And Now They Run GM and Chrysler

When faced with this.

(California) State Controller John Chiang made a similar point Friday in releasing his cash balance report for April. Through the first 10 months of the fiscal year, revenue is $2.1 billion below budget estimates.

"Beginning this summer, we face a cash problem unseen in nearly eight decades, and the magnitude of that problem grows with every projected revenue dollar that fails to appear," Chiang said in a statement. "The state's last shortage and the resulting payment delays in February hurt California taxpayers, businesses, local governments and public works projects - and yet the crisis looming could be at least three times as bad."

The Obama Administration responds with this.

Reporting from Sacramento -- The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Luckily, the days of borrow and spend are over.

Meet the new boss.

What's Your Sign?

Playing along with our Official Artist, here's mine.

You Are STOP

When you're confronted with a problem, you drop everything else you're doing at the time. You need to take a moment and collect yourself before you proceed. Once you've taken a quick break, you're ready to tackle almost anything that's come your way. But if you're not given time to figure things out, then the likely result is chaos.

What Street Sign Are You?

I Installed iTunes

... and I hate the stupid thing. It went out and converted all my music to a format it likes and now my Internet backup program, Mozy, is backing it all up. Two days of backing up these new, extraneous files created by iTunes.

What a piece of junk.

How Barack Obama is not Like Benito Mussolini

... because by age 45, Mussolini had only written one autobiography while Barack had written two.

Happy Mother's Day!

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Google Trends: Peron and Mussolini

Here are the Google search statistics for Peron and Mussolini for 2009 for the US. Hmmm.


Red is Mussolini, blue is Peron.

I Love my BerryTunes!

On Thursday I bought and downloaded BerryTunes for my Blackberry. I love it! I can listen to streaming Internet radio and podcasts from the web through my Blackberry with it. I've been listening to Dave Ramsey podcasts while I drive. The thing downloads them across the Verizon network so I don't have to download them at home and then transfer them to the Blackberry. Its wonderful!

Next up, tuning in to WWL so I can hear New Orleans Saints sportstalk. Yay!

Link of the Day

David Harsanyi has a great piece in the Denver Post translating Obamaspeak. Here's a tidbit.

Washington always has been a thermonuclear cliché generator. But the Obama administration, with all its super-smarts, has taken the exploitation of the euphemism to spectacular new heights.

This week, we learned a bit more about what the terms "sacrifice" (do what we want, you filthy, unpatriotic swine), "era of responsibility" (double the "sacrifice," half the prosperity) and "investments" (we squander money so you don't have to) really mean.

There's lots more at the link.

A Map of Europe

... and it's hilarious! Click on the image for a better version.


H/T: UK Housing Bubble

See Your Edsel Dealer Today!

Just for fun.

Good News About Our Maximum Leader

A while back I posted some sad news - it looked like our Maximum Leader was not going to be able to make the move into our new house. My fiancee loves her, but is allergic to cats. The neighborhood is prowled by coyotes both day and night. It looked grim for our little muffinhead.

I had plenty of offers to take her in. One in particular was attractive as it was with a family who had no other pets. Change is hard on cats and change that involves moving into someone else's territory is particularly difficult. Not having to deal with another animal would have made it easier on her.

The whole affair was very hard on me. She and I have been close friends for 10 years. She's nursed me through some very tough times. I was tempted to give her away early, long before the move, because each day was so excrutiatingly painful. Every time I petted her or gave her water from the sink or a bit of tuna, all I could think of was what the very last time would feel like.

Many tears were shed.


Last week, I was sitting in church after Mass, waiting for my fiancee to finish up her duties (she's a Eucharistic Minister), meditating on the Cross when I started thinking about the whole problem. Our new house has a 3-car garage with an open attic over one of the stalls. It also has an enclosed back yard. Coyotes can't jump the fence and our Maximum Leader is long past her jumping days as well. All I needed to do was keep her inside the back yard and keep the coyotes out.

Once posed in this way, the problem was easy to solve. We're going to make the garage and attic cat-friendly and install a cat door that opens into the back yard from the garage. The fence in the back yard will be made cat-tight so she can't get out. She'll live in the garage and the back yard and when we're home, she'll be allowed inside to hang out on the first floor. She'll be given plenty of cat furniture and kept off the human furniture.

She'll get socialization, access to the outdoors, a big living area and protection. She won't be able to sleep with me any more, but there's a price to be paid for everything.

Was this the right decision? If she had been given away to the other family, she'd be able to sleep with anyone she wanted all night long, but she would never see me again. How much would that matter to her? Would she be forever wondering why I had left her? Would she be constantly waiting for me to come and get her so we could be together again? Would she immediately adapt to the new family and forget I ever existed? Who knows?

What I do know is how I would feel. I would miss her terribly. Faced with saying goodbye to my little girl, I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for my future. What happened in church that Sunday was that I realized that I still needed her. I wouldn't be as good of a father or a husband without her. The sadness of losing her would take away too much energy from the family. I had to find a way to keep her.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

This post is getting long, but I want to share one more thing with you.

Our Maximum Leader has indeed nursed me through all kinds of horrific things. No matter how dark and how desperate things were in my life, she was always there for me. She greets me with her little tail straight up in the air and rubs against my legs and purrs and likes to lay pressed up against me, sharing her warmth with me. Her poetic cat love fills the house every day. As I thought about what she had meant in my life, I was reminded of this story.

Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only. This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord, “You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”

The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”

God sent me this little cat to carry me through those dark times.

San Diego Skyline

A while back, I took a walk with my fiancee on Harbor Island. It was a beautiful day and the sun was perfectly positioned to illuminate the San Diego skyline. Here's a cropped version of one of the best photos.


I love the way my Nikon D60 picks up the blues in the image. Clicking on this one is worthwhile, I uploaded a larger than usual version of the image.

Peron Instead of Mussolini?

Perhaps.

Peron pushed redistribution policies throughout his country in an earnest desire to improve the lot of the working classes that made up the base of his supporters. The problem, a significant amount of wealth was stolen by people around him, capital flight began as international business looked for safer pastures, and the workers themselves began to demand more pay for less work, a totally natural desire but when taken to an extreme capable of destroying a nation's economy. Even worse was the dramatic expansion of the state as government owned enterprises became corrupted by massive featherbedding and incompetence.

Cheezburger of the Day

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Calling Dr. Heimlich!

The world is choking on our debt.

The benchmark 30-year bond yield climbed 16 basis points, or 0.16 percentage point, to 4.26 percent at 1:22 p.m. in New York, according to BGCantor Market data ... Thirty-year bonds yielded 3.64 percent at the last sale, on March 12.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's more than a half point rise in interest rates in the last two months. The debt tsunami is just beginning.

Let's Elect Santa Claus President!

... or did we already do that?

So far, the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress have been forking over money to everyone in sight. Well, everyone that normally votes for them, like the UAW, or could be used as a weapon against other groups, like the banks. It's been Christmas for months. Every day we get to run downstairs and open the Interweb Tubes to find out what presents are being unwrapped.

Everyone is happy and Santa's approval numbers are high. Aren't they always?

No matter what you do, January always follows December. The credit card bills come in the mail and the family has to figure out how they will pay them. No worries, though. It's still December 24. For a little while longer at least.

Whoops! Looks like the bill came in the mail and Santa handed it out to the people who will really pay it.

It's All Coming Together

Mussolini:

The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) was an organization set up by the Italian fascist government in 1933 to combat the global depression. Its function was to rescue floundering companies which could no longer afford to repay their creditors.

Although set up as a temporary measure, the IRI continued to run for as long Mussolini was in power. It was able to reorganise companies so that production was maintained. The main action of the IRI was to buy shares of failing companies from banks. In 1937 the IRI's powers were extended so that it could nationalise companies, although no effective nationalisation were carried out. By 1939 the IRI controlled 20% of the Italian industry through government-linked companies (GLCs)

Obama:

Apparently, the $34 billion figure (in additional funding to bail out Bank of America) is good news because BAC (Bank of America) has all those preferreds at Treasury that can be converted to common stock, leaving Treasury with $34 billion of common and $11 billion of preferreds. But Joe Weisenthal asks a good question:

If this is how the conversion goes, and the bank does pay off the remaining $11 billion over the next year or so, are they considered to have repayed TARP? How does a bank that's taken the conversion ever actually repay the TARP?

This is troubling, because it's now clear that the worry many of us had at the time of the bank bailouts has come true: the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government's special friends.

Some Quick Thoughts

Some semi-random thoughts.

• Obama's words are meaningless. As the details of the Chrysler deal emerge, it's clear that they saw an opportunity to sieze control of a car company and they took it. Between that and the budget and the downpayment on the health care plan, his pronouncements are the opposite of what he's doing.


• Private investment is secondary to government investment, regardless of where it comes from. For all we know, the Nebraska Teacher's Union may have invested in Chrysler as a bondholder, but that's irrelevant. Bondholders are private investors and are therefore evil. Wipe them out!


• All this talk about the taxpayer bailing out these companies is misleading. The taxpayer isn't bailing out anyone since taxes aren't going anywhere. The dollar is bailing out these companies as the Fed prints the money the Obama Administration needs to continue siezing assets. It's not the taxpayer that's getting the bill, it's anyone holding dollars.


• The Republicans and the press and all the rest of us are indeed irrelevant. We will continue to be irrelevant until we start calling this what it is - economic fascism. There's nothing inherently wrong with fascism. It's just a system of government. Until we start discussing it, however, we won't have any say in the matter. Right now we're all like the family dog watching dad build a swingset (or a gallows) in the backyard. We don't quite understand what's going on, we think we have an opinion, but we don't really have an impact on the situation at all.

John Galt in Point Loma

I saw this sign in Point Loma today.


I love it. We need to start putting these up everywhere.

Devolving?

Over the weekend, as we were cleaning out our new home*, I tripped and fell, injuring my right hand. It's just a sprain, but I've temporarily lost much of the use of my right thumb. As I now have only an opposable thumb and not thumbs, am I at risk of devolving? Does that explain my recent, heartless, paleolithic posts?

And what of our Maximum Leader**? Shall we soon be dealing with this?


* - it was a foreclosure and the backyard was filled with junk that had to be removed.

** - I'm almost certain we'll be able to keep her. I'll know on Friday when I have a chance to go back and check out the house again.