Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Green Curtain

In his inaugural address, he told the American people to prepare for sacrifice, after they paid for a $120 billion stimulus package that didn't work, after they paid for a $700 billion bailout package that didn't work, as he prepares to spend $850 billion on another stimulus package and wants to spend even more.





He invited an openly gay Episcopal bishop to pray at the Inauguration concert last Sunday, Rev. Joseph Lowery prayed that "white will embrace what is right" during the benediction at his Inauguration, his Secretary of Labor wants to exclude white male construction workers from receiving contracts related to the $850 billion stimulus package, yet he warns Republicans against listening to Rush Limbaugh because that would be divisive.


He ordered the closure of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo without a plan to dispose of the prisoners there, could not explain the contents of his own Executive Order, admitted that some prisoners are so dangerous that they will never be released (one former detainee car-bombed the US Embassy in Yemen and has become the leader of Al Qaeda in that country) but bitterly criticized President Bush during the campaign for not closing Guantanamo anyway.


He has forbidden the use of torture when interrogating terror suspects, including the technique of waterboarding. His nominee for Attorney General has agreed, his nominee for Director of National Intelligence has disagreed, and when asked if we would torture Osama bin Laden if he fell into our hands to gain information that might prevent terrorist attacks, his Press Secretary demurred.


He signed a new Executive Order establishing sweeping new ethics rules for lobbyists and political appointees, then granted a waiver to William Lynn within 24 hours.

Only 1457 more days to go.


Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/23/obama-quit-listening-rush-limbaugh-want-things/



Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1411081/robert_reich_excludes_white_male_construction.html

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012303507.html

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/01/23/obama-hopeful-congress-pass-stimulus-plan-despite-gop-resistance/

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,481849,00.html

Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrder-EthicsCommitments/

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/01/23/lobbyist-nominated-pentagon-agrees-sell-raytheon-stock/

Bear Market

When Barack Obama assumes the Presidency this Tuesday, he will face an array of foreign policy issues that will demand his attention and not in the let's-make-nice-now-that-George W. Bush-is-gone sort of way. Israel and the Palestinians are mixing it up again, North Korea continues its hysterical temper tantrums, Iran continues to foment global Islamic terror and of course, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proceed unabated. Lost in the shuffle, possibly, is a dispute between Russia, Ukraine and the European Union over natural gas that threatens NATO expansion and possibly a split in the alliance itself, and which serves as a perfect example of the problem an inexperienced and outclassed rookie President has to handle.

The rise in fuel prices has given Russia a power it never enjoyed during the Cold War as the world's leading Communist nation. Flush with money, Russia has rebuffed American designs against Iran's nuclear program, has intimidated her Baltic neighbors, has sold weapons to that socialist goon Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and has threatened Poland and the Czech Republic for daring to cooperate with America's ballistic missile defenses. Led by Vladimir Putin and other KGB alumni, Russia has cast off its post-Cold War image as a weakened and pathetic country, asserting itself as a huge, ancient and powerful nation accustomed to dominating two continents and intimidating its neighbors. Money is indeed power, they have discovered, too late to save the USSR but in time to shape a new Russia and get things done.

They started four years ago in Ukraine. In an effort to maintain control of their former Soviet satellite, they poured boatloads of money into the presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych, tried their best to rig the election in his favor and when that failed, tried to assassinate his rival, Viktor Yushchenko: Old habits die hard. Overwhelming popular resistance ultimately prevailed, Yushchenko survived the dioxin poisoning and was inaugurated President, but the hearts that rule the Kremlin are stout hearts indeed and the new old Russia would try again.

Aleksandr Litvenenko, a former KGB agent turned author and rabid Putin critic, became violently ill in London in November 2006 and died an agonizing death three weeks later, all the while claiming that his enemies in Moscow were responsible. He was right. British authorities determined that he had been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210, a substance produced by nuclear power plants, tightly controlled by national governments and which was used to send a very loud message that the Kremlin was not to be trifled with. British attempts to interrogate and extradite Andrei Lugovoi failed, the man suspected and charged with Litvenenko's murder. British diplomats were expelled from Russia in retaliation, no-one has ever gone to jail and more proof was provided that the Russia everyone knew and feared was back and ready for a brawl.

