Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Obama’s Even Riskier Debt
The estimable Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post had a must-read column yesterday titled “Obama’s Risky Debt.” Samuelson writes that the administration is projecting a total of $7.1 trillion in additional publicly-held debt over the next ten years, on top of $1.8 trillion for this year alone. (The Congressional Budget Office, less enthralled by the allures of Rosie Scenario, projects the additional debt will be $9.3 trillion). Today’s publicly-held debt is $6.3 trillion. Thus, using the CBO figures, in ten years the publicly-held debt will total $17.4 trillion, 270 percent of the current debt.
That’s about the same as the percentage increase in the national debt from 1930 to 1940, when the country underwent an economic crisis orders of magnitude more severe than the current one. And in 1930 the total national debt was only about 15 percent of GDP, not the 40 percent that the publicly-held debt is today. [snip]
How that will play out is anyone’s guess, but it will be ugly, to put it mildly. The Republican Party, however, has a great opportunity here if it has the political machismo to take advantage of the situation. The Democrats own the government and therefore they own these numbers.
READ MORE
Biden Claims Stimulus Spending Has Created 150,000 Jobs, But That Isn't Backed Up by His Own Report
Vice President Joe Biden last week claimed that the federal stimulus spending program has created or saved 150,000 jobs since February, when President Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill into law.
However, the progress report on the stimulus plan released last week by the vice president’s office contained no such figure, nor did it reference any other document that might corroborate Biden’s claim...
[Proof? That's a distraction - move along...]
READ MORE
'Evening News' Lauds the Government Growth as 'Economic Bright Spot'
.
Leading up to and throughout the 2008 national election cycle, CBS News was generally downbeat on the economy, even when times were much better than they are currently. However, now that government has taken a much larger role in the private economy, the "CBS Evening News" has now been running a so-called "Economic Bright Spot" segment. And on the May 18 broadcast, "Evening News" anchor Katie Couric explained how government was going to save us all.
"Last month, there were 72,000 new government jobs - 66,000 federal. That's up more than 2 percent from the month before. As Kelly Wallace reports, for thousands of graduates who need jobs this hiring boom is one of the economic bright spots."
READ MORE
CBS Warns Our Kids Will Be the 'Lost Generation'
.
Katie Couric sees America through a very dark prism. On Monday, she launched a new “Children of the Recession” series, in collaboration with USA Today, with an op-ed in “the nation's newspaper” in which she speculated today's kids may become the “Recession Generation” since “in some ways, I think they already are,” or the “innocent victims could become the Lost Generation.”
In the May 18 USA today op-ed, “The recession's tiniest victims need help, too,” Couric denigrated the kind of news she's presented as dealing with “things and places that are cold, vague, incomprehensible” (quite an endorsement for her newscast), before pivoting to how the real news is an anecdote-based recounting of the plight of a very, very few kids: ...
[Amazing. But this same bleeding heart sees no problem with saddling our children with truly crippling debt levels.]
READ MORE
Ed Schultz, Jihadist, Invokes Almighty in Wishing Cheney Dead
.
Dick Cheney is, he is an enemy of the country. He's making it harder for those who are in power right now to protect the country. It just, I just think the guy's such a freakin' loser.
You know, Lord, take him to the promised land, will you? See, I don't even wish the guy goes to hell, I just want to get him the hell out of here.
[More class from the left.]
READ MORE
MSNBC Again Touts Right-Wing Threat of Violence; Features GOP Logo
"MSNBC News Live" host Contessa Brewer on Wednesday reported four times on the possible threat of right-wing violence against the government. And for several of those segments there was a graphic in the background that featured the elephant logo of the GOP and the words, "New Right-Wing Threat?"
In a bewildered tone, she wondered,"...Is it just a leap to think that they're talking about Republicans?"
If the DHS report didn't mention conservatives or Republicans, why did MSNBC feature a graphic that included an elephant, clearly a symbol for the GOP? In an earlier segment, NBC correspondent Pete Williams explained, "Now, we're not talking about [the] political right here. We're talking about extremist groups. Neo-Nazi groups, white supremacist groups, anti-government groups, hate groups." Brewer promptly responded,"So to be clear here, not just extreme conservatives."
Not just extreme conservatives?
