It occurs to me – it’s been over a decade since an employer has sent me to “quality training”.

A toast to ten years of non-wasted time!

While we Republicans fight to make sure our own party doesn’t cross over to the dark side on the biggest act of intergenerational larceny in history, it’s important to remember that since Obama is basically getting the “Stimulus” terms dictated to him from his party’s left wing, there is a fair number responsible, centrist Democrats who aren’t thrilled with the idea of saddling our next generation with trillions in debt, either.Mike Brodigan has a good list to start with – 47 of ’em to be exact.  I’ll reproduce the whole list below the jump.

Of regional interest (to my largely regional readers) – All my Minnesota readers should call Collin Peterson – he’s in a fairly conservative district, and by Democrat standards is one of the good guys.

If in the Dakotas, naturally, Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota is on the bubble, as is South Dakota’s Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

But wherever you are, check the list.
(more…)

…another reminder that the best thing Congress and Comrade Obama could do right now is simply make sure that unemployment benefits are well funded nationwide and otherwise stay out of the way.

[Despite a tough employment report], stocks traded strong on Friday, with the Dow industrials finishing up over 200 points. Broad stock indexes are up 15% to 20% from their November lows. How can this be?

Well, the stock market is telling us that the economy’s future is a lot brighter than its past. The stock market looks ahead; the employment report looks behind.

Which is to say while this particular recession is a wee bit longer than most, it is otherwise reasonably predictable. Unemployment numbers will peak while the stock market moves up and small businesses and large corporations will start hiring again, usually before they are done laying off all that were slated for release.

By the way, in Friday’s jobs report, wages rose again, and now stand nearly 4% higher than a year ago. With zero inflation, that’s a real increase in worker purchasing power for the 92.4%, or 135 million workers, still employed.

Mr. President? Curious. I thought we were in the midst of a national catastrophe (actually we are – it started on January 20th).

…stocks may now be telling us that the gloom-and-doom crowd — and its pessimistic economic prognostications that cover all of 2009 and in some cases 2010 — is about to be proven wrong.

Or you could believe the President, what with his track record of truthiness and all. It’s going to suck to tell America “we screwed up” again and again.

The commodity markets — among the first asset sectors to respond to [the lowering of rates and increase in the money supply by the fed]  — are stabilizing. Broad commodity indexes are 6% or so above their lows. Ditto for energy.

So, let’s spend a trillion dollars any way.

Barack Obama, a reputed master of the persuasive art, has settled on his central argument for the stimulus bill: I won.

That Obama is reduced to this crude appeal is a symptom of the intellectual collapse of the case for his stimulus bill, a congressional spendfest untethered from its stated goal of providing a rapid “jolt” to the economy.

Is there anything good about the Spendulus Package?

And as Art Laffer has taught us all, taxes also matter — a lot. In fact, the only real stimulative part of the behemoth stimulus package is the simple fact that marginal tax rates will not be raised.

Oh, you mean the Republican version. Gotcha.

So cheaper energy, bundles of new money creation, zero inflation and no tax hikes could very well combine to produce a stronger economy as the year progresses — to the great surprise of the majority of economic pundits.

…and to the dismay of The Little President that Cried Wolf.

Reagan said “a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A  depression is when you lose your job”.

Recovery, he continued, was when Jimmy Carter lost his job.  Well, we’ll have to work on that in 2012.  But until then, “recovery” really happens when you, the laid-off American, finally job up and get back to work.

And that is a great moment.  My only really significant period of unemployment in my life – my five months of unemployment and six more of subsistence-level contracting – was punctuated by a sudden burst of intense work at the end of ’03 and the beginning of ’04, as the Bush tax cuts kicked into high gear.  The dotbomb was a fairly short recession (depression, for me), and it ended because the economy, recovering fast, needed people, including me, to be getting the job done.

America is a big, throbbing place that needs people to do stuff.  We have incalculable pent-up demand for everything from bread to Escalades (or Priuses, or whatever) to houses to B-2 bombers.

Of course, companies need to feel that the recovery is solid enough to warrant hiring the people to start building all those Mister Coffees and Target stores and construction bulldozers and flavored condoms and everything else that makes up a consumer and capital market.

