Honk! If you're paying my mortgage

Do the Math: An Investors Graph

Do the Math: An Investors Graph 

Click to zoom

• November 1992: Clinton elected President, Dow = 3240

• November 1994: Republicans retake control of the House and Senate, Dow = 3807

• June 2001: Jim Jeffords gives control of the Senate to the Democrats, Dow = 10,990

• November 2002: Republicans retake Senate, Dow = 8537

• November 2006: Democrats retake control of House & Senate, Dow = 12,342

• November 2008: Obama elected President, Dow = 8943

• Today, little more than three months since Obama was elected President, Dow = 7350.

Let's review. During the first two years of Clinton, while the Democrats retained control of the House and Senate, the Dow increased slightly.

In 1994, the Republicans took control of the House and Senate. The Dow exploded, increasing at an annual rate of almost 18% per year for the next six-and-one-half years, the entire period while the Republicans remained in control.

In June 2001, the Democrats regained control of the Senate. The Dow then plunged at an annual rate of almost -16% until November 2002, when the GOP retook the Senate.

From November 2002 until November 2006, the Dow increased at a rate of over 20% per year, until the Democrats regained control of both the House and the Senate.

In November 2006, the Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate. During the first two years of Democrat control (from November 2006 to November 2008), the Dow plunged at an annual rate of almost -15% annually. Since the Democrats gained control of the House and Senate in November 2006, the Dow has dropped -40% or a total of almost 4500 points.

Since Obama was elected President, the Dow has continued to plunge, and is down over 17% in the three months since election day.

Anyone else notice a pattern?

• Republican Control = Bull Market and Prosperity

• Democrat Control = Bear Market and Depression

One hopes the drones can understand the chart.

The American Tea Party

Grab your Indian gear - The American Tea Party happens on Friday

by: Bill Dupray   

Photoshop credit Leo Alberti via Michelle Malkin

As many of you may have heard, there is a revolt brewing over the Democrats' grotesque tax and spending boondoggle. A trillion dollars belonging to future generations of Americans has been blown on absolute garbage.

The Liberals are abuzz about how Obama has done more in 30 days than any president in history. On that, I would agree. It took us 232 years to get to a $1 trillion national debt. Obama doubled it in 30 days.

Yesterday the Frankenstein Democrats in the House unveiled their monster Omnibus spending bill (one wit noted that the Omnibus is the Stimulus's retarded little brother) with another $410 billion of pure pork products, including 9,000 (pigs') earmarks.

People see what is happening and, in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, modern day Sons and Daughters of Liberty will be meeting simultaneously in cities all over the country this Friday, February 27, 2009 from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. to protest this grand larceny perpetrated on the American public by the Democrat Party.

Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me

lyrics to ‘O Fortuna’ of Carmina Burana:

“since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!”

Fate is pictured.
The strong man is small business.
We will all be out of a job,
when taxes are raised on the strong man.

Everyone indeed will suffer, please weep with me.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong

Great quote, and very TRUE! (linked from A little something called “God-inspired wisdom”)

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

Presbyterian minister William J.H. Boetcker (1873-1962)

Belie vein hope, Eschew false change

Yes, this is change you can believe in. HA! Yea right!

They block google and other search engines from indexing or storing searchable links to their site,  they block search engine tracking so that it is harder for people to hold them accountable.  Figures, certainly Obama's administration is not a very 'Open'.

I say:
Belie vein hope (was: believe in hope)

Eschew false change

Recovery.gov blocked search engine tracking

by Chris Soghoian

(Credit: Recovery.gov)

Update: As of 8 a.m. PST, within three hours of this story first going live, it appears that President Obama's Web team has (silently) pulled the robots.txt file from the Recovery.gov Web site. The site is now open to Web crawlers of all kinds.

The Obama administration has apparently opted to forbid Google and other search engines from indexing any content on the newly launched Recovery.gov.

Is this even more evidence that the administration's much-publicized commitment to transparency issimply hype?

Recovery.gov, which went live Tuesday, is set to act as a central clearinghouse for information related to the newly signed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The legislation is designed to stimulate the flagging U.S. economy.

In a video message, available on YouTube and embedded into the new site, President Obama states that the "size and scale of (the stimulus) plan demands unprecedented efforts to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending. Recovery.gov will be the online portal for these efforts." He adds that the new site will be used to publish information on how the stimulus funds will be spent in a "timely, targeted, and transparent manner."

Although the site is advertised as proof of the president's commitment to transparency, its technical design seems to betray that spirit. Most importantly, the site currently blocks all requests by search engines, which would ordinarily download and index each page to make the information more accessible to the Web-searching public.

The site's robots.txt file has just a few lines of text:

# Deny all search bots, web spiders
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Although the White House Web team did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the single-line comment at the top of the file indicates that the blocking of search engines is no accident but rather a statement of policy.

