New "smart" biology to eliminate aging. It reminds me of the stories about the 100 mph carburetors that are suppressed by GM and Big Oil, only in this case, it would have to be suppressed by Democrats, who would have nothing left to offer us by taxing our children to pay for it. If we didn't age, would anybody retire? Wouldn't we find life so boring, stupid and maddeningly intransigent that we'd long to die?

Or would we just go back and retrain for a new career, thus prolonging the inevitable?

Hey, that's right! He DID promise millions of new jobs! Where are they?

Los Angeles "is fast becoming a job-killing machine."

Paul Krugman is again demanding more stimulus spending, calling the first round "The Stimulus Trap, because it was inadequate and thus ineffective, leading opponents of record deficits to decry failure.

The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship.

I guess you have to be a Nobel winning economist to see with that kind of "clarity." The problem I've always had with Keynesian theory is that it works like a Chinese finger trap, a novelty device that is easy to put one's fingers into, but when one tries to withdraw them, clamps down and holds faster the harder one pulls.

Then, Krugman makes the Obama equivalent of the argument for the Surge: bigger deficits and "just have resolve and patience."

Even if I believed him, I'd have trouble giving the Democrats any more time. They should stew in their own promises. It is July now, not January, and this argument that "the size of the recession we inherited from our evil predecessors is proving bigger than we thought," is hardly encouraging when we were promised that unemployment would be on the way down by now. I'd really prefer that we follow Senator Reid's approach and declare the war lost and give this new bunch the same treatment they gave Bush, not out of spite, but because I think we're better off with a Congress bent on cutting spending to match revenues than with one that balances the budget by raising taxes to match the wasteful deficits they've run up in the past.

Maybe Keynes' theory of stimulus spending should be renamed the Keynesian Fiscal Trap (wouldn't want to unfairly blame the Chinese), since deficit spending is very easy, but balancing the budget and getting back to earlier spending levels is almost impossible, given the realities of American politics. Every spending program has thousands of constituents who complain loudly if it is cut, while the savings of such cuts are so diluted across the entire taxpayer base that it seems a petty amount being saved. Thus spending escalates, while accountability fails, and we nudge ever closer to the day when our notes become not worth a Continental.

Tax cuts have been shown to produce real stimulus, but since this approach doesn't involve new spending, the modern Democrats will never support it. Therefore, look for candidates who will, then watch them to make sure they don't fall victim to Potomac Fever.

I'm shocked, shocked!

Of course, this shouldn't be a partisan issue. It's about corruption and abuse of influence, but if we really cared about such things, we wouldn't have elected a community organizers from the South side of Chicago as president, and Hawaii wouldn't keep re-electing this old bull.

Google announces an OS to compete with Windows. Good! We can hope that Microsoft now has a competitor it can't bully out of business. Competition benefits consumers and makes products better. If Google can really innovate in this arena, we'll see, but right now there's reason to hope.

Is it just me, or is Obama starting to resemble the guy on the Cream of Wheat box, but without the chef's toque?

And come to think of it, how come we still have so many African American figures as trademarks for food products? Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Cream of Wheat dude? Those are the only people of African descent I knew in my deprived childhood, which is probably why I never had any prejudices towards them. They were all friendly and stood for good eats.

Now, I'm more afraid of brown people for fear that they'll hate me for being white. I just wish we could find some easier appellation than references to their ancestry like "African American" and less dismissive sounding than "black." Of course, the best think would be if there weren't any names for the races, but you have to know all of them these days to fill out the census forms.

Hearing Andy Morriss talk about this study, on a replay of an old Dennis Miller show today reminded me of Nancy Pelosi's confidant claim for the Cap and Trade Bill that it could be summed up in four words, "Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs!" I'm sure she was thinking of Congressional Seats more than real jobs, because as Dennis commented, "These are the green jobs Americans won't do."

Todd Zywicki:

Imagine a man in California who speculated in real estate at the height of the housing bubble. He bought a house with no money down and an adjustable-rate mortgage. But before he could flip that house for a profit, the market collapsed. He then owed more than his house was worth, but he knew that under his state's laws it would be impossible for his bank to sue him for the balance of his loan if he abandoned the house to foreclosure.

What is this man likely to do?

I hadn't realized that California law prevents lenders from suing borrowers for deficiencies from foreclosures. It's a wonder California isn't in worse trouble.

Joel Kotkin has some interesting thoughts about where California is headed and why the Democratic Party is less the party of the working man today and more the party of the "entitled". I like his term, causists, for people who work in media to serve a cause rather than to serve the public. They assume that they are sacrificing for the good of the country by promoting an outdated and disproven ideology, with the sense that they're struggling against the tide.

