Hyde Report

The economic chart that may doom the Obama presidency « The Enterprise Blog

2012-01-27T06:05:00.000-06:00

http://blog.american.com/2012/01/romneys-economic-case-against-obama-all-in-one-chart/

The economic chart that may doom the Obama presidency

In his State of the Union response the other night, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels neatly summed up Mitt Romney's (who has a roughly 90 percent chance of being the GOP nominee according to Intrade) economic case against President Barack Obama: "The president did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight, but he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse."

In other words, the Obama Recovery stinks. Even if today's GDP report — for the fourth quarter of 2011 — shows 3 percent growth or better, it would be just the fourth time that has happened since the economy began turning up in June 2009: 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2010, and 3.8 percent in the second quarter of 2010. But no 3 percent-plus quarters since then.

The first nine quarters of the Reagan Recovery, by contrast, looked like this: 5.1 percent, 9.3 percent, 8.1 percent, 8.5 percent, 8.0 percent, 7.1 percent, 3.9 percent, 3.3 percent, 3.8, percent, 3.4 percent. In fact, the Reagan Boom went from the first quarter of 1983 until the second quarter of 1986 without notching a sub-3 percent GDP quarter.

So while the Reagan Recovery quickly made up for lost years of growth, not so much for the Obama Recovery, as this chart in today's Wall Street Journal makes clear:

And few economists are expecting the Obama Recovery to take off anytime soon. The IMF predicts just 1.8 percent growth for 2012 (and that's assuming no EU sovereign debt meltdown). And the Federal Reserve sees growth in the 2.2 percent to 2.7 percent range with unemployment around 8.2 percent to 8.5 percent. Ugh!

The WSJ offers two explanations for the anemic rebound:

Economists say the nature of the recession helps explain the slow recovery. Aftershocks from the financial crisis have left banks reluctant to lend, making it hard for companies, and especially start-ups, to get access to capital. The housing market, which has historically helped lead the economy out of recession, remains deeply depressed.

Many business leaders say they are also being held back by policy-related uncertainty, everything from the threat of new regulations and higher taxes to the fear that political gridlock could hamper the government's ability to respond to a new crisis. Recent economic research has given some weight to those complaints. A study by a trio of academic economists found that policy uncertainty has risen in recent years, and that periods of uncertainty have in the past corresponded with rising unemployment and slowing growth.

Whichever explanation holds more weight with voters may go a long way toward deciding who'll be America's next president.

James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger for the American Enterprise Institute and an official CNBC Contributor.

Previously, he was the the Washington columnist for Reuters Breakingviews. And before that, he was the business editor and economics columnist for U.S. News & World Report. Pethokoukis has written for many publications including The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The Daily, USA Today, and Investor's Business Daily. In addition, he has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, The McLaughlin Group, CNN, and Nightly Business Report on PBS. A graduate of Northwestern University and the Medill School of Journalism, Pethokoukis is a 2002 Jeopardy! champion.

Obama's Disgusting Use of Warren Buffett's Secretary as a Prop - The Rush Limbaugh Show

2012-01-26T09:36:00.001-06:00

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/01/25/obama_s_disgusting_use_of_warren_buffett_s_secretary_as_a_prop

Obama's Disgusting Use of Warren Buffett's Secretary as a Prop

January 25, 2012

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I spent probably 12 hours on the airplane yesterday. I was getting e-mails. I did a lot of work, and as I'm in the air, I get a note from Brian Maloney. "Radio Equalizer" is his blog. He tells me that Warren Buffett's secretary is gonna be an invited guest in the House gallery. That's all the note said. Now, "invited guests," do you know when this started? It started with Ronaldus Magnus. Some guy named Lenny Skutnik dove into the Potomac to rescue passengers of an Air Florida flight that had crashed on takeoff.

It had been deiced in a snowstorm but it didn't get to take off soon enough after being deiced so it lost lift. There was no amount of power, and it plunged. I forget the bridge. Was it the Key Bridge or the 14th Street Bridge? I forget which. This guy, Lenny, just happened to be driving along and saw it all happen and bam, dove in there to try to rescue -- Reagan brought Lenny to sit in the gallery at the State of the Union speech and introduced him. It was great. So the tradition began thus, and it was heroes that were brought forth and recognized up there -- and pretty much that's what it's always been. It's been expanded on from president to president to president. When I heard that Warren Buffett's secretary was gonna be put up there as a victim or as a hero?

I can't tell you how enraged I was at that abuse. I couldn't think of the word that adequately described my emotions. It wasn't just anger. Another mockery was being made of what is a constitutional requirement: A State of the Union. Warren Buffett's secretary! I don't care what tax rate she pays. I don't care how many dollars she pays in taxes. She's not suffering. She's not hurting. Her life is not the epitome of unfairness. She is not a victim of anything! There's no reason for her to be up there in that gallery under such auspices. The reason she was up there was so that Obama could highlight this silly notion of unfairness, which is a class warfare keyword to further this notion that Warren Buffett pays a smaller tax rate, a lower tax rate than his secretary.

As though there's nothing anybody can do about that. There's something inherently unfair about the Republican tax code, as though Warren Buffett's secretary is eating pork and beans while sitting in the sewer grate, while her boss is flying around on his NetJets planes. And, lo and behold, she was up there! It was to further the simple notion that we need a tax increase on the rich. I mentioned this to some people that she was gonna be up there. "Well, why?" I said, "She's got no choice. She probably wants to be up there but if her boss, Buffett, tells her she's going -- or if the president invites you or the first lady invites you -- you go."

If Warren Buffett would simply pay his secretary in stocks, she'd have the same tax rate he does, the same tax rate as Mitt Romney! Do you realize Mitt Romney...? I'll get to this in a second. You look at the number of dollars Mitt Romney has paid in taxes, charitable donations, and Mitt Romney is giving away 40% of his income, if you count his tax rate and his occasional donations and other things. You look at the way he's being castigated, though. I've had people, so many people ask me over the years, "Why? Why are all these rich guys all of a sudden so liberal? Buffett, Gates." Folks, there's a simple answer: The filthy rich will SAY they are liberal -- they will do things in public that reflect that they might be liberal -- to keep the peasants with the pitchforks away from 'em.

It's all a game! Have you ever heard of a family called the Kennedys? Have you ever heard of a family called the Rockefellers? Every filthy rich individual or family must spout, support, do (in public) liberal stuff. It is how they convince people that their wealth is justified and is untouchable. It is a protection mechanism. It is to keep the Occupy Wall Street crowd off of their front yards and instead on the front yards of people that work at AIG. That's all it is. And these filthy rich people who claim publicly and do in public liberal things are simply engaged in 100% acts of public relations. It accomplishes two things. It keeps the hordes away from you.

When the president comes up and suggests that the rich aren't paying their fair share, they never say it about Buffett. Why? 'Cause he says it about himself. "Yeah, Warren Buffett, he gets it! That's absolutely right. Bill Gates, he gets it." So, they're left alone. The hordes, the peasants with the pitchforks never seek them out. The second thing that happens is that in many cases they end up being loved for it. The Kennedys were loved because it was thought that all they cared about was the poor, and the Kennedys never used their own money to fix any of this stuff. No liberal ever does. They always use everybody else's. But that's why they do this stuff. It's pure public relations. It also justifies earning more. All you have to do is say, "I'm not paying enough!"

Why do you think the Clintons run around saying (Bill Clinton impression), "Hey, hey, yeah. (chuckles) Yeah, I'm richer than you are -- heh-heh -- and you know what? I don't need that tax cut. I'm paying too little." Okay, fine. You get a pass. You're a rich guy; you and Hillary get a pass. We're not gonna hate you. It's simple PR, folks. I don't even know how much of it is real. I don't know how liberal Warren Buffett really is, but I know that Warren Buffett loves being in the news. His secretary up there in the House gallery, in the State of the Union, as a prop -- as either a hero or a victim, regardless -- as an example of the unfairness in our country is just simply appalling. It is appalling. It would be no different than dragging a Ted Kennedy secretary or a Nelson Rockefeller or David Rockefeller secretary. I don't think people fall for it. I don't think it worked. I don't think it did. This stuff is just beneath contempt is what it is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Quick question: Does anybody know that Warren Buffett's secretary does earn? Does anybody know what he really pays her? Where did this whole plastic banana, good-time, phony, rock 'n' roll stuff get started anyway? This notion she's some pauper paying some high tax rate? What does she earn? They never tell us that. It's a campaign prop. Now, I need to correct something on Romney. I said he gives away 70%. He's giving way 40% of what he earns, and he paid $3.2 million in taxes. So if you combine with what Romney paid in tax with what he gave to charity, he gave away more than 42% of his income in 2011, with15% of his income to charity. Joe Biden gave away $369 to charity! Romney gave away 15% of his income. The Obamas gave 1%.

Now, Romney paid over $3.2 million to the IRS last year. How much did Warren Buffett's secretary pay? And why doesn't somebody demand...? If she's gonna be used this way, why doesn't somebody demand...? I'll demand it! I want to see her tax returns. What is her name, Bosanek, is that how you pronounce her name? It's B-o-s-a-n-e-k. Somebody has to have heard it pronounced, Bosanek, Bosanek, Bosanek? Whatever it is, where are her tax returns? She's up there in the House gallery! She is a campaign prop at the Class Warfare Rally. She's paying a higher tax rate than her boss, as though nobody can do anything about that.

What a scam this whole thing is, from the PR of the filthy rich pretending to be as far-left liberal as they are. And that's just to see to it that people like you don't clamor that they pay more. It's just sheer dishonesty. Cut to the chase: It's just sheer dishonesty. They come up and say, "Yeah, you know what I did? I called Buffett and then I called everybody and I said, 'When you die, everything you've got, you should give to Bill Gates!' Oh, man, are those now wonderful people. What wonderful people! See? These are rich people we can love! They're going to give all of their money to Bill Gates." Right. All the rest of us are told we should give it to government -- and when we oppose it, we're called greedy! So a little clue: If you ever become filthy rich or moderately rich, then publicly go liberal! That's how you can keep everybody away from your money and that's the only thing they're doing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I found something. I have to give you a little secret here. The last 40 minutes prior to each show I'm like Lucy in the chocolate factory. That's when Cookie sends me the sound bites, and today's roster is 55 sound bites. I'm an hour-and-a-half in, and I still don't know what all of them are. I have not had time to look at 'em. I've got stuff flying in here, and that's why -- I'm just explaining something -- I say going into the break here at the bottom of the hour, "Your phone calls are coming up." Then at the break I found something that backs up exactly something I just said. So I'm gonna play this. It's Obama talking about Warren Buffett's secretary. I just now discovered I've got a sound bite for it.

I'm not complaining about it. I'm just explaining to you, the audience, you are who matter. I want you to understand. When I promise to go to the phones and I don't, it's not a trick. There has never been a more improv on-the-fly media show than this one, and there's not a producer organizing any of this. Now, this is Obama talking about Buffett's secretary, and this one sound bite encapsulates every theory, why these filthy rich people act like leftists and talk like leftists. Here is the class warfare class envy, the phony baloney Obama class warfare characterization of this woman as some victim of an unfair, rigged system? Does anybody believe Warren Buffett's secretary is a charwoman? All right, here's the bite, and it's from the rally last night in the House chamber.

OBAMA: Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, or do we want to keep our investments in everything else? We need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes.

RUSH: Stop the tape. You see, right there. "We need to change the tax code so that people like me pay our fair share." So the peasants with pitchforks will exempt Obama. "Oh, yeah, Obama's a rich guy, but he doesn't think he's paying his fair share, so we'll leave him alone. We love Obama. Obama is looking out for us. He's not one of these rich Republicans who wants to take everything we've got and keep it for themselves and make us all homeless." Here, grab audio sound bite six. Obama says it again from the class warfare rally. He says it a different way, but listen to this.

OBAMA: We don't begrudge financial success in this country.

RUSH: You do!

OBAMA: We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it's not because they envy the rich. It's because they understand that when I get a tax break I don't need, and the country can't afford, it either adds to the deficit or somebody else has to make up the difference.

RUSH: That is just outrageous. In the first place, this country is not a zero-sum game. This economy's not a zero-sum game. That means if you get a dollar somebody loses it, that's not the case. That does not mean if you get fired, somebody gets hired. Or if you get hired, somebody gets fired. That's a zero-sum game and that's not what this country is. The American people are not looking at things like he just described it. Obama plans on being filthy rich when he gets out of the Oval Office. Obama is planning right now how to become filthy rich without having to do any more work and without having to write any more phony books or paying somebody else to write 'em, whatever the hell happened there. And he is exempting himself from criticism for becoming filthy rich with this crap.

(imitating Obama) "We don't begrudge financial success. We admire it. Hell, people like me talk about not paying my fair share, it's not 'cause they envy the rich. It's 'cause they understand that when I get tax breaks I don't need..." Spare us the pain and misery of a tax cut you don't need. That's how the Clintons do it. It's how the Kennedys did it. It's how Bill Gates... Jobs didn't do it, Steve Jobs didn't do it. He took the money, kept it, and he cut off all philanthropy at Apple. That's another thing. Here's Obama wailing and moaning about outsourcing jobs and manufacturing jobs, and then there's Jobs' wife that was invited. There's no greater outsourcer of work in this country than Apple -- and I'm not criticizing it -- and yet there's Steve Jobs being praised by Obama last night.

I saw the Apple financials. They blew it out, set a record. I listened to their conference call and their earnings report. As you people know, I'm an Apple evangel. But my point is, here's Obama ripping into American businesses that ship jobs overseas, and nobody does that better than Apple. And yet there's Apple being honored. I'll tell you, this was a mass of confusion, hypocrisy, lies, distortions and a failed attempt of a failed president to attach himself to America's greatness, when he wouldn't recognize it if it slapped him upside the head.

END TRANSCRIPT

Obama defies Congress with 'recess' picks - Washington Times

2012-01-04T16:59:00.001-06:00

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/4/obama-unprecedented-recess-appointment/?page=all#pagebreak

Obama defies Congress with 'recess' picks

President Obama used his recess appointment powers Wednesday to name a head for the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to the National Labor Relations Board — moves Republican lawmakers said amounted to an unconstitutional power grab.

The president acted just a day after the Senate held a session — breaking with at least three different precedents that said the Senate must be in recess for at least three days for the president to exercise his appointment power. Mr. Obama himself was part of two of those precedents, both during his time in the Senate and again in 2010 when one of his administration's top constitutional lawyers made the argument for the three-day waiting period to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Obama tapped former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the CFPB, and named three others to the labor board — all of which had been stymied by congressional Republicans who said Mr. Obama is accruing too much power to himself through those two agencies.

