JP Morgan And Squawking Class

You have three men in a room, a business man, a politician, and a bureaucrat.    What are the chances that either the politician or the bureaucrat ate the smartest person in the room?  Squat.   Only the business man got his job by perceived ability and demonstrated ability do his job.

A politician has little interest in anything other than his re-election and the bureaucrat’s only needed skill is the ability to blame-shift.

J.P. Morgan hired the best the brightest, and paid them very well, to manage their business.   Well at least in one case, the best and the brightest failed, and some will now be looking for a new job.   I have not read any explanation of how JP Morgan two billion dollar “London Whale” went down.

Yet dim witted politicians, like Barney Frank, and screaming that the solution is yet more regulation.    As banking is simply above Frank’s pay grade, how doss he purport to be able to write statutory law which would remedy a problem he does not understand?

Look at it like this, if you don’t like the way JP Morgan handles money, and such is your right, then don’t bank with them and don’t invest in them.   Simple.

JP Morgan lost two billion dollars.  The company survived.  The markets survived.  Individual managers did not.   In other words, the system worked.

Addendum I:  Peter Suderman, Reason:

Would tougher regulation of the financial sector have prevented JPMorgan’s loss? That’s not at all clear. The Washington Post‘s Allen Sloan, who favors many stricter financial sector rules, says that because there’s no likely loss to taxpayers, the blown deal proves mostly that the bank should be embarrassed. Bernstein argues that Dodd-Frank would have prevented the loss if “properly implemented and enforced.”

But “proper” implementation is always harder than it sounds. And I’m not sure we have any more reason to trust that regulators have the wisdom and judgment to prevent such losses any more or better than the bankers themselves.

Writing regulations, appointing regulators and enforcing regulations is not a process, at least in Washington, that does anything to create wisdom.

Addendum II:  from Johnathan Macey, Wall Street Journal:

Regulators, politicians and news reporters are hysterical at the news of J.P. Morgan’s recent $2 billion trading loss. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating to see whether laws were broken.

We appear to be on the verge of making it a crime for a business to lose money. The truth is that nobody should care about J.P. Morgan’s loss—nobody except J.P. Morgan stockholders

Regulators and reporters have no incentive to learn, because they not responsible for the money they lose.

As I write this, I’m taking a rest break, after having spent the week moving freight.  It’s I fear my writing for the blog has suffered; Ive not had nearly the time I’d have liked to capture thoughts and comment on the passing moronic parade. Of course I watch it about as closely as I ever have, and if anything I have the ability, given the time involved to spent more time formulating thought lines, but not nearly as much time capturing them for posting, here. Darned shame, really.

That said, I have managed to formulate some thoughts about the latest distraction, (for distraction it is).

Since Barack Obama’s cynically calculated bow to the homosexual lobby, much has been made of his intentions.  Much has been written.  Much has been said.  While most of these observations appear  to focus on one motivation solely, it seems to me that there are many motivations on the part of Obama and his people.  All of which, focus on the idea of getting the man reelected.  The probably  of success for these plans seems debatable.

When this move was first announced, I suggested that it was a diversionary tactic:

He simply can’t run on his record. The economy after 3 years of Obama is abysmal. Our foreign policy is nothing short of frightening. So he’s got to latch on to something else. He’s basically flailing around for a flotation device like a drowning man. The is really latest in a series of smokescreens.

Some have suggested that this is to keep Romney off of his game, (The economy, and foreign policy) and on social issues. There is some merit to this. Frankly, that has always been one of my objections to Romney is his tendency to try to pick two extremes and come up in the middle, and claiming whatever is there as his position. this makes from the a very poor choice to argue for or positions. This has a tendency to cause a certain number of flip flops before he finally settles down. Ironically, I would suggest that had Rick Santorum won the day, Obama would not’ve been able to try this. Santorum, whatever his faults are, would have told voters in no uncertain terms where he stood and that would be the end of it. The fact of the matter is, Santorum’s position on the matter is much closer to mainstream America that is Obama’s, and Romney trying to split the difference isn’t going to help him in the general election. (Thanks again, Centrists. You gave us, perhaps by design, the weaker choice of the two. )

Others have suggested that this is a way to get the base solidified around Obama. But will it do so? Probably not. Indeed the polls I’ve seen suggests that the only state this position is going to help women as Colorado. Maybe one of the New England states, New Hampshire for example. As for others such as Ohio of Virginia, Arizona Missouri and certainly in North Carolina for example, what we see here is a net loser for Mr. Obama and the Democrat Party.

