken politician on feel-good nonsense like No Child Left Behind and Medicare prescription drugs, and was a major accomplice in creating the Housing Bubble. And don’t get me started on Eisenhower (hint: 1956).

Nevertheless, the bottom line remains that these guys, bad as they were, were better than their alternatives. What those alternatives would have been like is personified by Barack Obama, who differs from Jimmy Carter only in that his skin color and White Guilt allowed him to get away with shit that Carter never could have.

Republicans will do stupid things (especially Republican Senators); the important point is that however stupid the things that they do, they do less damage than the stupid things that Democrats will do. And, Libertarian fantasy to the contrary notwithstanding, that’s the only choice we get. We have no guarantees that Republicans won’t do stupid things; but we know for a fact that Democrats will do stupid things, as often as they can get away with it, and so that’s what we have to work with.

So don’t come whining to me about what Bush did or didn’t do; on his worst day, he was still better than Gore, Kerry, and Obama.

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

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And they’ll get it, I have no doubt.

As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: ‘Get a government job!’

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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 A group of scientists from the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan set out to study how methamphetamine interacts with influenza A virus in lung cells. Previous research has suggested that chronic meth abuse makes individuals more susceptible to pathogens such as HIV. The team wanted to investigate how the drug might reduce users’ resistance to flu viruses.

I wonder whether Obamacare will cover it at government expense.

Read it.

The newly named Xenoceratops foremostensis was around 20 feet long, weighed two tons and is the oldest known large-bodied horned dinosaur from Canada. Luckily old Xeno, pieced together from fossils originally collected in 1958, was a plant-eater.

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Archaeologists in Bulgaria are chuffed today to announce that golden treasures and artifacts produced by the ancient Thracians have been discovered in a subterranean tomb complex in the north of the country.

The treasures include snake-headed bracelets, a golden crown or tiara type affair, a golden horse head and piles of smaller solid gold items including rings, statuettes and buttons. They’re thought to date from the third century BC and to have been produced by the Getae, a tribe among the ancient Thracians.

Read it.

A KPIX news cameraman was punched and robbed during a live broadcast outside an Oakland high school, the latest in a spate of holdups targeting the media, police said Thursday.

Apparently they were doing a piece on how much local public schools had improved under SantaClausism.

Reporter Anne Makovec and cameraman Gregg Welk were on the air shortly after noon Wednesday outside Oakland Technical High School near the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. They were at the school to do a story on the passage of Proposition 30, the tax measure preventing deep cuts to education.

I’ve always heard that a conservative was a liberal who’d been mugged … somehow I don’t think it will work in this particular case.

One of the assailants punched Welk in the mouth before the group fled in a Mercedes-Benz, which apparently was accompanied by a Lexus, police said. Welk declined treatment by paramedics but saw his doctor.

That’s California for you — most affluent low-lifes in the country. Aren’t you proud?

The incident comes amid a series of robberies in which media representatives have been victims throughout Oakland, often in broad daylight.

The perps were only identified as ‘five men’, which means that they were either black or Latino, because otherwise their race would have been reported, since then there would have been no danger of the ‘journalists’ being suspected of racism.

Steve Sailer comments:

 With Jerry Brown on top of the world again and talking about running for a fourth term as governor of California, I recall when I met him a decade ago. When Brown was mayor of Oakland, I attended a Milken Institue speech he gave in which he explained what he had learned as mayor. I was quite astonished, because the gist of his speech, as far as I could tell, was that being mayor of Oakland had been a most eye-opening experience for an old liberal like him, that he had concluded that the main hope for Oakland was persuading poor people to move out and for the the poor people who insisted upon staying, trying to get their kids to go to a public military school he started to get some discipline pounded into their dysfunctional heads.

With results as you see them. You can knock some sense into the Governor, but if the electorate remain morons, it doesn’t help a whole lot.

 Now, that I think about it, why not Jerry Brown for President in 2016? Who is his competition? Hillary? Biden? That would be quite a field. The Democrats could really use some of that Senior Citizen Mojo that’s been working for Republican nominees so well since 1992.

And there you go.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Joel Kotkin has a fascinating analysis.

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.