Just replace “Greece” with the “US” and you can see our future, current our path:

The Greek government has spent too much for years. Markets became concerned about this in November after the newly elected Socialist government revealed that last year’s budget deficit was more than three times as large as previously estimated. The EU says Greece’s financial figures have been fudged for years.

With debt piling up to 113% of the economy, investors fear Greece won’t pay its debts, in the form of government bonds — or will need a lifeline from other EU countries to meet its 54 billion euro ($74 billion) borrowing needs this year.

Decades of irresponsible government have put us on the current trajectory. Program after program were put in place and structured in ways we cannot afford. Social Security, Medicare, the new Medicare drug program, Medicaid, and so on.

Barak Obama is perhaps, hopefully, at the tail end of this madness in spending. We surely can’t afford the health care bill he wants - and it looks like these new “reforms” will never be enacted anyway. The country’s #1 priority for the next decade should be to get our financial house in order - not coming up with extravagant new spending programs. This kind of reckless spending is so 20th century.

With government spending completely out of control, one likes to think of other presidencies to look for better management. Well, it wouldn’t be the prior president, George W. Bush, because he spent like a maniac. You would like to look back to Ronald Reagan and think he did the best job. But really, he was never able to slash government spending as he would have liked to have done. At best, he just for a time slowed the growth of government some.

But there was another president, uh-hum, a President Bill Clinton, that some say did the best job of all in recent years. Economist Arthur Laffer gave his view back in 2007:

“… he became more Reagan than Reagan the day afterwards. He lost the House, he lost the Senate, he lost the governorships, he lost the state legislatures. And then he became more Reagan than Reagan: He got Nafta through Congress, against the unions, against his own party. He reappointed Reagan’s Fed chairman twice. He signed welfare reform, that you actually have to look for a job to get welfare. He cut government spending as a share of GDP by 3.5 percentage points. No president ever has come anywhere near him on that. He had the biggest capital gains tax cut in our nation’s history in ‘97. He got rid of the retirement test on Social Security. This guy was a great president and I voted for him twice.”

I ran across a sane sentence in a New York Times editorial today:

America needs to shut the path to illegal entry and employment while opening smoother and more rational routes to legal immigration.

If we take this at face value, this would mean that the NYT’s editorial staff supports a secure southern border. And a secure southern border requires a high, multi-layer fence along nearly all of the southern border. Do they mean this? No way. So what do they mean? You know - hire a few more border agents, provide more aid of some type to Mexico to get people to want to stay there, or add a few more guest-worker programs. Right, like these things will have any impact on illegal immigration.

You can be sure that this NYTs editorial claiming they want to “shut the path to illegal entry” is all lip service. They would never support the steps needed to actually “shut the path to illegal entry”.

I recall the last mass amnesty reform in the 1980s. There were lots of claims then about how border security would be tightened. That turned out to be a complete joke as illegal immigration then dramatically increased over the southern border. I guess we are all just supposed to ignore this piece of history and plow ahead with this latest immigration reform.

All amnesty proposals should be opposed until the southern border is first secured. Actually, this was sort of agreed to at the end of the last Bush term. A program was put in place to build a fence - to first secure the border - but then this fence building program was gutted once the limelight went away. The American political class, Democrats and also establishment-Republicans, really don’t mind the open border. They ignore all of the problems that illegal immigration is leading to over time - like increased inequality, increased crime, massive new urban welfare-ghettos, educational decline, more demands for socialism, more congested highways, and charges of American racism as evidence mounts that 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos are not moving up economically.

It’s really bizarre that we let about 500,000 people sneak illegally into our country each year, and our elites believe that there are no problems with this. Imagine if you sat in an airport and watched 500,000 people (1370 per day) sneak into the country each year. Wouldn’t you think maybe something is wrong with the security system?

Does Mexico need the death penalty? They have not executed anyone in Mexico for a civilian crime since 1937. But consider this that happened today:

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen mowed down the family of a Mexican marine just hours after the military honored him as a national hero for losing his life during a raid that took down powerful drug kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva.

The brazen attack happened shortly before midnight Monday at the home of fallen marine Melquisedet Angulo in the town of Paraiso in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, police said.

Hit men linked to Beltran Leyva’s cartel have a strong presence in the state and are believed to be behind the slayings of Angulo’s mother, his two siblings and his aunt, federal officials said Tuesday.

Murderers like this deserve the death penalty.

What is the view of ordinary Mexicans regarding the death penalty? It is as you might guess - they believe, like most Americans, that the worst of murderers should get what they deserve:

A large majority of people in several countries, including the United States and Mexico, support the death penalty, according to a poll by Ipsos-Public Affairs released by the Associated Press. 71 per cent of respondents in Mexico and 69 per cent in the U.S. back the idea of sentencing convicted murderers to death.

