Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Obamamania? Not in Russia for presidential visit
For once, the adoring crowds were absent as Barack Obama visited Russia this week. (snip)The cooler reception reflects Russia's testy relations with the United States and the determination of its leaders, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, not to be eclipsed by a foreign star."For us he is not president of the world but the president of the United States of America."
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Russia warns US over missile shield
Moscow - Russia's foreign minister warned Tuesday that the U.S. would jeopardize progress toward a new treaty with Russia on nuclear arms cuts if it decides to create a global missile defense system.
Sergey Lavrov spoke a day after the Russian and U.S. presidents reached a preliminary agreement setting targets for further reductions of the world's largest offensive nuclear arsenals.
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Biden: US Will Not Stand In Israel's Way On Iran
Vice President Joe Biden says the U.S. will not stand in Israel's way if Israel believes military action is needed to eliminate Iran's nuclear threat.
Biden says the U.S. "cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do."
[Has Biden talked to Obama about this?]
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FLASHBACK > Saudis give nod to Israeli raid on Iran
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India Joins Russia, China in Questioning U.S. Dollar Dominance
.“The major part of Indian reserves is in dollars -- that is something that’s a problem for us,”
Tendulkar, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, said in an interview yesterday in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he was attending an economic conference.
As the talks have neared, China and Russia have stepped up calls for a rethink of how global currency reserves are composed and managed, underlining a power shift to emerging markets from the developed nations...
Former Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan said in a speech in Beijing yesterday, highlighting China’s concerns about a global financial system dominated by the dollar.“your currency is likely to become my problem”
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly called for creating a mix of regional reserve currencies as part of the drive to address the global financial crisis, while questioning the dollar’s future as a global reserve currency. Russia’s proposals for the Group of 20 major developed and developing nations summit in London in April included the creation of a supranational currency.“We will resume talks on the supranational currency proposal at the G-8 summit in L’Aquila on July 8-10,
Medvedev aide Sergei Prikhodko told reporters in Moscow yesterday...
[The consequences of the dollar being supplanted as global reserve currency (albeit unlikely) are staggering - and all brought about because America continues to spend money it doesn't have, essentially manufacturing money from nothing which lowers its value -- and the world knows it.]
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When Even Helen Thomas Denounces Obama Media Manipulation, You Know It's Out of Control
At yesterday’s White House briefing, CBS’s Chip Reid and Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas confronted Press Secretary Robert Gibbs over how "very tightly controlled" the media are by the Obama Administration. After the briefing, CNSNews.com reports that many members of the press corps went out of their way to thank Thomas for making her stand.
"Nixon didn’t try to do that. They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try. What the hell do they [the Obama Administration] think we are, puppets? They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them."
"When you call the reporter the night before, you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you. I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well--for the town halls, for the press conferences. It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame."
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell commented:
"Good for Helen Thomas and Chip Reid for standing up for journalistic principles and integrity. The fact that so many of their colleagues congratulated Helen for doing so shows that the press may finally have had it with being led around by the nose."
But if the media are fed up with being manipulated, there’s an easy solution: stop allowing yourselves to be manipulated, and begin reporting with the skepticism these two exhibited and you all applauded.
"If every member of the media refused to stand for the White House tightly controlling them, the White House would have to stop doing it."
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Stimulus Spending Is Making Things Worse Not Better
The economy being much worse than ever predicted isn't Obama's fault, the Bush administration supposedly left us a worse economy than anyone realized. Even to Stephanopoulos, the alternatives were only two: "either you misread the economy [that the economy was worse than Team Obama realized] or the stimulus package is too slow and to small."
A low and behold, here's this headline in today's Wall Street Journal reports "Calls Grow to Increase Stimulus Spending." [snip]
The alternative explanation should be obvious: the stimulus has made things worse.
The notion that "the stimulus package is too slow and to small" implies that massive government spending helped the economy. But the resources the government spends has to come from some place. Spending almost a trillion dollars on various stimulus projects means moving a lot of resources from where the private sector would have spent it, eliminating the jobs many people currently have.
And that's the explaination behind the acceleration of job loss under the Obama administration. Since 1990 there have only been three months where the unemployment rate has increased by as much as a half a percentage point, and two of those have been since Obama became president. During the last five months of 2008, 2.15 million jobs were lost. From February through June, 2.64 million jobs were lost.
If the Obama administration is going to invent history they might start with finding a single example where massive government spending has worked in the past...
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CNBC's Harwood Suggests Tax Cuts May Have Been More Stimulative
Harwood on CNBC's July 6 "Squawk Box" noted that the stimulus was not working as well as the Obama Administration had promised - this coming in the wake of comments from Vice President Joe Biden that the economy was "misread" by the administration."The solution to get it "out the door" might have been tax cuts - to stimulate the economy in a timelier manner. Certainly if you think tax cuts were the best option, you could have gotten more of that money out quicker."
Question for CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood: Where were you six-and-a-half months ago?