In strikingly sharp language, Republicans said the Senate considers itself still in session for the express purpose of blocking recess appointments, and the move threatened to become a declaration of war against Congress.

"Although the Senate is not in recess, President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.

GOP House Speaker John A. Boehner called the move "an extraordinary and entirely unprecedented power grab by President Obama that defies centuries of practice and the legal advice of his own Justice Department."

"The precedent that would be set by this cavalier action would have a devastating effect on the checks and balances that are enshrined in our Constitution," the Ohio Republican said in a statement.

The White House, though, argues Republican senators have been stonewalling his nominees for so long that Mr. Obama had no choice but to circumvent them.

The president introduced Mr. Cordray during a trip to Ohio Wednesday, telling a supportive crowd that the Senate Republicans' ongoing blockade of his nomination "inexcusable."

"I refuse to take 'No' for an answer. I've said before that I will continue to look for every opportunity to work with Congress to move this country forward. But when Congress refuses to act in a way that hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them," Mr. Obama said.

CPFB supporters has said the lack of a top executive has blocked the fledgling agency from taking on a number of tasks in its mandate to police the financial sector and protect consumers from fraud. Mr. Cordray was accompanying the president on the trip, and briefly spoke to reporters.

He said he would begin work immediately, adding: "We're going to begin working to expand our program to non-banks, which is an area we haven't been able to touch until now."

The Constitution gives the president the power to make appointments when the Senate is not in session and able to confirm them. Traditionally, that has been understood to mean when the Senate has adjourned for a recess longer than 10 days, and a Clinton administration legal opinion said a recess must be at least three days.

Mr. Obama's own top constitutional lawyers affirmed that view in 2010 in another case involving recess appointments. Asked what the standard was for making recess appointments, then-Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal told the justices the administration agreed with the three-day rule.

"The recess appointment power can work in a recess. I think our office has opined the recess has to be longer than 3 days," Mr. Katyal said.

Mr. Katyal, who is now a professor at Georgetown University, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the president's move.

The three-day rule was also the precedent Mr. Obama and his fellow Senate Democrats followed in 2007 and 2008 when they were trying to block then-President George W. Bush from making recess appointments.

"I am keeping the Senate in pro forma to prevent recess appointments until we get this process back on track," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said on Nov. 16, 2007, as he announced his strategy of having the Senate convene twice a week for pro forma sessions.

On Wednesday, though, Mr. Reid reversed course and said he backed the president's move.

"I support President Obama's decision to make sure that in these tough economic times, middle-class families in Nevada and across the country will have the advocate they deserve to fight on their behalf against the reckless practices that denied so many their economic security," he said.

CPFB opponents inside and outside of Congress say the agency, whose budget is not approved by Congress, will not be subject to legislative oversight and they have demanded changes in President Obama's financial regulatory overhaul law before they say they will allow a vote on a nominee to head the agency.

Senate Republicans last month filibustered Mr. Cordray's nomination, leaving him 7 shy of the 60 votes needed to get a final confirmation vote. Democrats and Republicans have increasingly turned to filibusters to block a president's nominees when they are in the majority.

Consumer and labor groups also hailed Mr. Obama's moves Wednesday.

Mr. Cordray's appointment "was long overdue and is essential to helping restore the frayed sense of confidence that Americans have in many financial institutions and consumer financial products," said Lisa Woll, head of the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.

James T. Callahan, general president of the International Union of Operating Engineers, said Republicans "have made a determined effort to cripple the NLRB and other government agencies by refusing to act on President Obama's nominees, no matter how qualified. Leaving the NLRB without a quorum would penalize both labor and employers."

But by abrogating decades of understanding of the recess appointment power Mr. Obama threatened to spark a full legislative war with Congress.

"Breaking from this precedent lands this appointee in uncertain legal territory, threatens the confirmation process and fundamentally endangers the Congress's role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch," Mr. McConnell said.

Part of the confusion is that in the Constitution the word "session" has different meanings. For example, each two-year Congress is divided into two sessions.

During Tuesday's pro forma meeting, the Senate officially gaveled out the first sessionn of the 112th Congress and gaveled in the second session.

And there is a precedent for making a recess appointment then. In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt used the instant one session was gaveled out and another was gaveled in to make a series of appointments. That is known as an "inter-session" appointment.

But Mr. Obama did not follow that route, instead choosing to make what scholars call an "intra-session" appointment, where the Constitution is far more vague.

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Get Into The Holiday Spirit With Scandinavian Glogg : NPR

2011-12-22T19:00:00.001-06:00

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/22/144101579/get-into-the-holiday-spirit-with-scandinavian-glogg

Get Into The Holiday Spirit With Scandinavian Glogg

December 22, 2011

In snowy Norway, nothing evokes Christmastime like a pot of glogg brewing on the stove. The traditional Scandinavian winter drink mixes wine and port with spices like clove, cardamom and cinnamon to make for a brew that smells divine and tastes even better.

Urd Milbury, cultural affairs officer from the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C., teaches NPR's Lynn Neary how to make the holiday treat.

Recipe: A Simple Glogg

Ingredients:

Aquavit (or brandy or vodka)
Burgundy or pinot noir wine
Port wine
Raisins
White sugar
Cinnamon sticks
Cloves
Cardamom seeds
One orange
One piece of ginger
Blanched almonds

Step 1: Soak 1/2 cup of raisins in one cup of aquavit (a Norwegian spirit made with potatoes); Brandy or vodka can be used instead. Soak for 30 minutes before Step 2.

Step 2: Put a large pot on the stove, over high heat. Add one cup of water and 1/2 cup sugar to the pot, and stir with a wooden spoon until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Step 3: Lower the heat to medium and add your spices - two sticks of cinnamon (each broken in half); four whole cloves; six whole cardamom seeds, crushed by hand; a thinly shaved orange peel; and one small piece of ginger, peeled and cut in half. Stir again with wooden spoon. Do not allow the mix to come to a boil from this point on.

Step 4: Add the aquavit-raisin mixture, two cups of burgundy or pinot noir wine and two cups of port wine.

Step 5: Sweeten and spice to taste.

Step 6: Strain, garnish with raisins and slices of blanched almond — and serve hot off the stove.

Note: The drink can be made a day ahead and kept covered, on the stove, at room temperature. Just reheat before serving.

Recipe courtesy of Todd and Urd Milbury.

KUHNER: Obama's Watergate - Washington Times

2011-12-16T11:12:00.000-06:00

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/15/obamas-watergate-758295296/

KUHNER: Obama's Watergate

A year ago this week, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. He died protecting his country from brutal Mexican gangsters. Two AK-47 assault rifles were found at his death site. We now know the horrifying truth: Agent Terry was killed by weapons that were part of an illegal Obama administration operation to smuggle arms to the dangerous drug cartels. He was a victim of his own government. This is not only a major scandal; it is a high crime that potentially reaches all the way to the White House, implicating senior officials. It is President Obama's Watergate.

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and overseen by the Justice Department. It started under the leadership of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than 2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than 1,400 guns remain lost. Agent Terry likely will not be the last U.S. casualty.

Mr. Holder insists he was unaware of what took place until after media reports of the scandal appeared in early 2011. This is false. Such a vast operation only could have occurred with the full knowledge and consent of senior administration officials. Massive gun-running and smuggling is not carried out by low-level ATF bureaucrats unless there is authorization from the top. There is a systematic cover-up.

Congressional Republicans, however, are beginning to shed light on the scandal. Led by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Darrell Issa of California, a congressional probe is exposing the Justice Department's rampant criminality and deliberate stonewalling. Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, who heads the department's criminal division, helped craft a February letter to Congress that denied ATF had ever walked guns into Mexico. Yet, under pressure from congressional investigators, the department later admitted that Mr. Breuer knew about ATF gun-smuggling as far back as April 2010. In other words, Mr. Breuer has been misleading Congress. He should resign - or be fired.

Instead, Mr. Holder tenaciously insists that Mr. Breuer will keep his job. He needs to keep his friends close and potential witnesses even closer. Another example is former acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson. Internal documents show Mr. Melson directly oversaw Fast and Furious, including monitoring numerous straw purchases of AK-47s. He has admitted to congressional investigators that he, along with high-ranking ATF leaders, reassigned every "manager involved in Fast and Furious" after the scandal surfaced on Capitol Hill and in the press. Mr. Melson said he was ordered by senior Justice officials to be silent regarding the reassignments. Hence, ATF managers who possess intimate and damaging information - especially on the role of the Justice Department - essentially have been promoted to cushy bureaucratic jobs. Their silence has been bought, their complicity swept under the rug. Mr. Melson has been transferred to Justice's main office, where he serves as a "senior adviser" on forensic science in the department's Office of Legal Policy. Rather than being punished, Mr. Melson has been rewarded for his incompetence and criminal negligence.

Mr. Holder and his aides have given misleading, false and contradictory testimony on Capitol Hill. Perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power - these are high crimes and misdemeanors. Mr. Holder should be impeached. Like most liberals, he is playing the victim card, claiming Mr. Issa is a modern-day Joseph McCarthy conducting a judicial witch hunt. Regardless of this petty smear, Mr. Holder must be held responsible and accountable - not only for the botched operation, but for his flagrant attempts to deflect blame from the administration.

Mr. Holder is a shameless careerist and a ruthless Beltway operative. For years, his out-of-control Justice Department has violated the fundamental principle of our democracy, the rule of law. He has refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panthers for blatant voter intimidation that took place in the 2008 election. Career Justice lawyers have confessed publicly that Mr. Holder will not pursue cases in which the perpetrators are black and the victims white. States such as Arizona and Alabama are being sued for simply attempting to enforce federal immigration laws. Mr. Holder also opposes voter identification cards, thereby enabling fraud and vote-stealing at the ballot box. What else can we expect from one who, during the Clinton administration, helped pardon notorious tax cheat Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists?

Mr. Holder clearly knew about Fast and Furious and did nothing to stop it. This is because the administration wanted to use the excuse of increased violence on the border and weapons-smuggling into Mexico to justify tighter gun-control legislation. Mr. Holder is fighting ferociously to prevent important internal Justice documents from falling into the hands of congressional investigators. If the full nature of his involvement is discovered, the Obama presidency will be in peril.

Fast and Furious is even worse than Watergate for one simple reason: No one died because of President Nixon's political dirty tricks and abuse of government power. But Brian Terry is dead; and there are still 1,500 missing guns threatening still more lives.

What did Mr. Obama know? Massive gun-smuggling by the U.S. government into a foreign country does not happen without the explicit knowledge and approval of leading administration officials. It's too big, too risky and too costly. Mr. Holder may not be protecting just himself and his cronies. Is he protecting the president?

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

Will Occupy Wall Street Upend Obama’s Presidential Election? -- New York Magaizne

2011-12-09T17:20:00.000-06:00

NOTE: The beginning of the article...

"AT 26, Berger is a redheaded Reed College alum and professional activist; his employers have included the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Van Jones's outfit, Rebuild the Dream."

This IS the OWS 'movement'; Hired/professional protestors!! Nothing grass roots about it.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/occupy-wall-street-2011-12/

In 2008, Barack Obama lit a fire among young activists. Next year, Occupy Wall Street could consume him.

The post-Zuccotti era of Occupy Wall Street began for Max Berger just after 1 a.m. on November 15, when he learned via text message that a forcible eviction of the park was close at hand. At 26, Berger is a redheaded Reed College alum and professional activist; his employers have included the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Van Jones's outfit, Rebuild the Dream. By hard-core standards, he had come late to the OWS action, not visiting the park until a week after the protest got going on September 17. But Berger found himself sucked in and became one of its central players. Now, with Zuccotti under siege, he raced to the park and fired off a series of frantic tweets—before being put in handcuffs. "People singing Marley!" "Press not being let in. This is gonna be some Tiananmen shit." "They can take this park, but they can't stop this movement. This will backfire. We will win."

Berger's optimism was shared by his OWS cohorts. Upset as the organizers were about losing the symbolic value of the encampment at Zuccotti, the way it happened—in a late-night raid by police in riot gear, with reporters denied access and even arrested—had its own symbolic oomph. The organizers thought, too, that the eviction would confer another benefit: catalyzing turnout for the next major OWS demonstration, which was scheduled to take place two days later. And although the "day of action" on November 17 failed to shutter the stock exchange, the demo's marquee goal, the show of force in Gotham was impressive—and replicated on a smaller scale in cities around the country.

When histories of Occupy Wall Street are written, those days in November will no doubt be seen as a watershed. In just two months of existence, OWS had scored plenty of victories: spreading from New York to more than 900 cities worldwide; introducing to the vernacular a potent catchphrase, "We are the 99 percent"; injecting into the national conversation the topic of income inequality. But OWS had also suffered setbacks. The less savory aspects of the occupations had provided the right with fuel for feral slander (Drudge: "Death, Disease Plague 'Occupy' Protests") and casual caricature. Even among some protesters, there was a sense that stagnation had set in. Then came the Zuccotti clampdown—and the popular perception that it meant the end of OWS.

It's perfectly possible that this perception will be borne out, that the raucous events of November 17 were the last gasps of a rigor-mortizing rebellion. But no one seriously involved in OWS buys a word of it. What they believe instead is that, after a brief period of retrenchment, the protests will be back even bigger and with a vengeance in the spring—when, with the unfurling of the presidential election, the whole world will be watching. Among Occupy's organizers, there is fervid talk about occupying both the Democratic and Republican conventions. About occupying the National Mall in Washington, D.C. About, in effect, transforming 2012 into 1968 redux.

The people plotting these maneuvers are the leaders of OWS. Now, you may have heard that Occupy is a leaderless uprising. Its participants, and even the leaders themselves, are at pains to make this claim. But having spent the past month immersed in their world, I can report that a cadre of prime movers—strategists, tacticians, and logisticians; media gurus, technologists, and grand theorists—has emerged as essential to guiding OWS. For some, Occupy is an extension of years of activism; for others, their first insurrectionist rodeo. But they are now united by a single purpose: turning OWS from a brief shining moment into a bona fide movement.

That none of these people has yet become the face of OWS—its Tom Hayden or Mark Rudd, its Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown—owes something to its newness. But it is also due to the way that Occupy operates. Since the sixties, starting with the backlash within the New Left against those same celebrities, the political counterculture has been ruled by loosey-goosey, bottom-up organizational precepts: horizontal and decentralized structures, an antipathy to hierarchy, a fetish for consensus. And this is true in spades of OWS. In such an environment, formal claims to leadership are invariably and forcefully rejected, leaving the processes for accomplishing anything in a state of near chaos, while at the same time opening the door to (indeed compelling) ad hoc reins-taking by those with the force of personality to gain ratification for their ideas about how to proceed. "In reality," says Yotam Marom, one of the key OWS organizers, "movements like this are most conducive to being led by people already most conditioned to lead."

