Politics of Payoff

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I love this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the House of Representatives to pass a bill spending $820 billion - or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate. This bill is sent to Congress after President Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for the president to have read the whole thing.

Only 10 percent of the "stimulus" to be spent on 2009.

Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ (or both) members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions or other Democrat-controlled unions. [snip]

There has been pork-barrel politics since there has been politics, but the scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before. For the amount spent, we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

How long until the debt incurred under this program is so immense that it causes a downgrade in the nation's sovereign debt? What happens to us then?

This is a coup for the constituencies of the party in power and against the idea of a responsible government itself...

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Look at the Time

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President Obama could have made big history here. Instead he just got a win. It's a missed opportunity.

It's a win because of the obvious headline: Nine days after inauguration, the new president achieves a major Congressional victory, House passage of an economic stimulus bill by a vote of 244-188. It wasn't even close. This is major.

But do you know anyone, Democrat or Republican, dancing in the street over this? You don't. Because most everyone knows it isn't a good bill, and knows that its failure to receive a single Republican vote, not one, suggests the old battle lines are hardening. Back to the Crips versus the Bloods. Not very inspiring.

[correction on that last: the opposition to the bill was bipartisan, with 11 Dems. {and I think our sole 'independent'} voting against it. Only its support was one-party rule.]

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Obama: Nation can't afford bickering over stimulus

[It's called debate, Mr. President, and is the corner stone of our political system. Believe it or not there are many who feel that your policies do exactly the wrong things for the nation, and it's their duty to voice their dissent.]

Dems’ $800b ‘mistake’ - Harvard prof slams stimulus plan

Harvard University professor Martin Feldstein may not be the Democrats’ favorite conservative economist for much longer.

Feldstein, a former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, surprised many last year by embracing the Keynesian concept that more government action - in the form of massive spending increases and tax cuts - was needed to confront the economic crisis facing the nation.

Ever since, liberal Democrats have cited Feldstein’s views when pushing President Barack Obama’s massive $800 billion-plus economic-stimulus package.

But Feldstein yesterday took aim at the Democrats’ general plan - a version of which passed the House earlier this week - saying it’s a “mistake” and needs to be “thoroughly revised”...

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In Iraq, security trumps sectarianism at polls

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Reporting from Baghdad -- A young Sunni man strolling along the Tigris River hesitated when asked whom he had voted for in provincial elections Saturday. Then he gave an answer that would have seemed unthinkable during the depths of Iraq's bloody civil war: "Our prime minister" -- the Shiite head of government, Nouri Maliki.

Along Haifa Street, where high-rises once served as shooting galleries for Sunni gunmen battling U.S. troops, another Sunni voter was coy about his choice but hinted that he too was pleased with the job Maliki has done.

"Definitely I'm happy," the elderly man said when asked his opinion of the current state of affairs in Iraq.

"When there are insurgents on the Sunni side, he hits them. When there are insurgents on the Shiite side, he hits them,"

the riverside stroller, Wissam Hussam, said of Maliki, whom he initially distrusted on sectarian grounds but has grown to admire. [snip]

Election officials and police reported no major violence, compared with Jan. 30, 2005, voting in which more than 40 people were killed. Many adults headed to vote with children in tow*, a sign that the security fears of the past were gone.

[* and that's the real end game here: the next generation. Current adults in Iraq will always be cynical/susceptible to reverting to the 'old ways'. But once the current generation of educated (including girls) and voting children becomes the majority of adults, it's game-set-match: there'll be no going back. The turn around from worst to now is shaping up {knock on wood} to be one of this nation's/military's finest accomplishments.]

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Gazans say Hamas kept them in homes used by gunmen

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Palestinian civilians have accused Hamas of forcing them to stay in homes from which gunmen shot at Israeli soldiers during the recent hostilities in Gaza, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Thursday.

More than 1,250 Palestinians were reportedly killed during Israel's offensive against Hamas in the coastal territory. But the Italian paper also quoted a doctor at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital as disputing the number:

"It's possible that the death toll in Gaza was 500 or 600 at the most, mainly youths aged 17 to 23 who were enlisted by Hamas - who sent them to their deaths,"

The Gaza doctor was further quoted as saying:

"Perhaps it is like Jenin in 2002. At the beginning they spoke about 1,500 dead, and at the end it turned out to be only 54 - of whom 45 were militants."

[history shows Arab 'reporting' is 90% fabricated propaganda - but our 'professional' media take it at face value anyway - and by the time the truth is know, it's no longer 'news'.]

