Buy The Book

One of the better perks of having been around a while in the gay blogosphere is that, between the numerous and depressing bits of flotsam and jetsam, you do run into some rather unique individuals -- folks who are charming, funny, intelligent, and extraordinarily talented.

Such a man is Famous Author Rob Byrnes.

His latest novel, Straight Lies, is rapidly creeping its way up the charts and soon will supplant Harry Potter as the book most likely to be banned for encouraging witchcraft and devil worship. Or something. At any rate, buy and read it. Or watch Rob talk about it.

And remember, everything goes with cheap white wine.

We Get (More) Letters

Same ol' song and dance, though.

You're not posting at any where nere the rate you used to, is it because you have AIDS? Is that why you hate gays so much, you blame them for your own irresponsibility?

Followed a week later by:

Here's a link you might find useful.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/brochures/livingwithhiv.htm

Again, the amusement of watching the gay community using HIV status to demand sympathy on the one hand and insult and attack on the other never really gets old.

Sort of like their claims bemoaning suicide among gays while at the same time they busily encourage it.

Today's Public Service Announcement

How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You.

(aka Why John in IL is Living on Borrowed Time).

For No Particular Reason At All

Admit it. You knew you wanted to look like Chase and act like Angela.

And of course, as a former citizen of the Republic of, I am thus obligated to post this.

Opportunities for Hotness Lost #42,576

Here's another one of those, "Oh, if he only would get a haircut....."

Today's Nice Warm Fuzzy

Lovely.

In an online Spanish language chat room, people from all over the East Coast seek tips on how to get driver's licenses in Maryland even though they don't live there. Businesses run classified ads in Spanish-language publications in Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland urging "undocumented Hispanic friends" to take advantage of the opportunity to get Maryland ID without having to prove they're in the country legally.

Makes me feel a lot better about getting on an airplane.

My Own Personal TelePrompTer

Been pretty busy lately, so it's kind of nice when people, as has happened before, step in to write my copy for me.

You're not posting at any where nere the rate you used to, is it because you have AIDS? Is that why you hate gays so much, you blame them for your own irresponsibility?

Priya Lynn

It just sort of answers itself, doesn't it?

There's a Saying About This

Something about living by the sword......

What a Surprise!

It truly does boggle the mind.

Among the eight members named Friday to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry and the 10 senior policy aides who will assist them in their work, two own American models. Add the Treasury Department's special adviser to the task force and the total jumps to three.

Do we have any more takers for my new line of Obama Party bumper stickers?

Welcome to Ludicrous Land

Line of the day:

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass urged state employees facing layoffs to call Republican senators and press them to vote for the budget.

Obviously her primary concern is the state employees' unions that fill her campaign coffers, versus the constitutents that she's planning to soak with a massive tax increase.

The tax hikes include an increase of 1 cent on the dollar in the state sales tax, a 12-cent-a-gallon hike in the gasoline tax and a boost in vehicle licensing fees.

The measure also includes a one-time, 5-percent income tax surcharge for taxpayers who owe money to the state at the end of 2009.

My personal opinion: if 10,000 California state employees were abducted by aliens overnight, the next morning, state offices would operate exactly in the same fashion they do now -- late, surly, and patently incompetent.

What Bass and her fellow nitwits have not and will not figure out is that people have reached the price limit they are willing to pay for this state's shitty government. Californians are not opposed to premium prices; they are opposed to paying premium prices for pathetic services.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

The headline alone of this op-ed by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings tells the story.

I’M the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third.

Then, the next time a chief executive earns an eye-popping amount of money, we can cheer that half of it is going to pay for our soldiers, schools and security. Higher taxes on huge pay days can finance opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

Ah yes, another one of those lovely "billionaire whines that they should pay more in taxes" stories.

Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.

Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion (£26 billion), said: “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

My response: Messrs Buffett and Hastings, if you really, really want to give 50% of your assets to the US Treasury, be my guest. You certainly don't need the tax codes to be changed to do that; all you need to do is get a pen and write the damn check.

But of course, you're not doing that. You're getting up in front, you're blustering, you're posturing about how your secretary is (inexplicably) paying a higher tax rate than you are, but every April 15th, you're still only paying your 17.7% or whatever rate.

Put your money where your mouth is. If you want to pay 50% of your assets in taxes, pay it. No one's stopping you. No one's complaining. But if you did, that would actually require you to pay what you're demanding of others, and as we see from Daschle, Rangel, Franken, Solis, Geithner, and Obama, that is the last thing any good Obama Party member is ever going to do.

Can They Get Any Clearer?

One would think this would be enough.

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

That is, if you thought the concerns of the Obama Party actually had anything to do with the economy.

Savor the Irony

Rarely do examples this stark of the priorities of the Obama Party come along.

Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s support for aerial wolf-hunting has sparked a heated cross-country war of words between the governor and an environmental ad campaign fronted by the actress Ashley Judd, with Palin calling the organization funding the ads an “extreme fringe group.”