And so in coffee shops and borrowed conference rooms around the city, far from the sound and fury in the park and on the streets, the prime movers have been doing just that—meeting, planning, talking (and talking) about the future of OWS. The debates between them have been fierce. Tensions have been laid bare, factions fomented, and ideological cleavages exposed—all of it a familiar recapitulation of the growing pains experienced by protesters of the past, from those in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the sixties to those fighting for workers' rights in the thirties.

Where OWS departs from precedent is in the breadth of support from the get-go for its overarching critique in the electorate at large. A November NBC–Wall Street Journal poll found that more than three quarters of voters agree that America's economic structure unfairly favors the very rich over everyone else, and that the power of banks and corporations should be constrained. "It took three years from the start of the anti–Vietnam War movement to the point when the popularity of the war sank below 50 percent," observes Columbia professor and social-movement historian Todd Gitlin. "Here, achieving the equivalent took three minutes."

Capitalizing on this support is the central issue facing OWS, and its ability to do so will depend on myriad factors, including the behavior of plutocrats, politicians, and police. (In terms of presenting shocking and morally clarifying imagery, the recent pepper-spraying incident at the University of California, Davis, struck many as reminiscent of Bull Connor's goons dousing civil-rights protesters with fire hoses in 1963.) But it will also depend on which of two broad strains within OWS turns out to be dominant: the radical reformism of social democrats such as Berger, who want to see a more humane and egalitarian form of capitalism and a government less corrupted by money, or the radical utopianism of the movement's anarchists and Marxists, who seek to replace our current economic and political arrangements with … who knows what? "My fear is that we become the worst of the New Left," Berger says. "I don't want to live in a fucking commune. I don't want to blow shit up. I want to get stuff done."

In the beginning, the idea that what became Occupy Wall Street would amount to much at all, let alone become a vehicle for getting stuff done, struck Berger as unlikely—and he was not alone. One of the unifying sentiments among many of the prime movers was skepticism about the protest in the weeks leading up to it. After a call in July by the Canadian magazine Adbusters for a "Tahrir Moment" in lower Manhattan on September 17, a series of general assemblies were held in places such as Tompkins Square Park to plan the occupation. But the early gatherings were dominated by antiquated far-left fringe groups, such as the Workers World Party, and marred by internecine squabbling.

Vlad Teichberg was one of those in the crowd turned off by what he saw, at least at first. "It was problematic," Teichberg says. "The groups wanted to control the process. But no consensus could be reached. So eventually a lot of the groups dropped out, but individuals stayed. When I came to the last two or three GAs before September 17, it was actually amazing, because suddenly you had a group that was easily finding consensus."

Today, Teichberg spends much of his time in a small, dark, second-floor room in a clapped-out building on Lafayette at Bleecker. (His neighbors include the War Resisters League, the Socialist Party USA, and the Libertarian Book Club.) This is the original home office of globalrevolution.tv, which channels vérité video from occupations around the world through hosting sites such as Livestream.com.

Teichberg is a 39-year-old Russian immigrant with stooped shoulders and a mop of brown hair who grew up in Rego Park and is so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer. But what makes him so interesting is that you could just as easily imagine him making a cameo in The Big Short. A math prodigy who was a Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalist before matriculating at Princeton, he left college (temporarily) after his sophomore year and went to work for Bankers Trust, the first in a string of Wall Street gigs at firms including Deutsche Bank, Swiss Reinsurance Corp., and HSBC. And what did he do in those places? He created, modeled, and traded derivatives, including some of the first synthetic CDOs. As he told the London Times, he was "one of the people [who] built that bomb that blew up the whole economy."

Teichberg's time in the Wall Street armament factory gave him a close-up view of everything wrong with the place: the culture of greed, the insane levels of risk, the corruption of the credit-rating agencies. "By 2001, it was obvious to me it was going to blow up," he says, "and I wanted to be nowhere near it." But he didn't leave. Instead, hopping from job to job, he tried to put brakes on the process, devising new ways to value risk more accurately, only to be rebuffed by his bosses. At the same time he starting taking the money he was making on Wall Street and funding ways to undermine it.

And not just undermine Wall Street. Teichberg had never been terribly political, but the Iraq War and what he saw as the exploitation of 9/11 awakened his inner activist. He co-founded a media collective and started staging guerrilla actions: filming the protests at the 2004 GOP convention; staging a flash mob at ground zero on the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War. He moved out of his Tribeca apartment and decamped to Bushwick, eventually taking up residence in what he describes as "a hard-core anarchist punk house."

This past April, Teichberg went to Madrid, where he worked at the media center of the Spanish anti-austerity protests. Upon returning to New York, he started building what he calls "Hackintoshes" (gussied-up used Dell laptops) and distributing them, along with modified handheld video cameras, to teams of OWS protesters. Since then, he and his people have shipped laptops and cameras to countless other occupations. "Two hundred stations were streaming by October 15," the day that OWS went global, Teichberg says. "Suddenly we're sitting in front of a badly managed TV network."

The centrality of Teichberg's shop to OWS can't be overstated. "The live stream is, in a way, the central nervous system of the entire operation," Berger explains. "Because in moments where the police have tried to fuck with us, it's our first line of defense. And it's been a big part of how we disseminate our information, raise the money, everything."

Over coffee one day around the corner from his office at the Yippie Museum Café, I ask Teichberg what kinds of changes he hopes to bring to the financial system. "I think you're assuming that, for me, Occupy Wall Street is about Wall Street," he replies. "Of course, it was a huge mistake to bail out the banks in 2008. If you did a proper analysis of how much money was lost when the bubble burst, it was north of $50 trillion. So pumping a trillion dollars into that system is giving Band-Aids to a corpse. We could have used that money to create an entirely new financial system, and the super-upper class would've taken a huge hit.

"But this really isn't about having a few demands for reform of the Fed or the transaction tax," he goes on. "We're talking about changing our society, so we no longer measure each other in terms of money, but based on fundamental things. What makes us special is not what we are against but what we are for: equality, unity, mutual respect. Those are very important elements of this new human system we want to build."

Vlad Teichberg's résumé—his experience of having been in the belly of beast, getting a gander at its guts, and recoiling in horror—is unusual but not unique within the OWS core. Here and there I found penitent or apostate Wall Streeters and other former corporate tools now railing against the system that once kept them flush. Like Teichberg's, their criticisms of that system are more sophisticated and precise than those of many of their comrades. But their politics, also like Teichberg's, are the opposite: earnest and idealistic, for sure, but also vague and half-formed.

Take Amin Husain, who is characterized by a number of the prime movers as one of OWS's "deep thinkers." Husain, a 36-year-old Palestinian-American who grew up poor before becoming a corporate lawyer, spent much of the aughts working on complex structured-finance deals. His last job before leaving the law to become an artist was as a contract attorney at Cravath, laboring on behalf of its client PricewaterhouseCoopers when PWC was being sued over its auditing (or, arguably, non-auditing) of AIG, reading hundreds of internal e-mails that may expose the perfidy of both.

In his kaffiyeh and a camouflage military cap, Husain certainly has the look of a revolutionary, but he sounds more like the artist he's become. When I ask what drew him to OWS, he says, "I felt it was a moment for something to shift. It's time to have people empowered to imagine, what does it mean to live in a beautiful country like the United States of America? This is a movement not about speaking to people, but about hearing. It's not for the people. It's with the people. It's a new way of thinking."

This kind of talk is common among a certain sort of OWSer, especially those who are newbies to public agitation. But then there is another sort: committed activists. Among the OWS prime movers, a goodly number, including Yotam Marom, were involved in Bloombergville, the sidewalk protest near City Hall against the city's budget cuts that took place last summer. While their vernacular is at times as airy as Husain's, their politics are much firmer, steeped in the cut-and-thrust of battles for tangible objectives. And, unlike Husain, who invoked the phrase "leaderless movement" again and again, the activist prime movers make no bones about the fact that OWS has a leadership cadre—and that they are part of it.

"Anybody who says there's such a thing as a totally nonhierarchical, agenda-less movement is … not stupid, but dangerous, because somebody's got to write the agenda—it doesn't fall out of the sky," says Marom, who in some ways is Husain's mirror image. A 25-year-old veteran of the New School occupation and co-founder of the quasi-socialist Organization for a Free Society, Marom was raised in Hoboken by Israeli parents and has lived in both a commune (in Israel) and a collective (in Crown Heights). Articulate and charismatic, he came to OWS with a bone-deep wariness toward many of the far left's ingrained tendencies, notably "the glorification of process and vagueness," he says.

At the outset, Marom represented one pole in a pivotal debate that illustrated immediately how easily OWS might be riven by factionalism: Should the occupation have demands? The media was asking incessantly what the protesters wanted. And so were important players in the institutional left. "Early on, the unions came down and were trying to figure out how to plug in," recalls Teichberg. "They said, 'We can't get behind you until you have a concrete set of demands.' "

Marom and others agreed that demands were necessary. "Working families from the South Bronx aren't gonna come to a general assembly for four hours to express their own demands," says Marom. "Demands are one way for them to hear that it's about them without them having to be there. Demands also give us clear markers and clear targets. If our demand is about housing, we know Chase is fucking over the housing market. Etcetera."

But the resistance to demands within OWS proved stronger than the pressure for them, and the former stance prevailed. For one thing, explains Michael Premo, a 29-year-old Brooklynite activist who has worked on issues from HIV/AIDS to housing since his teens, "even people who are for demands can't figure out what the demands should be." For another, although there were and are plenty of proposals that most OWSers could get behind—from a moratorium on foreclosures to a hefty Wall Street transaction tax to debt forgiveness for student loans—articulating demands for any of them would exclude others. And at a time when the movement's main goal is growth, that seems self-defeating. "When we can put a million people on the Mall," says Berger, "then we can have demands."

There is a subtler political logic in play here, too. "The problem with demands," explains Marom, who says that in retrospect he is glad that he lost this debate, "is they allow people to tune out. The Onion had a funny thing: 'The World Is Waiting for Occupy Wall Street to Articulate Demands So They Can Start Ignoring Them.' The thing about Occupy Wall Street is, it's so broadand imaginative that it allows everybody to hear themselves in it if they want to."

Columbia's Todd Gitlin, the third president of Students for a Democratic Society and author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, agrees that too much is made—at least for now—of OWS's absence of demands. "The student-movement part of the civil-rights movement, its definitive call-and-response, was, 'What do you want? Freedom! When do you want it? Now!' " he points out. "Is that a political program? Freedom?"

Eschewing demands is one thing; eschewing any kind of engagement in the world of practical politics and governance is quite another, and on this issue a much deeper schism exists among the prime movers. So far that schism has been papered over, except in one notable instance—a case that may prove an ominous portent for the future of OWS.

The march began in Zuccotti and ended in Foley Square in the mid-afternoon on the first Saturday in November. The crowd was maybe a thousand strong when it arrived in front of the New York State Supreme Court building. Some of the protesters tried to take the courthouse steps, only be met by a phalanx of cops sprinting over to block their path. Most of the marchers retreated to the center of the square, but a few who remained got rowdy. Shouting ensued. Scuffles, too. At least twenty people were arrested.

Which is to say, in most respects, it was just another day at OWS. But in one way it was novel: This was the first and only demonstration to date, as far as I can determine, aimed directly at Barack Obama.

The proximate cause of the protest was a proposed settlement between a coalition of state attorneys general and the country's biggest banks in the months-long state and federal investigation of widespread mortgage fraud—in particular, "robosigning." A few days earlier, Berger had heard that a deal worth north of $25 billion was close at hand; the White House and the Justice Department were leaning hard on the A.G.'s to get onboard.

To Berger, the settlement seemed a travesty—a craven cash-for-immunity deal. So Berger proposed and helped plan the Foley Square march. Because of the arrests, its theme got lost in the scant media coverage it drew. But if you were there, that theme was plain, from the enormous papier-mâché rendering of 44 to a sign bearing the slogan OBAMA, DON'T BE WALL STREET'S PUPPET.

Given Occupy's scathing view of the nexus between capital and the state, you might think that such a demo would be uncontroversial within OWS's ranks. Certainly that's what Berger thought. "Substantively, immunity is a big fucking deal," he says. "If we as a movement are capable of acting at key junctures where we have the capacity to shift the dialogue, we should. And if we're gonna build and broaden the movement, we have to show that we are capable of using the power that we have already acquired."

But Berger's proposal wasn't uncontroversial. Quite the contrary. It sparked an agitated backlash, in which a handful of core OWS organizers attacked the idea on three grounds. The first was that it risked alienating African-Americans. "The people we think will be the heart and soul of this movement have yet to join it, even though you see them in Sunset Park and you see them in Harlem," says Husain. "They identify with the president. So going after him isn't the smartest move."

OWS is the "rotten fruit of Obamaism," says a strategist.

The second was that by focusing on Obama, the march moved away from a systemic critique to a personal one, and thus let other responsible parties slide. "You need a message around Obama that doesn't let Boehner off the hook," says Premo. "All government is beholden to the same masters." And the third was that by assailing a specific policy, the march could be perceived as carrying an implicit demand.

Looking back on it, Berger allows that each of these objections had merit and admits he handled the internal OWS politics poorly. Still, the furor seemed to frustrate and deflate him. "What's the point of this protest if we don't do things like this?" he wondered. "It's ironic. At first, people thought I was a Democratic Party mole. Now I'm like, 'Fuck it, Let's go after Obama!' and they're like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.' "

In truth, Berger is seen by some as something nearly as nefarious as a Democratic hack: an agent of the professional left. From the moment OWS broke through in the mainstream media, every organization and personage in the progressive sphere, from the labor unions and MoveOn to Van Jones and Howard Dean, has beaten a path to the movement's door. "We were all like, 'Ohhhh, here the come the activists!" says Katie Davison, a 31-year-old filmmaker who has worked closely with Teichberg on the OWS media effort. "I guess we've arrived!"

The attempts by the institutional left to make common cause with OWS have raised hopes in some but hackles in many more. Some of the annoyance can be traced to the condescension of the left's old hands. "There was a gentleman who gave this lecture the other day and said, 'I've been doing this for 35 years,' blah blah blah," recalls Sandy Nurse, a 27-year-old New School graduate and former U.N. contractor who has been instrumental to planning OWS's major actions. "I said, 'If you've been doing this for 35 years and you're still at square one, you need to fucking think about how you're organizing.' "

There is also a deeper source of suspicion toward the mainline left: the fear of co-option. "Everyone is jumping in and wants a piece of this," says Husain. "The largest threat to this movement is at the institutional level, with these traditional, run-of-the-mill organizations getting in. The problem is that you start taking what is potentially a transformative movement and start making it into a corporation that resembles an organization that has been retarded and nonfunctional."

