The shortfalls in FEMA's disaster aid account have been obvious to lawmakers on Capitol Hill for months — and privately acknowledged to them by FEMA — but the White House has opted against asking for more money, riling many lawmakers.Hmmmm...tornado in lily white Missouri. Hurricane in very white northeast, especially glaringly lily white VT.
A front-page story by James Risen in The New York Times on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, reported on a "troubling trend" of sexual assaults committed by American employees of military contractors in Iraq. The centerpiece of his story was Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been brutally gang-raped in 2005 while working in the Green Zone...Well-worn ground, but always worth retreading:
Jones famously claimed that days after arriving in Iraq with KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, she had been drugged and gang-raped by fellow employees and then held at machine-gunpoint in a tiny shipping container by KBR managers, with no food or water for 24 hours, as retaliation for reporting the rape...
And then a few weeks ago, the Times ran a microscopic, one-paragraph Associated Press story on page 13 of a Saturday paper, reporting that a jury looked at the facts and found that ... Jones made the whole story up...
When the time came to put up or shut up, Jones' "gang-rape" claim simply disappeared. DNA evidence showed she'd had sex with one only man, and he claimed it was consensual.
In fact, the whole crime disappeared: After an investigation, no criminal charges were brought...
Jones' claim that she had been drugged with Rohypnol was demolished by tests taken by a female military doctor the day after the alleged attack. Rohypnol is detectable for 72 hours, but there was no trace of it, or any "date rape" drug, in her system.
Jones said the attack was so brutal that her breast implants were ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn, requiring massive reconstructive surgery. This was contradicted not only by the female doctor who examined her the next day, but also by her own plastic surgeon back in Houston...
Having showcased Jones' original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing.
President Obama has repeatedly derided the sort of Republican partisanship that led the current minority party in the Senate to filibuster some of his appointments -- most prominently his nomination of Goodwin Liu to the federal bench. But Senator Obama not long ago strongly advocated such partisan obstructionism when out of power he praised the filibuster as much as he now deplores it while in power. Indeed, he joined a filibuster to deny votes on the nominations of both Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and John Bolton to the U.N. ambassadorship...Heh:
During the last three years, in almost every debate -- deficit reduction, taxes, illegal immigration -- Obama has smeared the motives of his political opponents. He suggested that critics of illegal immigration wished to add moats and alligators to help close the border, and that they planned to arrest parents and children on their way to get ice cream. He advised that Latinos "should punish our enemies." He accused opponents who wanted balanced budgets of abandoning children suffering from autism and Down syndrome.
Obama's partisan rhetoric has always been rough. He called his political adversaries on taxes and the debt "hostage takers" who engaged in "hand to hand combat," and needed to be relegated to the proverbial back seat. Obama even suggested that AIG executives were metaphorical terrorists: "They've got a bomb strapped to them and they've got their hand on the trigger."
The Tea Partiers Lost America's AAA Credit Rating. Sure, the Tea Partiers may have supported the Ryan Plan and Cut, Cap, and Balance, both of which would have preserved America’s AAA credit rating, but what we’ve just experienced is a “Tea Party downgrade.” How does that work? Well, just as Paul Revere caused the British to attack America and Mothers Against Drunk Driving causes people to drive drunk, the Tea Partiers caused America's credit downgrade with their incessant demands that we cut spending to avert a credit downgrade…or something. It’s a little foggy.Take that. And that. And that:
First -- 32 months after his inauguration, 28 months after the unemployment rate first surged past 9 percent -- Obama will propose a "very specific" jobs package. In September. Following a well-deserved vacation...
Obama may be preparing unexpected policy wonders at Martha's Vineyard, but he cannot change the fact that he made a bad bet. In 2009, he assumed that a staggering economy would recover in a normal cyclical fashion, just in time for his re-election. So he spent his political capital on the largely irrelevant issue of health care. Now he wants to become the jobs candidate, mainly through the repetition of the word "jobs."
“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”Yeah. Like that?
