Libertyblog

Deadwood Shitcanned

Another “unexpected” drop in private sector employment has some additional data of greater interest:

Private payrolls unexpectedly fell in March, according to data released Wednesday.

Private-sector jobs in the U.S. dropped by 23,000 this month, according to a national employment report published Wednesday by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy firm Macroeconomic Advisers.

[...]

One of the great surprises of the economic downturn that began 27 months ago is this: Businesses are producing only 3 percent fewer goods and services than they were at the end of 2007, yet Americans are working nearly 10 percent fewer hours because of a mix of layoffs and cutbacks in the workweek.

That means high-level gains in productivity — which in the long run is the key to a higher standard of living but in the short run contributes to sky-high unemployment. So long as employers can squeeze dramatically higher output from every worker, they won’t need to hire again despite the growing economy.

The purpose of an economy is to create wealth, not make-work jobs.

The Narcissist and the Do-Gooders

Shelby Steele on Obambi and Obambicare:

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and “the good”—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today’s liberalism is focused on “the good” more than on freedom. And ideas of “the good” are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson’s Great Society was grasping for moral authority after the civil rights movement. I doubt any white president could use it effectively today, and even ObamaCare passed by only a three vote margin in the House and with no Republican support at all. Worse, in the end, it passed not to bring the nation better health care but to pull a flailing Democratic presidency back from the brink.

There has always been a narcissistic charge around Mr. Obama, the sense that in embracing him one was embracing something special in oneself—and possibly even a larger idea of human perfectibility. Every politician wants this capacity to attract identification. But it is also a trap. What happens when people are embarrassed for having seen themselves in you?

The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory—a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him.

Not a Joke

The Obambots are giving one another certificates commemorating the nationalization of health care. (Via Hot Air.)

Nothing to See Here, Move Along!

A whitewash of farcical proportions:

A first investigation into e-mails leaked from one of the world’s leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved -- although it was based on just a single day of testimony.

The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming -- two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

However, lawmakers stressed that their report -- which was written after only a single day of oral testimony -- did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending. Phil Willis, the committee’s chairman, said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain’s next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month’s time.

“Clearly we would have liked to spend more time of this,” he said, before adding jokingly: “We had to get something out before we were sent packing.”

So the investigation of climate fraud follows the same pattern as the fraud itself: Start with a politically ordained result, accept data that supports the reult, ignore data that contradicts the result, and proclaim loudly that the result has been confirmed.

Reaping the Whirlwind

This story ignores the abortion question, but looks at the potential for violence against IRS employees now that we’ve redefined the state-citizen relationship:

The federal government is investigating dozens of death threats to IRS employees that have been posted online since the House passed the health care bill, FoxNews.com has learned.

The health care law has sparked protests on radical anti-tax and anti-government Web sites and within their private, password-protected e-mail lists and message boards. Some writers have labeled March 21 -- the day the House passed the bill – “Bloody Sunday,” and they see it as a call to violent action against IRS workers.

In the days following the House vote, animosity toward the IRS intensified, and many heated online protests included specific discussions about the best way to go about killing tax agents.

[...]

A federal probe has been launched into the comments. “We are actively investigating all threats made against IRS employees,” J. Russell George, treasury inspector general for tax administration, said in a statement to FoxNews.com Tuesday morning.

[...]

Now the agency’s expanded role under the health care law has sparked a new wave of animosity toward its employees, which experts say has contributed to an unprecedentedly volatile atmosphere.

“The anger and resentment within the anti-tax movement towards the new health care is overwhelming,” said insurance analyst J.J. MacNab, who’s testified before Congress about the anti-tax movement. “Combine this legislation with the census arriving in everyone’s mailboxes and the fact that we’re heading into tax season, and this could be a really problematic month ahead.”

[...]

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said MacNab. “The health care bill could very well be the tipping point.”

Translation: Resisting the government is no longer the work of kooks and skinheads alone.

Coolest Job in the World?

Aircraft repo man. (Via InstaPundit.)

Suicide Bomber Politics

Obambi has compared Obambicare to Romneycare, which is to say a program that has not lived up to its promises and is hemorrhaging money. Whatever the political benefit of smacking Mitt, Obambi has lashed himself to the mast of his health plan and shouldn’t be inviting this comparison.

The American people will have more than two choices for president in 2012.

A New Definition of Radical Extremist

Anyone who’s still watching CNN.

Amateur

As in the case of the health care takeover bill, Obambi appears to have approved a nuclear arms pact without a common understanding of what it said.

Yeah, Baby

Chicks with guns. (Via Mary Katherine Ham.)