If they had any sense, they'd examine the press as it was back before it became an extension of The New York Times, and realize that it is contrary to the republican form of government for the people not to be given a wide spectrum of opinion. Of course, once you're in the cocoon where you think reality is the way all your acquaintances think it is, you must think America has achieved its greatest promise.

Christina Hoff Sommers has an explanation for why this recession has hurt men more than women, namely that there isn't any "masculinist" movement with comparable clout to the feminists.

What caused the Fannie-Freddie debacle? The article emphasizes that this is a Republican report with Republican conclusions (that government involvement in pressuring F&F to make more risky loans contributed to the mess), as if it can't, therefore, be trusted. But how hard is it to figure that out?

A report in the WSJ recently says that the foreclosure crisis if mostly due to zero-down-payment mortgages. Who would have guessed that, just because people don't stand to lose anything by letting their house be foreclosed on, they would just let it go? Apparently home-ownership isn't the religious experience that Barney Frank believed. Americans don't seem to have the sense of honor that Fannie and Freddy and the rest were counting on. Instead, they're acting in their own self-interest. Somebody should write a book about how that works.

The cure for liberal jerks turning everything into a political soapbox.

Do we want to become an incivil society? Too late.

Apparently, Michael Jackson will not be placed in a crystal casket and kept on permanent display, like Lenin. But the weirdness still won't let him go.

I'm no economist, but it seems to me that when the government dictates things like renewable energy, you're going to get overcharged for it.

Pretty much what I figured, about Palin's resignation. If all those conservatives piling abuse on her now had set up a defense fund instead of plotting her future for her, she might not have needed to withdraw. Let this be a lesson to you suckers who think that anybody can grow up to become president. Not without support from big money.

Forgive me if the nuances escape me. The WSJ explains:

What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007? The evidence from a huge national database containing millions of individual loans strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house -- that is, the balance of the mortgage is greater than the value of the house. This means that most government policies being discussed to remedy woes in the housing market are misdirected.. . .

. . . 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and . . . the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures.

But, I wonder, if the subprime mortgages hadn't been available would the prices of houses created a bubble, which in turn collapses and leaves a lot of people with negative equity? I guess that couldn't have happened if people had had to put 20% down at the start, which suggests that the old rule of thumb for bankers made some sense, at least for mortgage lenders.

Maybe Bono didn't get the message about meddling in Iran. It probably carries more weight than Obama's comments, as well.

And what's all this rubbish about "the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei." I thought the Koran says that all Muslims are equal and that, "those who divide their religion and break up into sects, you have no part in them in the least." By these verses, how can anybody who claims to be higher in authority than other Muslims and a leader of a sect of Islam be seen as holy?

Glenn Reynolds:

I’ve learned this by watching HGTV. On the one hand, I saw a rerun of a show on people buying their first house the other night. It was from 2007. The buying couple paid pretty much the asking price for an overpriced home. (Wife: “I think we’re getting ripped off, but I really like the house.”) Then at the closing they did a 100% loan.

Meanwhile, today on Real Estate Intervention, we see people who want way too much for their houses resisting any suggestion that they should drop the price, and hence having trouble selling. Watching them argue with the expert is simultaneously hilarious and infuriating.

People who paid too much for irrational reasons. People who ask too much for irrational reasons. Not surprising that things aren’t going well.

As I told someone a few months ago, the housing bubble was like a blimp with a huge tear near the top with the government trying to blow in enough helium at the bottom to keep it inflated.

A sobering assessment from a former citizen of Communist Slovenia.

Jennifer Rubin:

The White House is nothing if not dogged in its determination to use the “opportunity” which an economic crisis presents to remake the American economy. But for now, the opportunity is proving to be the undoing of the president’s credibility on the economy and reason for Democrats on the ballot in the next year or so to panic.

Barack Obama is a "community organizer," not a statesman or an economist or a foreign policy wonk. His whole world view is naive and shallow. It assumes that foreigners dislike us because they don't know how goodhearted we are, and that we are so rich as a nation that we can just divvie it all up and make each of us a millionaire. He has no real concept of where wealth comes from, only where government grants come from.

It's not his fault that he thinks like this. His whole party has based its politics on this kind of silliness, because in their recovered memories it was all proven true during the New Deal. They assume that conservatives oppose them just out of stinginess and unwillingness to share their bounty with others. The problem is that you can't become and stay rich as a society without everybody being willing to work, become educated, thrifty and prudent, and sacrifice for the future rather than consume the seed corn today.

