Perspective, Coffee, and Cheerios

Maybe you'll see this before sitting down with the local daily and reading screaming headlines about how the drop in 4Q08 GDP was the WORST IN 25 YEARS!!!!!!

If so, have a little perspective with your breakfast as you try to digest the bile.

1) Consider for a moment that the way the economy was repaired by Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker has led to a quarter century of almost uninterrupted growth - growth that never fell to the levels resulting from the economy they inherited from Carter. Isn't it just possible that doing what they did might again fix things and lead to another quarter century of stunning growth? Isn't it just possible that doing, instead, what we're doing, might not be the right solution since we're doing what was done by FDR, who turned a run-of-the-mill recession into what we now call "The Great Depression"?

2) Yes, 4Q08 GDP shrunk more than it has since the early 80s. But in the 70s and early 80s the GDP was like a nauseating roller coaster ride of doom. We've only had 2 quarters of negative growth, and the previous one was a mild 0.5% drop. Despite the claims of self-appointed "recession determiners" (we hereby declare a recession!) that claim the recession started a year ago, GDP growth was mild, but positive, for the first half of last year and we haven't seen the gorge-rising swings seen in the 80s and late 70s. In other words, while a 6+% drop isn't good by any stretch of the imagination - there is some perspective to be gained. And, unlike the "woe is us" mentality back then, many sound economists are saying the recession, without any crazy massive deficit spending orgy, could very well end this year, 2009, and certainly will end in 2010. And here's another little tidbit - even those claiming the spending orgy will do the trick and turn around GDP - remember, people will only have their shoes and socks off in 2009 - the orgy of spending doesn't even start until 2010 and isn't in full swing until after when they claim it will have turned the economy around! Yes, they're claiming that it will fix the economy before it starts!

3) Yes, 4Q08 GDP shrunk more than it has since the early 80s. But back then we also had double-digit inflation (1979, 1980, and 1981 averages of 11.22%, 13.58%, and 10.35%, respectively). Inflation today stands near 0% (0.09% in December and 0.03% in January).

4) Yes, 4Q08 GDP shrunk more than it has since the early 80s. But back then interest rates were in the double digits. Today interest rates are, in bizarre economics professor world, actually negative in some cases. Mortgages, needed to help turn around the housing market by getting buyers into truly affordable housing (that's when they can actually afford the house, not when you pretend they can afford it by acting like they have more income than they do or see that the seller gets less than its worth), are going for about 5% on a fixed 30-year right now. In 1983 such a thing cost your parents somewhere in the 13% range - nearly 3 times as much!

Perspective. It's what for breakfast.

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UPDATE (3-9-09)
I'm not the only one...

Every day's paper brings more Harbingers of Doom. And there are more to come. That's the message from Congress, the White House, various pundits and the ever-talking heads on television. Budget cuts at work, economies at home, the signs are everywhere. We seem to have entered the Age of Eeyore...

This new, young, vibrant president of the United States keeps talking like a pallbearer. He uses terms like Catastrophic and Unprecedented. As if we're supposed to be scared into prosperity, or at least into passing another bailout for Detroit. He tells us we're facing economic conditions unknown since the Great Depression, or maybe the Beginning of Time: "We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action."

Unprecedented? In history? That's all history is: precedents. We may choose to rely on the wrong ones, but after all homo economicus has been through, precedents we've got. Take your pick: The stock market crash of '87, aka Black Monday. The Reagan Recession of '81-82. The Roosevelt Recession of 1937. The Panics of '07 or 1893 or even 1873. Or the long-running bust that followed in Andy Jackson's wake in 1837. Or the New Madrid of economic shocks in 1819. ... Pick your collapse...

Unseen since the Great Depression. A little perspective, please. To restore it, just look around. Does this country look like those Walker Evans photographs of the utterly depressed Thirties?

Let's look at the numbers: In 2008, the American economy lost 3.4 million jobs. Painful. That's 2.2 percent of the labor force.

But from November of '81 to October of '82, 2.4 million jobs were lost -- a smaller number but just as great a percentage of the smaller labor force back then: 2.2 percent.

The unemployment rate last month (7.6 percent) was far below its peak in 1982: 10.8 percent. That's when the groundwork was being laid, thanks to dramatic tax cuts, for the Reagan Recovery, one of the longest-running booms in American history.

Comparisons to the 1930s are even less realistic. In the early '30s, jobs were being lost at triple today's rate. By the time FDR was inaugurated in 1933, a quarter of the country was jobless. Over 10,000 banks would fail that year compared to a couple of dozen last year. That number can't even compare to the more than 3,000 lost in the savings-and-loans debacle of 1987-88.

'Tax The Rich' CANNOT Work

I guess anyone could have run the numbers, but most of us on the right haven't bothered to do so because we already know that taxing the rich is a losing plan. But the Wall Street Journal decided to go ahead and crunch the figures.

Let me give you the short version - you can decide whether to read it all or not:

Obama and the Dems claim they can pay for their new spending by slightly raising taxes on "the rich", those that make over $250,000. In reality, they would have to tax everyone that makes over $75,000 to the tune of 100 percent of their income just to cover their costs.

President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by "one single dime."

This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions...

Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion...

I know...we'll give "the rich" a "bailout" of a couple of trillion dollars, and then we'll take it from them in taxes. That'll work...right?

Meanwhile I see at Rasmussen that the Fifth Column in the Fourth Estate has done their job...they've convinced a majority of America that 'taxing the rich' will make everything OK:

Fifty-one percent of U.S. voters say President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on those who earn more than $250,000 a year would be good for the economy, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Thirty-one percent say raising taxes on the wealthy would be a bad economic move, while 12% say it would have no impact. Five percent are not sure.

At the same time, a majority of voters continue to believe tax increases in general are bad for the economy and tax cuts are better.

Americans no longer even know what they think.

Now That The Senate's Gone Democrat

So what might the bold bright future of New York look like now that the Senate has gone liberal? Well, maybe now we can finally overcome California - a state long dominated by the left. We might have looked to our east, to MA, but they're just not big enough to use as an example...let's see what the front-runner, CA, is up to - and c'mon Mr. Smith! Yes we can! Let's beat CA!

-- California’s state expenditures grew from $104 billion in 2003 to $145 billion in 2008.

-- California has the worst credit rating in the nation.

-- California has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation, 9.3 percent -- higher even than the car manufacturing state of Michigan.

-- California has the second highest home foreclosure rate.

-- California’s tax-paying middle class is leaving the state. California’s net loss last year in state-to-state migration exceeded every other state's. New York, another left-run state, was second.

-- Since 2000, California’s job growth rate -- which in the late 1970s was many times higher than the national average -- has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent.

-- California has lost 25 percent of its industrial work force since 2001.

Outrageous! C'mon, Democrats, you can drive more people out of NY than CA can! Yes we can! Can't we get that unemployment rate up in striking distance of CA? Why is our credit rating better than theirs?! They must be doing much more for their citizens than you slackers in Albany are. C'mon, fellas! Tax and spend our way into the promised land!

Yes we can!

Will Democrat Party Intentionally Destroy Banks?

Many of them seem to want to nationalize the banks...but Obama said 'no' to that. Will the assault of people like Chuck Schumer (who destroyed IndyMac) continue to a full scale assault on banks?? Unbelievable...but true? It seems that some moderate Democrats (where'd they come from?) have stopped a bill that includes giving judges the right to reduce the principal on mortgages - in essence simply stealing from banks that are already strapped for cash in some instances.

Basically what you have is a bank loaning Joe and Mary Sixpack $350,000 for a house that they said they could afford, but can't. They really gave that $350,000 to Joe and Mary, who gave it to the old homeowner, but now the Democrats want to tell the bank 'sorry, Joe and Mary only have to pay you back $160,000'.

I'm very afraid to ask the question...but what will the Democrats do next to destabilize and cripple the financial industry in America and, by extension, the economy? Are they that afraid that the recession really will end this year?

Irony In The 20th

Irony: incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result

I think 'irony' is the word I'm looking for. I just saw a campaign ad for...uh...that guy....the Democrat running in the 20th...what's his name. Anyway.

How bizarre (and weak) has the world of politics become? You've gone one guy running as a democrat who has a history in the business world and a career politician running as a republican in Tedisco.

