Last year, White House economists claimed that the $862 billion stimulus would create 3.3 million jobs. Since then, the nation has lost more than 3 million jobs.

That’s a 6.3 million jobs gap. By the White House’s own standards, the stimulus failed.

So President Obama has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he concedes — but without the stimulus, it would’ve lost nearly 2 million more jobs.

This is nothing but faith-based economics. The White House estimate of “saving” nearly 2 million jobs is based not on observations of the economy’s recent performance — but merely on the administration’s unshakable belief that deficit spending must create jobs and growth.

Specifically, the White House staff’s “proof” that the stimulus created jobs is an economic model that they programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs. How’s that for circular logic?

In other words, even if we’d lost 20 million jobs, their models would basically crank out the conclusion that we’d have lost 22 million without the stimulus.

Worse, the central tenet of this “faith” is false: The premise that stimulus spending must create jobs just isn’t true.

The stimulus theory is that government spending injects new dollars into the economy, thereby raising demand and spurring economic growth. That makes some sense — if you don’t ask where the government got the money.

Congress doesn’t have a vault of cash waiting to be distributed. Every dollar it “injects” into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new income, and therefore no new demand, is created: It’s merely redistributed from one group of people to another.

Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and pouring it in the other won’t raise the overall water level, no matter how large the bucket. It’s the same with redistributing dollars from one part of the economy to another.

via Fantasy jobs – NYPOST.com.

Hundreds of Somali insurgents loyal to Islamist group al-Shabab have poured into Mogadishu with artillery and trucks, witnesses say.

Residents have been fleeing the capital for days amid a widespread belief that the rebels and government forces are on the cusp of a serious showdown.

Meanwhile, at least 16 people were reported killed in skirmishes that have become almost daily in the city.

Insurgents already control much of Mogadishu and southern Somalia....

Which one is more crazy?

Where did Danny Glover go to school?  How many science classes did the man take?  Should he have to give his college degree back to American University?  The man might not know karate – but he knows ka – razy!

If I asked you to think of the dumbest statement you could make up, it would be more intelligent than what Danny Glover said about the cause of the earthquake in Haiti.

“What happened in Haiti could happen to anywhere in the Caribbean because all these island nations are in peril because of global warming.  When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?” – Danny Glover

Read it again.  Yes, Glover actually believes that global warming and the failure of America to get substantial agreements at the climate Summit in Copenhagen somehow led to a massive earthquake in Haiti.

Glover’s statement is wrong on so many levels.  But we’ll just focus on the main one.  Let’s ask a real basic question.  Can global warming lead to earthquakes?  I’ll keep this at a 3rd grade level and see if Glover can follow the science.  The earth is covered by gigantic shifting plates.  Where they rub together we have fault lines.  When those fault lines push against each other they produce energy and stress.  As that energy builds up it will eventually release at those faults and cause an earthquake.  Almost all earthquakes are generated this way.  Not sure if Glover knows this, but Haiti happens to sit right on a major fault line.

On rare occasions earthquakes can be man-made.  It happens when people are using massive amounts of explosives or drilling deep into the ground.  In these rare cases, the human activity puts more pressure on an existing fault line.

Global warming is the belief that temperatures on our planet have increased and will continue to do so.  It has absolutely no relation to plate tectonics and earthquakes.  The equation “global warming = earthquakes” makes about as much sense as “more ketchup = shark infestation” or “Danny Glover=genius.”

I know Glover went off the deep end politically years ago.  Any man that likes to hug Hugo Chavez has no love for the founding principles of America.  But this recent statement is grounds for being committed.  Note to Glover, MotherJones, and Pat Robertson:  Stop finding fault for Haiti’s disaster outside of the country being on a fault line, and then shut your mouths and open your wallets to the needs of Haiti.

Related posts:

1. Danny Glover: Gaia’s Wrath ‘Is Punishing Haiti’
2. Lord Monckton Trashes Al Gore's Global Warming Nonsense
3. Is Climategate The Last Gasp of Global Warming Hysteria?