OK, to summarize, according to the transportation experts tapping away at keyboards at the Times Union and Daily Gazette, those that oppose wasting money on these rail projects are:Annnnnnnnnnd here comes the jury!
shortsighted
making rash decisions
puzzling
afraid of boondoggles
blundering
cynical for thinking it won't pay off
pushing fear over hope
Whereas the geniuses in NY and similar are:
looking at a boon to the economy
jumping on the gravy train
ambitious
have workable plans
reaping the spoils of victory
going to get a more robust economy
forward-looking
The Department of Transportation announced Monday that the government will spend $450 million upgrading a 24-mile stretch of rail between Trenton and Brunswick, New Jersey, on the busy Northeast Corridor to allow Amtrak's signature Acela trains to reach 160 miles-per-hour.Oh yeah baby, the JOBS, the JOBS! The spending! The construction! Oh YEAH BABY!
The speed-limit increase would save about one minute and forty seconds, Bloomberg reports — meaning the upgrade will cost about $4.5 million per-second.
An additional $295 million will be spent to separate Amtrak trains from Long Island Rail Road trains in Queens — to speed travel times north from Manhattan.
The money for high speed rail improvements comes from funds originally granted to Florida in the 2009 stimulus bill that the state sent back earlier this year.
The one. The only. The Eric Holder.
Right?
Biden, left, with Teamsters President James P. Hoffa in July (Julie Jacobson/AP)
An Ohio contractor was wounded by gunfire Wednesday by a shadowy man vandalizing his SUV with union threats...Oh, the White House is leading alright.
It's quite a different story for the Lambertville, Mich., contractor who woke up in the dead of night a week ago found a silhouetted figure on his driveway spraying "SCAB" on the side of his vehicle. The figure fired a gun at him before fleeing.
King runs a small business employing 40 people at high wages with good benefits. His success at a time when unionized contractors are failing made him the target of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which has unsuccessfully sought to unionize his workers...
IBEW tactics have been so objectionable a federal judge ordered them this week to refrain from hurling and/or spreading feces in their strike, as if they should need to be told...
• They've amassed political power since the last election. The Obama White House is their captive, with union leaders such as AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka bragging about talking to the White House several times a week...
Now it's turned to attempted murder. It's time for this to stop. Where's the leadership from the White House?
We thought perhaps the White House had received a sufficient dose of condemnation as well as some sensitivity training over a planned Sony film hyping President Obama's "gutsy call" regarding the successful Navy SEAL mission that killed Osama bin Laden. The film was to be released three weeks before the 2012 vote. We were wrong.
When 30 U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs from SEAL Team 6, the unit that got the world's most-wanted man, were subsequently shot down in a helicopter, the nation mourned its heroes. The White House, it seems, loaded its cameras.
Nineteen of the families asked for no media coverage of the ceremony at Dover, Del...
So why and how did a photo of President Obama, in silhouette no less, saluting the return of the remains of these brave men find its way to the White House website as its "Photo of the Day"? Did they not get the memo? For what purpose was the photo taken?...
When on Nov. 20, 2009, President Obama flew to Osan Air Base in South Korea to speak to American troops, he remarked, "You guys make a pretty good photo-op." Apparently they still do, living or dead.
Recently, PR Newswire ran the latest Harris Interactive poll under the headline, “Over Half of all Americans Favor National Recognition for Same-Sex Marriages.”...
For example, the headline was worded in such a way that readers might glance at it and believe that a majority of Americans favor same-sex “marriages.” But in reality, the questions in the poll revolved around how Americans feel about forcing state “A” to recognize – legally sanction – a same-sex “marriage” that took place in state “B,” even if state “B” does not license such “marriages” within its borders.
A bigger problem with the poll is that Harris Interactive purposely oversampled those who engage in homosexual behavior, thus guaranteeing the results would not represent the overall American sentiment, but rather would be skewed to reflect the views of those seeking to further the homosexual agenda...
How significant was the oversampling? Consider this: those who identify as homosexual only constitute 1.4 to 1.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the Harris Interactive poll, they constituted a sample of well over 14 percent...
All of this demonstrates that the Left doesn’t use polls to gauge public opinion as much as to form it.
