Miley Cyrus apparently has few friends

I hate celeblogging, but when they're this good, can you pass them up? Teen pop singer Miley Cyrus, aka Hannah Montana, was in the news recently for trading in her mom's Porsche Cayenne SUV for a Toyota Prius hybrid, stressing the importance of "going green". She is also recently on the record, with respect to driving, of saying she likes having a car "big enough for all of her friends to ride in." Having seen and been in a Prius, I take it she has a small circle of friends...

Not quite so fast...

...before turning the tables on people calling you "dumb".

Jessica Alba recently ranted against Bill O'Reilly, who made fun of her for her suggestion to "be neutral, like Sweden", saying that the predominant neutral country in Europe is Switzerland, not Sweden. She then calls O'Reilly stupid, saying that Sweden was a non-aligned country during World War II.

If we were in the 1940s, we'd have a fair argument here. But we aren't. Sweden is a full member of the European Union, and has entertained the thought of joining the Euro. Sounds really neutral to me.

O'Reilly might be a pompous blowhard with scattershot accuracy, but his calling out Alba in this case, much to her chagrin, is correct (insomuch as she didn't say "like Sweden in the 1940s"). Had she gone one country to the West, and said "like Norway", then maybe.

But she didn't.

Needless to say, geopolitics isn't particularly the realm of the Hollywood glitterati, nor do I expect it ever will be. After all, they're not paid to be intelligent.

Ya think?

As usual, George Soros has a flair for understatement.

Soros is criticizing the idea of creating a publicly-held "bad bank" through which the government could isolate the toxic mortgage debts the banks hold and thereby limit further damage from the credit crisis.

What he wants to do instead is create a government-held "good bank", consolidating all of the non-toxic assets into one central depository, although he cautions that it would "too closely approach nationalization".

Yeah, I think governmental control of the near entirety of good capital in the financial sector would be just a bit more than "approaching nationalization".

Back from the abyss...

...with a rejoinder to Keynes as well.

Supporters of the current proposed economic stimulus keep telling me, quoting Keynes, "in the long run, we are all dead." They use this as justification that what matters is getting the economy back up and running in the short term, and worry about future problems when they arise.

My response to "in the long run, we are all dead"? "In the last major recession (1979-1982)... today was the 'long run.'"

My favorite nemesis has officially lost it.

And, for some of my readers, it may come as a surprise that he is a Republican.

Or, maybe not.

Either way, Mike Huckabee, the Baptist minister-turned-politician-turned-self-parody, is releasing a new book in which he basically blames the downfall of the Republican Party in this year's campaign cycle on, well... pretty much everyone other than himself.

He's mad that Romney is rich, is a Mormon, and, most unconscionably, didn't congratulate him after he won the Iowa caucus.

He's mad that Giuliani is pro-choice.

He's mad that McCain denounces religion-based politics like what Huckabee advances.

He's mad that evangelist John Hagee endorsed McCain.

Get the picture?

In particular, he's now saying that, among other things, libertarianism is destroying the Republican Party. Why? Because it is reflexively opposed to tax hikes (when America has some of the highest tax rates in the world on investment and business activity) and because it leaves "little room for government-driven solutions to people's problems."

Former Governor Huckabee, I usually keep a general level of demeanor about this particular blog, and about my writing as a whole, but allow me to suspend that for a bit so I can tell you something:

FUCK YOU.

Unlike those who seek government control over people's lives (such as the people who seek caps on individual earnings as well as nationwide bans on smoking... sound familiar to anyone, Reverend?), libertarians offer a unique, clear, consistent, and easily explainable philosophy that differs from the current wave of left-wing power-grabbing going on through Washington. And guess what? It resonates; people, on the whole, don't like the government meddling in their lives, and they don't like the government having free reign over what money they earn. It may not give everyone everything that they want, but it allows people to associate freely to develop solutions that work for them.

