More Fast and Furious

A 'Furious' revelation - Michael A Walsh

This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.

Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.

New Fast and Furious docs released by White House - Sharyl Attkisson

Among the documents produced: an email in which ATF's Newell sent the White House's O'Reilly an "arrow chart reflecting the ultimate destination of firearms we intercepted and/or where the guns ended up." The chart shows arrows leading from Arizona to destinations all over Mexico.

In response, O'Reilly wrote on Sept. 3, 2010 "The arrow chart is really interesting - and - no surprise - implies at least that different (Drug Trafficking Organizations) in Mexico have very different and geographically distinct networks in the US for acquiring guns. Did last year's TX effort develop a similar graphic?"

More Solyndra

Solyndra. So Bankrupt. So Many Questions:

Keep Your Umbrella Handy

Huge Tumbling Satellite Could Fall to Earth Over US Tonight or Saturday, NASA Says - Tariq Malik

Late Wednesday (Sept. 21), NASA predicted that the UARS satellite would not be over North America when it finally plunged down to the Earth's surface. That scenario has changed now that the 20-year-old satellite's descent has slowed, the agency said.

But where the UARS spacecraft will fall still remains anyone's guess. NASA orbital debris experts have said the satellite could fall anywhere between the latitudes of Northern Canada and Southern South America, a region of Earth that encompasses much of the planet.

"It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any certainty, but predictions will become more refined in the next 12 to 18 hours," NASA officials wrote in the latest update.

Complete Coverage of NASA's Falling Satellite UARS - SPACE.com Staff

Update:
NASA Says Satellite Fell to Earth Over Pacific Ocean

NASA's dead six-ton satellite fell to Earth early Saturday morning, starting its fiery death plunge somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean.

Details were still sketchy, but the U.S. Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center and NASA say that the bus-sized satellite first penetrated Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. That doesn't necessarily mean it all fell into the sea -- although most of it is believed to have burned up.

Heads Up! (Part 2)

Old NASA satellite to tumble to Earth on Friday - Alicia Chang

While North America appears to be off the hook, scientists are scrambling to pinpoint exactly where and when a dead NASA climate satellite will plummet back to Earth on Friday.

The 6-ton, bus-sized satellite is expected to break into more than a hundred pieces as it plunges through the atmosphere, most of it burning up.

Nasa satellite could fall to Earth late Friday - James Meikle and Ian Sample

Further updates are expected 12, six and two hours before re-entry. The space agency anticipates that 26 potentially hazardous parts, weighing a total of 532kg, could remain intact and hit the Earth.

The debris will spread along an estimated 500-mile corridor of the Earth's surface. Among the parts expected to survive the fiery re-entry are four titanium fuel tanks, four steel flywheel rims and an aluminium structure that alone weighs 158kg. Depending on their size and shape, the components will strike at speeds of between 55mph (90km/h) and 240mph (385km/h).

Falling NASA Satellite Could Spark Stunning Light Show - Joe Rao

If you happened to be lucky enough to be within viewing range of a satellite that is re-entering the atmosphere, the sight, put simply, would amount to a short-lived but spectacular fireworks display. Unlike a fireball meteor, whose flight across the sky might take no more than a few seconds, a re-entering satellite’s path usually lasts much longer.

As the satellite descends to an altitude of about 50 miles (80 kilometers), friction with the atmosphere is converted to light and heat. As it moves on a relatively slow – one could almost use the adjective “majestic” – flight across the sky, what is usually seen is a long trail of light and sparks that can take on virtually every color of the rainbow.

More on Gunwalker

Gunwalker’s Body Count Grows, Along with the Obama Administration’s Cover-Up - Bob Owens

While the Oversight Committee investigation is far from over and a special prosecutor’s investigation hasn’t even begun, it is beginning to appear that the evidence and testimony being compiled so far indicate that the Obama administration was willing to break federal laws and get hundreds of people killed in Mexico and the United States in order to fabricate conditions that would help them implement their domestic gun control policies.

If so, it is entirely unethical and illegal, and it seems like only a matter of time before administration officials face felony indictments for their role in Operation Fast and Furious and perhaps the other alleged gun-walking operations that make up the Gunwalker scandal.

Should Isreal Recognize a Nation of Palestine?

Gov. Rick Perry: Obama’s Middle East Policy Is Naive, Arrogant, Misguided and Dangerous

Thank you. Let me begin by thanking Dr. Solomon Frager and Aron Hirtz for helping us organize this press conference today.

I am joined today by a diverse group of Jewish leaders from here and abroad who share my concern that the United Nations could take action this week to legitimize the Palestinian gambit to establish statehood in violation of the spirit of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

We are indignant that certain Middle Eastern leaders have discarded the principle of direct negotiations between the sovereign nation of Israel and the Palestinian leadership, and we are equally indignant that the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy of appeasement has encouraged such an ominous act of bad faith.

