Monday, March 16, 2009
GOP to Provide Alternative Budget to Obama's
The No. 2 House Republican says the president's budget plan doesn't address the needs of small businesses and that the GOP will put forward an alternative.
Rep. Eric Cantor is warning that President Barack Obama's spending proposal would raise taxes on every American by $800 -- the result of new taxes on polluting energy companies and manufacturers.
Cantor says the administration's long-term view ignores the country's immediate needs...
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'For the Top Earners, There Will Be Blood'
Daniel Henninger’s Thursday column in The Wall Street Journal – "The Obama Rosetta Stone" – suggested all Americans should read Obama’s budget document, 141 pages, printed by the Government Printing Office. Henninger instructed:
Turn to page five of Mr. Obama's federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:
"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."
"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."
"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."
....Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.
The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.....
The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood.
This presidency is going to be an act of retribution.
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Obama Adviser: U.S. Is in 'Economic War'
A top presidential adviser says the U.S. is in an "economic war" -- one that is not being won yet.
Economic aide Christina Romer says she agrees with investment mogul Warren Buffett, who used the "economic war" phrase last week to describe the nation's economic woes.
In Romer's words, "We haven't won yet. We have staged a wonderful battle."
Romer heads the president's Council of Economic Advisers. She says the White House believes the fundamentals of the economy are strong.* Romer says the administration is looking at the long-term view, not the daily ups and downs on Wall Street.
[*Was this not the phrase the MSM (and Obama) bludgeoned Bush with again and again when our economic situation was unquestionably better than it is now?
Sand by for a 24/7 MSM-storm over this administration's identical claim. Right?]
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Beijing raises stakes with tit-for-tat deployment in South China Sea
[HT:BM]
Beijing - Beijing has increased tension in a disputed part of the South China Sea by sending a patrol ship to protect fishing boats after the United States deployed a destroyer in the area. The American move was in response to alleged Chinese harassment of one of its surveillance vessels.
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Russia weighs Cuba, Venezuela bases: report
Russia could use bases for its strategic bombers on the doorstep of the United States in Cuba and Venezuela to underpin long-distance patrols in the region, a senior air force officer said Saturday.
"This is possible in Cuba," General Anatoly Zhikharev, chief of the Russian air force's strategic aviation staff, told the Interfax-AVN military news agency.
The comments were the latest signal that Moscow intends to project its military capability in far-flung corners of the globe [snip]
Zhikharev said Cuba had a several air bases equipped with the long runways needed by the heavy bombers and said the facilities there were "entirely acceptable" for use by the Russian aircraft during long-distance patrols.
"If the will of the two states is there, the political will, then we are prepared to fly there" to the bases in Cuba, the agency quoted Zhikharev as saying.
Last July however, a top US air force officer warned that Russia would cross "a red line" if it were to base nuclear capable bombers in Cuba.
"If they did, I think we should stand strong and indicate that is something that crosses a threshold, crosses a red line for the United States of America," said General Norton Schwartz said on July 23.
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Bolton: Obama Turns on Israel
Bolton writes in an opinion column appearing in the New York Post that U.S. pressure to find a solution to the decades-old conflict will be the greatest on Israel, because it is an ally.
"How will diplomatic pressure work to change Hamas or Hezbollah, where even military force has so far failed? If anything, one can predict coming pressure on Israel to acknowledge the legitimacy of these two terrorist groups, and to negotiate with them as equals"
"Why would America subject a close ally to this dynamic, playing with the security of an unvarying supporter in world affairs? For America, Israel's intelligence-sharing, military cooperation and significant bilateral economic ties, among many others, are important national-security assets that should not lightly be put at risk."
Bolton argues that America's focus should instead
"be on Iran and the manifold threats it poses to Israel, to Arab states friendly to Washington and to the United States itself."
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United States can’t ignore Iran’s genocidal incitement
The enduring lesson of the Holocaust and that of the genocides that followed is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hatred.
As international tribunals have recognized, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. These are the chilling facts of history...
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Kudos to those who will not embrace annual hate fest
For the past week, events marking Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) have taken place at virtually every major university in Canada. Among the noteworthy exceptions are the University of Calgary and the University of Western Ontario.
Students and faculty on these campuses have distinguished themselves by unanimously refusing to take part in this festival of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
Israel Apartheid Week was initiated five years ago by the Arab Students' Collective at the University of Toronto. Since then, the annual hate fest has spread to universities in more than 40 cities around the world. [snip]
At the Muslim Al Quds University near Jerusalem, IAW has been extended for a full month, during which the university's students' council is urging a boycott of Israeli goods on campus and seeking international support for the alleged right of Palestinian refugees to return in overwhelming numbers to Israel.
