Say Anything Blog

By John Hawkins

There seems to be some confusion on this blog about what conservatism is, and here’s another individual’s version.  BTW, as individualists, conservatives then to be...individuals.

Long ago, when I was a mushy headed moderate, I studied conservatism and liberalism to try to figure out what the best philosophy was for my life and for my country. After doing that, I became a conservative because…

* I don’t think some politician in Washington who has never held a job outside of politics in his entire life, has a better handle on what to do with my money than I do.

* I don’t resent wealthy people. To the contrary, I want to become one of them one day.

* Government policies should be based on whether they work or not and whether they are constitutional, not on whether they make the people advocating them feel “nice” or “mean.”

* “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In other words, I’m not a victim, you’re not a victim, and 99 times out of a hundred, the person on TV screaming about how he’s a victim, isn’t a victim either. If you’re not happy with your life, it’s your responsibility to fix it, not the government’s responsibility.

* I don’t get upset that the federal government “doesn’t care about me.” In fact, I’d be pleased if it forgets that I exist.

[...]

* I am a citizen of the United States, not a citizen of the world. As such, my loyalty will always belong to this country and its people, not to any other nation, group of nations, or any sort of world governing body.

[...]

* There are no fantastic new programs left for the federal government to implement.

* It isn’t the job of the federal government to make us successful; it’s the job of the federal government to create an environment that allows us to make ourselves successful.

[...]

* The market and private industry almost always do a better job of allocating resources than the federal government could ever hope to do.

[...]

* People of all races should be treated equally and any laws, whether we’re talking about Jim Crow laws or Affirmative Action, that do otherwise are immoral, unconstitutional, and un-American.

* Having a government that is too involved in our lives is far more of a threat than a government that isn’t involved enough.

[...]

Read the whole thing.  Works for me.

By Noel Sheppard

NewsBusters readers are well aware of our contention that the press have adopted the 1992 strategy of making every economic report look like the world is coming to an end, and we’ll all be in soup lines next year if the Democrat presidential candidate isn’t inaugurated in January.

No finer example is available than Thursday’s Associated Press article concerning February’s very disappointing retail sales report. To be sure, store traffic was much worse than expected last month, and we are not trying to paint a rosy picture.

However, there are two truly disturbing elements in Martin Crutsinger’s piece entitled “Retail Sales Plunge by 0.6 Percent” (h/t NBer Par for the Course):

1. A 0.2 percent rise was depicted as “small,” a 0.4 percent rise was “modest,” but a 0.6 percent decline was a “plunge”
2. In February, January’s rise in retail sales was “surprisingly strong.” Now, that same rise was depicted as “modest.”

First thing’s first (emphasis added):

Consumers, battered by plunging home prices and a credit crunch, stayed away from the malls in February, pushing retail sales down by a larger-than-expected amount. It was another worrisome sign that the country could be falling into a recession.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales fell by 0.6 percent last month, far worse than the small 0.2 percent increase that analysts had been expecting.

The weakness was widespread with sales of autos, furniture and appliances all down.

It marked the second time in the past three months that retail sales have taken a tumble. Sales had fallen by an even bigger 0.7 percent in December, the largest drop in six months, as the nation’s retailers suffered through a dismal holiday shopping season. Sales posted a modest 0.4 percent gain in January.

Hmmm. So, 0.2 is small, 0.4 is modest, but 0.6 is a plunge? How does one go so quickly to a plunge?

Applying Crutsinger’s logic to a real life example, if a $100 stock goes up 20 cents, that’s a small rise. If it rallies by 40 cents, it’s a modest increase. But, if it sells off by 60 cents, THAT’S a PLUNGE!

I get it, Marty.

[...]

MSM propaganda exposed.  It’s obvious that the lefties want an economic disaster for America, and probably want to use it to sell more govt and less private enterprise.

