Sadly, No!

Just when you thought Alan Greenspan had reached the pinnacle of uselessness:

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan embraced President Bush’s vision of an “ownership society” on Thursday, saying private Social Security accounts could foster feelings of wealth among poor Americans. […]

While admitting private accounts would not solve the solvency problem facing the government retirement system, he said they would create “a sense of ownership.”

“These accounts, properly constructed and managed, will create … a sense of increased wealth on the part of middle and lower-income classes of this society, who have had to struggle with very little capital,” Greenspan told the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. [Emphasis added, fuckstickery in the original.]

Private accounts will not solve the problem, but they are good because they will give poor Americans a sense of increased wealth and make them feel like they’re wealthy.

Alan! What have they done to you?

PRAY FOR ALAN.

Looks like Bush picked the wrong week to continue being a flip flopping liar.

President Bush, Feb. 12, 2005:

I will work with members of Congress and listen to any good idea that does not include raising payroll taxes.

President Bush, Feb. 16, 2005:

President Bush says he has not ruled out raising taxes on those who earn more than $90,000 a year to help bolster Social Security’s finances.

President Bush, Dec. 11, 2004:

Secondly, we must not increase payroll taxes, because higher taxes would slow economic growth.

President Bush, Feb. 16, 2005:

U.S. President George W. Bush suggested in an interview published on Wednesday he may be open to raising the cap on Social Security taxes paid by high-income earners.

President Bush, Feb. 5, 2005:

We will not increase payroll taxes.

President Bush, Feb. 16, 2005:

[White House spokesman Trent] Duffy said that while Bush is open to talking about such ideas as the raising the payroll tax cap, “that doesn’t mean he’s embraced it.”

President Bush says:

Bush Criticizes Syria, Iran As Instable

This was followed by Bush criticizes water as wet along with Bush criticizes Jeff Ganon for having a big schlong, with our personal favorite President Bush criticizes Ann Coulter for abnormally large Adam’s apple coming in last.

Well, now we know why the scientists keep making them:

The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far different from the army it has. […]

The robot soldier is coming. […]

His colleague, Jeff Grossman, spoke of the evolving intelligence of robot soldiers. “Now, maybe, we’re a mammal,” he says. “We’re trying to get to the level of a primate, where we are making sensible decisions.”

Innocent primate?

Mr. Pless: Mr. Kramer, he is an innocent primate.
Kramer: So am I. What about my feelings?

Then again, if we can get bathroom monkey, surely we can do this. Let’s just hope that the monkeys primate soldiers don’t start writing “MONKEY HATE NEOCONS” in red lipstick on the walls.

Then again, this is just another day at the office for Mark Steyn. Over a week after many web sites (including this one, damnum absque injuria and snopes) debunked the German unemployed to the brothel story, Mark Steyn is the latest to enter the race in what may well turn out to be one of the most (ab)used urban legend of the year so far. As we would expect of Steyn, he cranks up the hack-o-meter:

Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:

1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalized brothel. […]

A trio of itsy-bitsy little stories from the foot of page 27 of your daily paper, if they made it at all. But they’re as revealing about the course of the war as anything going on in Iraq.

Yes, there’s nothing like an urban legend involving a woman being forced to prostitute herself to enlighten us about how things are going in Iraq. Nothing at all!

The waitress forced into prostitution by the government pimp is, at one level, merely an example of the unintended consequences that follow every legislative initiative. But, at another, it’s the logical reductio of the modern secular welfare state. Like all those European utopias John Kerry wants America to be more like, Germany has a permanently high unemployment rate

Steyn shows his talent by leaping from urban legend to plain lying. Those EU utopias who all have high unemployment rates in common?

In December 2004, the lowest rates were registered in Ireland (4.3%), Luxembourg (4.4%), Austria (4.5%), the
United Kingdom (4.6% in October) and the Netherlands (4.7% in November).

Denmark? 5.1%. Sweden? 6.4%. Portugal? 6.7%. (PDF link)

When the Germans legalized their whorehouses, they thought it showed how relaxed and enlightened they were. The al-Qaida types take a different line: They think it’s a sign that the West is decadent and weak and cannot survive. And they have a point: The government forcing women into prostitution is merely the latest example of the internal contradictions of the modern secular state.