How ironic. Here we have students living in Israeli-Palestine openly advocating a policy that would spell the end of Israel as an independent state. Imagine the fate of any Jew in Gaza who dared to speak out against Islamist terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli civilians... [snip]
Incidentally, out of 15,000 students at Ben-Gurion, 1,000 are Arabs, including many low-income Bedouin on full scholarships. Is that the generosity one would expect of a government-funded institution in a real apartheid state?
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Venezuela's Chavez takes over opposition-run ports
CARACAS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday ordered the military to take over the country's ports and airports, a move aimed at gaining control of installations run by opposition-ruled state governments.
The self-styled revolutionary in recent months has removed regional leaders' control of services such as hospitals and police forces, sparking accusations he is undermining opposition elected officials and concentrating his hold on power.
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My Socialist Past
Anyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, as I did in the mid-1980s, knows to what depths of impoverishment the egalitarian fantasies of socialism inevitably lead. They lead to decades of frustrated poverty and lifetimes of untreated illness culminating in early death. I remember the columns of death notices for men and women in their forties and fifties that appeared in the local newspaper. Gradually I learned to associate those death notices with the lack of fresh foodstuffs, the travesty of state health care, and the pervasive demoralization of an enslaved population... [snip]
Socialism always stifles talent and ambition, and the more it does so, the more squalid things get. It is no accident that socialism always fails. It fails because of its fundamental assumption that self-interest can be suppressed in human relations. Socialism fails every time because of the arrogant lie upon which it rests. The reality is that it is free market capitalism that has been responsible for the explosive increases is wealth and productivity in America during the past two hundred years. This explosive growth could never be achieved in a society of utopian social planners because the goals of socialist planners do not correspond with the actual motives of human beings in the real world. [snip]
All socialist experiments, from the high-minded 19th-century utopianism of Robert Owen or Charles Fourier to the vicious authoritarian nightmare of Mao Tse-tung or Pol Pot, have been the product of middle- or upper-class fantasies, the underlying feature of which is the megalomaniac intention to "save" the working class from its own bad habits. Paul Johnson observed in his superb book, Intellectuals, that saving the working classes from themselves has been the ruinous ambition of middle- and upper-class intellectuals for over two hundred years, and the result has - in every case - been calamitous.
[Very long - but very good at conveying the seemingly benign but inescapably causative effects overtime of socialist experiments - as well as their relevance to our current situation -- Highly Recommended > ]
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Something Wicked This Way Comes
[HT:JV]
The darkest times in human history have all begun when someone decided "not to let a serious crisis go to waste". In fact, it is in times of economic crisis that folks are most susceptible to the ideas of tyrants. We look for an answer, any port in a storm that will shield us from the unknown.
And in our desire to be safe, we open ourselves up to things that we would never have dreamed of allowing in normal times...
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Reason #1287 why you're a chump if you pay your mortgage responsibily
We were promised when the Democrats took over the White House and the Congress that a new era of transparency, honesty, openness was upon America.
Not true.
The Democrats are seemingly intent on destroying the financial system of America through a variety of ill-considered steps. One is giving bankruptcy judges the ability to “cramdown” mortgages (allowing bankruptcy courts to unilaterally cut the value of mortgages held by financial companies, thereby damaging their balance sheets, capital ratios and ability, and willingness, to lend in the future).
That at least is reasonably visible and has led to opposition.
But when Democrats take steps that are all but invisible that could have hugely damaging consequences, they should be called on the carpet. This is especially true when provisions are slipped into bills that become law. Laws are very hard to overturn or to change and by the time they can be altered, vast damage has often occurred.
The Democrats (which ones, one might ask) slipped into the House bill dealing with mortgages a sneaky, near invisible provision, that would allow failing borrowers the right to outright own a house for a fraction of the purchase price if the lender makes even minor errors in federal disclosure rules :
[T]he American Bankers Association on Friday raised alarms about a little-noticed part of the bill, saying it would let a borrower end up owning a house for a fraction of the purchase price if the lender breaches certain federal disclosure rules.
The industry said the House version of the bill would force judges to invalidate a lender's claim in bankruptcy for committing minor and accidental errors, such as understating a finance charge by as little as $36.
Wonderful. Small, innocent errors can lead to a homeowner-who may have decided not to meet his debt obligations-to own a home, free and clear of any debts.
So everyone else has to pay their mortgages responsibly but if someone can find an innocent error made by a bank employee-a typo, for example-they can win a house?
The Truth In Lending Laws are important laws and have helped protect borrowers. They need to be strengthened.