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Iran says Obama's offer to talk shows US failure

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US President Barack Obama's offer to talk to Iran shows that America's policy of "domination" has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

"This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed,"

Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

"Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change,"

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[It's not what was meant by remarks, it's how they're heard. And nowhere is the penchant to interpret any conciliatory remark as weakness/capitulation stronger than among the muslim (to cover Arabs and Persians) mindset where the 'strong horse' concept means so much. I.e., any such Chamberlain-like remarks virtually assure a Chamberlain-like result...

I.e.2: Israel will not allow a country that professes its destruction to acquire the means to do so. We're headed for a middle-eastern war due to our refusal to stop Iran's acquisition of the bomb...]


Israel’s nuclear hawk Avigdor Lieberman in poll surge

AN ultra-rightwinger, who is said to favour flattening Tehran if Iran develops nuclear weapons, has emerged as the politician gaining the most ground in next week’s general election in Israel.

Avigdor Lieberman, 50, is advancing so rapidly in the polls that his Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party is set to overtake Labour and become the third largest party in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

In private Lieberman is said to have urged that Tehran be levelled if Iran goes ahead with its nuclear weapons programme. In public he told listeners to Israel Radio’s Persian service:

“You will pay a high price. You, the good Iranian citizens, will pay for your leaders’ actions.”

[Israel will not allow the nation publicly committed to its destruction to acquire the means to do so - no matter the mealy mouth EUNuchs or Washington Pollyannas .]

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French Jews ask Sarkozy to help curb anti-Semitic attacks

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An umbrella group of Jewish groups sought assurances on Friday from French President Nicolas Sarkozy that authorities would do more to stem a rise in anti-Jewish crime in the wake of the war in the Gaza Strip.

Some 100 acts targeting Jews were reported in France since Israel launched its offensive against Gaza's Hamas Islamist rulers in late December, said the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France

"These acts are the manifestation of very deeply engrained anti-Semitism in a portion of the population and particularly among the youth in our country."

In recent years, flare-ups between Israel and the Palestinians have been followed by acts of violence against Jewish people or buildings in France, home to Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities.

Earlier this month, attackers launched two cars packed with petrol bombs at a synagogue in France's southwestern city of Toulouse, causing damage but no casualties.

[anyone care to guess what the 'youths' have in common?]

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Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than rest of society'

The Muslim population in Britain has grown by more than 500,000 to 2.4 million in just four years, according to official research collated for The Times. The population multiplied 10 times faster than the rest of society, the research by the Office for National Statistics reveals. In the same period the number of Christians in the country fell by more than 2 million.
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The terrible warning of a Holocaust survivor

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At my dinner table on Friday night, a holocaust survivor admits that she is trying to persuade her son to take his family out of Europe to America, Canada, Australia, Israel...’ They say they can’t leave me, but I tell them:

“Go, get out. My parents left my grandparents behind in Berlin and brought me to safety in England. Now I want you to leave so that my grandchildren will be safe.”

There is an unbearable desperation in her plea. But she has a point.

As tens of thousands of demonstrators march through the streets of Europe, the chants are modified but the message remains substantially intact: ‘Hamas, Hamas, Hamas — Jews to the Gas’. Or, more simply: ‘Death to the Jews’.

Many European Jews, even well-established, affluent Jews, have been checking the suitcase they keep packed under the bed. They have been here before and many are (albeit reluctantly) reading the writing on the wall...

[this isn't history, it's now...]

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Russia Snares New Black Sea Bases

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The Kremlin's latest move to project military force is raising some alarms.

Russia and the breakaway state of Abkhazia announced they had concluded a deal that would allow Russia establish an air and naval bases in the republic. Abkhazia won recognition from Russia as an independent state after the war in South Ossetia this summer. (Besides Russia, only Nicaragua has recognized Abkhazia's 'independence'.)

The Financial Times summarizes the anxiety over Moscow's latest move.

"Nato members are concerned at the decision because they see it is an important step in allowing Russia to project its military strength beyond its borders ... They also believe the move deepens the violation of Georgian sovereignty after Russia invaded Georgia last August and declared Abkhazia and South Ossetia independent territories."

Russia has another Black Sea base at Sevastopol, which belongs to Ukraine. The lease for that base runs out in 2017. Building an airbase in Abkhazia could also be a raised middle finger at the United States, which runs an airbase in Kyrgyzstan. The head of Georgia's parliamentary committee on defense and national security, told Reuters the move proved Russia's expansionist ambitions.

"It demonstrates that Russia's real goal was never the protection of its so-called citizens in South Ossetia or Abkhazia, but to use these territories for new military bases,"

It gets trickier: the United States and Georgia signed a strategic pact earlier this month....

