Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Loves Taxes More than America Friday Edition
• Delta Gets You There. Well Not You; You’re A Jew! (UPDATED: Delta Says No Codeshare Agreement)
• The Ben Bernank: Blown Over and Baffled

Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Loves Taxes More than America Friday Edition Posted: 24 Jun 2011 03:10 AM PDT The next time one of your progressive friends or co-workers say the Democrats’ first and only response to any budget problem is to raise taxes, and only to raise taxes, show them this link from the American Spectator and this one from Ace. And laugh, loudly and haughtily. Then shame that person until they slink away. You can also use these links to support your argument that the media is fully in the tank for the left. There is an impasse over the debt ceiling and the only sticking point — the only sticking point — is that the Democrats will not give up tax increases. They are willing to put the solvency of this nation at risk, to destroy our economy even further, just to wring a few more bucks from “the rich” so they can…what? Buy a few more campaign commercials? Give it to wealthy public sector union bosses who will spend it on campaign commercials? Sink it into one of any number of failed progressive programs like they have for the past half decade? No. This has to stop and it has to stop now. No more tax increases, not until we’ve cut our government in Washington so far that entire Cabinet Departments disappear. The cronyism and rampant corruption that is so easy because there is so much money flying around our Federal government has to stop. They are selling our futures, and our childrens’ futures far too cheaply. We simply can not allow it to happen again. And now, links! President Obama has declared the end of the war in Afghanistan, or at least that the end is in sight. I don’t like to be cynical about our war efforts, but I imagine he had no better choice since he’s allergic to the word “victory” and his dawdling was killing our soldiers five times faster than they were when George Bush was Commander-in-Chief (via Instapundit). Is it just me, or does anyone else think the President has an extremely small bag of economic tricks? A Dutch court has acquitted Geert Wilders of, essentially, saying mean things about Muslims. It’s a shame that the Netherlands still can’t wrap their heads around the concept of free speech. How bad is our public pension situation? Let me just say you probably won’t want to hit the link right after you’ve eaten. I honestly don’t know what to say about this story. IBM offered to give the Obama administration a program that would seek out and eliminate about $900 billion fraud and overspending in our health care system — twice! — and the President turned both his offers down. The link, by the way, comes from a story published in February, and the interview in which IBM’s CEO revealed this potential bombshell happened last September. Did you know anything about this, because I sure didn’t. While I’m giving you links about government corruption and incompetence, here’s another one. Over 1,100 recent background checks done for sensitive positions in and around the Federal government were utter garbage. Okay. Okay. One more. Remember when the President said the Federal government would not involve itself in the business dealings of General Motors after the multi-billion dollar bailout? Well, guess what happened? And the people on the short end of the stick were non-union workers, who got the shaft in favor of union employees (via memeorandum).

