Thursday, February 19, 2009
Escape From D.C.
It's strange that so few mainstream media outlets have pointed out the obvious: The bill Congress hurried to pass late last week without anyone having read all 1,434 pages will in fact not stimulate much of anything.
It is a spending bill, pure and simple. Every dollar the government spends must either be borrowed, taken through taxation or printed. Any way you look at it, every dollar comes from the pockets of the people...
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Obama’s Stimulus Will Cause 'Lower Wages' for American Workers, Says Congressional Budget Office
[HT:SN]
The huge economic stimulus package that President Obama signed into law Tuesday will result in ''lower wages'' for American workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
(Snip) says the $787-billion plan will increase employment in the short-term, but will run up deficit spending which will ''crowd out'' private investment in the economy in the long-term. The analysis concludes that the stimulus will put downward pressure on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and wages...
TRUTH-O-METER Re: Debt due to Bush tax cuts
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Bush's tax cuts for high earners "have been the biggest contributor to the budget deficit."
Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 in during a news conference
Tax cuts for not biggest deficit factor
The Tax Policy Center calculated what share of the federal tax changes each income bracket gained from the Bush tax cuts. The top 5 percent of earners (those making about $225,000 or more) received 30.5 percent of the tax benefits in 2008, according to their analysis. But conversely, the bottom 95 percent of tax payers got 70 percent. Zoom out from the top 5 percent to the top 20 percent, and their share is 47.8 percent. Critics of the Bush tax cuts can call that disproportionate, but it's still less than half and therefore not "the biggest."
Although the wealthy did get benefits from the Bush tax cuts, their benefits did not outweigh those of everyone else put together.
"Within the tax cuts, the largest numbers went to the middle class, and those are the tax cuts that are most likely to be extended," she said. "I don't see how you could read the numbers to say otherwise."
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"We don't have a [52!] trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much." -- Ronald Reagan
Putin warns US to eschew socialism
What is the world coming to? Pat Dollard reports the Russian leader warned the US against adopting socialism because it doesn't work: Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin has said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise''excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence''
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Could ecoterrorists let slip the bugs of war?
The terrorists' letter arrived at the Mayor of Los Angeles's office on November 30, 1989. A group calling itself “the Breeders” claimed to have released the Mediterranean fruit fly in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and threatened to expand their attack to the San Joaquin Valley, an important centre of Californian agriculture.
With perverse logic, they said that unless the Government stopped using pesticides they would assure a cataclysmic infestation that would lead to the quarantining of California produce, costing 132,000 jobs and $13.4 billion in lost trade.
The infestation was real enough. It was ended by heavy spraying. It is still not known if ecoterrorists were behind it, but the panic it engendered shows that “the Breeders” were flirting with a powerful weapon.
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Court reverses ruling bringing 17 detainees to US
— A U.S. appeals court reversed a ruling Wednesday that would have transferred 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees, none of whom are labeled enemy combatants, to the United States. The ruling casts further uncertainty on the fate of the Turkic-speaking Muslims from western China. [snip]
Only the executive branch, not the courts, can make decisions about immigration, the appeals court said. That fact doesn't change, the court said, simply because the United States has held the men for years without charge."Such sentiments, however high-minded, do not represent a legal basis for upsetting settled law and overriding the prerogatives of the political branches,"
Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote.
Earlier this month, Beijing warned other countries not to accept the men, creating a potential diplomatic roadblock to President Barack Obama's plan to close the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.
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About those innocents . . .
SURPRISE: Closing down that military prison at Guantanamo turns out to be harder than just promising to do so in a presidential campaign. Now that the Obama campaign is the Obama administration, the job is being delayed for up to a year, and all the problems involved are being admitted, referred to study commissions, and-what a surprise again-being blamed on the previous administration.
The usual unidentified sources have told the Washington Post, which can now operate as a branch of the White House press office by printing leaks direct from the top, that the records of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo are in shameful disarray. Instead of a single neat case file a few pages long on each of the prisoners, the records seem to be scattered hither and yon throughout the federal government-from the various military branches to the Justice Department.
Gosh, do you think this mass of scattered records could have anything to do with the U.S. Supreme Court's many, confusing and generally fuzzy decisions granting these prisoners, legal and illegal combatants alike, habeas corpus and various other rights heretofore recognized only in civilian courts?
