On Inheriting A Mess

From small dead animals: How To Argue with an Obama Devotee?

She responded thusly:

Obama hasn't gotten us into this mess, which is the worst recession since the 1930's, and based on the fact that much of the collapse revolved around lack of regulation in the housing loan business, there's no quick fix. Once people started losing their homes, it has a domino effect. George W. Bush is the one who got us into two wars, gave tax cuts, and added medicare benefits without EVER including them in his budget. Obama got the hand he was dealt. And I can tell you that the Republicans have done absolutely EVERYTHING they can to stop every effort he makes to get the economy back on track.

Just curious, how would you respond to this?"

Read the comments for some excellent responses, but my favorite is from Kyla:

Just laugh and say, 'If Obama was to get re-elected, just imagine the mess he'd inherit this time!"

Another Reason to Keep Your Job

"The overall unemployment rate declined from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent last month, which should be good news, but the "improvement" came only because more people gave up looking for work."

From the Associated Press via NewsWatchCanada ~ world news & views from a Canadian perspective

Quote O'The Day

Aint it funny how small business owners didn’t do it themselves but Obama was the one who got Bin Laden?

Found here.

"And then I didn't speak up when they came for the rich" Or Something Like That . . .

A paraphrase of a quote from the past: "We voted for Mitterrand because he said he would tax the rich, then he told us we were the rich."

From Sovereign Man: "France is about to experience a mass exodus of wealthy elite" which references a NY Times article: "Indigestion for ‘les Riches’ in a Plan for Higher Taxes"

Perhaps a cautionary tale for the 99% in the USA.

Better Europe Than California?

From Peggy Noonan: A Nation That Believes Nothing

But he and his supporters should drop the argument that if we don't change our ways we'll wind up like Europe. That's a mistake because Americans like Europe, and in some complicated ways wouldn't mind being a little more like it. In the past 40 years jumbo jets, reduced fares and rising affluence allowed a lot of Americans, especially the sort who vote, to go there. The great capitals of Europe are glamorous, elegant and old, the outlands are exquisite. What remains of the old Catholic European ethic that business isn't everything, life is everything and it's a sin not to enjoy it, still has a lure. Americans sometimes think of it as they eat their grim salads and drink from their plastic water bottles.

When Americans go to Europe they see everything but the taxes. The taxes are terrible. But that's Europe's business and they'll have to figure it out. Yes what happens there has implications for us but still, they're there and we're here.

What Americans are worried about, take as a warning sign, and are heavily invested in is California—that mythic place where Sutter struck gold, where the movies were invented, where the geniuses of the Internet age planted their flag, built their campuses, changed our world.

We care about California. We read every day of the bankruptcies, the reduced city services, the businesses fleeing. California is going down. How amazing is it that this is happening in the middle of a presidential campaign and our candidates aren't even talking about it?

Mitt Romney should speak about the states that work and the states that don't, why they work and why they don't, and how we have to take the ways that work and apply them nationally.

Barack Obama can't talk about these things. You can't question the blue-state model when your whole campaign promises more blue-state thinking.

h/t: NewsWatchCanada ~ world news & views from a Canadian perspective

Tangentially Related: Ed Driscoll is on board to Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

A History of Home Foreclosure in Ramsey County

Trimming The Muscle from the local economy:

The first wave was froth and had the economy rebounded, that would have ended it. The second wave was fat – people who shouldn’t have had loans anyway – but the third wave is the muscle and bone of the economy. These are prudent borrowers who raised families in their homes and now have lost their life’s savings. That’s going to have a lasting impact on our economy far beyond this election.

This is the Obama Recovery.

Al Gore Will Pick Up The Tab . . .

for this. (I have always wondered why people who rail against exotic financial derivatives so willingly accept the concept of the "Carbon Credit".)

Just One More Drink: A Quick Tour of the Euro Debt Crisis

Jack and Jill ran up the bill . . . at Helga's Bar and Brokerage *BOOM*!

On Failing the Darwinian Test: Demographics as Destiny

Mark Steyn shows us the implications of a lack of demographic due diligence in An Upside-Down Family Tree:

We now live in Elisabeth's world – not just because technology has caught up with the deity and enabled women in their fifties and sixties to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it's broke but that it's old and barren. Which explains why it's broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency – "America's heading for the same fate as Greece if we don't change course," etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social democratic state where workers in "hazardous" professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren't enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars' worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent's economic "powerhouse" has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. "Germany's working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades," says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. "Rural areas will see a massive population decline, and some villages will simply disappear."

Related: The Party's Over

h/t OrthodoxyToday.org

A French Point of View

Some Treats from The Dissident Frogman:

• Here is a picture of The Leading Light of French Socialism.
• The article above includes a link to The Telegraph's history of the Euro Debt Crisis: Debt Crisis Live.
• A look at the decade since 9/11: A Decade Of Revelations

Maybe the Armageddon of the Apocalypse Will Be Economic . . .

Gates of Vienna: The Continuation of War by Other Means: Under the auspices of the Center for Security Policy , Kevin Freeman presents this in-depth briefing on the deliberate economic warfare bein...