HALF-FULL REPORT 02/05/10

While Remember The Alamo tried to be a good synopsis of our memorable Rendezvous in San Antone, I saved the best line of the event for the HFR.

After all the dystopian discussion of how the Dems are driving us into financial ruin, Jack Kelly announced in his presentation:  "There’s a lot of talk nowadays about America becoming a banana republic.  Here’s the reality, folks – the whole world is becoming a banana republic."

Kelly’s prophecy came quickly into sharper focus this week.  Big time.

After a 853-point drop since Jan. 19, the Dow is plunging over the 10,000-point precipice.  Greece, as the HFR has been predicting, is dragging the Euro into a deep hole.  Next to fall in are Spain and Portugal. 

And now comes China.

The myth that the Chicoms magically turned their economy around on an instant dime – one minute double-digit GDP growth via the US gorging on their exports, the next minute the exports fall off a cliff as we stop buying yet they still have double-digit GDP growth via a hocus-pocus stimulation of their domestic economy – is a myth few big-time investors believe in now.

And finally, folks are figuring out that of all China’s bubbles – make-believe growth, stocks, real estate – the biggest of all is its gigantic pile of "dead money" – those $2.4 trillion of our alleged dollars.

How many countless times have you heard some pundit bemoan how much we "owe" China?  Yep, sure was stupid of  us.  We got all this stuff – as in real physical products we actually use in our lives – and they got all this paper, all these imaginary things called "T-bills" and such, and please explain how they cash them in.

Finally, bankers are figuring it out.  "There’s nowhere for China’s reserves to go," is the latest buzz in London’s City.  "How do they unload them without taking a trillion dollar haircut?"  And with the whiff, the merest whiff of the US defaulting on its debt, the Chicoms are running scared and retrenching.  Their attempted stimulus of their economy has run out of steam – any more would be like pushing on a string.

So they’ve pulled back on buying up the world’s commodities, which is why everything from copper to oil to soybeans is down – which is why, e.g., Brazil’s Bovespa index is down thousands of points as China isn’t buying its beans and iron ore.

It is intensely interesting to watch one person’s reaction to China’s multi-bubble problems.  Maybe it is out of sheer pique due to Chicom premier Wen Jinbao’s so purposefully and personally insulting him at Copenhagen – but Zero has suddenly decided to give the finger right back to Beijing.

I’ve been told that Zero’s going ahead with his scheduled White House meeting with the Dalai Lama on February 18, despite the furious Chicom demands that he not, is payback for Wen’s personal insult.

But meeting with the leader of Chinese-occupied Tibet is symbolism.  Selling $6.4 billion of US weaponry to Taiwan is real substance.  Then to infuriate the Chicoms even more, he follows this up (2/03) by demanding they revalue their undervalued currency.

Well, good for Zero.  Comeuppance is exactly what the Chicoms deserve.  If you’re puzzled by what’s going on, take a look at what Ralph Peters has to say this week.  He lauds Zero for having our drones kill lots of terrorists on the Af-Pak border – then notes it’s schizo to be "softer-than-Charmin" towards Moslem terrorist captives here at home.

What Zero is, more than a schiz, is a narcissist.  He takes things personally.  He made overtures to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  They gave him the finger.  Okay, they get drones in return.  Same with China.  I wonder what he’ll do with Iran… 

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch… what will he do with America, now that more Americans every day are flipping him the bird, including Dems on Capitol Hill trying to save their derrières in November?

ObamaCare has died – as even Zero himself admitted today (2/05) – and his insane $3.8 trillion proposed 2011 budget is DOA.   Republicans don’t have to tear this monster to shreds – the Dems will do it for them.  Runaway spending and runaway tax increases – dozens of them – is so clearly the most disastrous policy for an economy so deeply in recession and debt that it is pathological to believe otherwise.

Yet that’s all Zero – as a "faculty lounge Marxist" per Jack Kelly’s description – can think of to do.  He really doesn’t know how to think of anything else – like, say, lowering capital gains taxes instead of raising them as his budget does.  No wonder the Heritage Foundation’s budget analyst Brian Riedl calls this wreck "the most irresponsible budget" in US history.

And it got even more irresponsible this week with the disclosure that, rather than Social Security going cash-flow negative a few years from now, it is in the hole this year – as in now.  Social Security will need at least a $28 billion bailout by September 30.  It will put Zero’s impending financial catastrophe in neon lights – just in time for the November elections.