The more grounded prime movers, though, express a more balanced view. "I don't think it's possible to co-opt this thing," says Marom. "For example, Howard Dean is sending around fucking yard posters with 'We Are the 99%, Occupy Wall Street' on them, but we don't do anything because of it." As for the institutional left, he goes on, "if you want to have a real movement, you need labor and people who have ties to political institutions. What are we gonna be, just a thousand college kids?

"We talk all the time about the danger of being co-opted and who would be co-opting this," Davison says. "It would be the liberals, and that's not a bad position to be in … But I don't feel we should be used in service of anyone else's agenda. We are not a rent-a-mob."

For some in the Democratic Party, that may come as a news flash, however. Back in mid-October, I happened to be on a panel at Baruch College sponsored by Harvard's Institute of Politics. The panel's moderator asked how we thought Occupy Wall Street might affect the 2012 presidential race. Elaine Kamarck—a lecturer at the Kennedy School and veteran of Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992 and Al Gore's in 2000—offered a sunny (for Democrats) prognosis. "I think it is evidence of the fact that the young generation, which is the Obama base, is still very much engaged … I think they're going to turn out for him. They have some complaints with him, which are probably justified. But all I see there is the energy."

Kamarck was echoing the view—or at the least the hope—of Obama's reelection team. A week earlier, David Plouffe, his campaign manager in 2008 and now a senior adviser in the White House, had told the Washington Post that the Obamans intended to make the public ire at Wall Street crystallized by OWS "one of the central elements of the campaign next year." A few days after that, the White House ostentatiously declared that Obama is fighting for "the 99 percent," while the president himself told ABC News, "I understand the frustrations being expressed in those [OWS] protests."

What Obama may not understand so well is the degree of frustration inspired by him specifically among the protesters and their prime movers. Or the extent to which OWS and its energy is, as one liberal strategist puts it, is "the rotten fruit of Obamaism"—an army of young people, many of them inspired and mobilized by his campaign in 2008, who feel betrayed by his performance since he has, er, occupied the Oval Office.

"He cheated," says Husain, who volunteered for the campaign on the belief that Obama could be a transformative president. "He ran on a platform he never intended to push. He made promises he never intended to keep. I was just amazed in his inaugural speech how little transformative there was. And then Tim Geithner—what the hell was that? And then the bailouts. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out what was going on. It was a continuation of the same bullshit."

Then there are others who never put any faith in Obama in the first place. "The new boss is ever the same as the old boss," says Sandy Nurse. "I think if either political party or politician thinks they have any credibility to come down here and tap into this energy, they're gravely misinformed."

The last point is one I heard again and again from OWSers about Team Obama's talk of channeling the movement. "They don't have a fucking clue what they are talking about," says Berger. "These [protesters] aren't out here because they're offended that they haven't been spoken to nicely. They're out here because they owe shitloads of money in student-loan debt and can't find a job. Or they can't afford their mortgage. And if Obama thinks that they're gonna be able to divert this energy by talking about doing something, he's got another think coming."

To be sure, if OWS falls part, Obama stands some chance of picking up the pieces. "If this dies, people might say, 'Look, we need to do something,' " allows Husain. But what if the opposite occurs? What if OWS continues to grow?

If it does, it will mean that the movement has succeeded in drawing an influx of more conventional lefties and even plain-vanilla liberals, which in turn might exacerbate the tensions already extant between OWS's radical and reformist elements, but would be the inevitable price of attaining mass scale. The efforts to make that happen are picking up steam by the day. Next week, for instance, two of the country's largest unions, the SEIU and the CWA, along with progressive groups such as the Center for Community Change, are planning to bus thousands of protesters to Washington, set up tents on the lawn on the Mall, and stage an action called Occupy Congress.

Occupy Congress is intended to lobby on behalf of Obama's jobs agenda. But in truth the expansion of OWS that it represents could pose substantial political risks to the president in 2012—and it is here that the parallels to 1968 are at once resonant and meaningful. Back then, Richard Nixon built his campaign around an appeal to "the silent majority," fueling and exploiting a growing backlash among white middle- and working-class voters against the less palatable aspects of the counterculture and its movements, and tarring Hubert Humphrey with guilt by association with them.

In the run-up to 2012, eerily similar Republican efforts are already being market-tested—from Eric Cantor's decrying of the OWSers as "mobs," to Herman Cain's claim that the protests are being "planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration," to Newt Gingrich's suggestion that the protesters should be told, "Go get a job right after you take a bath." As organized labor becomes increasingly involved with OWS, expect the attacks to extend from hippie-punching to union-bashing. Reacting to the news of Occupy Congress, the influential conservative blog RedState.com declared, "What began as a Neo-Communist movement that allegedly only had the goal of destroying capitalism has now become a full-fledged, union-financed class war."

Whether such absurdities will find much traction is an open question, but depending on how the movement conducts itself, there is a chance that the amount will not be zero. More worrying for Obama is the possibility that the growth of OWS might worsen the dilemma he already faces on the left, which shares, if less vehemently, the OWSers' jaundiced view of his tenure. Amazingly enough, many of them were surprised when I pointed out that the demonstrations in Chicago in 1968 occurred at the Democratic, not Republican, convention, and helped to shatter Humphrey's base—and it isn't hard to imagine a similar fate befalling Obama should Occupy Charlotte come to fruition next summer.

"I've felt from the beginning that this was going to be a crucial problem," says Gitlin. "A good deal of finesse might—might—succeed in creating a working alliance between Democrats and the movement, as opposed to a knockdown, drag-out cleavage. And both vectors matter here. The movement will have to reconcile its camps: those who say, 'We want to push the Democrats hard to be progressive' and those who scream, 'Co-option.' But a great deal depends on the Democrats. The other day, Bill Daley was asked, 'Is [OWS] helpful?' Daley said, 'No, I don't know if it's helpful.' Wrong!"

Gitlin smiles a rueful smile. "Of course, it's also conceivable that the structural divergences are so great that they can't be bridged. Sometimes these things blow up and leave everything in ruins."

One early evening in November, Sandy Nurse and I were sitting on the floor of an OWS storage space, surrounded by backpacks, sleeping bags, piles of rain ponchos, and enough toilet paper, toothpaste, Kleenex, and Q-tips to stock a Wal-Mart. Nurse is a striking half-Panamian, half-Irish-American who grew up as a military brat, worked on activist causes such as human trafficking, and now is a self-described "ballbuster" logistician for OWS. She was telling me about the time when Charlie Rangel showed up while she was speaking before a march and wanted to address the crowd. "I turned around and said, 'You can't speak here, you're too divisive a figure, you definitely don't represent what this is about, so you probably need to leave,' " she recalled.

Given Nurse's attitude, it's not surprising that when Jesse Jackson arrived two weeks later, she was no more welcoming. This was at a smaller meeting in the offices of the Communications Workers of America at 80 Pine. On hand were about a dozen of the prime movers—Berger, Marom, and Premo among them—and some union representatives. No one was expecting Jackson, he came unannounced, and Nurse's first thought was, Why should we interrupt this meeting for this person?

But Jackson played humble, taking the seat next to Nurse, asking if he was welcome, waiting quietly for his turn to speak. Then, holding Nurse's hand, he proceeded to unfurl a soliloquy in which he described the occupiers as inheritors of the mantle of the civil-rights movement. He talked about Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign, one of the last protests that MLK planned before his death. About Resurrection City, the shantytown on the National Mall that several thousand people populated in May and June of 1968. About how one advantage to having no identifiable leader is that "there's nobody to assassinate."

Jackson looked at Berger and asked, "What does Lyndon Johnson mean to you?" Berger shrugged. "The Vietnam War?"

Jackson folded his hands across his belly and declaimed, "Civil Rights Act of 1964—LBJ. The Voting Rights Act of 1965—LBJ. Medicare—LBJ. Medicaid—LBJ. Child Nutrition Act—LBJ. Jobs Corps—LBJ."

A few of the OWSers greeted Jackson's words with skepticism, but most found them powerful, inspirational. "The connection with historical movements is what gives this so much moral credibility," says Berger. "For someone like him to tell us 'You have a history, tap into that history'—literally, I have goose bumps."

The question is whether OWS will heed the message of Jackson's riff on LBJ: that the protesters need to ally themselves with semi-simpatico elected officials, and that merely howling about the depradations of the existing economic and political order won't be sufficient to change either. "At some point, movements must take on some form, some identifiable agenda," Jackson tells me later. "At some point, water must become ice."

The most savvy and hard-nosed of the prime movers agree, and think that moment is coming soon. "My take has always been that this movement must move in the shape of an octopus," says Premo. "The head of the octopus moves forward with a solid critical analysis of our economic and political system, but the octopus has eight tentacles, which can begin to gain concessions. There were organizations within the civil-rights movement that had the demands that allowed everything that was accomplished to be accomplished. The SCLC, CORE, SNCC, all the organizations within that movement had specific goals. And that's the moment we're in now, when we'll probably see our SCLC, our CORE, our SNCC emerge."

For that to happen, OWS will need to achieve at least four things. The first is to survive the winter, literally and metaphorically, going into hibernation rather than withering and dying. And in this regard, Mayor Bloomberg's clearing of Zuccotti Park is likely to prove a boon to the Occupy forces, allowing them to stop expending so much energy on defending space and more on movement-building. The second, as Gitlin puts it, is "dealing with the crazy"—avoiding instances of violence and property destruction that would taint the movement's image in just the way that Republicans and their media allies are attempting to. The third is that the protesters will need to put the conceit that the movement is leaderless behind them. For OWS to attract new adherents, it must have a clear and compelling voice, amplified by the media. The movement has many candidates who could step up and fill that void, if only the rank and file will permit it.

Fourth and finally, OWS will need to navigate the fork in the road between radicalism and reformism. "I don't think it's an either-or," says Marom. "People who only want reforms are probably just handicapped by cynicism. And if you don't want reforms as a revolutionary, then you're not a revolutionary, because people need the foundations on top of which to survive. And people need to win things, to feel like it's possible to win."

Of course, the sense of possibility that progressives might win was what fueled the election of Obama. And their frustration is what has created the context for OWS—and raises the specter that it might alter the landscape the president must traverse next year in dramatic and unpredictable ways.

"Obama didn't build a movement, he built an electoral machine," says Marom. "If he had built a movement, he would not be where he is right now. But the fact that he was elected, that so many people came out in the streets for him, that people cried when he won, was an expression of the fact that they wanted what they thought he was, which is an alternative. He wasn't it. He can't deliver it. This political system can't deliver it. This economy can't deliver it. But there are millions of people who genuinely want it. That's amazing and inspiring to people like us, who are just, like, 'Okay. This is for real.' "

Review & Outlook: Harry Reid's Jobs Surcharge - WSJ.com

2011-12-02T21:31:00.001-06:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204262304577068470560665732.html

Review & Outlook: Harry Reid's Jobs Surcharge - WSJ.com

So here's the latest Democratic growth plan: Pay for a temporary tax cut that has already proven not to create jobs with a permanent tax increase that almost certainly will cost jobs.

That's the essence of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's plan to finance a one-year payroll tax cut with a 3.25% income tax surcharge on upper-income Americans that would last for at least 10 years. Mr. Reid knows it can't pass the House, and as we went to press it looked likely to fail even in the Senate.

But this is the way it goes in the Senate these days where the real goal isn't to pass anything but to put Senate Republicans on the class-warfare spot. If they vote no, Mr. Reid and President Obama will claim that Republicans voted to deny a tax cut on the middle class. If they vote yes, he'll taunt them for breaking with their tea party supporters and also backing a tax increase. Meanwhile, Democrats can posture as opponents of "the 1%" to consolidate their base going into an election year.

The Democratic tax plan would cut the 2012 payroll tax in half for employees, to 3.1% from 6.2% and by another half to 3.1% from 6.2% for employers with less than $5 million in payrolls. The cost would be roughly $250 billion. But let's remember the history here. In December 2010, Republicans and Mr. Obama agreed to a two-percentage point reduction in the 12.6% payroll tax for this year.

Associated Press

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

Early this year the White House cited estimates by Deutsche Bank economists that the $110 billion payroll tax holiday would boost GDP growth by 0.7 percentage points to 4% in the months ahead. This was based on the usual Keynesian modeling. Instead, the economy has decelerated—from 2.8% in 2010 to barely above 1% this year. As for the predicted boost to jobs, the unemployment rate has stayed at or above 9%.

One reason the payroll tax cut hasn't worked is that it is temporary. Few employers who hire more than temporary workers see much of a gain from a temporary hiring incentive. Employers may also see through the Washington tax bait-and-switch, figuring that they'll pay for the temporary tax cut with higher taxes later.

Mr. Reid's surcharge—which would hit incomes of $1 million and above—would slam small business job creators. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that taxpayers will declare about $1.2 trillion of business income in 2013. Only a fraction of those small business owners and Subchapter S companies will have a net income above $1 million, but Joint Tax finds that 34% of that $1.2 trillion is on tax returns with "modified AGI [adjusted gross income] in excess of $1 million." This means about $400 billion of business income would be subject to Mr. Reid's profits surtax.

Mr. Obama's own Treasury Department examined 2007 IRS data and found 392,000 returns with incomes above $1 million. Some 311,00, or more than three out of four, were classified by Treasury as "business owners." Perhaps Democrats can explain how taking money from employers is going to lead them to hire more workers.

By the way, Mr. Reid's surcharge comes on top of the tax increase that will hit when the Bush tax rates expire at the end of 2012. So if Mr. Reid has his way, the top income tax rate will climb to 44.5% in 2013. And because dividend income will again be taxed as ordinary income starting in 2013, the dividend tax goes to 44.5% from 15% today.

And don't forget that the ObamaCare investment income tax surcharge of 3.8% also begins in 2013, so stock owners are going to be happy to hear that the new dividend tax rate could be 48% in the name of tax fairness. This will only deter business investment, which is critical to job creation and higher wages.

We hear some Republicans are nervous about this payroll tax debate, but they shouldn't be. If Republicans can't oppose a tax increase in a weak economy, they don't deserve to win the Senate majority. If they don't want to vote against a payroll tax cut, they can vote to offset the cost with spending cuts.

