Monday, December 31, 2012

According to Automotive News, the sales of the Volt at some dealerships does not justify the cost of special tools needed to repair and service the vehicles. Dealers are spending up to $5,000 on tools, including a new item that is needed to drain the vehicle’s battery to send back to GM in case of repairs.

Despite sales of the Volt reaching 20,828 through November, some dealers are unable to sell enough of the range-extended electric cars to make up the cost of the parts. Requiring to sell just five Volts to break-even on the costs of the tools, some dealers are instead opting out of the Volt authorized dealer program...

For those of you wondering, the accompanying photo (as I understand it) depicts the first Volt arriving at a dealership sometime last year.

The publication of the names and addresses of gun permit holders by the NY Lower Hudson Journal News , a Gannett paper, sparked controversy, including publication by a blogger (additional here) of equally personal yet publicly available information about the editors and writers of the Journal News...

...Which brings me to a comment submitted last night. It was from a first-time commenter, and it contained personal contact information for the Chairwoman of Gannett, including home address, telephone numbers, second home, neighbors, and relatives... I don’t like the tactic, but it is something done by a Gannett newspaper (at least as to names and addresses).

I’m on board with adopting some of the left’s Alinskyite tactics, like holding them to their own rules, but does this go too far, particularly since she was not directly involved?

An LI commenter, one "Subotai Bahadur", offered what I thought was an exceptionally insightful response:

Professor, we are literally in the end stage of pretending that politics as normal mean something. The Constitutional order has been de facto overturned, while retaining the external trappings of the old order.

The government is at open war on the Bill of Rights. Congress has lost the power of the purse and no longer represents anything but their own vested interests. The rule of law is gone.

Who you are and who you are connected to decides if you will be prosecuted for any crime. No connections [means] no mercy and frequently no due process. If connected to the regime, you are immune [Ed: see Jon Corzine].

Our courts have withdrawn from the fray or have been subverted. In any major issue, it seems that the courts rule that there is no one who has standing to oppose the will of the State; so the State wins. And if a matter does get before the courts, the courts rule based on politics, not law.

The Supreme Court is no longer a barrier defending the [Constitution]. When Chief Justice Roberts suddenly reversed his entire life’s work to rule that the Federal government could violate the Constitution so long as it did it in the guise of a tax; it was obvious that he has been [co-opted] and is now merely a tool of the regime.

Moderating our conduct while the country is still on this side of violence will not prevent things going from bad to worse. Things are going to get worse even if we become martyred saints. Our restraint in the face of ongoing attacks merely removes restraints on the conduct of those who seek the destruction of our country and Constitution. If their escalations are only met with feeble responses on our part, they are encouraged to push the envelope until they reach the point of violence.

So long as no law is broken [after all, that is the standard of combat that they have set; akin to say the real rules on the use of poison gas in warfare] then hit back twice as hard. Make them deal with their families and their neighbors being angry at them. And publicly out the nature of their biases in every thing they publish. Keep in mind that just recently the State got the power to wiretap, investigate, and arrest people without warrant of probably cause. Do you think that they are going to limit what they dig up in the name of “decency”? Look at their record.

Every employee of the paper should have a full background check, as deep as can be done within the bounds of the law. If a prospective employer can find it, then it should be legal. And publishable. Criminal records, court judgments, membership in various organizations, political contributions, public statements. If the investigation leads to family members, so be it. Reveal it all.

Publish the ownership/management details of all the companies who advertised in the editions where the permit holders are/were mapped who continue to advertise with them. There will be the implication that they could receive the same detailed attention as the employees. And if Gannett does not rein in the Journal News; move up the corporate food chain.

Given the nature of the Journo-List 2.0 media; it would be wise for all of their major personalities to be subject to the same investigation as the Journal-News’ staff just to have in reserve for when they next outrageously lie. And every personality in the current administration. There is a lot of work to do.

Oh, and one more little cross check on the Journal-News’ map. Do not take it on faith that their map was complete. Follow up on it and make sure that they did not “accidentally” forget to publish the names of various politically or otherwise connected individuals that they did not want to offend. If there are political or other celebrities who are calling for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment while themselves being armed; that needs to be Alinsky-ed out.