Maybe Zero is out to wreak havoc upon our economy in revenge for our no longer worshipping him.  But his efforts will backfire, for they will accelerate the entire Defund and Disobey movement.  This is not to advocate but to predict that one response will be a massive – massive – tax revolt.  Millions of Americans are going to stop paying their taxes.  And when tax collectors come, they will be met with guns.

If it doesn’t get this apocalyptic before November, it might not afterwards with a Republican House and Senate majority slamming the defunding brakes on Zero’s runaway train.

One of the more eye-opening signs that this may eventuate is that one of the most fascist and heretofore-impregnable senators – Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has become vulnerable.  He’s at a 10-year low of 47% approval and CNBC’s Larry Kudlow may run against him.

Schumer has been nothing but a professional politician his entire adult life.  After graduating from Harvard Law, he passed the NY bar but never practiced as he became a state assemblyman at age 23 (1974), then elected to the House in 1980 and the Senate in 1998 (defeating Al D’Amato).  He turns 60 this November and all he’s been is a political hack.

Kudlow is a top-flight free market economist.  If you’ve seen him on CNBC, you know how knowledgeable, quick-witted, and aggressively articulate he is.  He would wipe the floor with Schumer on the economy and jobs.

And if Schumer is in jeopardy – there isn’t a Dem on Capitol Hill who isn’t.

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Which includes the Senate’s Witch of the West, Barbara Boxer.  Vying to run against her are Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and Tom Campbell, a former Congressista and Arnold’s Director of Finance (plus state assemblyman Chuck DeVore).

Carly has targeted Campbell in this amazingly bizarre (and long) TV commercial, now known as the Demon Sheep Ad.  It is truly off the wall.  You have to see it to believe it.  But hey – it’s so kitchy-weird it just might work.  You have to admit, Carly swings for the bleachers.

***
Want another sign that the Dems are abandoning Zero’s agenda?  As you know, one of the Left’s Holy Grails is the homosexualization of the US military, to which Zero genuflected in his SOTU speech last week. 

Well, sorry, Galahad, no Grail this year.  Pelosi just got the word from Ike Skelton (D-MO), chairman of the Armed Services Committee to fuhgettaboutit.  Maybe a vote in the next Congress in 2011?  You mean, Nancy, when you’re no longer Madame Speaker?  Zero loses another one.

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And yet another sign.  This one’s a two-fer – both a demonstration of the pathological anti-capitalism of Democrats and of their hopeless desperation.  John F’n Kerry & Co are calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn the SCOTUS Citizens United decision that overturned McCain-Feingold restrictions on corporate campaign spending.

An Amendment?? This is Cloud Cuckoo-Land stuff, serious estrangement from reality.  Kerry is cracking up, the Dems are disintegrating.  And we’re barely into February.  Can you imagine what stage of derangement the Dems are going to be by summer?  By fall?

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But wait – there’s more!  Global Warming is deader than ObamaCare!  Even India is bailing out on the now-disgraced "Climate Change" UN outfit (the IPCC) that’s run by one of it’s own citizens.  It’s not just Climategate any more – every day now another fraud in "climate science" is uncovered.

(FYI:  the best compendium of all the on-going climate fraud is Marc Morano’s Climate Depot.)

This will not stop a lot of desperate folks who have staked so much on glowarming from trying to raise it from the grave.  Economist Walter Williams recently provided a list of them:

·        Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing ‘green cars.’ General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL).

·        Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies.

·        Thousands of major corporations around the world have taken steps to reduce carbon emissions including giants like IBM, Nike, Coca-Cola and BP, the oil giant. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Dell have vowed to become ‘carbon neutral.’

·        The Chicago Climate Futures Exchange plans to trade in billions of dollars of greenhouse gas emission allowances. Corporate America and labor unions, as well as their international counterparts have a huge multi-trillion dollar financial stake in the perpetuation of the global warming fraud.

That’s a lot of inertia.  But facts are stubborn things, and thanks to the Internet, more and more people are aware of them.  As these companies are unable to con their customers into buying ‘green’ products, they’ll soon abandon the effort.  Global Warming will stay put in its grave.

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It’s a grave that’s growing larger, with other political and ideological corpses being placed in it (perhaps Zero thinks doing so is the job of a "corpsman.")  ObamaCare.  Cap & Trade.  Homosexualizing the military.  A $3.8 trillion budget.  The entire Zero Agenda.

It’s a beautiful grave.  We weep crocodile tears at the funeral.