Who could of seen this coming eh? Surely not Obama:

Egyptian election results present ‘nightmare scenario’

Naw, the only thing Obama saw coming was the huge political benefits in portraying himself as the man who backs the little people as they fight oppression.

One little flaw in that thinking. He was backing those who wanted to ensure fanatical Islam ruled once more.

Egypt looks set for weeks of tension and uncertainty after the first round of its landmark presidential election produced a runoff between the candidate backed by the powerful Muslim Brotherhood and a former general who is seen as a hangover from the regime of the deposed Hosni Mubarak.

In what many described as a “nightmare scenario” that will mean a polarised and possibly violent second round, Mohammed Morsi of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party polled around 26% in the two-day first round. Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister, came second with 23% when 90% of the votes had been counted.

Amr Moussa, the former head of the Arab League, who tried to capture the centre ground, was knocked out. Late on Friday there was only a slight chance that the final picture would change when votes for Cairo and Giza were in.

Turnout was said to be around 40% of the 51m-strong electorate. Official results are yet to be published but a combination of exit polls, centrally collected data and reporting by the candidates appeared to confirm a dramatic runoff that many supporters of the revolution consider a catastrophic outcome. “It feels as if the revolution never took place,” lamented a despondent George Ishaq, a founder of the leftwing Kifaya Party.

“The Brotherhood are despotic and fanatical and Shafiq is the choice of Mubarak. It is a very bad result. The revolution is not part of this contest”

Shocking! I mean Hillary assured us that Islamic Democracy would cause western values to spring forth…and here we are. The Muslim Brotherhood or a Mubarak General.

Don’t you feel bad for those poor widdle union folks who appear to be well on the way to getting their asses kicked in Wisconsin?

No? Me neither.

Here they are whining about the fact that Democrats and the White House let them down:

…“I’m very disappointed that the DNC has not seen fit to make a dollar investment,” Schaitberger said. “When you’re facing $25 million or more in super-PAC funds, you need money. The campaign needed funds to get up on the air to fight back. … I think that would have been a good investment going into November.” …

When asked about national Democrats’ support in the recall election, another union official scoffed.

“Labor has always been there for the national Democratic Party. The national Democratic Party should be there for labor in this instance. They’re not,” he said.

And now, just like the adolescents they are, they are warning they are going to get their toys and run home to Mommy:

A Democratic strategist working for anti-Walker forces warned that union members would be less enthusiastic about working for Obama if he doesn’t step up for them.

“It won’t go unnoticed by labor the extent to which the White House ultimately decides to fight or not fight for working people the final critical days in Wisconsin,” he said. “The White House needs to move beyond being afraid of its own shadow. The Romney campaign has already been foaming at the mouth to pounce if Walker survives. If that isn’t motivation enough for the White House to start doing everything it can to help defeat Scott Walker, it’s hard to know what is.”

Yeah yeah. We all know the unions will go over the cliff with the Democrats. The rank and file may not like it but the leadership will force them to.

The house of cards will crash. Call it peak government. The game is up.

If we will not impose discipline on ourselves, the market will do it for us.
- Monty

It amazes me that this far in the recession the only solution they have is to increase taxes. It doesn’t seem like any State of the Union or any of the European nations outside of Iceland and Finland have smaller operating budgets today than in 2007. Just tax, tax, tax and spend your way out.

Governments are choosing to do all they can to perpetuate the status quo – focusing on keeping things together just through the next quarter, through the next election cycle. And it’s clear that their best efforts are meeting with less and less as the situation worsens.
- Macleod

Example #1 – the last paragraph says it all:

Malloy’s strategy is flawed because he enacted the largest tax increase in Connecticut history and the state is still facing a deficit.

Example #2 – In January 2011:

Illinois lawmakers raised income tax rates by 46 percent on businesses and a record 67 percent on individuals. And with this flood of new tax dollars, urgent pressure to pass lasting structural spending reforms deflated. The state is still broke. Not only still broke, but they borrowed more money last year further ballooning state debt.