And they are, at the moment, not hiring.
And, as my radio pardner Ed points out, that’s the untold, scary story of this recession so far.

Why has this recession generated such bad job opening rates? Isidore quotes Robert Brusca of FAO Economics as saying that “fear is running the show right now,” and small wonder. Instead of trying to calm the nation, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi have transformed themselves into Chicken Littles, abandoning FDR’s “All we have to fear is fear itself” in favor of “We’re all going to DIE!” Why? Their stimulus package keeps losing support, and only fear can propel it to passage, but that same hysteria has employers locking their doors, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of economic doom.

Look, even if you leave party identification out of it – don’t bother with “Republican” or “Democrat” labels for now – we need a “Ronald-Reagan”-type personality in this nation to reassure people that the end is not near, that the sun will come up tomorrow, that best thing to do with wolves at the door is go outside and shoot them, tan their hides, and make a fortune on wolf-skin wallets.

Barack Obama, to date, is not that person.

Question for all you Obama supporters; do you think Pelosi, Reid and Frank will allow it?

Too late for that now.

…but in hindsight, if one considers our economic woes the current regime’s “9/11”, clearly America chose poorly.

While Obama is caving in…

Stopping just short of a take-it-or-leave-it stand, Obama has mocked the notion that a stimulus bill shouldn’t include huge spending. He’s also defended earmarks as inevitable in such a package. And he’s pointedly reminded Republicans about who won the November election.

…John McCain is on point:

“The whole point, Mr. President, is to enact tax cuts and spending measures that truly stimulate the economy,” McCain said. “There are billions and tens of billions of dollars in this bill which will have no effect within three, four, five or more years, or ever. Or ever.”

While Obama is turning up the rhetorical amplitude, favoring expedition over the more contemplative approach that came and then went on the hill, and preying on American fears with his “National Catastrophe” rhetoric, cooler heads like John McCain are leading a growing opposition to the liberal crooks and liars that have dominated Congress for a handful of years now. Falling poll numbers for their Pork Pie stimuless package initiative (once Americans had a gander under the hood) are favoring restraint.

Congress and the Bush Administration got it wrong with the TARP monies and the Big Three bailouts. History will show neither were necessary nor effective. Both were costly and damaging to our reputation and currency. Both scenarios would have played out very differently given a more iterative approach to their design, and even moreso under the auspices of a Republican majority; but they squandered their chances for a fiscal overhaul under the Gingrich regime.

But hindsight as it were, doesn’t appear to be 20/20 for “That One.”

“They did not choose more of the same in November,” Obama said Friday. “They did not send us to Washington to get stuck in partisan posturing, to try to score political points. They did not send us here to turn back to the same tried and failed approaches that were rejected because we saw the results. They sent us here to make change with the expectation that we would act.”

How ironic is that statement? Three weeks in, and Obammy is calling earmarks “inevitable”, unprecedented government spending “stimulus,” lamenting political posturing while repeatedly reminding “who won in November,” and at the same time decrying the “tried and failed approaches that were rejected because we saw the results?”

How did the Bush stimulus work for us? TARP is a failure. GM and Chrysler will ultimately file Chapter 11.

Where’s our Change^© Mr. Jimmy? A few weeks in office and you’ve already succumbed to politics as usual when what we need is a man with a spine.

Someone like John McCain.

…my true love gave to me:

Twelve gorgeous mornings, eleven deranged liberals, ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

It is, of course, Reagan’s Birthday today.

Were he alive, the greatest president of my lifetime, and by far the best of the last half of the Twentieth Century, would be 98 years old today.

I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence.  His eight years were not perfect, and I’ll resist the urge to beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for twenty years (to say nothing of in their first month of service).  His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.

Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century.  And it’s gotten to the point where his former opponents know it, because they’re paying him the ultimate compliment; they’re trying to co-opt his legacy.  Obama the communicator is compared, favorably (and wishfully) to…Reagan.  And even Hollywood is in on the act, having tried to filch Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, carefully trim context to fit their narrative, and hand it to a Democrat.

Fortunately, the people freed by the end of the Cold War know better.  Hollywood makes movies; the Poles and Georgians and Czechs make statues.
But in these difficult times, when a President is promoting fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire (and 1980 was a lot worse than 2008), Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed slapnut predecessor – something our next president will need in 2012 or 2016.