Even among what is most certainly one of Mr. Obama score support groups, black voters, particularly, black church goers, Obama is in serious trouble. Consider the aforementioned North Carolina. It was here that such groups pushed Obama over the top in that state. Yet, it was these groups that pushed the entire homosexual marriage proposition to victory just recently, voting two to one in favor of the ban.

There are those who will suggest that Obama will retain the black vote regardless of his policies and positions. I tend to think better of the black community. The black voter’s smarter than the liberal media gives them credit for. The concept that black voters will vote for Obama simply because he’s black and ignore all else seems to me a singularly racist position to hold. It should be noted that the somewhat larger what e-mail community is similarly against Obama in this, and even assuming a racial loyalty factor amongst black voters, but to those are not as likely to be so swayed.

As an aside, there are those who will suggest that this is a “civil rights” issue. I suspect that among black voters that is a very unpopular line to take; proposing an equivalency between allowing homosexuals to marry, and blacks to be not slaves angers many blacks. While there are many Obama supporters who will claim that his stance will not cost in black votes, that assumption is that the very least, counter -intuitive.

As for raising support among independents, Obama struck out on that one too. The polling currently being runs suggests that he has seriously injured himself, here.

Then there’s the homosexual lobby which has flexed it’s muscle in the past. If there is much to suggest that Obama is wooing large campaign donors who support the homosexual lobby. That becomes something of a no -brainer when we see that Obama has been having trouble raising campaign cash of late.

It strikes me as laughable that Obama is being called courageous for having consulted with his political idea man before he was able to figure out what he “truly believes”, and what his “aha” moment has shown him. What we have here, is a cynical move by an extraordinarily cynical man, with nothing but political motivations on his mind. He wants power. He believes in an all powerful government.

At the end of the day, and like it or not, what we’re seeing here is an effort to buy a relative few to change the the culture by force of government. In reality, this is what Obama is supporting. He has, in effect, come out and stated that government should enforce rights, which he has identified… And I suppose not surprisingly those which he has identified, are those pushed by certain small subgroups within his base.

I suggest that granting “rights” is beyond the purview of government, even absent the issue of the culture’s approval of a particular position.

Consider my words from a few years ago;

So what is the purpose of government, anyway? No, I don’t mean what it evolved into, I mean rather it’s original purpose… the reason the concept of governments of any kind were even conceived of.

Some submit that government exists to protect privileges of a few, preserving a state of injustice for the majority.

Others hold the somewhat more optimistic view that the purpose of the state is to protect rights and to preserve justice. It appears to me that those questions form the arguments among the proponents of liberalism, libertarianism, socialism, conservatism and fascism, all at once.

I submit that all these four basic positions miss the point, because they generally don’t remember who it was who invented the concept of government…government of any kind, I mean… in first place. I should point out that in general, the ones who get it the closest are conservatives, but they are not spot on, either.)

Libertarians, mostly suggest, along with Jefferson, that “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.”, and that therefore, government exists for only one purpose, and that is to secure the unalienable rights of its citizens against violation.

Well… This is fine as far as it goes, but it ignores who created the concept of rights, and it thereby misses utterly, the best path to protect such rights. In doing so it ironically denies it’s adherents such protection.

And of course each of these groups has tended to abuse the power of government for their own ends.

To the end of answering overriding question of the purpose of government, (And thereby the question of what government needs to be doing today, and not doing, to remain legit) with any logic, we need to ask a few more questions:

1: Who invented the concept of government?

2: What purpose would that entity have had in such creation?

One way we can answer those two questions at once, would be to look at what existed as the most powerful force before government was invented, and therefore what was the most likely inventor of government: CULTURE.

