Category: News

Commentary in the Washington Times entitled “Nostradamus Redux“:

Mr. Celente’s accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal that he said would soon engulf the world at a time when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a macroeconomist and expert on the Great Depression, told us, “the worst is behind us.” In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”

“Worse than the Great Depression,” Mr. Celente opined. Beginning with a sharp drop in standards of living, and continuing with an angry urban underclass that threatens a social order that allowed the mega-rich to continue living behind gated communities with summer escapades to luxurious homes on the French and Italian Rivieras or to bigger and better and more expensive boats from year to year.

This time, Mr. Celente’s Trends Research Institute, which the Los Angeles Times described as the Standard & Poor’s of pop culture, can see a tax rebellion in America by 2012, food riots, squatter rebellions, job marches and a culture that puts a higher premium on food on the table than gifts under the Christmas tree.

I really ought to stop talking about loading up on guns and liquor and start doing it.

Speaks on the economy:

(Link seen on Hot Air.)

You put money on the Iran/Israeli conflict as the next nuclear wars? Pakistan/India’s odds are increasing even as we speak.

MUMBAI DAY 3
Mumbai Attacks Highlight the Cancer That Is Pakistan

Given potential for inflation coupled with the way Congress is dropping hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money into any industry it thinks of like tourists dropping their last pocket change into the slots at the airport on the way out of Vegas, you will learn that the next order of magnitude beyond trillion is actually quadrillion.

Assuming that the Chinese and Middle Eastern royalty allow our national debt to hit that level circa 2017.

In a brief programming note, posting will be light as I am tending to grim family matters. Prayers and small animal sacrifices will be accepted in the spirit in which they’re received.

50 at Normandy High face HIV risk:

The HIV threat at Normandy High School has widened to include up to 50 students, health officials said Tuesday.

Health officials last week said “some” students may have been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS but recently refined their estimate to 50.

The local news has been running this story pretty hard, with dramatic meetings between school administrators and whatnot. Of course, just using the words “exposed to” spices it up. One might think a cafeteria worked didn’t wash her hands before returning to work or a lab experiment went awry. Um, still, no.

The most likely scenario for HIV exposure among teenagers would be sexual relations, but health experts say sharing contaminated needles for steroids, tattoos or drugs could also be the source.

The story’s only commenter gets to the meat in the sandwich:

I would like to know how those children were exposed to the HIV virus. It would benefit all the schools, and for that matter, any gathering of people in one place, to know how this happened. Of course, if it was something like a gang bang, then I am not worried because my community does not practice those sort of behaviors.

Indeed, by not elucidating on the mechanism of exposure, the media is really trying to gin up the panic without reminding the public that these young men and women acted in a way to expose themselves.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Washington “editor” weighs in on ACORN’s fraud problems by calling them something else: GOP attacking ACORN’s voter registration efforts:

Trailing badly in new-voter registration, Republicans are waging an aggressive campaign in Missouri and around the country against a group that claims to have added 1.3 million people to voter rolls since last year.

Let’s play a new game: whenever the Post-Dispatch identifies something as fraud, let’s see how they would spin it if it involved/indicted the Democratic Party.

Like this: GOP attacks Nevadan’s fundraising efforts

Or this: Republicans assail investor efforts.

I guess I am just naive; I didn’t think that Republicans were upset with voter registration efforts. I thought they were upset that ACORN people were systemically and nationally caught making things up out of whole cloth:

I guess that explains why I didn’t go into journalism; I don’t want to “help” people see the “truth” through my creative writing and pretending it was something other than a fictional narrative.

A rising bailout bill raises all boats:

The Senate substitute now runs over 450 pages. And tucked away in the tax provisions is a landmark health care provision demanding that insurance companies provide coverage for mental health treatment—such as hospitalization—on parity with physical illnesses.

Really a bill onto itself, the mental health parity measure has been a bipartisan priority for top lawmakers in both chambers but has stalled because of disagreements again over how to pay for its estimated $3.8 billion five-year cost. In the current climate, that seems to be no longer a stumbling block, and if the Treasury plan becomes law, it will also.

I’m just spitballing here, but won’t imposing new services on insurance companies sort of make the insurance companies raise rates to cover them?

Leading to a din about the higher costs of health care, leading to more shrieks for government to do something, such as national health care plan?

Geez Louise, it’s almost like that was “our” legislators’ goal or something.

Vladimir Putin lashes US for economic failures:

The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lashed out at the United States today for what he said was its inability to deal with the financial crisis affecting the global economy.

In remarks unlikely to go down well in Washington, Mr Putin was especially critical of Congress’s rejection of a $700 billion bank bailout – a rejection that hit Russian financial markets particularly hard.

“Everything that is happening in the economic and financial sphere has started in the United States. This is a real crisis that all of us are facing,” the former president told a government meeting in Moscow.

“And what is really sad is that we see an inability to take appropriate decisions. This is no longer irresponsibility on the part of some individuals, but irresponsibility of the whole system, which as you know had pretensions to (global) leadership.”

Sadly, Putin cannot vote for Obama this year.

Ha, just kidding! Thanks to the tireless efforts of ACORN, Mr. Putin will vote for Obama six times in Columbus, Ohio, alone.

(Link seen on The Other Side of Kim.)

For airing anti-Obama advertisements:

The Obama campaign has written radio stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, pressing them to refuse to air an ad from the National Rifle Association.

“This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience about Senator Obama’s position on the Second Amendment,” says the letter from Obama general counsel Bob Bauer. “For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement.”