Heck, there's nothing preventing a community (Berkeley comes to mind as a convenient example/scapegoat) from, in a libertarian system of government, establishing a socialist cradle-to-grave system of care for its citizens if that is what they want. The converse, however, cannot exist. Under a socialist system, there is no way for the libertarian to live in a way consistent with their beliefs without leaving the country. There is little means by which to address grievances, and likely little access to the press to get a contrary view across. Libertarians have no problem with opposing points of view; in fact, they encourage it, and hope the best vision going forward wins for the individual and their community.

Maybe that's what it is that Huckabee is truly worried about... either way, his complaints ring hollow. He has been (relatively) successful at what he has done, carries influence, and is, on the whole, quite wealthy himself (although still takes time out to lambaste corporate CEOs and Mitt Romney for the exact same privilege that he himself benefits from).

Now let us all have the opportunity to do the same in our own lives, Governor.

Having fun in a bad economy - a "circling the drain" pool

In the wake of Circuit City's bankruptcy (which, honestly, was seen coming a long ways away) and Deutsche Bank setting a one-year forward-looking price target for General Motors stock of $0 (yes, zero), I've decided to put down some of my own money, the fruit of my labor, to amuse myself (and you, my readers) in a guessing game of buzzard-like proportions.

The name of the game: Guess when a gallon of gas will be worth more than a share of General Motors stock!

Some general rules to lay down... I will be calculating the price of GM's stock as of the closing price at any given day, and will compare it against the price posted at the S. Westnedge Road Speedway in Kalamazoo for a gallon of regular unleaded gas at the same time (currently standing at $1.95 a gallon). For those interested in a baseline measurement, General Motors stock is, as I am typing this out, $3.33 a share. One guess per person, and whoever is the closest to the right day I will send a $20 BP gas card (if, like myself, you don't drive... well, it works for getting snacks from their convenience stores as well!). I am posting this on my LiveJournal, Facebook (as it takes my LJ feed), The Corner Keyboard (my economics and politics blog), and MySpace, and, if there is no winning day by the end of 2009, well... I guess America wins, doesn't it?

Best of luck to anyone guessing!

-Michael Fisk
10 November 2008

A pox on both your houses!

Honestly, by this point, I am getting completely sick and tired of the election campaign, which seemed to have started all the way back in the middle of 2004 with Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention. Finally, barring any legal challenges, it will all be over, one way or the other, tonight. And I’m glad for that. But seriously, I’m needing something, anything, to get my mind off of all this political coverage, most of which seems more steeped in platitudes and sheer inanity than actual substance or reportage. So I decided to find a movie to watch that would somehow, hopefully, distract me long enough from the stuffed shirts and empty suits on the networks. Then, getting through most of the video releases at the local rental shop, I realized why it was that I don’t rent many movies; to me, they seem only of marginally higher quality than what MSNBC passes for investigative journalism. And then, on the cover of an especially crappy movie, everything about this election made sense.


The movie in question, in case you were wondering, is “Aliens vs. Predator”, a typical high-budget special-effects-laden popcorn flick with an overall intelligence level a few notches below that of Paris Hilton. Needless to say, I didn’t take that movie back with me to watch, but the marketing tagline for it stuck out plainly in my mind: “Whoever wins, we lose.” Once I read that, I knew my angle.


To some extent, that slogan just encapsulated the entire 2008 Presidential election campaign.


On one side, you have Barack Obama, possibly the only man on the planet to have lived for nearly a half century without leaving any sort of paper trail or appreciable perception on anyone in terms of his capacity for governance. In a sense, he has become the ultimate example of a tabula rasa, a blank slate, to which people have been able to attach their own visions, hopes, and aspirations to his lofty rhetoric about change and coming together to move forward. Not that, mind you, he has shown any semblance of “coming together” on anything, unless it is somebody from the other side of the aisle completely capitulating to his line of thinking (such as Chuck Hagel, a Republican Senator from Nebraska, with respect to foreign policy; Sen. Hagel is now being talked about as a potential Secretary of Defense in an Obama administration). While having surrounded himself with a fantastic team of advisors and academics to build his policy platform, he also seems to disregard them when he needs to listen to them the most (such as his words vis-à-vis Austan Goolsbee, the brilliant University of Chicago economist, on matters of trade). His campaign relies on iconography in campaigning that hearkens references to Latin American “cult of personality” dictators like Juan Peron or Hugo Chavez, while simultaneously saying that Americans cannot continue living their lives as they have in the past and “expect the rest of the world to be okay with that.” His faith in the state to provide solutions to all manner of personal and societal ills, while profound, is also alarmingly naïve; as even the Scandinavian governments are scaling back their welfare states in response to overpromising and underdelivering, Obama seeks to inform the American people that, on matters of the environment, finance, and education, yes, the government knows what’s best for you, and will do so whether you like it or not. His taxation plans provide disincentives for people to actually invest, take risks, and become successful, while simultaneously allowing foreign nations to effectively close off their markets to our manufactured products by wanting to rip up currently existing trade deals. In many ways, we haven’t seen such a level of disregard for the freedoms of the individual from a Presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis twenty years ago; the difference being, of course, that Dukakis had absolutely no shot at winning. Obama, barring a small miracle, should win easily.