By Christopher Chantrill

Now we know what Change-You-Can-Believe-In means.  It’s a code-word for the loose change that Tony Resko dealt out to the young Barack Obama when the young state senator was looking for a house in a ritzy part of Chicago.

That sort of change is completely different from the chump change that you or I put up when we buy a house in some modest suburb.

Of course, the big question is whether there will be any change left in the federal till next January when Democrats expect to change America by doing more of the same: spending more money on centralized bureaucratic social programs like socialized medicine.

When the Democratic candidates talk about Change, what they really mean is that they will redeem the mistakes of the Bush Era.  If you are upset about the mistakes in the endless war in Iraq, change means Getting Out Now.  If you are upset about the mistakes of Good Time Alan Greenspan, who gave us the real-estate boom that gave us the mortgage meltdown, change means Bailing You Out of your underwater mortgage and pitching the Republicans out of Denny Hastert’s old seat in the House of Representatives.  And we all know who to blame.

[...]

For there’s a good argument that the United States is heading into a perfect storm, a convergence of soaring government spending, high energy prices, collapsing house prices, soaring grain prices, and the falling dollar.  The good old blame game may get the Democrats back into power, but it won’t get the ship of state off the rocks.

It’s pretty easy to escape the perfect storm.  It’s been done again and again.  Governments get into trouble because, in the fat years, they promise too many goodies to too many people.  To get out of trouble you need to cut spending, cut subsidies, cut tax rates, and firm up the dollar. Any time you do any of this it helps the economy.  That’s because all government spending, from the military, to education, to health care, to welfare is staggeringly wasteful.  Each and every program, each and every subsidy represents an effort to divert resources from their most urgent use towards a less urgent use. Agricultural subsidies, education subsidies, ethanol subsidies, housing subsidies, wind and solar power subsidies, the list goes on and on.

The problem is, of course, that the people who get all this money from the government are the great political powers in the land.  In our land the great powers are not necessarily Big Business, but Big Seniors, Big Education workers, Big Healthcare workers, Big Environmental activists.  Of course, we should always keep an eye on the military-industrial complex; but the real $600 toilet seats disappear into the pension-industrial complex, the education-industrial complex, the social-service-industrial complex, and the global-warming-industrial complex.

[...]

But this is America and we know better.  Well maybe not everyone knows better.  According to Roy Blunt, House Minority Whip, the Democrats in Congress think it’s time to increase spending and raise taxes.

[T]he majority leadership unveiled a budget plan for 2009 that raises taxes on everything from starting a family, to starting a family business. All to finance a reckless spending agenda that comes in a full $276 billion in excess of what the president has requested.

Well, everyone makes mistakes.  But if the Democrats do another Clinton and raise taxes on the great middle class, then it will be time for Republicans once again to say: Never mind whose fault this is.  We are ready to own the problem.

Read the whole thing.  Yet another inconvenient truth for the Tax and Spendocrats.

By ALEX VEIGA AP Business Writer

LOS ANGELES—The U.S. economy will suffer as the slumping housing market eats away at job creation and consumer spending, but the nation should avoid slipping into a recession this year, according to a new economic report.

A recession could still happen though, if the credit crisis that has stifled the housing market deepens, preventing consumers from buying big-ticket items like cars and businesses from spending on equipment, according to the quarterly Anderson Forecast by the University of California at Los Angeles.

“We don’t see that happening,” said Edward Leamer, director and co-author of the forecast released Tuesday. “This is a tough call, but I will be very surprised if this thing actually precipitates into recession.”

The forecast anticipates job growth remaining sluggish in 2008, with the U.S. unemployment rate rising to 5.5 percent by the end of the year. The February rate was 4.8 percent.

The forecast expects the economy to post gross domestic product growth of about 1.5 percent this year, rising to about 3 percent growth in 2009. GDP grew 2.2 percent in 2007, the weakest showing in five years.

The no-recession forecast runs counter to the outlook among many economists and financial pundits, who contend the economy has already started to shrink amid rising unemployment, job losses, record oil prices, and the lingering effects of the housing and credit crises.