Like the entire Democratic agenda these days, Mr. Reid's tax gambit is preoccupied with income redistribution and politics. Fairness is trumping growth in Washington, which explains why we are getting so little of either.

Obama Pushing Shooters Off Public Lands - Washington Whispers (usnews.com)

2011-11-24T14:10:00.001-06:00

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/11/16/obama-pushing-shooters-off-public-lands

Obama Pushing Shooters Off Public Lands

Gun owners who have historically been able to use public lands for target practice would be barred from potentially millions of acres under new rules drafted by the Interior Department, the first major move by the Obama administration to impose limits on firearms.

Officials say the administration is concerned about the potential clash between gun owners and encroaching urban populations who like to use same land for hiking and dog walking.

"It's not so much a safety issue. It's a social conflict issue," said Frank Jenks, a natural resource specialist with Interior's Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres. He adds that urbanites "freak out" when they hear shooting on public lands. [Read about the subpoena issued as a result of Operation Fast and Furious.]

If the draft policy is finally approved, some public access to Bureau lands to hunters would also be limited, potentially reducing areas deer, elk, and bear hunters can use in the West.

Conservationists and hunting groups, however, are mounting a fight. One elite group of conservationists that advises Interior and Agriculture is already pushing BLM to junk the regulations, claiming that shooters are being held to a much higher safety standard than other users of public lands, such as ATV riders.

"They are just trying to make it so difficult for recreational shooters," said Gary Kania, vice president of the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation. His group is one of several, including the National Wildlife Foundation, Cabela's and Ducks Unlimited, on the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council fighting the new rules. During a two-day meeting ending this afternoon, they are drafting their own changes to the BLM rules.

"What we probably are going to be looking forward to is a reversal," said Kania. Asked about how to handle people who freak out when they hear shots on public lands, Kania said, "I don't know how to quanitify 'freaking out,'" and noted that he's seen people panicing when fly fishing in float tubes but nobody wants to ban then from rivers.

BLM actually invited the fight, seeking the council's comments. But officials suggested to Whispers that no changes are being planned to the draft regulations.

Over five pages, the draft BLM regulations raise concerns about how shooting can cause a "public disturbance." They also raise worries about how shooting and shooters can hurt plants and litter public lands.

This is the key paragraph foes say could lead to shooters being kicked off public lands:

"When the authorized officer determines that a site or area on BLM-managed lands used on a regular basis for recreational shooting is creating public disturbance, or is creating risk to other persons on public lands; is contributing to the defacement, removal or destruction of natural features, native plants, cultural resources, historic structures or government and/or private property; is facilitating or creating a condition of littering, refuse accumulation and abandoned personal property is violating existing use restrictions, closure and restriction orders, or supplementary rules notices, and reasonable attempts to reduce or eliminate the violations by the BLM have been unsuccessful, the authorized officer will close the affected area to recreational shooting." [Check out new Debate Club about whether Congress needs to overhaul gun trafficking laws.]

Squeezing out shooters, says the draft policy, is needed because, "As the West has become more populated, recreational shooters now often find themselves in conflict with other public lands users, and the BLM is frequently called on to mediate these conflicts."

At yesterday's meeting at Interior, the council balked at the BLM draft regulations, adding that the Obama administration was not being fair to shooters on the issue of safety.

In a draft retort to BLM, the council said other users of public land aren't required to be as safe as shooters. They note that shooters have a much lower injury rate than others, like ATV users. "The policy fails to recognize that recreational shooting has one of the lowest incidences of death and injury compared to virtually any other outdoor recreational activity. The policy is prejudicial and discriminatory to target shooters as compared to other recreationists," said the council's draft response, expected to be finalized today.

What's more, the group charged that the BLM is acting in a contradictory fashion, encouraging the shooting sports while limiting shooting areas.

See: the month's best political cartoons.
Read more: about Operation Fast and Furious.
Check out: our editorial cartoons on President Obama.

Kimberley Strassel: Obama's Virginia Defeat - WSJ.com

2011-11-11T17:34:00.001-06:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204358004577030481545613916.html

Obama's Virginia Defeat

Of all the noise of this week's state election results, what mattered most for Election 2012 came out of Virginia. It was the sound of the air leaking out of the Plouffe plan.

That would be David Plouffe, President Obama's former campaign manager and current senior strategist, who is focused today on how to cobble together 270 electoral votes for re-election. That's proving tough, what with the economy hurting Mr. Obama in states like Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania that he won in 2008. The White House's response has been to pin its hopes on a more roundabout path to electoral victory, one based on the Southern and Western states Mr. Obama also claimed in 2008.

States like Virginia. Mr. Obama was the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964; he beat John McCain by seven percentage points; and he did so on the strength of his appeal to Northern Virginia's many white-collar independents. Along with victories in North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, the Obama Old Dominion win in 2008 inspired a flurry of stories about how Democrats had forever altered the political map.

So the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state's former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats' "New Dominion." The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday's election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.

Let's just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.

Getty Images
Democrats were trounced in Tuesday's state legislature election, despite the president's heavy investment of time in the state.

Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber's votes—the party's largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn't work.

Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices—including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell—in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year's midterms.

Topline figures aside, what ought to really concern the White House was the nature of the campaign, and the breakout of Tuesday's election data. Mr. Obama may have big plans for Virginia, but the question is increasingly: him and what army?

Elected state Democrats—who form the backbone of grass-roots movements—couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race. Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.

State House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong felt compelled to run an ad protesting that it was a "stretch" for his GOP opponent to "compare me to Barack Obama." After all, he was "pro-life, pro-gun and I always put Virginia first." (Mr. Armstrong lost on Tuesday.)

Virginia Democrats were happy to identify with one top official: Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is providing a lesson in the benefits of smart GOP governance in battleground states. Criticized as being too socially conservative for Virginia when he was elected in 2009, Mr. McDonnell has won over voters by focusing on the economy and jobs. His approval ratings are in the 60s, and he helped raise some $5 million for local candidates. He's popular enough that Democrats took to including pictures of him in their campaign literature, and bragging that they'd worked with him.

Mr. McDonnell has been particularly adept at connecting with the independent, white-collar voters Mr. Obama used to win Virginia in 2008. That crowd lives in North Virginia's booming exurb counties of Prince William and Loudoun, and presidential races hinge on their votes. Mr. Obama's 2008 victory in Virginia rested on his significant wins in both Loudoun (8%) and Prince Williams (16%).

Yet Tuesday's results showed the extent to which that support has reversed. Loudoun in particular proved an unmitigated rout for Democrats. Republicans won or held three of four of the county's Senate seats. It swept all seven of the county's House seats. It won all nine slots on the county's Board of Supervisors, and pretty much every other county office. In Prince William, the story was much the same. This is what happens when a recent Quinnipiac poll shows Mr. Obama's approval rating among Virginia independents at 29%.

Democrats are now arguing that turnout (about 30%) was too low to prove anything, but then again, the particularly low Democratic turnout suggests that, on top of everything else, the White House really does face an enthusiasm gap. It's still got time to try to remedy that problem, and some other Virginia fundamentals. But going by Tuesday's results, Mr. Plouffe might need to start considering Electoral Plan C.

» Once Global Monetary Games Crumble, Stagflation Will Heat Up the Misery Index - Big Government

2011-11-05T14:27:00.001-05:00

http://biggovernment.com/cstreet/2011/11/05/once-global-monetary-games-crumble-stagflation-will-heat-up-the-misery-index/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigGovernment+%28Big+Government%29

Once Global Monetary Games Crumble, Stagflation Will Heat Up the Misery Index

by Chriss W. Street
With the 2008 "Credit Crisis" bursting the global housing bubble; the United States led and the world followed with the massive amounts of government spending and money-printing stimulus promoted by "Keynesian" economists. To stem the crashes in prices on stock and commodity exchanges and a run on European banks, the U.S. Federal Reserve enlisted the world's central banks in a coordinated drenching of the earth in vast amounts of freshly printed cash.

But as the crisis waned and the "Great Recession" began, governments and their central banks continued to pour wave after wave of Keynesian deficit spending and money printing. With economic activity about to slow and austerity shrinking excess government spending, the citizens of the world are about to be rewarded for their trust in government with a steep recession coupled with high levels of inflation. Economists refer to this witch's brew of escalating misery as stagflation.
The U.S. Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and other central banks around the world expanded money supplies by purchasing $2.5 trillion of sovereign debt and distressed banking assets to stem the risk of a deflationary spiral; from this, resultant lower wages and higher unemployment led to a self-reinforcing decline in global consumption.
The Congressional election sweep of 2008 launched a new political consensus that catapulted 2009 to 2011 at the largest deficit spending percentage increase since the Great Depression. What started out as a Keynesian an emergency economic rescue soon morphed into a permanent higher level of government spending and central bank money printing. But in a contradiction to the theory of Keynesian economics; this bold government intervention failed to generate economic growth and instead propelled global food and basic commodity inflation.
Bazaar levels of indebtedness and unwillingness to curtail spending has recently sparked a new European sovereign debt and bank insolvency crisis focusing on Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Germany, the only country to not implement Keynesian stimulus, is being asked as lender-of last-resort to bail out these countries, who are often grouped together with the acronym PIGS. The Teutonic tough love demanded by the Germans to rescue Greece is slashing public jobs equivalent to 20% of national employment and a decade-long economic squeeze on the consumer and corporate sectors that will shrivel the nation's standard-of-living by 1/3rd.
U.S. counter-Keynesian revolutionaries were swept into political power in January of 2011 on a mandate to banish deficit spending. The recent debt-ceiling compromise will slash $71 billion of spending this fiscal year. Add in the expiration of incentives, such as the 100% depreciation of capital purchases in 2011, plus the impact of continued fiscal tightening, and America's GDP will wither next year by 2%, or $300 billion. Getting government out of the economy will lead to big private sector growth in the future, but the transitional slowdown and spending austerity will lead to a nasty recession in the first half of 2012.
China, who benefited enormously by pegging their exchange rate to the U.S. dollar, has continued to stimulate their export economy by subsidizing state-owned-enterprises' commodity purchases and directing banks to loan at 2% borrowing costs. The result has been strong employment and flooding the world with products sold under their production cost. The dark side is the 15% inflation for consumer food and rent currently ravaging workers plus increasingly insolvent banks. As anger builds, China will be forced to reduce the subsidies and allow export prices to rise. To the world, this will generate a burst of inflation.
Governments have had great fun spending lots of borrowed money on their friends and allies. When recession began to cure over-leveraged consumers from speculating in houses, government used the pain of households de-leveraging as a green light to maximize spending. After three years of record expenditures, governments have become sub-prime and are now being forced to de-leverage. But the tsunami of government money is still sloshing around in the world economies and will continue to drive inflation of basic commodity prices higher.
This blend of government austerity with expiring tax incentives will soon pull the U.S. economy down, and the world's economy will follow. With our pre-recession Misery Index of 3.9% inflation and 9% unemployment already at the highest reading since Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, stirring in a severe recession will drive unemployment higher and make this witch's brew boil.
Feel free to forward this Op Ed and follow our blog at ChrissStreetAndCompany.com. Chriss Street's latest book, "The Third Way," is now available on Amazon. If you would like to order a signed copy, contact The Forum Press.

ACORN Officials Scramble, Firing Workers And Shredding Documents, After Exposed As Players Behind Occupy Wall Street Protests | Fox News

2011-11-03T20:47:00.000-05:00

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/03/acorn-officials-scramble-firing-workers-and-shredding-documents-after-exposed/

ACORN Officials Scramble, Firing Workers and Shredding Documents, After Exposed as Players Behind Occupy Wall Street Protests

Officials with the revamped ACORN office in New York -- operating as New York Communities for Change -- have fired staff, shredded reams of documents and told workers to blame disgruntled ex-employees for leaking information in an effort to explain away a FoxNews.com report last week on the group's involvement in Occupy Wall Street protests, according to sources.

NYCC also is installing surveillance cameras and recording devices at its Brooklyn offices, removing or packing away supplies bearing the name ACORN and handing out photos of Fox News staff with a stern warning not to talk to the media, the sources said.

"They're doing serious damage control right now," said an NYCC source.

NYCC Executive Director Jon Kest has been calling a series of emergency meetings to discuss last week's report—and taking extreme measures to identify the sources in their office and to prevent further damage, a source within NYCC told FoxNews.com.

Two staffers were fired after NYCC officials suspected them as the source of the leaks, a source told FoxNews.com. "One was fired the day the story came out, the other was fired on Friday. (NYCC senior staff) told everyone that they were fired because they talked to you," a source said.

NYCC spokesman Scott Levenson denied that anyone was fired for talking to the press.

FoxNews.com's report identified NYCC as a key organizing force behind the Occupy Wall Street protests. Sources within the group also told FoxNews.com NYCC was hiring people to carry signs and join the protests. NYCC -- a nonprofit organization run almost entirely by former ACORN officials and employees --did not reply for comment prior to the publication of the initial article, but later posted a statement on its website dismissing the article and denying that it pays protesters.

A source said that immediately following publication of the FoxNews.com report staff were called into the Brooklyn office for meetings headed by NYCC's organizing director, Jonathan Westin. Westin handed out copies of the article and went through it line-by-line, the source said.

Staffers were also given copies of photos of Senior Fox News Correspondent Eric Shawn and three other Fox News staff members, including this reporter.

"They reminded us that we can get fired, sued, arrested for talking to the press," the source said. "Then they went through the article point-by-point and said that the allegation that we pay people to protest isn't true."

"'That's the story that we're sticking to,'" Westin said, according to the source.

The source said staffers at the meeting contested Westin's denial:

"It was pretty funny. Jonathan told staff they don't pay for protesters, but the people in the meeting who work there objected and said, 'Wait, you pay us to go to the protests every day?' Then Jonathan said 'No, but that's your job,' and staffers were like, 'Yeah, our job is to protest,' and Westin said, 'No your job is to fight for economic and social justice. We just send you to protest.'

"Staff said, 'Yes, you pay us to carry signs.' Then Jonathan says, 'That's your job.' It went on like that back and forth for a while."

During the meetings, NYCC Deputy Director Greg Basta provided Westin with the copied photos of Fox News reporters to hand out to staff members, the source said. Basta told staffers they might be asked about the article when out in communities working on campaigns or when calling people by phone, the source said.

"They told us if people bring up the article, we're supposed to say the source and all the stuff in there came from a disgruntled ex-employee who's not working with us anymore."

NYCC is also monitoring its staff's behavior, cracking down on phone use and socialization. Officials have ordered all papers -- even scraps -- to be shredded every night, the source said.