Many sites use a robots.txt file to communicate, in machine-readable terms, the Web pages that they do and don't wish to be indexed by search engines. While the files don't carry much, if any, legal weight, most search engines act as good Internet citizens and honor the requests.

Luckily for the millions of Americans who might wish to find out how their money is going to be spent, it seems that Google has opted to ignore the administration's restrictive robots.txt on the stimulus-related site. It is unclear if this is due to an error or a manual override by someone at Google, but a quick searchturns up more than 60 Web pages on Recovery.gov that have been indexed by the search engine's Web crawlers in just the past three days.

Also, the stimulus bill requires that the site be run by the new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, but it seems to currently be under the control of the White House Web team--the same folks who revamped Whitehouse.gov and whose use of the robots.txt search engine-blocking code was expanded after the site initially was praised by bloggers for its openness.

It is this blogger's hope that with a bit of gentle prodding by members of the pro-transparency community, Recovery.gov's administrators will correct the "unintentional oversight" that was made in launching the site with such an restrictive robots.txt file.

It's a moral hazard!

VIDEO: 'The government is promoting bad behavior... do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages... This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage? President Obama are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgage! It's a moral hazard'... MORE...

Democrat party is the needle, Socialism is the drug

Why Obama backed Burris: he was Stimulus vote #60

Shocking Facts about Sea Level Rise

Shocking Facts about Sea Level Rise

Here is what the new IPCC Summary for Policymakers has to say about observed sea level rise:

Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003, about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year. Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear.

Although the IPCC would have us believe that sea level rise has been accelerating recently, they are not emphatic about it, and leave open the possibility that decadal variations may be responsible for the perceived rate increase. As shown by Holgate’s new research results that possibility looks like the leading contender.

From this article, we learn from the actual data that (a) sea level is generally rising, (b) the rate of rise decelerated during the 20th century, (c) the rate of sea level rise over the past two decades has been both positive and negative, (d) the rate of sea level rise has been quite small over the last few years, and (e) stations can witness an increase or decrease of sea level quite independently of one another.

At the very least, Holgate shows that the global warming – sea level linkage is far more complicated than typically presented to the public. Or the results show that what the public has been told about sea level rise is simply wrong.

You decide, but the facts look rather obvious to us.

Reference:

Holgate, S. J., 2007. On the decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century, Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L01602, doi:10.1029/2006GL028492.

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Has NASA's Hansen Finally Lost His Mind?

Even Al Gore's dream of "capping" carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants won't satisfy NASA's James Hansen. He wants to shut them all down.

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Retiree Makes Own Electric Car — Becomes Tax Cheat and Enviro Criminal

A retiree from NASA who resides in Texas tinkering around with spare parts, a friend’s junked VW Beetle, with the sponsorship of a battery maker, invented his own electric car. It’s that ol’ American ingenuity at work (I won’t say Yankee ingenuity since the fellow is in Texas). We should applaud him, right? Not so fast.

Like you, I celebrate the garage inventor, the sort of creature that makes Apple...

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'CO2 reduction treaties useless'

from BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition

A new report says that treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol, which aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, are useless.

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UK's CO2 plan 'certain to fail'

from BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition

The UK's plans to cut emissions by 80% by 2050 are almost certain to fail, according to a US scientist.

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Large Area of USA below Avg. Temps last 12 months...

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Generational Theft Act 2009, AKA Senate Stimulus Bill

Last Sunday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) referred to the phrase on CBS's "Face the Nation":

SENATOR JOHN McCAIN: Well, I can't, Bob. And I can't because I think it's the greatest transfer of not only spending, but authority and responsibility to government. I think it's massive, it's much larger than any measure that was taken during the Great Depression. I think it has policy changes in it which are fundamentally bad for America. For example, their "buy America" provisions. That's protectionism. It didn't work at any time in our history. But most of all, because I think this can only be described as generational theft. What we are doing is amassing multitrillions of dollars, if you look at what's going to be announced Monday or Tuesday, a new TARP. We've already spent 700 billion; another how many, half a trillion or more.

"Generational Theft Act" already generates almost 40,000 results in a Google search. 

Most delicious, the term is beginning to anger the extreme left.  

