With Ranked-choice voting, Oakland voters are facing the question whether they legitimately elected an incompetent, or if they were denied the opportunity to vote for their preferred candidate for mayor.

Jin Liqun explains with crystal clarity the prerequisite conditions for China’s potential role as a “white knight” riding to the financial rescue of the Eurozone. To whit – if it is not good for China, and it is not a good investment, China is not going to participate in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). Then in explicit terms, with no BS, no mincing of words, and no diplomatic artifice, Jin Liqun lectures Europe on exactly the problem with the Eurozone labor laws and welfare state.

Dipping into MF Global client funds to backstop the firm’s heavily leveraged high risk bets on European debt is about as serious as it gets. We’re talking – Federal Felony / Criminal Fraud / Grand Theft / Go To Jail / Do Not Pass Go / Do Not Collect $200 / Throw Away The Key / – that kind of serious. If tapping segregated client funds at a broker dealer is not criminal fraud, then it is at least criminal negligence for CEO Jon Corzine.

My hometown supervisors again set up The City for national ridicule and general hilarity, this time with the ban on Mcdonald’s Happy Meal toys. I guess it is a good thing that in these trying times we can offer ourselves up to the rest of the nation as civic clowns to help lighten the national mood.

I fully understand that – in the most progressive major city with the most progressive governing body in the country – it is impossible for them to resist the temptation to occasionally succumb to their core belief that no one is capable of making decisions for themselves or their family without their benevolent dictates guiding forcing us in the right direction. But… when even the Daily Show is pointing and laughing – you’d think our Supes might get a clue.

When an economic bubble bursts, normalcy can only return if the price excesses created during the bubble are wrung out of the market. A recession is often a painful but necessary market mechanism that corrects the pricing distortion and consequent misallocation of capital that occurs in a bubble. When government intervention prevents the mispriced asset class from fully deflating, capital continues to be misallocated and economic malaise lingers on. This is the takeaway message from Peter Schiff’s Wall Street Journal editorial.

Joe Scarborough tells the GOP to “man up” and take on Sarah Palin: Republicans have a problem. The most-talked-about figure in the GOP is a reality show star who cannot be elected. And yet the same leaders who fret that Sarah Palin could devastate their party in 2012 are too scared to say in public [...]

Observing the carving of our currency, as it is sliced by administration fiscal policy and diced by Fed monetary policy.

I wont be nearly the first person to be writing about California’s Proposition 14. I’m coming late into the game, having only listened to the vague positive talking points of the California Independent Voter Network (CAIVN), and their allies, who have talked this proposition up. But I began to see some dissent, and took at [...]

All week I’ve watched GM CEO Ed Whitacre walking down a factory floor in a GM advertisement, crowing about repaying government loans while saying he could respect the opinion of those who did not want to give GM a “second chance”. It is good to know that Ed can respect my opinion of the bailout. He might be interested to know that my current opinion is that his claim that GM repaid the loan from the US Government in full and ahead of schedule is more than a little disingenuous. I hope Ed still respects me.

Given that this is the slowest recovery from the deepest recession in the modern era, any argument on what impact the stimulus package or the Obama administration did or did not have on the duration or depth of the recession or recovery can only be made on a counterfactual basis. Despite the massive expenditures, you can’t say this recovery is more robust than any that has gone before, so all that can be said in defense of administration policy is speculation that the recovery would have been even more tepid without the stimulus. Problem being, a case can also be made that the uncertainty created by this administration’s wild spending, insane deficits, threatened increases in health care taxes, likely increases in health care insurance premiums on employers, an energy tax (cap & trade), repeal of the Bush tax cuts, increases in the minimum wage, uncertainty created in the health care, financial, and energy industries with the imposition of radical government mandated top down changes in industrial policy – all contributed to increasing uncertainty in the private sector and made the recession worse.

Hey gang, I know it’s been a while for me. I still visit The Donk everyday — because where else am I going to get top-notch discussion without all of the ridiculous name-calling — I just haven’t posted in quite some time. For that, I apologize. Although, it’s not like my writing has been missed [...]

One document escaped the purloined University of East Anglia CRU data dump. The CRU Scientific Methodology can be reverse engineered from the procedures documented in the e-mails and code. The New & Improved CRU Scientific Methodology can now be revealed.

The administration that has initiated so much that is unprecedented in American politics, introduced an unprecedented new Thanksgiving tradition – carving up our currency for the holidays.

In the annals of Supreme Court history, there are perhaps only a handful of cases that go down in history as more egregious than what happened in Suzette Kelo v. City of New London. In that case, the Supreme Court approved an eminent domain taking by the City of New London, Connecticut that involved taking [...]

Everybody’s abuzz about the new Wash Post story today that starts off with the idea that Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) was turned into some type of “terrorist professor” because he was waterboarded. And away we go… The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because [...]

You may have heard about this before, and one Florida lawmaker is finally doing something about it. Yes, I realize these laws are meant to prevent repeat offenses, but either up the penalties for those offenses or just leave them be. Once somebody gets out of prison, that should be it. End of story. If [...]

Not a whole lot of good has come the way to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) these days. The only organization I can think of that gets more right wing scorn has been ACORN, who I think mostly get picked on because they don’t fight back. Another ally, Health Care for America Now (HCAN), [...]

Anti-reform advocates are the gift that just keeps on giving. Take the case of David McKalip, who sent the above image out to his email list. Does he genuinely not understand the implications of distributing trash like this? Because not only is it guaranteed to get out to the broader media, it also seriously undermines [...]

In my last post I detailed some of the roadblocks that have kept the Democratic leadership in Washington from finding a way to pass a major health care reform bill with a public option. They’ve whittled the cost of the bill down a few hundred billion dollars by negotiating concessions from drug companies and hospitals, [...]

Sanford I have fewer problems with not resigning, although I think he should save South Carolina the embarrassment. His attention is clearly divided at this point and he let down the voters by abandoning his post. But Ensign fired his mistress’ husband from his staff and then continued to pursue her after the fact. Not [...]