"And all the supplies—everything around the office that said 'ACORN' -- is now all in storage until this blows over," the source said. "People literally have to cover up the cameras on the back of their cellphones in the office."

"Now there's no texting in the office, no phone calls in the office. They tell us to take our phone calls out into the waiting room where there's an intercom, and then they turn on the intercom to hear our conversations. They're installing new cameras and speakers around the building so they can hear everything.

"It's almost like working at Fort Knox."

NYCC officials declined repeated requests to respond to specific questions about the organization's response to last week's story. The group on Wednesday instead sent this statement, attributed to NYCC board member Jean Sassine:

"New York Communities for Change participates in protests, direct action, social activism and campaigns that promote social and economic justice. We see FOX as the enemy to those efforts. For the record, this is consistent with Fox attacks on Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod, George Soros, Citizen Action, Planned Parenthood and all those who stand for social justice. Once again, FOX entertainment poses as FOX News. Once again, FOX makes a series of false, unsubstantiated claims and accusations which have no basis in fact. Once again, through a series of sources FOX structures a story which is nothing but a series of lies."

Westin did respond to some questions a day earlier, when approached by FoxNews.com at an NYCC event in Manhattan.

When asked if a staff member was fired because people thought he'd talked to the press, Westin said, "I have no idea." When asked about handing out photos of Fox News employees, he said, "I have been? No, I don't think I have been. That wasn't me."

Westin did acknowledge NYCC staff have met to discuss last week's report. "People talked about it," he said. "People are interested."

He also deflected a question about the allegation that staffers were being told to blame the report on disgruntled staffers, telling this reporter to contact him later via email.

Responding to reports of pushback from staffers who said they were being paid to go to the protests, and reports NYCC had recently hired people as canvassers or organizers and then sent them to the protests, Westin replied repeatedly "We don't pay people to protest."

Westin later did not reply to two emails asking for follow-up.

Obama: Campaigning Like It's 1936 - Forbes

2011-10-30T20:55:00.000-05:00

http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/10/28/obama-campaigning-like-its-1936/

Obama: Campaigning Like It's 1936

Image by Tony the Misfit via Flickr

While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing variations of a flat income tax, President Obama's tax-the-rich campaign strategy is looking backward—to Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 reelection campaign. FDR won his reelection, but the American people lost: Roosevelt's new taxes on business and the "economic royalists" gave us the "Roosevelt recession" of 1937-38.

By August of 1935, Roosevelt had achieved some of his signature pieces of legislation: a new entitlement program known as Social Security, banking reform, pro-union reform, infrastructure expansion and massive transfers of wealth to the poor and middle classes. Sound familiar?

FDR also ran up federal spending significantly: from 6 percent to 9 percent of the economy.

However, FDR needed more revenue to support his big-government schemes. More importantly, he needed a villain to explain why, given the passage of his New Deal legislation, government spending and regulations, the economy was still struggling.

So he proposed raising taxes on the rich, which he dubbed a "Wealth Tax." As he explained to Congress in June 1935, "Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent the unjust concentration of wealth and economic power. … Social unrest and a deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must minimize by rigorous methods." President Obama couldn't have said it better himself.

There were several components to FDR's plan. First he wanted very high taxes on the rich—up to 79 percent—and to lower the thresholds so that more high-income earners paid more taxes. He also wanted to increase the estate tax. As for business, he wanted to close the "loopholes," a graduated corporate income tax and a tax on intercorporate dividends.

But the bill that actually passed the Democratically controlled Congress in 1935 would not raise much money—estimated at about $250 million, which initially seemed like enough to cover budgetary shortfalls. FDR's associates acknowledged at the time that the Wealth Tax was more about politics than policy, or as Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau put it, "it was more or less a campaign document."

However, by 1936 Roosevelt needed yet more revenue and had apparently grown to relish his new class warfare and railing against "organized money." So he proposed another business tax: an undistributed profits tax.

Like Obama, FDR faced what he saw as a big problem: Businesses had a lot of cash on hand but weren't spending it. "Regime uncertainty," the reluctance of business to hire and invest when faced with a growing onslaught of new taxes and regulations, suppressed capital spending. No one knew what the future held so businesses held on to their cash hoping to survive. Again, sound familiar?

Roosevelt believed that forcing businesses to spend that money would create jobs. So he proposed, and got, his undistributed profits tax. If the government were going to tax idle money anyway, maybe businesses would put it to work.

Page 2 of 2

The irony, of course, is that the more FDR dreamed up new taxes and regulations to get the economy moving, the more regime uncertainty he created. And those efforts had a predictable effect: the economy began to turn south in 1937, resulting in the Roosevelt recession. Unemployment had fallen from a high of 24.9 percent in 1933 to 16.9 percent in 1936, the year of FDR's first reelection—still significantly higher than the post-war high of 7.5 percent during Reagan's 1984 reelection and the current, and likely to remain, 9.1 percent unemployment rate under Obama.

However, unemployment under Reagan and Roosevelt were dropping quickly in their reelection years, which boosted voter confidence. Not so with Obama. And Obama's embracing of FDR's "soak the rich" tax policies—as FDR's critics called it—will do just as much economic harm now as they did then. While the unemployment rate fell to 14.3 percent in 1937, it rose to 19 percent in 1938 and only declined to 17.2 percent in 1939.*

If President Obama is trying to draw lessons from FDR's 1936 reelection, he is learning the wrong ones. FDR had a huge majority in both houses of Congress, so he was able to get his class-warfare agenda passed—though his efforts expanded the growing divide between conservative and liberal Democrats. Obama may complain about the need to tax the rich; Republicans won't let him do it.

In addition, the country leaned more to the left then, with several national demagogues—including Louisiana Senator Huey Long, Francis Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin—constantly pulling FDR leftward (whether FDR really resisted that leftward tug is a matter of opinion). There really is no strong national voice to the left of Obama, except for MSNBC and perhaps Occupy Wall Street.

The lesson Obama should be learning from the 1936 election is that FDR's Wealth Tax and class warfare set the economic recovery back years. Obama's effort to channel FDR's policies and reelection success would have exactly the same impact.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow at http://twitter.com/MerrillMatthews

* For a discussion of the best figures for pre-war unemployment rates see Robert A. Margo, "Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993.

Obama Administration Pulls the Plug on Their Failed Health-Care ‘Ponzi Scheme’ | Committee On The Budget

2011-10-15T09:24:00.001-05:00

http://budget.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=264552

Obama Administration Pulls the Plug on Their Failed Health-Care 'Ponzi Scheme' | Committee On The Budget

Obama Administration Pulls the Plug on Their Failed Health-Care 'Ponzi Scheme'

The President's Health-Care Law's House of Cards Begins to Crumble
October 14, 2011

WASHINGTON – Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin issued the following statement regarding the Obama Administration's decision to discontinue a key component of its health-care law:

"To hide the true cost of their health-care overhaul, the leaders of the Democratic party loaded it with gimmicks and double-counting. One of the most egregious of these gimmicks involved the CLASS Act, a new long-term care program that was scored as an offset against the ten-year, trillion-dollar cost of the Democrats new law. Independent health care experts warned that the CLASS Act program would turn into a classic 'insurance death spiral.' Not only would the short-term savings fail to materialize, but the long-term costs would prove catastrophically high. Even Democratic Senator Kent Conrad called the program 'A Ponzi scheme Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.'

"Today, the Obama Administration finally surrendered to reality: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has informed Congressional leaders that she 'does not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.' The smoke and mirrors that the Democrats employed to sell their health care overhaul are finally falling away, one broken promise at a time. When all of these gimmicks are stripped out, the new law would add hundreds of billions of dollars in red ink over the next decade, as health-care costs send the debt spiraling out of control. Now it is time for Congress to do the responsible thing: Repeal the disastrous new law and replace it with true, patient-centered reforms."

For more information: http://budget.house.gov/healthcare/

New Obama metric: “Jobs supported” « Hot Air

2011-10-14T05:09:00.001-05:00

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/13/new-obama-metric-jobs-supported/

New Obama metric: "Jobs supported"

Old and busted: Jobs "saved or created." New hotness: Jobs "supported." In attempting to advance the argument for Barack Obama's new jobs stimulus plan, the White House has decided to create a new term that has, er, even less meaning than their previous measure:

The American Jobs Act Will Support Nearly 400,000 Education Jobs—Preventing Layoffs and Allowing Thousands More to Be Hired or Rehired: The President's plan will more than offset projected layoffs, providing support for nearly 400,000 education jobs—enough for states to avoid harmful layoffs and rehire tens of thousands of teachers who lost their jobs over the past three years.

How exactly did the White House come up with its new metric? Chuck Blahous gives us a detailed analysis of exactly how they crafted this measure to be, well, unmeasurable:

To start the process of estimating educator jobs at risk, the Administration refers to a June, 2011 paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (a left-of-center think tank). This paper quantifies recent and projected shortfalls in state budgets.

The Administration then makes various assumptions about how the projected shortfalls would be filled. In effect, they assume first that shortfalls would be filled by a combination of tax increases and spending reductions, and then that spending cuts would be applied proportionally across all categories including education. As the Administration materials state, "These spending reduction numbers were then converted into estimates of educator jobs at risk based on estimates of average teacher compensation by state. These calculations implied that, if spending reductions had their full negative impact on education staffing, up to 280,000 educator jobs across the country would be at risk in the 2011-2012 school year."

The Administration then points to $30 billion in spending contained in the proposed American Jobs Act. The purpose of this spending, as specified in the bill text, is to "prevent teacher layoffs and support the creation of additional jobs in public early childhood, elementary, and secondary education in the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years."

Does this give readers a sense of deja vu? The block grants in Porkulus also assumed that states would simply lay off teachers and first responders as a result of large-scale budget deficits in the throes of the Great Recession. That's where jobs "saved and created" originated; Obama and his team meant public-sector employees in states and local governments. Only those organizations employ a lot more people than just teachers, police officers, and fire fighters; most states have vast bureaucracies that ended up getting "saved" thanks to the infusion of cash that allowed legislatures to put off tough decisions on the size and nature of government during the economic crisis.

Well, the acute economic crisis is over. What's the excuse for procrastination now? Instead of having the states take responsibility for tough budget decisions, Obama wants to let states like Illinois and California off the hook by forcing other states to subsidize their bad budgeting decisions. Why? Take a look at the recent history of the Electoral College for one reason, and the fact that most of these bureaucrats belong to public-employee unions like SEIU and AFCSME for another reason. That's what Obama is "supporting." Let's recall the extensive reporting in 2009 that showed that jobs "saved or created" were a myth, even in the public sector:

At the time, I called these "Porkulus fables," and it looks like jobs "supported" will be the newest addition to the Obama pantheon of mythical creatures. Blahous explains why:

First, the initial assumption made is that in the absence of these federal appropriations, states would make no effort to prioritize education spending relative to across-the-board budget cuts. Federal funding is to be credited with "supporting" any "job at risk" that is not lost, without accounting for displacement effects. In the real world, however, the presence or absence of external funding for a particular spending priority will have enormous spillover effects upon the tough decisions states and localities must otherwise make to operate within existing budget constraints.

Second, this foundational assumption clashes with empirical results like those shown in Figure 4 of the Administration paper – in which local education employment is seen to plummet virtually at the precise moment that the 2009 Recovery Act's funds are reportedly supporting education job retention. Advocates will naturally say that "without the funds, the employment decline would have been much worse." This could well be true to a significant extent, but just as with the "jobs created or saved" claims this is essentially being assumed rather than demonstrated.

Third, there are some conspicuous gaps in the chain of reasoning. The basic logic is that teacher layoffs are driven by state budget shortfalls; funding provided to states/localities under the jobs bill would therefore prevent future layoffs and allow rehires of those previously let go. But the Administration's state-by-state projections of education jobs "supported" doesn't fully comport with this representation. For example, the original CBPP paper shows no shortfalls for either Montana or North Dakota in any of fiscal years 2009-13. Yet the Administration document shows a (small) number of jobs "supported" in each of those states under their proposals. This makes little sense if state budgeting shortfalls are indeed the source of all of the education "jobs at risk."

The biggest problem is that even if numbers of "jobs at risk" were correct, this would tell us nothing about the desirability of the Administration's proposed policy response. The figures presented effectively describe a set of assumptions about state budgets; they carry no hard information about the efficacy of the AJA. And so we are left with a number that draws no clear connection between the policy advocated and the results claimed. By this same standard, virtually any advocate could reasonably claim that an opposing approach to funding education at the state level would "support nearly 400,000 jobs" – almost irrespective of the specific policy. For evaluating the relative merit of policy alternatives, this is not illuminating.

The cost per job supported comes in right at $75,000 per job, too — which sounds like about the average compensation level for public-sector employees when counting overhead. This presumes that the program has no overhead costs of its own, and I suspect it will resemble the "saved or created" metric in that the only proof of the jobs being "supported" will be the fact that the money got spent. As the series of Porkulus fables proved, that assumption failed badly with "saved or created," and there's no reason to believe it will work any better with "jobs supported."

China or the US? Make your choice - FT.com

2011-10-03T18:23:00.001-05:00

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7885de20-edab-11e0-a9a9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1ZlQ5NwTz

China or the US? Make your choice

The defining geopolitical drama of the next century will be the battle for power and influence between China and America. That emerging struggle is already posing awkward choices for Asian countries, caught between the two global giants.

On Monday the US Senate was expected to pass a bill allowing for the imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods. Even if the protectionist drive in America now pauses for a while, this confrontational mood in the US poses a dilemma for China's neighbours. China is now the largest trading partner for Japan, India, Australia, South Korea and most of the nations of south-east Asia. But these countries still have their most important military relationship with the US. How long can their economic and strategic interests point in different directions?

Not for long, if one is to judge by an editorial in the People's Daily last week. The official newspaper of the Chinese Communist party took aim at "certain countries" who "think as long as they can balance China with the help of US military power, they are free to do whatever they want".

The article was probably provoked by a statement from Japan and the Philippines, the previous day, in which the two countries promised to boost naval co-operation and implicitly disputed China's extensive territorial claims in the South China Sea. But China's warning could equally have been aimed at Vietnam, India, South Korea, Australia or Taiwan – all of whom have moved over the past year to strengthen military ties with America.

The irony, of course, is that it is precisely Chinese sabre-rattling, exemplified by that article in the People's Daily, that is sending its neighbours running screaming into the arms of Uncle Sam. Until recently China seemed to be playing an intelligent waiting game – relying on its growing economic strength to draw its neighbours inexorably into a Chinese sphere of influence. Now the People's Republic risks overplaying its hand – and so creating the anti-Chinese alliance that it both fears and denounces.