[Speaking of logos, here's one:
READ MORE
Rocket attack leads to air raids
Gaza City - Israeli air force jets have staged a series of strikes on the Gaza Strip after militants there fired a rocket into the yard of a house in the southern city of Sderot, Palestinians and medical sources said.
Israeli planes bombed the area six times today, targeting underground tunnels used to smuggle goods into the besieged territory [stop
Israel's the country being besieged - with rockets - and the 'goods' being smuggled into Gaza are the rockets.
No more rockets, no more problem - but that's evidently too much to ask, and it's Israel's fault.]
READ MORE
'No peace while Hamas rules Gaza'
A day after US President Barack Obama informed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of his intention to launch a new regional peace effort, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Tuesday morning that there was ''no chance for an effective peace process so long as Hamas rules the Gaza Strip.''
[This isn't a political position, it's a statement of fact by their own words...]
READ MORE
Hamas: We Won't Accept Two-State Solution
[HT:DT]
Hamas' Damascus-based leader Khaled Mashal said Saturday that his terrorist organization will not accept a two-state solution as a means to end the conflict with Israel, Germany's Deutsche Presse Agentur reported. Mashal recently criticized Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas for recognizing Israel and vowed to continue Hamas' "resistance" against the Jewish state.
Hamas is working to form a unity government with Abbas' Fatah party, but must first overcome a number of political and ideological hurdles. The Obama administration has conditioned any financial support for the PA on all of its members' explicit adherence to the three Quartet conditions—recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and acceptance of all previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
To date, Hamas has refused to meet any of these core conditions.
[Israel's 'partner in peace']
READ MORE
Tick, Tick, Tick
Yet another iteration of the negotiations track that has yielded nothing.
Who said “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable and we have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening”? It wasn’t Benjamin Netanyahu. No, Pres. Barack Obama said that at his first press conference after winning the 2008 election.
The clock is ticking ominously on that front.
With U.S. approval, the Europeans offered a smorgasbord of incentives for Iran to give up its nuclear program. They were met with meetings and more meetings. Iran agreed to nothing except more meetings in an attempt to run out the clock.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
READ MORE
India set to counter China's influence in Lanka
India will tell Sri Lanka that it has a definite interest in helping the island nation take on reconstruction and will be actively engaged in helping Colombo. This will be the essence of the message that foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon and national security adviser M K Narayanan will give to President Mahinda Rajapaksa when they meet him on Wednesday.
China has stepped in as one of Colombo's largest defence suppliers...
READ MORE
GM bankruptcy plan eyes quick sale to government
If General Motors Corp files for bankruptcy, as widely expected, its healthy assets will be quickly sold to a new company owned by the U.S. government, a source familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.
The source, who was not cleared to speak with the media and would not be identified, said the U.S. government would pay for the assets by assuming the automaker's $6 billion of secured debt and forgiving the bulk of the $15.4 billion of emergency loans that the U.S. Treasury has provided to GM.
The government is negotiating the terms on which it will assume GM's secured debt and might make an the offer to holders of the debt that is far superior to the one made to Chrysler LLC's secured lenders [about 28 cents on the dollar...
I.e., WE are buying a failed car company, to keep us on the hook for their lavish union pensions.
Congratulations.]
READ MORE
Union reluctant to grab wheel in Detroit
The current plans to restructure General Motors and Chrysler LLC will leave the United Auto Workers union in the driver's seat at both companies. But it appears that the union would rather be in the back seat.
UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said the union hopes to sell its stake in both companies quickly because he is more interested in raising cash to cover retiree health care costs than having an ownership stake in GM and Chrysler."Let somebody else take the stock. Give us the money,"
Gettelfinger said at a recent press conference."We are trading debt for equity, and what is the value of the equity? Let's be honest, it's zero today."
[What, perform - just because we were given billions? No thank you. Think through what his statements really mean. Where's our outrage?]
READ MORE
'Skeptical Environmentalist' Doubts 'Underwater Manhattan' Global Warming Scenario
.
One of the tricks in the global warming alarmist playbook over the years has been to show how global warming will cause sea levels to rise and flood the low-lying coastal areas where population centers happen to be, specifically lower Manhattan in New York City.
However, the imagery used by Al Gore in his "An Inconvenient Truth" and by various other global warming made-for-television specials isn't scientifically accurate according to Bjørn Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming."
