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.
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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...]
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'Evening News' Lauds the Government Growth as 'Economic Bright Spot'
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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."
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CBS Warns Our Kids Will Be the 'Lost Generation'
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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.]
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Ed Schultz, Jihadist, Invokes Almighty in Wishing Cheney Dead
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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.]
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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:
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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.]
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'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...]
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Hamas: We Won't Accept Two-State Solution
[HT:DT]
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']
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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.
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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...
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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.]
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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?]
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'Skeptical Environmentalist' Doubts 'Underwater Manhattan' Global Warming Scenario
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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."
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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.]
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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 > ]
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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?]
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