A more patient policy would make sense for China because it is likely to be the world's largest economy by 2020. The US remains the world's dominant military power – and is even the pre-eminent military force in China's own Pacific backyard. But since political and military power usually track economic power, American hegemony in the Pacific Ocean may ultimately be unsustainable. It is this point that the People's Daily was alluding to, when it warned – "No country wants to give back their ticket for the high-speed train of China's economic development."

With the US government borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that it spends – and China the largest foreign buyer of US debt – the Chinese are indirectly funding American military dominance of the Pacific. Even as America's allies in the region move to strengthen ties with the US, they worry that America's money problems will force the country to scale back in the Pacific. At the same time, China is building up its own military. American planners point to the development of a new range of Chinese missiles that directly threaten the airbases and aircraft carriers on which America bases its military dominance in the Pacific.

China's neighbours are also worried by the country's growing muscle – and its willingness to flex it. Over the past couple of years, China's maritime disputes with Vietnam and Japan have taken on a new bitterness – with clashes on the high seas followed by bitter diplomatic exchanges. The Indians say that China is becoming more assertive about its claims to parts of Indian territory. The South Koreans are also jumpy about China's relationship with the North.

The dark interpretation of China's actions is that nationalist forces and the country's military are becoming more influential in Beijing. A younger generation is coming to power, schooled to believe that China has been victimised by the outside world because it has been weak. The current contrast in the economic fortunes of China and America has also increased China's confidence and assertiveness.

A more benign interpretation of Chinese actions is that the country now has a growing range of economic interests around the world – which makes it all but inevitable that it will spend a lot more on its military and will be tougher in asserting its interests. The hungry Chinese economy is dependent on imported energy – and would be vulnerable to a naval blockade. Building a few aircraft carriers and submarines, and pushing China's claims to the energy riches of the South China Sea, might seem like a sensible precaution for the Chinese government – rather than the aggressive claim to regional dominance that its neighbours fear.

Yet even this relatively benign interpretation of China's actions is not entirely reassuring. It suggests that China and the US are increasingly likely to interpret each other's actions and alliances as threatening – and to respond in ways that then feed the other side's perception of aggression. This is a pattern of great power behaviour that might ring a bell for students of 20th century history.

Yet amid all these tensions, diplomatic exchanges across the Pacific continue. Next month Barack Obama will host all the major powers of the region, including China, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit that will be held in the president's native Hawaii. Perhaps Mr Obama should arrange a trip to Pearl Harbor to remind everybody of the dangers of strategic miscalculation in the Pacific.

Paul Hyde, PMP

214-302-7442

24 Hours of ManBearPig – Telegraph Blogs

2011-09-21T22:03:00.001-05:00

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100104897/24-hours-of-manbearpig/

24 Hours of ManBearPig

Today is ManBearPig day. World renowned carbon trader and masseuse enthusiast Al Gore will be kicking off the celebrations by showing wall-to-wall eco-porn videos of weather doing scary things; stock markets across Europe will be collapsing in sympathy with the Prince of Wales's recent claims that economic growth is unhealthy and we must all live more "sustainably" (ie in abject poverty); and here on this blog we plan to commemorate this glorious event with fun, games and some of our favourite South Park, Futurama and Eco-loon propaganda videos.

Altogether now: "GLOBAL WARMING! WE DIDN'T LISTEN!!!!"

Here is a Futurama:

Here's an incredibly lame one from Futurama which pretends to be funny but is actually just PR for a complicit Al Gore:

Here's the CEI's take on ManBearPig day:

Here's some high gloss toss from the trustafarian Luddites at Plane Stupid:

Here's the WWF with its characteristic charm and lightness of touch, making light of 9/11

Here's the South Park episode that introduced the world to ManBearPig

Here's where you can download a transcript of the police interview with the victim of Gore's alleged wandering hands when he booked a massage in Portland, Oregon. Not for the weak of stomach it includes the phrase "sex-crazed poodle."

Here's the funny video put together by Franny, Eugenie and all their lovely friends including cuddly Richard "Vicar of Dibley" Curtis, that fit actress out of X Files, Radiohead and some famous footballers, in which they hilariously suggest that people who don't believe in Man Made Global Warming should be executed.

Here's Greenpeace grooming tomorrow's eco-fascists:

And here, just to lighten the tone a bit after all that worthy misery, is a fun new game from CFACT in which you fire corks at cows bottoms to prevent them releasing deadly greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere….. I've tried it. It's fun, with something of the brainless, addictive quality of Angry Birds or Hungry Shark, only with Farting Cows instead.

Al Gore's five loaves and two fishes – Telegraph Blogs

2011-09-21T22:00:00.000-05:00

NOTE: The ManBearPig pusher is no Christopher Columbus.......

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100106264/al-gores-five-loaves-and-two-fishes/

Al Gore's five loaves and two fishes

Not content with having invented the internet, the great Climate Science communicator Al Gore appears to have developed still more miraculous skills of late: the ability to turn 17,000 into 8.6 million – just like that.

The figures refer to the number of "views" for Gore's special "24 Hours Of ManBearPig" which this column helped celebrate the other day. Gore claims that as many as 8.6 million flocked to his thrilling festival of climate fear; but a nasty cruel man called Charles the Moderator at Watts Up With That? has "done the math" and reckons the figure is probably more like 17,000. And that, he believes, is a generous estimate. (H/T John from CA).

So whom are we to trust? An evil climate denying website run by evil climate deniers? Or a loving family man who has selflessly made it his mission to travel the world acquiring as large a carbon footprint as possible in order to spread the word that we should all drastically reduce our carbon footprints?

I'm with Gore, obviously. Not only has his knowledge and insight proved hugely influential on our own beloved Prime Minister's climate policies – "I've just had a meeting with Al Gore. He really knows his stuff", David Cameron once told a distinguished businessman who'd come hoping for a quiet word about his economically disastrous environmental policies – but it's quite obvious that he really is a man with the power to work miracles.

Just look, for example, at the magical way he has managed to make his fortune grow. In 2000, the year he lost the presidential election, he was worth a modest $1-2 million. Now his fortune has swollen to well over $100 million, thanks to partly to his $100,000 plus speaking engagements (which have earned him at least $10 million) and partly to his canny green investment decisions (such as his decision to pull his investments out of the Chicago Carbon Trading exchange before it collapsed due to global lack of interest in trading an Emperor's New Clothes commodity invented by Enron's Kenneth Lay and championed by an even dodgier Hawaiian/Kenyan born Chicago lawyer).

Not everyone, unfortunately, seems to share my enthusiasm. Indeed it is being whispered in some quarters that Al Gore has become nothing but an embarrassment to the green movement. And this from some of his former biggest fans!

Rep. Joe Walsh: Media Will Show ‘Real Desperation’ to Protect Obama | CNSnews.com

2011-09-21T21:32:00.000-05:00

NOTE: I would agree with this...

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rep-joe-walsh-media-will-show-real-desperation-protect-obama

Rep. Joe Walsh: Media Will Show 'Real Desperation' to Protect Obama

Rep. Joe Walsh (R.-Ill.) speaking at a Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill on July 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg)

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Joe Walsh (R.-Ill.) said Wednesday in an interview with Media Research Center President Brent Bozell that he believes the media will show "real desperation" to protect President Barack Obama during the 2012 campaign.

Having noted that Tea Party audiences show tremendous enthusiasm for Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, Bozell asked: "Yet, you see this administration playing class warfare and race warfare games. Now, that's their problem. But what does it say about the national media that they are aiding and abetting this by not exposing the dishonesty here?"

"This guy pushed every one of the media's buttons," Walsh said. "He was liberal, he was different, he was new, he was black. Oh my God, it was the potpourri of everything.

"They are so vested in our first black president not being a failure that it's going to be amazing to watch the lengths they go to to protect him," Walsh continued. "They, I believe, will spout this racist line if some of their colleagues up here aren't doing it aggressively enough. There is going to be a real desperation."

Walsh added that he believed the campaign should not be personal, but should be about public policy. However, he did not believe the president's allies would follow that rule.

"His policies to my way of thinking are destroying this country," said Walsh. "We need to keep the discussion at that level. But the other side won't. The other side is going to personalize it. And [Texas Gov.] Rick Perry, Michele [Bachmann], whoever our nominee is going to be, is going to really be in to it."

CNSNews.com is a part of the Media Research Center.

What would a Libertarian Do?

2011-08-21T15:41:00.000-05:00

Why is Everyone Still Ignoring Ron Paul?

2011-08-17T16:45:00.001-05:00

The Daily Show - Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Understanding the Debt Ceiling Deal « Intellectual Conservative Politics and Philosophy

2011-08-14T16:31:00.001-05:00

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2011/08/01/understanding-the-debt-ceiling-deal/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Understanding the Debt Ceiling Deal

Boehner has thrown in with the governmentalist Looters. Is he ignorant of the fact that he's helping to kill the nation?

Shortly before this column was published the House of Representatives approved a deal on the debt ceiling debate and life will go back to normal, until the next time that loudmouth at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue screams that the entire world will be sucked into a gigantic chipper-shredder unless he gets his way. The Senate can be expected to follow suit. But more important than the next impending fake disaster is exactly why the Democrats and their allies cannot understand the TEA Party inspired legislators who refuse to be bought, and won't compromise their principles on government spending. This issue is the other side of the coin of why the big government types cannot stop spending and regulating.

An interesting perspective on this issue was provided by the Trifecta Team at PJTV the other day when they invoked a scene from Atlas Shrugged. John Galt is being begged by the Looters (as Any Rand rightfully calls them) to solve the nation's economic problems. Galt tells them to get out of the way, that is return to the free market. They refuse and Galt says that they have nothing more to discuss. This was the bottom line issue at bar in the debt ceiling debate, although no one appears to have actually said it in the halls of Congress. It may be about time that they did.

What so many people fail to understand is that we are facing the same issues in our real world as Ayn Rand's characters did in her philosophical novel. Government had taken over everything and as a result nothing worked. Yet, the people in charge didn't understand why the more they taxed and spent and regulated the worse everything became. It seemed to them that some mysterious force was working against them. After all, what they wanted was to make things better, not worse. It made no sense (to them).

That's the paradox of the free market. When someone believes that regulation brings about prosperity a free market makes no sense. Someone who believes in eliminating risk cannot comprehend that doing so also eliminates the possibility of reward. To the entrepreneur and the gambler it makes perfect sense, but to the political hack and his or her colleagues trapped inside the beltway it doesn't. They believe that they are doing the right thing and their intentions govern their expectations.

When big government advocates take the extreme measure of consulting the management of giant businesses such as GE they invariably get the wrong information. Companies of such size and sophistication have learned that they can use political influence for their benefit; the market be damned if they can make a few million more bucks by eliminating competition. They know that government regulation is the easiest way to do it. How do you expect to get valid information from an unreliable source operating from an ulterior motive?

Just the other day Nancy Pelosi was recorded talking about how she saw her role in politics as relating to her role as a mother and grandmother. This certainly fits; Pelosi has finally admitted to what a lot of people have been accusing her of for years; trying to be the nation's mother in chief because she believes that she knows what's best for everyone. To take it a step farther, she fails to understand one of the comments she made in connection with the above. There are things you can't provide for your children. So, instead of admitting it and letting the children do it themselves, she insists on persisting in the vain attempt. Intentions, once again get in the way of reality.

To cut to the short answer, Nancy Pelosi believes in social engineering and that no one can achieve their needs or desires without the engineers and managers helping them or providing it to order. It is likely that engineer Herbert Hoover had a similar belief when he intervened after the stock market crash of 1929 and made things worse, after which FDR did more of the same creating the Great Depression. This is essentially the same attitude that led to the enactment of the recent "Affordable Health Care Act" aka Obamacare which is making health care more expensive and will likely destroy our health care system completely if not repealed.

To return to political impasse, the "obstructionist" TEA Party types have little or no common ground with the professional politician types. They have lives outside the beltway, and unlike many of the fat cats, they have reason to be concerned about the future wellbeing of their family members. Because they aren't fat cats that future depends on something other than trust funds. They know that the nation is being driven off a cliff and they don't like it. The opposition won't understand this, because they equate intent with results. When the economy finally hits the wall and either implodes or resorts to hyperinflation they won't understand that either. Only a fool like Joe Biden would declare that continued profligate spending shows financial responsibility. He probably believes it too, because it will benefit the nation ... until it doesn't and then he and his friends will have what they need to survive the disaster that will befall everyone else. It is likely that, as Hitler did when the Red Army entered Berlin, Pelosi, Reid, Obama and company will blame the people for not being worthy instead of their own misguided policies. It would only be fitting.

This writer has been very disappointed in some of the big name political commentators who have suggested that it is time to declare a " moral victory" and take what we can get from a less than ideal congressional bill. That's not the point. A moral victory would mean delaying national destruction for another 10 or 20 years. But what is happening in Washington DC right now is nothing less than a fight for the nation's survival. If the government backs down and stops spending the people will win and the nation may survive. If the government looters win then the nation will eventually fall, and in today's world of rapidly moving events that could be all too soon. It took centuries for Rome to fall. Today it could take only a year or so. Perhaps less.

Unfortunately in the House vote the looters won. That's not even a moral victory. It is pretending that you aren't committing suicide even as you pull the trigger on the gun pressed to your head.

We all know that definition of insanity - doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. When the government Looters expected John Galt to get them out of trouble by engineering a government solution they were continuing their insanity. Pelosi and Reid are just as insane. What you conclude about Obama depends upon whether you believe he wants to help America but doesn't understand how, or that he is out to destroy the nation because of a perverted hatred of capitalist success. Either way, disaster will follow. The motivation is irrelevant.

America's John Galts are its small business owners, and its ordinary citizens who live their lives by common sense. Government doesn't listen to them because it doesn't understand how such common people could know better than they do. But common sense dictates that you can't spend your way to prosperity and you can't regulate your way to freedom. If government doesn't get out of the way it will thwart its own professed goals.

As Bobby Eberle wrote on August 1, 2011, "Why does an "immediate" cut take 10 years?" This question is right on point. The recent "deals" have all amounted to immediate increases in spending that exceed the graduated spending cuts. The result is that the vast majority of these projected cuts won't take place and are, in fact, decreases in anticipated increases in future spending. No, that isn't double talk.

The House of Representatives, despite all the media coverage to the contrary has just given away the store. Obama got what he wanted and the people got nothing. Boehner and company have just thrown in with the looters and have decided to kill the nation. After all, they will survive. Who cares about the rest of the people.