[...]

Read the whole thing.  Obviously, there is more than one side to the “recession” story.  Mostly, the MSM is only presenting one side, which is a well-known propaganda technique.  Why does the MSM want a recession so badly?
Maybe what’s bad for the country is good for the Dems/lefties.

Vaclav Klaus

A WEEK ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism.

As an economist, I have to start by stressing the obvious. Carbon dioxide emissions do not fall from heaven. Their volume (ECO2) is a function of gross domestic product per capita (which means of the size of economic activity, SEA), of the number of people (POP) and of the emissions intensity (EI), which is the amount of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. This is usually expressed in a simple relationship: ECO2 = EI x SEA x POP. What this relationship tells is simple: If we really want to decrease ECO2 we have to either stop the economic growth and thus block further rise in the standard of living, stop the population growth, or make miracles with the emissions intensity.

I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the change just now, especially with arguments based on such incomplete and faulty science. Human wants are unlimited and should stay so. Asceticism is a respectable individual attitude but should not be forcefully imposed upon the rest of us.

I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with. Without resisting it we would find ourselves on the slippery road to serfdom. The freedom to have children without regulation and control is one of the undisputable human rights.

[...]

Vaclav Klaus is President of the Czech Republic. This is an edited extract from a speech he gave on March 4 to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Read the whole thing.  Vaclav Klaus lived under the totalitarian Soviet communist regime, and knows totalitarianism when he sees it.

Find it here

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
An election-season essay
by David Mamet

[...]

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

[...]

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

[...]

Read the whole thing.  It runs about five pages, but is noteworthy and well-written.  I obviously don’t agree with everything he says, but he is moving in the right direction, and in this age of wall-to-wall leftie propaganda, that is a hopeful thing.

By Brent Baker

In 1,760 words, Tuesday’s front page USA Today article on New York Governor Eliot Spitzer never identified him as a Democrat, not even in photo captions, though the online version was updated with his party affiliation, yet described Senators Larry Craig and David Vitter as Republicans in the first mentions of their names in the story. Here’s the lead of the hard copy edition delivered to the MRC’s offices Tuesday morning:

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was the brash Wall Street corruption buster who made ethics his trademark. He was on many lists of future presidential contenders. On Monday, he apologized after he was accused of meeting a high-priced prostitute in a Washington, D.C., hotel last month.

However, in the online “print edition” posting (not the updated throughout the day USAToday.com site) of the March 11 newspaper, “he” was updated to “the Democrat” so the online version begins:

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was the brash Wall Street corruption buster who made ethics his trademark. He was on many lists of future presidential contenders. On Monday, the Democrat apologized after he was accused of meeting a high-priced prostitute in a Washington, D.C., hotel last month.

In both versions of “Revelation could cost Spitzer political future: N.Y. governor apologizes after report links him to pricey prostitution ring” by Andrea Stone, the 28th paragraph clearly identified two Republicans caught up in charges of scandalous behavior:

Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, is serving out his term despite being arrested on an accusation of soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. In a more direct parallel, Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, was identified last year as a client of a D.C. madam. He is still in office. “It’s hard for Republicans to argue that Spitzer should go when Vitter is still in,” [Larry] Sabato says.

Only hints in the hard copy edition, or the logical implication drawn by careful readers, let on that Spitzer is a Democrat, starting with the Larry Sabato quote above referring to how “it’s hard for Republicans to argue that Spitzer should go when Vitter is still in.”

[...]

Read the whole thing.  Typical media bias from the MSM.

By Tim Graham

A prostitution scandal strikes the Democrats? When Sen. David Vitter admitted he’d used the services of the “DC Madam,” thanks to probing by ABC News, the major media saw harm for the entire Republican Party nationwide. Will Governor Spitzer become a national problem for the entire Democratic party? Or will the media suddenly keep the scandal as localized as they can make it?