If we are to have a hope of stopping the enemies of our country before they physically attack us, we have to make them pay a price and show that they will be opposed if they cross that line. Yielding to them does not accomplish that end.

I am reminded of a quote by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his The Gulag Archipelago that seems on point. It was about the greatest regret of those in the slave labor camps:

What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? --Part I The Prison Industry, Ch. 1 “Arrest” (p13, The Gulag Archipelago, Collins 1974)

The forces of the Left right now know that they attack us short of violence in perfect safety. We cannot let them think that that safety will be there when they inevitably turn to violence. Thus, we must strike back overwhelmingly before that line is crossed.

I'm guessing that women with restraining orders against abusive ex'es, those who had been threatened for their religious or political views, and others revealed by Gannett's unconscionable disclosures would back Subotai's position.

While President Putin pushes through reforms, the local authorities, especially in our vast hinterland, do not feel they need to act like they work for the people. They do as they please, a tyrannical class who knows they have absolutely nothing to fear from a relatively unarmed population. This in turn breeds not respect but absolute contempt and often enough, criminal abuse.

For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. In all cases where guns are banned, gun crime continues and often increases. As for maniacs, be it nuts with cars (NYC, Chapel Hill NC), swords (Japan), knives (China) or home made bombs (everywhere), insane people strike. They throw acid (Pakistan, UK), they throw fire bombs (France), they attack. What is worse, is, that the best way to stop a maniac is not psychology or jail or "talking to them", it is a bullet in the head, that is why they are a maniac, because they are incapable of living in reality or stopping themselves.

...No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

QOTD: "Central banks have become the great enablers of fiscal profligacy. The overarching belief is that there will always be someone or something there to act as the safety net. The safety nets worked so well recently that investors now trust they will be underneath them ad-infinitum. Markets and economists alike now believe that quantitative easing (“QE”) will always “work” by flooding the market with relatively costless capital. Unlimited QE and the zero lower bound (“ZLB”) are likely to bankrupt pension funds whose expected returns happen to be a good 600 basis points (or more) higher than the 10?year “risk-free” rate. The ZLB has many unintended consequences that are impossible to ignore.

Our belief is that markets will eventually take these matters out of the hands of the central bankers. These events will happen with such rapidity that policy makers won’t be able to react fast enough. The fallacy of the belief that countries that print their own currency are immune to sovereign crisis will be disproven in the coming months and years. Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation." --Kyle Bass

Most people run to the corner bodega for a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread, but some welfare recipients are plunking down $500 at a time in suspicious transactions... Welfare users are only allowed to use their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards to buy food, yet they are rung up like fat cats in tiny stores in The Bronx and Brooklyn where the priciest item is usually an $8 pound of ham.

Earlier this year, an owner and a cashier at Glenwood Food Corp. in Canarsie, Brooklyn, were arrested for ringing up bogus transactions... A federal sting found the bodega was recording phony purchases on EBT cards, handing customers about 70 percent of the amount in cash — and pocketing the rest. Goods were rarely exchanged in the scam, which defrauded taxpayers out of $985,000 in two years...

Sheridan Mini Mart in Morrisania, The Bronx, rang up single sales of $543.40 and $473.50 on June 4, 2012, alone. That’s a lot of bread for a store where the most expensive item is an $11.99 jug of cooking oil... At Tremont’s Palenque Supermarket Corp., ETB where the priciest product is an $18.99 gallon of olive oil, transactions reached as high as $400 last year... Desi Grocery, a tiny East New York store now known as Anchor Grocery, racked up a $585 sale and several $400 sales through June 2012...

Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation called the USDA’s anti-fraud procedures “a joke... “There’s virtually no oversight or effort from the USDA to stop this at all,” Rector said. “A store gets disqualified from the program and miraculously it’s back in business in the next two weeks with a new name on the front door.”

How many hundreds of billions of dollars in our money are "redistributed" through fraudulent Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamp transactions?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind.

In the run-up to the 2012 election, a story surfaced about an Iraqi billionaire who managed to buy access to Washington policy makers while funding a Chicago Pay-to-Play scheme that helped produce a Governor, a U.S. Senator, and, ultimately, a President of the United States.

