Why We Want A Balanced Budget

... because banking crises occur.

In 1873, there was a massive financial panic. The country had overbuilt railroads and other industries as everyone sought to cash in on the latest growth area, much like the dot com bubble around 2000 and the housing bubble of this year. In 1873, banks failed, people lost their money, companies went bankrupt, all the things we're seeing today. For a variety of reasons, the government could not step in at that time and calm things down.

Today, we have much more flexibility and many more tools to deal with these crises. Well, we would, if we didn't have a national debt of about $9.7T. We've blown through all that money, paying for unnecessary things. Whether that's massive increases in agricultural subsisidies or a bloated education budget or weapon systems for favorite congressional districts, the result is the same - a crushing debt burden that was incurred in the absence of a crisis.

Imagine what things would be like today if we did not have any national debt. There's no reason to have one - the things we bought weren't crucial and the taxes we could have paid to retire the debt weren't overwelming. Imagine what you could do to bail out a $150B loss at Lehman (with all kinds of requirements and punishments on the management staff at the company) if you had no national debt. It would be trivial. Even if you had to borrow money to do that, your comparative national debt would be this:

Current debt: $9,700B
Lehman debt: $150B

Bailing out Lehman's investors and stockholders would have been trivial. More later.

Once Lehman Brothers Goes Under, Who Will Finance the Politicians?

Well, there will always be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy congressional votes and executive branch indulgences. Let's see here, who has the second highest total of political contributions from these two mortgage giants?

Barack Obama.

Who's got a pair of former Fannie Mae CEOs high up on his campaign staff?

Barack Obama.

“You look at Obama’s economic advisers, the guys he has counted on from day one and who have raised him a ton — and I mean a ton — of money: Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, both of them are waist to neck deep in the mortgage debacle.”

Both Raines and Johnson have served as CEO of Fannie Mae, with Raines taking over from Johnson. Both are key political and economic advisers to Obama.

Now that's change you can believe in.

Or not.

Update: Jennifer Rubin at Contentions has more.

Separate but Equal

... as long as you're a man.

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

The inability to pass judgment on value systems has led to this.

Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.

The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

It turns out that for the last 100 years, the British have allowed similar Jewish courts to operate. Since it would be evidence of bias to not allow the Islamic courts the same authority, they now have partial Sharia in Britain.

One of the basic tenets of modern liberalism is that no value system is better than any other. You cannot pass judgment on a culture. You may disagree with them, but they have a right to live their lives the way they want. Who are you to say what is right and what is wrong?

That's above your pay grade.

The Meaning of my Name

Thanks to the Feline Theocracy's Offical Artist, we've been turned on to yet another silly quiz. This week it has to do with the meaning of your name.

The name K T means "pure and clear" which certainly fits our Maximum Leader. Clearly, she wants pure tuna.

To get to the meaning of your name, visit the link given above.

Proof That I Love My Kids

And now, a post designed to elicit sympathy for poor little me...

The Saints-Redskins game was on at 10AM Pacific Time. I didn't listen to it, despite the fact that listening to New Orleans Saints football games is something I look forward to all year. Instead, I went to my daughter's soccer game and went shopping for a dress for her to wear to a dance and social skills class at her school.

Now that's parental dedication.

The Law of Unintended Irony

...strikes again. Here's part of a screen capture from the NFL.com front page.


Meanwhile, we have this:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)—The Tennessee Titans called police Monday night for help searching for Vince Young because his therapist told coach Jeff Fisher the quarterback mentioned suicide several times before driving away from his home with a gun.

Ouch.

I Can't Figure out the new SiteMeter

Seriously. Just what is that junk they put up there? Can we please have the old metrics back?

Update: Rick Lee agrees.

Update 2: A commenter over at Rick Lee's site left this link to a long list of very unhappy bloggers who use SiteMeter.

FAIL!

Random Thoughts

Just odds and ends from my life.

• When my son was little, around 1 years old, the only way we could get him to take naps was to drive him around in the car. Now our Maximum Leader naps there. Only this time, there's no driving.
• San Diego imports all of the water it uses. When I water my little potted plants, I hold them over the bigger ones so that any water that comes out the bottom goes into the bigger plants. It's not much, but it makes me feel better.
• Cooler weather has finally come to San Diego and I love it. If I'm going to have the heat and humidity of the Deep South, then I want to yummy fried foods to go with it.
• I made a dish of mussels and clams last night for my fiancee, taken from a Mediterranean cookbook. It was outstanding.
• We also had eggplant spread on garlic toast and some baked onions and mushrooms. It was a feast!
• She has an outstanding selection of wine. I don't bother to bring any over to her house, because she is so much more knowledgeable than I am.
• I bring the beer.
• I went to Beverages and More and stocked up on Abita Turbo Dog beer to celebrate each New Orleans Saints victory. After last week's game with Tampa Bay, it looks like I'll need to make another trip. Yay!
• This might have made for a good Thursday Thirteen. Maybe I'll get back into that again.

Hurricane Ike Eyewall Hits Galveston

Dig this video.

Wow. Citizen news reporting scores again.

In the Tank

...so deep that the Hillary Clinton supporters see it clearly. This election isn't as groundbreaking in the race or sex of the candidates so much as the way the MSM has allowed the mask to fall from their faces.

What will the election 4 years from now be like?

Update: Dig the edits in the first Palin interview. Wow.

Game Over

Lipstick on a pig was bad enough, but this one ends the contest.