NBC and MSNBC were especially aggressive in describing conservatives and Republicans “in crisis.” The standout quote on the Vitter scandal (along with the Mark Foley internet-messages-to-pages scandal) came from MSNBC reporter David Shuster on August 29, 2007, who blurred the ethical embarrassments into Hurricane Katrina:

The problem, among others, is that the GOP campaigns as the party of family values and Senator Craig’s bathroom bust underscores the hypocrisy. Never mind Craig and his old attacks on President Clinton....There is former Republican Congressman Mark Foley, who built his social life on male pages. Conservative pastor Ted Haggard, who had trysts with a male prostitute. Republican Senator David Vitter, who campaigned as a family man but later acknowledged encounters with a woman who police described as a prostitute. It all adds moral insult to the injuries being suffered today by the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

That morning, the Today show used the words “Conservative Crisis” on screen, as Ann Curry asked Joe Scarborough:

Well let’s talk about the political fallout. First it’s been a rough year for the right. Let’s list them. Congressman Mark Foley, conservative pastor Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter. All involved in scandals, accusing them of inappropriate conduct. So the question’s gotta be asked, why do these kinds of scandals seem to be following Republicans, lately?

[...]

I wonder if they will emphasize the fact that Spitzer’s former job as Attorney General of the State of New York makes him a hypocrite for committing illegal acts?
The usual MSM double standard here.

Warner Todd Huston

Harris released one of their latest polls on the 6th and it showed that less than half the general American public trusts the press. With the state of the media today, this should come as no surprise to anyone. But, the numbers are pretty amazing when it is realized that 54% of those responding said they did not trust the press while 46% admitted that they don’t trust television news either. The Internet fared better with 41% saying that they trust what they see there with only 34% saying they do not trust the web for their news.

But, the really interesting news with this poll is the wide disparity between Democrats and Republicans where it concerns their trust in the media. It seems that Democrats are far more trusting in the media in nearly every category than are Republicans. (Independents trusted the media even less, incidentally.)

[...]

The final word of this survey is that the media isn’t trusted by either side of the political divide, but that the left does trust their compatriots in the media a bit more than the rest of us do.

Read the whole thing; it has a link to the actual survey, and the numbers are there, in black and white.  If the media weren’t so biased, why the discrepancy?

Thomas Lifson

One of the cruelest and most telling barbarities of Hamas is its use of civilians (especially children) as human shields, deliberately firing weapons from densely populated locations, so that counterstrikes will either be deterred or will cause civilian casualties, reveals indifference to the welfare of their own ostensible constituents.  The people for whom they are fighting are nothing but ammunition in the struggle to wipe out Israel and the world’s Jews.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign affairs has assembled visual proof of this barbarism.

In its fight to defend itself against Hamas attacks against its civilians, Israel is faced with moral challenges unprecedented in their complexity. Hamas, as a basic element of its strategy, exploits the Palestinian population as shields for its terrorist operations and infrastructure. This cynical strategy include the following tactics:

[...]

Read the whole thing.  What amazes me is the amount of denial among some sectors of our society that this is happening.

James Lewis

We all knew the race-gender-homophobe card would be played at some point in this election. Well, it just happened. Mark this date on your calendar: On Sunday, May 8, 2008 the Big Guns of the Left fired both barrels at the same moment. If you’re agin’ Obama or Hillary, you are the embodiment of evil. Islamaphobia has just been added to the heavy burden your soul will have to bear. And don’t you dare deny it.

Here’s WaPo’s subsidiary Newsweek, ready to nail your writhing despicable sexist skin to the wall:

“America is not ready for a female president. I have typed and deleted that sentence five times. It appalls me. It goes against everything I grew up hearing, everything I tell my daughter. But I have come to believe it. I have been convinced not just by nasty bloggers or by Limbaugh the Comic Insult Dog. It’s not because of the far more disturbing bias I have seen in otherwise respectable political commentators, as they gleefully declared Hillary Clinton’s campaign dead and deader. Or even because 34 percent of adults recently confirmed in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll that they do not think America is ready for a woman president (compared with 26 percent who said we weren’t ready for a black president). Nope, I expected all that. It’s the people I know and respect who have convinced me. It’s the people who have no qualms about making sexist comments and jokes about Hillary-Those cankles! Her pantsuits! Iron my shirt!-who’ve convinced me that, in America, we still do not like our women powerful.”

