The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Spain’s Woes Fuel U.S. Stock Slide

Posted on | July 23, 2012 | 13 Comments

After opening down more than 200 points today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has now stabilized at around 12,700 — about 130 points down — as of 1 p.m. Eastern. The Dow has lost more than 500 points since its May peak of 13,279, and the ongoing European debt crisis is to blame:

Fresh crises in Spain and Greece weighed heavily on markets this morning, sending stocks sharply lower and raising borrowing costs across Europe to levels seen as unsustainable.
In Spain, Catalonia was the latest of up to six regions in the country that say they may need aid from the central government, prompting speculation that Spain would need a full bailout.

The Eurozone crisis is, to some extent, a good-new/bad-news scenario for U.S. stocks. The bad news is that the instability and uncertainty undermine investor confidence, and portends the chance of another international bank crisis. The good news is that Europe’s problems make U.S. stocks a sort of safe haven as investors flee endangered European markets.

Overall, the situation in Greece and Spain is a net negative for Wall Street, but it does create a limited amount of upside opportunity.

UPDATE: The Associated Press:

Fear that Spain may need a government bailout sent its borrowing costs soaring, the euro to a two-year low against the dollar and stocks around the world sharply lower as investors pulled back Monday from all manner of risk. . . .
Borrowing costs rose sharply for Spain and Italy after news the Spanish economy contracted by a quarterly rate of 0.4 percent in the second quarter. Falling economic output makes it more difficult for Spain to deal with its debts. . . .
Bank stocks, which tend to take a hit when fear flares in Europe, were among the biggest losers. Citigroup stock dropped more than 2 percent and Bank of America 1.3 percent.
There were also signs that a global economic slowdown is hitting U.S. companies that rode out the recession fairly well, largely because currencies overseas have tumbled against the dollar.

Gold prices were actually down about $5 to $1,577 an ounce as of 1 p.m. Eastern, but if worries about the Eurozone continue to escalate, it would be reasonable to expect gold to go up.

UPDATE II: More explanation on Spain’s problems:

Financial pressure is mounting on Spain as its economy shrinks and the cost of bailing out banks and regional governments grows. Investors pushed the country’s borrowing rates to alarming heights Monday amid concern the government could be overwhelmed by debt and forced to seek an international bailout.
The interest rate, or yield, on Spain’s 10-year bond spiked 0.22 percentage points to 7.45 percent. That is the highest level since the euro began in 1999 and is considered unsustainable for more than a few months. . . .
If those borrowing rates do not fall back, the central government may end up being locked out of international markets and be forced to seek a financial rescue, like Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
“The higher the yield goes, the more untenable the situation becomes,” said Rebecca O’Keeffe, head of investment at Interactive Investment.
Spain is the fourth-largest economy in the eurozone, bigger than Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined.

The moral of the story is simple: In the long run, you can’t fool the market.

UPDATE III: Also, in the long run, you can’t fool voters:

A new poll from The Hill shows that two-thirds of likely voters blame bad economic policy for the current state of the economy — and more blame Obama than anyone else . . .

Well, duh. Bad economic policy causes a bad economy. Americans can look at the situation in Europe and figure out who it is that has been implementing European-style economic policies in this country. Are we headed into another recession? As Ed Morrissey points out, for many Americans the last recession never ended.

 


Category: Economics, Spain

I Hope That Mass. Voters Give Elizabeth Warren The Martha Coakley Treatment

Posted on | July 23, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

This is a great ad, worthy of reflection by all Americans:

via The Corner

Category: Massachusetts

Chicago Woman Dies After Abortion

Posted on | July 23, 2012 | 24 Comments

A 24-year-old Chicago woman died Friday after receiving an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic, CBS News reports.

Tonya Reaves died of a hemorrhage after undergoing a type of abortion procedure called “cervical dilation and evacuation” at the Michigan Avenue clinic, according to the medical examiner’s officer.

“It happened so fast,” the dead woman’s twin sister, Toni Reaves, told CBS. “She was just fine one day and then the next day she was gone. We’re just trying to figure out what happened.”

Steve Ertelt of LifeNews.com reported Reaves was underwent an abortion Friday at the Loop Health Center, a clinic operated by Planned Parenthood of Illinois, that advertises abortions for women who are up to 18 weeks pregnant. The “dialation and evacuation” procedure is typically “employed in pregnancies that have advanced beyond the first trimester,” Ertelt reported.