The New York Times's Eric Lichtblau published a front-page hit piece on the House oversight committee chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, on Monday, titled "Helping His District, and Himself." The piece opened with an attempt to paint a corporate image of the entrepreneurial congressman, saying, "Here on the third floor of a gleaming office building overlooking a golf course in the rugged foothills north of San Diego, Darrell Issa, the entrepreneur, oversees the hub of a growing financial empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars," going on to attempt to forge a connection between Issa's public service and private business. The errors began in the lede, as Issa's office is not located in a ritzy building near a golf course, and continued for the rest of the article...Remember when the leftwing press could do this sort of thing without worrying about any backlash, because even if the person objected no one would ever see the objection to their lies, smears, and distortions? No more.
Issa's director of communications, Frederick Hill, explained that the three central examples the Times used to justify their claims are "wildly inaccurate," citing 13 inaccuracies in the article that reflect incorrect information or baseless assertions. With only one exception, the Times has yet to correct or retract any of the errors in the article...
The first major claim Lichtblau made in his front-page Times article was that a medical complex purchased by Issa in 2008 supposedly appreciated in value from $10.3 million to $16.6 million, a 60% increase, due in part to "government-sponsored road work" Issa supported. Lichtblau was entirely wrong here, as the property was purchased for $16.6 million, which is the exact same value listed its current tax assessment, an appreciation in value of 0%. Furthermore, the road work Lichtblau mentioned has not even begun yet, and Issa's support of the project came before the property purchase.
The next factual inaccuracy was that Issa "went easy" on Toyota during the 2010 hearings on the unexpected acceleration experienced by some Toyota car drivers. This was supposedly because Issa's electronics company played a "role as a major supplier of alarms to Toyota." In fact, Issa's former company, Directed Electrics, is not a supplier to Toyota, nor does Issa still have a personal financial stake in the company.
The third disputed claim with the Times article is that Issa's charitable foundation made a 1900% profit on a less than $19,000 investment, selling it only seven months later for $357,000, mere months before the stock market crashed. This is once again a reporting error. According to Issa's press release, "the Issa Family Foundation's initial investment in the AIM Small Company fund was not $19,000 but $500,000. The asset was later sold for $375,000 resulting in a $125,000 loss - not a 1900 percent gain...".
The one error the Times has corrected was the assertion that Issa had "multibillion-dollar businesses." Issa does not own any multibillion dollar businesses...
Weekly applications rose 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 408,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's the highest level in four weeks. Applications have been above 400,000 for 18 of the past 19 weeks...BLS (8-18-11):
Still, July's job gains are barely enough to keep up with population growth. At least double that many new jobs are needed to significantly reduce unemployment. And a consumer sentiment survey taken earlier this month showed confidence in the economy fell to the lowest level in 31 years, raising concerns that Americans could pull back on spending...
The Fed's assessment of the economy last week was gloomier than it had been in June. The Fed said it "anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually."
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.5 percent in July on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.6 percent before seasonal adjustment.Bloomberg (8-18-11):
The gasoline index rebounded from previous declines and rose sharply in July, accounting for about half of the seasonally adjusted increase in the all items index. The food at home index accelerated in July and also contributed to the increase, as dairy and fruit indexes posted notable increases and five of the six major grocery store food groups rose...
The 12 month change in the all items index remained at 3.6 percent for the third month in a row. The change in the index for all items less food and energy continued its upward trend...The energy index has risen 19.0 percent over the past year.
Crude oil declined the most in more than a week, leading commodities lower around the world amid concern that economic growth in the U.S. and China is slowing.Reuters (8-18-11):
"Our revised forecasts show the U.S. and the euro area hovering dangerously close to a recession -- defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction -- over the next 6-12 months," Joachim Fels, who co-heads Morgan Stanley's global economics team, said in a research note dated Wednesday.FoxNews (8-6-11):
The United States has lost its sterling credit rating.CNNMoney commentary (8-18-11):
Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Friday lowered the nation's AAA rating for the first time since granting it in 1917. The move came less than a week after a gridlocked Congress finally agreed to spending cuts that would reduce the debt by more than $2 trillion -- a tumultuous process that contributed to convulsions in financial markets. The promised cuts were not enough to satisfy S&P.
Stocks plunged Thursday after several economic reports in the United States raised more worries about stagnant growth and higher inflation.TheStreet (8-16-11):
I wish there was a word to describe such a scenario. Oh yeah. There is! Stagflation...