And the most important part?  He did it by unleashing something that many, then as now, thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit.

Reagan’s gone.  But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people.  Most of it, anyway.

NOTE:  While this blog encourages a bumptious, raucous debate, this post is a pro-Reagan zone.  All comments deemed critical of Reagan will be expunged without ceremony.  You’ve been warned.

You have the whole rest of the media to play about in; this post is gonna be gloriously monochrome.

Russia, the for most of the past century the laboratory for so many bad social ideas, is taking aim at Keynsianism:

Russia signalled a change in its policies to fight the financial crisis on Wednesday, indicating that it would switch from bailing out individual companies to supporting the economy through the banking sector.Moscow also plans huge budget cuts in an attempt to limit its fiscal deficit – rejecting pressure to follow the US and other western countries to try to stimulate the economy with a big boost in public borrowing.

The proposals suggest that Moscow is losing hope it can stave off the crisis with public spending and is instead battening down the hatches for what might be a prolonged recession.

“…battening down the hatches”, or has merely figured out that extended, pronounced Keynsianism doesn’t work.

(more…)

E. J. Dionne on the leftymedia’s approach to all of us uppity peasants who are rooting for the GOP’s red-zone play:

Obama’s network appearances were planned as a response to a wholly unanticipated development: Republicans — short on new ideas, low on votes, and deeply unpopular in the polls — have been winning the media wars over the president’s central initiative. They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to “less than 1 percent of the overall package.” But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts.

The fact that the “stimulus” would “stimulate” more if it were paid directly to the people in cash -that it creates a tiny film of jobs, mostly for Democrat constituencies, in exchange for a ruinous avalanche of pork – is the “least significant part?”

Heather Cromar responds:

Just imagine for a moment if my two daughters took my credit card on a spending spree of their own and came back with a whopping $80, 000 bill. Now try to imagine that the little sister, who flat out opposed the whole nonsense, in complaining to me about it, happened to mention that the older sister had bought some items that were sure to make my hair stand on end the moment I found out about it. Which would be the bigger issue to me? The couple of no-nos, or the total bill that is going to set our family budget back by a considerable amount for decades?

The thing to remember as you watch the media rally, legs a-tingle, around The One; they need you to be stupid.

Social media, meet socially inept:

I was at a cocktail party tonight, and someone asked me, flirtatiously & with no preamble “so, how many you got followin’?”

I told him none since I started using the new restrainingorder.twitter.com app.

Among many heard on the endlessly-expanding nerdpickuplines discussion on Twitter…

Five years ago, former Marine General Anthony Zinni became every liberal’s favorite general (also the only general they could name) when he came out against the Bush Administration’s strategery in Iraq.

You knew there had to be limits.  Ed Morrissey writes:

When General Anthony Zinni publicly criticized the Iraq War, he became a darling of the Left. Now that the Iraq War has all but ended in victory, he’s apparently dispensable. Zinni had been offered the position of Ambassador to Iraq, accepted it, and had even received a congratulatory phone call from Barack Obama. While he made arrangements to live in Iraq, though, Obama and Hillary Clinton changed their minds — and never bothered to tell him:

And why?

…So what happened to the man Democrats used repeatedly to bolster their efforts to undermine George Bush’s efforts in Iraq? Zinni works for a company that does a lot of business in Iraq, and supposedly the Obama administration worried about how that would look in a confirmation hearing. Another source told FP that the Obama team worried about the optics of sending two former generals as ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously.

However, neither of those explanations make much sense. Given how hard Obama fought to keep Tom Daschle and his $5 million worth of work for the industry he would soon regulate, the Dyncorp position would have been hardly a burp in a Democratic-controlled Senate. Obama’s appointed 12 lobbyists to key positions already, and an ambassadorship even to a key post like Iraq wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. And who cares whether one general or two becomes Ambassador to war theaters?

Rumor also had it that Zinni had his taxes all paid up.

Let me get this straight – Bush was the dumb, fumbly one?

Before I forget – today’s my BlogBirthday. 