Yet, if you elect the Democrat he will pretty much certainly vote in a business-crushing, anti-business, economic damaging manner while the career politician would vote in ways that support businesses and economic growth.

Go figure.

A Pretty Basic Question

The president just told America that he wants to cut our dependence on foreign oil.

Riddle me this...how exactly does he plan on doing this considering the following:

1) The widespread availability and feasibility of alternative energy sources as a petroleum replacement* is years if not decades away.

2) His interior secretary is shutting down attempts to use America sources of oil approved by Bush**.

3) Funding for clean, reliable nuclear energy just took a hit with the president defunding the place where we were going to store the waste, the Yucca Mountain site.

So we're going to use less foreign oil...but we're not going to replace it with American oil...and there's no other source available to replace it...and we're going to keep it that way by stopping development on the energy source relied on by many Europeans - nuclear. I see exactly one way to reduce reliance on foreign oil under these circumstances...cripple the economy so badly that we are no longer even using oil...we're all just planting gardens and burning our landscaping for heat and bartering at what used to be the bus stop. Anything else is fantasyland.

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* Wind, solar, geothermal...all potential replacements for electricity. Last time I checked our cars, trucks, boats, trains, and planes - the things that separate us from the third world, run on oil products - not electricity. In other words, we not only have to invent comparable engines that run on electricity (years away at best) but have to invent ways to produce electricity from those items (years away at best). Even if there were a huge wind power breakthrough in 2010, it would do little to nothing to cut down on oil use - most electricity being generate from nuclear, coal, hydro, and natural gas at the moment. Unless you have a sail on your car, you're not driving on wind power any time in the foreseeable future.

Investor and blogger Paul Kedrosky of Ten Asset Management says such debates miss the broader point: Unlike during the growth of computers, when the industry coalesced around the Mac and Windows OS, there is no agreed upon alternative energy platform. As a result, nobody really knows how much money we need - or don't need - to invest in clean tech, which he says is more akin to drug discovery (biotech) vs. traditional tech.

Clean tech is "a giant capital pit" and public investors should only play at the margins, while private investors should focus on technologies like batteries for hybrid cars that play on the edge of existing, established industries, Kedrosky says.

Beyond that, "there's no there there" in clean tech investing, he says.

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** The administration is ludicrously and dishonestly calling the Bush rules allowing the use of these oil shale sites "a midnight" rule change or some carp like that...they neglect to mention the fact that Congress only started allowing this stuff at the end of the Bush term.

AP Continues Calling All Unemployed "Laid Off"

This just doesn't pass the smell test. The AP is continuing to consider all those receiving unemployment benefits as being "layoffs" and also seemingly considering all those being laid off as going on unemployment. Not being an expert, but having looked over the requirements for getting unemployment, this just doesn't make sense:

New jobless claims rose more than expected last week and the number of laid-off Americans continuing to receive unemployment benefits topped 5.1 million, fresh evidence the recession is increasingly forcing employers to shed jobs.

If there's something more to this than just trying to fault "the economy" or "employers" for every single unemployed person, I haven't been able to locate it, yet.

Time To Panic?

I'm not one to panic ordinarily. Just not my way. I've been convinced that the communistic Obama administration, coupled with a socialistic Congress, could do grave, long-term harm to the US - primarily though the economy. When things looked their worst I did concede that they might plant the seeds that would lead to the collapse of the US as a financial world power. I hoped against hope that I would be wrong, that America might wake up in time.

Now I'm not so sure.

Each and every time the administration comes out with some new plan the market starts plumbing new lows not seen for more than a decade. I don't give a rat's fanny how many 'dig hole, fill in hole, repeat' "jobs" you give people and pay with money that doesn't exist, none of that will repair the economy. The foolish Keynesian theory, reportedly only taught now as a 'what not to do' example in economics classes, that the Democrat party is following, says that if you keep spending money you don't have the economy will recover. How that's even supposed to make sense when you start looking at the nuts and bolts I'll never understand. Nevertheless, the Democrats claim they're just doing it until the economy recovers.

Well, maybe my newspaper can explain to me how the economy is supposed to recover when everything the administration is doing causes more and more and more investment to run screaming and hide under the bed?

Stimulus plan? Markets nosedive.

Bank plan? Markets nosedive.

What's next, you ask? Health plan. Result? As if you need to ask...nosedive.

As of 11:30 today briefing.com was reporting:

The financial sector continues to trade with robust gains. Advancers in the financial sector currently outnumber declining issues by 7-to-1.

And at 10:30:

Stocks continue to trade with solid gains, though action has been choppy.

Yeah, well...then we get the noon report:

Weakness in UnitedHealth, Wellpoint, and Abbott is weighing down the health care sector (-1.7%), causing the sector to underperform the broader market.

This session's declilne in UnitedHealth and Wellpoint, among other managed care names, shares follows the release of details in President Obama's health care plan.

Now at 12:30 the market has nosedived:

Choppy trading has taken the major indices to their session lows. The Nasdaq has actually slipped into negative territory.

The Dow dropped more than 100 points on the news, although investors are trying to rally.

This is pretty scary. This is John Galt scary. This is the people that put America to work with this invested money stashing it under their mattress instead scary. No matter how much money Obama spends, it's not going to recover the economy - because at the end of the day THE GOVERNMENT MAKES NO MONEY, it only spends taxes...and you've got to have your head shoved much further up a dark hole than I can imagine to find a way to explain how an entity can survive on the taxes it collects from the wages it pays them.

Do Democrats even remember the purpose of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)? The purpose was to make sure that the rich paid at least some taxes (in truth there were very few that it applied to before Democrats decided it should apply to the middle class, too). Why was it 'necessary'? Because "the rich" decided that they didn't want to send 90+% of their earnings to the gubmint. So instead they monkeyed around with it until it wasn't really income anymore as far as the law was concerned. Start taking all their money away and they're going to do the same thing again - they're going to not invest, they're going to move out of the country, they're going to not spend. This is a disaster waiting to happen...

or already happening...

editoriaLIES

The Times Union slips over the line (after being on a bit of a roll) today. I'm willing give Great Leader the benefit of the doubt on his false claim that oil imports are at a record high, he might simply have made a mistake (unlike a leftist, I can believe that a President can make some misstatements that aren't lies). However, when the AP came out with a story yesterday disproving this claim, repeating it today is out of line.

1) The Times Union today claimed that oil imports are at a record high. According to the AP fact check I noted yesterday, imports peaked in 2005 and have been dropping since.

2) The Times Union blatantly lied at the end of the editorial, claiming that there are "no serious Republican" alternatives to the massive deficit spending of Obama and Co. This is easily refuted and demonstrably untrue. House Republicans produced numerous examples of alternatives - Democrats both refused to consider them or even allow them to be a part of the discussion, they were completely locked out of the process. Senate Republicans, likewise, brought up a number of alternatives, although they were also shut out of the writing of the bill. In the case of the Senate, unlike the House, Republicans were able to introduce amendments to the bill (each of those amendments shows that this is a lie), but in nearly every case (not EVERY case) the amendment was defeated by the majority Democrats. Just because your amendment fails, that does not mean you didn't have an alternative.

Generally speaking, the alternatives proposed by Republicans (publicly, since they weren't able to do it as part of the lawmaking process), were reasonably similar to the Democrat bill that was passed - therefore the claim that they were not "serious" is likewise refuted. The bills were generally smaller (they removed the wasteful earmarks that doubled the size of the Democrat bill), contained similar infrastructure improvements and extension of benefits, and also contained actual tax cuts (the passed bill contains no tax cuts - only tax credits and tax incentives for special interests). The tax cut portion likewise showed that the alternatives proposed by Republicans were "serious" - since they would have immediately placed money in the pockets of the middle class and capital in the pockets of investors (the scary "rich", I guess, you know, the ones that hire people). Additionally, the GOP alternatives with tax cuts enjoy the benefit of mirroring proven historical success from earlier this decade, the late 90s, the early 80s...back to Kennedy and well before him. Unlike the not serious Democrat plan, their plan does not rely on Keynesian principles that have proven to be historical failures at home and abroad when attempted in the past. Finally, one final proof that their alternatives were "serious" is that a majority of Americans agreed with their plan - that there should be more tax cuts in the plan - more than 50% last time I checked. That means that their alternatives, falsely accused of not being "serious" by the Times Union, enjoyed 2 to 3 times the public support as the bill that passed. For all these reasons this is easily demonstrable as a LIE.