What are investors worried more about? If you look beyond the latest carnage in stocks Thursday, investors are clearly sending a signal that they are worried both about stagnation and inflation. But the emphasis seems to be more on the "stag."...
As if this wasn't bad enough, there were two other gloomy economic reports later Thursday morning. Existing home sales fell 3.5% in July and manufacturing activity in the Mid-Atlantic region actually contracted in August...
And guess what? Gold prices shot up to a new record high...
The sharp rise in consumer prices -- which can partly be blamed on Fed policies that have fostered an environment conducive to a weak dollar commodity boom -- is worrisome.
The current level of homebuilding is "severely depressed," Mike Schenk, vice president of economics and statistics with CUNA told TheStreet, referring to data released Tuesday morning that showed July housing starts at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 604,000. He pointed out that annualized historical levels of housing starts averaged around 1.5 million dating as far back as the 1960s, though as a glimmer of hope July's rate was around 10% higher than year-earlier levels.AP (8-18-11):
"Unfortunately none of the data we see suggest that there will be a significant turnaround anytime soon. While mortgage interest rates are near all-time lows and housing affordability is near all-time highs, consumers remain cautions, builders remain dejected ... and permit activity suggest very little new construction on the horizon."...
"Extreme and prolonged weakness in labor markets are the key underlying feature of housing market weakness" with the true unemployment rate -- including the underemployed and part-time workers looking for full-time work -- near 16%...
"The experts tell us that there is a significant amount of foreclosure activity still working its way through the system -- all of which bodes ill for the notion of a quick housing market recovery," he concluded.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 445 points, or 3.9 percent, to 10,958 about an hour after the open. It was down more than 500 points earlier. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 49 points, or 4.2 percent, to 1,144. The Nasdaq composite fell 112, or 4.5 percent, to 2,399.FoxNews (8-16-11):
Thursday's plunge meant a return of volatility that has sent stocks falling since July 21.
The number of people on food stamps has been growing to record levels for 30 straight months. The latest report from the Agriculture Department showed nearly 46 million people -- or one in seven Americans -- were enrolled as of May in what's formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.US Treasury (8-16-11):
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The White House on Wednesday said President Barack Obama would unveil fresh ideas to jump-start the economy and cut deficits, but details offered so far appeared to be a compilation of old proposals.And I assume you at Reuters are surprised by this?
Now this is just getting silly. The Obama White House is gearing up for a Supreme Court case in which it will defend its refusal to list “Jerusalem, Israel” on the passports of Americans born in the Israeli capital. As part of its preparations the administration recently scrubbed all the captions on a White House photo gallery of Vice President Biden in the city, changing “Jerusalem, Israel” to “Jerusalem.” The optics of methodically erasing the word “Israel” from the White House webpage caused a predictable uproar.(click through for linky, example-y version)
Those who make it their business to rationalize White House hostility toward Israel were relieved, then, when the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo published an article claiming that the Bush administration had enforced an identical policy...
Sometimes Bush-era White House photos explicitly identified Jerusalem as being in Israel and sometimes they didn’t, just like sometimes they explicitly identified Tel Aviv as being in Israel and sometimes they didn’t...
It gets worse for Obama’s defenders, though, than merely being demonstrably wrong. It turns out that while they were insisting that the Bush administration consistently refused to reference “Jerusalem, Israel,” the Obama State Department was busy scrubbing documents in which Bush administration referenced “Jerusalem, Israel.” Straight down the memory hole. That’s kind of amazing when you pause and think about it, no?
The “Jerusalem, Israel” captions and statements from the Bush-era White House are digitally archived and frozen, and so beyond the administration’s reach. But Bush-era State Department reports are stored on the Obama State Department’s servers. Two old documents in particular – the State Department’s FY 2002 and FY 2003 Performance and Accountability Reports – come up quickly in searches. When they were originally written they both had appendices identifying the location of the Jerusalem consulate as “Jerusalem, Israel.” Some time in the last two weeks that location was changed to “Jerusalem.” Whoever made the changes even went back and scrubbed the old “hard copy” PDFs...