Lomborg was asked by Gene Epstein in the May 18 issue of Barron's if it would be "smart to prevent global warming as soon as possible -- to avoid seeing Manhattan under 20 feet of water in ten years?"
"That makes for vivid imagery, but it isn't what the science is telling us," [snip]
The tactic of suggested Manhattan would be underwater due to the effects of global warming has been one used on repeated occasions in the media. Aside from former Vice President Al Gore using it, CBS's "The Early Show" host Harry Smith has used it and more recently, NBC's Lester Holt used such imagery in his MSNBC special, "Future Earth: Journey to the End of the World."
READ MORE
ABC's Pleads for European-style Gas Tax
"Good Morning America" co-host Diane Sawyer on Tuesday aggressively lobbied for the Obama administration to install a European-style gas tax on the United States. Talking to Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, about Obama's plans for increased fuel standards, she began,"Why not just go to a gas tax, for instance, which would accomplish a reduction in the use of gasoline, dependence on foreign oil [?] right away?"
Sawyer would proceed to ask variations on this question six times...
[I heard it, and not once was it recognized that tax gas doesn't reduce 'foreign dependence' by a single gallon, it just makes it cost more.
The honest way to reduce our 'dependence on foreign oil' is to drill more of it here - but that alternative was never mentioned.]
READ MORE
Big risk in health care reform plan
We know what the president wants when it comes to health care reform. We know what Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. Henry Waxman want. And we know what interest groups really want from any health care reform effort. But what do the American people want when it comes to comprehensive health care reform?
Stanford University, in a new comprehensive study, has tried to find out. Its Center on Longevity commissioned a huge qualitative and quantitative study to dig deeper into what the people really want from health care reform.
What the study found suggests that the Obama administration should tread carefully when it plots its legislative strategy on health care...
[Highly Recommended > ]
READ MORE
This health care 'reform' will kill thousands
One of the more unproductive elements of President Obama's stimulus bill is the $1.1 billion allotted for "comparative effectiveness research" to assess all new health treatments to determine whether they are cost-effective. It sounds great, but in Britain we have had a similar system since 1999, and it has cost lives and kept the country in a kind of medical time warp.
As a practicing oncologist, I am forced to give patients older, cheaper medicines. The real cost of this penny-pinching is premature death for thousands of patients -- and higher overall health costs than if they had been treated properly.
Sick people are expensive...
[We're being warned - are we listening?]
READ MORE
Despite success, school choice runs into new barriers
Obama, Democrats deny D.C. kids option they exercise themselves.
Few national images are more shameful than those of innocent, low-income kids milling through decrepit public schools, uncared for, unsafe and barely educated.
In Washington, D.C., alone, 173 schools — 67% — fail to meet federal standards of learning.
So it was curious that when President Obama recently allowed 1,716 of Washington's neediest schoolchildren to keep, until graduation, the vouchers they use to escape their failed public schools for higher-quality private ones, he also closed the program to new applicants.
All this occurred as the Education Department reported that voucher participants show superior skills in reading, safety and orderliness. The news was buried in an impenetrable study released without a news conference.
Why the ambivalence? Because teacher unions, fearing loss of jobs, have pushed most Democrats to oppose vouchers and other options that invite competition for public schools...
[The damage being done {by known improvements thwarted} is severe - Highly Recommended > ]
READ MORE
Citing 'Diversity,' Obama Admin Sides with Leftist Grievance Group
Since the inception of tracking those who listen to Guglielmo Marconi's marvelous invention, Arbitron had relied on a personal pen-and-paper diary system and the journal-keepers' honor and memory as to what they had listened and for how long they had done so. The potential for misremembering and book-cooking was simply staggering.
So Arbitron came up with a pager-esque device called the Portable People Meter (PPM). This gadget automatically tracks to where the radio dial is tuned, thereby virtually eliminating human error and the ability to cheat.
Obviously, this is far more accurate way to establish who is listening to whom, right? If you do find this to be a self-evident truth, you are not a master of the obvious, you are - according to the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB) - a racist bigot.
How so? Because the ratings under the new regime revealed that the numbers for hip-hop, urban and other racial minority stations had long been incorrectly inflated (and conversely the listenership of talk radio had long been underreported).
