Monthly Archives: November 2008

Warren Buffet: Financial Genius?

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I once had an argument with an Obamunst pre-election who claimed Obama could fix the economy because “unlike that moron Bush” Obama was smart enough to listen to Warren Buffet. I said Warren Buffet can’t stop the deleveraging of the Credit Derivative Markets (which may literally be financial Armageddon) nor could he or anyone fight the markets. You simply cannot artificially avoid the busts that follow booms without creating larger busts and you can’t, as Peter Shiff has argued, have a credit driven society where the government makes policies (like farm subsidies) that decrease the incentive to produce actual wealth.

At which point he called me a Fascist and said America will be just fine after Obama wins the election. This one’s for you:

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. fell the most in at least 23 years, dropping for the eighth straight day since reporting a 77 percent decline in third- quarter profit.

The stock plunged $11,550, or 12 percent, to $84,000 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and has slipped 41 percent this year, compared with the 45 percent drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Berkshire, based in Omaha, Nebraska, rose in 17 of the past 20 years.

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Berkshire, what’s really happening is people are wondering if there’s something fundamentally wrong with the economy, and Berkshire is in some ways a bit of a proxy for that,” said Michael Yoshikami, president of YCMNet Advisors in Walnut Creek, California, which manages $850 million including Berkshire shares.

Berkshire has posted four straight profit declines, the worst streak in at least 13 years, on falling returns at insurance businesses and investment losses. Buffett, ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest American, has committed at least $28 billion this year to acquire companies, finance buyouts and purchase securities as prices fell and competitors were hobbled by limited access to credit.

Berkshire’s shareholder equity, a measure of assets minus liabilities, fell by about $9 billion in October on declines in debt and equity markets, the firm said Nov. 7. American Express Co., the credit-card company that is one of Berkshire’s top 10 stock holdings, plunged 47 percent since Sept. 30 as borrower defaults increased. Wells Fargo & Co., Berkshire’s No. 2 investment, dropped about 35 percent.

So Warren Buffet may not be smarter than any other high profile investor, you know, the ones who helped drive a policy of replacing actual wealth with credit. Who would have thought?

Democrats Stealing Kentucky Election!

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The Democrat Party in Kentucky is attempting to have more than a thousand voters disqualified due to an procedural error made by bi-partisan poll working team. This case will be the most blatant attempt at voter fraud in this election and should tell everyone on the right where Democrats really stand on issues of fairness, liberty and justice:

From Blue Grass, Red State:

When an entire precinct of voters are about to have their votes thrown out by state legislators, you would think that some of those bold first amendment types would step up and sue and embarrass everyone in the process, top to bottom, to be sure that the votes were counted.

Thus far in Kentucky, the disenfranchisement has been accompanied only by awkward silence.

Why?  How could they?  Could it have something to do with whose votes are being thrown out?  Whose seat is up for grabs?  I suspect it does.

In the election for the 26th District house seat State Rep. Tim Moore (R) defeated former Rep. Mike Weaver (D), also a failed 2006 congressional candidate, by about 100 votes.

In one Hardin County precinct, there was an issue with a voting machine in which ballots being fed into the machine to be counted were not being counted.  The bipartisan team of poll workers replaced the machine and fed the uncounted ballots into the new machine.  All of the ballots have been counted twice with little or no variation.  Under every scenario, State Rep. Tim Moore defeated Mike Weaver at that precinct, B121 Pine Valley, and in the general election.

County Clerk Kenneth L. Tabb, a Democrat, said proper procedure had been followed.  However, Democrats claim that Kentucky law is explicit when it comes to broken voting machine procedure.  They say the uncounted ballots should have been kept safe until the end of the day to be counted.

The election results will be certified by Secretary of State Trey Grayson’s office this Friday, where they will be promptly challenged by House Speaker Jody Richards, a Democrat whose leadership has come under intense fire this past year.

Guess what happens then?  The challenge will be heard in the House, with Richards presiding over a committe of 5 to 9 other House members, chosen at random.  The Democrats hold a majority in the House and chance tells us they will probably be able to stack this challenge committee.  If the challenge committee concurs with Richards’ challenge they will have to make a recommendation about how to resolve the conflict.

h/t Gateway Pundit

Suburban Gang Violence Reaching Critical Mass

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Criminal gangs are a problem that have been growing for years in America unchecked. Their reach into the suburbs is driven by drugs, Liberalism and a breakdown of traditional morality. In the story below Jon Scott is discussing Bergen county New Jersey, considered an upscale area. I’ve been to Bergen and have met people there, they are by and large listless leftists suffering from ennui.

The children are raised by children, 50-year-olds who still smoke pot and leave their kids to their own devices while abdicating their parental responsibilities to the state.

The laws in New Jersey favor criminality with some of the most draconian gun and self defense laws in the country.

And the rich Bergen county kids have no hope of staying rich. New Jersey is lowly draining the money from their families with some of the most onerous taxes in the country leaving them with the knowledge that even if they are as successful as their parents they’ll never be as wealthy.

They are ripe for the picking, looking for a group to belong to that is strong enough to protect them, won’t abandon them and most of all has a future beside downward mobility. No amount of scared striaght programs will change that until the people of New Jersey change from charactures of east coast parents and into real communities whose kids don’t need drugs and gangs for fulfillment:

Fox has a transcript.

Roger Bergendorf Gets Prison Time in Las Vegas Ricin Case

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You may remember Roger Bergendorf as the man who almost killed himself making the deadly toxin Ricin in his Las Vegas motel room. He had a dog, several cats (test subjects) as well as books on Anarchism in his room as well. Some people have been saying it’s pure stupidity to think that such a situation was an instance of attempted domestic terrorism, but those people are going to hell for lying. Those people include Las Vegas authorities who believe that because a person is “disturbed” his actions aren’t terrorism. You know, because terrorists are so mentally stable:

h/t Breitbart

John Stossel: The Road to Serfdom

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Stossel uses the title of F.A. Hayek’s classic text on the economics and the state as a jumping off point for some much needed Libertarian criticism of the Democrats clamoring for “action” on the economy by their new dear leader:

It’s exciting that the world is so excited about Barack Obama. I’m excited, too. That he achieved the presidency says something good about America.

But the excitement also frightens me. It reinforces the worst impulse of the media and political class: the assumption that all progress comes from Washington. In a free society, with constitutionally limited government, the president would be a mere executive who sees to it that predictable and understandable laws are enforced. But sadly, the prestige and power of the presidency have grown, and liberty has contracted. That is not something to celebrate.

Read the rest, it’s well worth your time to see the level headed Libertarianism of Stossel making the points about an Obama administration the Alex Jones Libertarians miss in their zeal to claim Obama is the anti-Christ. Stossel is on the mark in his critique of the cultural shift Obama represents slowly eroding our sense of individual worth and responsibility.