But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent — or getting on for twice as much as the second-most-insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.
Insty concludes:
No organization can survive corruption and ineptitude at the top forever. And we’ve had the worse political class in American history for a while now, though its rottenness has really accelerated lately.
My contention is that if Barack Obama had not been located to #OccupyResoluteDesk, the plutocrats would have located another tool. The worm eating the heart out of everything is the Federal Reserve. If you haven’t diagnosed the problem, and told me what we’re going to do to halt the longest-running heist in human history, then, I submit, you’re merely re-arranging the tungsten on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Of course, returning to Insty’s point, the only GOP candidate discussing the Federal Reserve seriously is the one with the lowest likelihood of election. But is Paul talking about the Fed despite, or rather becauseof his relatively lower chance? The U.S. has to realize that crude propaganda plays like the Sandra Fluke farce or leveraging the Trayvon Martin tragedy are symptomatic of an utterly broken, dysfunctional President. If we are insufficiently exceptional to call ‘nonsense’ on #OccupyResoluteDesk, then we’re collectively justifying his idiocy.
The more often a person attended religious services, Gallup discovered, the more often they experienced positive emotions and the less often they experienced negative emotions.
The less a person attended religious services, the more they experienced negative emotions and the less they experienced positive ones.
People who attended religious services at least every week reported experiencing an average of 3.36 positive emotions the day before Gallup called them.
People who never attended religious services told Gallup they had experienced only an average of 3.08 positive emotions the previous day.
Having rejected faith, and sought solace elsewhere, people seem to have a relatively harder time. Now, here is an interesting, possibly related, result:
But Obama’s highest approval came among those who say they seldom or never attend religious services. Among these Americans, 51 percent said they approved of the job Obama is doing.
What you do faith-wise is a big input into that self-actualization thing.
Here is a big hint, folks: rejecting the possibility of Truth is a really, really Bad Thing. Also, the State really sucks, as gods go.
Update: via Gerard, this one went a completely unexpected direction:
Very, very well played, Justin Flom.
The TDI diesel is reliable, gets great gas mileage, has decent power, and is available in a manual transmission. Automatic transmissions are as exciting as government entitlements to me. Your mileage may vary. Also, I would certainly have preferred to buy a Ford, except that Ford doesn’t seem to care fig #1 about the commuter market, not offering a diesel below the F350, for my scant research before shopping. I am the customer. Hear me roar on my blog about your need to target me, Ford.
It’s hard for bailed-out GM to compete using $28/hour legacy auto assemblers when VW and other non-union transplants are paying $14-19/hour and (more important) don’t have to deal with UAW-negotiated work rules.
The UAW’s regulations, in 2008, resembled ObamaCare, and for the same reason: both are about preventing the thing they claim to facilitate.
Would #OccupyResoluteDesk and the Abominable Joe-man unleash the NRLB to screw over VW? Hm. The Toyota fracas of a couple years ago, and the Boeing kerfuffle in South Carolina: why, yes: yes, they might. They have to take time off from selling T-Shirts, but yeah.
Update:Best Social Program has linked and abused me at length for Un-American Activities. Sniff.
Once upon a time in the not too distant past, there was a blogger who linked furiously to The Other McCain, and made frequent note of this in the comments. Unfortunately, this blogger used Blogger, and as we all know, WordPress hates Blogger and doesn’t recognize its links. Which is why I encourage people to e-mail me their links – because sometimes WordPress doesn’t even like WordPress. Sadly, this blogger never quite got around to sending in their links, and their furious linking went unacknowledged in the FMJRA.
Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! There will be no FMJRA next week (unless Smitty can take a break from his feverish posting pace to pinch-hit) as I will be in the arctic wastelands of the Great American Desert for about a week.
HARAHAN, Louisiana UPDATE 9:29 p.m. CT: While the exit polls had indicated a double-digit margin for Rick Santorum, few suspected that he could beat Mitt Romney here by more than 20 points but, with 65% of precincts reporting, it’s Santorum 49% to Romney’s 26%. Santorum staffers here say they don’t expect that margin to shrink much.
UPDATE 10:05 p.m. CT: The Harris sisters, who sing the Santorum campaign song “Game On,” just arrived at the victory party. And, via Talking Points Memo, here is video of Santorum’s victory speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin:
“We don’t believe, as the pundits have said, that this race is over. We didn’t get the memo . . . We’re still here. We’re still fighting. . . . I’m not running as a conservative candidate for president. I am the conservative candidate for president.”
UPDATE 8:10 p.m. CT: The suspense didn’t last long. The networks called it for Rick Santorum as soon as the polls closed. The key now will be the margin of victory.
UPDATE 8:48 p.m. CT: Fox News is currently showing Santorum winning by 16 points, 44% to 28% for Romney, with 19% for Gingrich and 6% for Paul with 15% of precincts reporting.
According to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office, it’s 45%-28%, and also currently: 335 votes for Buddy Roemer, 157 votes for Rick Perry, 72 votes for Michele Bachmann and 29 votes for Jon Huntsman.