Simply put, we would not be here today at the precipice of such a dangerous move if the Obama Policy in the Middle East wasn’t naïve, arrogant, misguided and dangerous.

It must be said, first, that Israel is our oldest and strongest democratic ally in the Middle East and has been for more than 60 years. The Obama Policy of moral equivalency which gives equal standing to the grievances of Israelis and Palestinians, including the orchestrators of terrorism, is a dangerous insult.

Should People be Forced to Share Their Money?

My money: I deserve to keep it all - J.E. Dyer

Of course we all deserve to keep our own money. If it is ill-gotten – stolen, swindled – then it’s the crime that deprives us of it, not any inherent function of the armed authorities to prowl the land in search of “undeserved” bank balances.

The question of what we “deserve” boils down to which came first, the individual human with rights, or the state. America was founded on the principle that the individual human with rights comes first. Any idea that violates that principle is counter to our founding idea. It is not possible to reconcile with our founding principle the idea of collective schemes in which we make some modification to “what we deserve.” We either deserve to keep all our own earnings – money – wealth – goods – or we do not have unalienable rights.

Now, what we decide to do with our own money will inevitably involve government functions of some kind. People have to have a government in some form. A certain minimum set of public services is essential to corporate human life. The American founding idea is that we the people decide what government will do, and we decide how much money government will have to do it with. Then we contribute out of what is inalienably ours.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge

This is why Calculus is important.





More info at wikipedia.

Solyndra: The Tip of the Iceberg

The Solyndra saga - Chicago Tribune Editorial

A series of emails between White House officials and Office of Management and Budget watchdogs suggests that Solyndra got its federal guarantees prematurely, under pressure from the Obama administration, which wanted to stage an event featuring Vice President Joe Biden announcing the guarantees at a ground-breaking ceremony. A perfect example of shovel-ready stimulus!

But staffers reviewing the deal were voicing concerns about not having sufficient time to conduct proper due diligence on the financial underpinnings of the loans. The evidence suggests taxpayer dollars were put at undue risk for the sake of an administration photo op.

Obama admin reworked Solyndra loan to favor donor - Matthew Daly

The Obama administration restructured a half-billion dollar federal loan to a troubled solar energy company in such a way that private investors — including a fundraiser for President Barack Obama — moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment in case of a default, government records show.

...

Under terms of the February loan restructuring, two private investors — Argonaut Ventures I LLC and Madrone Partners LP — stand to be repaid before the U.S. government if the solar company is liquidated. The two firms gave the company a total of $69 million in emergency loans. The loans are the only portion of their investments that have repayment priority above the U.S. government.

Argonaut is an investment vehicle of the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa, Okla. The foundation is headed by billionaire George Kaiser, a major Obama campaign contributor and a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama's 2008 campaign, federal election records show. Kaiser has made at least 16 visits to the president's aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

Barack Obama, Flim-Flam Man - John Hinderaker

The facts are very bad. Solyndra was a money-loser from beginning to end. Its business model was untenable. The Bush administration turned it down for funding. Its owners wanted to do a public offering; for that purpose, they had to have their books audited and a report written by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The report was more or less an obituary for the company...

The Solyndra Fraud - Andrew C. McCarthy

The Solyndra debacle is not just Obama-style crony socialism as usual. It is a criminal fraud. That is the theory that would be guiding any competent prosecutor’s office in the investigation of a scheme that cost victims — in this case, American taxpayers — a fortune.

Fraud against the United States is one of the most serious felony offenses in the federal penal law. It is even more serious than another apparent Solyndra violation that has captured congressional attention: the Obama administration’s flouting of a statute designed to protect taxpayers.

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

Solyndra Execs Will Plead the Fifth - Andrew Stiles

Solyndra LLC’s chief executive and chief financial officer will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions put to them at a Congressional hearing on Friday, according to letters from their attorneys obtained by Reuters.

Dubya and History

Dubya and Me - Walt Harrington

I had just read Bush’s 2010 memoir Decision Points, and I was struck by his many references to history. In the back of my mind was an article that Karl Rove had written for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, which revealed (much to the consternation of the president’s derisive critics) that Bush had read 186 books for pleasure in the preceding three years, consisting mostly of serious historical nonfiction. Intrigued, I asked Bush whether he would talk to me about how his passion for reading history had shaped his presidency and perspective, and he agreed.

When I sat down to write about that meeting, however, a different story emerged. History is composed of significant and less significant moments, the trouble being that we often don’t know at the time which is text and which is footnote. Yet when it comes to presidents, even footnotes are worth recording. I realized that what I had before me was a story that went beyond politics or policies or the reading habits of a president, an idiosyncratically personal story, a footnote-to-history story spanning a quarter-century.