The squabble began Tuesday when the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund unveiled a campaign called “Eye on Palin,” targeting the governor for what they call her “extreme anti-conservation policies.”

The group is highlighting “Palin’s championing of the brutal and unnecessary aerial killing of wolves and other carnivores” — a controversial practice allowed by permit in Alaska since 2003, with the goal of protecting populations of moose and caribou.

My question: Why does Judd oppose the limited killing of wolves for logical and scientific reasons when she herself endorses the unlimited killing of humans for personal convenience?

Smoot-Who-Ley?

To paraphrase Santayana, those who choose to ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Smells Like Desperation

If there is one theme going through all the propaganda outlets of the Obama Party this week, it's why the government needs to waste billions of dollars on contraceptives, resodding the National Mall, and god knows what else instead of simply cutting taxes.

The stimulus is about one-third tax cuts and two-thirds government spending. The trade-off is fairly simple: Tax cuts work quickly but ineffectively, because much of the money is saved. Most government spending takes longer to implement, but generates more impact because the money is spent.

Um, according to the Obama Party's own chief economic advisor, bullshit.

A key issue facing the new Obama administration is to what extent the economic stimulus should take the form of spending increases versus tax reduction. One way to think about the issue is the size of the fiscal policy multipliers. The multipliers measure bang for the buck--the amount of short-run GDP expansion one gets from a dollar of spending hikes or tax cuts.

So what are these multipliers? In their new blog, Bob Hall and Susan Woodward look at spending increases from World War II and the Korean War and conclude that the government spending multiplier is about one: A dollar of government spending raises GDP by about a dollar. Similarly, the results in Valerie Ramey's research suggest a government spending multiplier of about 1.4. (Valerie does not present her results in multiplier form, but she emails me this translation: "The right column of figure 5A of my paper shows that for a log change of government spending of 1, log GDP rises by 0.28, implying an elasticity of 0.28. To back out the implied multiplier, we can use the fact that government spending averages around 20% of GDP. This implies a multiplier of 1.4.")

By contrast, recent research by Christina Romer and David Romer looks at tax changes and concludes that the tax multiplier is about three: A dollar of tax cuts raises GDP by about three dollars. The puzzle is that, taken together, these findings are inconsistent with the conventional Keynesian model. According to that model, taught even in my favorite textbook, spending multipliers necessarily exceed tax multipliers.

So when that blows up, again, the Obama Party Ministry of Propaganda mainstream media, starts with the ultimate scare tactic: we can't have tax cuts because Americans will save the money instead of spending it!

Americans are hunkering down and saving more. For a recession-battered economy, it couldn't be happening at a worse time.

Economists call it the "paradox of thrift." What's good for individuals — spending less, saving more — is bad for the economy when everyone does it.

Little did I know how much my grandparents hated America when they bought a house with cash and just used their old living room set; if they had been truly patriotic, they would have taken out a no-money-down subprime mortgage, maxed out their cards to fill it with furniture, and then demanded that their Social Security checks be increased to pay their interest costs.

And how evil and unpatriotic I am for buying a seven-year-old American-brand car with cash; had I really cared about the good of our country and self-sacrifice, I would have spent nine times the amount to impress the neighbors with an appropriate high-end brand, borrowed it all, and spent eight years paying through the nose for depreciation, interest, and insurance.

However, because of this treasonous behavior, our banks have one less toxic mortgage, bad credit card, and nonperforming auto loan -- and two rapidly-growing savings accounts. Meanwhile, my financial terrorism against the United States has made several hundred more dollars a month available for me to use in purchasing good, strong, dividend-paying value stocks and bonds.

In short, what we are doing is keeping toxic assets off the banks' books, injecting cash into the banking system, and providing companies and local entities with investment money for improvements. We are making all of these changes without it costing taxpayers a dime or requiring any bit of government intervention.

Which is likely why the Obama Party hates it.

Who Cares, As Long As It's Free?

Read and be frightened.

If Democrats learned anything from the HillaryCare defeat, it was the danger of admitting to their wish to federalize the health market. Since returning to power, they've pursued a new strategy: to stealthily and incrementally expand government control. "What no one is paying attention to in the [stimulus]," says Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, "is that Democrats are making a big grab at the health-care sector."

First grab: the children.

Initially designed for children of working-poor families, this new Super-Schip will be double in size, and even kids whose parents make $65,000 a year will be eligible.

Given that the US median average household income is just over $44,000 per year, that means that nearly 65% of American households qualify as "working-poor" and thus get free health insurance.

And the kicker:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million individuals will drop their private coverage for the public program.

Read that again. These are people who already HAVE health coverage; all they're doing is taking advantage of a government "freebie".

And yes, it does get worse.

Under "stimulus," Medicaid is now on offer not to just poor Americans, but Americans who have lost their jobs. And not just Americans who have lost their jobs, but their spouses and their children. And not Americans who recently lost their jobs, but those who lost jobs, say, early last year. And not just Americans who already lost their jobs, but those who will lose their jobs up to 2011. The federal government is graciously footing the whole bill. The legislation also forbids states to apply income tests in most cases.