One of the problems for politicians is GDP. GDP in of itself isn’t bad. But insert a bureaucrat statistician and GDP becomes a numbers game.

Take for instance efficiency. Efficient producers such as the manufacturers and suppliers of electronic goods and services, who reduce their prices over time, see their output diminished as a proportion of the statistical whole, while those that maintain their prices by monopolistic or subsidized means keep and even increase their weightings.

Alasdair Macleod continues and spells it out:

if you try and measure an economy by GDP, all you are measuring at the end of the day is the amount of money in the economy. It is not a measure of economic progress and/or true economic growth.

You have money in the private sector where value is produced and competitive advantages are gained – Keynesians are taking money away from the productive economy and injecting it into something less productive or not productive at all.

The money from the productive area of the economy is the area that needs to progress for the world to move forward from this global malaise.

Not only have politicians completely deceived the public over economic growth, but they deceive themselves. For this reason they are unequipped to deal with the developing crises, which are the result of earlier interventions. They now claim that economic growth, the ultimate source of tax revenue and government solvency is jeopardized by spending cuts. Statistically, this is obviously true, because if you take away government costs and support for unwanted economic activities, GDP will fall. But the important point that is commonly missed is that a government which stops draining an economy of its private sector resources actually releases them to be deployed more effectively for the common benefit by those randomly-acting entrepreneurs.
– Alasdair Macleod

The next economic cycle? The Facebook ipo flop – this was as good as any confirmation that we are entering it. And this one is going to be nasty.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told Harvard graduates they faced one of the most challenging economic times since the 1930s…pointing out the inability of 75 million young people to find a decent job.

Barron’s has an article up about the Baltic Dry Index no longer being a relevant metric because of too many ships and not enough trade.

I read China defaulted on coal contracts this month.

Spain, France, and Germany just passed new border controls laws. When the EU collapses, people are going to attempt to flee with their money as this email from a family member in Europe illustrates:

Shortly after I arrived, the merchants did not want dollars or to be paid by credit cards issued from American banks (no Visa, no MasterCard etc) and they covered up the slots to swipe American credit cards on their machines and asked for cash or a bank card with a “chipknip” from a euro bank…The banks are undercapitalized, they are being asked to increase their capital requirements. … When we drove across the German border from Switzerland, there were armed border patrols.

Hattip – Brother Bob, TAB, ZeroHedge, Monty

Hat tip: CJ

This vainglorious administration is so self-absorbed that it refuses to keep secrets if it can in any way benefit politically from them regardless of the cost. Obama is so bent on preening he seems not to have any concern at all for those who actually make the sacrifices. First Joe Biden outs SEAL Team 6 as those who participated in the Bin Laden raid and then Leon Panetta outed the doctor who helped provide intelligence for the raid. That was catastrophic for the doctor.

First he and his wife were fired for engaging in a “fake” vaccination program.

In a notification issued in this regard, the health department said that Afridi’s services were terminated under the Efficiency and Disciplinary (E and D) Rules for being involved in anti-state activities, the Express Tribune reports.

Earlier, 15 lady health workers who were part of the alleged fake vaccination campaign, were were also sacked from their jobs.

It was reported earlier this month that Dr Afridi was dismissed from his post, along with four LHVs.

Earlier, Dr. Shakeel’s wife, Imrana Ghafoor was also removed from her post. She was the principal of the Government Girls Degree College in Darra Adam Khel.

Now he has been jailed for 33 years for treason:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani surgeon recruited by the CIA to help find Osama bin Laden was on Wednesday sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason, officials said.

Shakil Afridi, who was sacked as a government doctor two months ago, was found guilty under the tribal justice system of Khyber district, part of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt.

In addition to his jail sentence, he was fined 320,000 rupees ($3,500). The doctor had worked for years as a surgeon in lawless Khyber, part of the Taliban and al-Qaeda infested tribal belt.

Afridi was not present in the court and not given a chance to defend himself, officials said. Under the tribal system, he would not have had access to a lawyer.