And this, you see, is not the better results of technological advancement, this is racism... [snip]
This new grievance gaggle is made up of groups with names quite reminiscent of the un-diverse FCC "Diversity" Committee that convened on May 7:
- National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB)
- Spanish Radio Association
- Minority Media and Telecommunications Council
- American Hispanic Advertising Association
- Border Media Partners
- Entravision Communications Corporation
- ICBC Broadcast Holdings, Inc.
- Spanish Broadcasting System, Inc.
- Univision Communications Inc.
That Obama's FCC has picked up and made official this pseudo-intellectual twaddle - and assigned the Agency that determines the fate of every broadcaster in America the task of its investigation - isn't very heartening to those of us still enamored with the First Amendment.
As we've already seen in myriad other areas - federal spending, banking and auto manufacturing to name but a few - timidity is not an Obama characteristic. If he is willing to take on this most ridiculous of claims in the name of media "Diversity," we are naturally left to think that there is nearly nothing he WON'T do to ensure that the broadcast world is remade in the manner he thinks it should be.
[SOP: stack a 'panel of experts' with left wing radicals, rely on the MSM to portray it as legitimate, and voila: you can pursue any extreme agenda you want with impunity because 'the experts suggested it'.
This is the same scam being perpetrated in the so-called Health Care Reform 'debate' - stacked with industry representatives but not a single consumer group.
With a duplicitous media and foks who get their news from TV, all things are possible.]
READ MORE
It's Time for a Vote on the Broadcaster Freedom Act
Media Research Center (MRC) President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell is calling on FCC Chairman Copps to call for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to bring the Broadcaster Freedom Act to the floor for an up-or-down vote:
When this many high-powered elected officials are calling for a return of the mis-named ‘Fairness’ Doctrine, and are actively opposing a vote on the bill to prevent the FCC from reinstating it, it isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a determination to shut down free speech on talk radio.
The solution is simple: Chairman Copps should call on Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid to allow a full, fair stand alone vote on the Broadcaster Freedom Act. That way we will know once and for all how each member of Congress thinks – are they for free speech, or are they for the ‘Fairness’ Doctrine?
The May 19 press release is available at MRC.org .
READ MORE
[then >
"VOTE ON THE Broadcaster Freedom Act "
Senate-Reid: http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
House-Pelosi: http://speaker.house.gov/contact/
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
YOUR Congressman: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...
and as always, pass it on...
.
Lifetime TV Beats Up on Divorced Dads
Strong families need strong fathers, but American television has come a long way from the 1950s series "Father Knows Best." Now Lifetime TV, a network known for its movies about women being endangered by men, has sunk to a new low - a reality program called "Deadbeat Dads."
In the beginning of gotcha TV, viewers enjoyed watching the police bust down a door and haul away the bad guy on a show like "Cops." That same format migrated over to Animal Planet, where the cops bust down the door and arrest the man who has been starving his dogs or kicking his cats.
Now Lifetime is doing the same thing to divorced fathers...
[Relax; everybody knows men are the root of all problems in our nation - read or watch or listen to any media in this country. What's one more?]
READ MORE
FLASHBACKs >
Bar Association and Sen. Joseph Biden Enlist in War on Dads
"10 Myths" is designed to teach lawyers how to win money verdicts against fathers by using false or misleading arguments masquerading as objective research."Bad Dads" a Bad Idea
"Bad Dads," redundant in these male-bashing times, is the name of a new reality show Fox is considering....
NRA sues S.F. over firearms laws
The National Rifle Association has filed suit against the city of San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong, taking aim at city laws it contends violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The NRA filed the lawsuit in federal court Friday on behalf of six residents and the San Francisco Veteran Police Officers Association.
It claims that local ordinances interfere with their right "to defend themselves and others ... within their own homes."
[Bravo.]
READ MORE
The 'Conservative' Geraldo Rivera? Only in the NY Times
A New York Times story on Friday by young Atlanta-based reporter Robbie Brown, "Mississippi Mayor Facing Trial Dies After Election Loss," included a bizarre characterization of Fox News host Geraldo Rivera:
"... This approach earned him a national reputation and the support of conservatives like the Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera."
Brown evidently doesn't watch much Geraldo.
READ MORE
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
