No, the edit probably isn't completely fair. Oh, well. Neither is life.

This video. I think it may be real, but I can't quite bring myself to be sure . . .



Of course, we don't really know if leprechauns are real, either . . . do we?

Remember this from my post of yesterday?

In less than fifteen years, these "entitlement" programs will consume all of the Federal Government's revenue. All of it. No more national defense, no more national parks, no more federal research grants, no more federal highway funds, no more air traffic control system, no more education grants, no more federally guaranteed loans or bank accounts, no more NPR, no more PBS. It will all be going to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Turns out that "less than fifteen years" was actually RIGHT THE HELL NOW.

Well, Federal Fiscal year 2012 . . . which starts in October, 2011. If Obama has his way, that is.

Here’s a stat for you: In President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget, the White House Office of Management and Budget estimates (in Table S-4) that mandatory spending this year (2011) will be $2.194 trillion, while total federal receipts will be $2.174 trillion.

Raise taxes? Oh, sure, that's a wonderful way of strangling an economy that's already struggling under the weight of excessive government intervention, high unemployment, skyrocketing energy prices, and an increasing tolerance of both governmental and private-sector corruption.

Entitlements will be cut. You might as well get your mind around that idea right now, because it's going to happen. And it can happen the easy way, or it can happen the hard way.

The easy way is the Tea Party way. The hard way is the Democratic Party way.

That's the bottom line. And there is no more avoiding the bottom line.

Choose.

Now.

In order to get the deficit down to 3 percent of GDP, not to balance the budget, you would have to confiscate around 80 percent of all income over $209,000--recall that the large majority of these taxpayers pay state income taxes too--which would destroy the economy . . .

Via Powerline.

An influential Silicon Valley venture capital company prepared a report entitled "USA, Inc." which analyzed the financial state of the United States, as if the USA were a company in which they were considering investment.

Download the entire 420-slide Powerpoint presentation entitled "USA, Inc." here.

It is not pretty. But we have to face the cold reality of the numbers.

We have promised with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid more than we can deliver. That is the bottom line. We will wind up breaking those promises. It is only a matter of when, and how. And on top of those empty promises, we lay out a new, equally undeliverable promise of universal free health care. A promise you can not deliver on has a name. That name is "a lie."

In less than fifteen years, these "entitlement" programs will consume all of the Federal Government's revenue. All of it. No more national defense, no more national parks, no more federal research grants, no more federal highway funds, no more air traffic control system, no more education grants, no more federally guaranteed loans or bank accounts, no more NPR, no more PBS. It will all be going to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We need to stop lying to ourselves. We need to fix this problem.

If we do it sooner, the pain will be less for everyone. If we wait, or try to pretend that we can somehow muddle through, the pain will be much greater, and the pain will be greatest for those who are least able to bear that pain.

Compassion demands that we fix this.

Now.

Reynolds' Law:

“Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.”

From The Professor himself:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Emphasis mine.

This is what "progressives" do not understand. Wealth does not cause social conditions. Wealth is an effect of social conditions.

Don't believe me?

Dump a million dollars on Egypt, and dump a million dollars on Utah, and see what each culture does with the money. Are you seriously willing to argue that in ten years Egypt will have turned that million dollars into a larger pile of wealth than Utah? Really?

How much foreign aid have we squandered on various totalitarian hell-holes around the world? What have we gotten for that "investment?" How much money have we spent on the "war on poverty?" Is there less or more poverty than there was when we started? (Hint: more. Go look it up.)

It's not the money. It's how you get it that differentiates "good money" from "bad money." Bad money is generally obtained by pointing a gun at someone else. This is how dictators and much of the current Democrat leadership believe money is obtained. They believe in the "zero sum game." They believe in "getting a bigger piece of the pie." They might give lip service to "making the pie bigger" but deep in their hearts, they really don't believe it--if they do believe it, they sure don't act like they do.