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Geert Wilders and the Fight for Europe
Does defending Western values constitute “inciting hatred”?
Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the country because he constituted “a threat to public policy.” Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was sent back to Holland.
Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders for “insulting Muslim worshippers” through his public statements and his 2008 film, Fitna.
The order to proceed with the criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only.
The OIC’s aim is to punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.’s Wilders ban possible.
Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe’s civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe’s independence from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms.
Wilders’s enemies pretend that he is an insignificant personality who makes “provocative” statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation were self-interest, he could do far better by courting the OIC’s favors — as so many Europeans are doing, consciously or unconsciously — rather than risking his freedom and indeed his life.
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>> VIEW VIDEO HERE
Owner of Muslim Relations TV Network Beheads Wife, Media Mum
The owner of a cable TV network created to promote better understanding of Muslims in America was arrested in Orchard Park, New York, Thursday for beheading his wife.
If you hadn't heard about this that wouldn't be a surprise for the story has been almost completely boycotted here in the states.
As WIVB-TV reported Friday (video embedded below the fold, h/t Marc Sheppard, photo courtesy WIVB): ....
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Headless Body in Legless Story
Kathryn, that self-pitying imam is part of a now familiar pattern: Pay no attention to that dead body; the real victim here is Islam.
Beheaded woman in Buffalo?
"Shocked friend says murder damages Islam's image."
Hindus, Jews and Christians massacred in Bombay?
"The recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India highlight the dangerously vulnerable situation of India’s Muslims."
Jonah writes today about the reluctance of journalists (a profession that congratulates itself on its "bravery" and "courage" far more than, say, firemen do) to speak truth to politically correct power — or, as I put it in my testimony in Toronto last week, their willingness to serve as eunuchs to the PC sultans. [snip]
Oddly enough, the one story that did decline to take spokesimams at face value came from, of all people, The Toronto Star's reporter:
Aasiya Hassan recently filed for divorce, authorities said. According to Buffalo News reports, she obtained an order of protection on Feb. 6, barring her husband from their home in Orchard Park.
Under sharia law followed by Muslims, a woman can ask for a divorce, but only a man can grant the request, and he can refuse, according to a book on sharia published last month, Cruel and Usual Punishment, by Egyptian-born American author Nonie Darwish.
Spousal murder is not unusual. Beheading your wife is. If Muzzammil Hassan decapitated his as an Islamic ritual, then his entire professional life — Mister Moderate Muslim — was a lie. As I noted at the weekend, when Mr. Hassan launched his Bridges TV station to counter "negative stereotypes" of Muslims, he got the traditional tongue baths from NBC's Brian Williams, NPR's "All Things Considered" et al -
Don't they have a responsibility to revisit the story now that it's got a little more complicated - or, as old-school editors would say, "newsworthy" - than the press releases they read out a couple of years back?
If you're not intrigued by the apparent fraud at the heart of this man's life and work — a fraud in which the U.S. media cheerfully colluded — you lack the elementary curiosity necessary to be a journalist.
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No fans allowed for Israel tennis match
[HT:BN]
Sweden's upcoming Davis Cup tennis match against Israel will be held behind closed doors, Malmö city council ruled on Wednesday. The decision follows a vocal campaign against the match in protest at the situation in the Middle East. The match was scheduled to be played from March 6th to 8th at the Baltiska Hallen venue, which can hold 4,000 spectators.
[It's called cowardice.]
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Obama Naïveté at the U.N.
In a major foreign-policy decision taken over the weekend, President Obama has decided to legitimize the United Nations’s “anti-racism” forum known as Durban II. State Department officials announced in a press release buried on Saturday, that starting today the United States will attend for the first time the preparatory meetings of this controversial U.N. conference. The “Durban Review Conference,” scheduled for April in Geneva, is the progenitor of the anti-semitic hatefest that took place in South Africa in early September 2001.
The searing images of the demonization of America and Jews on the U.N.’s global stage, and the terrorism in New York 72 hours later, should have made joining this revived forum for U.N.-driven hate inconceivable. But President Obama seems intent on learning the lessons of history — and the relationship between hatemongering and violence — the hard way.
The speed at which President Obama is selling off American assets is breathtaking. The speed at which he is selling them out is even faster.
