Today’s Mid-Day Cyprus Roundup

March 19th, 2013

Update: REJECTED!

Imagine a basketball being swatted back into Angela Merkel’s face…

A few updates on yesterday’s Cyprus bank deposit seizure story.

  • Supposedly the votes aren’t there to ratify the money grab. Which may mean that Angela Merkel and the EU will just keep twisting until the “proper” decision is arrived at.
  • “A one-time, ad hoc seizure of money isn’t a tax. It is confiscation. Or we can use a plainer word for it: theft.”
  • “The decision to expropriate Cypriot savers—even the poorest—was imposed by Germany, Holland, Finland, Austria, and Slovakia, whose only care at this stage is to assuage bail-out fatigue at home and avoid their own political crises.”
  • The Cyprus crisis as a pick-your-own-path adventure. That’s almost as retro as fiscal restraint and balanced budgets.
  • The New York Times says not to worry about Cyprus. OK, now I’m really worried.

    • The EU creditor states have at a single stroke violated the principle that insured EU bank deposits of up $100,000 will be guaranteed come what may, and in doing so they have more or less thrown Portugal under a bus.

    They have demonstrated that the rhetoric of EMU solidarity is just hot air, that they will not force their own taxpayers to share a single cent of clean-up costs for the great joint venture of monetary union – in which northern banks, insurers, pension funds, and indeed governments, were complicit.

    Their refusal to pay is entirely understandable in one sense – and if I were a German taxpayer, I would not care to swallow these losses either – but then the leaders of these creditor countries can hardly expect the world to believe that they will in fact do whatever it takes to hold EMU together. Quite obviously, they will not.

    The sooner this is made clear, the better. The sooner they take the proper course of withdrawing from EMU and organise the break-up the euro in the least disruptive way, the sooner Europe can recover.

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    Posted in Budget, Economics, Welfare State | No Comments »

    It Begins

    March 18th, 2013

    Chances are pretty low that you haven’t heard that the EU has decided to seize portions of people’s bank accounts in Cyprus as a condition of a bank bailout:

    When Cyprus’s banks reopen on Tuesday morning, every depositor will have some of his or her money seized. Accounts under 100,000 euros will have 6.75% of the funds seized. Accounts over 100,000 euros will have 9.9% seized. And then the Eurozone’s emergency lending facility and the International Monetary Fund will inject 10 billion euros into the banks to allow them to keep operating.

    It’s hard to express in words just how bad an idea this is. Europe has truly crossed the Rubicon.

    “The establishment of the principle that a government can, and at times of economic strain must, help itself to your savings, and that this is a legitimate tool of statecraft, ought to provoke riots.”

    I’ll go further: riots are not enough.

    If I were one of the people having my wealth confiscated, the proper response to such actions would be join an angry mob hanging the still-twitching bodies of the people who proposed and passed such a measure over the nearest lightpost.

    Think it can’t happen here? Remember, liberals have already floated the idea of seizing your 401K.

    The Eurocrats in Brussels have already decided that they would prefer to seize people savings rather than let the Euro fail, or admit that the European cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable. “The dream of political union matters more to Europe’s governing caste than the well-being of the people they represent.”

    I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was trying to figure out how much money I should put into gold and silver to get ahead of the European bank runs I half anticipated. Indeed, in this case such bank runs would etirely rational But they haven’t started outside Cyprus itself.

    Yet.

    More Cyprus news here.

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Economics, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    Ted Cruz’s CPAC Speech

    March 17th, 2013

    Haven’t watched all of it yet, but it’s been getting rave reviews.

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    Posted in Budget, Republicans, video | No Comments »

    Ted Cruz Announces New PAC

    March 16th, 2013

    Ted Cruz has announced he’s forming a new Jobs Growth & Freedom Fund PAC. Or rather, will be announcing it at 4:10 PM Eastern Time at CPAC. (You can watch Cruz’s address live.) “Our mission is to elect strong conservatives and to build a Republican Senate Majority in 2014.”

