For some on the left the answer is to give Obama the dictatorial powers he craves so he can “fix” our problems with his omniscient set of advisers (who have the least real-world experience of any set of presidential advisers ever). One of these was Woody Allen I admit but one was Thomas Friedman, a supposedly serious journalist with the NY Times. Yeah, great idea. Is it any wonder that we have an ongoing crisis of confidence? Or that the public approval of its legislators is at its lowest ebb? Things will turn up once confidence returns. Confidence will return once these clowns (we actually elected an actual clown to the Senate from my home state, and from my own high school) are sent packing and the ratio of those who are minimally serious and competent in Washington rises above the 10% or so it numbers currently.

Now comes the Secretary of he Interior, a cabinet official of the United States, appointed by the President. He apparently suggests in all seriousness that BP pay the salaries of those laid off because the US Government overreacts and stops all drilling?  This is so far outside what would be reasonable, so absolutely outrageous in its audacity and idiocy, that Ken Salazar should resign immediately or be fired by the President. You just cannot make this stuff up.  One more example of the horrifying lack of seriousness and gravitas of those who represent the interests of the polity in Washington.  To the right is a picture of this buffoon.

Of course what I have heard no one mention is that one of the great tragedies of this blown well is that we are losing all this oil! Jim Cramer was just on saying that his “oil people” are telling him this crude deposit is one of the greatest finds of all time. That is why the pressure is unmanageable. And it is all flowing out into the Gulf at this point. What a waste.

Now it is also pretty obvious that much of the gas you burn in your car is used in overcoming the inertia represented by the sizable mass of your vehicle at a full stop. So it stands to reason that if you did not come to a full stop where possible, you would use much less fuel. And if everyone did this, we could save millions of barrels of crude oil annually. Therefore we would send many fewer dollars abroad annually to people who want to kill us. It therefore seems that we should, as a matter of policy and law, treat all stop signs as slow down signs where possible.

Some may object that this would increase the number of accidents. It might. But I think people are smart enough that they will stop at intersections that pose a danger but can keep some of their momentum at intersections where there is clearly no other car or bike or pedestrian approaching. In any event, police departments could be trained not to issue rolling stop citations unless the motorist actually presented a danger to someone else.

In a market economy, it is not the responsibility of the government to provide jobs (a statement with which nearly everyone agrees, freaks from places like moveon.org notwithstanding). It is the responsibility of the government to provide an environment in which the people of the country can go about their business, which will collaterally result in creating jobs. So the government takes care of the national defense and provides an impartial system for the adjudication of disputes, which in our country is predicated on applying the same set of rules to similarly situated people similarly (unless you are a demunist, in which case the rules get applied depending on whether you are in one of their identified support groups or not, the nub of identity politics). This is something that statists, redistributionists and collectivists like Barack Obama and his Demunistic brethren fail to understand. The more they do to create jobs, the less likely it is that we will have sustainable job growth. They are destroyers. They destroy. If they really wanted to see jobs created, the best thing they can do is get the government the hell out of the way.

Click me (Soybeans Daily)!

President Barack Obama dared Republicans on Thursday to try to repeal his newly signed healthcare law… I don’t believe the American people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat. We’ve been there already. We’re not going back.

Riiiggghhht.  Because all of those 85% of people who are satisfied with their current health insurance arrangement would rather have the government in the driver’s seat than their insurance company.  A sick and twisted mind it is.   He actually thinks that it is preferable to have your health care dictated by the government, against whom there is no appeal and who wields the sovereign right of extortion (it is called taxation, and is in the end backed up by force), than a private company that you can fire or sue.  Simply amazing.  My mouth just gapes open when I hear this kind of stuff.

In a related bit of news reported here,  a Harris Poll, aptly critiqued for its methodological shoddiness by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal here, apparently finds 25% of Republicans think Obama is the AntiChrist.  I am not a Republican, though I have never voted for a Demunist in any election for any office, and I never will.  I also do not believe there is an AntiChrist.  But if there were an AntiChrist, I think Mr. Obama might just fit the bill.  Certainly he will be remembered that way once the whole house of cards comes crashing down because he threw the wet towel of state on top of it.

These days I have seen it as low as 8 minutes and regularly under 20 minutes.  Instead of bumping along at 5-15 MPH, I am hitting 70 and rarely under 20.  This has been going on now for some months.  Which indicates to me that there are very many fewer cars and trucks on the road into Downtown Chicago.  This further implies then that there is less shipping being done and fewer people going to or going home from work.  So when I see blow hards talking about a V-shaped recovery in the economy and how we will see 1300 in the S&P 500 this year, I have to scratch my head.  I told my father in November 2007 he should go to cash.  I also told him in November 2009 that he should go to cash because the S&P would stall somewhere between 1150 and 1200.  It barely hit 1150, but it was around 1150 for about a week, ample opportunity to lighten a portfolio.  I wrote him on Feb 18th to say that the recent bounce up from near 1040 to 1110 was another opportunity to get out.  I expect that this year we will be testing lows from last year as there is a new wave of Mortgage resets and foreclosures to come over the next 2 years.

Look at the chart below from T2 Partners via Amherst Securities.  Note how the market climbed as we were in the trough.  We are now climbing the hill.  The market is not going higher.

Instead he said that no jobs were created.  Now the average American will look at a statement like that and say to themselves, “um, obviously it did create some jobs.  This must be one of those nay-saying Republicans (like the media says) saying something demonstrably untrue that anyone can see at a glance is probably false.  So I guess we cannot trust those guys either.”  And of course the Left will run with such a statement to prove that Republicans are lying idiots.

Which brings us to Thursday’s trap setup.  Obviously Obama is trying to lay a trap to make Republicans look bad on Health Care.  If Republicans go into it with thoughtless language like Romney used at CPAC then they are going to get their hats handed to them and blunt the force they have going into the mid-terms in 8 months.  Hopefully whoever winds up going will take a page from the recent editorial by Newt Gingrich, which laid out a number of ideas for handling health care reform, and be well-prepared enough on why the Left’s ideas are dangerous not to sink the party’s fortunes this fall.

In the meantime, America’s  great medical entrepreneurs and doctors and scientists (some from outside America too) have figured out how to extend our lives to the point where we are now living not 2 – but 15, 20 or 30 years past the point where the government starts paying benefits.   So we need to either decrease life expectancies, which seems rather evil, or move the retirement age out to be in line with our ever-increasing life spans.  The blunder the government made at program inception (and one they seem to make with every program in one way or another, do they not ever learn anything?) was not to index the age at which benefits start to life expectancy.  It is just as stupid as not indexing other benefits for inflation.  The Germans have already taken steps to address this.  Are we less capable than Germany?  The obvious solution is to move the retirement age out to be more in line with increased life expectancy.  Is that so hard?  See here for a discussion of how some countries have done this.

Instead we have Demunists trying to take over health care which will have the nearly immediate effect of reducing life expectancies.  While that might help in the long run, it is not the optimal solution I would submit.  And it does not address the other driver of our entitlement crisis, the fact that health costs rise faster than economic growth.  It actually makes it worse.  The country senses this.  Is it any wonder that Commocrats will get wiped up in the fall elections?  Not that I trust the Republicans to do the right thing.   But with them any legislation will likely be only marginally destructive rather than utterly destructive as it will be under the Demunists.