You can't make this stuff up, folks!

H/T Hot Air

Lawmakers, aides may get Obamacare exemption

Politico:

 Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

 One of the hallmarks of a too powerful government is when the ruling class exempts themselves from the laws their subjects must follow. Last week, congress quietly repealed much of the STOCK Act, last year's well publicized law that finally made insider trading illegal for congressional employees acting on proprietary legislative information. You'll still go to jail for that, but your betters in Washington? Some animals are more equal than others.

Update: John Boehner has quickly distanced himself from this:

CNN: 3 Reasons The Housing Recovery May Not Last

CNN:

The housing market has made a big comeback over the past year; home prices have surged some 8% and homebuyers can't seem to buy up properties fast enough.
But just as quickly as the market is gaining ground, some industry experts worry it will come crashing back to Earth. Here are three reasons the housing market recovery may not last:

Everyone's got an opinion, so let's look at this one:

 1. The housing recovery is being led by investors. One problem is that investors are leading the latest surge in home prices, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. They are taking advantage of low interest rates and depressed home prices and when those rates and prices rise, they'll likely pull back, he said.

"An investor-driven boom is likely to end badly," said Baker. "I'm worried that some of the big jumps in prices are driven by the same sort of speculation that drove the [original] housing bubble."

Well, yes and no. Investors large and small are taking advantage of low interest rates and prices. However, they mostly plan on renting and then selling when prices and interest rates do rise.That would be reflection of increased consumer demand in general. Some are doing the traditional fix-up flip, but  rentals are strong because a lot of consumers aren't buying.

Hedge funds are, well, hedging against the inevitable burst of the stock market bubble, and there are now fears of a  spreading triple dip recession in Europe. When things go pop and the real financial condition of governments, and banks in general are revealed, money will be driven toward the still low priced and hard-asset real estate market.

2. The economic recovery is just not strong enough yet. "These days, I worry more about the economy hurting housing than housing hurting the economy," said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

The economy is hurting housing and everything else right now. We are in the worst recovery from a recession in history, and in a jobs depression. Food stamp use has doubled since 2008 and a record number of Americans are on disability, many with dubious ailments and bad job prospects. Investors and consumers instinctively, if not actually know that our anemic GDP and job growth, isn't enough to prevent economic decay, much less repair the damage already done. We will continue bouncing along the bottom, and likely dip below into another recession in 2014, when the remaining uncertainties of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are fully realized.

 3. Government cuts will hurt homeowners. Headwinds from the current round of government spending cuts -- $85 billion worth -- could also curb the housing market's recovery."The spending cuts from the sequestration [will] hit their apex this summer," said Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's Analytics.

A cut of less than 3% in an already bloated budget that already misallocates hundreds of billions, will have little or no effect on the economy, The Obama administration is doing its level best to create headwinds, as it plays the old statist game of making those cuts as visible and painful as possible. As of now, the public doesn't seem to be buying the absurd notion that the federal government is a lean machine, incapable of withstanding any efficiencies. The sequester pales in comparison to the already hurricane force headwinds of this administration's regulatory jihad, along with current and future tax increases. Besides, the worry over the economic impact of spending cuts is evidence of government  already controlling too much of the economy.       

Greece To Sue Germany For WWII Reparations

Daily Mail:

Greece is planning to pursue a long-dormant claim for reparations from Germany over Nazi occupation during World War Two, it emerged today.
Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos told parliament today that the government was willing to 'exhaust every means available' in its claim.
News of the debt-stricken country's bid for reparations will add to the already strained relationship with Berlin, which foots most of the bill for Greece's 240-billion euro rescue.

Eventually you run out of other people's money, and the desperation begins. Like the beggaring poor relation who resents your help in order to relieve themselves of self-examination and change, so too has Greece turned on its chief benefactor. These absurdities will continue to mount as more EU countries fight over an ever shrinking pie that's been masked by bureaucratic chicanery and central bank manipulations 

It's Not About Islam, Again

Foreign Policy:

According to the Washington Post, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev "told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack." Policymakers and pundits will dismiss this rationalization with little acknowledgment, analysis, or certainly sympathy. Moreover, even if we could agree that we had perfect information for why the attacks happened -- based upon the perpetrators' words, and corroborated with official investigations -- we won't engage in honest self-reflection or change public policy in response. First, no state wants to acknowledge that their policies, institutions, or culture might contain any flaws that could serve as primary motivations for terrorism. Politicians cannot accept any correlation between domestic or foreign policies and terror attacks.