Cracks Are Showing

Interesting. The rookie again throws a pick in crunch time. All Obama needed to do was keep handing off to the press and let them grind out the clock for him. But, oh no, not Mr. Wonderful. He has to put it up in the closing minutes.

Sorry for another sports analogy. The facts are overwhelmingly showing that the press was and is utterly in the tank for Obama. Just no two ways around it. They were just sitting there on his lap like good doggies desperately hoping for a belly rub. Instead Obama keeps shoving them on the floor roughly. Like most good dogs, many of them just take this, misinterpreting the rough treatment as 'any contact is good contact' or just hopeful that he'll start being nicer. The "shoving on the floor roughly" includes:

* kicking reporters off his plane if their paper didn't endorse him

* deciding ahead of time who gets picked on at press conferences

* 'let me eat my waffle, dammit!'

* no follow up questions allowed...EVER

* no unscripted photo-ops

* no questions about matters that are embarrassing

* no questions except at 'official' question time

A few reporters were definitely rubbed the wrong way by this. A few, a very few, mostly veteran reporters really didn't like this behavior during the campaign. Could it be that the rose-colored glasses of a few more have started to slip off as they get slapped to the floor time after time (like not being able to ask a question at a press conference about something controversial so someone from a partisan entertainer blog can ask something stupid?)? I will be flabbergasted if this happens - but you never know what the rookie will do, because he IS a rookie, and they have no track record. The first month has shown nothing more clearly than that Obama and his top people (the ones telling those that ARE experienced what to do and think) have no clue what they're doing.

They passed off the spending spree bill to Congress, then politely objected when they crammed stuff in there he was publicly denouncing. Some of it they changed, some they didn't.

His treasury secretary is a one-man Dow wrecking crew. He dithered in putting together an economic team for months, which caused nervous investors to shed stocks. Then they announce their plan, to much investor anticipation, and you announce that your plan is to try to figure out a plan. Stocks again nose dive. You pass a massive spending bill that makes Bush look like an amateur - stocks nose dive. The only adult in the room, Ben Bernanke, tells people to lighten up, that this too shall pass, and markets rally. Instead of following up on that message you give a primetime speech that again sounds like you don't know what you're doing and are basically 'winging it' - stocks again tank.

You go to sign legislation and have to ask the people around you what you're doing and what's in the bills.

You tell everyone to RUSH RUSH RUSH RUSH to get a bill done - then spend 3 days jetting around America before signing it - might as well just yell IN YOUR FACE to everyone that complained about automaker CEOs taking private jets to Congressional hearings.

Eventually some reporters are going to notice that your slip is showing, then they might notice that you don't have any clothes on at all.

Chris Matthews - yes Mr. "tingle up the leg" Chris Matthews and even Eugene Robinson are getting fed up by the fact that their messiah doesn't seem to have any clue what the hell he's doing:

Howard Fineman of Newsweek says Obama has been "grim and a little distant at the same time . . . Tim Geithner hasn't inspired any confidence anywhere, as far as I can tell."

Matthews: "He seems like Barney Fife to me."

Eugene Robinson: "I actually referred to him as Doogie Howser, Treasury Secretary, and I think it's a little unfair." Much laughter ensues.

More Fineman: "Despite his high approval rating and obvious intellect and goodwill, he hasn't quite yet seemed to convey the sense that he knows the way forward and that he can get us there . . . I thought the first fifteen minutes of this show were devastating. Not that Jim Cramer is the only person they have to convince, but they have to convince people that they know what they're doing, that they're not just feeling their way forward." Robinson points out that they are feeling their way forward.

Matthews: "I thought 8,000 was the floor, and it looks like 6,000 is the floor. People are angry, I'm getting angry."

Now the AP even feels their oats enough to run a critical fact check on their savior's speech:

President Barack Obama knows Americans are unhappy that their taxes will be used to rescue people who bought mansions beyond their means.

But his assurance Tuesday night that only the deserving will get help rang hollow.

Even officials in his administration, many supporters of the plan in Congress and the Federal Reserve chairman expect some of that money will go to people who used lousy judgment.

The president skipped over several complex economic circumstances in his speech to Congress — and may have started an international debate among trivia lovers and auto buffs over what country invented the car.

A look at some of his assertions:

OBAMA: "We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values."

THE FACTS: If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money only goes to those who got in honest trouble, it hasn't said so...
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OBAMA: "And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."

THE FACTS: Depends what your definition of automobiles, is. According to the Library of Congress, the inventor of the first true automobile was probably Germany's Karl Benz...

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OBAMA: "We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before."

THE FACTS: Oil imports peaked in 2005 at just over 5 billion barrels, and have been declining slightly since. The figure in 2007 was 4.9 billion barrels, or about 58 percent of total consumption. The nation is on pace this year to import 4.7 billion barrels, and government projections are for imports to hold steady or decrease a bit over the next two decades.

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OBAMA: "We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade."

THE FACTS: Although 10-year projections are common in government, they don't mean much...Obama only has a real say on spending during the four years of his term. He may not be president after that and he certainly won't be 10 years from now.

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OBAMA: "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day."

THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn't only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.

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OBAMA: "In this budget, we will end education programs that don't work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them. We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn't make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas."

THE FACTS: First, his budget does not accomplish any of that...

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OBAMA: "Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years."

THE FACTS: While the president's stimulus package includes billions in aid for renewable energy and conservation, his goal is unlikely to be achieved through the recovery plan alone...

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OBAMA: "Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs."

THE FACTS: This is a recurrent Obama formulation. But job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers...

He just had to keep pushing them and pushing them and pushing them, didn't he? Well, I do believe some of them are starting to have thoughts along the "we made you, we can unmake you" lines.

What Do You Know - The Left Wrong Again

Once again, it becomes blindingly obvious that the left's attempt to blame all the world's ills on George Bush proves to be a foolish, naive argument. Debra Saunders:

Think that credit collapse that triggered the Bush administration's $700 billion bank bailout was necessary because of Republican hostility to regulation and the ineptness of President George W. Bush?

If it were that simple, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Labor Party would not be squirming, and the United Kingdom would not be swimming in staggering sums of debt.

It was not that long ago that market watchers hailed Brown as the savvy Euro-technocrat who, as the United Kingdom's former chancellor of the exchequer, understood capital markets and calmly navigated British finance through the storms that swamped Bushdom last year. When the Halifax Bank of Scotland was on the verge of collapse in September, Brown began working on a takeover of the bank by Lloyds TSB -- for which the prime minister was hailed as a hero who averted a crisis.

But the deal did not save the empire. Instead, it helped sink Lloyds, requiring government intervention. British taxpayers now own a 43 percent stake in Lloyds -- which may grow. Some wonder if Brown will have to nationalize Lloyds.

Oh, yes, and last week, the Sunday Telegraph reported that Lloyds was planning to pay 120 million pounds ($171.72 million) in bonuses to top execs.

Sound familiar?...

Throughout the Bush years, Democratic critics spoke as if every problem would be dealt with smoothly under different leadership. But in the United Kingdom -- one of Our Betters in Europe, with European higher taxes and commitment to liberal regulation -- their very European Union oversaw the same credit craze that occurred under the bumbling, right-wing, go-it-alone Bush.

Obama Disses Germany In Big Speech

Way to insult an ally, Yabut.

President Obama's speech to Congress last night might have emphasized urgency over historical accuracy when he stated, "And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."


Many inventors contributed to the rise of the car in modern-day life. But the U.S. Library of Congress credits German inventor Karl Benz with creating the first true automobile that ran on an internal combustion engine.


Benz came out with his patented car around 1885, or about the same time when fellow Germans Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach produced a four-wheeled automobile with a four-stroke engine. The names of these inventors live on in modern car companies such as Daimler AG and its Mercedes-Benz division.

Kudos for Yahoo and/or AP for getting this LiveScience piece on the front page of Yahoo.

Mr. Galen? Mr. Sharpton On Line 2 For You

Rich Galen goes out on a limb (a limb that's not supposed to be there anymore, remember?):

Attorney General Eric Holder, who is Black, gave a speech to the staff at the Justice Department the other day marking Black History Month. As part of his remarks he said:

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."

