Alex Tabarrok, in discussing business cycles, made an interesting observation. He wrote:
In the United States, for example, sales of the top 100 firms account for about 30% of GDP. (The share is even larger in most other developed economies.)
What caught my eye was that the 100 largest corporations represent a higher percent of the economy [...]
The WSJ had a piece recently that took about 24 hours for me to digest and understand the full significance of. Mary O’Grady wrote about the creeping anti-semitism in South American courtesy of our pal Hugo Chavez. I don’t want to downplay that aspect of it but it’s the broader picture that hit me in [...]
Undercut our friends. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country.
Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy
Is it me or is the Obamaphilic left more willing to trust in the benevolent intentions of the likes of Iran, Russia and Venezuela than in American businesses.
One of the most dangerous delusions of the Left is the idea that we might be able to create a civilization that has no enemies. Civilization always has its enemies. -Unknown Author
The left just never seems to grasp the idea that we have enemies not because of George Bush or because of alleged past wrongs [...]
How else can you describe it when Obama’s Attorney General is more interested in prosecuting CIA operatives for saying mean things to terrorists than in following through on an already-won voter intimidation conviction of several club-wielding Black Panthers?
PowerLineBlog, by the way, walks through the CIA report in detail. Blowing cigar smoke in a killer’s face!? [...]
Apparently, the U.S. interest section in Havana installed a news ticker on the outside of the building a few years ago. It would display pro-democracy news, inspirational items and (no doubt) irritate the Marxists. Well, apparently Obama feels that quoting the likes of Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and Lech Walesa is just too pushy. [...]
Tucked into an excellent piece by Deroy Murdock demonstrating the horrors of government run medicine in Canada and the UK, is a great example of how statistics can be fudged.
“Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets,” Daniel Martin wrote last year in [...]
For many you Europeans, Western civilization comprises little more than pop music, soccer, a sexual free-for-all, social security programs and five-week holidays in exotic places: not a strong position from which to face either the economic or the ideological challenges of the day.
Theodore Dalrymple
Harry Patch, Britain’s last surviving WWI veteran, died at the ripe old age of 111. Another story said there are no surviving French or German veterans and one remaining American WWI veteran (a mere 108 years old).
It’s really amazing to think about everything Patch would have seen in his life. A transition from horses to [...]
Things are going to get worse for the U.S. economy in the long run unless our great thinkers in Washington get the message that we already have uncompetitive corporate tax rates and their schemes are only going to exacerbate the problem. You know things are ugly when corporations are moving from the U.S. to Canada [...]
Two excellent points were made this morning on Bill Bennett’s radio show. I am paraphrasing.
Obama’s plan for dealing with thuggish dictatorships like Iran and North Korea appeared to be that he would just say nice things and they would succumb to his personal charm. That doesn’t appear to be happening and there does not seem [...]
I try to limit my criticisms of the left to the issues. I don’t like to make personal attacks on them, even though they do not return the courtesy (who knew, for example, that Pat Toomey and John Boehner are troglodytes). Despite my general rule there are times when I have to wonder about the [...]
The EU is beginning to log essentially all electronic communications, including all email, web traffic and VOIP phone calls. I see nothing in the article that discusses safeguards for the information.
Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes.
I’d [...]
This is what multiculturalist asshats like Rowan Williams what to make cultural room for. That would be a young woman being held down and flogged in the streets of Pakistan in case you don’t have the stomach to watch.
And this and this and this are also Sharia, in case anyone thinks it can’t happen here.
Obama is trying to offer “honorable reconciliation” to the Taliban. The Taliban think that’s a pretty goofy idea. I hate to say it but I agree with the Taliban. The problem is that our current president, and too many of his fellow travelers on the left, simply misunderstand the world.
They seem to think we have [...]
This gem was tucked away deep within the bowels of the Inquirer today. To summarize, the U.N. Human Rights Council has passed a resolution calling for countries around the world to prohibit criticism of religion, particularly Islam. This is a direct, frontal assault on human rights, modernity and western civilization. When will our so-called great thinkers and [...]
I will never understand the left’s belief that the UN is this hallowed place, gifted with special legitimacy in the world. It doesn’t represent the people of the word in any way. It represents the governments of the world, regardless of how repressive and repulsive they are.
I’d like to hear the UN lovers comment on [...]
Howard Nemerov recently made devastating use of the UN’s own gun data against the UN’s antigun arguments. He broke countries into quartiles based on firearms ownership per capita. He then compared per capita firearms ownership to their homicide rate.
The results are best demonstrated in a table and it wouldn’t be right for me to lift [...]
One of the patterns we are seeing out of the Obama administration is a tendency to spin a policy one way while the actual policy contradicts the headlines. The we-won’t-torture except-when-we-feel-it executive order being a good example.
Now the headlines trumpet that Obama is going to withdraw from Iraq. But if you read the details a [...]