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FLASHBACK > Cantor says Biden misread stimulus, not economy
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PERMANENT TAX CUTS: THE BEST STIMULUS
When it comes to stimulating the economy, what works? Much can be learned by examining a previous attempt, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, says John B. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For example:
- The major part of the 2008 stimulus packaging was the $115 billion temporary rebate program, targeted at individuals and families that phased out as income rose.
- The argument for these temporary rebate payments was that they would increase consumption, stimulate aggregate demand, and thereby get the economy growing again.
- Yet, the rebate did little or nothing to stimulate consumption, overall aggregate demand or the economy.
So what could Congress and the Obama administration do to give the economy a real boost? The following fairly bipartisan measures are worth considering:
- Pass a law keeping all income-tax rates where they are now, effectively making current tax rates permanent; this would be a significant stimulus to the economy because tax-rate increases are now expected on a majority of small business, capital gains, and dividend income.
- Enact a worker's tax credit equal to 6.2 percent of wages up to $8,000 as the president proposed during the campaign, and make it permanent.
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They Hate the American We Love
Like much of the country, you may have spent your time last week snickering about the peccadilloes of yet another hapless politician who couldn’t keep his pants zipped. Or maybe you were captivated by the untimely but predictable passing of the most talented musical freak of the last quarter century. Perhaps while watching the ABC-Barack Obama dog-and-pony show purporting to deal with the future of your health care system, you were deceived into thinking that this was the big issue of the week.
If so, you would be wrong. Make no mistake, it is on the agenda, but the real threat of the moment was simmering up on Capitol Hill in the United States House of Representatives.
Far too many Americans were distracted by other things to notice that on Friday, June 26, 211 House Democrats and 8 Republicans defiantly thumbed their noses at the will of their constituents and passed the largest tax increase in the nation’s history.
The “Cap-and-Trade” bill will kill two or three real jobs for every so-called green job it creates... [snip]
As we look back on Barack Obama’s first six months in office, one of two things must be true: the man either believes his policies are good for the country (in which case he is a fool), or he knows those policies are destructive to our economy and he is promoting them anyway (in which case he is every bit the autocrat and Marxist many of us warned he was during the campaign).
I have come to believe the latter, but either way we have a long, expensive ride ahead of us...
[Recommended > ]
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Global Warming Overshadowed: Media Give Massive Cap-and-Trade Tax Second Billing
Obama has used the compliant media to keep the focus to health care, and they are neglecting a critical largest news event that could impact the lives of every man, woman and child for the foreseeable future.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a 1,200-page [1,500, counting the 300-page/3:00 am 'rider'] climate change bill known as the "American Clean Energy and Security Act" sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. and Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., by a narrow 219-212 vote on June 26.
Prospects for that piece of environmental legislation might have been hurt had reporters pointed out the scientific censorship taking place in the Obama administration. A veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency strongly questioned the theory of manmade global warming in a report that was then silenced by the administration.
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FLASHBACK > EPA QUASHES CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE... the two scientists' superior declines to make their report public because "the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment."
Journalists protest Global Warming spin cycle
Even journalists are beginning to revolt at tactics the government is now using to spin the Global Warming myth.
Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation's "underwriting" of media projects.
It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for 'news' outlets....
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Officers, mayor square off over immigration policy
Houston’s largest police union, citing the death of six officers during Mayor Bill White’s tenure, called on the mayor and City Council this week to hire more officers, restore $14 million in overtime pay and overturn the long-standing policy of not questioning residents about their immigration status.
In a letter to White, Gary Blankinship, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, called last week’s slaying of veteran officer Henry Canales a “trifeca failure” of federal, state and city government to protect citizens and police officers from criminal illegal immigrants.
White responded with a news conference Thursday to make clear there would be no change in the department’s policy on illegal immigrants...
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U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Illegal Immigrants
Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.
The federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines for any workers confirmed to be unauthorized...
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DIPLOMAS AND DROPOUTS
Less than 60 percent of new students graduate from four-year colleges within six years, say researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Using official U.S. Department of Education graduation rates, researchers identified the top and bottom performers among institutions that have similar levels of admission selectivity. While student motivation, intent and ability matter greatly when it comes to college completion, this study suggests that the practices of higher education institutions also matter.
America's college graduation rate crisis is not just happening at the handful of institutions that admit only a few of their applicants and graduate most, it's happening at a large swath of institutions that admit many but graduate few.
[Heard a discussion on the radio recently where a common thread emerged re: Universities' practice of spreading the education out {hence the 6-year measure for a 4-year degree used above?} over six years, in that doing represents a nearly 50% increase in the educations' cost...
But who would be so cynical as to suspect that would have anything to do with it.]
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DON'T GET THAT COLLEGE DEGREE
The four-year college degree has come to cost too much and prove too little. It's now a bad deal for the average student, family, employer, professor and taxpayer.
A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades.
Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education.
I'm not arguing against higher learning but for it -- and against the degree system that stands in its way.
[Here-here to that last, if not so much the title. The system is the problem, we need move to a wider array of speciality degreeS taught primarily over the internet for free. That's how we get higher learning to the masses and provide for the rapid 'retooling' we're constantly told the future will require of our workforce going forward.