It’s your jokes that convict you!

Then there’s Nicholas Kristof, career propagandist for the New York Times, writing in the NYT-subsidiary The International Herald Tribune: 

“The ugliest prejudices in this campaign season are not directly about race. ... Sexism seems more of a factor. Americans have typically said in polls that they are less willing to vote for a woman than a black, and Shirley Chisholm (a black woman who ran for president in 1972) always said that she encountered more prejudice because of her sex than her race.

Yet the most monstrous bigotry in this election isn’t about either race or sex. It’s about religion. The whispering campaigns allege that Obama is a secret Muslim planning to impose Islamic law on the country. Incredibly, he is even accused—in earnest!—of being the Antichrist. Proponents of this theory offer detailed theological explanations for why he is the Antichrist, and the proof is that he claims to be Christian—after all, the Antichrist would say that, wouldn’t he? The rumors circulate enough that Glenn Beck of CNN asked the Rev. John Hagee, a conservative evangelical, what the odds are that Obama is the Antichrist.”

You see, Kristof is addressing our European friends, and the question is not, “Is there racism in America?” but rather, “Of all the sins America is guilty of, which is the most despicable? Is it race, gender, favorite sexual sports, religious hatred?” Because you are automatically assumed to be guilty. There is no absolution, you’re destined for Hell if you don’t vote Democrat.

Why is the Left firing at its real enemies—that is, you and me—right now? Because Hillary and Obama are at each other’s throats, of course, and this thing is going to end up with enraged Democrats tearing at each others’ throats at the convention. It’s the Clintons who dropped the “Hussein” card on Obama. It’s Obama who dropped the “incompetence” card on Hillary—a deadly insult from a feminist point of view. So the Left is fighting the Left.

Solution? Look for outside scapegoats. You, you and you! You’ll do. Up against the wall!

[...]

When we get to the general election --- huffing and puffing from the long grind --- we’ll have white-bread John McCain and his attractive blonde wife. Nobody will have to say a word. Imagine McCain versus Obama or Hillary on TV.  You know who’s the embodiment of Evil. Don’t even check your TV Guide.

It was bound to happen.  Lefties can’t function without playing the race card and the gender card, and now fighting radical Islam is somehow a sin.

By Noel Sheppard

There’s no denying the economy is slowing, and may have either entered a recession, or is on the brink of one. Maybe.

However, the media’s hysterical response to Friday’s February jobs report lacked any historical reference to how the labor market behaved in previous recessions.

Instead, press outlet after press outlet decided that the loss of 63,000 jobs in February was a clear signal the recession they’ve been calling for since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in September 2005 had finally begun.

In fact, as they fretted over this decline in non-farm payrolls, media chose not to ask and answer an important question:

How does a loss of 63,000 jobs compare to payroll declines at the beginning of previous recessions?

Interesting historical question, wouldn’t you agree?

Let’s begin our examination with the recession that began with a 7.8 percent decline in Gross Domestic Product the second quarter of 1980. That April, non-farm payrolls declined by 145,000, 2.3 times what was lost in February 2008.

Of course, since the total number of employees in April 1980 was a little under 91 million versus today’s almost 138 million, this 145,000 loss represented even a far greater percentage decline.

Maybe more important, since February 2008 was the second month of job losses, a potentially better reference point would be the 431,000 jobs lost in May 1980, the second month of that year’s recession. Compare that to the 63,000 payroll declines last month, and one has to question all the hysteria.