The story was eight years in the making, yet despite the extent of his political influence, this Iraqi’s name remains largely unknown. He wants it that way. In fact, he has spent a significant sum attempting to hinder the reporting of his activities by the news media. The lack of attention paid to him, however, is inversely proportional to his level of importance.

His name is Nadhmi Auchi.

Auchi is now a British citizen. He bought respectability in Britain and in Europe through both donations to charities and self-serving gifts to politicians.

He also reportedly gained access to the White House over the course of four separate administrations, beginning with George H. W. Bush, through the Clinton era and that of Bush 43. And it goes without saying that he was intimately involved with the political career of one Barack H. Obama.

QOTD: "Decades hence, our offspring will listen in disbelief when we tell them we used to pay billions of dollars to warehouse children in “gun-free zones” overseen by morons; that 21st-century kids were groomed for 19th-century jobs and came out functionally illiterate but experts nonetheless on the subjects of Kwanzaa, “safe” sex, and something called global warming." --Kathy Shaidle

I'm starting to think the Democrat Party should rename itself the Fascist Party. Its love of an all powerful, centralized government, and contempt for independent, successful individuals, are traits of a fascist mentality. Killing the long-standing Senate filibuster while in the majority, but using it unconstitutionally to block judicial nominations when in the minority, underscores an ends-justifies-the-means treachery.

Power is the obsession, not societal improvement through virtue, prudence, and justice.

Taxpayers footed the bill for a $465 million loan to troubled electric carmaker Tesla as part of President Barack Obama’s “green energy” stimulus. But Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is now riding high with the purchase of his new $17 million mansion.

Mr. Musk’s 20,248-square-foot hilltop mansion boasts breathtaking views, a two-story library with rolling ladder, a home theater, and a five-car garage to house his taxpayer-subsidized, pricey Tesla vehicles.

In September, The New York Times reported that Tesla had burned through cash and missed production targets, raising “questions about the long-term viability of the company” and igniting “ criticism of the government’s energy loan program, which has been heavily promoted by the Obama administration..."

Here's something you probably didn't read in the funny papers: $2.1 trillion has been added to the national debt in the last 16 months alone.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has alerted Congress that the nation will once again hit the debt ceiling on Monday, but that his department can take “extraordinary measures” to keep paying the bills for another few months.

Incredibly, the debt ceiling was raised from $14.294 trillion in August 2011, to its current level of $16.394 trillion. Thus in the span of only sixteen months, the Obama administration has added a whopping $2.1 trillion to the national debt. [Source]

The entire hullabaloo about the "Fiscal Cliff" is a politico- and media-manufactured diversion.

DON'T RAISE THE DEBT CEILING

I've thought long and hard about this issue -- and have arrived at what is probably a controversial opinion: Republicans should refuse to raise the debt ceiling without huge spending cuts and entitlement reforms.

Here's a news flash: President Obama wants the country to default. He has layered on so much debt, so fast, that the U.S. simply can't honor its obligations.

DEFAULT NOW -- OR DEFAULT LATER?

The real question we should be asking is whether a default now is preferential to a default later.

I believe a default now is by far the best solution for the vast majority of Americans: when the default occurs, it will shock the financial system, rattle markets around the world, and -- in all likelihood -- herald the onset of another Great Depression.

A default several years down the road, however, will be far worse for America:

• The crash will be much larger, and much more catastrophic for the citizenry -- and it will hit seniors and the poor much harder;

• The military will be weaker, having been gutted by years of Obama's efforts to defund national defense;

The real question we must ask is this: do we want the economy to crash on Obama's timing -- or ours?

THE NEXT DEBT-CEILING DEBATE

I believe that the House of Representatives should refuse to raise the debt ceiling without immediate and immense cuts and entitlement reforms. Barring, say, a $900 billion reduction in annual spending (removing the Stimulus from the baseline budget, for example), the House should refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

QOTD: "If we are foolish enough to embrace a ban on any weapon in the coming Congress, then we are unwittingly embracing a ban on every weapon.

Republicans in the House and Senate need to let Feinstein and company know this is a non-starter, and voters need to start weighing potential congressional candidates for 2014 on the basis of where they stand on the 2nd Amendment.

Since our wise rulers in the governmedia have determined that gun-free status makes schools safer, if you care about the safety of the president and his children, you might want to sign this White House petition:

Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them.

