SAR #10168

Managerial incentive bonuses lead to managerial fraud.

After the Fall:   The GOP, with the help of a few loopy Dems, has decided that saving the bankers is more important than feeding the families of the unemployed.  So screw 'em.  No more long term unemployment benefits. Besides, by election day most of them will be too busy standing in soup lines to bother to vote.

Sputtering:  May's housing starts were but 593,000, not the 659,000 expected.  That's down 10% from the already downwardly revised April numbers.  Hard to get excited about an economic recovery when the economy isn't recovering.

Fig Leaf:   Is it possible that BP's leak estimates - from 1,000 barrels a day to 5,000 bbl to 25,000 bbl to 60,000 bbl – have all been relatively accurate and that the increase in the leakage rate is real and caused by the oil, gas and trash rushing out of the hole, constantly eroding it and making it bigger?  Yeah, erosion is quite possible . So is BP lying.  The one doesn't preclude the other.

Logic Has Noting To Do With It:  The same folks who don't want the government to mess with social security or medicare insist that they want cleaner fuels and less global warming, as long as it won't raise the price of gasoline.

Rebuttal:  As expected, Obama called for federal programs that would encourage a transition from fossil fuel to cleaner energy.  Predictably, the GOP agreed we need to do these things, as long as it doesn't cost anyone a job or a penny a gallon at the pump, and does not harm industry profits.

Poor Performers:  “Despite the current economic rebound”, consumers are not consuming the way they should be at this point in the recovery. They must have missed the rehearsal.

Ignorance is Bliss:  Most Americans know little about what the US government does in its name, and what it thinks it knows it learned from the MSM's distortions and pandering.   And most Americans are clever enough to know they don't want to know.  All they want is to continue to live in the fantasy.

In Character:  The headline said  “Senator aims to force unemployed to take drug tests.”  Without reading any further, why do you suspect it was a Republican?  Usual prize if you can, without reading any further, name the Senator who hatched this scheme and feels that poverty is “a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society.”

Apples and Oranges:  US industrial production was up 1.2% in May – a third consecutive monthly gain.  Capacity utilization is a puny 73.7%. Nearly all of the increase was in “defense and space equipment”.   Industrial activity is booming, plowshares into swords.

Aw, Ain't It Cute?  A new Louisianan law mandates that a woman must have, and view, an ultrasound, before an abortion can be performed.  Man-date is a precisely accurate term.

Do the Math:  The UN is scaring the women and children and pointing out that food prices will rise by “up to 40% over the next decade!”  Scary, until you do the math and realize that that is 3.75% a year.

Simmons Says:  Matt Simmons, who for many years was one of the most respected commentators on the global oil industry and author of the much respected Twilight in the Desert,  has been a pariah of late. Because he sees BP going to $0 a share, says nukes are the only way to seal the leaking well, that there is a serious down-hole leak, from a well-bore rupture, that leaked oil covers 40% of the subsurface Gulf, and that BP has pretty much done everything wrong. I hope Matt's wrong, but wouldn't wager against him.

Moby Dick:  Japan is resorting to cash and call girls to break the 24-year moratorium on the slaughter of whales.  Well, Melville did write a couple of books on the attractions of South Seas ladies...