j_b

Spare us the drivel. Nobody needs to be reminded of the justification behind the voodoo economics that led to the present economic fiasco. Every single measure proposed by the Chamber of Commerce has been fully implemented for the last 30+ years. You guys are the true DEAD-ENDERS. I hope you built those walls high enough.

Rand was an intellectual midget that passed for a giant among nincompoops, including those that are responsible for the present economic collapse (Greenspan among them).

The US Chamber of Commerce came up with a bunch of new ideas that haven't been tried before: deregulation of business, tax cuts for the wealthy, free trade agreements, a reduced corporate income tax, expanded offshore drilling and logging in national forests and the privatization of waterways and roads. and don't forget cuts in social security to help pay for wars

Never underestimate the power of propaganda ...

The scariest part for me is that I once thought Reagan and Bush2 weren't electable either (although Bush wasn't elected).

You wish: the war will be over food instead, wherein you raging retrograde neo-hitlerian conservatives try and finally take over the world... Sorry, I was actually trying to paraphrase JB there, but couldn't take it as far as he so easily does. I can also be blamed for Nixon having been to the left of present Democrats, which gives us a slight idea of the ideology currently peddled by the morons on the right these days. Their program is essentially that of the Birch Society in the 60-70's, i.e. a step or two removed from fascism.

You wish. Between the water and oil needed for intensive agriculture, there is plenty cause for war (according to some, obviously)

Corkscrew on Sloan, West ridge on Forbidden, Fischer on Shuksan (or most anything on the North through SWest aspects), etc ... so many to list since almost everything can be done in a day.

whose handle has been changed to that moniker of historical significance?

Actually, after the incident, an overwhelming majority of Republicans said they'd vote for him if he was the GOP candidate. Because it was joke ... can't you guys take a joke anymore?

Funny how they forget to mention that they used to point at Ireland as one of the good student of the neoliberal way. I guess we won't hear regurgitated ad-infinitum that California is like Ireland. Here is some news from that other showcase piece of neoliberal order across the big pond (the UK): Budget will cost 1.3m jobs - Treasury Exclusive: Leaked government data concerning next five years shows hidden costs of austerity drive George Osborne's austerity budget will result in the loss of up to 1.3m jobs across the economy over the next five years according to a private Treasury assessment of the planned spending cuts, the Guardian has learned. Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015. Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/29/budget-job-losses-unemployment-austerity Note: Unemployment in the UK is already grossly under-reported at ~9%

Now, you are going all PC on us Don't be so godam "sensitive".

Ireland: the High Cost of Austerity DUBLIN — Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations. “When our public finance situation blew wide open, the dominant consideration was ensuring that there was international investor confidence in Ireland so we could continue to borrow,” said Alan Barrett, chief economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland. “A lot of the argument was, ‘Let’s get this over with quickly.’ ” Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession. Joblessness in this country of 4.5 million is above 13 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed — those out of work for a year or more — have more than doubled, to 5.3 percent. Now, the Irish are being warned of more pain to come. [..] Politicians here have raised taxes and cut salaries for nurses, professors and other public workers by up to 20 percent. About 30 billion euros ($37 billion) is being poured into zombie banks like Anglo Irish, which was nationalized after lavishing loans on developers. The budget went from surpluses in 2006 and 2007 to a staggering deficit of 14.3 percent of gross domestic product last year — worse than Greece. It continues to deteriorate. Drained of cash after an American-style housing boom went bust, Ireland has had to borrow billions; its once ultralow debt could rise to 77 percent of G.D.P. this year. [..] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/business/global/29austerity.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

LOL good find! but he forgot 'Freedumb'

This one by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is priceless: Ensuring there's enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country's entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he'd favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/29/john-boehner-accuses-demo_n_629265.html

Easy, even LUST is better than true love. (NSFW)

More ass kissing of big banks, including by so called "populist tea-baggers": "In an extraordinary move aimed at winning over reluctant Republican senators, the top Democratic negotiators on the Wall Street reform bill will reopen the conference committee Tuesday to swap out a controversial $19 billion tax on big banks, according to House and Senate aides. The unusual development points to deepening troubles for Democrats in their push to finish the bill before the July 4 recess. The death Monday of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and the decision by Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) to oppose the bill unless the tax was removed left Democrats several votes shy of Senate passage. Other key Senate Republican holdouts — Susan Collins of Maine, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Grassley of Iowa — also expressed concern with the tax, saying they were surprised to learn that it was added early Friday morning during an all-night committee meeting. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/39167.html?om_rid=DXn0aN&om_mid=_BMKk7kB8M4BlB9ixzz0sHixDFiu

I think you didn't see the ledge because it is mostly to the left of the Becky-Davis (in between the Stanley-Burgner and the Becky-Davis). On the pic above, on the left of the horizontal set of dots, where you can see bushes.

Nice dihedral pitch on the Stanley-Burgner. Once, I reached this final dihedral one pitch below where the SB reaches it by climbing a face (10) off snafflehound ledge thereby avoiding entirely the chimney pitch. There is also a high quality alternate start ~ 50' to the left of the regular SB, which climbs a thin hand/finger double crack (10+?). There are so many crack systems on that face, it isn't too surprising that people get confused about what is what.

You mean this time around perhaps or so it seems considering the level of apathy. I wonder if they'll try to sell us a world war like they are now selling Afghanistan: untold riches to be had ...

I don't think they share the same last pitch. The yellow line is the Becky Davis, no?

Naomi Klein's take: Sticking the Public With the Bill for the Bankers' Crisis "How else can we interpret the G20's final communique, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard earned benefits; public sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse. For instance, reducing the projected 2010 deficit in the U.S. by half, in the absence of a sizeable tax increase, would mean a whopping $780-billion cut. They are happening for a simple reason. When the G20 met in London in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the leaders failed to band together to regulate the financial sector so that this type of crisis would never happen again. All we got was empty rhetoric, and an agreement to put trillions of dollars in public monies on the table to shore up the banks around the world. Meanwhile, the U.S. government did little to keep people in their homes and jobs, so in addition to hemorrhaging public money to save the banks, the tax base collapsed, creating an entirely predictable debt and deficit crisis."

or elect Herbert Hoover posing as FDR, then expand the war on terra since GW recently told us that war is the solution to all good depressions. baa

Deficit hawks won't be able to claim that "nobody knew". The Third Depression By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: June 27, 2010 Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31. Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses. We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending. In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer. But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps. In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy. As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels. Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine. It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating. So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times. And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28krugman.html?dbk

LOL is that a worm coming out or a 'librul' devil? what's the ubb code for clown?