Fraydog Blog Log
Friday, January 16, 2004
New Website
Visit fraydog.typepad.com and you can see what I'm up to on my new, enhanced, state-of-the-art weblog! Change your links accordingly, because in 30 days this blog will not be here any more.
Thanks,
Ryan Fraley
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Russert on Leno
Basically, he's stating that the Clintons want Howard "the Duck" Dean to get the Democratic Party nomination. Interesting stuff, from a guy that's pretty smart.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Bitter Former Treasury Secretary cries that Iraq war "was planned before 9/11".
Expectedly, the left is howing about this. Really, if it is true, though, it should be true. If the Democrats weren't so out of whack right now - Bush would be seriously challengeable. This is why political dynasties are a bad idea.
Speaking of Howard the Duck...
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that Gephardt is starting to pull even in Iowa and Clark is close to doing the same in New Hampshire. Could Howard the Duck be quacking his last in this campaign? Holy cow, Batman! Stay tuned! Same Bat-Channel, but probably not the Same Bat-Time!
F'n Kerry puts foot in mouth again
InstaPundit's Glenn Renyolds has the details. Damn, just when he was starting to get traction and the Duck was starting to slip.
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
California versus business
People on the left need to read people like Thomas Sowell with an open mind. This is a good column to start. Professor Sowell basically documents the attitude of dedicated anti-capitalists like Mr. Dick, and the people like him on the Board of Supervisors in California:
One executive said: "When you look at the Board of Supervisors and how they talk about business, you'd think we were the enemy." Another said: "The city's lost 60,000 jobs and yet many members of the Board (of Supervisors) are doing everything they can to prevent job growth." He added: "The Board of Supervisors has to cut it out and start acting like adults."
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Two takes on Rubinomics
George Will waxes poetic on it, while Jack Kemp disregards it.
Here's my take: I agree with Robert Rubin on the problems that deficits can cause. However, I disagree with the method of hiking taxes that he encouraged to deal with the problem. It's funny in a way, that a capital gains tax cut that Clinton signed in 1997 actually was one of the hallmarks of the government's first balanced budget in a very long time. I disagree with Rubin on the methodology here. I think that effectively postioned tax cuts, such as the ones on capital gains and dividends that have been passed under Clinton and Dubya, can deal with the problems better than tax hixes do, which actually hurt in the long-term, because they cut off investment, which in turn lowers tax revenue. The only method that can balance a budget then is to cut spending more sharply than first anticipated. Rubin rightly condemns the spending spree going on in Washington by both political parties, but then prescribes the wrong remedy. People in America are already overtaxed. Letting that noose free will deal with the deficit problem...but only if we cut spending, that is.
When loonies go shrill: exhibit no. 522 - today's Krugman column
You know that someone gets shrill when they pile on fellow Democrats, one example being Paul Krugman piling on former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin.
Even if deficits can cause the financial markets to lose confidence in American capitalism (not that likely unless it causes the government to default), it is because of the exponential pace that spending is increasing, a belief that I share with Rubin and differ with Krugman.
Howard the Duck blames Bush Tax Cuts for cancer
Well, almost. He did say that the Bush tax cuts lead to higher taxes for the middle class. However, as John Adams said, "facts are stubborn things", and Rich Lowry explains that this is no exeception:
To maintain that the benefit of these tax cuts has been wiped away, Dean has to blame everything bad in the country — up to, but not including, tooth decay — on the Bush tax cuts. One of his theories is that President Bush has had to drastically cut various government programs to make up for the lost revenues, which is funny because all the Democrats are simultaneously blaming the federal deficit on the Bush tax cuts — exactly because Bush has done nothing to restrain spending.
Hitler Socialism Revue
The next time someone says something to the effect of:
Hitler was no socialist, he was for authoritarian corporatism.
Simply use Hitler's own words against these little proto-facists:
"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." --Adolf Hitler
Sounds just like the socialists of today, doesn't it?
Monday, January 05, 2004
A Democrat tells it like it is
You might be wondering, "Did Fraydog just have a minor typo there?" No. Zell Miller of Georgia basically summed it up better than any Republican pundit could about Howard Dean, John Kerry, Terry McAwful (he actually used that nickname for DNC chair Terry McAuliffe in the title of the op-ed), and the other Dwarf contenders (or maybe should I say pretenders instead.)
WSJ: Memo to Terry McAwful by Zell Miller, Democratic Senator from Georgia.
MOONBAT ALERT!!! MOONBAT ALERT!!!
The moonbat meter has officially gone from yellow to orange at the Official Moonbat Threat Level. What causes this you might might ask?
Maybe moveon.org ads comparing Bush to Hitler? Maybe!
Also, at the time of this posting, the domain moveon.org returned a 404 message. It will be back up soon, because these moonbats can't just stop pushing their hatred. They must keep on going, because it's part of their being. Maybe I should have named this post "hater alert" because they would also be player haters as well.