Excerpt from the Spike Lee profile:

In October 2005 Lee produced and directed a movie for HBO entitled When the Levee Broke – a reference to the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina that had engulfed much of New Orleans the previous month. Lee made clear his belief that President Bush had been slow to dispatch federal aid workers to Louisiana because so many of the victims were black. When Lee was asked by CNN anchorwoman Daryn Kagan whether he thought the government had purposefully allowed blacks to drown or to lose their homes, he replied, ”It’s not too far-fetched … I don’t put anything past the United States government. I don’t find it too far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.” The film featuredinterviews with Harry Belafonte and Sean Penn.

According to Lee, “racism is woven into the very fabric of America.” He believes that the problem of contemporary racism is caused overwhelmingly by whites, and that blacks are incapable of being racists because they lack social, political, and economic power. “Racism,”he says, “is when you have laws set up, systematically put in the way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing … then it will be done, but not until then.” …

To view the full Spike Lee profile, click here.

Question: How does the United States “steal” the resources of other (third world) [sic] countries?

Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor (sic) that cannot be turned down.

Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?

Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, (sic) we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning.

Question: Why is it necessary to examine the theory of cumulative advantage when it comes to affirmative action?

Answer: Because it is unfair to discredit the many members of minority groups that have (sic) been offered more life chances through the program.

Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?

Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. for (sic) example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female’s expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.

Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.

Answer: the (sic) belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males (sic) are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished.

via Hate-America Sociology.

Eric over at Classical Values had a great response to my recent discussion about Birtherism and it’s crackpot leftist cousin Trig Birtherism (the belief that Sarah Palin’s son Trig is actually her grandson instead of her son.) He also had an important discovery:

In fact, I’m going to scoop Andrew on something. It may shock readers to know this, but Trig Palin was born in Kenya!

No, seriously. The only known, true, government-certified copy of his Kenyan Birth Certificate has come into my possession.

And here it is, for the first time on the Internet!

See this amazing revelation for yourself here.

BTW, while we’re on this inane subject again, I feel it necessary — given all the action in the comments on various other posts — to define the term “birther” as I see it.

I define “birther” as someone who argues that President Obama is not eligible to be President because of the alleged circumstances surrounding his birth. Some birthers say Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be President. Others say that because his father was not a citizen it wouldn’t matter even if he was born in Hawaii. Such people have sought to explain away all available evidence which points toward the circumstances of Obama’s birth being as he says it is. In their behavior they are clearly individuals possessed of the “Crackpot Conspiracist Mentality” as I’ve defined it.

Those who acknowledge that Obama is almost certainly eligible to be President but merely want to see his “long-form birth certificate” and desire to investigate Obama’s school records, dental records, and movie rental records are therefore, not, by definition, birthers. And I have little quarrel with them except I think they’d be much more effective to distance themselves from self-described Birthers. (And, frankly, I think it’s not the highest priority. Obama’s records have been pursued and studied by the finest opposition researchers in America. Anything big would have been found already. Conservatives should be more focused on America’s future than Obama’s past. It’s better to spend one’s time coming up with policies and strategies to make America better than trying to find out if communist poet Frank Marshall Davis was really Obama’s Dad. Let’s focus on beating bad ideas, not destroying the people who promote them.)

What I wish could be my final message to the Birthers: if the evidence was overwhelmingly clear that Obama was not a natural born citizen and was thus ineligible to be President then it would be a different ball game. But there’s no extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim. And because of this Birthers need to acknowledge the reality here: by continuing to push this conspiracy theory the Conservative Movement is being undermined. This stuff destroys credibility. Just as the “Trig Birtherism” theory hurts Andrew Sullivan and every leftist who gets near it, so too does the Obama Birth Certificate theory.

Related posts:

1. Is Sarah Palin a Birther? No, But the Left Wishes She Was
2. Progressive Alaska Lies about NewsReal, Andrew Sullivan Reprints; Surprise Bonus: The Revival of Trig Birtherism to Disgrace the Left
3. CNN: Was Obama Born in U.S.? What's the Difference?

FP: Ines Laufer, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

In our last discussion, we focused on how Germany has exposed a young girl to female genital mutilation and how Germany, and Europe in general, is not protecting young girls from this barbaric crime.

Today I would like to talk to you about a new campaign you have started. Tell us about it.

