Army of Dog

And I strongly suspect he’s been having a few phone chats with Mitt Romney, because a guy who clearly did not understand economics particularly well a few months ago seems to be picking it up pretty fast. If you’re a politician and you want my vote, getting me a little tipsy with some smooth, free-market-oriented fiscal talk is gonna help, a lot. Especially if the rest of your political resume leaves something to be desired.

McCain was addressing the “housing crisis” in a speech yesterday when he unleashed this bit of hard truth:

I will not play election year politics with the housing crisis. I will evaluate everything in terms of whether it might be harmful or helpful to our effort to deal with the crisis we face now.

I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers. Government assistance to the banking system should be based solely on preventing systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system and the economy.

I have my issues with some of the rest of the speech, but this is an excellent distinction for McCain to make between himself and the two communists still in the race for the Democratic Party nomination. As a contrast, here’s The Shrew on how the Government is going to wipe your nose and make everything better:

That means acknowledging that our economic crisis is, at its core, a housing crisis, a crises caused in part by unscrupulous mortgage lenders and brokers and unregulated transactions in mortgage-backed securities, in part by speculators who were buying multiple houses to sell for a quick buck and other buyers who didn’t act responsibly. And in part by a president and administration who failed to anticipate and continue to downplay the problems we face. Unlike what happened here in Pennsylvania, when Governor Rendell started seeing problems - and I remember those articles we had in the newspaper, governor, where the housing supply was being, you know, expanded and people were putting zero money down and they were trying to once again get the American dream, they were commuting sometimes two hours to be able to afford that house. Well, those warning signals went unheeded in Washington. But thankfully, not in Harrisburg. And what we have to do now is to look at our housing crisis in greater detail. And I’d like to outline my plans to address it.

2.2 million foreclosure notices went out last year - up 75% from 2006. Communities of color have been especially hard hit. Subprime loans are five times more common in predominantly African American neighborhoods than predominantly white ones. And 41% of loans to Hispanics are subprime compared to only 22% to whites. But this crisis isn’t just about the more than 2 million households at risk of losing their homes and, of course, 2.2 million foreclosure notices means many more people than that because obviously you have homes where anywhere from two to ten people live. It’s about the tens of millions of families who have lost value in their homes.

When I talk about the home foreclosure crisis, sometimes people, I can tell, look at me a little skeptically because they, I can tell, they’re thinking to themselves, I didn’t buy one of those mortgages, I don’t have an ARM, I’m not at risk. But, in fact, that is just not the case. Home prices dropped almost 9% last quarter. Home prices for everyone. If you have paid off your home, if you have a fixed rate mortgage with a manageable interest rate, you have suffered the steepest decline on record. That means families have lost at least $1.9 trillion in housing wealth so far, nearly two-thirds of the size of the entire United States government budget. And today, nearly 9 million families are struggling with mortgages that are under water. They actually owe more for their mortgages than their homes are worth. So what was once their biggest financial asset is now a financial liability.

In other words, these people were a victim of their lack of understanding of basic economics and if you elect me President, I’ll make it stop, dammit. I’m too lazy at the moment to drag up any of the Obamessiah’s comments on the issue, but just go back and read Hillary’s speech and pretend it’s a little less shrill and you’ll pretty much have it nailed.

The problem with the “housing crisis” and all of its proposed government solutions is that it presents, once again, the age-old conflict between making economically rational decisions and making politically rational decisions. There are those who, out of extreme frustration, like to accuse politicians of not understanding basic economics. Given the education level of most of the serious candidates for high public office, this is unlikely. What seems more likely to me is that politicians will knowingly make economically incorrect decisions because they are politically advantageous.

The free market economy relies on the idea that individual actors in that market will make rational decisions and that the collective effect of those rational decisions will be an efficient economy that provides goods and services to consumers at the best possible price. This system works best when it’s left to its own devices, since the various pressures inherent in the market will tend to correct problems long before an outside observer (say a nanny state politician) even recognizes them. Not only do problems tend to be fixed faster when market forces are doing the fixing rather than politicians, the negative effect those problems have on individuals tend to be much milder.

Politicians, on the other hand, have a completely different set of criteria for rational decision-making. As elected officials, they are required by their sense of political self-preservation to make decisions that are more likely to result in their reelection, even if those decisions are economically irrational.