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Europeans are finally waking up to the demise of democracy

Angry people across the EU are discovering the fine print in all the treaties signed by their leaders

The peoples of Europe have finally discovered what they signed up to. I do mean "peoples" (plural) because however much political elites may deceive themselves, the populations of the member states of the EU are culturally, historically and economically separate and distinct. And a significant proportion of them are getting very, very angry.

What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.

Meanwhile, demonstrators in Paris and the recalcitrant electorate in Germany are waking up to the consequences of what two generations of European ideologues have thrust upon them: the burden not just of their own economic problems but also the obligation to accept the consequences of their neighbours' debts and failures. Each country is true to its own history in the way it expresses its rage: in France, they take to the streets and throw things at the police, in Germany they threaten the stability of the coalition government, and here, we revive the tradition of wildcat strikes.

But the response from the EU political class is the same to all of these varied manifestations of resistance. Those who protest are being smeared with accusations of foolhardy protectionism or racist nationalism... [snip]

And here we are, with a generation of European political leaders who almost all accept the terms in which their predecessors gave away the most important principle of that great democratic pact between a free people and its government. While times were good and there was enough prosperity to keep everybody distracted and happy, the loss went almost unnoticed except by a few persistent and despairing critics.

Well, not any more.

[Will we learn from Europe's mistakes? America is the perennial top target of the one-world-government crowd and they never rest {it's their 24/7 job at the UN} - we need be eternally vigilant.]

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Free trade frenzy

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The main focus of Colombia’s international economic policy might be the FTA with United States, now hindered in the US Congress. But it is not the only interest. In less than a week, the country struck two free trade agreements and also secured an important cooperation deal

They include two of the biggest countries in the world –China and Canada- and a group of four politically small –but stable- European states, which have ratified their support for trading with Colombia even amidst one of the biggest economic crises of all time.

President Hu is considering, according to Chinese Press Agency Xinhua, “increasing imports from Colombia to realize a balanced rise in bilateral trade”. He added that his government will continue to encourage Chinese investments in Colombia, especially in areas such as infrastructure, construction, agriculture, telecommunications and energy.

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Call for obese children to be taken into 'care'

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Severely obese children should be notified to child protection authorities, and even taken into care, if their parents are unwilling or unable to help them lose weight, experts have argued. The continuing failure of parents to ensure treatment for their obese child could be considered medical neglect when the child is at high risk of suffering associated severe health problems.

[Who decides what constitutes 'high risk'? The government of course]

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The Next Big Stink

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They're worrying up a storm in Washington. (Good thing that George W. Bush is no longer in charge of the weather and FEMA the way he was during Hurricane Katrina.) America is experiencing a polar ice cap and financial meltdown, causing sea levels to rise and sending cold water flooding into Wall Street where the rapidly acidifying ocean is corroding our 401(k)s and releasing mortgage securities full of hot air into the atmosphere until our every breath is full of CO2 especially when we exhale, which should be banned when children are present lest their uninsured health care be harmed by second-hand greenhouse gases that are causing endangerment of plant and animal species (Republicans are extinct already), leading to a shortage of green, leafy vegetables vital to the fight against America's growing epidemics of obese hunger and housing foreclosures on the homeless. [snip]

My guess is that the next great government crusade will be against soap. The president will appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission, which will determine that soap releases polluting grime into the ecosystem, leads to aquifer depletion, and contains fatty acids that laboratory studies have shown to be acidic and not fat-free. Soap encourages teenage pregnancy as well as adult sexual activity with multiple partners, driving America's divorce rate higher, causing more children to live under the poverty line in single-parent households. Soap is a factor in many cases of child abuse, according to small boys in bathtubs. Soap bubbles may contain methane, especially if rising to the surface of bath water containing small boys. Soap marketing sends the wrong message about the Ivory trade and also about Irish Spring, which is being altered by climate change. Soap degrades the flame-resistant properties of children's pajamas. And soap makes whales foam when they spout.

Socialism--you can smell it coming.

[Sadly, Recommended, to demonstrate how consistently P.J.'s satire strikes resonant cords throughout his piece - and where there's such volumes of smoke...]

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Democrats Launch Petition Against Rush Limbaugh

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has launched an online petition for readers to express their outrage at conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for saying last week that he wanted President Barack Obama to fail.

On Tuesday, in a note at the top of his Web site , Limbaugh responded to the Democrats' petition:

"I am greatly puzzled. Why would the Democrats petition against me if I am doing such terrible damage to the GOP? "

Last Friday, Obama advised Republicans to stop listening to Limbaugh if they wanted to get along with Democrats and the administration. [snip] According to Wolff,

"Limbaugh's cheap shot at President Obama might be the first by the Republican attack machine this year but we know that it won't be the last. We need every grassroots Democrat to show Rush Limbaugh and all of the Republicans what they're up against if they start attacking President Obama and Democrats who are working to end the failed GOP policies of the last eight years."

