Category Archives: America

Update III: A Cow Is Born (About The Title)

America, Ann Coulter, Film, Intelligence, John McCain, Pop-Culture, Relatives, The Zeitgeist

“Ann Coulter could have easily dispatched of the ding-dong, as she did Keith Olbermann. A couple of masterful syllogisms mixed in with a few devastating facts, and that would be it. Alas, by denying Meghan McCain the satisfaction, Annie Orkin has left us with a pest-control problem.”

The excerpt is from “A Cow Is Born,” my latest WND column. You can catch it now on Taki’s Magazine, where the weekly column appears each Saturday. The current column is titled deliciously, “Media Discovers Woman Even Dumber Than John McCain.” Here’s more:

“… Just as you thought American pop-politics could go no lower, a woman with real curb appeal appears on the political scene. Meghan McCain might just be the greatest ditz to date to emerge from that big tent Republicans keep touting.

… Ms. McCain is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. …

Yes, idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. …

The housing house-of-cards was not the only ‘bubble in search of a pin’ in the modern-day USA. The intellectual bubble is also begging to be burst.

As for Republicans, if they don’t stop their love affair with idiots, it’s not a bigger tent they’ll be seeking, but a giant tin-foil hat.”

Read the complete column, “Media Discovers Woman Even Dumber Than John McCain,” now on Taki’s.

Update I (May 8): ABOUT THE WND TITLE. The original column came with an asterisk near the title and the following explanation and link:

*Title: “A Star Is Born” was a 1976 film starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, about a love affair between two rock stars; one a has-been, the other a wanna-be.

Ira, a reader (and BAB resident composer), was the only one to date who was familiar with the reference. I see that Free Republic has a lengthy thread about the title, asserting that the reference is to the heft of the heifer discussed.

An email to me would have clarified the matter, but, hey, this is the Age of the idiot. Complete knowledge is assumed. Conjecture soon morphs into assertion and certainty, and no one is the wiser. Curiosity can kill.

Incidentally, I owe the Age of the Idiot concept to my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson. He truly captured the Zeitgeist with that one.

Update II: My dear WND editor added the original asterisked title explanation. I’ll have to avoid esoterica; it dates me. My editor at Taki’s simply chose to improve the title. Good call.

Top Dog Dogs Tax Havens

America, Barack Obama, Economy, EU, Private Property, Taxation, UN

The swindler-in-chief’s shakedown efforts have taken a predictable turn today. Reports a sympathetic Bloomberg:

“President Barack Obama proposed raising about $190 billion over the next decade by outlawing three offshore tax-avoidance techniques. Obama’s plan also would make it riskier for Americans to stash money in tax-havens.”

Note how the efforts of private property owners to retain what is theirs by right are criminalized with the use of terms such as “stash away,” “tax avoidance,” “abusive,” “hiding money.” But state theft of said property is framed as “raising money,” “closing loopholes,” and conducting a “tax overhaul.”

The tax code is “full of corporate loopholes that makes it perfectly legal for companies to avoid paying their fair share,” Obama said at the White House today, as he outlined the plan [and as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner looked on with that evil-gnome scowl of his].

In 2001, I had the unusual occasion to commend the Bush Administration for refusing “to support an attempt by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to clamp down on tax havens. If the junta of high-tax governments has its way,” I wrote in the Financial Post, “not only will there be no place left to run to, but by eliminating what tax havens offer, these governments will have eliminated tax competition, and with it the imperative to downsize their fiefdoms.”

In “The War on Tax Havens,” I strongly condemned the coercive efforts of the OECD to strangle, “sanctuaries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Malta, Mauritius and San Marino are rolling over.”

The sentiment applies to the Obaminator in spades. I fully expect him, moreover, to fulfill the UN’s dream of establishing an international tax collection organization, so as to better co-ordinate the confiscation of private property.

Incidentally, a few weeks back the administration (and Bush would have been of the same mind) sanctimoniously castigated Castro for taxing remittances from the US. Pot. Kettle. Black. And oh the hypocrisy! The US is one of the few nations to tax the income that nationals earn outside its borders.

Recommended: “The War on Tax Havens”

A Republican Warns … Two Years Late

America, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Republicans, Socialism

Since the crowning of Obama, Republicans have begun to cultivate a convenient awareness of the weight of the federal debt on the American economy.

Penned in February of 2007, my “Inflation 101 For Women Pundits And Other Tyrants” put the burden Dubya’s “national debt of $9 trillion” had placed on “America’s $12.98-trillion economy” in perspective:

As the American national debt stands, we would not be admitted into the company of socialists: The European Union. The EU expects member nations to hold debt below 60 percent of GDP.

Two years later, in March 26, 2009, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) claims the same, and makes headlines in The Hill.

A little late, don’t you think?! (Where do you go for the truth years ahead?)

Poisonous Pundits Never Go Away

America, Economy, Elections 2008, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Journalism, Media, Political Economy

Just a few months back, during the Bush era, high-ranking commentators like Larry Kudlow and proxies were touting the strength of the US stock market. Stocks were undervalued. The economy was “strongly reaccelerating.” “Goldilocks, Goldilocks,” Kudlow would crow from the CNBC rooftop. (What on earth does than mean?)

Kudlow and Company could not say enough about the economic benefits of a depreciating dollar. A weak dollar was an asymptomatic blessing, helping to make “US assets very cheap,” and thus ameliorating the trade imbalance. Never mind that it has made Americans poorer.

That was the man and his entourage’s cri de coeur.

“Today’s economic weakness is coming from the business side, not the sub-prime/housing/consumer side,” Kudlow wrote in January 2008.

Back then, Kudlow called for cheaper money and more credit: “the Fed needs to deliver a 50 basis point rate cut at its January 30 meeting. A big-bang rate cut would help businesses, consumers, and mortgage owners. It would make the cost of money cheaper and expand the overall liquidity base of the economy. … Inflation is the most overrated issue out there,” Kudlow asserted.

Kudlow failed to see that government had set the scene for the “minority Meltdown.”

Another snake-oil merchant is Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal. He wrote a book praising Bush’s quicksand society. It was titled “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer.” Fox New’s Greta Van Susteren has seen fit to make the man who praised the state’s house-for-every-Hispanic schemes an authority on our economic woes.

Like Kudlow, Moore’s congenital inability to call the situation has not dented his career.

Now Kudlow has switched, conveniently, cribbing Peter Schiff’s analysis and pretending he was capable of the same prophetic predictions.

Why does he retain his job?

If you don’t believe me, check out the manner in which Schiff was maligned in 2007 by Kudlow’s crowd as another “Michael Moore,” for forewarning about the consequences of the US’s consumption and credit-based economy.