As a case in point, the promise to bail out financial institutions that made questionable loans to borrowers they knew were more likely to default. Under free-market conditions the institutions would have to have an increased financial incentive that outweighed the additional risk they would assume in making these loans. If their judgment about the risk/reward ratio was poor, they would face ruin if a significant enough portion of the borrowers defaulted. While this would have a negative effect in the short-term on the economy, the firms with poor judgment would be replaced by new or existing firms who were more capable of accurately assessing the risk/reward of their loans.

The borrowers who defaulted would also suffer consequences such as losing their house and damage to their credit. This is the natural economic consequence of poor judgment, and borrowers would, ideally, learn the lesson about buying more house than they can afford. If they don’t, their credit will likely be bad enough in the long-term that they won’t be able to get another loan from a credible source.

In both cases risk either shapes decision-making or it shapes survival. In this way the presence of risk both now and in the future ensures that the current problem will be less likely to be repeated.

What the Democrats are doing is promising to remove or mitigate the consequences of the increased risk that was assumed by both the borrowers and the lenders. This is an economically irrational decision since it will increase the likelihood of the risky behavior being repeated in the future either by the current players or by others. It is, however, a politically rational decision because it will appeal to a large number of traditional Democratic Party constituents who have little understanding of the economic consequences.

In order for a politician to make an economically rational decision at the expense of a politically rational one, they must, in effect, decrease their likelihood of being elected. They must display political courage, which is what McCain displayed in his speech. There can certainly be an argument about how much political risk he really assumed in saying what he said and whether or not he’ll stick to his position when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, but he made the point and assumed some risk. That’s more than most will do, and I applaud him for it.

I can’t help but think he’ll fuck it up pretty quick though. I’d vote for Bill Clinton before I’d vote for his wife or that race-baiting snake oil salesman she’s running against, so McCain pretty much has my vote locked up. The only thing in doubt is how much drinking I’ll need to do after I pull the lever.

when the First Lady and the President’s daughter are under threat of sniper fire, but I’m pretty confident it’s not “stand in the open and force yourself on young girls.”

Of course this was the Clinton White House, so who really knows. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, we have the internet now, you need to watch what you say. I don’t know if it’s that particular brand of Clinton hubris or just rank political stupidity, but making statements that can be directly contradicted by video evidence is unbelievably stupid. To make matters worse, this wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark, it was part of a speech. Somebody had the opportunity to scrutinize this and say “this sounds a little stupid, perhaps someone running for president shouldn’t say it.”

I like to troll the internet looking for morons, it’s a target-rich environment as they say. For example, someone writing a letter to the editor arguing that being armed makes one more likely to be attacked.

Re: “I now have a fighting chance,” by Lawrence Bradford, Thursday Letters.

Mr. Bradford writes in support of the “castle law” that, in his 40 years of living in Texas, he’s been shot at and threatened several times. He also offers the fact he’s now almost always armed.

As a nearly 45-year-old native Texan, I can say with a straight face that I’ve never been shot at. Then again, I’m never armed.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s any correlation between always being armed and finding oneself the target of attack.

Melody Townsel, Dallas

To be fair, she didn’t actually argue anything, she just insinuated it in the most condescending manner she could come up with. No support of her claim except the anecdotal evidence of her own experience. This is why I love blogs, if she had posted something like this on a public forum or blog, I could immediately respond with scorn, derision, and possibly a fancy argument to thwart hers. When it shows up in a newspaper, all I can do is blog about it or go out and punch a hippie to make myself feel better. The hippie is in the corner crying.

And yes, the Melody Townsel who wrote the letter is probably this woman:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations once threw a file folder and a tape dispenser at an American businesswoman in Moscow, disparaged her weight and alleged she was gay in an attempt to get her to withdraw criticism of a foreign-aid project, the woman said Wednesday.

In a telephone interview, Melody Townsel, who heads her own public relations firm in Dallas, discussed allegations she made in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before the panel began confirmation hearings on John Bolton, who was until recently the State Department’s top diplomat for arms control.

Bolton’s nomination is in jeopardy because of last-minute objections by Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who told the committee Tuesday that allegations about Bolton’s behavior suggest he does not meet standards of propriety appropriate for such an important position. Faced with objections from Voinovich and at least two other Republican senators, the committee agreed to postpone a vote on Bolton’s nomination until next month.

She writes letters to the Dallas Morning News on a pretty regular basis, all with a left-wing slant to them. All of this means that we were denied the continued service of the most effective UN ambassador in history by a fucking idiot. Swell.

In a shocking story sure to surprise everyone who hasn’t read a newspaper or passed by a television in twenty years, the U.N. is tripping over its own dick in the Sudan.

As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even before it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by the Sudanese government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

“Just let us know when everyone is dead, and we’ll be happy to send some troops along.”