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[And if you question Obama's policies? For the 100th time: not a big fan of Rush - but this is prelude to reintroducing the misnamed 'Fairness Doctrine', which is overt censorship by our government and must be resisted...

please join me in working against it by joining MRC's Free Speech Alliance - and as always, pass it on...]

Bye, Bye, American

Economy: In barring foreign steel from infrastructure projects and forcing payment of "prevailing wages," [union wages] the stimulus bill merges the Davis-Bacon and Smoot-Hawley acts in a way that could be a recipe for depression.

[Could be? They're considered key factors in worsening the great depression - what do we think they could do this time around?]

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UPDATE: Obama Will Review Buy American Provision in Stimulus

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s administration will examine a “buy American” requirement in economic stimulus legislation that has raised concern among U.S. trading partners, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The issue may cloud Obama’s trip to Canada on Feb. 19, his first journey outside U.S. borders as president. Officials in Canada, the top U.S. trade partner, are criticizing a part of legislation that passed the U.S. House of Representatives Jan. 28 that requires the use of U.S.-made iron and steel in infrastructure projects.

Ralph Goodale, house leader for the opposition Liberal Party, said today in Parliament. Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday that he will complain to U.S. officials over the “buy American” measure. “This is obviously a serious matter,” he said.

The provision also is opposed by U.S. companies with significant sales overseas such as General Electric Co. and Caterpillar Inc., which warn it may spark other countries to retaliate by restricting U.S. products.

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GDP Better Than Expected: Have Media Overhyped Depression Talk?

The Gross Domestic Product declined by 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 2008.

It was bad, but nowhere near as bad as expected.

Is it possible that all the hysterical gloom and doom emanating from the media is way overdone, and that things are not close to as apocalyptic as we've been told the past five months?

Consider the actual numbers reported Friday morning by MarketWatch:

The U.S. economy contracted at a 3.8% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department estimated Friday. This is the largest contraction since the first quarter of 1982. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch were expecting a negative 5.5% growth rate in the fourth quarter.

For the year, GDP rose 1.3 percent which was its worst performance since 2001. Is this the end of the world we've been hearing about since September?

After all, this 3.8 percent decline is only the 13th worst since the Commerce Department began doing quarterly reports in 1947. This means that there's been twelve worse quarters since 1946, and none of them signalled the end of the world nor required the kind of government spending now being discussed in Washington.

For instance, GDP declined by an astounding 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 1982. This followed a 4.9 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 1981. History now shows this to be the worst of that decade's recession, as the economy exploded in 1983 beginning one of its most powerful and long-lasting expansions ever.

In fact, there have been two recessions in the previous three decades [i.e., not counting the big D] when we experienced far worse economic growth than this most recent quarter without it indicating a depression and without the need for historic increases in deficit spending to get the economy going again.

Is it therefore possible all this doom and gloom is way overstated?

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All Seriousness Aside

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It is like the Peanuts gang laughing in derision after yet another Charlie Brown gaffe. It is like the doubling-over at the double-stumble (video) during fashion week in Paris.

The cackles and guffaws now come routinely. Global warming alarmists, led by inconvenienced (because of cooling weather) Al Gore, are seeing their prophecies of doom dissolve. Now that big ice grows, big winter is bad (like last year), cold temperatures hit record levels, and global mean surface temperature has not continued upward -- despite continued increases in that demonized "greenhouse" gas, carbon dioxide -- the panic peddlers look like flailing jesters.

Look at the recent responses to the self-caricature, Gore. The late nighters already found global warming (targeting both sides) to be fodder for yuks. But after the former vice president gave a repeat command performance before Congress this week, the scorn against alarmists is stronger than ever. The acerbic Dennis Miller, who said Gore probably is otherwise a good guy, called him a "doofus" because of his global warming beliefs... [snip]

It's not limited to Gore. Even scientists recognize they have a credibility and perception problem, yet they still can't harness their own panicky rhetoric. The faltering reputation of the alarmists, so dependent on the climate change industry bubble they've inflated, now drives environmental reporters to find quotes that attempt to shore up credibility,

Since when does the mainstream media need quotes of validation to support their fellow environmental activists? You would never have seen this, even six months ago. The alarmists are desperate.

[Sadly, the burgeoning realization we've been scammed is likely too late: with big business figuring out how to profit from the game the last serious impediment to government expansion has evaporated, and it's very likely that laws will make it on the books - and once on...

still, Recommended > ]

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