Next was a territorial dispute with Georgia, another ex-Soviet slave state. President Mikhail Saakashvili embraced the US and emphatically sought NATO membership in the face of bitter Russian protests, confident that his personal relationship with George W. Bush ensured American support in any potential conflict, and made the mistake of putting that assumption to the test. In August 2008, he ordered Georgian military forces to reoccupy Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian provinces who were ethnically Russian and who had been allowed to assume a measure of autonomy. Russia responded swiftly. In a matter of days, Russian troops had repelled the Georgian attack, seized their largest Black Sea port, cut the major east-west highway and a major oil pipeline and threatened the capital of Tbilisi while inflicting thousands of casualties before retiring, proving that handshakes and photo ops in the White House are no match for Russian tanks.

That brings us to the present. Ukraine imports Russian natural gas for its own consumption as well as for transit to Europe through a 23,000-mile network of pipes, paying about $195 per 1000 cubic meters for its fuel. Russia has demanded that Ukraine pay $450 per 1000 cubic meters, has withheld gas for Ukraine while shipping supplies meant for its European customers and refusing to supply so-called "technical gas" meant to push fuel through the pipeline. President Yushchenko of Ukraine, of course, is unwilling to allow his own citizens to freeze while he argues with the Russians and has kept the gas intended for Europe, sparking criticism from the EU since they now have to scramble for alternate supplies in the middle of winter. Russia is capitalizing on this mess as they now blame Ukraine for stealing fuel and forcing Europe to suffer unnecessarily, President Dmitri Medvedev going so far as to propose a conference in Moscow where the whole European Union can debate a solution, his own preference being to place Ukraine's pipeline network under "international control" - meaning Russia. In short, we have Russia bullying Ukraine with a view of either ruining her economically, gaining control of her pipeline network, short-circuiting her aspirations of NATO membership (most of the EU nations now shivering in the cold are also NATO members who would look at any Ukrainian request with a certain amount of, say, circumspection), cancelling further NATO expansion altogether or, in a perfect world, all of the above. This is bare-knuckle politics the way the Kremlin likes to play it, and there is real danger here. If Russia is allowed to intimidate the West and those countries who have befriended the West, if Russia is allowed to bite off those smaller countries and beat them up, if Russia is allowed to force Europe to choose between loyalty to the alliance and keeping her people warm, if Russia is allowed to dictate European and American foreign policy without heavyweight repercussions - they do, after all, need us so much more than we need them - then the effort of winning the Cold War will have been wasted and Mr. Obama will find himself facing the Russia of 1949, not 2009.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479880,00.html

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/2531027/Georgia-Crisis-deepens-as-Russia-snubs-George-W-Bushs-call-to-pull-troops-out.html

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4061253.stm

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/26/ap/world/mainD8LKJSHG0.shtml

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/2547451/Russia-Georgia-conflict-timeline.html

Drinking Our Way To Sobriety, Part II

His Serene Loftiness gave a major speech up at George Mason University in Fairfax last week during which he warned us that failure of Congress to approve another "stimulus" package to assuage the currrent economic crisis could result in a recession extending for years, and urged his Democrat colleagues to present the $850 billion bill for his signature not later than 31 January. In a continuation of my remarks last week, I have several observations about Mr. Obama's plan and its supposed urgent nature.

