Nancy Pelosi suffers from nuclear grade stupidity:

By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job.

“It injects demand into the economy,” Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”

Pelosi said the aid has the “double benefit” of helping those who lost their jobs and acting as a “job creator” on the side.

“It’s umpossible to think of a situation where we would have a country that would say we’re not going to have unemployment benefits,” Pelosi said.

I emphasized the denser than dense part and may have played around with what she said in the last line.

What helps to create jobs or helps people find work is hunger and hardship. Not handouts.

Payrolls and jobs are falling. Unicorn farts aren’t as powerful as they thought.

Recession, depression, recover, bounce back to depression.

Finally, it’s not really good news but it’s not bad either. Tea Parties are having an influence:

Grover Norquist, the veteran crusader for tax cuts, has seen a lot of groups passionate about a particular cause take a seat at the Republican Party’s table over the years. There are the gun owners and the Christian conservatives, the business lobby, the defense hawks and the anti-abortion activists.

But this year, thanks to the tea-party movement, Mr. Norquist has seen a new seat pulled up: the cut-spending seat.

That is to say, there is now an activist group within the Republican orbit interested, first and foremost, in demanding that government spending be cut. Oh sure, there have always been people at the GOP table who said they were for cutting spending, but it wasn’t their A-1, top priority.

That’s how federal spending was able to rise 36%, while the federal budget moved from surplus to deficit, between 2001 and 2007, when President George W. Bush and his Republican Party were in full control.

But the last year has brought a change, one already having real political impact. There’s now a large swath of voters who say that cutting spending is at the top of their list of concerns. Indeed, in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this month, support for spending cuts was the single attribute most likely to make voters enthusiastic about a candidate for Congress this fall.

Have a good and safe holiday weekend.

Once it becomes increasingly true, and is generally recognized, that the position of the individual is determined not by impersonal forces, not as a result of the competitive effort of many, but by the deliberate decision of authority, the attitude of the people toward their position in the social order necessarily changes. There will always exist inequalities which will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortunes which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is consciously directed, the way in which people will react will be very different from what it is when they are nobody’s conscious choice.

Why worry about the stockholders when they can put the US Taxpayer on the hook?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said they intend to delist their stock from the New York Stock Exchange as the U.S. government-backed mortgage companies continue to struggle amid billions in losses.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the companies’ conservator, said it directed them to delist their stock because of stock-exchange requirements for maintaining price levels above $1 per share.

“FHFA’s determination to direct each company to delist does not constitute any reflection on either enterprise’s current performance or future direction, nor does delisting imply any other findings or determination on the part of FHFA as regulator or conservator,” said Acting Director Edward J. DeMarco.

After the delisting, the companies’ stocks will be traded in the over-the-counter market. Freddie said it expects the delisting of its common stock and the 20 listed classes of its preferred stock from the NYSE will happen around July 8. Fannie will delist from the NYSE and the Chicago Stock Exchange.

Is it that irrational for me to think that if the Republicans gain control of Congress that they might revert back to their old habits when George W. Bush was pushing the agenda?

To put it briefly: Earn it!

Note to Republicans: Whenever possible, victory parties should be held after the election, not before it.
[. . .]
Why were Republicans predicting victory in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1? Given a choice between two candidates who both hate ObamaCare, why would lifelong Democrats not vote for the Democrat?

Republicans are playing the same raised-expectations game with the November elections. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner is ludicrously predicting Republicans will pick up 100 seats in the House in November. Newt Gingrich puts the figure at an equally insane (and weirdly precise) 78. He also predicts the Cubs will win 132 games this season and six games will be rained out.

Keep it up, Republicans, and I’m going to keep naming names. I have Nexis.

For more than half a century, the average midterm pickup for the party out of power has been 24 seats.

Your job, Republicans, is not to go on Fox News and whisper sweet nothings in conservatives’ ears. Your job is to repeal the Obama agenda. Raising expectations so high that a 30-seat Republican pickup will seem like a loss is not helping.

Be sure to read the rest.

At least two influential unions will spend close to $100 million on the 2010 election, with most of those funds going to protect incumbents.

Union officials told The Hill they plan to help endangered members — particularly freshmen — who made politically difficult votes in a year during which an anti-incumbent mood has filled the country.

And the number will be even higher since the AFL-CIO declined to give its figures.