UPDATE 9:15 p.m. CT: The lead widens: With 57% of precincts reporting, Santorum leads by 23 points, 49%-26%, Gingrich trailing in third at 17%. Also: Buddy Roemer remains firmly in fifth place.
UPDATE 7:50 p.m. CT: We have exit polls via Fox News and it looks like an easy double-digit win for Santorum. He beats Romney 54%-22% among evangelicals, 46%-30% among Tea Party supporters, 47%-30% among conservatives.
PREVIOUSLY (7:30 p.m. CT): We are at the Fox & Hound pub here for the Rick Santorum campaign Louisiana victory party. Polls close at 8 p.m. CT (9 p.m. ET), and it’s expected to be a big win for Rick. Fox News will immediately provide the Team Mitt spin, minimizing the significance of this Santorum victory.
People have asked me why so many people in the media — including many in the conservative media — have joined the “Roll Over for Romney” crowd when, despite all the spin about “inevitability,” Mitt’s still got less than 600 delegates and Santorum keeps winning primaries and caucuses. It’s mainly bandwagon psychology. Once the political press corps gets an idea into its collective hive-mind, the Conventional Wisdom congeals quickly.
Team Romney has been pushing the “inevitability” argument ever since the Florida primary Jan. 31, and on March 7 — the Wednesday after Super Tuesday — they rolled out their delegate-count calculus (which involved some dubious assumptions about apportionment of delegates) to assert that Mitt had already effectively clinched the nomination.
The media eagerly bought into that and, so far as Fox News and much of the conservative media are concerned, the attiude now seems to be, “Hurry up and get this silly nomination thing over with, so we can get on to the big Romney vs. Obama showdown.”
Team Romney has been trying to scare people with dire warnings about what a disaster it would be for Republicans if Romney comes into the GOP convention without the 1,144 delegates needed to win on the first ballot, and so Santorum has been getting dismissive coverage from Fox for the past couple of weeks.
When Santorum complained about this treatment last week, it seemed the bias at Fox actually got worse. For a few days, Santorum got almost zero coverage from Fox, and very few conservative bloggers have objected to what is clearly an unfair and unbalanced attitude at the network. Now let’s take this moment to count up Santorum’s victories:
That’s 10 Santorum victories so far over Mr. Inevitable. To this point, according to the Associated Press, Santorum has amassed 263 delegates, and now he’s poised to win the Louisiana primary.
Expect the talking heads on Fox News tonight to talk a lot about how only 20 of Louisiana’s 46 delegates were at stake in today’s vote. Louisiana has a two-step system, and the remaining delegates will be awarded at the state GOP convention in June. But like all the “non-binding” chatter we heard after Santorum’s Feb. 7 “trifecta” victories, this is just a bunch of bullshitRomney spin.
An aide to Cheney said he had been waiting for a transplant for more than 20 months and does not know the identity of the heart donor.
“Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift,” aide Kara Ahern said in a written statement that was authenticated by several close associates of the former vice president.
Cheney was recovering Saturday night at the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., after surgery earlier in the day.
Hopefully Cheney can recover and get back out on the road with Dread Zeppelin without breaking this heart too quickly:
Is that Troglopundit on lead guitar?
Twitchy points out that #OccupyResoluteDesk is hawking T-Shirts on Twitter. One is briefly moved to sympathy, in the vicinity of the right clavicle, that the re-election campaign fundraising is going so poorly that the President of the United States is reduced to vending T-Shirts like somebody on the road with Phish:
If I wasn’t
Too worried about the economic future of the country, and
Focusing what spare contribution money I do have on non-sucktacular candidates,
I might nearly be moved to support the poor wee crypto-Marxist despoiler of our liberties. Because #ILikeObamaCare that much.
Louisiana Santorum volunteer David with Lisa Graas in Central, La., March 24, 2012
CENTRAL, Louisiana
Mitt Romney’s got the big money and the big endorsements, but Rick Santorum has Lisa Graas who — with 6,835 Twitter followers and about 1,500 Facebook friends — has been a sort of social-media equalizer, helping lead an amazingly effective online grassroots campaign for her candidate. It was Lisa who urged me to cover Santorum’s campaign in Iowa back in August, when he was stuck in single digits in the polls and the media were ignoring him. When I showed up that Saturday in Roland, Iowa, at a barn in the middle of a cornfield, I called Lisa and handed my phone to the senator, who talked to her for more than 10 minutes — and that impressed me.
Rick Santorum talks to Lisa Graas in Roland, Iowa, Aug. 6, 2011
Ask anyone in politics: Nothing is more valuable to a campaign than the candidate’s time. The fact that Santorum was willing to spend 10 minutes on the phone with this Catholic blogger mom from Kentucky was an indicator that he understood the value of her online activism.
Lisa was 100% for Santorum at a time when almost no one believed he had a chance in Iowa — or anywhere else, for that matter.
Santorum understood the value of that kind of volunteer enthusiasm and he understood that encouraging volunteers like Lisa, at a time when there seemed to be so little cause for optimism, was an important part of his campaign. Continue reading Lisa Graas: Santorum’s Secret Weapon →
