Category Archives: Politics
Citizen Barack
In a 2008 campaign speech in Berlin Barack Obama called himself a “citizen of the world”. Whatever his path to citizenship, he hasn’t been a model citizen.
Since his humbling election to the presidency of just the United States, our Citizen of the World has been withdrawing America from the world. That’s left a big vacuum – if a vacuum can be big. Anyway, very bad guys have rushed in to fill the vacuum. The result has been a refugee crisis a WSJ editorial calls “the worst human catastrophe of the 21st century”.
Right on cue, enter Vladimir Putin. Russia is planning to send S-300 missiles to Iran.
During the Bush administration Putin complained about a planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. The purpose of the system was to deter Iranian missiles. In 2009 President Obama withdrew the system.
Back to School
Labor Day is the traditional end of summer break but it seems most kids now stagger back to school in mid-August. All that late summer sweat doesn’t seem to be making them any smarter. The average SAT score in 2015 was 1490, down from 1524 in 2006.
School Costs
IBD says the Department of Educaton runs over 100 grant programs at a cost of $100 billion with nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile student debt is soaring. According the LA Times, tuition and fees rose from $1,832 at an average private 4 year school in 1972 to $31,231 in 2015. Student loans are up 76% to $1.2 trillion since 2009.
The median household income in 1972 was $8,282 according to US Census stats. It was $48,874 in 2012. According to my cartoon math private college costs consume 63% of a family budget now compared to 22% 40 years ago. Paul F. Campos, in the NYT, says if car prices had risen at the same rate as tuition the average car would now cost $80,000.
Why would that be?
Professor Campos blames it on exploding administrative salaries. Utah State Professor William Shugart II writing for American Thinker cites a NY Federal Reserve study to blame federal subsidy itself.
Hillary’s Classified Comments
Mark Thiessen quotes Dave Barry:
“when your opponent is obviously right and you are spectacularly wrong.” The answer, he wrote, is simple: “Compare your opponent to Adolf Hitler.”
Thiessen says that’s what Hillary did when she accused The Donald of wanting to round up illegal immigrants and ship them off in box cars.
Hillary went on to compare Republicans who oppose abortion as terrorists.
She also says that if there were classified email messages on her secret server she didn’t know about it because they weren’t marked classified.
Denali
William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States. He’s from Ohio. The highest hill in Ohio is 1,500 feet. The Highest mountain in the U.S. is 20,000 feet. Never mind that it’s in Alaska, it’s named after McKinley.
Denali
At least it was until now. President Obama changed the name to “Denali”. That was kind of redundant since the people in Alaska have been calling it Denali for past 100 years.
Still, it didn’t sit well with Ohio politicians. Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio called it an insulting “political stunt”. The congressman complained that presidents can’t just go around renaming mountains.
After a enjoying few beers the president changed the name of “Mauna Kea” in Hawaii to “Mount Obama”. He also changed “global warming” to “climate change“.
Fed Up
The Fed has kept the stock market and, so it claims, the U.S. economy afloat with low interest rates. The Dow lost 1500 points in the past week. World economic growth is stuck in the mud.
And with interest rates near zero, the Fed is low on flotation devices.
If income inequality is your thing, cheer up. Jeff Bezos lost $2.6 billion on Monday. Bloomberg has the fat cat score card here.
