#1
Words cannot express the utter stupidity and self-destructiveness of US policy in allying itself to the rabble of Ouattara and his friends. What government in Africa will ever trust or deal openly with such a maniacal formulation of national interest on the part of the US. The US is at war in Africa. To win, or survive, requires helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies. What imp of the perverse can have gotten things so wrong; and so often?
The current imp is obvious, who doesn't want a win, in the conventional sense. But screwups in Africa didn't start in 2008, either.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/03/2011 6:20 Comments ||
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#2
It's early. the first paragraph should've been in italics, as a quote.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/03/2011 6:22 Comments ||
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#3
The current imp is obvious, who doesn't want a win, in the conventional sense. But screwups in Africa didn't start in 2008, either.
Posted by Bobby
A comment I originally posted at Paterico that I thought might be deserving in its own right.
At first I had a hard time figuringMSNBC out. Then the answer finally dawned on me. If you want to keep the bad stuff out of everyday life, you give it a place to go. That is why we have sewers, they keep the streets cleaner. We need to have an MSNBC to act as a sump for all that stuff or we would be seeing it in the places we actually watch.
Comcast is actually doing us all a favor by providing that venue and by concentrating all that crap in one location where it is easily avoided. I can choose not to watch MSNBC and I can avoid the worst of these lunatics for my entire life.
Thanks, Comcast, for providing us with the sewer that MSNBC is and keeping the rest of the airwaves a little cleaner. Its a dirty job, but thankfully someone does it.
#2
Maddeningly Inexact because unemployed are not a single uniform population. There are, at least two axes: financial & attitude to leisure.
(1) Financial: all the possibilities between two extremes.
(a) People content with material benefits provided by welfare.
(b) People who want a lot more.
(2) Leisure
(a) People who can live without working.
(b) People who can't.
Let me sum up: Zero's re-election might be related to unemployment, but it might not.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/03/2011 6:00 Comments ||
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#4
It's all 'funemployment' anyway.
Not too many places on Earth where you get paid not to work for up to 99 weeks.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/03/2011 9:03 Comments ||
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#5
Yeah, when people couldn't explain the data showing the retrograde motion of planets in the sky and continued to insist upon an earth centric model of the universe they came up with some pretty bizarre rationales for the 'inexact relationship'.
Exactly, there is something wrong when the workforce participation rate for a region is 67.5% and the unemployment rate is 12%. Does that mean 20.5% of the workforce has fallen off the radar by exhausting their unemployment or quit looking for work?
The unemployment rate is a phony statistic, if you look at the way it is calculated, it uses the number of new claims and existing claims, ignores those who exhaust benefits,etc...
The true picture is that in Riverside where I live the employment participation rate is 67.5% which means we have an unemployment rate of 31.5%. The true unemployment rate in the US is at or above the unemployment rate during the Great Depression.
The media will never use the "D" word to describe the economy with the ONE as president. If we had a Republican President, the word "depression" would have been on the front page two years ago.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
06/03/2011 10:46 Comments ||
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#7
When the Soviet Union collapsed the bureaucrats in the CIA were 'surprised'. That's because they kept reading the reports submitted by the apparatchiks in the Soviet bureaucracy that wrote the 'good story' their bosses wanted to hear. The same behavior is in play now as the party and faithful shills keep this BS up. We can take what little comfort there'll be when they're 'surprised' as our world collapses too.
#8
This article is a perfect example of a writer ignoring the 800lb baby elephant in the room.
The key is the graphs at the bottom of the article. Several have near horizontal slopes (i.e. change in one variable has almost no effect on the other).
However 2 charts have near 45 degree slopes:
Incumbant party's margin of victory/defeat vs change in unemployment rate.
President seaking re-election's margin of victory/defeat vs change in unemployment rate.
Both of those charts are relevant to 2012, and both should worry the democrats. In fact the 2nd chart indicates that even if the unemployment rate declines slightly, the incumbant still has a less than 50% chance of winning.
In short these charts indicate that Barack needs to get the unemployment rate below 7% to have a better than even chance of winning.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
06/03/2011 12:28 Comments ||
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#9
RE #6: Does that mean 20.5% of the workforce has fallen off the radar by exhausting their unemployment or quit looking for work?
If it's 67.5% of the total poulation, the other 20.5% might be mommies, kiddies, and baby bunnies.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/03/2011 14:52 Comments ||
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The United States is currently involved in three warson the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in and around the Libyan theater. President Obama has talked about a civilian surge, but alas, his administration has had trouble filling the slots. Heres one reason: Shortly before I began blogging for Commentary, I wrote a short blog post for the Corner at National Review Online in which I looked at the tremendous inefficiency at the Defense Security Service (DISCO).
While the Office of Personnel Management reports that the average time of security clearances declined from 153 days in 2007 to 47 days in 2010, this is creative accounting. One of the cases I have followed involves a secret clearance. The investigation was straight forward and involved no surprises. Yet it has taken more than nine months after the conclusion of the investigation for an adjudicator to look at the file.
Its not an issue of borderline security (no criminal history, no financial problems, etc.), but rather one of lazy supervisors. Rather than take 47 days, DISCO is sitting on cases for over a year. In effect they are lying to Congress by massaging their reporting statistics to focus not on their complete job, but one phase. One security professional explained that the DISCO facility involved is moving states, and its employees are conducting a bloated bureaucratic equivalent of the blue flu. So much for being a nation at war.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