    Cruz is “paying it forward,” since endorsements from Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund and the Club for Growth were hugely important in gaining early momentum in Cruz’s Republican primary fight. So far I think Cruz has done an excellent job as senator, so I kicked in a few shekels myself.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans | 1 Comment »

    Ted Cruz Schools Dianne Feinstein

    March 15th, 2013

    Nice exchange over gun control:

    I’m pretty sure David Dewhurst would never have gotten under Dianne Feinstein’s skin, which is all the more reason we in Texas are happy we elected Cruz…

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    Posted in Guns | No Comments »

    Conservative Blog Meetup Dinner Query for Saturday, March 23, at 6 PM

    March 14th, 2013

    Dwight of Whipped Cream Difficulties and I are contemplating a conservative/gunner blogger meetup Saturday, March 23, at 6 PM, venue TBD (but not too close to the SXSW madness downtown). Drop me a line at lawrenceperson at gmail dot com if you’re interested in attending.

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    Posted in Austin, Guns | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for March 14, 2013

    March 14th, 2013

    This week we’ll do it Thursday rather than Friday:

  • Obama is trying to work the same magic on America’s economy that a half century of Democratic rule has worked in Detroit. More details here.
  • And Detroit’s former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is going to prison.
  • Since 2002, total federal spending has increased 89% while median household income has dropped 5%.
  • In Iran, 5 of top 10 porn search terms are for gay porn (no nudity, but NSFW-ish terms, and the usual warning that it’s (ick) Gawker).
  • Thanks to ObamaCare, your veterinarian bills are going up as well as your medical bills.
  • Thomas Friedman hates the Keystone pipeline because the oil is dirty, but loves China, where industry is a thousand time dirtier than here in the U.S. And where will that oil go if the pipeline isn’t built? China. Maybe Friedman just wants all the jobs to be in China. That, or actual checks from the Chinese government or their business subsidiaries, would explain an awful lot of Friedman’s writing over the last few years…
  • “Most developed nations are fundamentally broke.”

    The degrees of broke-ness varies: from completely and utterly broke, like Greece or Italy; to wobbly, like the U.K., France, the U.S., or Japan; to getting poorer like Germany. But all of them are going to have to raise the percentage of gross domestic product they collect in tax — and many of them very significantly.

    The U.S. deficit is more than 7% of GDP. The U.K.’s deficit is just as high. There is very little sign that spending cuts to close gaps of that magnitude are on the cards, nor is there any sign that growth will be sufficiently strong to make up the difference — certainly not in countries like the U.K. or Japan.

    Huge sums of additional revenue will have to be raised.

    Willie Sutton once famously remarked that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”

    In the same way, governments will look to raise more tax from companies because that’s where the money is.

    Or they could, you know, actually cut spending…

  • I’ve not been following the Prenda Law case closely. Fortunately, Ken over at Popehat has. Exceptionally brief background: Scumbag copyright troll lawyers operate shakedown operation, filing dubious (at best) copyright infringement lawsuits. Then they compounded the problem by suing bloggers and lawyers in an attempt to silence them. As you might expect, that strategy isn’t working out very well for them… (Hat tip: Dwight)
  • Florida Democrats want mandatory anger management classes for people buying ammo.
  • From Popcap Games, the makers of Plants vs. Zombies, comes Trees vs. Rockets. Wait, did I say Popcap Games? I meant the Israeli Defense Forces.
  • White House journalists as Ring-Wraiths.
  • Third round of Climategate documents released?
  • Michael Totten says that Lebanon is ready to explode from the spillover effect of the Syrian Civil War.
  • News of the horrific 5-year old terrorist who brandished her fearsome Hello Kitty assault bubble gun (link fixed).