Modern Jobs and Careers

Me, Inc. - Jim Manzi

The way I have put this is that workers in our economy are in a race between development of as-yet-non-commoditized cognitive capabilities on one hand, and wage reductions as capabilities are commoditized through technological advances (broadly defined) on the other. This has been going on for a long, long time, but it does seem to be speeding up — why?

My Jobs Speech - Arnold Kling

The Curious Background of Barack Obama

Two items on Barack Obama's background: One humorous, the other scholarly.

Breaking: A Power Line DC Bureau Exclusive! “Operation Chaos” Exposed!! - Steven Hayward

Rush: Gentlemen, I’m really starting to worry that our plan of placing our hand-picked, CIA-groomed Manchurian candidate Obama in the White House to unravel liberalism from within is working too well and too fast.

The Chosen One - Angelo M. Codevilla

Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii's most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones.

...

In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.'s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government's then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.

...

The point here is that this network was formed precisely to help the careers of kindred folk, while ruining those of others, and to move the requisite money and influence unaccountably, erasing evidence that it had done so. Exercising influence abroad on America's behalf—the network's founding purpose—never got in the way of playing a partisan role in American life and, of course, of taking care of its own.

...

In sum, Barack Obama grew intertwined with the narrow, self-referential left side of the American Left. They helped one another believe they had come up the hard way, as underprivileged but brilliant, square-jawed tribunes of the common man. Their common problem, however, is that their agendas are antagonistic to people unlike themselves, and that they cannot keep from showing their contempt for the common folk in whose name they would ride to power.

A Timely Sonnet

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

Percy Shelley

Classics in Economics

Rethinking Bastiat and Broken Windows - Amity Shlaes

His old ideas actually resemble candles, shining so brightly they help us sort out murky proposals made today.

In the summer of 1850, just before going to Paris, Bastiat laid out the now-famous parable. Disaster happens. A thief breaks a man's window, or a storm does. The man has to pay the glazier to fix it. The glazier spends his money at the store. When enough windows are smashed, voila: a visible benefit, new jobs for the glass industry.

True enough, noted Bastiat. The window replacement is what is seen. What about that which is not seen? "Since our citizen has spent six francs for one thing, he will not be able to spend them for another. It is not seen that if he had not had a windowpane to replace, he would have replaced, for example, his worn-out shoes or added another book to his library."

The same holds for a government: when it repairs windows -- cleans up hurricane damage -- it is not using the same money for other causes that might be more worthy, such as reducing government debt or taxes.

The Use of Knowledge in Society - Friedrich A. Hayek

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

Famous Quotes

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Winston Churchill

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P. J. O'Rourke

At Least Try Out Your Idea On Monkeys

From the illustrious Frank J. Fleming
Okay, so let’s try real science - Frank Fleming

But despite the obvious importance of science, one group of people does everything in pure defiance of scientific methods: politicians.

What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist. You always have to at least try out your idea on monkeys to make sure it doesn’t kill them.

Were farm subsidies first tried on monkeys? Social Security? Bank bailouts? No, the unscientific politicians went straight to trying all their ideas on humans, and now we have a bunch of bankrupt people instead of harmless bankrupt monkeys.

But the problem with testing political ideas on monkeys is that forcing them to go billions into debt would violate animal-cruelty laws. The only ones we’re allowed to do that to are people.

Look! There's more from Frank J!

• http://www.imao.us/
  
• http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/author/frankjfleming/

The Impending Eurozone Crack-up

Europe Slips As Greece Falls - Walter Russell Mead

What is worrying investors worldwide is the evident intellectual and political bankruptcy of Europe. The Europeans are not stupider than other people, but they face deep structural economic and political problems that their institutions are hopelessly inadequate to solve. Creating a monetary union without a true federal government is looking more and more like the biggest European policy mistake since Britain and France let Hitler have the Sudetenland.

The current crisis is the result of a decade of policy failure. Greece should never have been allowed into the euro; prudent leaders would have checked its statistics, discovered the blatant frauds with which the Greeks sought to conceal the true state of their affairs, and told the country politely but firmly to come back when it was ready. Following that initial blunder, Europe failed to take note in any serious way of the serious distortions that were caused by suddenly reducing interest rates in Greece and other peripherals to near-German levels. Beyond that, alarm bells should have been ringing as it became clear that Greece and a number of other countries were treating their suddenly lower interest costs as found money. They were spending the windfall rather than taking advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity to reform their economies in preparation for life under a monetary union with countries like Germany. If Europe’s institutions were up to the job, the warning signs would have been noticed and corrective steps taken years ago.

Social Ponzi Scheme

Poor Tom Friedman. When the genius, Pulitzer Prize winning, New York Time columnist is cornered by Rick Santelli on Social Security, he resorts to insults rather than admit that Santelli is right.

You’re idiotic, he explained - Scott Johnson

Heads Up!