Reaves reportedly began bleeding heavily after the procedure and was transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where she was pronounced dead at 11:20 p.m. Friday.

Planned Parenthood of Illinois CEO Carole Brite issued a statement: “While legal abortion services in the United States have a very high safety record, a tragedy such as this is devastating to loved ones and we offer our deepest sympathies.”

UPDATE: The death of Reaves is also reported by the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Blaze.

UPDATE II: The story has been picked up by the London Daily Mail in an article that features numerous Facebook photos of Reaves:

‘Abortion deaths like this are completely avoidable,’ said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Nation, in a statement Sunday to the Christian Post.
‘When a woman bleeds to death after an abortion, it is usually an indication of error on the part of the abortionist coupled with a delay in calling for emergency assistance.’

 

Category: Abortion, Illinois, Planned Parenthood

‘Zimbabwe’ Ben Rides Again?

Posted on | July 23, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

The post title is meant to connect Ben Bernanke with ruinous monetary policy in another country, not as a derogation of the fine people of Zimbabwe, who certainly deserve better than a Bernanke riff.

Financial Times reports that, while the Federal Reserve isn’t addicted to the cocaine of currency inflation, the Fed does seem to think it smells kinda purdy:

The recent slowdown in US economic growth is forcing the Federal Reserve to consider something for which it has always set the bar very high: a third round of quantitative easing.
A decision on whether to launch another round of asset purchases remains in the balance as the central bank wrestles with a complicated economic outlook and uncertainty about the costs and benefits of its easing tools.
In an interview with the Financial Times, John Williams, president of the San Francisco Fed, said that the weak outlook and the extent of downside risks “would argue for further action” but the counter-argument was doubts about tools such as QE3.

Read the whole thing.

In defense of ‘Zimbabwe’ Ben, when you put a junkie on guard at the police evidence vault, you can’t be surprised if there is a lot of nosing about going on. The problem really isn’t Bernanke himself, but rather the system, and the fact that there is bi-partisan reward for playing along.

Via Mataconis

Update: more at Ace of Spades.

Category: End The Fed

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.23.12

Posted on | July 23, 2012 | 12 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

TOP NEWS
Heaviest Rain To Hit Beijing In Six Decades Kills 37

A woman wades across a flooded street

25 drownings, 6 killed by collapsing buildings, 5 electrocutions and one lightning strike. Seriously?

Riot Erupts After Shooting By Anaheim Police
Officers involved in shooting placed on leave

President Obama Stoic After Meeting Aurora Shooting Victims
Romney praises Obama for “doing the right thing,” avoids campaigning



POLITICS
Romney Tops Obama Fundraising In June

The $73 million dollar man

Small-donor base growing; heavy hitters pouring money into RNC

No Appetite For Gun Control In Wake Of Aurora Shootings

Weiner Wife Under Guard After Threats

House Leaders Wary Of Showdowns Over Farm, Postal Bills

U.S. Poverty On Track To Hit 46-Year High

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) Defends Gun Rights, Calls Aurora Shooting Suspect “Sick, Demented, Evil”

Chicago Woman Dies After Abortion At Planned Parenthood Clinic



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Price Surge Is All About Iran; NYMEX $91.83, Brent $106.83
Kodak Loses Patent Case Against Apple, RIM; Plans Appeal
Euro Hits 11-Year Low Against Yen Amid Spanish Debt Woes
Will PRC Build 82 Unneeded Airports BY 2015? You Betcha
NRG To Buy GenOn In $1.7 Billion All-Stock Deal
Crop-Killing Drought Will Cost You At The Grocery Store
Samsung Galaxy S3 Hits 10 Million Sales Mark Early
Google Sells Out Of 16GB Nexus 7 Tablets
Even At $699., Ultrabooks Still Overpriced
DARPA Funds A Hacking Tool You’d Never Notice
EA Agrees To Settlement In Antitrust Suit



SPORTS
Barry Larkin, Ron Santo Enter Cooperstown Without Controversy

Ron Santo's widow Vicki

Larkin’s tearful speech thanks Pete Rose for his chance with the Reds

Paterno Statue Removed As Penn State Prepares For Punishment

Jays Hit Four Homers, Score 11 Off Larkin To Complete Sweep Of BoSox

0 For Oakland: Yanks Lose 5-4, Get Swept By A’s

Elliott Sadler Wins STP 300 At Chicagoland
Danica Patrick struggles with car, finishes 14th