The hold up? The usual: the vast sums of money in our current system and its corrupting influence on our policy politics.]
[Highly Recommended > ]
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'Nightly News' Promotes Paying Children for Public School Success
No matter how much money any government - federal, state or local - puts into public education, it's never enough in some people's eyes.
A July 1 "NBC Nightly News" segment detailed a new use of tax payer dollars in one of the worst performing, financially struggling school systems in the country - the Washington, D.C. public school system. They are paying school children with taxpayer funds, part of a social experiment to improve school participation at the middle school level.
Alfie Kohn, author of "Punished By Rewards," criticized the program on a philosophical level because it distorted the meaning of learning in schools for success on standardized tests."This program is a bad method consisting of dangling goodies in front of kids rather than treating them respectfully as partners in the learning, married to a bad objective, higher scores on bad standardized tests,"
But Brokaw credited Washington, D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee for being instrumental in making this program a reality. He explained the Capital Gains program was the invention of a Harvard think tank that came with a $1.35-million price tag for taxpayers.
Brokaw's segment ignored the financial woes that have been facing the D.C. schools.
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THERE'S A VERY GOOD REASON WAL-MART SUPPORTS AN EMPLOYER MANDATE
Recent press reports, including a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, announced the news that Wal-Mart has signed a letter to President Obama endorsing the idea of an "employer mandate" -- a requirement that employers offer health insurance to their employees.
Why would Wal-Mart -- the nation's largest employer -- endorse such an idea? Simple: It would cripple many of their competitors, says Robert Book, a health economist with the Heritage Foundation.
- Wal-Mart has 1.4 million U.S. employees and can negotiate a health insurance contract for them all at once.
- As a large multi-state employer, they can self-insure and provide coverage under federal regulations contained in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
- Self-insurance exempts Wal-Mart from costly compliance with most state health insurance regulations.
- Wal-Mart's small competitors that have less than 20 employees often pay more than twice as much per employee for the same insurance coverage, and small employers must comply with sometimes-onerous state regulations.
Supporting the employer mandate is just another way large business can harness the forces of government to hobble their smaller competitors.
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Media Yawn as Obama Gives Ambassadorships to Campaign Contributors
All three morning shows on Tuesday ignored a Washington Times report pointing out that Barack Obama is "continuing the Washington tradition of handing out ambassadorships to political friends and fundraisers." Good Morning America, the Early Show and Today skipped the piece by Jim McElhatton noting that despite pledging to change the tone in Washington, the longstanding practice has continued.
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California: Teetering closer to junk
New York - California's bond rating is far from golden. Citing the Golden State's ongoing budget upheaval, Fitch Ratings on Monday downgraded California's long-term debt to BBB, one category above junk bond status. The next step is BBB- before the state's bonds would be considered speculative debt.
California has the lowest bond rating of any state, and therefore must pay higher interest rates than its peers when it issues debt...
[And still they refuse to stop spending.]
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LATimes: Men Secretly Sympathize With Adulterers, 'See Sanford in Mirror'
Meghan Daum of the L.A. Times has had an epiphany. The story of adulterous South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is still in the news, she's decided, because America's men see themselves reflected in him. Yes, Daum apparently feels that all men are adulterers, so they sympathize with him causing the story to keep bumping along.
[It's ok; blatant sexism against men is allowed.]
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New John Stossel Blog Often Counters Conventional Wisdom
Media types often have a habit of masking their true beliefs in their online blogs in attempt to maintain the fiction that they are "unbiased." One such blog that comes to mind is the Daily Nightly blog of Brian Williams in which he attempts (not always successfully) to hide his liberal bias to an extent that it comes off as quite inane.
In stark contrast to the Williams ennui is the new John Stossel blog of ABC News, John Stossel's Take, which began less than two weeks ago. And in that short time, Stossel has already made waves with his amazingly candid views which frequently run counter to the liberal conventional wisdom. An example is Stossel's blog edition posted last Friday titled, Arrogance:As I read about the President’s new econ regulatory plans, I marvel at the arrogance. I doubt whether any president, with all his advisers and cabinet officials, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system of a great economy.
A day earlier, Stossel posted Stimulus Not Working: Why is Vice President Biden Surprised?
Stossel views can't all be defined as conservative. Many of his libertarian opinions, while welcomed by many conservatives, might also cause some reservations among the same group such as his June 17 blog entry, Drug Control Begets Gun Control:... conservatives who oppose gun control should also oppose the drug war. A war on drugs inevitably becomes a war on guns.
However, whether or not you agree with everything that John Stossel writes, his frequent astonishing frankness (for a journalist) is a refreshing break from the standard journalist blog banality. John Stossel's refreshingly candid new blog is off to a great start. I already added it to my Bloglines feed.
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Katie Couric Named 'Giant of Broadcasting'
Although having the lowest rated broadcast evening news program, Katie Couric was just named a "Giant of Broadcasting" by the Library of American Broadcasting.
[You can't make this stuff up.]
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