If we make the logical assumption that governments were originally created by the individual cultures, then it follows that each culture constructed their respective governments in their own image… governments that best reflected and advanced each culture’s interests.

The original purpose of government, therefore, is to protect, nurture and defend, and if possible expand the influence of, the culture that gave it life. As such, to the greatest of degrees possible, each government’s laws, on the whole, were the culture, codified. It follows, then, that any government holding to the original purpose of government will perform this task.

Now, notice I said to the greatest degree possible. I freely admit… Trumpet, even, that there are no perfect governments, no perfect laws. No law, or government can ever capture in amber, a culture. Cultures are far more complex than any law, however written, can encompass. So it is that laws cannot be the end-call and be-all to a culture, or to a country. Laws when taken too literally and made to apply to all events uniformly, can instead of being just, will instead dispense injustice. It is said that in hell, there will be law and policy and little else. Yet, this imperfect tool did at least manage to provide a mechanism toward the intended purpose… The furtherance of the culture that founded said government. This understanding that there is imperfection in government implies that other values should supersede governmental power when the tool of government doesn’t fit the task at hand well. I submit the highest value applied here should be the values of the culture, not that of the law.

(Which, I would argue is why there are judges which read not only the wording of the laws but then intent of them.)

Now, I hear some of you balking at this, suggesting the right of the individual are paramount; a noble sentiment. But consider this immovable fact:

Rights are not universal.

Yep. That’s what I said…Read it again, just to be sure.

Rights are not universal.

Clearly, this will raise many questions on the part of some. This should answer most;

When Jefferson wrote that “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT” he was not speaking a universal truth at all. The operative word in that phrase is “WE”.

Rather than talking about a universal point of view, a universal truth, if you will, he was instead talking about the point of view of WE the new American culture. With this angle, many of the long-held myths about rights tend to disappear.

Consider; if it was in fact a universal truth that all men were created equal, it wouldn’t have been such a radical idea, for the time, much less then to now. Last I checked, it is quite true that a vast majority still do not consider these as any kind of truth, universal or otherwise; they consider them to be anything BUT self-evident. Royalty still exists, as do class structures, and slavery, as well.

Again, I say…Jefferson was speaking of the point of view of OUR culture, not that of others.

The fact of the matter is that RIGHTS ARE A CULTURAL CONCEPT, and are nigh on meaningless outside that construct. Once the culture is allowed to fall to the law, even in an attempt to impose rights where they do not exist, what happens to real rights, which are a cultural concept?

Did you catch the last paragraph? And go back and read it again.

The constitution is not designed to prevent society from exerting its will. It is designed to prevent the government from exerting its will. It is not a restriction on the people, it is a restriction on government. It is designed to be a limitation on government. Not on society.

Our founders also clearly recognized both in their daily actions and in their writings in the early days of our government that rights were not granted or guaranteed by government. The culture that founded this nation held that all men had writes that were provided by their creator. Government couldn’t touch those rights, to regulate them, but neither could they provide them.

If, then, by fiat of government, we grant as a “right”, that which has never before been a part of our society, thus overruling the culture what happens to the very concept of rights, which themselves are a cultural construct? It seems to me that when we buy legal fiat allow government to create a right to marry someone of the same sex, what we are doing is accepting the concept that government can create rights. That seems to me a very dangerous precedent, even absent the damage to the culture, Because the concept of where rights come from, is itself damaged.

There are those who will suggest that the comparison to slavery is valid on the basis that society approved of slavery. (Thus the strident comparisons by white homosexuals and their supporters,  to blacks and their “civil rights”.) I suggest once again that the context of that claim can be found on any stable floor, though doubtless, in lesser quantities.

I suggest the test cannot be made, since it never really came to a vote. There was no referendum on the matter. But I would suggest to you that a look into history tells us that there was certainly enough of a societal movement afoot that slavery would have ended even absent the Civil War, by about the turn of the last century, because of society exerting its voice, along with the business interests reacting to other countries not wanting to trade with slaveholders.

For that said, there is no such movement as regards the homosexual marriage issue… Either nationally, or internationally. And of course nationally such a referendum on the subject of homosexual marriage go down to defeat as something of a routine. The enforcement of such “rights” seems to me a corruption of government.

As I said back in the day;

Culture is by far a more powerful force than government, over time. Indeed; Where governments have gotten themselves into problems over the centuries, is invariably where governments have tried to alter the culture artificially, by means of law. Culture eventually triumphs.

I notice a trend, and I will leave it to your consideration; when the subject of “civil rights” comes up, invariably we’re talking about government overriding the culture. Since the purpose of any government which is to survive for very long, is to support and extend the influence of that culture that give it life, any government attempting to do so is in the end committing suicide.

I do quibble a bit with Mr. McCain, just a wee bit. Given the sorry history of the Pulitzer Prize, reporting out and out fiction is not a disqualification.

That said, Stacy is all over the Washington Post imploded hit piece of Mitt Romney, from Other McCain:

By God, you can’t do that in journalism: You cannot base a key element of a story — in this case, the claim that Romney’s bullying left Lauber emoitonally traumatized for life — on a quote from the deceased “victim” attributed to him based on an (alleged) private conversation. Lauber isn’t around to verify or dispute the accuracy of Seed’s account, and therefore it is unethical to include the “quotes” that Seed attributes to Lauber.

Stacy ain’t pretty, but neither is the sorry mess called the Washington Post.

Professor Ann Althouse posting as a member of the A-Team,  from Instapundit:

Just add in a sex change, and the libtards will be all for it.    Sterilization is just like a sex change, disabling perfectly useful equipment, but without adding the new, but useless parts.    Libtards  don’t mind sterilizing perfectly healthy people    So why would sterilizing a drug addict somehow offend them?

It is is well know, albeit denied by the media, that Barack “President Fifty-Seven States”  Obama is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.   Now in addition to being a moron, Obama, a/k/a Dumbo,  now appears to a gullible sap, from Bristol Palin:

Is anyone really surprised by the fact that President Obama came out of the closet for gay marriage? What was most surprising is when he explained how his position (supposedly) “evolved,” by talking to his wife and daughters:

[…]

So let me get this straight – it’s a problem if my mom listened too much to my dad, but it’s a heroic act if the President made a massive change in a policy position that could affect the entire nation after consulting with his teenage daughters?

While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.

Even if Malia and Sasha(1) prove brighter, less angry and more sober than their parents, they are still but children.   The idea that children reside in the realm of wisdom is a yarn best reserved for Walt Disney movies.

Sasha and Malia are mere children incapable of spinning a sophisticated argument   Bill Ayers is quite intelligent and can spin a very intricate arguments, see Dreams of My Father.    If Dumbo’s brain, such as it is, is incapable of resisting the arguments of his two children, just think of how easy it would be for a unrepentant terrorist and college professor like Bill Ayers to twist Dumbo’s mind.   Likewise think how much the hate monger Jeremiah Wright twisted Dumbo’s pliable mind in the twenty years Obama spent in Wright’s churck

If Dumbo can lead to the conclusion that homosexuality is good just because his daughters purport to know some homosexuals, what conclusion did Dumbo reach about terrorism spending all that time in Ayers’ living room, or about racial hatred spending all those Sunday’s in Wright’s church?.

1.    Barack Obama having submitted his two children, Sasha and Malia, as sources for his decision making, such as it is,  it is appropriate to examine Obama’s declared sources.    I’ll put like this,  Obama can not both claim his children as a source for his decision making and expect that they will be somehow off limits     If Obama does not want his children to the subject of blog posting, I advise the President to keep his children out of his political speeches.

More gems from the A-Team, Sarah Hoyt reports this gem from Fort Lee, NJ, via CBS New York (NFL(, from Instapundit:

Fort Lee’s police chief has seen his share of careless pedestrians texting or talking on the phone in his own town. He said he has counted 23 pedestrian accidents since January, ranging from minor bumps and bruises to three fatalities.

After trying pamphlets and brochures, he’s ordering his officers to ticket careless pedestrians on the spot.

“They’re not alert and they’re not watching what they’re doing,” Police Chief Thomas Ripoli told CBS 2?s Derricke Dennis. “As of now, they are to give summonses to pedestrians who do not adhere to crosswalks and the lights.”