Friday, January 02, 2004
"God endorses Bush", says Pat Robertson
Speaking of endorsements, I wouldn't be surprised if God did back Bush, even in spite of the President's faults. Yet, I do question any prediction that matches the conventional wisdom that is spewed inside the Beltway. This should be for reasons that are fairly obvious, mainly because I've seen enough times that the CW inside the Beltway is completely off base. Hindsight is 20/20, but I do think that this prediction seems fairly obvious. Yes, Howard the Duck seems vain to me if he leaves the Episcopalian denomination because of a bike path, but I've seen too much happen to say that the election is a signed, sealed, and delivered.
Barry Lynn, the fool that he is, has to chime in at the end of the story:
The Rev. (yeah, like Jesse Jackson is) Barry W. Lynn, a frequent Robertson critic and executive director of Americans United for Taking God Out of the Public Square, said he had a prediction of his own: "Pat Robertson in 2004 will continue to use his multimillion broadcasting empire to promote George Bush and other Republican candidates."
In a reference to Bush's political adviser, Lynn said, "Maybe Pat got a message from Karl Rove (search) and thought it was from God."
Oh, really? Remember this rule when dealing with liberals: When they criticize someone, they are usually telling more about themselves than those they criticize. Therefore, I guess that he thinks that God is backing Dean because he gets messages from Paul Krugman in the New York Times and thinks that they're from God.
Krugman endorses Dean
I was going to chop down Krugman's lack of logic, but Q and O already did it. Don Luskin also chimes in about the ethical quandry that Doktor Herrprofessor might have backed himself into:
As I read it, that's not a violation of the New York Times' Code of Conduct. After all, the Times ran it, so they must approve of it. The Code of Conductdeals with endorsements outside the pages of the paper which the Times can't control. And I'm an eye-witness to one such ethics violation -- and I've got it on tape.
Katy bar the door...spending goes through the roof again in 2003
That especially includes nondiscretionary spending, go figure. This isn't good long-term economics, and it isn't going to inspire a lot of confidence from Wall Street and foreign investors. See the details here, courtesy of the Heritage Foundation's Brian Reidl.
Howard the Duck wants to take a hike...from you
Stephen Moore illustrates how Howard wants to raise your taxes...yes, even on you low income college students (from 10% to 15%).
Some formula for election this is. For those of you opposing tuition hikes, you should oppose this too. Not only does he want to implement state socialism, he wants the poor to pay more for it. Go figure.
National Review shows Christian roots
NRO gives props to Jesus in interviewing Anthony DeStefano. This is a must read column.
Also, check out Larry Kudlow's column on the economy while you're there.
More bad news for the Democrats
If 54 economists are correct, you can say goodbye to the specter of a jobless recovery. I'd say that the "jobless recovery" is an urban legend anyway, but now any talk of it can officially cease with the coming of a new year.
Bovine feed monitored closely after Mad Cow incident
Personally, I don't think they monitor the feed closely enough. Maybe it would take something like this to show that feeding the cattle other dead cattle is just bad economics.
Saddam dental inspection leads to inspection of N. Korea nuke sites
Yup, another victory for the doctrine of "sometimes, you have to fight to negotiate a more lasting peace."
U.S. grounds British flights from London to D.C.
It turns out that our friends the Brits aren't being surrender monkeys like the French. Thank God.
More details are here.
Almanacs!!! Bloody Almanacs
This morning, I was firing up my computer from the two day break I took for New Year's Day, and got this rather hysterical message about almanacs from one of my liberal friends who is also the president of the student body at my school Southern Illlinois University Carbondale:
Below is a story fresh out of the REAL news. So laugh it up as you call us
"unpatriotic" and "paranoid", we're certainly laughing at you. It's the
almanac people; THE ALMANAC!!!!
What followed was this news story about almanacs from the AP wires:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.
Now my liberal friend would normally suspect people like me to be paranoid about things like this. Why then, did it sound like he was paranoid? There could be a coulple of logical explanations for this:
1. Somebody from the FBI with a bone to pick with the Bush Administration leaked this so it would be a political football the liberals, namely Democrats, could use against Bush.
2. It could very well be that terrorist communications were intercepted where almanacs were being planned as tools in a terrorist attack.
Now, any source of information that's valid could be used to plan a terrorist attack. That includes almanacs. Now to both my friends at the FBI and the Loony Left, it isn't necessarily that having an almanac would indicate being a terrorist, but it is how these tools can be used. Much like a religious holy book like the Quaran, the Torah, or the Bible, the information inside can be used for the great benefit of humanity, or it can be used to hurt life and peace. It's all in the context of how these books are being used.
Likely, you have a situation here where almancs were being detected as being used by terrorists by intelligence sources, and you will also have the Left using the story as a political football against President Bush. Much like the supposed connection of the Green Party being linked to terrorism (something I doubt, but it all depends how closely linked they are to organizations like ISM who should be classified as terrorist organizations), it's going to be hysteria on the Left about this, which will make them look even more silly (as if they didn't look that way anyway.)
