The News Factor, an online Conservative News Magazine

Electric cars are a boondoggle according to Rush Limbaugh – “nothing more than an expensive way to promote the environmentalist agenda.”

AM summary of MUST READ stories across the web:

NYT Oops:
“Government Motors” and its new Chevy Volt is an epic fail. Taxpayer money bought a bankrupt business, which then proceeded to build cars that no one wants to buy.
Friday NY Times rare gem: “G.M.’s Electric Lemon” (Chevy Volt).

Jerry Brown … fiscal conservative?:
Jerry Brown was known as “Governor Moonbeam” in the 1970s, and ran for president from the left three times (to the left of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, and to the left of Bill Clinton in 1992). But now that he’s running for governor again, Time magazine is trying to convince its readers he’s really a centrist. In the August 2 magazine, reporter Karl Taro Greenfeld helpfully laid out Brown’s case that he’s a penny-pinching budget hawk:
Time Helps Jerry Brown Sell False Image as ‘Budget Hawk’ Who ‘Never Raised Taxes’.

ARIZONA LAW … the Fed’s CATCH 22:
Comes now President Obama, the Chief Executive Officer of the United States, sworn to faithfully execute the federal laws, who instructs Attorney General Holder to march into federal court to seek an injunction against this new Arizona law and to prohibit the enforcement of federal laws (bad enough by itself) and compounds this violation of his oath by restraining police officers from performing their sworn obligations.
Arizona Police and Tribal Police.

WHERE’S THE OIL?
For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem — they’re having trouble finding it.
Mystery in the Gulf: The case of the disappearing oil.

LIB TALKER HAS MOMENTARY LAPSE INTO REASON:
Chris Matthews strayed from the liberal talking points today. But don’t worry, it only happened for a little while. Two hours, in fact, before he was back to his old self, lashing out irrationally at conservatives. We’re not sure where Matthews’ original bout of intellectual honesty came from, but we’re pretty sure that some sort of JournoListy Intervention occurred to get him back on message.
Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed.

BOOK REVIEWS: How did Obama do it?
Two new books from Oxford University Press take different approaches to try to explain the general election result. Regrettably, neither has much to say about the primary fight, which was very hard-fought, and over a much longer period. That contest produced the Democratic candidate in what was shaping up to be a Democratic year even before the financial crisis in mid-September 2008, the point at which most analysts believe Obama sealed his victory.
The Obama Victory Reconsidered.

OH GOOD, more “back stories” to the back story:
Breitbart, however, had put a potentially huge story into play the only way he could — through sheer provocation. As he knew, and as we are learning, the story goes well beyond Sherrod’s long-ago racist mischief-making with a poor white farmer.
Real Sherrod Story Still Untold.

Ouch:
Barack Obama seems to have a pattern of using ceremonial or stately events as opportunities to ambush and humiliate people. This behavior is unpresidential and reveals a vindictive streak that makes Richard Nixon look like Mister Rogers.
Obama’s Mean Streak.

TIME MAG SHOCKER:
Maybe a little too heavy on the distracting shock factor here?
Time magazine’s new cover: Woman whose nose was cut off by Taliban.

Current Events Barack Obama, Catch 22, Financial crisis, Mexico, Newsbusters.org, Taliban, taxes

This article at The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute by Jeffrey Friedman shows us that there is something to learn on BOTH sides of the aisle …

Capitalism gets a bad rap from the libs ... but as an economic system, it "mitigates both human greed and human fallibility."

A BBC poll conducted in 27 countries found last month that only 25 percent of Americans think capitalism is working well—and that this is the highest proportion of any country in the world. Overall, 51 percent of those interviewed thought that “regulation and reform” are needed to fix the problems of capitalism, and 23 percent maintained that an entirely new economic system is in order.

This is the intellectual toll taken by the financial crisis. But the people of the world, including most of its intellectuals, are simply wrong to think that capitalism caused the crisis. And once we understand what really happened, we get a rather different conception of capitalism than those entertained by either its conservative defenders or its liberal critics.

Beginning with “What Really Went Wrong,” Friedman walks us through the mortgage market from 2001 to 2006. During this period subprime mortgages slowly ate away at an otherwise stable financial market.