So, let's get this straight. The author, Micah Zenko, believes we should reflect on how our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have instigated a terrorist attack. Those wars were a result of attacks and provocations by Muslim countries, but we probably brought that on ourselves as well, I suppose. However, even if the perpetrator admits, and the evidence shows that Islam was the motivator, we should reflect on how our 'policies, institutions and culture' contributed to the crime. The values of Islam and those of Islamic societies are never questioned. When we're attacked, it's cause for self-criticism.

The 'we' in the article is the United States, of course, and even though Muslims carry out several terror attacks worldwide every day, that overwhelmingly common denominator doesn't really matter. There just has to be some commonality between the policies, institutions and cultures of The United States, UK, Spain, Indonesia, Russia, India, Tunisia and everywhere else Muslims have slaughtered unsuspecting victims. Oddly enough, the policies, institutions, and cultures of Iran and Saudi Arabia don't inspire much in the way of terrorism on their soil. Weird, huh? 

Actually no, this hackneyed meme'  only applies to the west in general, and America in particular.  As intellectually and morally bankrupt as that sounds, it's what passes for sophisticated thought by self-loathing westerners. The fact that it's espoused by a PhD from The Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard is just more proof that higher education in the U.S. is no longer about the pursuit of truth and knowledge.It's about the pursuit of rationales in support of Left Wing conclusions, no matter how glaringly stupid and morally obtuse those rationales may be.

These terrorists were also products of an American, Blue State education. Perhaps they were just very good students and fully digested the anti-American indoctrination they were fed. 

Update: OK, it's now self-parody:

  "Could the amateur boxing career of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased suspect in last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, have had a role in the massacre? That’s a question leading brain researchers at Boston University’s School of Medicine hope medical examiners look into when they perform an autopsy of the 26-year-old who was killed during a firefight with law enforcement officials early Friday morning."

 Update: And the hits keep coming!

 "[H]e was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.”

From an e-mail to a New York Times reporter by the former brother-in-law of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, explaining the Boston bomber's motives.

The EU ‘Is the New Communism’

Via The Blaze:

The late, great Milton Friedman predicted this twelve years ago:

“There is no historical precedent for such an arrangement. It involves each country’s giving up power over its internal monetary policy to an entity not under its political control. Such a system has economic advantages and disadvantages, but I believe that its real Achilles heel will prove to be political; that a system under which the political and currency boundaries do not match is bound to prove unstable.”

The larger point is that the EU  jammed together dozens of countries with vastly different political and economic cultures, under the absurd assumption that central planning under an 855 page constitution, along with a common currency , would magically transform these centuries-old cultures into a single European civilization. That goal was supposed to be achieved despite promises to dubious citizens that this new bureaucratic behemoth would respect those cultural disparities. So Greeks would still be Greeks, but would somehow feel a common bond with Germans, because an Athenian could travel to Berlin without dealing with exchange rates. That comradeship would be furthered cemented under the shared misery of relinquishing freedom and national sovereignty to unelected regulators who would develop one size fits all policies. What could go wrong?

Americans would do well to remember this lesson as the federal government arrogates more power unto itself.      
  

The Train Wreck That Is Obamacare

 OpenMarket.org

 At least one union that supported passage of Obamacare, is now calling for its repeal. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers has given up on salvaging the deeply-flawed health care law...

 Meanwhile, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who helped write Obamacare and is up for re-election in 2014, says he’s worried about a “huge train wreck coming” when the Obama administration begins fully implementing the health care law later this year. Baucus “sharply criticized the administration’s outreach efforts in a budget hearing on Wednesday. He told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that people and businesses ‘have no idea what to do, what to expect’ from the law.” His colleague, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., now admits the health care law is so unprecedentedly complicated as to be “just beyond comprehension” (alas, his inability to comprehend it didn’t keep him from voting to pass Obamacare).

Obamacare is strangling job creation and will harm life-saving medical innovation. Some employers have stopped hiring because of Obamacare, and others are cutting full-time workers and replacing them with part-time workers to avoid Obamacare mandates that apply to full-time employees. Obamacare caused layoffs in the medical device industry through what a liberal Senator conceded was a “job-killing tax” that will “impair American competitiveness in the medical device field.” Obamacare will cut employment by an additional 800,000 because of work disincentives and bizarre income-cliffs.

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