Jason Kubel, Chris Young Go Yard As Snakes Sweep ‘Stros

Nats Settle For Split After Ragged Start Against Braves



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Despite Opening Night Horror, “Dark Knight Rises” Estimated To Top $160 Million

Christian Bale as Batman

Studios withholding estimates until Monday due to Aurora shootings
Christian Bale: “Words Cannot Express The Horror I Feel”
Anne Hathaway: “My Heart Aches”

Michael Jackson’s Mother Reported Missing In Ongoing Family Dispute


Grieving Sylvester Stallone Attends Private Memorial Service For Son Sage

Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher Smooch At L.A. Party

Nick Stahl – Back Home, Going To AA

Tara Reid Hospitalized In France



FOREIGNERS
Both Sides Claim Progress As Fighting Continues In Damascus, Aleppo
Pranab Mukherjee Elected India’s 13th President
U.S. Warns Assad Regime On Chemical Weapons
Norway Marks Anniversary Of Breivik Massacre
Turkey Sends SAM Batteries To Syrian Border
Aging Japan, PRC Drive Jobs To Southeast Asia
Pope Benedict XVI Blesses Olympics As Hope For Peace
PRC Approves Military Garrison For Disputed Paracels



BLOGS & STUFF
Clayton Cramer: James Holmes Too Weird To Join Gun Club
American Power: Keeley Hazell Shocked At Shooter’s Picture At AdultFriendFinder.com
Jammie Wearing Fools: Mexico Urges U.S. To Review Gun Laws In Wake Of Colorado Shooting
Weasel Zippers: Jason Alexander Slanders Tea Partiers After Colorado Shooting
Gateway Pundit: Former Democrat Zell Miller Says A Christian Conversion Made Him Conservative
Donald Sensing: Paterno Statue Removed From Penn State Stadium
Volokh Conspiracy: The Dark Side Of Privacy
Iowahawk: You Didn’t Build That

Category: Live at Five

Rule 5 Sunday: Burning Photographs

Posted on | July 22, 2012 | 12 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Standard disclaimer: some of the following links are to photographs liable to cause unfavorable reactions from wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, fellow workers, bosses, Gender Studies majors, and other people in a position to make your life miserable or otherwise pollute your purity of essence. Discretion is advised.


Randy’s Roundtable leads off this week with Carin Ashley and Rachel Reynolds, followed by Fishersville Mike with the extremely talented Morgan Smith. Laughing Conservative submits Lauren Wood, The POH Diaries go with Kate Upton, while EBL passes up Ms. Upton for Jessica Pare. First Street journal returns with another fine portfolio of women in uniform, while the Rio Norte Line introduces us to Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton.


A View From the Beach brings us Penelope Cruz, Sunny making a sandwich, a brief history of the bra (with obligatory cave girl content), 21st century romance, discrimination against married Olympians, a former porn actress working as a volunteer EMT, women passing men in global IQ scores, and fainting bikini girls.


Soylent Green’s Monday Motivationer is Nicole this week, followed by Anastasia providing the Tuesday Titillation. Humpday Hawt is supplied by Spencer Scott, Dawson Miller gives us another reason to go O! Canada, and then something came up. Jenny McClain follows, along with triple-D’s at Comic Con, Son Of Corsetcare, Adrianne Curry, and some brain candy.


El Opinador Compulsivo submits Alice Eve for your consideration, along with Kaitlyn Leeb, What Would Sheldon Do?, and a high-res collection.


Three Beers Later offers a cautionary tail and some Toby Keith Rule 5. Dustbury has Melissa Theuriau and Rebecca Ferguson, while Proof Positive goes with Aida Yespica, vintage babe Anne Gwynne, shimmying hurdler Michelle Jenneke, and some Victoria’s Secret for the Sex in Advertising slot. At The Camp of the Saints, it’s Carrie Stevens, Serinda Swan, Happy Anniversary Rule 5! and the Hee Haw gals.


The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Sakura Sato (and a Rule 5 tour), Holly Robinson Peete, Kat Riel, Aisha Tyler, Eva Larue, Nia Long, Stacy McCain’s ditzy cousin Meghan, Kim So Yeun, Vanessa Veasley saluting Rule 5 bloggers, Michelle Williams, Reika Miki, Minka Kelly, Kanami Okamoto, Michelle Jenneke, Yolanda Pecoraro and a complaint about distractions offered by Theo Spark.