Moving forward, when the ‘81-82 recession began with a 4.9 percent GDP slide in the fourth quarter of 1981, 100,000 jobs were lost that October, followed by 209,000 in November.

When a 3.0 percent GDP drop signalled the start of the ‘90-’91 recession, 161,000 jobs were lost in October followed by 144,000 in November.

The most recent recession in 2001 is a hard one to plot. After all, from a classical definition standpoint, there ended up never being too consecutive quarters of GDP declines. However, as most economists feel a recession began in March 2001, 281,000 jobs were lost in April of that year.

Add it all up, and in the first two months of the 1980 recession, 576,000 jobs were lost. In the ‘81-’82 recession, this number was 309,000. In ‘90-’91, the tally was 305,000. In 2001, the number was 311,000.

Yet, in the first two months of what media believe to be the recession of 2008, the total job loss has been 85,000.

As such, from a historical standpoint, it seems to be quite a stretch to claim that a 63,000 decline in non-farm payrolls signals the beginning of a recession.

[...]

Does this mean the media are beginning to follow the same strategy they employed in 1992 when they assisted Bill Clinton in his run for the presidency? After all, despite the fact the 1990s recession actually ended in the second quarter of 1991, press outlets continued to portray a terrible economy so that Team Clinton could focus on their mantra, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”

And, for those that forgot when the recession ended that decade, please also be advised that as media members depicted bad economic times in 1992, the GDP grew by 3.3 percent that year, its strongest performance since 1989.

With this in mind, it seems imperative for New Media outlets to do everything within their power to make sure the electorate is getting the real economic news this year, for the mainstream press, all atwitter at the thought of regaining the White House, certainly can’t be trusted to do so.

Amen to that.  Unlike with the bubble-boosted Clinton economy, the MSM is doing all they can to torpedo this one.  Wonder why?

MarketWatch Reporter: We Got ‘Poorer’ Last Year

Yours truly had a memorable series of exchanges with MarketWatch Washington Bureau Chief Rex Nutting roughly 18 months ago. At one point, he appeared to reveal an expectation (otherwise, why provide a graph of it?) that home prices might actually fall like the NASDAQ did from 2000-2002 -- which, for the record, was almost 78%, from a peak of 5048 in March 2000 to a trough of 1114 in October 2002). He also described the housing market, which was still advancing nicely, as "in a free-fall."

Given the history, we shouldn't be surprised that Nutting pounced on the Fed's latest household net worth report, producing the following (link requires free registration):

MarketwatchOnNetWorth0308

Darn it, this is really weak:

* The headline assumes that Americans on the whole were poor even before the fourth quarter drop in household net worth (you can't get "poorer" unless you were "poor" already). This is beyond ridiculous and crosses the line into insulting our intelligence. Poor? Americans are clearly the richest "poor" people in human history. My math shows that the average person in America is worth $190,000 ($57.7 trillion divided by a population of 303 million).
* The subheadline ("net worth down 3.6% in fourth quarter") is flat-out wrong; the text of the article itself tells us that the drop is a "3.6% annual rate." But what's with the annualizing, anyway? The drop in household net worth during the quarter was 0.91%; the only reason to annualize it as Nutting did is to make the decline look worse than it really was.
[...]

Nutting does make a valid point: The 3.4% increase in household net worth during 2007 is less than the year's reported 4.1% inflation, meaning that real net worth indeed declined during last year. But though he referenced debt growth that took place between 2003 and 2005 (see last paragraph pictured), he "somehow" never got around to telling us what happened to real net worth during the previous 4 years.

[...]

Real household net worth increased almost 28% between 2002 and 2006, before falling back a "whopping" 0.7% in 2007.

Poorer, schmoorer, Rex.

By Michelle Malkin

Judge: USAToday reporter in contempt, must personally pay fines

I noted two weeks ago that a federal judge had decided to hold a USAToday reporter in contempt of court for refusing to name sources who fingered former Army scientist Steven Hatfill as a possible suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people.

