4
POPS Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts
But what this means is that even the record-breaking federal deficit understates the government's real financial liabilities, because agencies like FDIC and the Federal Housing Authority are likely to need increased amounts of money to keep going. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. I doubt whether the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood will pay with his life for the lives that he took. He may well be free again someday. We can only hope that he does not get a hero's welcome when he arrives in some terror-sponsoring country, the way the Lockerbie bomber did. A recent study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that, after the housing boom and bust, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians all reduced their subprime mortgage loans. Only politicians seem not to have learned anything from the economic disaster ...
3
POPSSorry Ass News For A Sunday Morning Did you ever pick up a newspaper and wished you hadn't? Well that's what happened to me this morning. It wasn't an actual real time Newspaper but in today's world it was a Newsdig but I still wished that I hadn't clicked! First it was a, Health Care {NO} Reform won by the Health Care and insurance Industry. Then the gloom and doom news from Afghanistan. It's enough to make you put on a pair of rose colored glasses or stick your head in the sand. But alas, I can't do that, because then I would become part of the (Sarah Palin - Michele Bachmann et al ) crazy lunatic fringe mob on the right! :eek:
9
POPSThe Science Behind Global Warming Is Settled. Sadly, It's Also Been Incinerated The Dog Ate Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels @NRO Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared. Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense. In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce . .
3
POPSInsurers Fight Public Health Plan
The worst-case scenario from the insurance industry's standpoint? The government mandates individual coverage, but also creates a public plan offering consumers a better deal, and drawing them away from the private companies. When nine of 10 Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee sent a letter to President Obama on June 8 opposing the public-option plan, they argued that such a move could destroy private insurers. "Washington-run programs undermine market-based competition through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchasers," they wrote. "Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition." The nine signers have received $2.6 million from HMOs/health services and health and accident insurers to their candidate committees and leadership PACs since 1989. Of them, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) ranks 11th among all current members of Congress to get $$.
15
POPSDamnit! Why Didn't They Listen To Ron Paul! Everywhere you look, big events are occurring in the global economy. Last week, the United Nations said that the dollar’s unique role as a global currency was at an end. Although China, Brazil, Russia and India have all called for a new economic system not based on the dollar, this is the first time that a multinational institution has suggested scrapping the greenback. Also last week, the U.S. administration was forced to ask Congress to raise the debt ceiling again—this time to over $12 trillion—a level that will be breached by October. On Friday, three more banks failed in the U.S., bringing the total to 92 this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. recently increased the number of problem banks on its watch list to 400—up from around 300 during the first quarter of the year. In Britain, last week, the World Economic Forum listed Britain’s economy as less stable than Peru’s. The world is awaking to the possibility that America and Britain face real collapse.
6
POPSIn Which Obama Has A General Problem, Just Like A Real President* The tug-o-war playground politics of the matter aside, there is still the fact of war in Afghanistan, a persistent global threat, and the rapidly diminishing credibility of the United States as a stalwart, moral force in the world, from the limp handling of Iran to the delivery of tribute to Vladimir Putin, and now the dawdling and dithering over the erstwhile good war. For all their squawking about us, the Euros don’t need us to be another EU member. They need someone to do the dirty work. Ditto the Arabs. China and Russia have got to be enjoying this, though. On second thought, there is a sort of double-reverse presidential precedent to this crisis. It’s Obama as McClellan. Not exactly Lincolnesque, but very Lincoln-proximate. Totally related: Victor Davis Hanson at NRO looks at Two-Front Wars, Theirs and Ours and comes away with something other than the currently fashionable doom-and-gloom mongering. It’s al-Qaeda after eight years of war, on the ropes and desperate.
5
POPSJob-Killing Policies Could Doom Democrat Hopes: By Michael Barone There was something to these arguments. But it's also true that job creation accelerated in 2004 and kept going for another three years. Perhaps, although Democrats would not like to admit it, the Bush economic policies had something to do with that. And perhaps the rather different policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress may help Summers' gloomy predictions come true. Tax policy is one example. The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire next year, and the Democratic Congress will surely allow income tax rates on high earners to go up to 39.6 percent again, or even more if it enacts the administration's proposed policy of limiting high earners' charitable deductions. These increases will produce revenue that the government needs to reduce the enormous budget deficit, though surely not as much revenue as static economic models indicate. But they will also depress economic growth to some non-trivial extent, and thereby depress job creation.
7
POPSBritain BC / Britain AD Episode 1 of 2 (BC) and 1 of 3 (AD). Fascinating new understandings of British culture, history, and archaeology. Rather than being solely the inheritors of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman invaders, Pryor demonstrates that there was a sophisticated homegrown British culture that didn't just roll over when the next group of heavily-armed foreigners in boats showed up. And that in the absence of outside "civilizers" Britons didn't just revert to mud-wallowing barbarians.
3
POPSAre Earlobe Creases a Sign of Heart Disease? Why a connection between ELC and heart disease? Nobody knows. We continue with our checklist of heart disease signs: Retinopathy. Ring finger length. - A short ring finger in males = lower level of testosterone = higher risk of heart attack early in life. Male pattern baldness - men with frontal baldness were about 9 percent more likely to have heart disease. Those with baldness at the crown (top) of their heads were 23 to 36 percent more likely. Bad breath - Some studies claim people with lots of antibodies due to bum gums have a 50 to 100 percent greater chance of heart disease. Acne - men who had acne as teenagers had a 30 percent lower chance. Green snot - there's a connection between heart disease and green snot. Earwax - Dry earwaxers had a greater risk of arteriosclerosis than wet earwaxers. (Unconfirmed, but if you're going to worry about snot and bad breath, you might as well worry about earwax, too. )
0
POPSThe Flying Dutchman - Ghost Ship The Flying Dutchman, according to folklore, is a ghost ship that can never go home, doomed to sail the oceans forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes glowing with ghostly light. It is said that if hailed by another ship, its crew will try to send messages to land or to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a portent of doom.
0
POPSCourage Courage involves being bigger than the fear and doubt hovering in your space.
4
POPSConservative George Will calls for Afghanistan pull-out Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked Monday by Peter Cook of Bloomberg TV: “Are we winning in Afghanistan?” “I think it's a mixed picture in Afghanistan,” Gates replied. “I think that there aren’t too many people with too rosy a view of what's going on in Afghanistan. I think there are many challenges. But I think some of the gloom and doom is somewhat overdrawn as well. … I think that there are some positive developments. But there is no question our casualties are up and there's no question we have a very tough fight in front of us, a lot of challenges.” Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26628.html#ixzz0Pocw7LWI
1
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update