Holder may have been absent the day that we elected a Black President...

Let us now turn to the case of United States Senator Roland Burris, Democrat of Illinois. According to the NY Times:

Mr. Burris is under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee, as well as an Illinois prosecutor, over his evolving descriptions of what transpired before he was asked to fill the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Evolving. I love that...

During impeachment proceedings against Blagojevich in the Illinois House, Burris testified he had no contact with Blagojevich nor with any of Blago's associates prior to his being appointed.

Last weekend, according to the AP:

"Burris released an affidavit saying he had spoken to several Blagojevich advisers, including Robert Blagojevich, the former governor's brother and finance chairman, who Burris said called three times last fall asking for fundraising help."

Then a couple of days ago, Burris "changed his story again when he admitted trying, unsuccessfully, to raise money for Blagojevich."

Now, that's an evolving position if ever I read one...

The Justice Department's Criminal Division has a unit - the Public Integrity Section - which is specifically responsible for investigating this kind of behavior.

The question is: Is Eric Holder comfortable enough about race relations in America to open a case against the only Black member of the United States Senate?

Inanimate Objects Protesting Global Warming Hysteria

NASA global warming satellite lands in ocean

(AP) A rocket carrying a NASA global warming satellite splashed into the ocean near Antarctica early Tuesday after a failed launch...

The 986-pound satellite was supposed to be placed into an orbit some 400 miles high to track carbon dioxide emissions...

The observatory was NASA's first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide on a global scale. Measurements collected from the $280 million mission were expected to improve climate models and help researchers determine where the greenhouse gas originates and how much is being absorbed by forests and oceans.

No! You can't make me be a part of your ridiculous hype! That's it! I'm going doooooooooooowwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnn!

Stimulus We Hardly Knew Ye - 6

POST 6 IN A RECAP OF WHAT THE MEDIA WILL NOT TELL YOU, OR WILL SWEEP UNDER THE RUG, ABOUT THE PORK-LADEN "STIMULUS" BILL RECENTLY PASSED BY DEMOCRATS AND PRESIDENT OBAMA:

CONTAINS HEALTH CARE RATIONING / SOCIALIZED MEDICINE ADVANCEMENT

Then, of course, there's the continuing slide towards disastrous socialized medicine in this country embedded in this "stimulus" bill. Long story short, it's going to put political appointees in charge of deciding what you can and can't get treated for according to whether it's cost effective or not. That's the reasoning behind a lack of incubators for premature kids in Canada, restrictions on drug choices, and legendary wait times for things like surgery, cancer treatment, and MRIs in those countries - not to mention flat out refusals for things we take for granted here, like being able to get a knee replacement at 65. This is not a joke and not an overreaction. Oh, and you might have noticed the story in the paper today about medical records being publicly released. Well, with the government now in charge, you can guarentee this will no longer be an anomaly worthy of front-page reporting.

(originally posted as part of this post: here)

=

UPDATE: I see a pushback from the left on this item, including a letter in today's Gazette. Simply put, if you refuse to look at what the bill actually intends vs. the bare minimum of what it says, you can, wrongly, conclude that the bill does not sow the seeds of rationing. I weep for those. Consider the evidence:

* The bill allocates $400 MILLION for comparative effectiveness research (pg 63).

* The bill calls for the HHS Secretary to take into account the recommendations of the new Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research in deciding where to spend "Comparative Effectiveness Research" money (pg 63).

* "The Council shall foster optimum coordination of comparative effectiveness and related health services research conducted or supported by relevant Federal departments and agencies, with the goal of reducing duplicative effort" (pg 73)

* "Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Council to mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer." (pg 74) - note the careful language - "the Council" itself will not be allowed to mandate coverage.

* Then you have to read SEC. 4101. INCENTIVES FOR ELIGIBLE PROFESSIONALS beginning on 353. Basically it bribes doctors and hospitals to put patient data into the new electronic health record database. Why mandate something unpopular when you can pay someone to do it 'willingly'? No one said Daschle was a complete idiot. Finally, check out the House's "Joint Statement" on the issue, where you see that doctor's Medicare reimbursements are cut if they don't go along with the EHR requirements (document B, pg 241).

So, if you choose to read this as completely benign, again, I feel sorry for you. Given the fact that this parallels what Daschle has called for in the past and, as anticipated HHS Secretary at the time, he surely was involved in writing this, it makes no sense to take this out of context - that context being the ultimate goal of Tom Daschle and his supporters of failed health care socialization.

In order to find this benign, you have to believe that the government is going to spend $300,000,000 on research to find out what treatments are most effective in most cases, is going to pay doctors off to collect health records on Americans and submit them to the government, punish them financially and make them less likely to treat Medicare patients if they don't submit that information, and then do nothing further with that information.

I don't have that much faith, personally. I fail to see why they would be going through all this if their purpose wasn't to eventually limit or deny payments for treatments that do not meet the standards set by broad spectrum analyses of treatments that are found to be 'effective'.

Look, if someone is telling you that this is outright rationing right here, it's either hyperbole and should be identifiable as such, or they're not being honest. As I've said, this is the roots of it. This is the foundation on which it will be built. It mirrors other nations efforts to ration health care. How many cholesterol drugs are there that your doctor could prescribe? WebMD appears to list 15 in a quick search. In order to find that the right is not being honest on this, you have to believe that the government is going to spend millions to tens of millions looking at which of these is "effective" and, I don't know, pick 4 of them, let's say for argument's sake. I picked cholesterol because a lot people, especially those on Medicare, are probably on this. Going back a half step, all that data submitted by doctors and hospitals will be used to see which treatments to look at "to get the most bang for their buck". So they'll probably see that there's money to be saved on cholesterol medication. So they pick their 4 and then your doctor's formulary for cholesterol drugs will be cut to those 4. Well, maybe you have interaction issues with 2 of them, a bad reaction to another, and the 4th doesn't fix the issue you have. Well...tough. You can't have one of the others.

That's how rationing works - it's not just some clueless executive flipping through pages and saying 'this one and this but not that one and this one...'. No, it all sounds great. Unfortunately, what it does is tie a doctor's hands with regards to available treatments. Another thing it does is limit new research. Why invest a billion dollars or more (no joke) developing a new drug when you probably can't make that money back? Maybe it's a niche drug that only people that can't use a common drug will want. Well, they're not going to get it, so why bother?

How about this scenario? What if they gather up all these records and find that Medicare patients live an average of 4 years after a knee replacement and, by the way, have other medical problems (since they're older and all)? How likely is that knee replacements are going to be covered as a 'cost-effective' treatment? But, this bill doesn't say anything about this! you cry. No, no it doesn't. Again, this is just the first step - this is the step where they authorize/force the gathering of information that will be used to determine who gets what (I'm guessing Senators will be exempt - don't you think?) that later is used as the basis for rationing. Who cares if your quality of life in your retirement years is nonexistent because you can't get a knee replacement and are bedridden or wheelchair-bound because of it? Tough - not 'cost-effective'. This is all about 'the masses' - which, by itself, is fine. As long as alternatives exist for the individual. In many cases, though, that is exactly what suffers under socialized medicine - in Canada, for example, private health insurance is forbidden. You get what the doctor gives you and that's it (unless you can get across the border and pay cash for a doctor here).

You simply don't spend $300,000,000 plus bribing doctors and hospitals just to find out what treatments are effective - doctors and researchers already do this all the time and publish those results in journals. You only do this if you plan on using that data to affect the treatment available. Frankly, I can come up with no other explanation that makes a lick of sense.

Yes, Free Markets Still Work

Seems like the socialists are getting an awful lot of print lately. You know the type, there's pretty much at least one a day in the Letters of any newspaper - they're the one's whining about how the 'free market' is responsible for the current economic situation and that proves it is a 'failure' and it's time to let government fix things up for us. There is a simple way to translate all of these incorrect and foolish ravings and it's not even a new saying. Newspapers could save a lot of time and ink by simply paraphrasing their remarks: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Every day you just print that headline and put the names and towns of everyone that wants you to run a letter calling for the US to become the USSR. Simple. Fast, easy, and true.