I’ve related the story a time or two; it was seven years ago today, whilst working at a rapidly-failing dotcom, that I read an article at Time Magazine about Andrew Sullivan and (here’s a time-capsule piece for you) the new breed of young conservative intellectuals…

…which featured a bit about Sullivan’s blog.  Which I read…

…and, after the kids were in bed, I hurried out to Blogger.com, set up the original Shot In The Dark, and scrambled to write my first post.

Anyway – thanks for keeping me company all this time!

…my true love gave to me:

Eleven deranged liberals, ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

The “Brady Campaign” is mad at Minnesota:

Minnesota has weak gun control laws, says a national group.

Let’s stop there.  The link is to a piece by Joe Kimball at the MinnPost.  Kimball has a track record as a decent reporter, to be fair.

But he calls Brady a “national group”.  Now, I don’t expect Joe Kimball, employed as he is by a “progressive” agenda-news outlet, to call Brady “a group whose numbers, “research” and claims have been roundly debunked at nearly every turn for the past 25 years”, which would be true, albeit highly perspective-based. 

But Kimball can’t even call Brady “a national gun-control advocacy group”,  – which would be honest, non-partisan and factual.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says Minnesota’s laws “help feed the the illegal gun market, allow the sale of guns without background checks and put children at risk.”

The group gives Minnesota only 11 points out of 100 in a checklist of laws. That ties us for 23rd among the 50 states.

In other words, “failing” is the mainstream! 

We do get passing grades on holding gun owners accountable for leaving guns accessible to kids and for giving cities authority to hold gun makers legally liable.

We also have a waiting period on gun sales, limitations on “junk” handguns — Saturday night specials — but on many other possible laws, like a ban on assault weapons and limitations on large-capacity ammunition magazines, we don’t fit their bill.

Because Minnesota, like most states, realizes that none of them make any difference in public safety (and bans on “Saturday Night Specials” merely make guns unaffordable for poor people, usually in crappy neighborhoods). 

The real question isn’t that Brady is lying and misrepresenting fact – that’s been their stock in trade for a generation. 

The real question is, why can’t the local lefty “alternative” media report on this issue any more clearly and honestly than the bigs?

President Obama and his supporters have said many times that, never mind that he has a history of gun-grabber appointments, positions and votes, the new Administration has no designs on gun control.

Flash back to 1994; the Clinton Administration used the “war on drugs” – a largely manufactured crisis – and “domestic terrorism” and “militias” –  as motivation for history’s largest peacetime assaults on the civil liberties of law-abiding American citizens, the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

Of course, the “war on drugs” – which has killed more Americans than the Vietnam and Korean wars put together – could be solved tomorrow by decriminalizing the more harmless recreational drugs. And “Domestic terrorism”, despite a few highly-publicized incidents (and, of course, the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing) was controlled fairly handily by existing measures.

Nonetheless, the government used both as pretext for an assault on our civil liberties.

With that in mind, consider the current meltdown in Mexico; armed narcotraficante gangs are pretty much screwing up the program throughout northern Mexico.

They’re as nasty as Al Quaeda, and they’re armed like a small army:

They were armed to the teeth. Their arsenal ranged from semi-automatic rifles to rocket-propelled grenades. When the smoke finally cleared and the government had prevailed, Mexican federal agents captured 540 assault rifles, more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 150 grenades, 14 cartridges of dynamite, 98 fragmentation grenades, 67 bulletproof vests, seven Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifles and a Light Anti Tank (LAW) rocket

Now, when they say “assault rifles”, bear in mind that they’re talking about the real thing – the German G-3s that arm the Mexican army (which the gangs have heavily infiltrated), and the AK-series weapons, which come from all over the world, including many parts of Latin America, where communists funded insurgencies for many ears.

But that’s not the angle the media is going with (with emphasis added):

This is modern Mexico, where the leaders of the powerful drug cartels are armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons, many of which are smuggled over the border from the United States.

Let’s make sure we get this straight, since all too many even in the conservative media get this wrong; the narcotraficantes have access to the real thing, the stuff that armies all over Latin America use; fully-automatic weapons, rockets, machine guns, explosives.

But what is the only source mentioned in this (and, anecdotally, any) story on the subject?

“Americans are understandably focused on the flow of drugs and migrants into the U.S. from Mexico,” says Andreas Peter, author of “Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide.”