The heart of the matter is that most mortgages written during the housing boom were pooled into enormous mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Fannie and Freddie securitized mortgages, but so did investment banks, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Shares of these MBS were then sold, as bonds, to investors around the world—but primarily to the world’s commercial (lending) banks. When subprime mortgage defaults began to spike in the summer of 2007, the value of all MBS began to be doubted. By September of 2008, doubt had turned to rout. Nobody wanted to buy the MBS inventory held by Lehman Brothers, since nobody knew how far home prices would drop, and therefore how low the value of MBS might go.

Think you know the “REST OF THE STORY?” Heh, heh … think again and read more HERE

Aw shucks … let me give you one more tidbit just to bait the hook …

How Liberals Get Capitalism Wrong

Liberals are correct to see through the usual defenses of capitalism. But they are wrong on the big picture. They fail to notice that there’s more to capitalism than luck and greed: there is competition—the saving grace of the whole system and, when undisturbed, the source of its strength.

… A baker who offered moldy or tasteless bread would be driven from the field by a competitor offering a better product. That is the message of Adam Smith.

The reason is the competitive nature of the capitalist system; the motives of individual capitalists are irrelevant. Competition puts capitalists’ different motives and ideas to the test of consumer satisfaction. This tends to give consumers what they want—and it diversifies a capitalist society’s investment portfolio. Capitalism thus mitigates both human greed and human fallibility. This is an amazing achievement, but there’s nothing magical about it.

Economy American Enterprise Institute, capitalism, Financial crisis, Jeffrey Friedman, mortgage-backed securities, subprime mortgage market

Remark on report from U.S. News & World Report

As can be seen every day in the rapidly plummeting Dow Jones, James Pethokoukis writes that the stock market is having second thoughts about The One:

“I think he overestimates his ability to take people .. and, sort of, charm them into being nice,” Barney Frank, has famously said of Barack Obama. And while America’s Charmer-in-Chief has worked his magic with the Women from Maine and some of the Blue Dog Democrats, not so much with the Rump Republicans in the House.

One could view the slow-motion crash as a financial vote of no-confidence in the White House’s ability to effectively fix America’s economic mess and lead the rest of the world out of its tangle. (No confidence in the spending-heavy stimulus plan that treats 2009 as a wash. No confidence in the work-in-progress Geithner plan that seems intent on forcing banks to take losses. And certainly, one could argue, no confidence in a long-term economic plan will raise taxes by $2 trillion (including interest expenses and cap-and-trade costs) over the next decade as well as increasing government’s role in healthcare and energy.) Or maybe, to be fair, investors think nobody has any answers. To Wall Street, the Long Boom looks to have morphed into the Long Bust.

I tend to think that NOBODY has an answer for the short term.

Economy Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Breaking News, Dow Jones & Company, Financial crisis, Financial News, news, Stock market, u.s. economy, U.S. News & World Report, Wall Street

Nailed it!

Kyle-Anne Shiver – a frequent contributor to American Thinker.

The problem with handing over huge sums of taxpayer money to government bureaucrats, who’ve done not a single thing to earn any of it, is that they tend to squander it on pet projects or give it over to the constituency with the loudest voice or the biggest clout, a fact you seemed to acknowledge as bad policy during your campaign. This bill is big on money, honey, and gives extremely short shrift to specificity. None of this lends any credence whatsoever to your campaign promises of honesty and accountability.

Now, Barry Honey, I am loath to call anyone a hypocrite. As you may be aware, there is really nothing on God’s earth that Americans hate any worse than a hypocrite – a man who says one thing and then does another. But after four weeks of double-dealing, closed-door meetings, pre-selected questioners at press conferences, exorbitantly priced cocktail parties, failure to give more than a passing fancy to promised bipartisanship, and gadding about on taxpayer dollars during “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” every time I see you in public now, I’m seeing a chest-sized, bright-red “H” emblazoned on your GQ shirts.

I promise that if you read the rest of Kyle-Anne’s article, your outrage meter will max out.

Obama Nation Financial crisis, Great Depression