All course it's all codswallop. Without nationalizing anything the economy will turn around. It always has. Why? People are selfish. They want things and will work to get them. I've got skills, you have products. My skills can't produce your products, your products aren't made by my skills. I swap (usually through numerous intermediaries) my skills for your products. You swap your products for the fruits of my skills. Considering it's been going on probably since a few bright fellows or gals figured out how to make wheels and agreed to swap a couple of wheels for barrows or carts for some stuff their hunter/gatherer friends hunted and/or gathered while they were busily making wheels. Everyone benefits. The wheelmaker gets food without tracking it down themself and the hunters/gatherers get to hunt/gather more stuff because now they have a way to transport more of it. I'm sure you can think of a bazillion more examples.

The current economic climate is not a result of "deregulation" or "trickle down" anything or "free markets gone wild". The current economic climate is a direct result of exactly two things (with lots of other things added as seasoning).

1) Over-regulation of the US's petroleum reserves. Because liberals refuse to let us use our own natural resources, prices were allowed to get absolutely out of hand when supplies ran tight (naturally or artificially or both). When prices shot up, people stopped spending money on other things and found they were having trouble paying their mortgages that they already could barely afford on their best day.

2) Over-regulation of the housing market. Far from being 'deregulated', the housing market was badly warped and controlled by Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo in the '90s. In order to counteract 'red-lining', they basically forced banks to offer mortgages to 'red-lined' areas. What is 'red-lining'? Well, that's when banks sort of cordon off areas of the map where they don't want to loan to people for the simple reason that the people in those areas don't pay their bills. Shocking, isn't it? But, since the unfortunate truth is that many of those areas are dominated by minority residents (well, black and hispanic anyway, asians had less trouble getting loans than whites), naturally the government concluded that the real reason was that banks didn't want to loan to minorities (well, blacks and hispanics anyway). So they forced the banks to give these bad risks loans via the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA. This was done in two ways and people that claim the CRA argument is nonsense will only tell you about one way, ignoring the other. The first way was by forcing banks they had direct control over to give loans or basically cripple their operations (not allow them to expand, merge, etc.). Since banks don't particularly want to be hobbled, they went along with this. A relatively small portion of banks were forced into loaning to poor risks this way. That's usually the argument used against what I'm telling you. What they don't like to get into is the second way. The second way was to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up these questionable mortgages. You know, I assume, that very often mortgages don't stay with the bank that gave it to you - they sell it to another entity. In this case it was the quasi-governmental Fannie and Freddie that were told to buy up these lousy mortgages. So what's the big deal? Well, now you are essentially forcing non-CRA banks to offer mortgages to bad credit risks? How is that, you ask? Simple - first the banks are seeing that their competitors are offering mortgages to a new group of borrowers, while you are missing out, and you also see that the government is willing to buy up that mortgage after you close on it. How do you turn that down? If you want to survive, you have to play the new game, and Clinton made sure that you'd play by making it 'risk-free'. As an added bonus, then we sprinkle these bad loans all throughout the financial industry. We do that by take a big sheaf of mortgages, good and bad, and mixing them up. Then they sell off those stacks that contain both bad and good mortgages - want the good ones? Then buy some bad ones. The cherry on top was that buyers were essentially if not explicitly told that the mortgages were now 'government-backed securities' because they came through Fannie or Freddie. Buyers knew that if those mortgages went bellyup that Uncle Sam would make good on them, because even if Fannie and Freddie were nominally independent, they were still, where it counts, governmental bodies, and the Treasury would 'bail out' anyone that bought bad loans from them. That's what the banks were led to believe. We now know that that is exactly what happened.

This wasn't a free-market or deregulation failure - it was a socialistic, over-regulation time bomb. Central planners told the market that they knew better than them how to lend money. Fail. The free market was told if they didn't play along they'd be hobbled and, oh by the way, their competitors would get rewards that they would miss out on. Fail.

There is simply no way to pin this on allowing banks to both be your neighborhood bank and also an investment bank. That just doesn't even make any sense.

So, what do to about it? Well, the 'better red than free' group would say 'nationize the mortgage industry (now, and everything else later)'. Fail. The government already showed that it doesn't know how to run a successful mortgage industry. The free market did it quite well for a long time without interference. Now, that's not to say that the government shouldn't do oversight work - far from it. If a bank is legitimately not lending to minorities simply because they're minorities (and not because they don't have jobs or have sub-600 credit scores), then they need to answer for that and be held accountable. That's just common sense. But accusing bankers of being a bunch of racists because they don't want to risk their depositers' and investors' money by using it to buy a $300,000 house for someone that makes $35,000 a year and has a credit score of 570 is simply a form of evil.

At long last I drag you kicking and screaming to a point. The bacon-wrapped "stimulus" bill that was just passed was rushed through just in time to see that some economic indicators aren't as bad as expected and economists were increasingly talking about the recession being over by the summer or fall of this year. A GREAT DEPRESSION that ain't. So now why is a new bill going to be rushed through so that I can pay my mortgage along with someone else's? Could it be, as Larry Kudlow notes, because the housing market is already correcting and the Democratic hucksters that were put in charge of America need to get this additional level of socialism through before America notices?

What’s even more incredible is Team Obama’s stubborn refusal to have any faith in the free market. In some of the hardest hit areas of the country, markets are already solving the housing problem. Writing on his Carpe Diem blog, University of Michigan professor Mark Perry notes that while California home prices dropped 41 percent in 2008, home sales in the state jumped 85 percent. It now looks like 2008 sales for single-family houses will exceed levels reached in 2007.

What’s more, the unsold-inventory index for existing single-family detached homes in December 2008 was 5.6 months compared with 13.4 months for the year-ago period. And the median number of days it took to sell a single-family home dropped to 46.1 in December 2008 compared with 66.7 in December 2007. So inventories are dropping, the number of days to sell a home are falling, and sales are rising in the wake of lower prices.

Don't Start The Rookie

Smart baseball managers don't start a rookie in Game 1 of the World Series on the road against a patient, hard-hitting opponent, no matter how good a preseason he had.

Apparently American voters would not make good baseball managers - as they decided to start a total rookie, one that didn't even pitch during the regular season, in game one based on a few good innings in the preseason.

The result of starting a rookie executive who has surrounded himself with yes-men catchers that call for one pitch, but when the rookie decideds to throw a different pitch suddenly decide that they were an idiot before and now think the rookie's pitch selection was the wisest move imaginable is this: Stocks tumble; Dow hits lowest since '97

A bunch of spendthrift, backroom-dealing socialists in Congress and the most liberal/communistic president we've ever even imagined have combined to instill such an utter lack of confidence in themselves amongst professional gamblers (investors), that the Dow currently sits lower than it ever did during the Bush years and before the tech bubble exploded under Clinton. Yes, all you Bush-haters, your hero has, in mere months, so exasperated and deflated investors that the market now rides below anything seen in the past 8 years despite our waging a multi-front war against suicidal terrorists and the temporary collapse of the nation's financial heart in NYC in 2001.

Now, mind you, there's no real news out there today - which means that the market's continuing plunge is a result of speculation and only speculation - in other words, traders are simply trading on what they think will happen...and guess what? People don't invest in businesses that they think will be nationalized by a communist government - it's why the west was loathe to fully buy in to investing in Russia and why no one would calmly invest in a place like Venezuela today.

Going back to baseball, or football, if you're a fan you'll note that a good pitcher or a good QB will act as a rock to settle everyone else down, even if they're nervous themselves - and even if the bases are loaded with nobody out or the ball's on their own 5 yard line with 30 seconds left, they keep the team together and at least give themselves a chance to get out of the jam. What they don't do is what an inexperienced, naive rookie would do, which is what we're seeing today from Great Leader - panic, rushing about giving speeches not about hope or pulling together, but about how dire everything is and how much worse it's going to get, and desperately throwing money around that doesn't exist, telling America if Uncle Sam just sticks enough thumbs in enough dikes we'll get out of this pit of certain doom. The rookie is sweating and mumbling in the huddle, telling his receivers that they're screwed and the running back might as well just fall down at the line of scrimmage - that unless the other team just decides to switch sides they have no hope.