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STUDY WARNS OF HIGH U.S. CORPORATE TAXES
The U.S. corporate income tax rate is higher than all other global regions -- 14 percentage points higher than the global average and nearly 17 percentage points higher than the average among European Union nations, says a new study by KPMG, a U.S. accounting firm.
Of the 106 countries surveyed, only the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Japan impose a higher corporate tax rate than the combined rate of 40 percent in the United States. This is not good for America's competitiveness. According to researchers:
- The global average corporate tax rate is 23.2 percent in the E.U., 26.6 percent in Latin America and 28.4 percent in the Asia Pacific region.
- Nearly 23 countries cut their corporate tax rates in 2008 alone, including Canada, Columbia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
- In contrast, the U.S. corporate tax rate has remained unchanged since 1994.
- Recent OECD studies show U.S. corporate income taxes are 50 percent higher than the average among its counterparts in the industrialized world, and that corporate taxes are the single most harmful tax to GDP growth - even more harmful than personal income taxes or consumption taxes.
Furthermore, in 2008, the Tax Foundation released an analysis showing that the U.S. federal corporate income tax quietly taps family pocketbooks for nearly $370 billion per year in the form of higher prices, lower wages and poorer return on investment.
If even notoriously high-tax Sweden recognizes that taxes matter to a country's business climate and work incentives, when will the political class in Washington tack action?
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Bankruptcy remains an option for GM, analysts say
DETROIT - A government-backed bankruptcy reorganization remains an option for saving General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC, analysts said on Wednesday, even though the automakers have said they would rather not go down that road.(Snip)
Some Wall Street analysts were disappointed that the restructuring plans submitted to the U.S. Treasury did not include key concessions from the United Auto Workers union and the automakers' bondholders...
[And their we have it: either they reorganize under bankruptcy, which is exactly what it's for, or they bilk us forever.]
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64% Oppose Any More Loans for GM and Chrysler
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
General Motors and Chrysler are back this week seeking $22 billion more in federal help, but 64% of U.S. voters are opposed to providing any additional taxpayer-backed loans for the embattled automakers.
Twenty-four percent (24%) support more loans for GM and Chrysler, and 11% are undecided.
Forty-four percent (44%) say it is better for the U.S. economy to let companies like General Motors fail than for the federal government to provide subsidies that will keep them in business.
In December, just 40% thought it was better to let the auto companies fail.
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Facebook Backs Down After Censoring Opposition Ad
In yet another example of flag spamming and poor corporate over sight Facebook decided this week to remove an ad from the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. The group was advertising a petition on their site nostimulus.com which lets people voice their opposition to the near $800 billion stimulus going through congress right now.
After originally screening and approving the ad CNS News, a sister site of NewsBusters and the Media Research Center, reports that Facebook claimed to have received some complaints from users. They then proceeded to put a disapproval notice on it and then yank it from the site all together.
Luckily Americans for Prosperity didn't take the censorship sitting down and CNS News didn't ignore the story. In a move that Phil Kerpen, the national policy director at Americans for Prosperity, credited to pressure resulting from the CNS News report Facebook decided to back down from its original decision to censor the conservative group's ad.
Of course the reasons Facebook gives for their reversal only go to further the idea that this is indeed a case of liberal flag spamming combined with poor moderation and oversight.
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[Sound familiar to (some of) you? It should, it was this one...
Broken: Barack Obama Campaign Promise No. 505:
PROMISE: Create a $3,000 tax credit for companies that add jobs"During 2009 and 2010, existing businesses will receive a $3,000 refundable tax credit for each additional full-time employee hired."
UPDATE: $3,000 tax credit not in stimulus bill, no future action seen
The credit was never part of the stimulus legislation as far as we saw, and it was not included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which Obama signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009. Likewise, we see no indication that this idea might re-emerge. So for now, we rate it Promise Broken.
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Jindal Signals Louisiana May Not Take Stimulus Money
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate, has suggested his state may not be interested in all of the roughly $4 billion allotted to it in the economic stimulus package to be signed by President Obama.
“The flawed bill the President will sign today is a missed opportunity, one for which our children and grandchildren will pay a hefty price. It’s a raw deal for American families, providing just $1.10 per day in relief for workers while saddling every family with $9,400 in added debt to pay for special-interest programs and pork-barrel projects. It will do little to create jobs, and will do more harm than good to middle-class families and our economy."