House Democrat Henry Waxman was so thrilled by this blowout, it was left to Republicans to remind him that the very banking millionaires he dragged to the Hill last year for a grilling would now qualify for government aid. His response? A GOP proposal to limit subsidies to Americans with incomes under $1 million was accepted during markup, but had disappeared by final passage. In this new health-care nirvana, even the rich are welcome. CBO estimates? An additional 1.2 million on the federal Medicaid dime in 2009.

And if that wasn't enough:

The "stimulus" also hijacks Cobra, a program that lets the unemployed retain access to their former company health benefits -- usually for about 18 months. The new stimulus permits any former employee over the age of 55 to keep using Cobra right up until they qualify for Medicare at age 65. And here's the kicker: Whereas employees were previously responsible for paying their health premiums while on Cobra, now the feds will pay 65%. CBO estimates? Seven million Americans will have the feds mostly pay their insurance bills in 2009.

So let's see; the average COBRA cost is $1,069 per month, so times 65%, times seven million people, times ten years.

Oh well, that's only $4.8 billion a month, or $583 billion over ten years if you're counting -- plus the minor detail of tens of billions more on Medicaid. All on the taxpayer's dime, and all coming out of the pockets of working people, of course.

But what do the Obama Party nitwits pushing this care? They don't pay taxes.

Robbery By Any Other Name

Today's example of the Obama Party mentality, brought to you by liberal and self-determined Social Security expert Susan Alexander.

Let's exclude high rollers from receiving Social Security benefits. Affluent individuals can refuse to receive them, but many have chosen to take them instead, creating a glaring example of waste.

A means test that would exclude seniors who live in wealthy households could start us on the road to saving Social Security.

Problem is, Social Security already HAS a means test that is used to reduce benefits for the affluent; it's called the bend points.

PIA formula
For an individual who first becomes eligible for old-age insurance benefits or disability insurance benefits in 2009, or who dies in 2009 before becoming eligible for benefits, his/her PIA will be the sum of:
(a) 90 percent of the first $744 of his/her average indexed monthly earnings, plus
(b) 32 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $744 and through $4,483, plus
(c) 15 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $4,483

Put into English, what that means is that the more you earn, the less you get credited for it -- even though the more you earn, the more you pay into the system.

And where is the income threshold cutoff for what constitutes "affluent", at which point you have too much money and should start receiving proportionately less in benefits?

$8,928 per year.

In short, the Obama Party believes that the key to "saving" Social Security is to punish success on both ends; not only will those who earn more and pay in more get credited less, but now they'll have even that taken away if they dare to accumulate assets or retirement savings.

One can only hope that Susan Alexander gets the trip to Washington she so obviously deserves to advise Pelosi and Obama. It should be hailed as another example of Obama Party political brilliance to state to the public that they are going to take people who have worked, saved, and paid into the Social Security system at the highest rates for over forty years that they get no benefits -- especially as they put into power officials like Timothy Geithner who don't pay their Social Security taxes.

Who Needs Skills?

In this case, the title says it all.

The Stimulus: How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

And yes, it's real. Here's the video of Reich telling Congress the same thing.

I'm telling you, it makes me feel a whole lot better to drive over roads, cross bridges, and use telecommunication networks built by unskilled labor instead of skilled professionals. After all, remember; it's not the integrity of the structure that counts, it's the color of the person who built it.


(/sarc)

(h/t AoSHQ)

More "Name That Party!"

Read it. Then read more.

So let's review the situation here.

-- Send suggestive instant messages to former interns and be hounded out of office

-- Have romantic and sexual relationship with then AND former intern, lie about it yourself, tell said intern to lie about it, initiate full-blown coverup with things like hiring a person who just happens to know more than you would like about the relationship to a job as a city planner for which she's wholly unqualified....and nothing will happen.


I suppose the lesson here is either to go for the gusto -- or, if you want to prey on teenagers, change your party affiliation.

And It Can Get Worse

Much, MUCH worse.

The government wouldn’t be able to spend at least one-fourth of a proposed $825 billion economic stimulus plan until after 2010, according to a new report that suggests it may take longer than expected to boost the economy.

A Congressional Budget Office analysis of President Barack Obama’s plan found that most of the approximately $355 billion in proposed discretionary spending on highways, renewable energy and other initiatives wouldn’t be spent before 2011. The government would spend about $26 billion of the money this year and $110 billion more next year, the report said.

But wait, there's more!

The analysis suggests that much of the stimulus may not come until after the economy has begun to recover. The CBO has previously said it expected a “slow” recovery to begin later this year and that the economy will expand by a “modest” 1.5 percent in 2010.

That clinches it. This "stimulus" has nothing to do with the economy; it has EVERYTHING to do with increasing government spending and is using the recession as an excuse.


(h/t DrewM at Ace of Spades HQ)