• National governments have several ways to raise money. They may simply print more of it, they may increase tariffs on imports, they may increase taxes or they may borrow the money. Printing money is easy, it avoids increasing the public debt or risking a public backlash over taxes, but it also decreases the currency's value and risks inflation. Increasing tariffs shifts the burden to foreigners which is pretty good if you're a politician, it also avoids the dangers of public anger over increased taxes and inflation, but raising the kind of money desired might be problematic, what with treaty obligations and all. Increasing taxes carries no danger of inflation and likely results in the amount of money desired being raised, but it's extremely unpopular to the point of dangerous: See the Congressional elections of 1994 or the voters' rejection of Bush 41 when he broke his pledge not to raise taxes. Borrowing money doesn't risk inflation or voter outrage, it results in the desired amount being raised and the pain of repayment is postponed, all very attractive inducements to politicians who want to spend more money but who want to keep their seats, the same inducements that persuade ordinary citizens to live on their credit cards. But the consequences of national governments borrowing money can be catastrophic. Because there is no immediate cost to spending on credit, governments are tempted to live that way, becoming complacent, adopting a spendthrift lifestyle until there is nothing left to borrow and everything comes crashing down. As of this writing, the United States government owes $10.6 trillion or over $37,000 for every man, woman and child, legal and illegal in this country. Mr. Obama proposes to borrow $850 billion more at the very beginning of his Presidency and use that money to "stimulate" the sluggish economy. In reality, borrowing such a vast sum will act as a sedative to the economy since the government is taking money out of circulation, money badly needed in the private credit markets that Mr. Obama says he wants to help, and blowing it on its own purposes. The national debt is increased, the percentage of the annual budget devoted to repaying that debt and its interest is increased and in effect, the borrowed money amounts to a de facto tax increase that further interrupts the recovery Mr. Obama claims to be seeking, definitely not sound fiscal strategy.

• As part of the $850 billion boondoggle, Mr. Obama wants to provide $350 billion worth of "tax cuts" to lower- and middle-income families, the people who voted for him and his liberal Democrat allies two months ago. The problem is that the bottom fifty percent of American wage earners pay less than 4% of all Federal income taxes, presenting us with a logical dilemma: How can the government provide income tax relief to people who pay no taxes? That might be difficult to answer if you aren't Barack Obama, but for him, it's easy - it's redistributing income. You see, his offhand comment to Joe the Plumber during the campaign was too telling and he intends to write $350 billion in welfare checks to his friends, be financed mainly by people who voted against him. (The top ten percent of wage earners pay over 65% of all Federal income taxes.)

• The Emperor of the Americas would also like to spend $500 billion or so to repair infrastructure and clean energy projects with the intent of converting America into a Green Republic. However, 98% of our vehicles are powered by fossil fuels and 70% of our electricity comes from the same, so it seems hugely illogical to spend such a huge sum on "clean energy" when the market has largely rejected the same. But if the point is to placate the rabidly Leftist environmental lobby and to feed fat construction projects to pro-Democrat unions, then you can see why Mr. Obama finds this plan so attractive.

• The $120 billion stimulus package approved in Spring 2008 had virtually no effect. Half of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package approved in October 2008 has been spent but the country has lost over one million more jobs regardless. Undeterred by facts, Mr. Obama is prepared to throw another $850 billion worth of borrowed money at the problem, which seems illogical because it is illogical.

So what are we to make of Mr. Obama, the Democrats and the financial geniuses who advise them? For starters, their strategy has nothing to do with returning the country to long-term prosperity but everything to do with implementing liberal dogma:

• The market is fundamentally unfair and government intervention is necessary to correct it.
• Rather than allow the market to correct itself naturally which might cost hundreds of thousands of union jobs and many low-wage, bad-credit homeowners their homes, the government should spend a colossal amount of money for a temporary fix knowing that their Republican rivals will be stuck with the check.
• The tree huggers and the unions are traditional Democrat constituencies. The government should spend whatever it needs to spend to help them and screw the consequences.

And people used to ridicule Ronald Reagan for cutting taxes in the middle of a recession...like that's just plain crazy.

Source: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in06tr.xls

Source: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/obama-speech-pushes-clean-energy/