Delta Gets You There. Well Not You; You’re A Jew! (UPDATED: Delta Says No Codeshare Agreement) Posted: 23 Jun 2011 06:36 PM PDT The nation of Saudi Arabia has a few interesting rules for who may enter the country and what they can bring if they’re allowed in. For instance, you can’t enter the country if your passport has an Israeli stamp on it. The Saudis have a pretty strict We Hate the Hell Out of Israel policy and that extends to anyone who may have been there, in case there is some sort of Jew Cooties that might infest their nation like bedbugs in New York City. You can’t bring a Bible into Saudi Arabia either. Ditto a Star of David, a crucifix, a picture of Jesus, a Book of Mormon, a statue of Ganesh, or any other religious symbol that isn’t Islamic. I assume that a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion might get you upgraded to the luxury suite at your hotel and complementary women sent to your room in case you wanted to beat someone with a switch later. Hey, you never know, right? The reason for those rules is simple. Saudi Arabia is a paranoid nation packed full of anti-Semitic, oppressive, woman-hating, backwards primitives. Normally, a nation like that wouldn’t make news since there are only so many stories about camels and sand one can stand, but the Saudis are special. They happen to sit on top of one of the largest oil deposits on the planet. What luck, huh? That oil has bought them an outsized amount of global and financial power. It’s also made at least one American company incredibly stupid. Delta Airlines has entered into a code-sharing partnership with Saudi Arabian Airlines. That means it’s going to make a considerable pile of cash selling flights flights into and through Saudi Arabia. Though Saudi Arabian Airlines will do the flying, Delta will get at least a piece of the ticket price. And the opposite will be true for Saudis who wish to fly on Delta flights (assuming the code-share is mutual, which so far as I know, they usually are). In short, Delta Airlines will to reap a hefty profit off of anti-Semitism and religious bigotry and they’re pretty okay with it because, as their customer service blog explained, they won’t be the ones hating on the Jews, Christians, Hindus, or Buddhists. First and foremost, I think one of the most important things to mention here is that Delta does not discriminate nor do we condone discrimination against anyone in regards to age, race, nationality, religion, or gender. That said, some have raised questions about whether Saudi Arabian Airlines' membership in SkyTeam means Delta is adopting any type of policies that could present barriers to travel for some passengers, including Jewish customers. For this particular concern, it's important to realize that visa requirements to enter any country are dictated by that nation's government, not the airlines, and they apply to anyone entering the country regardless of whether it's by plane, bus or train. Comforting, no? Note there’s not a single hint that Delta realizes how appalling its behavior is. Of course it doesn’t discriminate; it just enters into close business relationships with those who do. Of course Delta has a “diverse” workforce and serves a “diverse customer base”, but that workforce and base just got a little less diverse. Delta’s commitment to diversity obviously doesn’t extend to a pilot in a yarmulke, a female flight attendant who prefers her face uncovered, or a passenger who has a Bible in his carry-on. Those employees and customers aren’t nearly as important to the fine folks at Delta as a truckload of cash. Back in the 1980s, Delta Airlines’ slogan was “Delta Gets You There with Care”. Obviously, that care doesn’t extend to everyone. UPDATE: Yid with Lid has a couple points of contact in case you want to register your polite but pointed objections to the airline’s business arrangement. UPDATE 2: Wait, this is the same Delta Airlines whose employees charged soldiers coming home from Afghanistan over $2,000 to carry all their luggage home. Makes you wonder what’s happening at the highest levels of that company, doens’t it? UPDATE 3: Delta contacted Brian Bolduc at NRO. According to a company representative, “Delta does not operate service to Saudi Arabia and does not codeshare with any airline that serves that country. Delta does not intend to codeshare or share reciprocal benefits, such as frequent flier benefits, with Saudi Arabian Airlines, which we have confirmed with SkyTeam, an Amsterdam-based 14-member global airline alliance.” So that’s that.

The Ben Bernank: Blown Over and Baffled Posted: 23 Jun 2011 11:53 AM PDT How is it possible that The Ben Bernank and his people at the Federal Reserve could remain this blinkered? We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting. One way to think about it is that maybe some of the headwinds that have been concerning us, like weakness in the financial sector, problems in the housing sector, balance sheets and deleveraging issues – some of these headwinds may be stronger, more persistent than we thought. Well, sure. That’s one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is that maybe some of the “headwinds” are easy to remove. Repeal Obamacare. Burn away tens of thousands of useless Federal regulations, including a small blizzard that have landed on businesses since January 2009. Stabilize the plummeting dollar and provide some long-term foundations on which business owners can build long-term plans. Approve the free-trade agreements with South Korea and Columbia. Lower the corporate tax rate. Make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Stop taxing repatriated income. Every one of these “headwinds” is strong but none of them need be persistent. While it’s not in Bernanke’s power to deal with all of them, there are things he can do to open things up considerably and put some much-needed stability into place so that our business owners can move forward with some confidence. If he’s looking for one precise read on why the economy isn’t growing, he can look at himself and those with whom he sits in meetings at the White House. Almost all our economic woes right now trace back to government meddling. The very best thing Bernanke can do right now is to set the Fed’s dials toward more economic activity (even if that means a little inflation comes with it) then walk away for a while. If he could stop meddling with a system far too complicated for anyone to direct remotely from Washington, we might just summon enough power to fly through his baffling headwinds. (via Mark Hemingway)

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