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Thingish Things

Bettors Sour on Debt Ceiling Deal

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 13•11

In Trade Market Chart

More than half of bettors on the Dublin-based InTrade Predictions Market are waging that a deal to raise the U.S. Federal Debt Limit will not be penned by July 31st.  Just 40% of bettors are bullish that a deal will get done by then (that percentage dropped eight points in the three or four minutes it took to scribble this post.)

The graph above shows just how much faith in the negotiations has eroded in recent weeks. There was virtually no market back in February when more than 90% of bettors believed a deal would get done.

In Trade bettors are more sanguine long-term, though.  Seventy-percent bet a deal will be cut by August 31st.  I bet they’re right. 

A Case that Cries for the Death Penalty

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 13•11

Leibby Kletzky, RIP. Photo by Paul Martinka

New York needs the death penalty back for cases like the one we read about today involving a murdered and mutilated eight-year-old boy in Brooklyn. The animal who did this needs to disappear.

Innocent people tragically have been put to death because of faulty trials, which gives any death penalty advocate pause, but in a case like this one, it seems — at this point anyway — there is a little doubt who committed the outrage.  The suspect had the little boy’s severed feet in his freezer and took police to the rest of the boy’s remains.

The U. S. military will dispatch dozens of enemy combatants today in Afghanistan.  It will drop bombs on Libya and target insurgents in Iraq because they represent opposing political interests. The overwhelming majority of Americans have no problem with that conceptually. But the full weight of the civil libertarians will come to bear to stop the killing of a sadistic child murderer.  I do not get it.

People who kidnap and murder children should not be allowed to walk the earth. Period. 

If found guilty, the suspect will be lucky.  There are very few Hasidim in prison.  They would tear him limb from limb, and they would be right to do it. 

 

Oceans 2012

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 13•11

http://youtu.be/I0tuAJkbUWU

It all really comes down to this speech, doesn’t it?

Kooky California Strikes Again

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 12•11

Concord High

It is bewildering to contemplate the mindset of California legislators.  They make New York officials sound sober by comparison.

San Francisco legislators, in Grinch-like fashion, banned “Happy Meals” in restaurants recently and will soon join Santa Monica in voting to prohibit the 6,000 year-old medical procedure and Jewish cultural ceremony, circumcision.  There is no religious exemption in the bill.  The state is planning to require drivers to blow into straws in moving vehicles to keep them operating.  Now, neighboring Concord, CA is considering a novel approach to reduce truancy. It plans to fine public school students and their parents up to $500 per day for playing hooky.

It is amazing how far afield California has wandered from the traditional notion of American government. It has already trodden on the rights of private businesses to freely market themselves — freedom of religion is next — so it is only natural that Concord would contemplate charging students not to attend school, which is effectively what it would be doing. 

There are lots of problems with this idea. Here is the most obvious: When the kids don’t pay, what is Concord going to do, suspend them? Or will they not allow them to graduate — the disengaged students they are hoping to matriculate? What other barriers to attendance can Concord construct?  

If it’s money they are after, Concord might be better off lowering the price of a day off.  If the city knocked it down to, say, $10, even good students might be willing to buy a few days off a year.  At $1 per day (Dollar Thursday’s?) the city could probably clear out all but the AV squad.  It could make a small fortune.

The bottom line is that government cannot make students who do not want to learn learn. Ridiculous ideas like fining recalcitrant students — fining their parents, disproportionately poor ones — only make that reality farcical as the law would be patently unenforceable. All it would do is create another California bureaucracy, which maybe is what the bill’s sponsor is after, Golden State style.   

California has got to get it together.

Sherwood Schwartz, RIP

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 12•11

It would seem wrong for someone of my generation not to note the death today of Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz. He was 94. I remember watching the very first Brady Bunch episode with my siblings in September 1969 in our apartment on East 93rd Street in Manhattan.  We were excited to watch this “brand new series” for kids and it didn’t let us down.  

Sherwood Schwartz.  The name is seared into my brain.  And it comes with music, doo, da, doo, da, doo, doo… 

And oh, Mary Anne.

 

Obama’s Scare Tactic

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 12•11

President Obama, in a clear and calculating move, reached low into the political bag of tricks Tuesday in choosing to unnecessarily terrify millions of senior citizens about their Social Security checks.  It was a low blow for a president who is better than that.

The President told CBS News’s Scott Pelley that he cannot guarantee Social Security payments beginning August 3rd.  That is nonsense, and the President knows it.  Even if the U.S. were to fail to raise the debt ceiling, Social Security payments will be able to flow.  The country would just begin paying interest-only on its debt while discussions continue.

This move reminds me of Mayor David Dinkins in New York City warning the public — in the middle of an historic 1992 crime wave — that he would be forced to extinguish every other street light because of budget cuts. It was a preposterous bluff. But even more than that, it was mean to city seniors frightened by their own shadows at the time.  Dinkins backed off and cut something else. 

My money says President backtracks by 5 pm Eastern on this one.  If he doesn’t, he will be showing that there is  a real Chicago politician in him. 

Quote of the Day, Mitch McConnell

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 12•11

from washingtonindependent.com

 

“…After years of discussions and months of negotiations, I have little question that as long as this president is in the Oval Office, a real solution [to the federal deficit] is unattainable.” — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, July 12, 2011

Huntsman Shows Life; Goes Negative

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 12•11

photo from dailycaller.com

The one thing you don’t want to be in a crowded presidential field is the front runner.  The front runner gets all the media scrutiny and all the attacks from the also rans.  Mugging the front-runner on camera is how one gets attention in a race where one is being ignored. Members of the media covering his campaign will cover your campaign’s attack.