Laufer: Thanks Jamie.

Our research brought to light that to up to 400,000 sponsored girls who are marketed by the big development organizations PLAN International, World Vision, Kindernothilfe and ChildFund do not receive protection from female genital mutilation. We have started a new campaign, at sponsoredgirl.com, to protect the girls from female genital mutilation. We invite your readers to come join us.

These children are marketed in order to acquire money from trustful donors. The donors pay about 30 Euros per month – which means 360 Euros per year, in the belief that the organizations do all they can for providing a better life — including health for the sponsored children. PLAN International for instance, acquires about 72 million Euros every year, just by marketing the 240,000 concerned girls.

But asked about female genital mutilation on the sponsored girls, these organizations openly and publicly claim that demanding the safe protection of the girls would be against their approaches and against their policy.

So, by failing to demand, to stipulate and to control the protection of the sponsored girls from FGM, the organizations must be considered complicit in every single crime perpetrated against a little girl in this regard.

We are The Alliance for Protection of Girls from Female Genital Mutilation. We consider this simply scandalous and unacceptable. It is a crime against the girls and also a system of defrauding the donors.

That’s why we launched this campaign. It is suited to go the largest step forward in the direction of an end of FGM since the beginning of the fight against these practices. It could lead to true and immediate protection of a few million girls.

FP: Ok, what concretely does the campaign demand?

Laufer: It demands that all organizations who work with the sponsored-child-system, should make sure that all girls in their projects – in the relevant regions – are safely protected from violence like female genital mutilation.

This demand is based on the cognition that it is not only possible but very easy to achieve that goal – and even more: It does not cost any money.

It is just about the change of the attitude, approach and policy of the organisations. We call for:

[1] The stipulation of the safety and protection from FGM of the sponsored girls in the preconditions for support for the communities – and regular check ups.

[2] A careful selection of the project partners, which means that only those communities that support children’s rights will be targets of help. This means an investment of donations in the most economic and effective way.

[3] The complete solution – the two steps to safe protection – you find here.

FP: How do the mentioned organizations react to your activism on behalf of the victims of FGM?

Laufer: To be honest, Jamie, they all react quite similar so far, with a mixture of ostrich behavior (putting their heads into the sand) and helpless efforts to defend their current policy of tolerating and accepting the mutilations of thousands of sponsored girls.

But in fact, they deliver us one proof after the other that confirms how much this campaign is needed – how important it is and that it will have a deep impact to truly stop FGM.

To the people who sign and send the petition letters, they send standard-answers which make clear that they did not even read or understand what we demand. They still refuse to admit that they are fully responsible for every single mutilated girl in their projects because of their failure to implement the adequate protection measures. And they do not have any scruple to simply tell tales.

We can sum it up as following: There is much ignorance and denial and no adequate seriousness or goodwill to even understand what should be changed and how.

But I am sure this will change soon.

Only, it doesn’t lie in our hands anymore. Now, the world public – every person who feels concerned and disturbed by the knowledge that every day, thousands of little girls are mutilated by FGM – is asked to help the campaign.

FP: What exactly can people do to help the campaign? Is it about money and donations?

Laufer: No, Jamie – it is absolutely not about money or donations. It is about something much more important: It’s about the power of everyone’s voice. By investing exactly two minutes of time and a few clicks, everyone can help – while comfortably sitting in front of the computer. Every reader can help free this world from the nightmare of female genital mutilation. It has never been so easy.

At the www.sponsoredgirl.com website, you find four prepared letters, addressed to PLAN International World Vision, Kindernothilfe and ChildFund, see here.

Every person who signs and sends the letters – and who even steps back from current sponsorship-contracts, enlarges the pressure on the organizations. And this helps us to strengthen our efforts in demanding them to consequently protect the children.

That’s why: Please sign the letters and send them to your friends that they can do it too.

FP: So how has the campaign been going?

Laufer: Well, let me tell you this. In the last ten days, more than 750 letters have been sent to the organizations already. But we would like to achieve at least 5,000 to put the campaign at the next level of public pressure.

FP: Ines Laufer, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview. I encourage all of our readers who want to help stop this genocide against girls to go to www.sponsoredgirl.com.