“He has been sentenced for 33 years on treason charges and has been moved to Peshawar central jail after the verdict was announced by the local court,” said Mohammad Siddiq, spokesman for the administrative head of Khyber.

In January, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed Afridi had worked for U.S. intelligence by collecting DNA to verify bin Laden’s presence and expressed concern about Pakistan’s treatment of him.

He was arrested shortly after U.S. troops killed the al-Qaeda leader on May 2, 2011 and in October a Pakistani commission recommended that he be tried for treason.

Golly, given this event who wouldn’t want to want to come to the aid of America? The left has not had word of complaint- not about this nor about the unprecedented access to classified material offered to filmmakers in the process of Obama idolatry.

Contrast that to the phony kerfuffle over Valerie Plame and the scorn wrongly heaped upon George Bush.

Yup….you guessed it, they are all racist:

That President Obama lost roughly 40 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia over the last two weeks has drawn massive national headlines.

Those headlines have drawn a collective eyeroll from Democrats — and many others who closely follow national politics — who ascribe the underperformance by the incumbent to a very simple thing: racism.

No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.

…Former Texas Rep. Charlie Stenholm, a longtime conservative Democrat, acknowledged that “race is definitely a factor for some Texans but not the majority,” adding: “The most significant factor is the perception/reality that the Obama administration has leaned toward the ultra-left viewpoint on almost all issues.”

Oh, so race is a factor for “some” but he has also leaned ultra-left. That couldn’t be the reason could it?

According to the WaPo, it’s not because these states are mostly conservative (including the Democrats in those states) and they don’t like ultra-left candidates. No, it’s just racism.

Tom Cole, a Republican House Member, dismissed the idea of race as a major factor in opposition to Obama out of hand.

Said Cole:

“Obama fares poorly in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas because he has nothing in common with them. They are rural, he is urban. They are populist, he is elitist. And in case anyone hadn’t noticed, they are conservative while he is liberal. That isn’t just true of Republicans in these states. It is true of Democrats as well.”

Get outta here. We all know it’s because they are all a bunch of redneck racist hillbilly’s.

Sigh….

Surprise Is A Near Sighted Porcupine Falling In Love With A Cactus
Cowboy Proverb

I remember hearing my creative writing instructor say, we should write about things we are familiar with and understand. I repeat this advice to myself at least once a week; my old writing instructor’s words have served well as a guide, but they have never been humorous until today.

When You Got Nothin To Lose, Try Anything
Cowboy Proverb

Robin Abcarian was probably excited about the prospect of covering the horsey story of Ann Romney, while trying to gain political traction for the failed presidency of Barack Obama; however, writing an article on a minnow in the shark tank and trying to expose the secrets of life in the shark world is laughable.

Apparently, Ann Romney sold a horse and the horse turned up lame at a later date. Does Robin know how many advanced Dressage Horses turn up lame at some point. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Robin, nearly all of them. Lameness finishes up all the careers of dressage, jumpers, hunters, and three day event horses; it is not a question of “will” or “if”, it is a question of “when”.

It was the end of a long day in a stuffy Simi Valley office building. Ann Romney had been under oath for more than four hours, testifying in a sometimes contentious deposition about a pricey horse she sold that may or may not have been afflicted with a condition that made him unrideable.

In the airless room, Romney was getting annoyed.

“That really is — that really is irritating,” she said when the opposing attorney implied she didn’t know who looked after her horse in Moorpark when she was at her home in Boston. “Of course I know who was looking after my horse. You’re just trying to irritate me.”

Stupidity and overwork on the part of a rider or trainer can lead to premature lameness, but if a horse continues to advance and compete, they will eventually become lame. (Ask any human athlete at the upper levels if he has lameness) There are a few “iron horses” that never display lameness, but they are approximately one in a thousand.