Huge Defunct Satellite to Plunge to Earth Soon, NASA Says - Leonard David

Heads up! That's the word from NASA today (Sept. 7) given the impending re-entry of a 6.5-ton satellite through Earth's atmosphere.

The huge Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere in an uncontrolled fall in late September or early October. Much of the spacecraft is expected to burn up during re-entry, but some pieces are expected to make it intact to the ground, NASA officials said.

The U.S. space agency will be taking measures to inform the public about the pieces of the spacecraft that are expected to survive re-entry.

...

The actual date of re-entry is difficult to predict because it depends on solar flux and the spacecraft's orientation as its orbit decays. As re-entry draws closer, predictions on the date will become more reliable.

NASA plans to post updates weekly until about four days before the anticipated re-entry. The agency will then share daily updates until about 24 hours before re-entry, when it will begin even more frequent postings.

Auto Bailouts

The Economy - September 2011

California Employment at Record Low - Christopher Palmer

The percentage of working-age Californians with jobs has fallen to a record low, and employment may not return to pre-recession levels until the second half of the decade, according to a research group.

Just 55.4 percent of working-age Californians, defined as those 16 or older, had a job in July, down from 56.2 percent a year earlier and the lowest level since 1976, the Sacramento- based California Budget Project said in a report released late yesterday.

California’s 12 percent unemployment rate in July, the nation’s second-highest after Nevada, compared with 9.1 percent nationwide. The most-populous state lost 1.4 million jobs during the recession that began three years ago, and has gained back only 226,800, or about 17 percent, according to the report.

Senior IMF Economist Expects Hard Default For Greece. Soon. - ForexCrunch

The Greek government says any more steps will only deepen the recession and make things even worse. The debt trap is quite clear at this stage.

These complications triggered not only the aforementioned expectations for a hard default, according to WSJ:

“I expect a hard default definitely before March, maybe this year, and it could come with this program review,” said a senior IMF economist who is keeping close tabs on the situation. “The chances for a second program are slim.”

A hard default means a messy one. A default that is not controlled could have a serious domino effect: it can push banks to bankruptcy (such as French banks, that are highly leveraged), and it can send bond yields of other countries much higher. A hard default for Greece also seriously endangers .

...

All in all, the bailout mechanism secures only one thing: a crisis on every inspection. Last time, it ended with a reshuffle of the Greek governments, fresh austerity measures and violent protests on the streets of Athens.

Zero Jobs 101 — the Psychology of Alienating Employers - Victor Davis Hanson

Zero jobs last month — a net change of zero job growth? It was just announced that last month’s unemployment is still above 9% — despite the nearly five trillion dollars in Keynesian pump-priming, the near zero interest rates, the expanded unemployment and food stamp support, and the government takeovers and subsidies of businesses. There is a scary sort of deer-in-the-headlights look about Obama and Biden that is quite disturbing, as if they are thinking, “This was not supposed to happened to us. Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers assured us that all this borrowing would turn things around — but they are all gone or leaving, so now we are alone? What to do?

...


Here is the lament I heard: the near $5 trillion in borrowing in just three years, the radical growth in the size of the federal government and its regulatory zeal, ObamaCare, the Boeing plant closure threat, the green jobs sweet-heart deals and Van Jones-like “Millions of Green Jobs” nonsense, the vast expansion in food stamps and unemployment pay-outs, the reversal of the Chrysler creditors, politically driven interference in the car industry, the failed efforts to get card check and cap and trade, the moratoria on new drilling in the Gulf, the general antipathy to new fossil fuel exploitation coupled with new finds of vast new reserves, the new financial regulations, an aggressive EPA oblivious to the effects of its advocacy on jobs, the threatened close-down of energy plants, the support for idling thousands of acres of irrigated farmland due to environmental regulations, the constant talk of higher taxes, the needlessly provocative rhetoric of “fat cat”, “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” etc. juxtaposed, in hypocritical fashion, to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail First Family getaways — all of these isolated strains finally are becoming a harrowing opera to business people.

Despite enormous opportunity for many cash-rich firms to take advantage of the down cycles (low interest, plentiful potential employees, discounted prices, etc.), they are taking a pass, almost as if to collectively sigh, “This bunch doesn’t like me much and I’m going to hunker down, hoard my cash, and sit out the next year and a half until they are gone.” And the administration’s efforts to counteract these symbols and impressions by courting a high-profile, hyper-capitalist Warren Buffett, or a GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt have proven even more ironic: the former calls for higher taxes that his firms seek to avoid, or targets his post-mortem wealth to (more efficient?) private foundations that rob the Treasury of billions in lost inheritance taxes, or knows higher taxes won’t much matter to his tens of billions in net worth; the latter’s firm paid no 2010 U.S. income taxes on many of its profits and outsourced jobs overseas.