Verizon Communications Inc. reported a dozen cases of sabotaged cable lines and warned of delays in repairs and customer service on the second day of a strike involving about 45,000 employees.Remember this?
The telecommunications company said there have been 12 acts of sabotage to telephone lines and to Internet and television services in Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York since the strike began.
Fiber-optic lines were intentionally cut in Tewksbury and several other municipalities on the East Coast, the company said.
Stolen equipment in Cedar Grove, N.J., affected service to a police department, and a heat system was tampered with at a central office in Manhattan...
Meanwhile, across the Northeast, the desperation is clear from a message left on a phone hotline set up for members of a union chapter in Brooklyn. The voice of a representative encourages members to deal harshly with “managers and scabs.”
“It is open season. Follow them safely, but when you get to a location, torture them, torture them with chants and noise. Be so loud that they can’t concentrate and wish they never got out of bed,” says the recorded voice...
A New Jersey Superior Court issued an injunction against a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers, which is one of the two unions currently on strike against Verizon Communications, and represents about 10,000 of the 45,000 striking employees.
The injunction prohibits a range of activities, some of which have reportedly been employed by various union picketers in efforts to obstruct or harass the company or its workers since the strike began more than a week ago.
Among the practices specifically forbidden under the court’s ruling: the throwing of feces.
…“Dropping, spreading, throwing, placing or otherwise causing nails, glass, cinder block, spikes, feces, clubs, rocks, screws, or puncture devices of any kind, or other object or debris to be thrown or strewn in, on, or about Verizon’s driveways, parking lots, entrances, exits, vehicles and adjoining roads to any of Verizon’s property or at any work site.”...
The watchdogs at Labor Union Report have been keeping track — and report at BigGovernment.com on a violence-infused and sabotage-promoting internal e-mail allegedly from a CWA officer:
The company is using out of state cars/vehicles that are unmarked except for verizon door magnets. There is a possibility that other Unions may be accessing our facilities whether building or manhole. If they are you may first beat them repeatedly with a tire iron then advise them that we are on strike...
But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained Thursday that paying out unemployment checks “is one of the most direct ways to infuse money directly into the economy because people who are unemployed and obviously aren't running a paycheck are going to spend the money that they get. They're not going to save it, they're going to spend it.”Funny, I always thought that unemployment insurance was a way to give people a hand when they needed it, keep their heads above water until they got back on their feet and got a new job.
But fine, let's give all honor to Clinton for the things he did right. Memo to Democrats: We know you liked the Clinton tax increases, but why do you not praise the other aspects of Clinton's tenure such as the spending restraint, the strong dollar, free trade and the capital gains tax cut?...Always bears repeating:
But Clinton was lucky. His health care bill failed. Congress tossed his stimulus bill into the trash, as well. And when the voters delivered a head smack in the form of handing Congress to the Republicans in 1994, Clinton began to veer away from the policies that would have damaged the economy and the country...
It was Republicans in Congress who insisted upon balanced budgets...Clinton also reversed himself on welfare reform, finally signing (after two vetoes) a Republican reform in 1996.
Those Democrats who get goose bumps remembering the Clinton tax hike of 1993 are forgetting a lot. Those tax increases failed to yield the kind of revenue the Clinton administration had advertised. While the economy expanded during the first years of the Clinton presidency, it really took off only after Congress passed and the president reluctantly signed the capital gains tax cut in 1997.
You say, "Williams, certain jobs are destroyed by technology." You're right, but many more are created. Think about it. If 90 percent of Americans still had been farmers in 1900, where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce all those goods that were not even heard of in 1790, such as telephones, steamships and oil wells? We need not go back that far. If there hadn't been the kind of labor-saving technical innovation we've had since the 1950s -- in the auto, construction, telephone industries and many others -- where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce things that weren't heard of in the '50s, such as desktop computers, cellphones, HDTVs, digital cameras, MRI machines, pharmaceuticals and myriad other goods and services?Inconvenient truthiness:
While our nation is going broke, the National Council of La Raza is doing just fine. Since Obama and Munoz took up the white house, they have seen their funding skyrocket, nearly tripling from 4.5 to 11 million dollars in 2010. Judicial Watch also found out that the La Raza affiliate, Chicanos por la Causa received over 18 million dollars of tax dollars. That group was the primary plaintiff against Arizona’s law against illegal employers...