Yes, the latest example… of something preposterous:

Mr Perkins: This is preposterous!
Headmaster: Yes, it is. Or at least, it would be…if it were true.
Mr Perkins: …What?
Headmaster: I’ve been joking, Mr Perkins. Pardon me, it’s my strange academic sense of humour. I’ve been pulling your leg.
Mr Perkins: Oh, thank God!
Headmaster: I wouldn’t cancel afternoon school to bury that little shit!

Who will be next to fall victim to this urban legend? Only the shadow knows.

Thanks to Harry H. for the link.

David Frum opens up a can of worms and spills it all over himself:

True story: I arrive at a Washington DC office building this morning. The guard asks me to show ID so he can sign me in. I produce a driver?s license. He says: “Sorry I can?t read small type ? would you mind spelling out your name for me?” I reply, “Sure. A-b-r-a-h-a-m, L-i-n …” Okay, that last part I made up. But is anybody else getting the impression that some of these so-called office security policies are kind of beside the point?

Never mind office security policies — have you looked at so-called national security policies lately?

This is not your father’s extremist terrorist group:

Jane’s warns of new terror group more radical than Al-Qaeda

The movement, Al-Takfir Wa Al-Hijra (Excommunication and exile), has gradually built its presence in Europe in recent years through loose networks of imams and supporters, according to Jane?s Intelligence Review. “It is so extreme that it once tried to …

How extreme is it? You tell us.

Good news everybody!

LONDON (Reuters) – A British woman was sentenced to two and a half years in jail Thursday for ripping off her ex-lover’s testicle with her bare hands during a drunken brawl after he refused her sex.

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage in May last year after Geoffrey Jones, 37, who had ended their long-term relationship, rejected her advances.

She grabbed him by the genitals, tearing off his left testicle, then hid it in her mouth before a friend of Jones handed it back to him saying “that’s yours.” [Emphasis added.]

Well, at least he didn’t say “Here, I think you dropped this.”

Sadly, in related news:

One To Support Welsh, Cuts The Testicles!!

LONDON (Reuters) – A fan of Welsh Rugby cut the testicles following a bet lost related to the unexpected victory of his team vis-a-vis in England this weekend, brings back Tuesday Daily Mirror.

Geoff Huish, 26, were convinced so much that England would carry it Saturday that it declared before the match with the people who had accompanied it to drink glass in a private club: “If the Welsh gain, I cut myself them.”

His/her companions thought that it joked.

But after the victory of its team, Huish returned at his place and cut the testicles by means of a knife.

It then traversed, its gonades in the hand, the 200 meters separating it from the club where it was presented at general amazement. [Emphasis added, well-deserved general amazement in the original.] [French original]

Happy Valentine’s Day for ALL!

(First link thanks to She Flies With Her Own Wings. Thanks to Blair for the second link.)

James Pinkerton, previously seen being a hack here, does it again:

Long before Dean became a short-lived presidential phenom, the Cato Institute had him pegged. The libertarian think tank released its “report card” on the nation’s 50 governors, giving the Vermont governor a “D”:

We’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. It wasn’t until Dean became a presidential phenom that Cato started flunking him. In 2000, Cato had written:

In some ways he is. [Vermont?s most fiscally conservative governor in decades.] In his first three terms as governor (Vermont still has two year terms), state spending rose by less than personal income growth. In 1999 he sought and won support for an across-the-board income tax cut to make the state more economically competitive.

By the same token, when Bush was busy “just being a governor” he didn’t earn much praise from the Cato folks:

He is a politician who seems to always want to keep everyone happy. His last budget climbed to growth rates not seen since Ann Richards: his last budget grew by close to 10 percent, among the largest increases in the nation in 1999. He shoveled a record $2.1 billion of new money into the Texas schools and then declared himself “the education governor.” In 1993 Bush crafted a convoluted tax-restructuring scheme that proved to be hugely unpopular with small businesspeople who would have seen their tax bills rise. The plan blew up, Bush was politically wounded, and finally he strategically retreated and signed a $1 billion property tax cut instead.

What else would you expect from a man (Pinkerton) who spent a column worrying about the reelection of Jean Chretien as Canadian PM months after Chretien had announced his retirement?

The latest book being plugged by Human Events Online is The Coming Crash in the Housing Market. While we’d normally pay little attention to the matter, our attention was caught by the sales pitch for said book:

Over the past four years, the stock market has crashed, layoffs are up, consumer confidence has evaporated […] Startling similarities between the “warning signs” of previous economic crashes and what we’re seeing today in real estate[.]

Which goes to show that it’s ok for conservatives to talk smack about the economy — as long as they have a book to sell anyway. Well, at least social security is almost saved.