Is Dressage an Elitist Sport? It can be, especially, if you ride in Sullivan Canyon, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, Hidden Valley, and Moorpark; however, there are low scale operations in those areas, where the riding is comparatively inexpensive. Although, I must report, some of the Liberals’ biggest and wealthiest donors and fat cats are horse owners who live in these areas and their horse stories of indulgence would make delightful reading material for many Americans. I am sure they would gain far more traction than Ann Romney’s deposition over a horse deal that went south. (Not an uncommon event by the way, but when someone feels like a fool in California, someone else should pay.)

When we speak of spending excessive amounts of money on equine indulgences, comparing the Libs in Sullivan Canyon and Malibu, to Ann Romney in Moorpark, would be like running a race between a freight train and a fat man. The LA Times might call some of the Lib Fat Cats with horses and ask if they mind having their horse indulgences opened up to the internet. Ask if they want the public to know of luxury bathrooms in barns that cost more than most homes in California or if they want to hear of wood from Africa and South America being used to build stalls for their horses. Luxury digs for horses within twenty or thirty miles of people living in the drug infested squalor of the ghettos of LA. The same ghetto dwellers for whom they pretend to care for so self-righteously.

Do Not Tamper With The Natural Ignorance Of A Greenhorn
Cowboy Proverb

Ann Romney says she loves her horses and I believe her; although, I have never worked for her and I don’t know her, but I recognize her compassion for animals, for people like her, people with genuine or real compassion for horses, generally have the same compassion for humans.

Many horse owners have no compassion for horses when they can no longer perform, they become more like inanimate objects; to be frank, they become disposable, they become devoid of value when they no longer allow the limelight to shine upon the rider. They are discarded with extreme indifference, for they have served their purpose. This is the real story, a story of cold callous cruelty, especially, among those who wear false compassion on their sleeve.

“It’s like children,” Romney, a mother of five, testified about Super Hit, the horse at the center of the lawsuit. “You don’t … say one is better than the other, but I loved him.”

Ann Romney spends her own money on her horses, she feels they are therapeutic and for those of you who have read my articles on horses, you probably know, I agree with her.

Romney, who rode horses as a girl, began riding seriously as an adult after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998. “I was losing most of the function of my right side,” she testified at her deposition on June 3, 2010. “And I decided I needed to go back and do what I loved before I couldn’t do it anymore.”

She soon fell in love with dressage, a fussy Olympic sport that is also called “horse ballet.” In dressage, a horse moves in delicate, dance-like steps to music as the rider, formally clad in top hat and tails, imperceptibly guides the animal.

Because it requires tremendous muscle control, dressage also provided Romney unexpected therapeutic benefits.

“Riding exhilarated me; it gave me a joy and a purpose,” Romney told the Chronicle of the Horse magazine in 2008. “When I was so fatigued that I couldn’t move, the excitement of going to the barn and getting my foot in the stirrup would make me crawl out of bed.”

So now, we know why Romney is not suited for the presidency. His wife sold a horse that became lame and during a deposition she became annoyed with a lawyer or maybe it is because she has a healthy hobby, a hobby she pays for with her own money, instead of flying around on vacations at taxpayer’s expense with an entourage. Oh excuse me, Michelle’s vacations are to promote good will around the world and show poor people how the Obamas can spend money on indulgences like separate jets to vacation hot spots, now there is an indulgence.

I would rather write about more significant political ideas, but if the LA Times wants to continue trying to smear Ann Romney over senseless and inane horse trivia, they might be surprised at the some of the secrets of the elite equestrian world.

Have you ever seen one of those movies where a car is speeding towards a cliff and just before it heads over the edge the driver jumps out and the car flies into the abyss and maybe crashes and ignites into a ball of flame?

If you haven’t don’t worry, you’re about to live one… and unfortunately for you, you’re not the driver who escapes, you’re a passenger strapped in for the excitement. President Obama is the driver and the way he’s running his campaign, it looks like he’s getting ready to jump…

As you probably guessed, the car in this story is the United States economy. Everyone knows that the economy is… anemic to say the least. The unemployment rate, which is now down to 8.1% is so only because 2.2 million people have given up looking for work since Obama’s inauguration. If those people were still looking for work, if they had any expectation of actually finding a job, the unemployment rate would be 11%.