Although some of La Raza’s government funding was earmarked by congress, virtually all of it was doled out by the Obama administration. Sixty percent of La Raza's take came from the Department of Labor—run by Hilda Solis. They lobbied hard for her appointment and honored her with an award. She paid them back—with millions of our tax dollars.
Even if we were running trillion dollar surpluses, there is no reason why La Raza should get a dime of taxpayer dollars. Here are just a few reasons why.
“La Raza” means “The Race,” specifically the Latino race. Could you imagine if the government were giving millions of dollars to a group called “The National Council of the White Race”?
La Raza counts the pro-reconquista Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) as an affiliate and helps fund the organization. MeCHA’s slogan is "Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada," meaning “For the Race everything, outside the Race nothing.”
The Treasury released its budget for July today. It showed a deficit of $129.0 billion...Let's put that all in perspective...the USA's deficit, just for the month of July, under the spending put in place by Obama and the Democrats, is generally in the ballpark of the deficit for the entire year under the last budget done by Bush and a Republican Congress. It is a couple hundred billion worse than the last budget done by Clinton and a Republican Congress.
If the economy falls back into recession, as many economists are now warning, the bloodletting could be a lot more painful than the last time around.How many Tums and Rolaids tablets were downed by NYT editors before letting this sentence pass their desks? In one swell foop it notes:
Given the tumult of the Great Recession, this may be hard to believe. But the economy is much weaker than it was at the outset of the last recession in December 2007, with most major measures of economic health — including jobs, incomes, output and industrial production — worse today than they were back then. And growth has been so weak that almost no ground has been recouped, even though a recovery technically started in June 2009.
...When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available.If only the NYT would realize that, gee, perhaps the "policy makers" using the "economic tools at their disposal" are the reason that we never recovered? Cause? Effect? Ya think? Again, admits that when Bush was in office Americans had "lots of fat to cut", unlike since Obama took over.
...President Obama acknowledged the challenge in his Saturday radio and Internet address, saying the country’s “urgent mission” now was to expand the economy and create jobs. And Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview on CNBC on Sunday that the United States had “a lot of work to do” because of its “long-term and unsustainable fiscal position.”I see...just now is that Obama's position? They could probably stand to admit that he's been saying this for 3 years and we ain't there yet. As for Tax Evader Timmy, what happened the administration's desire for 'clean' debt ceiling hikes? Did we not have a "long-term and unsustainable fiscal position" a couple of months ago?
...In the four years since the recession began, the civilian working-age population has grown by about 3 percent. If the economy were healthy, the number of jobs would have grown at least the same amount.Again, blow to Obama's midsection and backhanded compliment for Bush and the GOP Congress that had us at 5% unemployment vs. Obama's 9.1%. Admits that the economy is not healthy and the number of jobs available, despite Obama's bragging about jobs 'created and saved', "has shrunk".
Instead, the number of jobs has shrunk. Today the economy has 5 percent fewer jobs — or 6.8 million — than it had before the last recession began. The unemployment rate was 5 percent then, compared with 9.1 percent today.
...Adjusted for inflation, personal income is down 4 percent, not counting payments from the government for things like unemployment benefits. Income levels are low, and moving in the wrong direction: private wage and salary income actually fell in June, the last month for which data was available.How, exactly, did Obama "inherit" this recent trend? Exactly.
...spending is only barely where it was when the recession began. If the economy were healthy, total consumer spending would be higher because of population growth.Again, shot to the midsection and Obama's clearly hurt. Spending, in the years since Obama "won", hasn't moved since he took office, defying historical trends and common sense. When nothing has happened in the 3 years you've been in charge, well, that's not "inherited", buddy.
Likewise, and perhaps most worrisome, is the track record for the country’s overall output. According to newly revised data from the Commerce Department, the economy is smaller today than it was when the recession began, despite (or rather, because of) the feeble growth in the last couple of years."feeble growth"? Was that Obama's mouthpiece that just flew across the room? I like the casual "last couple of year" part, where they avoid saying "since Obama took office". Again, they avoid directly saying the economy is unhealthy, just saying 'if it were...'.