Wasteful and Non-Stimulus Spending Provisions

• $2 billion earmark to re-start FutureGen, a near-zero emissions coal power plant in Illinois that the Dept. of Energy defunded last year because the project was inefficient
• A $246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film
• $650 million for the digital television (DTV) converter box coupon program
• $88 million for the Coast Guard to design a new polar icebreaker (arctic ship)
• $448 million for constructing the Dept. of Homeland Security headquarters
• $248 million for furniture at the new Dept. of Homeland Security headquarters
• $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees
• $400 million for the CDC to screen and prevent STD’s
• $1.4 billion for a rural waste disposal programs
• $150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities
• $1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion
• $75 million for “smoking cessation activities”
• $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges
• $75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI
• $25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction
• $10 million to inspect canals in urban areas
• $6 billion to turn federal buildings into “green” buildings
• $500 million for state and local fire stations
• $650 million for wildland fire management on Forest Service lands
• $150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities
• $1.2 billion for “youth activities,” including youth summer job programs
• $88 million for renovating the headquarters of the Public Health Service
• $412 million for CDC buildings and property
• $500 million for building and repairing NIH facilities in Bethesda, MD
• $160 million for “paid volunteers” at the Corporation for National and Community Service
• $5.5 million for “energy efficiency initiatives” at the VA “National Cemetery Administration”
• $850 million for Amtrak
• $100 million for reducing the hazard of lead-based paint
• $75M to construct a new “security training” facility for State Dept Security officers when they can be trained at existing facilities of other agencies.
• $110 million to the Farm Service Agency to upgrade computer systems
• $200 million in funding for the lease of alternative energy vehicles for use on military installations.
• State Medicaid Bailout: $87.7 billion Through 3 different mechanisms, the bill would provide additional federal funds to state Medicaid programs over the next 3 years. This is nearly $70 billion more than the governors asked President Obama for in December, and should be a loan to be repaid by the states.

Questionable Policy

• Eliminates fees on loans from the Small Business Administration, thus pushing private capital toward unproductive businesses and away from productive businesses.
• Increases the definition of “youth” for certain summer job programs from age 21 to age 24.
• $160 million to the Job Corps program at the Dept. of Labor, but not for job programs – rather, to construct, alter or repair buildings.
• Requires a government study on the impact of minimum wage laws on the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa.
• $79 billion State Fiscal Stabilization (slush) Fund to bailout the States by providing billions of dollars for “education” costs of any kind.
• $47.843 billion is appropriated for a variety of energy programs that are primarily focused on renewable energy development and energy conservation/efficiency. Not one dollar is appropriated to make fossil fuels more affordable in the near future. More than $6 billion of these funds go to environmental clean ups.
• Increases eligibility for “weatherization” assistance to households 200 percent above the poverty level.
• The “Making Work Pay” credit of $500 to every individual making less than $75,000 (or $1000 to couples making $150,000 or less) would pay people whether they are productive or not – akin to welfare.
• The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP – food stamps) would temporarily suspend the 3-month limit for non-working adults to receive SNAP benefits, thus giving incentives not to find a job.
• Installs government as the creator of broadband deployment regardless of whether the specific local/regional market can sustain it.
• Funds new “green jobs” job-training program without eliminating inefficient job-training programs or consolidating duplicative job-training programs.
• $890 million to the Social Security Administration without any provisions to reduce improper payments, or any plan to increase solvency of the trust fund.
• Nothing requires the products that are purchased with these funds be here in America. Lithium ion batteries, for instance, are primarily made in Asia.

A picture is worth a TRILLION words

after interest is added in about a year, it'll be a Trillion dollars...

Obama: Spending and Scaring: his top two talents

Spending isn't Obama's only talent. Obama also knows hot to scare... Scaring people is not leadership. It is shameless. The problem is that this stimulus trillion dollars won't work long term, because there is no impetus for business to hire people. We need a drastic reduction in business taxes. I don't understand why that isn't on the table, because most tax revenue comes from individuals anyway, they won't be losing that much if the drop the 35% to 25%. What are they thinking? They are not thinking, they are feeling, that's the problem.

RS: the President is now out to terrify the populace into rallying behind it:

President Barack Obama warned on Thursday that failure to act on an economic recovery package could plunge the nation into a long-lasting recession that might prove irreversible, a fresh call to a recalcitrant Congress to move quickly.

In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, the president argued that each day without his stimulus package, Americans lose more jobs, savings and homes. His message came as congressional leaders struggle to control the huge stimulus bill that’s been growing larger by the day in the Senate. The addition of a new tax break for homebuyers Wednesday evening sent the price tag well past $900 billion.

Senate Democratic leaders hope for passage of the legislation by Friday at the latest, although prospects appear to hinge on crafting a series of spending reductions that would make the bill more palatable to centrists in both parties.

Obama painted a bleak picture if lawmakers do nothing.

“This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse,” Obama wrote in the newspaper piece titled, “The Action Americans Need.”

As you consider the President’s thing-resembling-an-argument, consider this story as well:

A government watchdog group says the federal government overpaid for stocks and other assets from financial institutions under its $700 billion rescue program.

The chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds told the Senate Banking committee Thursday that Treasury in 2008 paid $254 billion and received assets worth about $176 billion.

The same government that got things so wrong is now asking us to trust it to get things right with a stimulus bill that is well over $800 billion. How many people actually trust it to deliver on its promise?

And at the end of the day, whom does the President think he is kidding?

Resistance is futile