You elected a man with ZERO executive experience at running anything, America - and now you expect him to run the country. What would you say if the hometown team started the rookie in the World Series - a guy they just signed out of little league? Well, that's what you just did. And now you're coming crying to the do'ers for another handout and threatening that if they don't 'act patriotic' and 'stick 'em up' you're going to just take it from them.

Brilliant. How's that working out for you?

Times Union Continues Violating Own Policies

February 21, 2009 -
Trudy Quaif of Delmar writes:

Mr. Brown is expressing economic theory that can no longer be easily defended. For the past 25 years, deregulation and trickle-down economics have prevailed. These were policies that exponentially increased the wealth of America's wealthiest citizens and led to the current economic crisis.

The Times Union's policy is to edit for accuracy. The Times Union has admitted that Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo's modifications to the CRA are at fault for the "current economic crisis". This should have been corrected or edited out, failing to do so violates their own written policies.

How much taxes have the rich been paying recently?

At one point, the highest tax bracket paid over 16 percent in taxes; today it is less than 7 percent. Corporations used to account for more than 39 percent of the country's tax revenue; today it is only 7.5 percent. The top 1 percent of the richest people in this country have financial wealth equal to the combined 95 percent of the American people.

And the top 1% pay as much in taxes as the bottom 95%. Coincidence?


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Update (by Falze)

I just stumbled across quite the coincidence researching a post about assassinations and such. Guess who I found quoted by Mark McGuire at a screening of the screwball, tinfoil hat conspiracy moonbattery "Loose Change"? If you guessed "Trudy Quaif of Delmar", way to go! From the 8-6-06 TU:

"They made a lot of good points," said Trudy Quaif of Delmar, "(and) it's really powerful, but I'm not sure I believe all of it."

I just thought it was a funny coincidence, not implying anything by it.

OK. Of course I couldn't stop here. Seems Ms. Quaif turns up quite a bit in the Times Union as an apparent spokesman for "Neighbors for Peace".

She had a March 23, 2005 letter published attacking Bush for wanting to drill in ANWR instead of giving more money to the Amtrak failure.

She appeared in a December 15, 2005 photo (captioned as "Rudy", seems probably a typo or someone took the name down wrong) protesting "the war".

Featured in a Jan. 28, 2008 article "Hundreds from region travel to D.C. protest - They're among thousands who expressed their feelings on Iraq".

"One of the best signs I saw said, `Do you have a surge warrant?' " Quaif said, noting the play on words with search warrant.

President Bush's decision to put more troops in Iraq is a bad idea, Quaif said.

"He doesn't have the approval of the American people. ... He's making a huge mistake," she said by cellphone as the bus prepared to take her north Saturday night.

Guess it wasn't so much of a mistake after all.

Gets into a May 6, 2007 article in the Gazette, too- "Local peace activists turn attention to Iran - Groups fear Iraq war could spread to neighboring country"

Even as the war in Iraq rages on, local peace activists are growing more concerned about what they perceive as the Bush administration's desire to go to war with a country the president described as being part of an "axis of evil" in 2002. They are planning activities, circulating petitions and inviting speakers to talk about Iran-U.S. relations. Most of all, they say they worry that the U.S. will repeat the mistakes it made with Iraq.

"A lot of us have been really concerned about this for a while," said Trudy Quaif , a member of Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace. "A lot of us spend a lot of time talking about it and thinking about it. There's a lot of hard work ahead of us."

Ooops. Lots of needless worrying there.

Featured again in the TU on March 23, 2008- "Looking back in sorrow, regret - Activist leads crowd in West Capital Park protesting Iraq war"

Featured again in the TU on April 11, 2008- "War foe Sheehan to address conference - Peace, environmental activists explore issues this weekend in Albany". Her take on unstable Sheehan?

"We're really excited about having her here. She's a modern-day hero and one of our role models," Quaif said.

Ouch.

Contact person for a lecture from "a member of the U.S. Academics for Peace Delegation" about Hezbollah and Hamas.

A letter on Oct. 5, 2008 lying about health care.

How's The Weather Up There?

George Will here has both some "fun" quotes as well as a very interesting link between Great Leader and "science". It really all dovetails nicely, the more evidence that comes out linking Great Leader to failed past policies, the more that seem to be revealed.

Massive government spending turns recessions into depressions? Yeah, let's do that!

Earth is cooling? Yeah, let's "fight global warming"!

Nutty stuff, just nutty (I'm being polite).

In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (The New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from central European forests, the North Atlantic was "cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool," glaciers had "begun to advance" and "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser.

Despite the piles of newspapers and magazines and journals that are available, the left will continue to try to convince you if you bring up the "global cooling scare" of the '70s, that that wasn't really a scare and didn't really have "consensus".

Fool us once...

So, You Admit It?

It's been a difficult slog - including exchanging ludicrous emails with still-deep-in-denial Casey Seiler of the Times Union, but I am heartily encouraged and pleased to see that on Wednesday the Times Union's editors finally acknowledge that the roots of today's current economic crisis can be traced back to Bill Clinton and (ex-HUD, now NY AG) Andrew Cuomo and their fatal expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

I gotta tell you, the vindication of this admission beats the pants off of having Rex Smith write a snarky column about a letter you wrote to him any day.

Mr. Clinton objects to even mild criticism.

"My question to them is: Do any of them seriously believe if I had been president, and my economic team had been in place the last eight years, that this would be happening today?" he said on the "Today Show" Monday. "I think they know the answer to that: No."

Mr. Clinton ought to reread his brief mention in Time, starting with the reference to the economic prosperity of the Clinton years. That's obviously what he wants us to remember — very low unemployment and the creation of 22 million jobs, along with a $290 billion deficit that was turned into surpluses.

What Time says, quite gingerly, is that the Clinton boom times were also ones of deregulation. That, in turn, helped bring about what Time calls a "permissive lending environment."

Recipients included people with mortgages they couldn't begin to pay. Thus, the housing bubble.

The issue: Editors that finally acknowledge the reality that is as plain as the noses on their faces.

The stakes: An honest media is necessary to factually inform America.

Bravo, guys. Bravo.

Now You Sea Ice, Now You Don't

The word 'ridiculous' springs to mind when I look at this story. I've underlined the things that jump out at me. First - Bloomberg reports on how sea ice covering an area the size of California sort of just 'disappeared' from evaluations of sea ice mass - despite the minor inconvenience of the sea ice still existing...Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor

A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.

“Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality- control measures prior to archiving the data,” the center said. “Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check.’’

The extent of Arctic sea ice is seen as a key measure of how rising temperatures are affecting the Earth. The cap retreated in 2007 to its lowest extent ever and last year posted its second- lowest annual minimum at the end of the yearly melt season. The recent error doesn’t change findings that Arctic ice is retreating, the NSIDC said...

Go ahead and click through and find NSIDC's explanation...

Upon further investigation, we discovered that starting around early January, an error known as sensor drift caused a slowly growing underestimation of Arctic sea ice extent. The underestimation reached approximately 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February. Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality control measures prior to archiving the data...

NSIDC gets sea ice information by applying algorithms to data from a series of Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) sensors on Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites. These satellites are operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Their primary mission is support of U.S. military operations; the data weren’t originally intended for general science use.

The daily updates in Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis rely on rapid acquisition and processing of the SSM/I data. Because the acquisition and processing are done in near-real time, we publish the daily data essentially as is. The data are then archived and later subjected to very strict quality control. We perform quality control measures in coordination with scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which can take up to a year. High-quality archives from SSM/I, combined with data from the earlier Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) data stream (1979–1987) provide a consistent record of sea ice conditions now spanning 30 years...

However, the SSM/I sensors have proven themselves to be generally quite stable. Thus, it is reasonable to use the near-real-time products for displaying evolving ice conditions, with the caveat that errors may nevertheless occur. Sometimes errors are dramatic and obvious. Other errors, such as the recent sensor drift, may be subtler and not immediately apparent. We caution users of the near-real-time products that any conclusions from such data must be preliminary...

Upon further investigation, we found that data quality had begun to degrade over the month preceding the catastrophic failure. As a result, our processes underestimated total sea ice extent for the affected period. Based on comparisons with sea ice extent derived from the NASA Earth Observing System Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (EOS AMSR-E) sensor, this underestimation grew from a negligible amount in early January to about 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February (Figure 2)...

Sensor drift is a perfect but unfortunate example of the problems encountered in near-real-time analysis. We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above...