If the economy were healthy, it would be much bigger than it was four years ago.
...Interest rates cannot be pushed down further — they are already at zero. The Fed has already flooded the financial markets with money by buying billions in mortgage securities and Treasury bonds, and economists do not even agree on whether those purchases substantially helped the economy.They were about at zero before this all happened, that was part of the problem, not part of the solution that was tried - why don't they try raising them? Roundhouse aimed at Bernanke's shiny noggin here, admitting that his decision to print money (QE1 and QE2) was neither a good move in the eyes of a consensus of economists nor successful.
...Congress had some room — financially and politically — to engage in fiscal stimulus during the last recession.Nice to see historical comparisons here on just how much the Democrats jacked up the debt. Would love, of course, to see this built upon, pointing out that it was the Democrats with Obama that did it, not the GOP ("end of 2007" saw Dems controlling Congress), that the GOP is the party trying to fix it, and that this is a real problem that needs to be fixed...and, again, which party it is that's trying to do so while being called "terrorists" by the party that did this to the economy and, by the way, the media that supports them and joins in.
But at the end of 2007, the federal debt was 64.4 percent of the economy. Today, it is estimated at around 100 percent of gross domestic product, a share not seen since the aftermath of World War II, and there is little chance of lawmakers reaching consensus on additional stimulus that would increase the debt.
“There is no approachable precedent, at least in the postwar era, for what happens when an economy with 9 percent unemployment falls back into recession,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. “The one precedent you might consider is 1937, when there was also a premature withdrawal of fiscal stimulus, and the economy fell into another recession more painful than the first.”What hath Obama wrought? Something unseen since the Great Depression. Roll the tape on Cousin Vinny questioning the automotive expert, "It's OK, you can say it. They know." It's OK to outright say the GD term.
...Nervous about the future of the economy, corporations are reluctant to make big investments like hiring. As a result, they are sitting on a lot of cash.I thought the problem was that banks weren't lending and we had to make the banks lend? Does this not fly in the face of liberal orthodoxy and the myth they've created about Obama's economy? It certainly does. The ref has started counting.
While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:Painful cuts? Hardly:
1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I?...Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state -- vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents -- Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared...
7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.
8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men -- men who have not grown up -- is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.
And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26...
If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.
After months of talk about the nation's runaway debt, lawmakers managed to agree on a plan that, at most, will cut spending by a mere 5%. Is it any wonder federal spending is out of control?...
President Obama says the deal will produce "the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president." The media talk about "sharp" and "deep" spending cuts, while liberals wail about the inhumanity of it all...
According to IBD's analysis of available budget numbers, the deal's $2.4 trillion in 10-year cuts amounts to a mere 5% trim off total projected federal spending during that time. It's like a 400-pound man boasting that he plans to drop 20 pounds over a decade, while his doctors warn about the risks of losing weight so fast.
Even calling these "cuts" is a bit of a stretch, since spending will continue to increase, just at a slightly slower pace. (See charts below.) By 2021, federal spending would still equal 22% of the nation's economy, above the post-World War II average of 20%. Not really a cut, is it?
Plus, in the short term, these "deep," "sharp," "slashing" cuts would still leave the federal government spending roughly 4% more in 2012 than it did in 2010, and 20% more than it did in 2008.
Are you paying your "fair share"?
In December 1996, a Florida couple, John and Alice Martin, who sounded suspiciously like union goons, claimed to have inadvertently tapped into a phone conversation between then House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Republican leadership.
According to these Democratic and union activists, they were just driving around with a police scanner in their car, picked up a random phone conversation and said to themselves, "Wait a minute! I could swear that's Dick Armey's voice!"
Luckily, they also had a tape recorder and cassette in their car, so they proceeded to illegally record the intercepted conversation and then turned the tape over to Democratic Rep. James McDermott -- the top Democrat on the Ethics Committee that was at that very moment investigating Gingrich...
McDermott promptly turned the tape over to The New York Times and other newspapers...
And yet, more than a dozen news organizations, many of the same ones demanding the death penalty for Rupert Murdoch right now, filed amicus briefs defending McDermott's distribution of the pirated tape.