Good money is created (or "earned") by providing somebody else with some good or service that somebody else wants at a price that somebody else is willing to pay. This is the "classical liberal" belief, and it fueled the greatest expansion of wealth to the greatest number of people the world has ever seen.

Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple.

But, despite this dazzling success of the classical liberal economics of Ricardo and Smith and von Mises and Hayek and Friedman, we today face once more what seems to be the fundamental conflict of mankind's nature: the tension between those who believe wealth can only be obtained by force, and those who believe wealth must be earned by mutually beneficial trade.

This conflict has been clearly illustrated by the recent unpleasantness in Madison, Wisconsin.

So, which side are you on?

The fist, the club, and the gun, or the handshake, the contract, and the trade? The time for choosing is very, very near.

Forget the NCAA tournament! Forget the Japanese nuclear reactors melting down!

Rooster Sauce! It's what's for dinner!

From The Other McCain, in case you're really really horribly concerned about the multiple meltdowns happening (or not?) to Japanese nuclear power plants in the wake of the recent earthquake disaster:

My advice: Get some sleep. And when you wake up Sunday morning, go to Denny’s and have their Grand Slam breakfast while reading the local newspaper. Then go back home and drink a couple brews while watching a basketball game on TV. At that point, you can then safely log back onto the Internet and try to figure out what actually happened Saturday.

Free people should never, ever cave in to threats of violence if demands to sacrifice their freedoms are not met.

Volokh Conspiracy: Thugs Win Again:

This time they are pro-Israel thugs as opposed to extremist Muslim thugs (and various other thugs), but thugs are thugs. Here’s what happened; I quote Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign v. King County (W.D. Wash, decided last Friday): The county Department of Transportation in Seattle sells advertising on buses; the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign bought space for an anti-Israel ads: “The proposed ad read ‘Israeli War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars at Work,’ and featured a picture of children next to a bomb-damaged building.” When this hit the news, the Department got lots of objections, including “four [messages that] suggest[ed] an intention to disrupt or vandalize buses, four [that] communicate[d] violent intentions, [and] approximately twenty [that] express[ed] concern for rider safety.”
. . .

The Department then canceled the ad contract, partly based on these messages. And the federal District Court held that the action was likely constitutional, because the ad violated city policy that excluded ads that are “so objectionable under contemporary community standards as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of, or interference with the transportation system” or that are “directed at a person or group” and are “so insulting, degrading or offensive as to be reasonably foreseeable that [they] will incite or produce imminent lawless action in the form of retaliation, vandalism or other breach of public safety, peace and order.” This policy, the court said, was viewpoint-neutral and reasonable, when applied to this ad, because “The threats of violence and disruption from members of the public ... led bus drivers and law-enforcement officials to express safety concerns.”

Now on the one hand I sympathize with the Department’s safety concerns, and its desire to protect passengers. But on the other hand, behavior that gets rewarded — here, the making of threats — gets repeated.

The message is clear: If you want to stop speech that you dislike, just send a few threatening messages and you’ll win. You don’t actually need to act violently, and risk punishment for that. You could send the threats anonymously, in a way that makes it quite unlikely that you’ll be punished.

This is a travesty.

This is, if you think of it, exactly what the union people are doing in Madison to the citizens of Wisconsin--threatening them.

It is an extremely dangerous road to keep going down. We should probably stop. Before the threats begin turning into something much, much worse. I really, really do not want to live through a civil war.

People who threaten violence in order to advance their goals are outlaws, and should be treated as such. They should not be defended by the very laws they threaten to violate.

Two heros, actually.
The Honey Badger.

And Randall, the professional nature film narrator.

Not safe for work.



Via Ace of Spades HQ. Because Honey Badger don't care.

Man "forecloses" on Wells Fargo, wins judgment, attention of Wells Fargo managment.

Especially amusing is the poster (at the link) announcing the sherriff's sale of the Wells Fargo Home Mortgage office, in order to pay the guy's judgment award.

Definitely a "man bites dog" story.