[Responsibility, class.]
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has said he’ll take any money that Louisiana turns down.
[not so much]
Jindal is scheduled to give the response to the president’s not-exactly-a-state-of-the-union address next Tuesday.
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'Climate Scientist' Ratchets Up Global Warming Alarmism in Face of Record Cold Weather
You're a global warming alarmist yet we're experiencing the coldest winter in decades. What to do? What to do? Well, if you are "climate scientist" Chris Field, you go even further out on the limb and declare that the climate is warming up even faster than predicted despite evidence to the contrary right outside our doors. Here is the Reuters report about Chris Field sounding the global warming alarm bells:
The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
One "little" problem with this Reuters report written by Julie Steenhuysen. Chris Field is not a "top climate scientist." In fact, he isn't even a climate scientist at all.
Just a wee bit of googling on the part of Steenhuysen would have revealed that Chris Field is a professor of biological sciences whose shtick is pushing something called "global ecology." Field has no more expertise in predicting future climate patterns than, say, a proctologist performing brain surgery.
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Danger of U.S. 'environmental protectionism'
CALGARY — A University of Alberta business professor says America isn’t likely to stop imports from Canada’s oilsands but there’s a credible threat from what he calls “environmental protectionism.”
Andrew Leach says there’s a danger of oilsands costs rising even further if the United States adopts more aggressive climate change rules than Canada has.
Both Ottawa and Alberta back carbon capture as a climate change strategy — but there is disagreement over who should pay billions of dollars for it. Professor Leach says there’s a danger that Washington may levy a special tax on what environmentalists have dubbed “dirty oil” from Alberta’s oilsands.
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60% Stress Need For New Sources of Energy
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Sixty percent (60%) of U.S. voters say finding new sources of energy is more important than reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume.
Generic support for developing new energy sources is up four points from a month ago.
Republicans (71%) and unaffiliated voters (63%) more strongly support placing the priority on finding new energy sources than Democrats (50%).
On a related topic, 51% say more nuclear power plants should be built in the United States
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California Needs California's Oil
Both our energy and budgetary answers lie right off our own shores - available to us immediately to the tune of 1 Trillion dollars...
WATCH THIS (2 minutes)...
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California lawmakers fail to pass budget
California lawmakers narrowly failed to pass a $40 billion budget on Sunday. [snip]
The bill includes $14.4 billion in new taxes and $15.1 billion in spending cuts in a bid to close a $42 billion budget deficit the state's government faces over the next 17 months.
Residents of the "Golden State" face a 1 cent [I.e., a 12.5% increase] sales tax rise, steeper income and gasoline taxes and higher vehicle licensing fees. Some aspects face voter approval in May.
Republicans seeking re-election have faced pressure from constituents averse to tax increases, while Democrats are under similar pressure from voters to maintain spending... [last I looked, everyone in the private sector was cutting back in this time of hardship - but evidently that's just for the working class. [snip]
This month Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut its rating on California's general obligation debt, which has left California, the biggest issuer of public debt, with the lowest rated GO bonds of any U.S. state.
Nevertheless, The budget, which extends through June 30, 2010, also relies on borrowing [another] $11.4 billion. If California receives at least $9.1 billion in new federal funds, the spending cuts would be trimmed [I.e., they'd keep spending at a higher level [snip]
California's treasurer has started delaying tax refunds and other payments because of the cash crunch.
[It's the same old scam: they continuously spend us into oblivion - even when we haven't given them permission to do so {I.e. 'deficit spending'} - and every few years when the crap hits the fan claim the only 'responsible' thing is a 'balanced' approach of some spending cuts and even more taxes. This is the consequence of our permanent Democratic majority in Sacramento {as aided my unions and the media}. ]
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New GOP Senate leader wants to kill proposed state budget deal
California's budget crisis heightened further this morning when the newly elected leader of the state Senate's Republicans, who replaced his predecessor in an overnight ouster, said he hopes to kill the current spending plan.
Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth of Murrieta said this morning that he would like to scrap that plan and renegotiate a package without raising taxes as the current plan does...
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[Sounds good - let's support it...
"REWRITE THE BUDGET - NO NEW TAXES"
CA Governor: http://gov.ca.gov/interact mailto:governor@governor.ca.gov
YOUR CA Legislators (Sen+Assy): http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html
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