The explanation makes perfect sense:

Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.

Our rulers care enough about us little folk to want us to be safe from evil guns. Shouldn’t we care just as much about them?

Considering that the CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of gold since 1973 is roughly 17.2%, who's to say this ad wasn't right?

An ad from a 1973 issue of Barron's provides clear proof that feverish concerns about imminent economic collapse and a concomitant enthusiasm for precious metals has long been a theme amongst modern investors.

With the race to devalue currencies around the world -- led by Ben Bernanke's magical printer -- and unsustainable sovereign debt, it's pretty clear that a collapse will come.

QOTD: "AP: We're Pretty Sure That Holiday Sales Were Bleak Due to Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown Massacre

Anything bad that happens under Obama's watch is beyond his control. He has no power over the economy -- its dire health is attributable to ATM machines, Japanese earthquakes, and the NRA's promotion of murdering children.

Of course, whenever there's a speck of positive economic news, that is due to Obama's mastery of the levers and gears of production...

...Much, much later the article mentions another possibility -- the coming financial cliff and people's fear of the next dip in the endless recession." --Ace

Thursday, December 27, 2012

In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade. Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million. Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers...

The spiral continues each year. Married couples with children have an average income of $80,000, compared with $24,000 for single mothers.
“We have one class that thinks marriage and fatherhood is important, and another which doesn’t, and it’s causing that gap, income inequality, to get wider,”

...Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status, census data show. Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother...

[One black father] is quick to blame the absence of fathers to deaths or incarcerations, though women point out that many absent fathers live around the corner...

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has decided to resign her post as top environmental regulator, a move that comes as Congress applies pressure on her for complicating oversight of the EPA by using at least one secondary email address under an alias.

...Lawmakers and the EPA inspector general wonder if Jackson used a private email account created under an alias to develop those policies in a way that would be invisible to watchdogs and congressional oversight...

...Jackson used a private email under the alias “Richard Windsor” to correspond with EPA colleagues, a decision her staff defended by saying that her official email account received too many messages for her to use it efficiently.

Her official email received too many messages?

Gee, I'm no Bill Gates, but I figure with 17,000 employees and an $8 billion budget the EPA could marshal the necessary brainpower to add a lisa.jackson2@epa.gov to their Exchange server.

Did you catch that? The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 will require registration of firearms, which is always -- always -- the precursor to confiscation by a tyrannical government.

REGISTRATION IS CONFISCATION

The Holy Grail of the gun control crowd is registration of firearms.

This is because once a gun is required to be registered, it is virtually confiscated. The government will know who possesses which firearms and where those arms are stored. And when they desire physical possession of those weapons (which history tells us is inevitable), they can then order the citizenry to voluntarily turn in their weapons.

This has happened over and over again throughout all of recorded history. In the 20th century alone, mandatory registration followed by confiscation occurred in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Red China, and Cambodia. More recently, registration and confiscation have occurred in Great Britain and Australia.

Once registration has been accepted by the citizenry, the rules for gun ownership are gradually tightened. This serves to further reduce the number of gun owners and to help facilitate the eventual confiscation step.

THE "GUN SHOW LOOPHOLE"

The gun control crowd likes bleating about a "Gun Show Loophole" that ostensibly allows an individual to visit a gun show and purchase weapons without a background check. This is utter nonsense. The vast majority of guns sold at shows are by licensed dealers, all of whom must pursue background checks for each firearm they sell.

The background check requirement is only waived for private gun sales, which helps prevent a registration list from being developed.

There is no "Gun Show Loophole"; there is only an exception for private sales. This protects Americans from a government run amok.

Because a government that pushes for gun registration distrusts its citizens, and have thereby earned the citizens' distrust.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT GUNS

The clearest reason for the Second Amendment is to insure that the people retain a large measure of power, to balance that of the government.

The Second Amendment codified the God-given right of the individual to defend himself, his family, and his community. It is a right, granted by God, not a permission or license granted by government.

In the 20th century alone, the wisdom of the founders has been validated over and over again.

It could never happen here, you say? Perhaps. I wonder what the Japanese-Americans who were thrown into internment camps during World War II would tell us.

I suspect that this legislation will serve as a line in the sand for many.