“But too often glossed over in the border security debate is the flow of weapons across the border into Mexico,” he told Foxnews.com in a statement via the Internet.

The cartels are obtaining arms from America by using “straw man” buyers, who legally purchase weapons at gun shops and gun shows in the U.S. The weapons cross into Mexico, where border security is much weaker heading south of the border than it is going north.

And onward, and onward.  Read the whole story.

Look for a lot more media stories about “the flow of guns to Mexico” in the near future.

And then look for a raft of gun control proposals – to stop the “flow of guns to Mexico”, naturally – to come up sooner than later.

Apparently, none of King Banaian’s relatives have the chops to get on Top Chef.
Anyway, today’s job is to get one Deb Banaian (presumably related to King) onto Survivor.

OK.  I can get behind that. I’d draw the line at Rock of Love.

…for the guy in the next cube over to bring the Samoas I ordered two weeks ago, it’s interesting to peruse the history of Girl Scout Cookies.

It’s informative – although I have yet to see where the connection to Samoa is…

A fun interactive map of Super-Bowl-related words popping up on Twitter during the Super Bowl.

Click the “Play” button to get the full time-lapse effect.

Love the way “Springsteen” explodes during the Halftime show – mainly east of the Mississippi…

I’ve created a bit of a mathematical law, derived from observing liberals.

When they’re quoting numbers (except for spending figures), divide by an order of magnitude.  Maybe two.  Maaaaaybe more.

For example:  the Million Man March?  That was a bit of an outlier:  according to the Park Service, you needed to divide that by a trifling 2.5.

The Million Mom March?  An order up front, a little over two today.

Nancy Pelosi’s joblessness estimate?

Look – I understand flubs.  Even though Barack Obama went to Harvard (and thus only needs to really know three or four states for real) I’m pretty sure he knows there are fifty states.

Although it’d be fun to quiz him on near-eastern and Central Asian languages; d’ya suppose Charlie Gibson is available?

…my true love gave to me:

Ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

http://www.slate.com/id/2102081/

I do love winter.  I’m not wild about shoveling, hauling kids to school when it’s below zero, or paying heating bills – but I do love the snow, and walking the dog on clear, brisk nights, and settling into a hot bath or a steam room after a cold day.  All to the good.

Still, I’m not going to kid you; seeing that the temperature bottomed out about two hours ago, and is going to basically rise hour-by-hour for the next five days, is one of the highlights of the year.

Preserving (also instituting) the constitutional rights of non-American-citizens caught in action against America were a key part of the Obama campaign.
Now that they’re in charge and actually have to deal with terrorists?

Not quite:

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

“controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe”?  Yes – the circles that got President Obama elected, at least in part over the collective vapors because Europe didn’t heart us anymore!

One provision in one of Obama’s orders appears to preserve the CIA’s ability to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects as long as they are not held long-term. The little-noticed provision states that the instructions to close the CIA’s secret prison sites “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

Despite concern about rendition, Obama’s prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the “transitory” technique.

Well, I’m sure Chris Matthews will be all over this one.

It was sixteen years ago tonight Zam was born.  He was two weeks late, covered in a bright scarlet rash from head to toe, and his forehead was pushed down over his eyes like a little puppy.

But he was sure adorable.

And underneath all of that awful teenageryness, he still kinda is.

Happy Birthday, Zam!

Are we on the final leg of Minnesota’s endless recount?

Maybe not.  But the Ramsey County court hearing Senator Coleman’s petition on the improperly yesterday rejected ballots has ruled [PDF alert!], largely, in Coleman’s favor.

Scott Johnson at Powerline writes:

The order entered by the three-judge panel presiding in the Coleman election contest proceeding is accessible here. A few observations:

Scott follows up with a dozen points, from the perspective of a guy who unpacks legalism for a living.  Read the whole thing.

So how about the big leftyblogs?

MNPublius, whose franchise Aaron Landry has immeasurably cheapened as a tingly-legged wind-up petblogger for Franken this past year?

Bupkes as this is written.

The Minnesoros “Independent”?

Their bosses in Washington must not have told the “Independent’s” staff what to think yet.

The MinnPost?

“This is so complicated“.

So read the Powerguys…