He had postponed imposing penalties pending an appeal by the reporter, Toni Locy. But tonight, via AP, the judge ordered Locy to start paying up:

A federal judge held a former USA Today reporter in contempt Friday for refusing to identify her sources for stories about a former Army scientist under scrutiny in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

[...]

Starting at midnight Tuesday, the fines will be $500 a day for the first week, $1,000 a day for the second week and $5,000 thereafter until she appears before him on April 3.

“To maximize the potential that Ms. Locy will ultimately comply with the court’s order … Ms. Locy is required to personally bear the responsibility of paying the fine the court imposed,” Walton wrote.

Locy “is precluded from accepting any monetary or other form of reimbursement,” the judge added.

Judge Walton said two weeks ago:

“I don’t like to hold anyone in contempt,” Walton said. “I fully appreciate the importance of a free press. On the other hand, the media has to be responsible.”

[...]

It’s about time.  The MSM has been abusing its “freedom” for a long time, having turned it into advocacy for one particular political ideology.

John Hawkins

“All change is not growth; as all movement is not forward.”—Ellen Glasgow

As people who have followed Barack Obama closely over the last few months have long since realized, there has been very little substance to the man’s campaign besides his determination to lose—oops, I mean “end”—the war in Iraq.

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks during an election night rally Tuesday, March 4, 2008, in San Antonio, Texas. Obama won the Vermont primary for his 12th straight victory in one month’s time, and he and Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton are locked in a tight race in the Texas primary.

If you boil Obama’s appeal down to its essential core, most of his supporters seem to like him because he’s a relatively young, charismatic, black man who talks a lot about “change,” “unity,” and the “audacity of hope.”

But, what does that tell you about how Obama would behave if he gets into office? Very, very little. After all, pretty much anybody, from Napoleon, to Fidel Castro, to Mickey Mouse could run on a platform of “hope,” “change,” and “unity” because it’s so broad and meaningless.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Barack doesn’t have an agenda. He most certainly does have one, but it’s just an agenda that he tries to avoid talking about because the better Americans get to know him, the less appealing he’s going to be.

So, with that in mind, let me take you through a short tour of some of Barack Obama’s radical beliefs. In all fairness, I should note that he has flip-flopped on some of these issues after his Barney the Dinosaur style “I Love You, You Love Me” campaign for the presidency got into full swing. But, experience has taught us that you can put a lot more stock into what a politician says before he starts trying to desperately convince middle America to vote him into the White House, than after.

#1) Weakening America’s Military: Barack Obama has pledged, among other things, to make defense cuts during war time, to cut spending on national missile defense, that he won’t weaponize space, to slow development of future combat systems, and to seek a “world without nuclear weapons.” Is this a man who can be trusted as Commander-In-Chief?

#2) Losing the War in Iraq: Obama is promising to throw away the hard earned gains our troops have made in Iraq by immediately removing combat brigades each month, regardless of the situation on the ground, and by having all of our “combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly warned Barack and, for that matter, Hillary that they could create a “chaotic situation” with their policy that could take the “gains we have achieved and struggled to achieve and turn them around overnight.” Come on, Admiral, don’t you know that Obama isn’t going to listen to what the military has to say about a war when there’s an election to be won?

#3) Gay Marriage: Although Barack Obama claims to oppose gay marriage, in 2004 he said that he opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the only thing keeping the courts from imposing gay marriage on the whole country. If you want to see gay marriage become the law of the land in your state, no matter what the voters think, vote for Obama.

[...]

#9) Gun Control: Obama is a perfect example of the stereotypical, liberal gun grabber. Obama has pledged to “Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons,” has “opined unequivocally that D.C.’s ban was ‘constitutional’,” and in 1996, Obama, in a survey, “supported banning the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns.” If you’re an opponent of the 2nd Amendment, who believes law abiding citizens shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, Obama is your man.

Read the whole thing.  Be afraid, be very afraid.
This guy is dangerous, to say the least.