That is not to say, however, that everything is fine and dandy with Senator John McCain, a man who is becoming more emblematic of a historical relic than he is of being a viable Presidential contender. McCain escaped a circular firing squad of a Republican primary simply by virtue of the fact that nobody had many serious qualms about him, not so much of having any practical expertise or qualifications to be President. He was selected more or less because nobody could gin up enough hatred of him. In an age where rhetoric and capacity for ideas is paramount, Republicans placed their hopes on a man who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the US Naval Academy and whose main qualification in the Senate was that the media didn’t seem to hate him all that much (mainly because they only covered him when he criticized President Bush, fairly or not). He took a gamble on making the election be all about national security as conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan improved rapidly, undermining his own alleged confidence in the military direction of the current Commander In Chief, whom he claimed to be in agreement with. He stated that he didn’t know much of anything about economics… as the election became almost entirely about the economy. He tried making the argument about Obama taking away many individual freedoms… while still fondly talking about the idea of mandatory national service for American teenagers, a notion not unlike the state-driven conscription regimes practiced within Western Europe. When Obama punched, McCain seemed lost, either going off in tangents or trying a new line of attack rather than doing the manifestly obvious of refuting Obama’s wildly inaccurate statements (in particular about the economy). He tried making the election be about experience, then selects as his running mate somebody even younger than Obama, with just as little political experience, largely on the grounds of finding somebody who would be inoffensive to a group within the Republican Party whom a) had nowhere else to go and b) had been a group that, until that moment, John McCain completely disregarded. After that point, McCain seemed satisfied in letting the majority of the high-profile campaigning be handled by his running mate (apparently being oblivious to who was at the top of the ticket), only starting to get back into things a couple of weeks before Election Day, as he was already taking a drubbing in the polls. He locked himself into public funding, effectively freezing out some of the party’s top fundraisers, while Obama burned through a literally superhuman six hundred million dollars in funding, outspending him in battleground states by at least a 3:1 margin and spending more in usual “safe” Republican states than were spent on battleground states in 2000. Normally these mistakes are fatal in an ordinary election year; in a year where the Republican Party brand is hitting rock bottom, the campaign seemed less like a competitive group and more like a suicide mission until the last few weeks… but a campaign is not made in a couple of weeks. This is hardball, not the Easy-Bake Oven approach to the Presidency. All of these factors combine to raise questions about McCain’s competency for the top office.


So, am I pessimistic about the fate of our country moving forward? Not in the slightest; America will only decline when and if it chooses to, on the backs of its individuals rather than on its government. One man, regardless of how ambitious and how poorly-thought-out their decisions are, cannot bring it down on their own. Hell, our country survived twelve years of FDR’s statism as well as four years of Jimmy Carter’s malaise; after that, we can survive anything. That being said, to anyone who thinks that either one of these candidates are the best possible person to run this country, you have another thing coming; this is not a battle of who will do the best as it is one of who will be able to inflict the least damage. For at least the next four years, our individual freedoms will be put to the test in ways that they likely haven’t been at least in several decades. “Whoever wins, we lose” indeed. Just know that the bright sun of morning only comes after hours of darkness, as it seems as though the darkness is upon us.