The Tea Parties numbers must be making them worried. Expect a nasty smear campaign from the big labor special interest this election cycle.

Landscapers are having trouble filing temporary jobs in Michigan– who has the lowest unemployment in the US– because people don’t want to give up their unemployment checks.

Landscape workers can earn about $12 per hour in Michigan and would make $480 per week before taxes working full-time, or about $350 per week after taxes. In addition, full-time landscape workers would face transportation costs and other work-related expenses. But collecting unemployment benefits and working zero hours per week, many of those unemployed workers can receive $255 per week tax-free for almost two years, which is only $95 less per week than if they worked full-time. For some workers who are getting the maximum of $387 per week in jobless benefits, they can receive even more from collecting benefits than they would get paid going back to work full-time.

It’s policies like this that help kill the entrepreneurial spirit of a nation.

After almost two months of waiting for the iPad to arrive in their country of residence, international users are now complaining about the inflated price some of them must pay for the tablet, compared to the U.S. prices. For example, in the U.K., the entry-level 16GB Wi-Fi-only iPad costs £429, which equates to almost $150 more than in the U.S.. In Canada, the price difference is of almost $40 for this model, while in the Euro currency area, the difference can reach $150 as well.
[. . .]
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has once again taken to his iPhone to respond to complaints. Jobs reportedly said in an e-mail to an obfuscated U.K. customer that he needs to educate himself, explaining that U.K. prices must by law include VAT (17.5 percent), while U.S. price do not include tax — hence the difference

There’s some more nuances than that but the VAT is the big difference so far.

Shocker! Fannie Mae has lost even more money. $13.1 billion in the first quarter of this year. For perspective, the court has estimated that Bernie Madoff has lost about $18 billion of investor’s money with his ponzi scheme. Piker’s work compared to Fannie and Freddie.

And after the Federal Government’s handling of FM/FM, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and their soon to be mishandled ObamaCare, why not put everyone’s 401K’s in their hands?

One way they might do this is to confiscate the cash on hand in exchange for a promise to make future payments in the form of an “annuity.” An involuntary annuity, in that scenario.

Sounds like how Social Security is treated. Cash will go into a “lockbox” (The general fund) and IOU’s will be paid out later. What could possibly go wrong?

Robert Stacy emailed:

Just got off the phone with Angela Lash of the Tim Burns for Congress campaign and she says they’ve already got teams of volunteers coming in from Virginia, Maryland and Ohio. But it looks like they’ll need all the help they can get because — with less than two weeks to go before the May 18 special election — Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post just raised the stakes:

While the special elections in Pennsylvania’s 12th district and Hawaii’s 1st district — set for May 18 and May 22, respectively — are both important markers in the race for control of the House this fall, the Keystone State race to replace the late Rep. John Murtha (D) matters more when it comes to analyzing the overall political environment. . . .
Pennsylvania goes before Hawaii and primacy matters in these sorts of things. A loss by Democrats in Pennsylvania would prime the pump for a series of “Are Democrats headed for disaster?” stories if Djou goes on to win for days later. If Democrats can win in Pennsylvania though, they are far more able to withstand a loss in Hawaii — writing it off to local rather than national politics. . . .
[I]t’s clear that Pennsylvania’s special election is the more true national referendum of the two May races. It’s why spending by the two national parties is already over $1.1 million and nearly certain to grow considerably in the final 13 days of the race.
And, it’s why every political eyeball in the country will be focused on southwestern Pennsylvania on May 18.

So there you have it. If Tea Party people want to make a difference — to help write those “Democrat disaster” headlines Cilizza is worried about — then it’s time to visit TimBurnsForCongress.com, or e-mail the campaign or call 814-619-3414.

Please click over and see the other updates and help out.

Now Whitacre is not a dumb guy, nor are there any ethics scandals in his previous record as a very successful CEO at AT&T. He was even the national head of the Boy Scouts of America, so why all of a sudden is he making a transparently false statement in a GM TV spot?

Three Republican members of Congress are asking the same question and they are also demanding some answers from Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who oversees the TARP program and who issued a statement endorsing the GM claim and citing the repayment as evidence that the government’s bailout effort is working.

Be sure to read the entire thing.

In other news, I made a buck by taking a dollar out of my right pocket and putting it in my left.