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Links for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday should be submitted no later than July 28 to the
Rule 5 Wombat mailbox.

Category: Rule 5

America’s Decadent Elite

Posted on | July 22, 2012 | 27 Comments

More than 15 years have passed since Robert Bork published Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, one of the most astute analyses of its kind ever written. Bork emphasized that the 1960s were the pivotal epoch. In his introduction, however, Bork made an important point: The remarkably sudden collapse of the “Establishment” under the assault of Sixties radicalism indicated an inherent weakness within America’s elite, a vulnerability that was little suspected during the tranquil decade of the 1950s.

The Sixties, Bork observed, “brought to a crescendo developments in the Fifties and before that most of us had overlooked or misunderstood.” Citing various phenomena of the 1950s — including rock music, the radical social critique of C. Wright Mills and the so-called “Beat” culture of Kerouac and Ginsberg — Bork asserts that these were “harbingers of a new culture”:

“The Fifties were the years of Eisenhower’s presidency. Our domestic world seemed normal and, for the most part, almost placid. The signs were misleading. Politics is a lagging indicator. . . .
“[The rapid triumph of Sixties radicalism] suggests that the supposedly oppressive ‘Establishment,’ without realizing it themselves, had already been eaten hollow by the assumptions that flowered into modern liberalism. When the push came in the Sixies, an empty and guilt-ridden Establishment surrendered.”
— Robert H. Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1996)

Anyone who carefuly studies the era must endorse Bork’s conclusion, whether or not they share his politics. He was clearly onto something, and it is extraordinary that his insight has not been further developed. What happened in the years between triumph in World War II — the pinnacle of our national prestige in what has been called “The American Century” — and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which proved the flashpoint of the Culture Revolution? How was the Establishment “eaten hollow” during the roughly 15 years that elapsed between Whittaker Chambers’s exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy and that November afternoon in Dallas when a Communist sympathizer aimed his rifle at the motorcade in Dealey Plaza?

It’s not as if America had no warnings of the impending storm. In 1944, Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, which documented the inherent dangers of Western liberalism’s embrace of the Welfare State. In 1948, Richard Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, examining the philosophical roots of modern cultural decline. And in 1951, a young man named William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale, showing how leaders of America’s leading universities defended intellectual subversion in the name of “academic freedom.”

Taken together, those three books are now recognized as sort of an intellectual pedigree of post-war American conservatism, and constitute a fairly comprehensive critique of what Bork calls “the assumptions that flowered into modern liberalism.” Yet it is amazing in retrospect that, insofar as the Establishment’s ability to resist the subsequent radical onlaught, these prescient warnings fell on deaf ears. The Establishment either underestimated the sincerity of its radical enemies or else became “empty and guilt-ridden” because of its (perhaps not entirely conscious) sympathies with radical beliefs.

Bork’s insight has been stuck in my mind since I first encountered it in the mid-1990s, and the thought of turning it into a book, examining how we went from the Cold War liberalism of Harry Truman to the anti-American radicalism of the 1960s, has been in mind mind ever since.

What is needed, I think, is not an argumentative polemic, but rather a lively, detailed narrative history of the era, modeled somewhat on the pattern of liberal historian William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream. The point to be demonstrated is that historical change is not a product of anonymous deterministic forces — trends that are as irresistible as they are impersonal — but rather (a) history results from the ideas and actions of individuals, and (b) the beliefs and choices of leaders have a disproportionate influence on history.

Leaders who make change happen are often not recognized as leaders until after the fact. Prior to 1948, for example, almost no one could have predicted the enormous influence of the work of an Indiana University biology professor named Alfred Kinsey. Nor, for that matter, did anyone prior to 1963 suspect what changes would result from the work of a freelance magazine writer named Betty Friedan. What I have in mind would in some ways be a countweight to the Left’s class-oriented “social history” and its mechanical, materialistic concepts of change, as well as a rebuttal to the anti-American perspectives of Howard Zinn and other academic leftists.

This is another one of those Books Nobody Will Ever Pay Me to Write, but the idea has been stuck in my brain for 15 years. I spent a few minutes turning it over in my mind while driving home from the Smart Girls Summit today. It’s still a good idea. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Category: Books, History

Heston

Posted on | July 22, 2012 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Category: Uncategorized
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