A case in point is former Utah Governor and Ambassador to China John Huntsman, who launched a rhetorical assault in South Carolina last night against national Republican front runner Mitt Romney.  He is pressing that attack today. Huntsman, who has been invisible since entering the race in dramatic fashion a couple of weeks back, and who has been taking tough criticism in the press for his tepid roll out, is now arguing that Romney’s economic record as governor of Massachusetts wasn’t as hot as Romney is suggesting. Romney’s campaign is trying to answer that assault without giving Huntsman — and his charge —  too many headlines. It is a tricky balance.  Ask John Kerry, whose campaign let the Swiftboat issue catch fire.  

This will all be labeled as “negative” campaigning, of course, but it is really just campaigning 101. It will be interesting to see how deftly Team Romney can deflect Huntsman’s attack.  And it will be interesting to see how Huntsman prosecutes it. 

 

The Uppity Red Chinese

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 11•11

American Flying Tiger Pilots in Burma

The Chinese are starting to piss me off.  Not the people; The People’s Republic. 

Today, they publicly lectured U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, charging that America should spend less on its military for the sake of the taxpayers.

First of all, hah!, ha!, ha!, ha!

And secondly, screw you.

The Chinese didn’t criticize the U.S. military when it defeated the Imperial Japanese Army – the one occupying China — 66 years ago. And their Nationalist government gladly accepted the help of America’s Flying Tigers volunteers in Burma before that.   When Red China secretly entered the  Korean War on the side of North Korea a few years later, our taxpayers were more than happy to pay for the ammunition to beat the ungrateful  nation back to its borders. Maybe they are still angry about that. 

Today China is getting downright uppity.  They presume to instruct our President not to accept the Dalai Lama in the White House.  They criticize our economic policies, and now our military, both of which are vastly superior to theirs.  And why? Because they have cheap labor.  China has no other remarkable economic attributes. What do they make themselves?  What are their latest inventions? After gunpowder, noodles, and the abacus, I can think of nothing.  Red China is a nation led by blueprint thieves and counterfeiters.

I would put 10 Chinese-American entrepreneurs against 1,000 Chinese nationals  any day.   Because economic freedom – the freedom to think and take risk – is what builds a great nation.  This China will never know that. Not under its current authoritarian government.

The Chinese may hold a lot of our debt, but that doesn’t give them the right to lecture us.  They buy our debt because it is still the best bet on earth. There are two reasons for that, economic freedom and a military that can back it up in all corners of the globe, even in the South China Sea. 

Admiral Mullen should have flipped his Chinese counterpart the bird. 

Lessons of Our Fathers; Bad News for the Economy

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jul• 11•11

I’m no economist.  But I know how I spend.  And if that is any measure, it is going to be long time before this economy fully recovers. Decades possibly.

There is nothing President Obama or Congress can do to change that.  Like so many Americans, I have been burned financially and it has forever altered my thinking, in ways large and small.  

Take this weekend.  A niece and nephew came to my house on Saturday for a slumber party with my youngest daughter. “Where should we bring them?,” my wife asked. “How about we stay here,” I replied. It was purely a financial decision.  Did we really need to go somewhere?  Little kids will have fun together anywhere.  Why pay for what they will have for free, each other’s company? (Okay, we broke down and took them out for ice cream.)

For me to think that way – and I think that way all the time now – is a big problem.  I always have been lousy with money, a retailer’s dream. But less and less so now.  In fact, I don’t think I will ever spend money the way I once did. It would seem wasteful, immoral even.

I know that thinking.  I was raised with it. My father was a product of The Depression and we were raised not to waste.  Whenever my family went somewhere – to a park, a high school track meet, or the movies – we never bought the extra thing.  We were fortunate enough to go the event itself, but we never found ourselves at the concession stand.  Not once.  Saying “no thank you” was ingrained in our vernacular.  It was automatic everywhere we went, as was finishing every pea on the plate.  We went out to dinner once a year – on Mother’s Day, with my Scottish stepmother complaining all the way.

My father started life in solid circumstances.  His father was a banker and his grandfather was a prolific author and an ambassador under three U.S. presidents.  They were of the fortunate and educated class in 1923, when my father came into the world.  But his father’s untimely death from Parkinson’s Disease, followed by the Great Depression, cleaned his family out and indelibly changed his view of the world.  My father was the only one of his siblings able to finish college. He won a scholarship to Notre Dame, where his grandfather once chaired the English Department.   His older brother had to leave Georgetown to support the family, and other siblings went right  to work. After graduating from Notre Dame– and some heavy combat in Europe – my father won another scholarship, this one to Harvard Business School, but he could not accept it.  He needed to work to chip in for family expenses and to stay alive.

And work he did, unfailingly providing everything and more for his family.  But he never wasted money.  He still doesn’t at age 88, because he knows better.  He remembers.

A generation later, one of his children forgot that lesson for a while.  He remembers it now and will not overlook it again.  I suspect there are a lot of me’s among today’s 312 million Americans, people who temporarily forgot the lessons of their parents and grandparents.   

It is going to be long time before this economy fully recovers. But heck, we’ll survive.