Needless to say, the Times ferociously defended its own publication of the hacked phone call, arguing that it would be unconstitutional to punish the publication of information, no matter how obtained.
So it's strange to see these defenders of the press's right to publish absolutely anything get on their high horses about British tabloid reporters, operating under a different culture and legal system, hacking into cell phones...
Why wasn't Les Moonves responsible for CBS anchor Dan Rather trying to throw the 2004 presidential election with phony National Guard documents one month before the election? Moonves was president, CEO and director of CBS, a company with half as many employees as News Corp. And his rogue employee constituted a much bigger part of CBS' business than News of the World did of the Murdoch empire.
And yet no one asked if Moonves was aware that his network was about to accuse a sitting president of shirking his National Guard duty. Moonves wasn't dragged before multiple congressional panels. Nor was MSNBC tracking his every bowel movement on live TV. No one remembers the biggest media scandal of the last 30 years as "The Les Moonves Scandal."
What about all the illegally obtained information regularly printed in the Times? Was Pinch Sulzberger unaware his newspaper was publishing classified government documents illegally obtained by Julian Assange?
President Barack Obama on Monday issued a statement marking the start of Ramadan, the month devoted to prayer and fasting in the Muslim religion...It's basically just 'I won!' all over again...as a non-religious person brought up by a new age 'spiritualism' mother (when he wasn't being a muslim in Indonesia for schooling purposes) that simply plays the part of a "moral Christian" for political expediency (when he wasn't being whatever the racists at Trinity Baptist are for 20 years), he's simply thumbing his nose at Christians every year and giving us the finger by emphasizing Ramadan. I don't think it's any more nefarious than that.
Obama did not issue a statement marking Easter this year, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about it during a press conference on April 25.
“You guys traditionally put out statements or proclamations on various religious holidays and I don’t think I saw one from the president on Easter yesterday and was just wondering if there’s any reason one didn’t go out?” a reporter asked.
Carney responded, “You know, the president went to the church yesterday; it was well covered. I’m not sure if we put out a statement or not, but he obviously personally celebrated Easter with his family and went to church to celebrate that, and–”
Another reported interjected, “Wait a minute. The highest Christian holiday and you don’t know if he put out a statement?”...
A review of presidential statements documented at whitehouse.gov indicates that Obama has apparently not issued a statement specifically about Easter since taking office in January 2009...
Commentary: Economic numbers look terribleThe Daily Ticker - Recession Almost A Certainty, Says Advisor — Stocks Could Crash Soon
...If it's August it must be time for another chapter of the European crisis. But markets around the world, including in the U.S. these last two weeks, are forecasting something more sinister. The eight-day decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI - News) — snapped Wednesday with a paltry almost 30-point gain — shows that investors are discounting a new recession next year.
The latest batch of economic reports are almost too weak to digest, though that didn't stop MarketWatch's Washington bureau chief from compiling them into a terrifying summer reading assignment on Wednesday.
If the payrolls and unemployment numbers on Friday are anywhere near as bad as they are expected to be, then stocks could get even worse next week. Economists predict July's nonfarm payrolls grew by a meager 75,000, and that the unemployment rate stood pat at 9.2%...
The economy is...on a pronounced downward slide, though, and no amount of Federal Reserve stimulus is going to counteract that, if indeed the Fed proceeds on a new spending program.
For investors, it's important to remember that the stock market is a leading indicator, which means the last two weeks of pain was not so much tied to the U.S. debt talks as to discounting of some future economic calamity, likely a recession...
...One advisor who thinks that a recession is almost a certainty, however, is Lance Roberts, the Chief Economist at Streettalk Advisors, a $400 million advisory firm.I was just thinking...now is a great time to have an inexperienced, unqualified chief executive
Roberts says he began warning clients about a recession more than 6 months ago, urging them to be more defensive. And now, after the string of lousy economic data in recent months, Roberts thinks another recession is almost a foregone conclusion...
He also argues, however, that this is NOT a normal post-War recession--it's a debt-fueled balance-sheet recession, which we haven't experienced since the Great Depression. To reduce their debts, Roberts says, consumers will have to continue to spend less money, and this will weigh on the economy. So if we do have another recession, Roberts argues, the stock-market fall could be more severe than usual.
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