Drinking Our Way to Sobriety

In seventeen days, President Bush will leave office as the most unpopular President in the history of our Republic, at least as far as polling can determine. After enjoying approval ratings as high as ninety percent after 9/11, Mr. Bush's support has slowly dwindled to its current level of 28 percent and settled there, the deepest funk suffered by any Chief Executive and an indication of the public's deep dissatisfaction with his performance. Certainly, Mr. Bush has had his successes, such as his handling of the Navy P-3 incident with the Chinese, the tax cuts, his appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and of course, the liberation of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. The United States homeland has not been attacked since that dreadful day seven years ago, surely the best metric we could possibly hope for and for which Mr. Bush should receive all the credit. He oversaw the expansion of NATO and our country's missile defenses and persuaded Libya to abandon its major weapon programs, a huge achievement considering Muammar Qaddafi's history of belligerence. However, the negatives were overwhelming. He allowed liberal Democrats to undermine education reform and to drive him (maybe willingly) toward establishment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, saddling the American taxpayers with a huge new entitlement program. He mishandled the Federal responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (though Gov. Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the culture of corrupt Louisiana politics were the main culprits), advocated clemency for millions of illegal immigrants in the face of stiff public opposition, allowed North Korea to test a nuclear weapon, test fire a salvo of missiles on the Fourth of July and repeatedly ignore its international obligations, and invaded Iraq without adequate preparations for security and reconstruction that cost tens of thousands of lives before the successful surge of 2007. But beyond education reform, new entitlements and even war, Mr. Bush's legacy is defined by a titanic increase in the Federal debt, some of which was beyond his control (the recesssion he inherited from Bill Clinton, the economic shock of 9/11) but much of which was completely controllable.







The positive results of the Bush tax cuts - relieving the burden on the Federal taxpayers, encouraging corporate investment, the creation of five million jobs and an increase of $188 billion in Federal income tax receipts since 2001 - have been more than offset by runaway Federal spending. Even before the current economic crisis, increased Federal spending was responsible for 90% of the final budget deficit between 2000-2006, according to figures from the Heritage Foundation. Stir in the bailout fever that has gripped the nation and add another $1.1 trillion to the national debt in one year alone which would be scandalous by itself, but we're not done yet. As of this writing, Congressional Democrats intend to offer an $850 billion "stimulus" package for Barack Obama's signature on 20 January that would represent the total national debt for the first 200 years of our existence and push the new total somewhere north of $11 trillion, or $37,377 for every man, woman and child in the United States. Given the Republicans' traditional aversion to this kind of fiscal lunacy and the Democrats' supposed new-found discipline, how did we then get to this point?





First, Mr. Bush and his GOP colleagues in the Congress decided in favor of political expediency very early in his Presidency. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 provided a ready excuse, like, "Spend whatever you need to spend and worry about paying the bill later." There was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Global War On Terror, disaster recoveries from California wildfires to Midwest floods to the forementioned Gulf Coast hurricanes, to the Federal bailouts of Wall Street and the Big Three Detroit automakers. All this spending nullified the benefits of the Bush tax cuts and removed a very important issue from the Republicans' traditional agenda - that they are careful with the people's money. Second, the Democrats and their irresponsible Republican fellows predicted, in their Keynesian fervor, that colossal levels of government spending would spark the economy and generate a new round of prosperity, "priming the pump" as they say. However, the Department of Labor announced recently that unemployment rose to 6.7% in the month of November 2008 and overall job losses have reached 2.7 million since the beginning of the recession in December 2007, indicating that the $120 billion "stimulus" package approved last Spring, the various Wall Street takeovers and the $700 billion TRAP package approved in October have had exactly the opposite effect as intended, deepening the economic stress rather than relieving it. But as I mentioned above, politicians want to be seen as "doing something" and government does nothing better than spend money, though in this case it is somewhat analogous to the alcoholic who tries to kick the habit by going on a binge. It's illogical in the extreme and undeserving of even a shred of respect.






There is a fundamental economic failure at work here. Liberals who complain of high Federal deficits under Republican administrations but simultaneously urge trillions in new outlays to "stimulate" the economy are actually saying that government spending is OK but only as long as they are in charge and implicitly acknowledge that simply blowing money at a weak economy does nothing but weaken it further. They also refuse to consider cutting levels of spending and taxation in order to stimulate the economy, reducing the burden on taxpayers instead of increasing it, since the whole point as far as they are concerned is to grow government, increase its power and influence and increase the people's dependence on it. They see government as a leveler of social and economic differences, taking resources from those who've earned them and giving them to others who have not, reversing the basic unfairness of life at least as they see it. But as I already observed, by proposing $850 billion in additional government spending when $820 billion hasn't worked is like the neighborhood drunk going on a binge to attain sobriety - for all you Democrats out there, aren't you glad you voted for this?























Source: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTVjNzIxZDhjMWNlOGM4Zjg3ODc1MDg0NTliNDhjMTU=



















Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/wm2152.cfm



















Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Economy/wm2150.cfm





Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf