Conservatively Speaking

As the State’s fiscal collapse continues California’s Senate Rules Committee takes up a flock of gubernatorial appointments, but the only appointees required to appear and answer questions are four nominees for the state parole board. The list of those not required to appear include Bo Derek, best known for her scantily clad role in the movie “10,” whom Schwarzenegger has appointed to the state Horse Racing Board. Exactly why California spends money on such commissions can not be explained.

Two illegal aliens, Raphael  Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26, probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home.

It seems the two crooks never learned two things: they were in Montana and Patricia  had been a local clay shooting champion and hunter since she was  nine.

Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house using a sledge hammer.  She quickly ran to her father’s room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.

Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor only to be the first to catch a near point blank  blast of 00 buckshot from the 11-year-old’s knee crouch aim. He  suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.

When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast which  shredded his left shoulder and staggered out into the street and  bled to death before medical help could arrive.

It was  found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber  handgun he had stolen earlier from another home invasion robbery.  That victim, 50-year-old David Burien, was not so lucky. He died from multiple stab wounds to the chest.

Ever wonder  why stories like this never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, & MSNBC, CNN,  or ABC news……..an 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended  her home and herself……against two murderous, illegal aliens  ……..and she wins, she is still alive.

hecatomb (HEK-uh-toom, -tom) noun: A large-scale slaughter. ETYMOLOGY: Originally a hecatomb was a public sacrifice and feast of 100 oxen or cattle to the gods in ancient Greece and Rome. The word is derived from Latin hekatombe, from Greek hekatombe, from hekaton (hundred) + bous (ox). Another word derived from bous (ox) is boustrophedon. USAGE: “The use of high-tech weapons will result in hecatombs, smart as the US bombs may be.”

When the bankrupt San Francisco Chronicle lectures Obama about fiscal fornication you know you’re wading around hipdeep in a dung pile. “This year,” the Chrincile says, “the government is borrowing 50 cents of every dollar it spends. If that were just a blip caused by a historic financial crisis that necessitated a $787 billion fiscal stimulus and a $700 billion bank rescue in the space of about three months, there would be little cause for concern.”

It talks about Obama’s borrowing reducing the USA to a “banana republic.”

Worse it says is not a blip. It is a relentless curve of red ink that will, within the decade, take U.S. debt levels to the record reached at the end of World War II, from 40 percent of the nation’s output now to 80 percent, and then rapidly thereafter into the realm of banana republics.

“We (US taxpayers) owe about half that debt to foreigners, including the Chinese whom are playing the dollar like a commodity and others whose foreign policy is not always well aligned with ours,” said Isabel Sawhill, a former Clinton administration budget official who now co-directs the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “So we are really losing control of our economic destiny and possibly losing control of our foreign policy as well.”

Japan has lost its AAA credit rating, the United Kingdom may soon follow, and there is talk that the United States is headed fast down the same path.

Last week the Treasury Department announced a huge sale of new debt - $162 billion - as part of its financing of the government’s $1.8 trillion deficit this year. That’s as much as the entire government spent just eight years ago. Within hours, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries shot up.

In recent weeks, the prices of credit default swaps on U.S. government debt - a measure of the risk that the government could do the unthinkable and default - have risen to record levels.

The market reactions highlight a growing disconnect between the Obama ambition including a $1.5 trillion overhaul of the nation’s health care system, and the money available to do it. Sunday Obama admitted that “we are running out of money.”

As if to underline the point, the Social Security and Medicare trustees, who include three Obama Cabinet officials, issued their report saying the finances of the two bedrock social programs are dire.

“We are heading toward very high debt-to-GDP ratios very soon,” said UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach. He said the rise in perceived risk of the federal government going bankrupt is sobering.
The United States does not now even meet the standards for admission to the European Union, because its deficit and debt levels are too high. The federal government faces either enormous tax increases or inflation (regressive taxation in another form), to remedy the problem.

The consequence is people, instead of having money to buy a home, have to send it to the government to pay the interest on the debt. “There are no ways around this. This is not academic. It’s not theoretical. It’s real. The numbers are there.

The appetite for U.S. debt has remained robust, and Treasurys were viewed as a safe haven amid the financial turmoil last fall. The United Kingdom credit warning has turned many eyes suddenly to the United States.

“Nothing happens until it does,” says Auerbach. “People were warning about the housing market and the bubble and nobody seemed to worry about that, and now a lot of us are sorry. The United States can go on for several more years doing absolutely nothing responsible to get the debt under control and things may be fine, but at some point, and it’s impossible to predict when, people can lose confidence in the U.S. government’s ability to deal with its problem, and things can unravel. Whether that happens in five years or 10 or even longer, it’s impossible to say.”

The idea that something very bad will happen is now a consensus view among budget experts.

“Our creditors are beginning to ask questions, and it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens,” said Saw-hill. ”

Even House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the top lieutenant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said this month, “If a fiscal meltdown comes, there will be no one to bail out America.”

So far, there is little indication that Obama is taking the issue seriously, other than talking and talking about which comprises his entire domestic and foreign policy.

Laughably Obama said several days ago in announcing $17 billion in proposed budget savings that “we can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.”

But $17 billion is a grain of sand in the roughly $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities the federal government carries.

Obama calls his budget a “new era of responsibility,” but it would add $9 trillion to an already unsustainable debt burden over the next decade.

Obama inherited a mess, including the financial crisis. The Bush administration put everything - wars, tax cuts, Medicare prescription drug benefits - on the national credit card instead of paying for them. While Obama talks about changing direction, he has not yet done so. Pundits joke that his cuts include: Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, and Hannity but nothing substantive.

In fact, his plans not only do not fix the problem, they make it worse. The Congressional Budget Office said the Obama budget will cut taxes by $2.1 trillion, most of that by extending most of the Bush tax cuts, and increase spending $1.7 trillion over 10 years, resulting in a net increase in interest costs alone of $1 trillion.

Obama made some hard choices, but most of these have been shunned or are being watered down by Congress, from trimming tax write-offs for charity to raising revenue by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Congress has already raised the price of the administration’s latest supplemental spending bill, adding $6.2 billion for military hardware, including C-17 aircraft that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended terminating.

But the larger problem, as in California, is that the public also recoils from spending cuts and tax increases

“It goes back to my days as mayor,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and former mayor of San Francisco, who noted during an interview in her office Thursday that she is very worried about the situation. “I would go before a group. Do you want more police officers?”

“Yes,” was the firm reply.

“Do you want more firefighters?” Yes, again, very firmly.

“Do you want to pay for them?” An emphatic no.

“That’s the situation out there,” Feinstein said.

Money isn’t there

“The requests don’t stop coming,” Feinstein said. “We’ve had over 2,000 earmark requests from counties, from cities, up and down the state. Local governments are in trouble, they’re looking for money, and everybody comes here, and says, ‘Can’t you do it?’ And there just isn’t the money.”

The story is a microcosm of what will happen with increasing frequency as Medicare starts squeezing out more and more other spending as the Baby Boom retirement gets seriously under way.

But Pelosi and Obama have said no to taking on Social Security and want to proceed instead with health care reform. They argue that it is Medicare and health care costs generally that are driving U.S. finances over a cliff. The United States spends $2.5 trillion a year on health care, more than any other rich nation, and yet has poorer outcomes. About $700 billion is wasted each year. Health insurance premiums have been rising five times faster than wages for eight years and are bankrupting businesses too.

But there is also widespread skepticism about Obama’s claim that spending more on health care now will somehow fix the budget. Savings from such things as computerized health records and preventive care will not begin to cover the cost of expanding care to the uninsured. Nor will higher taxes on the wealthy. In fact no serious, non-drug using economist agrees with Obama.

Obama has been hard-pressed to even find ways to pay for the expansion of health coverage, much less a way to bring down the deficit at the same time,” Sawhill said. “If you could slow the trajectory on health care spending it would help, but not much in the next decade. And I’m not sure we have a decade to fix this problem.”

Obama tapped federal appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court on Tuesday, officials said, making her the first Hispanic in history picked to wear the robes of an associate justice. A Hispanic  born in Puerto Rico she was the least likely among those nominees discussed, and controversial for her views, comments and demeanor.

If the Senate confirms her, Sotomayor, 54, would succeed retiring Justice David Souter.

Obama made the formal announcement at 10:15 AM EST

Obama had said publicly he wanted a justice who combined intellect and empathy, the ability to understand the troubles of everyday Americans.

If approved, she would join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the current court.

Sotomayor is a self-described “Newyorkrican” who grew up in a Bronx housing project after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico. She has dealt with diabetes since age 8 and lost her father at age 9, growing up under the care of her mother in humble surroundings. As a girl, inspired by the Perry Mason television show, she knew she wanted to be a judge.

A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, a former prosecutor and private attorney, Sotomayor became a federal judge for the Southern District of New York in 1992.

As a judge, she has a bipartisan pedigree. She was first appointed by a Republican, President George H.W. Bush, then named an appeals judge by President Bill Clinton in 1997. Since being on that court her decisions have been overturned five times by the Supreme Court and a very controversial decision involving affirmative action in the New Haven Fire Department is widely expected to be overturned this summer.

In that decision she sided with the city of New Haven, Conn., in a discrimination case that white firefighters brought after the city threw out results of a promotion exam because too few minorities scored high enough.

In one of her most memorable rulings as federal district judge, Sotomayor essentially salvaged baseball in 1995, ruling with players over owners in a labor strike that had led to the cancellation of the World Series.

She is expected to be confirmed after a spirited debate.

Before she left for China, reporters repeatedly questioned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her claim that the CIA lied to her, but Pelosi remained tight-lipped . . . she also remained tight-foreheaded and tight-eye-lidded

Overall, 55% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance so far while 44% disapprove. The Rasmussen index is the product of the percentages of those who strongly approve or disapprove of Obama’s performance. That currently stands at +1%. So far that number has never been negative.

31% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty percent (30%) Strongly Disapprove

Following the President’s speech on the Guantanamo prison camp, just 38% agree with the President’s decision. Forty-nine percent (49%) now disagree. Opinion was evenly divided in January. By a two-to-one margin, voters oppose having any of the suspected terrorists brought to prisons in the United States. Only 25% share the President’s belief that the Guantanamo camp weakened the nation’s security.

Patricia Demauro set a new record for the longest craps roll, hanging on for four hours and 18 minutes at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City.after 154 rolls of the dice. She bought in for $100 and the casino won’t say how much she won. The odds of doing so are several million to one.

Everything Obama, the Federal Reserve, and Congress are doing was predicted in startling detail almost two decades ago by a famous Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.

Friedman died  in 2006, in his prophetic book, Friedman showed how, facing massive deficits, the U.S. government would dramatically increase the money supply; why foreign countries would stop buying our debt; how the Fed would start buying our Treasury bills; and why this would call cause massive inflation.

He even predicted that our officials would claim inflation was no problem at all.

Amazingly all of this is coming to pass!

Make no mistake about it - the Obama administration is embracing massive inflationary deficit spending.

In just 100 days, Barrack Obama has more than doubled the U.S. money supply . . . committed the government to at least $7 trillion in new spending . . . and warned the American people to expect trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future.

While the media has been falling over itself to praise Obama’s “bold initiatives,” the question no one has been asking is, “Where is all of this money coming from?”

Decades ago, Milton Friedman answered these questions clearly and precisely in his insightful - and very topical - book, Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History.

In Money Mischief, Friedman even warned that the coming inflation could “destroy” our country.

Here’s what he wrote: “Inflation is a disease, a dangerous and sometimes fatal disease that, if not checked in time, can destroy a society.” (Money Mischief, Page 191)

You see the end result of that process in countries like Zimbabwe today, where prices double every day, and it now takes a $10 billion Zimbabwe note to buy a single loaf of bread - assuming you can find one.

Could America suffer the same fate? Friedman wrote ominously, “The fate of a country is inseparable from the fate of its currency.”  The US Dollar is under attack woirldwide.

Even Warren Buffett recently admitted on CNBC that the only way for the U.S. to solve its woes was to inflate the currency.

There is little doubt that Obama’s massive deficit spending will doom the dollar and our economy.

You need to find out what is really happening to our economy and your wealth and get a copy of Milton Friedman’s pathbreaking book, Money Mischief.

Its insights are so relevant and shocking - it reads like it was just published for our times!

Friedman also tells how the U.S. and the West could still avoid hyperinflation, even with unbacked paper currency

Looks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg will no longer be the hot chick on the Supreme court.