Libertyblog

This Is How Futures Markets Get Started

Like the dividing line between those to be rewarded and those to be punished by government taxation, the percentage of Supreme Court cases to be decided other than by law under Obambi’s new order is up for grabs. It has moved (here and here) from 5% to 1%.

Peggy Noonan on Obambi’s Substitute for Government Spending

I think I said approximately this (the Obambi part) a few weeks back:

Whoever is elected Tuesday, his freedom in office will be limited. Mr. Obama is out of money and Mr. McCain is out of army, so what might be assumed to be the worst impulses of each -- big spender, big scrapper -- will be circumscribed by reality. In Mr. Obama’s case, energy will likely be diverted to other issues. He will raise taxes, of course, but he may also feel forced to bow to a clamorous base with the nonspending items they favor: the rewriting of union law to force greater unionization of smaller shops, for instance, and a return to a "fairness doctrine" that would limit free speech on the air.

Carrying the “Fingertip Formation” Thing a Little Too Far

A Blue Angel engages in a little probe-and-drogue refueling:

The U.S. Navy Blue Angels will be down one jet for the rest of its season after two members were removed from duty for an inappropriate relationship.

Capt. Tyson Dunkelberger, a spokesman for the flight demonstration team, said Thursday the squadron will finish its last three airshows next month — one in Texas and two in Florida — with five jets instead of six.

Dunkelberger would not identify the two members involved but said the relationship was between a man and a woman. All six of the F-18 stunt pilots are men, and 23 of the squadron’s 133 members are women.

Dunkelberger says a military administrative hearing will be held to determine further disciplinary actions, which could include removal from the military.

I’m sure they really loved being called "stunt pilots."

As to keeping the aviator’s name secret, that will last until the day of their next show. They have a website listing all the members.

Is the guilty party Lt Mark Swinger? That would be too much.

Grueling

Check out this schedule:

She received a small stipend over the past year for working six hours a week as a volunteer resident health advocate in her complex, he said.

That’s Obambi’s aunt, a 56-year-old Boston public housing resident. The article calls her "a Kenyan woman," with no further clues about her citizenship status.

The Silver Lining for McCain

Before Obambi’s economic plan, what’s the last thing most Americans were offered that seemed too good to be true? A really nice house and a really great mortgage ...

“Selfish”

Obambi’s new word for those who would like to keep what they have earned. (Via Drudge.)

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave ...

The latest version of reality from Helen the Bureaucrat’s office:

Vanessa Niekamp said that when was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.

Niekamp didn’t know she just had checked on "Joe the Plumber," who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain’s example in a debate of an average American.

The senior manager would not learn about "Joe" for another week, when she said her boss informed her and directed her to write an e-mail stating her computer check was a legitimate inquiry.

The reason Niekamp said she was given for checking if there was a child-support case on Wurzelbacher does not match the reason given by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are "thrust into the public spotlight," amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.

Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. "I’ve never done that before, I don’t know of anybody in my office who does that and I don’t remember anyone ever doing that," she said today.

Add another zero to that lawsuit demand, JTP! (Via Drudge.)

Do I Hear $120,000?

Bill Richardson offers yet another Obambite dividing line between rich and poor. This is now fluctuating more than the stock market. What number will be pulled from their asses tomorrow?

From Affordable Socialism to Unaffordable Socialism

Charles Krauthammer turns to domestic policy in making the case for McCain:

McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment -- a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.

[...]

This [union card check, Fairness Doctrine, judging on "empathy," not law, and an unprecedented expansion of government power] is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.

This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-redistributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.

The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.

I would argue that it damned well is socialism, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. As Brit Hume argued with Krauthammer, asking the wealthy to pay for traditional government (roads, defense, courts, etc.) is vastly different than asking the wealthy to write checks to poor people for housing and food. We’re already doing too much of it. McCain offers the status quo, Obambi a vast expansion.

Phoning It In

George Will omits a few details from his take on campaign finance regulation and this campaign:

McCain revived a familiar villain -- "huge amounts" of political money -- when Barack Obama announced that he had received contributions of $150 million in September. "The dam is broken," said McCain, whose constitutional carelessness involves wanting to multiply impediments to people who want to participate in politics by contributing to candidates -- people such as the 632,000 first-time givers to Obama in September.

Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We’re now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans’ freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.

Will ought to try reading something other than the MSM outlets that run his stuff. The law’s treatment of small donations, and Obambi’s credit card laxity, have allowed the Messiah to take (a) foreign donations and (b) large donations from contributors making multiple untracked disbursements.

The "632,000 first-time givers" aren’t really all first-time givers, and the average contribution isn’t really "$86."

Will’s own modest demands for a campaign finance system include a ban on foreign donations and full disclosure of who gave what. Obambi isn’t meeting those standards. Indeed he has gone out of his way to dodge them.

Will’s opposition to McCain’s stupidity has fomented some of his own.