Holy Joe and Iraq under Obama

Senator Lieberman has nothing but praise nowadays for the "Marxist" he was trashing alongside Palin a mere month ago.

Holy Joe predicts that the war in Iraq "will not be a divisive issue" within the Democratic tent and that "more normal times" are ahead. Michael J. Smith has a spot-on analysis of Holy Joe's comments:

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win Ben Stein's money by Andy K.

August 18 2007, Peter Schiff is being laughed at because he predicts that Wall Street is about to crash because of the subprime credit mess. Ben Stein tells Peter that he's full of shit. Then Ben Stein tells the viewer to go buy shares of stock in: Merril Lynch. Ben Stein says that Merril Lynch "is an astonishingly well-run company." When Ben Stein made this prediction, it was trading at $76 per share. Today, Merril is at $11 per share.

update on the U.S. dollar by Andy K.

The U.S. dollar has been doing very well since August (price of oil has crashed). It's a temporary illusion, and the U.S. dollar is about to crash. The reason that the dollar has done so well recently is because investors have fled the stock market as stocks have become worthless. Foreign investors are hoarding U.S. cash, but pretty soon that will be worthless too.



Things are about to get much worse...

upset by Obama's torture policy

Andrew Sullivan was rabidly pro-Obama. But he's appalled that torture apologist John Brennan is apparently on Obama's shortlist for CIA director...

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Bill Kristol approves

"His selection of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff suggests that Obama’s not going to be mindlessly leftist," - Bill Kristol, (editor of the Weekly Standard and apologist for all things Zionist).

The Fox Guarding the Henhouse by Andy K.

On Wall Street [and Las Vegas], the term "leverage" refers to an investor who takes out a loan and gambles with the borrowed money. Astonishingly, this reckless behavior is considered to be civilized and respectable. Ever since 1975, the law said that banks could not be leveraged more than 12 to 1. (For every $1 the Las Vegas drunk owned, he borrowed $12 to gamble with.) This 12 to 1 limit was called the "net capital rule." Starting in 2000, the big banks lobbied the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to remove the net capital rule. The SEC changed the rule in 2004, but not for the small banks; the new deregulation only applied to the biggest of the big banks, because the wise men who run the biggest banks are the most responsible. By 2008, Bear Stearns was leveraged 33 to 1; Merril Lynch was leveraged 40 to 1.

So who was the man who spearheaded this deregulation? Who was the man who personally lobbied the government to give Wall Street the rope it needed to hang itself with?

HANK PAULSON!!!!!!!!!!

"We and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital. This is the single most important factor in driving significant parts of our business offshore, so that our firms can remain competitive with our foreign competitors risk-based capital standards must become the norm. The SEC has made it clear that risk-based capital rules can be implemented only when the Commission is confident that firms employing value-at-risk models have robust credit and risk management policies in place."
-Goldman Sachs CEO Henry M. Paulson's testimony to the SEC on Feb 29, 2000

He's a wise man worthy of our trust and respect. He'll spend that $700 billion responsibly.

what the Dems (and Palin) won't tell you about oil

(U.S. energy policy in a nutshell: we are forced to buy oil from Saudi Arabia because our Texas oil is going to Singapore)



from Reuters:

American oil companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.

The biggest share of U.S. oil products exported went to Mexico, Canada, Chile, Singapore and Brazil.

The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

"We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country," President Bush told reporters this week. "We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home.

But environmentalists disagreed. "It doesn't look good to say: 'We need more oil.' But then export the refined products that you're getting. It doesn't seem to be consistent," said Jim Presswood, energy lobbyist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

U.S exports of diesel fuel in April averaged 387,000 barrels per day, up almost seven-fold from 59,000 barrels a day in the same month a year earlier.

U.S. gasoline shipments in April averaged 202,000 barrels a day, the most for the month since 1945, when America was sending fuel overseas to ease supply shortages in other countries during World War II. Gasoline exports in April 2007 were almost half at 116,000 barrels per day.

Daily U.S. gasoline exports to Canada skyrocketed to 41,000 barrels in January-April this year from 9,000 barrels in 2007.