The force, which officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1, has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers, and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nation officials said.

Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force plus two other battalions, lack essential equipment - like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters - to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.

The peacekeepers’ work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, said United Nations human rights officials.

For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias.

Without getting into the root causes of violence in genocide in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is painfully obvious that the United Nations and its member organizations are impotent in the face of any serious threat to life and limb anywhere, much less a horror show like Darfur. Stories like this one should serve as a testament to the absurdity of the concept of “international consensus.” Listening to leftists in this country and around the world opine about the need to entrust more authority and power to these clowns would be hilarious if real people weren’t being slaughtered in the face of their incompetence.

If a man who marries slutty celebrities for attention and a hepatitis-positive former Playboy centerfold whose previous matrimonial accomplishments consist of Tommy Lee and Kid Rock can’t make it work, do any of us really have a chance?

Pam Anderson, Husband Agree Two-Month Marriage Should Be Annulled Over Fraud

Rick Salomon agrees in papers responding to a filing by the “Baywatch” actress that the marriage should be annulled because of fraud, though neither set of documents elaborated.

Salomon did not ask for spousal support and asked that it not be awarded to Anderson.

A phone message left for Anderson’s publicist was not immediately returned Friday.

Rick Salomon married Shannen Doherty and is most famous for being the dick in the 1 Night in Paris video. Pamela Anderson has publicly admitted to having Hepatitis-C, changes cup sizes more often than I change my oil, and got pounded by Tommy Lee in the most famous celebrity sex tape in history. How in the hell is “fraud” even possible in this disaster?

Just when the Jeremiah Wright story seemed like it might die for a while, the Rev. Otis Moss III compared media coverage of the Wright controversy to lynching. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but it’s almost like Reverend Otis woke up on Easter morning and said to himself “What’s the most hopelessly retarded thing I can utter today so that Brett has something entertaining to write about following an otherwise slow Easter weekend? I know, I’ll compare reporters asking about my predecessor’s prestigious ‘God Damn America’ sermon series to racists hanging black people in the South fifty years ago. Cuz their like the same thing anyway.”

In a sunrise Easter sermon, Rev. Otis Moss III never mentioned Wright by name, but implied that his mentor, who has delivered sermons in which he likened the U.S. to the Ku Klux Klan and declared it damned for its “state-sponsored terrorism,” is facing the same challenges Jesus did.”No one should start a ministry with lynching, no one should end their ministry with lynching,” Moss said.

“The lynching was national news. The RNN, the Roman News Network, was reporting it and NPR, National Publican Radio had it on the radio. The Jerusalem Post and the Palestine Times all wanted exclusives, they searched out the young ministers, showed up unannounced at their houses, tried to talk with their families, called up their friends, wanted to get a quote on how do you feel about the lynching?” he continued.

Seriously, this actually makes me want to go to church in the hope that ministers all across the country will collectively realize that they can say almost anything and still be less crazy than this stupid bastard.

Maybe I would if I suspected, even for a moment, that most of these ant-war morons actually gave a damn about the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines in harm’s way. Some of them certainly do, but most of them seem to be living a self-centered fantasy world where barbarians who saw the heads off their hostages are simply a product of disagreement with U.S. foreign policy. That, and they’re attention whores. Case in point:

Chicago Police Arrest Six Iraq War Protesters for Squirting Fake Blood on Easter Churchgoers

Six Iraq war protesters disrupted an Easter Mass on Sunday, shouting and squirting fake blood on themselves and parishioners in a packed auditorium.

Three men and three women startled the crowd during Cardinal Francis George’s homily, yelling “Even the Pope calls for peace” as they were removed from the Mass by security guards and ushers.

One Mass attendee, Mike Wainscott of Chicago, yelled at the anti-war protesters.

“Are you happy with yourselves?” he said. “There were kids in there. You scared little kids with your selfish act. Are you happy now?”

The group, which calls itself Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War, said in a statement after the arrests that they targeted the Holy Name Cathedral on Easter to reach a large audience, including Chicago’s most prominent Catholic citizens and the press, which usually covers the services.

Kevin Clark of International Solidarity Movement told the Chicago Tribune that he attended the Mass to serve as a witness for the protesters.

“If Cardinal George is a man of peace and is walking the walk and talking the talk, he should have confronted George Bush and demanded an immediate end to the war,” Clark said.

Let me make something clear, if you run into a room that I happen to occupy and start throwing any substance on people that is even remotely suspect, I’m going to chase you down and knock the shit out of you. It’s my policy.