Some people might ask why we don't simply switch to the EOS AMSR-E sensor. AMSR-E is a newer and more accurate passive microwave sensor. However, we do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data. Thus, while AMSR-E gives us greater accuracy and more confidence on current sea ice conditions, it actually provides less accuracy on the long-term changes over the past thirty years...

So...

1) The data takes up to a year to verify. That sure doesn't stop anybody from reporting the unverified results right away, results that could contain catastrophic failures in them, now does it?

2) The sea ice record that they're confident in goes ALLLLLLL the way back to...about 1980. Wow. You can glean a lot about geological climate shifts from that, right?

3) The sensors are "generally quite stable". Well, that sounds like something we can use to force us back to the stone ages.

4) The sensors are "generally quite stable" up until the point they experience "catastrophic failure". Of course up TO that point, we're still using the data and assuming it's correct and, hey, do we really have a way to verify when it starts to go bad? Sure, we compare it to this other thing...that, of course, is just as reliable.

5) "We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above"...that would be since 1980...in other words, conveniently beginning JUST AFTER a period when it got chilly enough for the scientific community to warn us about an impending ice age. Quite convenient. How shocking that sea ice has been melting since then.

And finally, this just absolutely floored me:

However, we do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data. Thus, while AMSR-E gives us greater accuracy and more confidence on current sea ice conditions, it actually provides less accuracy on the long-term changes over the past thirty years.

So they're not using a more accurate sensor because it doesn't agree with the sensor they're using now and therefore, the more accurate sensor is not being used because it doesn't agree with the less accurate sensor! Does that make any sense to you? It doesn't to me. Maybe they just explained it poorly, but it sounds like a buttload of nonsense to me. 'Yeah, we could switch over to the better sensor, but then our old data, you know, since 1980, might be shown to not be accurate, and we can't have that, because we need to keep using this historical data...despite the fact that a newer and better sensor says the data's not as good, it's what we have, so we're sticking with it.'

I'm struggling for a comparison here...I guess it's the old man driving an old gas guzzler. His kids give him a new fuel-efficient model, but he keeps driving the old car because he's been driving it for 30 years and it makes him comfortable to know that, yes, it uses a ton of gas, but at least he is familiar with how much gas it is using...unlike that new car, that, yes, might use less gas, but then he'd be all confused about how much gas he needs. Bad example maybe, but it's what I could come up with on short notice.

I dunno, this all strikes me as vaguely fishy - admitting that you're not using the best data source available, admitting that your historical record only goes back to end of the last period of global cooling, and yet making VERY forceful statements and rendering VERY sure conclusions about something that operates on geological time.

Who's Pulling The Strings

Well this is just bizarre. I'm reading through this column by Tony Blankley, who's pointing out that people are trying to figure out what sort of executive Great Leader will be. He makes this really good point that is an angle I certainly pondered:

Regarding the Cabinet selection, he famously said he "screwed up." But from a management perspective, the unanswered question is: How did he "screw up"? Did he actively design the failed vetting process and actively assess the various negative pieces of information and fail to see their significance? Or did he "screw up" by letting others design the failed system and assess the data inflow? The former would show poor substantive judgment. The latter would show he wasn't paying sufficient attention to a presumably vital matter. We don't know yet which kind of "screw-up" it was.

But then this one really struck me:

The second item, President Obama's performance at the Gitmo executive order, provided brief but revealing insight into the president's personal involvement in vital decision making. He had campaigned hard on closing Gitmo. His first public signing as president was that executive order to close it down. The central issue of Gitmo's closing was and is: What do we do with the dangerous inmates? President Bush kept it open primarily because his administration couldn't figure out an answer to that question.

Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn't know how -- or even whether -- his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.

President Obama: "And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we're going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?"

White House counsel Greg Craig: "We'll set up a process."

To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

Very interesting, I thought. Is there more to this? As I nearly always try to do, I decided to look for a 'pure' source, or a 'primary' source. In other words, if someone quotes a scientific journal, I try to find the journal article and read it for myself, or at least make sure it's in context and not a mutilation of the intent of the article. In this case - how about a transcript. Happily one was found rather easily. Now, because this is on LexisNexis, which I'm not totally familiar with, I have no idea if this will remain freely available forever. Still, here is the link: link. I'll be quoting chunks of it, so it's not like it will disappear into the ether...it might even be on the White House site. So I'm reading the transcript and I'm simply blown away by the way the president has to keep turning to White House counsel Gregory Craig (who we found has a rather unsavory past, as described in the Skeletons In Obama's Cabinet post) to find out what the heck he's signing and doing. It all reads like 'What am I doing here? What's this again? Oh, yeah, today I'm freeing the slaves. No? That's the other one? What's this one? Who am I again? Oh, right, thanks.'

I need to take a step back. I started reading more and more of this because, at first, I thought Mr. Blankley had taken a bit of a liberty with his quote. I thought, oh, he's just confused because he's signing a bunch of stuff and isn't sure if there is in fact a particular plan amongst all the stuff he's signing, Blankley took that out of context!. But, after reading more, I think Blankley's on firm ground. Even when you get to the 'what do we do with them' part, it's just some sort of 'we'll put together a group of people to figure out what to do with them' cart before the horse sort of deal. And he continues to be rather baffled by everything...and, yes, it's probably a good time to remind America that they just elected A MAN WITH ZERO EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE TO BE THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF THE ENTIRE NATION. Pay careful attention to how Obama turns to Craig to find out what he's supposed to be doing and then repeats back what Craig tells him almost word for word. Here's a chunk of the transcript:

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA AT HIS SIGNING OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS CLOSING THE GUANTANAMO BAY DETENTION FACILITY, IMPLEMENTING USE OF THE ARMY FIELD MANUAL GOVERNMENTWIDE, SETTING UP A SPECIAL INTERAGENCY TASK FORCE ON DETAINEE DISPOSITION, AND THE CASE OF ALI SALEH KAHLAH AL-MARRI LOCATION: WASHINGTON, D.C. TIME: 11:22 A.M. EST DATE: THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA: (In progress) -- order that we are signing. "By the authority vested in me as president of the -- president by the Constitution under the laws of the United States of America, in order to effect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo, and promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, and the interest of justice, I hereby order" and we then provide the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.

We will do -- is there a separate executive order, Greg, with respect to how we're going to dispose of the detainees? Is that written?

GREGORY B. CRAIG (White House counsel): (Off mike) -- set up a process -- (off mike).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We will be setting up a process whereby this is going to be taking place.

...

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Two more. I got two more.

What we're doing here is to set up a special interagency task force on detainee disposition. It's going to be made up of the attorney general, secretary of Defense, secretary of State, secretary of Homeland Security, director of National Intelligence, the director of the CIA, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and any other officers that we may need. They are going to provide me with information in terms of how we are able to deal in the disposition of some of the detainees that may be currently in Guantanamo that we cannot transfer to other countries, who could pose a serious danger to the United States, but we cannot try because of various problems related to evidence in a(n) Article III court. So this task force is going to provide us with a -- a series of recommendations on that.

Is that correct, Greg?

MR. CRAIG: That's right. And detainee policy going forward.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: And detainee policy going forward, so that we -- we don't find ourselves in these kinds of situations in the future.

MR. CRAIG: And we have clear guidance for our military as well as -- (off mike).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: And that we are providing clear guidance to our military in terms of how to deal with it.

Okay.

...

I can't possibly draw any conclusions from all this at this time, but I found it bizarre enough that people should probably also have a look.

Considering Collusion

collusion: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose

straw man: a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted

A few musings here. I think I'll give the background first, then the example. One of the false charges of media bias is that there is a great liberal media conspiracy where the captains of the newspaper and TV news industry get on the phone every day and talk about what they're going to cover, how they're going to slant it, etc. Liberal media types like to bring this up when they're "refuting" charges of media bias. This is a straw man. I'm not aware of any media watchdogs of sound judgement and character that actually makes this claim, let alone believes it. I certainly don't.