John McCain can't send emails because he lost the fine motor skills required to operate a keyboard easily while spending 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison camp being tortured for his country.

John Hinderacker has the best headline on this one yet, Obama Gets Tough, Shoots Self In Head. The comments on this post over at the Ace of Spades blog are hilarious. Here are two of my favorites:

I think they spent months trying to figure out how they can position Obama as better qualified than McCain, and basically came up with the fact that Obama can type.

and

This is a first. With this ad, Obama has gotten inside his OWN decision cycle!

The whole notion of "Now I'm going to get tough with John McCain" is pretty ludicrous considering the dude spent 2 of those years in solitary confinement in a total hellhole and all of those years getting the stuffing beaten out of him on a regular basis. Just what on Earth does Mr. Arugula think he can do to top that?

Joe Biden is probably wondering how he can gracefully get off the ticket and save his own skin.

Palin Derangement Syndrome Explained

So why is it that the lefty bloggers and the MSM are tripping over each other to see who can print the most hideous tripe about Sarah Palin? Or as Mark Steyn points out satirically,

If you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

How did it get to this point? Two factors lead you inescapably to where we are today.

1. The MSM and the lefty bloggers are playing to each other. The New York Times and MSNBC have dropped all pretense of fairness and are simply running Obama campaign ads 24/7. So is Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and CNN.

2. Modern liberalism is nihilistic. There are no objective standards of behavior, no fixed rules of personal conduct. Any attempt to suggest such things is seen as the ultimate in repression. When Barack Obama said that determining when life began was above his pay grade he meant it. They cannot even suggest that slaughtering children who have survived abortions is wrong. Where does nihilism lead?

The caustic strength of nihilism is absolute, Nietzsche argues, and under its withering scrutiny "the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer" (Will to Power). Inevitably, nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective Western mythos. This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity...

The press and the lefty bloggers are going off the deep end because they reward each other for it and because no one can tell them, "No. You must stop."

If you've got a better explanation, I'd like to hear it.

Sarah Palin Gets Confused by the Bush Doctrine

... so what?

Here's the video.

The pro-Hillary site, TalkLeft, has the best take on it of all. From their comments:

Palin and Gibson in that clip are a little odd, but I don't think that she showed ignorance in that exchange as much as she demonstrated mastery of the the ubiquitous political tactic of not giving a direct answer.

and

Palin's response was clearly a delaying tactic, trying to look for a foothold on which to base her answer. Her follow-up answer, "it's his worldview" confirms that. I think anyone who's ever been in school and had to fumble through a question from a teacher knows what was going on there.

Yep, Sarah got that deer-in-the-headlights look and floundered for a minute or two? So what? In this election the only choices we have are McCain/Palin or Obama/Biden. You could choose your foreign policy positions with a dart board and never do worse than the abysmal record of Obama/Biden. They're the 2007 Miami Dolphins of foreign policy.

If this were a perfect world, the Republicans would be running Fred Thompson and General Petraeus and the Democrats would be running Joe Lieberman and Bill Richardson. We'd have a coherent, reasonable debate about the role of government and the future of the country. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world and we've got imperfect candidates. We have to pick our favorites from the choices we've got.

Yep, Sarah Palin slipped a gear in that interview and had to stall for time. So what?

Charlie Gibson's Holy War

OK, so I've seen a couple clips of Sarah Palin's first interview with Charlie Gibson. I'm not going to watch the whole thing. This exchange alone made me want to jump through the screen and smack some sense into the condescending, superior and ignorant Gibson.

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side.

Of course, the quote Charlie threw at her weren't her exact words at all, as has been detailed elsewhere. Those were the words heard by the secular, nihilist MSM who is so far in the tank for Obama that it's drowning. Had she been a little quicker on her feet, the exchange might have gone like this.

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: Well you certainly are. The One is in retreat and you need rally around and defend him! Smite the evildoers who criticize The One, Charlie! Smite them!

Doesn't Deepak Chopra Worship Trees or Something Like That?

After reading this, you might think he does. He's got a full on case of PDS*.

One thing is for sure. Deepak is an idiot.

If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules. On the other hand, if you have sad thoughts, and angry thoughts, and hostile thoughts, then you make those molecules which may depress the immune system and make you more susceptible to disease.

Happy molecules? Well, by all means, lets have more of those!

* - Palin Derangement Syndrome

Please Take Your Insulin

... before looking at this.

more animals

Long Time, No Daisy

We've had a series of bouts with predatory caterpillars and a few parasitic insects, but we've managed to fight them off. One of Momma Daisy's girls has decided to reward our efforts with a bloom.

MG Cat

Our Maximum Leader's new favorite place to sleep is on the floor of the passenger's side of my (not quite running yet) MGB.

Hop in! Let's cruise down to the store and get some tuna!

The Crab Nebula is Racist

No, really. Check it out.

Racist!

Designing for Grampa Kitteh

I'm at a meeting today where a variety of Web 2.0 vendors are pitching their products. As they talk about their capabilities, I'm thinking about how a certain coworker of mine would use them. Here's the lolcat most representative of him and many others where I work.

more animals

While the products shown by HiveLive and Mixx are totally cool, they are way too sophisticated for Grampa Kitteh. If it doesn't work for the techanogoly-challenged, then what you've done is shaved off a large portion of your workforce from the total set of those who will use the product. That doesn't seem to work at all.

If Grampa Kitteh can't use it, then I don't think it works for us.