How about a Truth in Legislating Law?
Source
55% Say Government Mortgage Help Rewards Bad Behavior
Fifty-five percent (55%) of American adults say the federal government would be rewarding bad behavior by providing mortgage subsidies to financially troubled homeowners. Among investors, 65% hold that view.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that, among all adults, just 32% disagree.
Seventy-seven percent (77%) of Republicans and 60% of those not affiliated with either major political party believe the mortgage help subsidizes bad behavior. Most Democrats (51%) disagree.
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The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that, among all adults, just 32% disagree.
Seventy-seven percent (77%) of Republicans and 60% of those not affiliated with either major political party believe the mortgage help subsidizes bad behavior. Most Democrats (51%) disagree.
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Nobody listens to the real climate change experts
The minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers [because it's in their intere$t]
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.
The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it,"this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".
What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade. [snip]
Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.
Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average... [snip]
...there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore.
The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.
[More, Highly Recommended > ]
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California's Wet Dream
I live in a state managed by a pack of damned lunatics. Not only have the spendaholics who comprise the California legislature submerged us with an unsustainable budget deficit and then swamped us with the largest combined tax increase in the Golden state's history to attempt to pay for it -- now they have spent money on gawd-awful 'research' which proclaims the state is about to go under water -- literally.
According to yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle:
"Driven by global warming, the ocean is expected to rise nearly 5 feet along California's coastline by the end of the century, hitting San Francisco Bay the hardest of all, according to a state study released Wednesday."
"Rising seas, storms and extreme high tides are expected to send saltwater into low-lying areas, flooding freeways, the Oakland and San Francisco airports, hospitals, power plants, schools and sewage plants. Thousands of structures at risk are the homes of low- and middle-income people, the study said."
This so-called "study" was concocted by the Pacific Institute (www.pacinst.org), a nonprofit propaganda outfit in Oakland. The hogwash was paid for by the California Energy Commission, Caltrans and the state Ocean Protection Council. The Pacific Institute's mission statement says,
"We envision a world where the basic needs of all people are met, where resources are managed sustainably and the natural world protected, and where conflicts over resources are resolved in a peaceful and democratic fashion."
Wonderful. My beloved California is purchasing purposefully misleading goo-goo eco-doctrine from a leftist group. It gets even worse. On the Pacific Institute's Board of Directors is Anne Ehrlich, wife of Paul Population Bomb Ehrlich...
[Yet there it is in the The SF Comical without a word of background on its source.]
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Justice Dept. Investigates Arizona Sheriff for Enforcing Immigration Law
- The Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched an investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona following requests by congressional Democrats and allegations by liberal activists that the department has violated the civil rights of illegal aliens.
Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Robert Scott (D-Va.) requested the investigation, and activists groups such as National Day Laborer Organizer Network and ACORN launched petition drives and rallies in support of the probe. [snip]
"The investigation will focus on alleged patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures conducted by the MCSO, and on allegations of national origin discrimination, including failure to provide meaningful access to MCSO services for limited English proficient (LEP) individuals." [snip]
The press release goes on to say that 20 percent of inmates in the Maricopa County Jail are illegal aliens and that of those, 2,000 illegal aliens - 70 percent - were arrested for felony crimes.
Those felony crimes committed included the following: forgery, 12 percent; kidnapping, 10 percent; aggravated assault, 7 percent; driving under the influence, 7 percent; drug charges, 27 percent; robbery, 3 percent; murder, 3 percent; and theft, 4 percent.
The Democratic Congress members have also asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to launch an investigation into the training provided by ICE.
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Harassing A Lawman
Immigration: At a time when our border is becoming a war zone, something's a bit suspect about the Justice Department suddenly harassing a border-state sheriff who zealously enforces the law.
Last Tuesday, the Justice Department notified Joe Arpaio, the top lawman in Maricopa County, Ariz., including Phoenix, that his department is under investigation for "patterns" of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures.
The letter offered zero specifics.
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A Ph.D. in Every Pot
Obama's diploma mill.
... And as you might expect, the people who stand to receive the most money under the president's proposal are adamant in their belief that the country probably will not survive unless it is enacted at once. The president of the American Council on Education could barely contain herself.
"The education components of the new economic stimulus package prove that President Obama will back his words with resources and action,"
said Molly Corbett Broad. This is lobbyist talk for ka-ching! [snip]
The assumption here is that the way to make somebody a competitive worker is to send him to college, an idea that will astonish anyone who's ever been served in a restaurant by a waiter with a master's in art history. [snip]
When you expand the cohort to those between the ages of 25 and 65, the U.S. participation rate jumps and the United States ranks fifth among the 30 OECD countries. It turns out that lots of Americans earn their degrees after they've passed college age and even the middle years.