I've written a few times, if I recall correctly, about what media bias is and isn't. Here's a good run down from someone that works for a watchdog: Conservative Media Critics and Other Scary Monsters (incidentally, Rex should REALLY read this, because it notes that the argument he made in his column "rebutting" the letter I sent him about my criticism being a desire for them to simply report things the way I want instead of simply fairly is actually a retread of an OLD Bill Moyers argument, one long since discredited, as Tim Graham does in this article). While it doesn't come up here, it's pretty standard fare: Critics contend that we all get on a big conference call with the New York Times in the morning and get our marching orders from them.... No. Sure, I'm sure some kooks believe this. But in general, if you hear it out of the mouth of a legitimate media watchdog, it's a joke or swipe at the media's use of this straw man argument (since the evidence generally overwhelms the evidence of their actual biases).

So, I hope I've dispensed with that illusion. I don't believe it. I certainly don't think the MRC or AIM or Bernie Goldberg believe it.

Yet...now I'm confused.

Why does the Gazette and the Times Union often run the same story on the same day (and I'm sure other papers, too)? Now in most cases there's hardly any mystery in this. I mean, a plane crashes you're going to get stories the next day. A big bill passes, again, stories the next day.

But what about delayed news? Here's where the example comes in. I wrote last week about the local media's curious disinterest in the recent murder in Orchard Park where a prominent state businessman and media figure, a muslim as it happens, with a history of domestic violence, beheaded his wife at his TV station's offices 2 days before Valentine's Day, allegedly, because she filed for divorce...he turned himself in. The murder happened Thursday. By Friday the story was appearing in the news, particularly, as one would expect, in the Buffalo area news. The AP and UPI issued stories. Other sources were picking it up including Newsday and the NY Post. The Times Union even ran the feed from the AP on their website. But nothing in the papers here on Friday...or Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. Finally, stories showed up in both the Daily Gazette and Times Union yesterday - the Gazette with a HUGE story taking up most of page 2 and the Times Union with a teeny-weeny blurb.

Now I'm confused. See, if this had 'trickled out' over the past week, fine. But, instead, after ignoring the story for nearly a week, both papers suddenly ran stories on the same day. Again, this wasn't a new story that the AP was finally putting out - the story was out from the AP (where they got the story from) last week.

Here's what I don't understand about the newspaper industry - Who's pushing that button that suddenly goes from 'available' to 'everybody run it now'? Is it the AP? Do they put out a story but then put out a different 'wire' version that papers then use? Can local papers bypass that 'hold' or whatever and run with the earlier version if they want? Is, despite how nutty it sounds and unlikely it seems, someone, somewhere making that call on when to run stories that don't go "right away"?

Me? I think there's some logical logistical reason. Whatever that reason is, however, still doesn't justify the shameful delay on reporting this timely, newsworth story for nearly a week. It was on their site - why didn't the Times Union jump on it? Why did it finally show up in both papers at the same time? It was well covered in the blogging world by the end of last week - but nothing until Wednesday in the dailies? Who made that call? Who made the call to finally run it? What changed? Who said 'go'? Who was saying 'stop'? What's the role of the AP in how papers run their wire stories?

Space? We can eliminate that, I think, since the 2 local papers ran substantially different versions - about as different as you can get - one huge with photos, one a bare bones, nearly useless blurb that does no justice to a story that, under other circumstances, might warrant a made-for-TV movie or endless bloviating on cable news channel tabloid celebrity and crime shows (looking at you, Greta).

Volume? Do the papers simply get so many stories that it takes them 5 days to wade through them and get them in print? That seems extraordinarily unlikely, that two papers would be wading at the same rate - and, also, surely NY stories get precedence over the sheer volume of carp they must get from the AP on a daily basis. Like with 'plane crash' stories, they must be nearer the top of the pile.

If it's not collusion, and, again, I don't think it is - at least not in a wide-reaching, everybody's-in-on-it sort of way, how are such coincidences explained?

--
Media Bias note: you might find yourself asking well, if it's not collusion that leads to such similar bias in the news media, what is it? The standard watchdog response, that I think makes a lot of sense, is simply that you have a lot of like-minded people doing the same sort of thing, that went to the same schools, hang out in the same places, know the same people, etc. making the decisions for the papers and TV news, so it's no surprise that they talk alike, look alike, and, yes, practically (or really) think alike. That's why FoxNews stands out like a sore thumb in today's market - clearly the people running it aren't quite in the same orbits, think differently, etc. What the mainstream leftist media should remember is that the vast majority of America did not go to the same school, go to the same hangouts, hang around with the same people as them - and their way of thinking is decidedly not on the same page. That is why Fox routinely trounces them in the polls of who is more balanced, in the cable news ratings, etc. Fox, it seems, is just more like they are. The classic example is a liberal reporter wondering aloud how a Republican could have been elected when "no one they know voted for him". That is how you end up with what looks like collusion if you don't have the intellectual curiosity to dig any deeper.

--update - Jonah Goldberg gets into it here: link--

(originally posted 2-19-09 - bumped and updated with information from the MRC confirming the apparent 'spiking' of this story in the national press)

Does the media show religious discrimination in their news judgment? The founder of a TV network devoted to improve the image of Muslims being charged in the beheading of his wife is not a story the major media have leaped on. On Friday, news broke that Muzzammil Hassan, founder and CEO of Bridges TV, was charged with murdering his wife Aasiya after she filed for divorce. After some Nexis research, here’s a listing of major media outlets that have yet to report it: ABC, NBC, NPR, the NewsHour on PBS, USA Today, and The Washington Post...

Updated: while the Nexis search showed no CBS story on the beheading, MRC's Kyle Drennen found a news report on Wednesday's Early Show...

CNN has offered a handful of stories on the beheading of Aasiya Hassan...

Major newspapers who have noticed the Hassan charges have downplayed the Muslim angle. Nexis says the New York Times reported the story on Wednesday with the headline "Upstate Man Charged With Beheading His Estranged Wife." The story began frankly enough: "A man who founded a Muslim-American television station to help fight Muslim stereotypes is to appear on Wednesday in a suburban Buffalo court on charges that he decapitated his wife last week." (The Washington Edition of the Times we’ve received here in Virginia has featured no story.)

The Los Angeles Times also arrived on the story on Wednesday in a tiny 81-word article headlined "TV exec accused of beheading wife."

Wire-service reports also omitted the Muslim angle in their headlines. An AP dispatch was headlined "Police: TV exec beheads wife who filed for divorce." A Reuters story was titled "U.S. TV network founder charged with beheading wife."

Stimulus We Hardly Knew Ye - 8

POST 8 IN A RECAP OF WHAT THE MEDIA WILL NOT TELL YOU, OR WILL SWEEP UNDER THE RUG, ABOUT THE PORK-LADEN "STIMULUS" BILL RECENTLY PASSED BY DEMOCRATS AND PRESIDENT OBAMA:

CRIPPLES FINANCIAL INDUSTRY'S ABILITY TO HIRE

So what else is there in this bill so huge and so secret and so rushed that Congress never even had a fighting chance of reading it or even leafing through it before voting?

Well, it turns out there's a little provision in there that Mr. Rah-rah Stimulus himself, Chuck Schumer, didn't notice (for the simple reason that he never read the damned thing). Quoting from Crain's New York Business:

Sen. Schumer has pledged to undo a provision included in the stimulus package that will make it nearly impossible for New York’s banks to hire foreign workers through the H-1B visa program...

Advocates say that the mandate is so onerous that it will virtually stop banks from bringing foreign workers into the country.

According to a report released last year by the Partnership for New York City, roughly 13,000 workers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are here on H-1B visas. The top visa sponsors in the area are the very same banks that have received TARP money. Those banks also have significant overseas operations, says Kathy Wylde, and this provision will hurt most when the economy turns around and the banks look to hire talent to tap new markets...

Since the bill was signed with the provision included, Schumer will need to undo it in another bill, which could be tough sledding.

“This is a counterproductive amendment that could hurt New York’s economy, and we are going to work hard to change it,” Schumer says.

So it's going to be hard to change, it's going to be counterproductive, and will be particularly damaging to New York. Gee, maybe you should have, I dunno, READ IT FIRST!?

Incidentally, you recall who it was that said:

And let me say this, to all of the chattering class, that so much focuses on those little, tiny — yes, porky — amendments: The American people really don’t care.

Oh, right. Chuck Schumer.

I guess Chuck doesn't read Investors Business Daily and Michael Ramirez' cartoons:
(contains material originally posted as part of this post: here)