Now that we have that bit of information out of the way, let me ask an honest question. Other than bringing attention to themselves or their stupid little group, what could these protesters possibly hope to accomplish with this kind of childish shit? Do they really think that a single person would change their position on the most significant issue of current American foreign policy based on retards throwing blood during an Easter service? Furthermore, if they really believe that Iraqis are dying by America’s hand, is using that sad reality to gain attention for themselves not a ghoulish act of self-promotion?

I strongly suspect the reality is that the morons don’t possess enough capacity for self-examination to feel any shame about this kind of stunt. Besides, aside from anti-war protests and vegan conferences, how are poor pasty white guys with bad hygiene supposed to get laid?

As if we needed further evidence that the “call 911 and wait for the police to handle it” school of home defense is the refuge of pusillanimous bastards, we have this story:

Woman Shot and Killed While Calling 911 to Report Intruders

We can’t say for certain that having a firearm in the house would have saved this woman’s life, but this case once again illustrates that the police cannot protect a homeowner from an immediate threat. Every individual and family must be responsible for their own safety, and the insidious argument that we should surrender that responsibility to “authorities” should be met with scorn, derision, and frankly violence if the feckless bastards ever try to enforce such dependency through confiscation.

This point can be illustrated further with another story that occurred in one of the suburbs close to where I live:

Frisco home intruder shoots man after confrontation

Steven Geddie, 24, heard someone breaking into the back door of his home in the 8400 block of Hickory Street around 6 p.m., police said. He told police he grabbed a shotgun and confronted the man in a hallway.

The two exchanged gunfire, and the intruder fled. Mr. Geddie suffered a minor wound in his left arm and refused to be taken to the hospital for treatment, police said.

Keep in mind that in this part of the world and at this time of year, 6 p.m. is still daylight. That means that an armed criminal broke into an occupied home in broad daylight. We can assume from that set of circumstances that the criminal had already decided that violent confrontation was an acceptable outcome of the act if not the goal itself. If the homeowner were not armed with a shotgun, we would very likely be reading a news blurb about a murder instead of a home invasion. And yet, there are those who would tell you that the homeowner should be forced to rely on government for protection from such threats.

I’ve heard many times the joke that a politician would sell his own grandmother, but this is ridiculous.

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  Obama typical white person
  Uploaded by dollarsandsense123

There is very little more satisfying in the political arena than watching a pretentious asshole dig his own electoral grave.

(found via Hot Air)

in the Vacuous Bullshit Hall of Fame. I wanted to post about this yesterday, but things got busy at the Evil Capitalist Venture headquarters, so I’m a little late.

Obama: Trust me to end the war

He said Clinton and likely Republican nominee John McCain talk tough on national security yet they make decisions that leave the country less secure.

This has been a mantra of leftists and anti-war activists for the last five years. It is a prime example of a school of political thought that never lets facts get in the way of a good bumper sticker.

We can all argue back and forth about whether or not the policies and personnel we have in place to fight terrorist attacks in the U.S. are adequate, but one thing is indisputable, the fine men and women of the United States Armed Forces have killed or captured thousands and thousands of jihadi assholes in Iraq. That’s thousands of terrorist turds who won’t be planning or implementing terrorist attacks on American soil. I don’t think I’m alone in suggesting that dead terrorists are a good thing, in fact I’ll go so far as to say that every dead terrorist is a cause for celebration. I would add that we also deposed, captured, and handed over for trial a dictator who was a past, present, and potentially future sponsor of Islamic terrorism. The fact that he was sitting on ten billion in UN Oil-for-Food money means that the notion of containment was absolute bullshit.

Obama and his ilk, on the other hand, want you to believe that peace-loving Muslims the world over have suddenly been moved to join terrorist organizations and fit themselves for bomb belts by the U.S. presence in Iraq. I would humbly submit that anyone who can find it in their heart to strap on a vest and blow up women and children in a shopping mall was not peace-loving in the first place.

The lack of logic in statements like Obama’s is not their most insidious quality, however. The fundamental vision of the world that prompts the pacifist objection to a proactive war on Islamic terrorist networks is the same vision that strenuously objects to the idea of law-abiding citizens arming themselves and taking responsibility for their own safety. It is a vision in which terrorists and criminals alike have been driven to their violent means by the fundamental injustice of the societies that the victims represent. In other words, if a criminal or a terrorist attacks you, it’s kind of your fault. Unless the criminal is a rapist, then it’s the fault of evil white male hegemony. Or some crazy shit like that.