As a vocational matter, late learners are more likely to concentrate attention on abilities that the current marketplace needs, unlike kids who have to predict what jobs this finicky global economy of ours will be rewarding 10 years from now. And the learning is more likely to stick. Adults are smarter than teenagers. In general. [snip]
When he included four-year schools in his list of higher-ed options, the president was being very generous. (Why wouldn't he be? It's not his money.) But the traditional college was only one of four options.
In practice the three others--postsecondary education understood as job training--will be where the action is and, if we're lucky, where the students are.
[If our President was serious about expanding higher learning, he'd move it to the internet for its rudimentary baseline. Dissemination of information is exactly what the internet does - and can do so for anyone, of any age, at any time, as many times over their careers as necessary - for virtually (comparably speaking) FREE.
And that's the rub: there's not enough money to be made in 'free' - and our education system has a hammer lock on our President's party.
The vast majority of Americans aren't interested in a classic liberal arts indoctrination, they need marketable skills and (if free on the internet) probably want a fair amount of 'other' learning they find interesting (i.e., still not liberal indoctrination).
This is nothing more than yet another pay off to a special interest group that supports him - and an example of no-change-whatsoever when it comes to things liberal.
Our education challenges are overwhelming with the state-backed education industry currently highjacking it. We need to liberate it at both ends by a) universal vouchers for K-12 and b) and internet buffet for higher learning - and make it "all you can eat".]
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No choice
If consistency is really the hobgoblin of little minds, then Hilda Solis and George Miller must be America's top ghostbusters. They think the secret ballot is the cornerstone of democracy -- except for American workers deciding whether to join a labor union. [snip]
Oddly enough, Miller and Solis used to think secret ballots were the very lifeblood of democracy. In 2001, introducing himself as someone "deeply concerned with international labor standards," Miller wrote Mexican officials urging them to allow workers to vote on unionization with secret ballots."The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose," Miller said, adding that the practice "will help bring real democracy to the Mexican workplace."
The American work place, apparently, is quite another matter...
[Criminal hypocrisy - which, if they're successful, you will pay for.]
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LA Times Columnist Cheap Shots CNBC’s Larry Kudlow
Could this be a sign of things to come?
Now that CNBC Chicago Mercantile Exchange reporter Rick Santelli has mysteriously disappeared from the spotlight after his criticism of President Barack Obama's mortgage proposal in February and now that CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer has been marginalized after his lackluster appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" on March 12, could the new target of the Obama machine and the left and their accomplices in the media be CNBC "The Kudlow Report" host Larry Kudlow? [snip]
Rainey suggested as a credibility measuring stick, that Cramer and Kudlow should have to reveal their financial portfolios and if they weren't at least keeping pace with a major stock index, they should voted off "the CNBC island.""I see CNBC running a bar graph with a composite of Kudlow and Cramer's portfolios (no dollar amounts necessary) right alongside a graph tracking a broad stock index," Rainey wrote. "If the TV touts fall more than 10% behind? We vote them right off the CNBC island. Then there'd be more room for me and my timeless, slightly cowardly style of money management."
Perhaps Rainey is on to something here. We could apply his standard to the entire Los Angeles Times as a business model and if his newspaper's parent company's stock, the Tribune Company (PINK:TRBCQ), wasn't keeping pace with the major indices, we could vote it off of "mainstream media island," or at least its business coverage and the analysis of business coverage.
[Again and again, don't debate the idea - attack the proponent personally. I wonder who's setting the example for such behavior?]
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California Teachers Rally as 26,000 Job Cuts Loom
California teachers organized protests in more than a dozen cities today as about 26,000 may lose their jobs because of spending cuts the Legislature approved last month to keep the state from running out of money.
School districts across the most-populous U.S. state have been warning thousands of teachers that they may be fired as a result of California’s declining tax collections.
[Blatant inaccuracy: our tax load was just raised to the highest in the country - it just didn't deliver the increases wanted, hence 'cuts' to the MSM.
Recall, we literally give our broken public education system more money from our state taxes than everything else combined.
Will we ever recognize it for the abysmal failure it is and give our children a future by privatizing it?]
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Train thief took a 120-ton joy ride
The heist from a Kendall sidetrack was revealed on a Sunday, shortly before midnight. A railroad crew came out to crank up locomotive No. 2617 -- a 120-ton blue and yellow behemoth that has snaked up and down the East Coast, hauling loads for CSX. But somehow, it had vanished. They called 911 with a most unusual and alarming request:
We need your help finding our missing locomotive.
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