More at Snowflakes in Hell, Bitch Girls, and a roundup at Instapundit.

First, the Obama campaign wanted Justice Department investigations and charges for an opposing political group. Then, the Obama campaign warned broadcasters their licenses were in jeopardy for running anti-Obama ads. Then Missouri prosecutors said opposing viewpoints would be prosecuted.

Is this 21st Century America? Is this the Change Happens on November 4 we were waiting/hoping for?

Whatever you imagine the Bush administration’s civil liberties failings were, get ready to be prosecuted for your speech under the Obama administration.

Chavez says Bush is his comrade:

“I nationalize strategic companies and get criticized, but when Bush does it, it’s OK,” Chavez said on weekly television program Sept. 21. “Bush is turning socialist. How are you, comrade Bush?”

(Link seen on The Volokh Conspiracy.)

You know what this story fails to mention?

Joan Anzalone’s children blame her longtime boyfriend for the helicopter crash that killed the couple, and filed a lawsuit Tuesday claiming he may have doomed them by flying blindly and negligently into a heavy fog.

The lawsuit was filed in Cook County, Ill., where Anzalone and Alan Sapko began their flight back to Kenosha early Sunday morning, after taking in a Huey Lewis and the News concert at the Horseshoe Casino just over the border in Hammond, Ind.

Sapko, 54, reportedly played cards until about 4:30 a.m. before lifting off in his Robinson R-44 helicopter, with Anzalone, 45, a mother of children ages 21, 19 and 17.

Their lawsuit claims Sapko failed to follow federal regulations, failed to verify the weather conditions, failed to abandon his flight plan when he encountered fog and negligently flew into an area with insufficient visibility.

That Sapko’s dead:

A helicopter carrying two people crashed into a Kenosha family’s home early Sunday, the rotor blades slicing through the two-story structure like a loaf of bread as the aircraft tumbled down a stairway before blowing out the front door and coming to rest on a neighbor’s driveway.

While the two helicopter occupants were killed, a couple and their three young children survived unharmed as the cart-wheeling wreckage blew their bedroom doors off the hinges just before dawn.

Good to see that the children waited to try to dip their hands into their mother’s boyfriend’s deep pockets a whole two days.

University City tests out its property condemnation system after a flood:

The city condemned about 275 properties in the aftermath of the storm, but nearly all of the condemnations have been lifted. City officials said the condemnations were to protect residents from potential electrical or other hazards or the lack of utilities.

If this had been an actual emergency, such as the need for a strip mall, these condemnations would have stood.

Would a billionaire financier who has spent beaucoup money in the last eight years opposing the Bush administration, someone like George Soros, say, tank the American economy just before an election to help his client party?

Think about it. Ah, nah, don’t think about it, that’s too complicated. Parrot it to a couple of friends, maybe mention it in an e-mail or two.

The steady, marching drumbeat of Marxism in everyday life:

The drumbeat. It’s always there. Day and night. Rain or shine. Winter or Summer. Sunday or Monday. It comes at you from every direction. It comes over the TV, the radio, at work, at school, in music, in the newspapers, from the politicians, in conversation with others, even in church. It wears you down. It robs you of the will to resist its message. Even short-lived victories, which stop it briefly, leave you with the knowledge that it will return; each minor victory bound to be lost to the redoubled efforts of this patient and persistent force. You can’t escape it. It never stops. It never gives up. It never ends. It rains upon you from every possible angle, from every possible source.

It’s the drumbeat of the left. It is political, philosophical, theological, and social. It pervades every activity. It is post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day. It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism.

The Smallest Minority reprints a transcript of Mark Levin explaining the current credit crisis.

(Link seen on View from the Porch.)

Remember, there are 2 parties in this country: The ones who go into government or near government to get rich and the rest of us.

Loans came easily, then fell apart:

While earning a salary of $21,000 a year, Leesa Robinson landed on top of the real estate world in 2006, overseeing nearly $1 million in property.

The 45-year-old single mom started buying houses after watching late-night infomercials and their tales of fast wealth.

Lenders from across the country wrote more than $800,000 in home loans in 2005 and 2006 so Robinson could buy eight north side rental properties, half of which she purchased with no money down. All but one of the loans came with high-interest, adjustable rates.

Today, her credit is shot. She lost all eight houses. She went bankrupt.

Robinson’s story is far from unique.

Far from unique? What does that mean? Common? A lot of people making $11 an hour buying a million dollars in property?

And whose fault is it? None, apparently, on the person who believed too much in infomercials, reached for the American Dream, and failed. Failure is no longer an option; it’s something that The Man or Big Mortgage does to you.

Not like this fellow, who celebrated Walk The Walk Like A Pirate Day:

Hoard of gold coins found in banker’s home basement

Our nation’s defense forces are just spitballing here:

The American military and intelligence communities are increasingly worried that would-be bin Ladens might gather in a virtual world, to plan a real-life attack. But the spies haven’t given many details, about how it might be done. Now, a Pentagon researcher has laid out how such a terror plot might unfold. The planning ground is World of Warcraft. The main target of this possibly nuclear strike: the White House.

There’s been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games make it incredibly easy to gather plotters from around the world. But, mostly, virtual worlds are nerve-wracking to spies because they’re so hard to monitor. The accounts are pseudonymous. The access is global. The jargon is thick. And most of the spy agencies’ employees aren’t exactly level-70 shamans.

And by “spitballing,” I mean rousing a panic amongst the ignorant controllers of budget strings so they totally can get budget for a couple of full time MMORPG players, probably themselves.