Ms Hoyt:

As a frequent pedestrian, I should think the risk of getting killed if hit should be enough deterrent. If it isn’t, then big-nanny law enforcement won’t do it. You can see what’s next on this, right? Walking helmets. And bans on eating, reading, window shopping listening to music or talking on the phone while walking. Minding our own safety is too much for the likes of us. We must let nanny mind for us.

Gotta die of something.   As for me, I have no intention of dying a couch potato.

Having done some walking in my time,  I keep it simple,  two rules:

• One, never trust a four-wheeler
• Two, never surprise a four wheeler.

A four-wheeler is a car.  Bit will like the first rule.  I stole it off a trucker.   The second is my modification.

I now know more about Naomi Schaefer Riley.   She knows her subject, writes very well and  keeps her cool, from Wall Street Journal:

Thirty-five years later in a piece for the Minding the Campus website, former Berkeley Prof. John McWhorter noted that little had changed: “Too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.”

My critics have suggested that I do not believe the black experience in America is worthy of study. That is not true. It’s just that the best of this work rarely comes out of black studies departments. Scholars like Roland Fryer in Harvard’s economics department have done pathbreaking research on the causes of economic disparities between blacks and whites. And Eugene Genovese’s work on slavery and the role of religion in black American history retains its seminal role in the field decades after its publication.

The academic plantation left can not hold up to this women.   The more the plantation populations attack, Riley, the better she  looks.

Hat tip:  RS McCain.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if I scream at the top of my voice that a tail is as good as a leg, how many legs does as dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg, does not make it so. Like wise a demented fool like Ana Marie Cox can scream, rant and rave that some same sex marriage ought to be the equal of traditional, one man, one woman marriage.

I hold every child ought to have both a mother and a father, and not just one real parent.  Same sex marriage can never put a child into the same family as both his mother and his father. It is therefore not equal to traditional marriage, from Guardian(UK)

There are no pink processionals crowding the streets of Durham, and while my St Paul neighborhood sees a lot of pairs of women pushing one stroller down the street, I have yet to be invited to the big “WE ARE UNDERMINING THE FOUNDATIONS OF YOUR MORALITY” party, which social conservatives seem to imagine taking place just out of sight. The fact is, both of these initiatives are propelled less by the presence of an in-your-face homosexual “agenda” than by the gradual, inevitable, and growing normalization and acceptance of gays and lesbians as complete equals in our society. From the perspective of anti-equality activists, the flood waters – probably consisting of Evian – have already breached the dam. And these measures are life-rafts.

That baby in St. Paul has a father somewhere.    I, for say, that fathers are not disposable.  What say you?

The blog post that shock up the black plantation industry, sent them into a hissy fit and gave them the vapors.  Posted in full for archival purposes, from Naomi Schaefer Riley, Chronicle of Higher Education[sic]:

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.'” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

Reax:  Johnathan Last, Weekly Standard:

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education can fire and hire whomever it pleases—for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. That’s its business; that’s its prerogative. But the publication ought to at least have the sand to admit what it’s doing. They didn’t fire Naomi Schaefer Riley because of what she wrote. They fired her because their readers didn’t like it.

The great irony, of course, is that the whining and gnashing of teeth from the “Black Studies” crowd only reinforces Naomi’s point about the “discipline.” You’d never see chemists or physicists or mathematicians worked into a hysterical mob by a critical blog post. Because they study actual fields of knowledge—and don’t simply tend the garden of their own feelings.

Further reax, William E Jacobson, Legal Insurrection:

But after the petition and nasty online comments, McMillen gave in to the mob:

[…]

This sort of cowardly behavior is all too common. Witness the corporations who run at the slightest hint of a Color of Change or Media Matters boycott.

Rumor department has it that Ms McMillen will be renaming her blog from Brainstorm to Parrot.   That is if her masters, give her permission.

Even more reax:  Mollie Hemingway, Ricohet:

And how did academia respond to some extremely mild criticism? They flipped out. They kept flipping out. They lost their ever-living minds.

They claimed she was bullying kids (which is, apparently, what we now call people my age who are getting their doctorates). They were super upset that she hadn’t read the dissertations for a brief blog post riffing on a sidebar from a Chronicle article. (Really.) Then they thought she couldn’t criticize dissertations because she hasn’t written one (worse, perhaps, she’s written dissertation-length books that people have actually read and enjoyed). Finally, they said she was racist. One comment I read from the Chronicle web site suggested that Riley, who is white, really needed to sleep with a black man. A classy comment, I’m sure you’ll agree, even if Riley and her black husband weren’t expecting their third child in a few weeks.

Mrs. Riley addresses significant problems which plague the black population.   Yet in the long tirade, passed off as comments,  nobody actually takes issue these.   The comments seem intent protecting the black studies program, but rather indifferent to actually addressing any real problems besetting the black population.  How sad.

The  plantation masters need black studies program to help maintain the victim mindset, which will precludes blacks leaving the liberal plantation.   Nothing gets a black madder than a suggestion that he look in the mirror to see the source of  much of his own problems.

A very stupid,  dishonest and short man wrote:

Francois Hollande’s victory doesn’t and shouldn’t mean a movement toward socialism in Europe or elsewhere. Socialism isn’t the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations.

The answer is to reform capitalism. The world’s productivity revolution is outpacing the political will of rich societies to fairly distribute its benefits. The result is widening inequality coupled with slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment.

So say Robert Reich.    No  one who believes and understands a market economy, would babble about the [state directed] distribution of benefits.   Bruce McQuain takes the short one to the woodshed, from Questions and Observations:

And, apparently, the top 1% a) bury the money in cans in the back yard and b) don’t pay 37% of all income taxes collected (the top 5% pay 59%).  That’s just not sufficient anymore to keep the bottom 50%, who essentially pay no income taxes, in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.  And Reich thinks that’s wrong. However, and this is the whole point of his pitch, that’s not Socialism.

Really?  A “fair distribution of benefits” so neatly defines Socialism, I’m not sure what’s left to say

A market economy produces goods and services, which in turn support the standard of living.   A socialist, like Reich, can to see the goods and services because he blinded by envy.

When you see yourself as a messiah, it does not matter what you do.  from Neil Munro, Daily Caller:

Civil rights lawyers told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign managers may have violated employment law by hiring an overwhelmingly white office staff for his campaign headquarters in Chicago.

That skewed workforce is starkly visible in an April photo released by Obama’s Chicago office, which shows roughly 100 of the office’s staff.

Only two of the people in the photo, far in the back, are clearly African-American, far below their 13 percent of the national population, and their 33-percent representation in Chicago.

Imagine if this were John McCain or Mitt Romney’s staff.   Imagine if the Bush EEOC had filed a complaint.

It’s rather strange that Obama’s composite girlfriend matches Bill Ayers’s real one

Bookworm, Bookworm Room

Doug Mataconis, Outsde the Beltway:

As James Joyner noted on Tuesday, five Cleveland area men were arrested after plotting to blow up a bridge in the area. Last night the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that one of those five men had ties to the Cleveland branch of the Occupy movement:

[…]

You might also want to think about being a lot more careful about who you associate with. But, then, this is what happens when you have a leaderless “movement.”

I do not agree.    There is nothing inherently violent about a grassroots, bottom-up. or leaderless moment[1]    Nor am I convinced the occutards are in fact leaderless, clueless yes, leaderless no   How blowing up a bridge in Ohio is somehow supposed to convince Joe Sixpack  to both pay for a new bridge and pay-off the occutards student loan balances is beyond me.

The problem with the Occupy movements is that they have no coherent message.   The occutards offer no path forward.  Indeed, I doubt they could even recognize forward.   Rather, the occutards are simply angry.   They see the success of others and they are jealous.   Angry, jealous, clueless people with no plan are enticed to go the Bill Ayers route.

The occutards want to consume goods and services, but seem totally unwilling to produce any

1.   Planned Parenthood is both strongly led and extremely violent.    The Tea Party is a bottom-up organization that is peaceful, polite, neat and non-violent.