This is Independence Day. We should all think about that. We didn't declare ourselves merely free of English government. We declared independence, which goes a step beyond freedom. It means that we took responsibility for ourselves, for our own sustenance, our own social welfare, peace, trade and government from that day forward. There was no going back, like a person in his twenties who has been unable to find a decent job and comes back to live with his parents. Independence means literally that you will not depend on anyone else hereafter. It's up to you. You know that and are willing to sink or swim.

Sadly, we are presently in thrall to a political theory that preaches more dependence, on the theory that the government just has to tax the richest of us and spread the wealth and all our problems will be over.

America has rewarded independence and initiative well, although we don't pay much attention to those who try again and again and never quite find the key. We have never had much use for the ne'er do well, presuming that if you worked hard and scrimped and saved and got your kids educated, they'd live better than you did. Today, we seem to have the attitude that we all deserve to have the best right now, and if we don't all have it good, well that's not fair or just. The problem with that promise is that it makes those who vote for it dependent on the politicians doing the promising, and most of what they promise us can't happen. They're pipe dreams, an appropriate term recalling to mind the opium pipes and dens where addicts once dreamed their lives away, spending their resources on more of the drug.

It's Independence Day. We should examine ourselves and ask how really independent we are.

Well, I have thought that if I were her, I'd bail on this nonsense. I admire people who run for public office out of a desire to serve the community, but politics has become so caustic, especially by those who think conservatism consists only of hate speech why they are justified in the most crude, vulgar, slimy and disgusting attacks on anyone whom they perceive as a threat to their hold on power, that I don't think a country that tolerates such nastiness deserves honest leaders.

Even as the announcement is still making its way through our consciousness, the politicos left and right are reviling and jeering Mrs. Palin, as though she had announced her candidacy for President in 2012, though she didn't. Perhaps she was unwise to agree to run with McCain, but I have never seen anybody besides George Bush subjected to such a blast of hatred and nastiness. You'd think she was threatening the future of all "progressives" just by her existence. She is too likable, photogenic and exemplary. She must not be allowed to live!

Imagine all the imps in hell gnashing their teeth and howling in rage, and you get a sense of how the left has reacted to her and violated every rule of decency and civility to destroy her.

Her family comes first. Good for her. It should. And if conservatives are angry that she has withdrawn, maybe they should reconsider what politics is for. Sarah Palin doesn't owe it to anybody to go through this sludge-storm any further. I have heard a lot of people discussing her strategy for 2012, but not her. Maybe she just got sick and tired of people presuming to tell her what she needs to do to meet their political purposes.

I especially like this comment from Glenn Reynolds: ". . . I don’t want to hear any of that dishonest have-you-no-decency posturing from the usual moral poseurs if that happens to somebody they like. They have sown the wind."

Indeed.

Gallup reports that the number of Americans who view the Democrats as "too liberal" is rising. If the Republicans would just wake up and nominate good candidates, they could come roaring back, but if they keep producing scandals and old, tired candidates, I'm afraid we're in for really really tough times.

So now giving fresh living flowers isn't green? Next time a large pine cone with instructions for inserting it where the sun don't shine.

Shouldn't they really change the name of their party? James Pethokoukis comments on how the Cap and Trade bill got passed:

One of Pelosi’s goals also was to get the bill passed without the votes of Democrats who might suffer at the polls in the 2010 midterm elections if they voted for the bill. (Many Democrats suffered for their BTU votes in the 1994 congressional elections when the Republicans won back the House.)

In other words they were trying to avoid honestly representing their constituents. Isn't that anti-democratic? More like Oligarchy? If they take my advice and change the name of the party, I would also suggest that they avoid any name signifying honesty.

Would a 28th Amendment do any good?

In my case, the question is rhetorical. The past 80 years have so transmogrified the federal government that I don't think there's any way to fix it. The cancer has metastasized, and the patient is losing ground fast.

I guess this is what is meant by the term Hobson's Choice. Congress isn't going to cut spending when the left has the best opportunity in a lifetime to impose their fondest schemes over the objections of Republicans, even as their policies continue to produce shrinking tax revenues.

Bamboo as a cash crop? Sounds fine to me, but I doubt that environmentalists will support it, because at root they're anti-capitalists using environmentalism as leverage to achieve a centrally controlled economy. They despise profits more than pollution. They will deny this, but if you examine their positions on most issues opposition to anybody making money is a common thread.

Why, for example, don't we have at least as many nuclear power plants as France? Why do they constantly press to impose by fiat technologies that are not competitive in free markets. They think they know better how to allocate resources that markets can, but their solutions are CAFE standards that result in automobiles that most Americans don't want because they're small and less safe. They insist that we build wind turbines for power when it can never be more than a marginal technology, but oppose nuclear energy on specious and overcautious grounds.