It is sad that the Republicans don’t get together and stop the Democrats from raising the debt ceiling limit. If they did that then Obama would do about anything they wanted!!!! It seems to me that the Republicans are a bunch of wimps though. The fiscal debate should focus of Washington’s real crisis of excessive spending
Why Are Republicans Willing to Help Obama Make America More Like Europe When the Welfare State Is Collapsing?
November 30, 2012 by Dan Mitchell
Washington frustrates me. The entire town is based on legalized corruption as an unworthy elite figure out new ways of accumulating unearned wealth by skimming money from the nation’s producers.
But one thing that especially irks me is the way people focus on the trees and forget about the forest. Politicians and journalists are now engaged in an inside-baseball game of analyzing every twist and turn of the fiscal cliff negotiations.
That’s all fine and well, but perhaps it would be a good idea to talk about the need to fix the real crisis of excessive spending instead of arguing about how fast we should be traveling in the wrong direction.
And let’s not delude ourselves. In the absence of real entitlement reform, the United States is doomed to repeat Europe’s mistakes.
And how are things going in Europe? Well, I’m glad you ask. Let’s look at some excerpts from an Associated Press report.
Another month, another record unemployment rate for the economy of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro. Figures released Friday by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, showed that the recession in the eurozone pushed unemployment up in the currency bloc to 11.7 percent in October, the highest level since the introduction of the euro in 1999. …Eurostat found that 18.7 million people were out of work across the eurozone, an increase of 173,000 on the previous month and 2.2 million higher than the year before. The wider 27-nation EU that includes non-euro countries such as Britain and Poland had an unemployment rate of 10.7 percent in October and a total of 25.9 million out of work. …”Talk of a `lost generation’ of young people now looks like an alarming possibility,” said Andrea Broughton, principal research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies.
In other words, we may complain about America’s miserable track record on jobs during the Obama years, but at some point in the future we may someday look back on 8 percent unemployment as good news.
Unfortunately, the crowd in Washington doesn’t want to acknowledge that the real problem is spending. And I’m particularly irked (but not surprised) that Republicans now seem willing to go along with Obama even though they won this fight back in 2010 when they didn’t control the House and had fewer seats in the Senate. Here’s what I said to one of the local DC stations.
I realize I’m sounding glum, so let’s close out this post with a couple of amusing cartoons about America’s European future.
I’ve already shared the “European Lemming” cartoon. This one has the same theme.
Other Eric Allie cartoons can be enjoyed here, here , here, here, here, and here.
And here another cartoon with the same theme.
If you like this Bok cartoon, some of my other favorites can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
If you still haven’t cheered up, this bit of Dave Barry humor about the European fiscal crisis is a classic, and I’d also recommend this bit of unintentional satire.
, 
and 
, annually and read through 
at least four times. Outside the Bible, Schaeffer’s writings have influenced my thinking more than any other. It is from that perspective that I read Colin Duriez’s biography, 
.Admittedly, my expectations were unattainably high, but I was moderately disappointed. A characteristic of a good biography is the way an almost intimate relationship develops between the reader and the subject. When the reader puts the book down, it should be as if they’ve ended a conversation with a close friend (unless the subject is a villain—in which case the reader is anxious to leave but somehow mysteriously drawn to return). Such was not the case with this biography.
…Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children. She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway. …‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die. ‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’