As bad as two million people being so discouraged that they quit looking for work altogether is, there are a pair of dangers right around the corner that may mushroom that number, and take millions of jobs with them.

The first has to do with taxes. Unless it’s fixed, in January 2013 the tax code is going to create what the Washington Post has christened Taxmageddon. Between the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the beginning of the taxes within ObamaCare, and a variety of other tax changes, federal taxes are going to increase by a total of $500 billion next year. That means that the government is going to be sucking $500 billion out of the private sector, i.e. your pocket, to fund its turtle tunnels, green energy boondoggles and Las Vegas conventions. To put that amount in perspective, that $500 billion you will no longer have to spend is more than the revenues of Apple, Target, Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Procter & Gamble combined! Now imagine removing that much activity out of the economy… That shouldn’t have much of an impact on jobs.

Would you rather keep that $1,600 (per person) tax hike and spend it as you like on goods and services that benefit you and your family, or would you rather send it to Washington so that the borg can spend it on things like National Public Radio, wealth redistribution schemes and Amtrak? Unfortunately for us we already know what Barack Obama thinks about that.

The second bomb the country is facing is particularly troubling because the danger is so obvious. Why is it obvious? Because we’re still licking our wounds from a mini version of the same problem: the housing crisis driven recession. Although the fundamental cause of the economic meltdown was government intervention in the housing market, the proximate cause was the sub-prime mortgages. Many of those mortgages were of the variable rate type where borrowers received a low introductory rate that would adjust (usually upward) over a period of time or in some cases, abruptly. When rates were low everything was peachy and consumers were purchasing houses at record numbers while investors were borrowing to buy investment properties. The markets were humming along.

Then everything hit a wall. Interest rates jumped, borrowers were no longer able to pay their mortgages, property values plummeted, banks collapsed, and the economy staggered into the “Great Recession”. We were told we were on the brink of a financial meltdown on par with the financial collapse of 1929 and civilization might not survive. Five years later we are limping along, but at least the world didn’t end.

Unfortunately for you and me, Barack Obama has not been smart enough to learn from that recent history. Over the last three years he has piled a total of $5 trillion in new debt on the shoulders of the American people. As bad as that is, that’s not the worst part of it! The greater danger is that virtually every dollar of that new debt is in the form of short term notes. The administration chose this route because, like the homebuyers, they get a great low rate. A two year note today carries a .03% interest rate while a ten year would carry a 2% rate. The problem is, when interest rates spike, all that debt will have to be refinanced, likely at the much higher rates. As an example of the impact of higher rates, consider this: If the government were today paying the 5% it was paying a mere 5 years ago the interest payments alone would be an additional $400 billion a year, almost as much as they will spend on the whole of Medicare this year. That would be like removing from the economy the revenue of Ford, Dow Chemical, Kellogg’s, Google, GAP, the NFL and Microsoft as well. A rate jump from .03% to 5%? No way, that’s not possible. Really? In the two years between January 1978 and January 1980 interest rates jumped a total of 14%, from 6% to 20%. Imagine what $10 trillion financed at 20% might look like!

Barack Obama has set the United States on a Thelma and Louise course, but likely won’t be in the driver’s seat when we actually leave terra firma. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, the pain that Obama has guaranteed us will likely occur on his watch and there may not be much he can do to avoid it. Indeed, unbelievably, it has the potential to make the current disaster of a presidency look relatively prosperous in comparison.

If he recognizes this in advance, Romney will have the opportunity to steel the American people for the maelstrom ahead while giving them a reason to expect things will get better. That is after all what real leaders do: They prepare their countrymen to persevere through difficult times without needing a scapegoat to make their case; they inspire their citizens to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and go forward to build the prosperous future they seek; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, they seek to reduce the state’s power to frustrate and obstruct the citizenry’s ability to build that prosperous future. Now that’s an action movie I’d like to see.