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, ObamaCare | No Comments »

    Vetting the “Pro-Gun Democrats” Part 2: Kirsten Gillibrand

    March 13th, 2013

    After putting up this look at Max Baucus, I haven’t had a chance to look at other top “pro-gun” Democrats.

    Fortunately, S. E. Cupp has already done that for me with this look at New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. When she represented an upstate House district, she earned an “A” rating from the NRA. And after she moved to the Senate?

    She was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2009, following a messy selection process by then-Gov. David Paterson. On the day of her appointment, Mayor Bloomberg publicly criticized her for her staunch opposition to gun control.

    Suddenly, the moderate Gillibrand of 2006, who had earned the affection of the ultimate moderate Democrat in Bill Clinton, needed a makeover, and quick, if she was going to make it as a senator, not just an upstate representative.

    So a new and improved Gillibrand, one who was more politically palatable to downstate liberal elites, was born, practically overnight.

    Within two years, she had impressively turned that “A” rating from the NRA into an “F.” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam remarked at the time that he couldn’t recall a similar instance in recent history of a politician’s score changing so drastically, so quickly.

    When it comes to Democrats at the national level, there are two types: Those who have betrayed gun owner rights already, and those who are going to betray them when enough pressure is applied.

    When push comes to shove, there’s no such thing as a pro-gun Democrat.

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns | No Comments »

    George P. Bush Running for Land Commissioner

    March 12th, 2013

    “George Prescott Bush filed the official paperwork Tuesday to run for Texas land commissioner next year.”

    That would be Jeb Bush’s son, Bush43’s nephew, and Bush41’s grandson, one of the “little brown ones.” The Bush name alone is probably enough to win him the office, but add to that the fact that the Bush family has one of the most powerful money machines in all politics and you have a prohibitive favorite. Jerry Patterson was probably right to think he’d have an easier time defeating a post-Senate-race-meltdown David Dewhurst for Lt. Governor.

    Deeper analysis of a continuing Bush dynasty, and of how Democrats and the press react to facing a Bush scion who happens to be Hispanic, will have to wait until (at least) tomorrow.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    It’s All the Same Fight

    March 12th, 2013

    Rand Paul has won some liberal plaudits for his filibuster against extra-judicial drone strikes against Americans on U.S. soil. Fine and dandy. But what liberal don’t realize is that debate, the debate over government spending, the debate over gun control, and the debate over ObamaCare are not separate fights, they’re the same fight over the central issue: what is the proper size and scope of the federal government in a constitutional republic with limited, enumerated powers?

    The founders were deeply and rightly suspicious of centralized government power. They set up a system in which the federal government’s power was not only limited, but balanced against competing power. Not only were the executive, legislative and judicial branches balanced against each other, all were balanced against state governments, and against the power in the people themselves, which is why the Bill of Rights is an enumeration of what the federal government could not do to its citizens. The state exists not to do things for people, it exists to keep things from being done to them.

    Those right have been eroded by the excessive expansion of the federal government, and those checks and balances thrown off by the creation of a permanent parasite class in Washington D.C. that benefits from raking its percentage off the top of an ever-expanding redistributionist state.

    Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, etc. all know, understand, and believe this. To them, the Constitution is a constant, a vessel of liberty to hand down from generation to generation to keep America strong and free. To liberals, the Constitution is an obstacle to be nullified by left-wing federal judges who ignore provisions like the 2nd and 10th Amendments because the limit how much power Democrats can take from the people and give to government.

    The larger government’s sphere, the smaller that of the American people. Drone strikes on U.S. soil are a big, bright line even liberals can understand. But gun control, outrageous deficits, and ObamaCare are all chipping away at the constitutional republic left to us by the founding fathers, day by day. Barry Goldwater once said that “A government big enough to give you everything you want it is big enough to take away everything you have.” Rand Paul and Ted Cruz understand that. Liberals either don’t, or actively want to participate in the taking.

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Guns, Supreme Court, Welfare State | No Comments »

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