But would the death penalty really help reduce the number of murders in Mexico? Based on recent studies , it appears that the death penalty does indeed deter murderers.

Mexico not having a death penalty impacts us too in the US. A lack of a death penalty increases violent crime in Mexico, and this crime spills over into the US. And there is this too:

Mexico does not extradite to countries that are seeking the death penalty, and has successfully defended 400 Mexicans charged with a capital offence in the United States. This has in the past led to American fugitives crossing the border into Mexico in order to avoid the death penalty.

Update: Oddly, it is the Green Party in Mexico leading the charge to restore the death penalty (… something about the carbon footprint of murderers or something).

I wondered what yearly temperatures have been doing in the US. I was thinking that we should look at non-urban temperatures to get a better read since as cities grow they could surely artificially alter temperature readings (roads absorb heat, car and trucks emit heat, buildings block wind, etc.). This boy and his father did exactly this:

With the climate control meetings in Copenhagen going on, this got me to wondering how fast sea levels are expected to rise. After all, isn’t that the bottom line problem that is supposed to occur due to global warming? I have been hearing all week that the rich countries are going to cause the sea levels to rise, because of the melting ice near the poles, and the poor countries are going to get flooded as sea waters creep over their shores.

So with all the press coverage of the climate control event, you would expect indisputable data regarding rising sea levels. Well, hmm. This is from a 2007 interveiw with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner:

I am a sea-level specialist. There are many good sea-level people in the world, but let’s put it this way: There’s no one who’s beaten me. I took my thesis in 1969, devoted to a large extent to the sea-level problem. From then on I have launched most of the new theories, in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. I was the one who understood the problem of the gravitational potential surface, the theory that it changes with time. I’m the one who studied the rotation of the Earth, how it affected the redistribution of the oceans’ masses. And so on.

… So, we have this 1 mm per year [rise in sea levels] up to 1930, by observation, and we have it by rotation recording. So we go with those two. They go up and down, but there’s no trend in it; it was up until 1930, and then down again. There’s no trend, absolutely no trend.

… Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their (IPCC’s) publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something, but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original data which they suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge.

So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences meeting in Moscow—I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!

Of course, you can find tons of articles that say the global sea level is rising steadily. It gets hard to know what to believe. Thousands of scientists are in group think mode regarding global warming. They are just convinced it is real and don’t want to hear anything that challenges this. So I don’t trust the scientist-activists.

Personally, I’m still trying to learn what is really going on. One thing I know is this: All of the claims that existing climate prediction models have certitude in predicting temperature and sea levels 100 years from now are crap. I think the most that can be said is that there is a possibility that significant global warming will occur. What I am trying to learn is - what is probability? We are dealing with probabilities here, not certitudes - regardless of what some scientists, politicians, and celebrities say.

While visiting Denmark, I wrote here about learning of the incredibly high taxes on cars there. They are so high that it was hard to believe. Below is more about this in the NY Times this week. Amazingly, the numbers in my blog post match exactly with the NYTs. (Huh - the NYTs must have stolen them from me. For all your accurate facts and figure, come to NoSpeedBumps.)

Is saving $40,000 at the showroom enough to get drivers behind the wheel of an electric car? With a program in the works to add easy access to charging stations, Denmark is about to find out. The country imposes a punitive tax of about 200% on new cars, so a vehicle that would cost $20,000 in the United States costs $60,000 here. For a quarter-century, electric cars have been exempt from that tax. But the models on the market were so limited in their capabilities that only 497 of them are registered in the entire country.

For all their potential, electric cars have always been the subject of more talk than action, and only a handful are on the road in Denmark. But now the biggest Danish power company is working with a Silicon Valley start-up in a $100 million effort to wire the country with charging poles as well as service stations that can change out batteries in minutes.

The government offers a minimum $40,000 tax break on each new electric car — and free parking in downtown Copenhagen. But even in Denmark, one of the most environmentally conscious nations in the world, skepticism abounds. It is not clear that car buyers can be persuaded to make the switch.

With this deal - who wouldn’t buy an electric car? I sure would.

Hat tip for this NYT’s article to Carpe Diem, a blog I read daily.

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn quit this week. The MSM reports this with no mention of what is surely a factor: her Mao comments. Did she quit on her own or was she pressured into quitting? Who knows? Don’t forget that Glenn Beck had a field day with Dunn’s Mao comments. Since Beck is on Fox News, this being the most watched news channel in the US, surely this made the Obama team worry about their image of being too far left.

I wrote a few weeks ago that she should be fired for not having enough sense to not refer to Mao as one of her favorite philosophers. Dunn claims that she was using irony and humor in her reference to Mao. When I watched the video, sure she had a little humor mixed in, but I took her as being oblivious to the notion that Mao (the world’s greatest mass murderer) could be quoted approvingly.

Some right-wing bloggers have tried to say she is a true Maoist, which is pretty silly. Actually, I can see how she could think it was okay to quote Mao as a person of wisdom. She may have taken some humanities classes in college where a Marxist professor, living in an academic cocoon, glossed over Mao’s atrocities and made Mao sound respectable and quote-worthy. Dunn, surely a lifelong lefty, perhaps never went back and re-evaluated this nonsense that she picked up in college. But of course this is all just speculation on my part.

Funny too that all of the media accounts of her quitting manage to mention her bashing of Fox News - but they mostly leave out the Mao flap that got so much attention from conservatives. I mean, she lasted less than a month after her speech quoting Mao was found. When reporting on her quitting, how could the media reports not even mention this controversy?

Why does Fox News continue to employ Geraldo Rivera? Rivera is a fanatic about allowing illegal immigration to go on unhindered. So on that issue, he is a hard-core left winger. Now, of course, hard-core left wingers have a big problem with intolerance. Their political opponents, in their eyes, are just rotten people. Listen to how Rivera in 2007 described fellow Fox employee (at the time) Michelle Malkin who is a conservative activist:

“Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I’ve ever met in my life. She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people.” He added, “It’s good she’s in D.C., and I’m in New York. I’d spit on her if I saw her.”

What I dislike the most about so many lefties is that they claim to be the broad-minded tolerant ones, but the opposite is true. Their world views are very narrow, and the range of thought they are allowed by their peers is quite limited.

It sure feels good to be a non-liberal. It makes you feel like a free person!

Update: I must add that conservatives lately have been doing their share of displaying political intolerance. To this, liberals are horrified. Hey, only they are supposed to get to be intolerant and say awful things about their opponents! What’s the world coming to?

In the past year there has been some comments, including from Texas Governor Rick Perry, about Texas seceding from the United States. The same things have been said about Alaska. Perhaps we should listen to President Lincoln speak about this:

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was “to form a more perfect Union.” But if [the] destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union, — that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

Indeed, Lincoln’s entire first inaugural is all about making the case against succession.

The talk of Texas seceding may be good fun for some, but of course no one should take it seriously. After all, the last time Texas seceded things didn’t turn out too well.

Barack Obama did something this week very unpresidential. The classic problem with left-wingers is that they have a deep intolerance of those with political views different than their own. But when you are president, you are supposed to rise above this and at least acknowledge that your political opponents have legitimate concerns, but you just happen to disagree with them. You are supposed to be the president for all Americans, not just those on your political side.

The issue of illegal immigration over the southern border has created a profound divide in political opinion in the US. Some think that we should be aggressively trying to stop illegal immigration. Others like the border pretty much left open and they want to give amnesty to those that sneak in and manage to live here and work for awhile. Obama, of course, holds the later view. Well, okay, but he should not be demonizing those that think we should be working hard to secure our borders. Having open borders, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented persons sneaking in every year, is a legitimate concern on many fronts.

Unfortunately, Obama has turned to crass intolerance toward those who want stronger measures taken to slow illegal immigration. At a fundraiser in Florida Thursday night he said:

“A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year,” Obama said. “If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”

So Obama is accusing two of his prominent political opponents of stirring up violence against Hispanics. While I disagree with Obama on most political issues, I have tended to cut him slack outside of politics. But he has really lost me here. He is bringing the crassest tactics in politics to the executive branch. Barack Obama - you should be ashamed.

And worse, this will just give legitimacy to those on the left who already aggressively declare that their political opponents are all racists, xenophobes, sexists, and people with bad intentions. Thus Barack Obama is contributing to the coarsening of the national debate on a major issue before us. The message is: If you disagree - you better just shut up.

Left wing blogs are already filled with this kind of political intolerance. Political opponents are seen as simply wicked people. Obama should not be re-enforcing this kind of thinking.

In Europe they have been adding laws that outlaw speech that stirs up racial tensions. A new federal hate crimes bill was just past this week in the US. How long before the US has hate crime laws outlawing things that Dobbs and Limbaugh might say? Fast forward 50 years - is it really that far-fetched? Brigitte Bardot keeps getting arrested in France for saying that Muslim immigration is hurting France. How long before in the US you can get arrested for speaking out assertively against illegal immigration?