» What Are the Consequencs of the Obama Downgrade? - Big Government

2011-08-14T16:18:00.001-05:00

http://biggovernment.com/dmitchell/2011/08/06/what-are-the-consequencs-of-the-obama-downgrade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigGovernment+%28Big+Government%29

What Are the Consequencs of the Obama Downgrade?

by Dan Mitchell

Even though I predicted it had to happen at some point because of the Bush-Obama spending binge and America's giant long-run entitlement crisis, I confess that I'm somewhat surprised that the United States has suffered a debt downgrade for the first time.

That being said, I don't think the downgrade will matter. Everyone knew the U.S. was heading in the wrong direction before the announcement by Standard & Poor. Moreover, big investors have very few attractive options for where to place their money – thanks to a weak global economy. As such, I suspect the federal government will still be able to borrow money at very low rates.

What does matter, however, is that the American economy is burdened with a bloated public sector that is sapping the nation's economic vitality. And this problem will get worse every year because of a toxic combination of poorly designed entitlement programs and demographic change.

As the government gets bigger, this hinders growth by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy. The damage is then compounded by the fact that the two main ways of financing the public sector – taxes and borrowing – both have additional adverse economic consequences.

In other words, the United States has fiscal cancer. Yet rather than try to cure the disease, politicians are – at best – kicking the can down the road. Here is my dour assessment on Bloomberg.

The only glimmer of hope, as I wrote yesterday, is that House Republicans have made serious efforts to restrain the burden of federal spending.

S&P credit rating analysis values spending cuts more than tax revenue - The Hill's Floor Action

2011-08-14T16:17:00.001-05:00

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/175755-sap-values-spending-cuts-more-than-tax-revenue-in-credit-rating-analysis

S&P credit rating analysis values spending cuts more than tax revenue

Standard & Poor's laments the possibility cuts to entitlement programs won't materialize and the decreasing likelihood of new tax revenues.

The decision by Standard & Poor's to downgrade the U.S. credit rating to "AA+" at once laments the possibility that cuts to entitlement programs will not materialize and the decreasing likelihood of new tax revenues. But it appears to give more weight to the need for more spending cuts, as it warns that a further credit rating downgrade is in the cards if the U.S. does not trim spending.

In contrast, while the report indicates that new tax revenues would help mitigate the debt crisis, failing to find these revenues does not immediately put the U.S. at risk of another downgrade.

Specifically, the report warns directly that a further downgrade to "AA" status could occur within the next two years if there is "less reduction in spending" than what was agreed in the debt ceiling agreement. S&P said one factor that could lead to this second downgrade is if the minimum $1.2 trillion in spending cuts under the debt ceiling agreement does not occur.

But S&P sees the continuation of the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 as something that could still allow the U.S. to maintain its new "AA+" rating.

While this difference would seem to put a greater emphasis on spending cuts, the report more broadly seems to value both spending cuts and tax revenues as a way out of the debt crisis. S&P said it takes no position on the "mix of spending and revenue measures" needed to put the U.S. back on a path to its historic "AAA" rating, a sign that it believes both are needed in some measure.

It also laments Congress's failure to find a way forward on either prescription as part of the debt ceiling agreement.

"It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options," the report said. "In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability."

While Democrat and Republican leaders on Friday night argued that the S&P report shows the need for more taxes and more cuts, respectively, the report pointed out the benefits of both. The report's "base case scenario" assumes that a minimum of $2.1 trillion in spending cuts are made as part of the debt ceiling agreement, and assumes that the Bush tax cuts do not expire.

Under this base case scenario, net general government debt would rise from 74 percent of GDP in 2011 to 79 percent in 2015, and 85 percent in 2021.

But the S&P's revised "upside scenario" assumes that the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013, which it said would slow these increases. If the tax cuts expire, S&P expects the debt-to-GDP ratio to increase more slowly, to 77 percent by 2015 and 78 percent in 2021.

S&P's revised "downside scenario" shows the cost of not following through on spending cuts. In this case, the debt-to-GDP ratio would increase to 90 percent in 2015 and 101 percent by 2021.

The report does not say these increases would be due to the lack of spending cuts alone -- also part of this downside scenario is an assumption that interest rates rise, and the presence of other less favorable economic conditions.

Rob Portman: Make the Dollar-for-Dollar Rule Permanent - WSJ.com

2011-08-14T16:16:00.000-05:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903341404576483791295988516.html

Make the Dollar-for-Dollar Rule Permanent

By ROB PORTMAN

Congress and the president have finally agreed to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt limit, along with spending cuts of an equal or greater amount. There are many points of view about the final agreement, but here's a positive aspect of the underlying principle: If we pledge to hold all future debt-limit increases to the same "dollar-for-dollar" standard, we can balance the budget within a decade.

Increases in the debt limit used to be routine. In fact, for many years the House of Representatives did not even take a stand-alone vote to raise the debt limit, but rather employed the so-called Gephardt Rule to "deem" the necessary increase every time they passed a budget expanding the debt. As a result, the past decade saw the national debt soar to $14.3 trillion from $5.6 trillion with no significant deficit-reduction bills attached to any of its 10 debt-limit increases.

That era is over. With this latest debt-limit increase, Congress—at the wise suggestion of House Speaker John Boehner—adopted a new standard: that the bill raising the debt limit must also cut an equal amount of spending over the following decade. In this instance, rather than accede to President Obama's demand as recently as this spring for a "clean" debt-limit increase, Congress matched a $2.4 trillion increase with at least $2.4 trillion in spending savings over the decade.

My hope is that Congress and the president will make further structural spending reforms to respond to the fiscal crisis. But at a minimum, lawmakers should commit to making the "dollar-for-dollar" rule a permanent debt-limit policy. Using Congressional Budget Office data, I have calculated that if we apply this every time we reach the debt limit over the next 10 years, we will balance the budget by 2021 without raising tax rates over current rates.

That's more than $5 trillion in spending cuts over the decade. And because many of these spending reforms would necessarily carry over past 2021, the savings in the following decade would be even larger. If this framework were followed, starting in 2021 budget surpluses would end the era of debt-limit increases.

Granted, cutting more than $5 trillion over the next decade will be challenging. But that is out of the $46 trillion in projected spending which increases the annual budget by 57%. So there is room to cut.

Corbis

With this agreement, Congress has already begun a process to cut the first $2.4 trillion with nearly $1 trillion of those savings up front. I've identified more than $2.8 trillion in possible spending reductions that have received bipartisan support through either Vice President Joe Biden's working group, the Senate Gang of Six, or other bipartisan legislative or public pronouncements. Any of those proposed cuts that do not make it into this current two-step reform should be applied to the next round.

All spending should be on the table. Discretionary spending—both defense and nondefense—has surged in recent years and cannot be excluded from responsible spending reforms. Entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must also be modernized and reformed to aid 77 million retiring baby boomers and yet ensure solvency for future generations. Repealing the new health-care law would save hundreds of billions of dollars, while providing a second chance to get health reform right. Wasteful spending must be eliminated, and Washington must right-size the federal budget to fit the new realities.

The right tax reform can also reduce the deficit. The current tax code is so large and complex that Americans are forced to spend a combined eight billion hours complying with it annually. Worse yet, the tax code discourages the working, saving, investing and entrepreneurship that are vital to growth and prosperity. We should create a tax code that's fair for everyone, not just those who can manipulate it. Fixing the code can bring in new revenues not by raising taxes, but by creating economic growth, jobs and higher incomes.

These spending and deficit reforms are vital to encouraging economic growth and job creation. An April 2008 study by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff shows that when a nation's debt exceeds 90% of the size of its economy—which ours passed last year—growth is reduced by one-to-two percentage points. For the U.S., that means one million fewer jobs today.

Over 25 years, continuing this fiscal irresponsibility would leave the economy one-fifth smaller than otherwise. But by committing to the "dollar-for-dollar" rule that keeps spending cuts in balance with any debt-ceiling increases we could actually begin paying down the national debt, to strengthen our economic outlook and to save future generations from inheriting this unconscionable burden.

Mr. Portman, a Republican, is a senator from Ohio and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Paul Ryan: Where's Your Budget, Mr. President? - WSJ.com

2011-08-14T16:15:00.001-05:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903341404576484124282885188.html

Where's Your Budget, Mr. President?

By PAUL RYAN

During the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama reportedly warned Republican leaders not to call his bluff by sending him a bill without tax increases. Republicans in Congress ignored this threat and passed a bill that cuts more than a dollar in spending for every dollar it increases the debt limit, without raising taxes.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama signed this bill into law. He was, as he said, bluffing.

Nevertheless, the president still hasn't shown us his cards. He still hasn't put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and his evasiveness is emblematic of the party he leads.

Ever since they abused the budget process to jam their health-care takeover through Congress last year, the Democrats have simply done away with serious budgeting altogether. The simplest explanation—and the president's real bluff—is that they don't want to commit publicly to the kind of tax increases and health-care rationing that would be required to sustain their archaic vision of government.

The president's February budget deliberately dodged the tough choices necessary to confront the threat of runaway federal spending. It was rejected unanimously in a Senate controlled by his own party.

Since then he has offered a lot of rhetoric but no real plan to avoid a spending-driven debt crisis. His speeches and press conferences are no substitutes for actual budgets with specific numbers and independently verified projections of future deficits and debt. Meanwhile, it has been over two years since the Democrat-controlled Senate passed any budget at all. This is a historic failure to fulfill one of the most basic responsibilities of governing.

This leadership deficit has thrown the federal budget process into chaos at the worst possible time. Even though Congress has cut spending by a significant amount, it still hasn't dealt with the drivers of our debt—primarily federal spending on health care.

The math is scary, yet simple: In the years ahead, spending on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Democrats' new health-care entitlements is projected to skyrocket relative to the size of the economy, even as federal spending on everything else is projected to decline (see the nearby chart).

Even well-intentioned proposals such as the one put forward by the Senate's Gang of Six lacked specific reforms to curb the health-care spending. Actually, it took steps in the wrong direction by explicitly requiring policy makers to "maintain the basic structure" of government health-care programs. That structure is unsustainable.

Medicare reimburses all providers of care according to the same formula, even if the quality of the care they provide is poor and the cost is high. This top-down delivery system exacerbates waste, as none of the primary stakeholders has a strong incentive to deliver the best-quality care for the lowest cost. Medicaid has fallen victim to the same trend: an open-ended commitment that drives up costs, coupled with a flawed federal-state matching formula that is breaking state budgets.

Supporters of the Democrats' new health-care law claim that the law will fix these problems. But we are already seeing evidence that its maze of mandates, dictates, controls and tax hikes will actually push costs even further in the wrong direction.

Getty Images

President Obama signing the Budget Control Act of 2011 in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

Even the president seems to understand that the status quo of these programs is unsustainable. As he put it during a press conference on July 11, "If you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up."

On this point, Mr. Obama and I couldn't agree more. Where we disagree is over how best to confront this problem.

The president's health-care law represents an attempt to double down on the failed policies of the past. Despite claims that new methods of reimbursing Medicare providers will tame costs, the fact is that the federal bureaucracy has tried most of the measures before, without any success.

Worse, the law would create a new 15-member board of bureaucrats empowered to bypass Congress to make deep cuts in payments to Medicare providers. Time and again, such provider cuts have had two consequences: Providers have either increased the volume of services they provide for each condition, or they have stopped accepting Medicare patients altogether.

There is a better way—structural reforms that empower patients with greater choices and increase the role of competition in the health-care marketplace. The budget passed by the House of Representatives in April, "The Path to Prosperity," outlined the beginnings of such an approach by repealing the president's health-care law and proposing reforms that would make Medicare and Medicaid stronger and solvent for current and future generations.

In other words, we've put our cards on the table: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), our plan puts the federal budget on the path to balance without resorting to job-destroying tax hikes. It will eliminate the shadow of debt that is discouraging job creation while advancing pro-growth tax reforms to get the economy moving again.

By contrast, the president and his party's leaders have refused to submit specific, credible budget plans that tackle health-care costs while restoring economic growth. Unwilling to reconsider their failed bureaucratic approaches to health and retirement security, the Democrats can only propose tax increases, and lots of them.

The CBO's latest Long-Term Outlook in June estimated that total tax revenues would have to double by mid-century in order to finance our current spending path. Health-care costs rose about 8% in 2011 and are projected to rise by 8.5% in 2012. At this rate, taxes would have to rise again and again just to keep up with health-care spending. Is it any wonder that the president and his party are afraid to produce a budget that requires such ruinous levels of taxation?

The president tried to use the debt-ceiling negotiations to secure the first of many tax increases that his party needs to pay for its legacy of unfunded promises. He failed. Instead, Republicans won the policy debate by securing the first of many spending restraints we need to avoid a debt-driven economic calamity.

Much hard work remains. But this work will be harder still if leading Democrats remain unwilling to lay their cards on the table and give the American people the debate they deserve.

Mr. Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin, serves as chairman of the House Budget Committee.

A Resurgent M.B.A. Jobs Market - Forbes

2011-08-14T16:14:00.001-05:00

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattsymonds/2011/08/03/a-resurgent-m-b-a-jobs-market/

A Resurgent M.B.A. Jobs Market

Image via Wikipedia

It looks as if confidence has finally returned to the M.B.A. jobs market, according to the latest survey of employment trends for professionals and managers around the world. The July edition of the 'Global Snapshot' from the international recruitment specialist, Antal, for example, questioned nearly 13,000 companies on six continents and found 52% currently hiring, up from 50% in February. And in many of the top emerging markets confidence is even higher. In Brazil, for example, 70% of employers are planning to recruit at professional or managerial level in the next three months, in China 70% and in India a staggering 80%.

No surprise then that this sense of optimism is permeating the business school arena. The latest data from the MBA Career Services Council shows 76% of US schools registering more on-campus recruitment activity in 2011 than in 2010. As Lisa Feldman, director of recruiting at UC Berkeley-Haas explains, "Investment banks and consulting firms continued to recruit MBAs throughout the downturn to maintain their leadership pipelines, and firms like Chevron and Abbott that hire for rotational programs kept them going. But the real difference we're seeing now is the enthusiasm, the time and the money these recruiters are investing and the sheer number of positions available."

Rebecca Joffrey, co-director of Career Development at the Tuck School of Business in New Hampshire gives a similar up-beat report. "This was an outstanding employment year – the strongest in the last 6 years. Companies had slowed down so much in hiring for the last 2 years, so when the economy picked up this year, they had to be aggressive in their hiring and it showed." Building on the school's tight network of alumni to help secure jobs, 97% of the Tuck class of 2010 already had job offers 3 months after graduation, but Joffrey says that 2011 looks even better. "Every sector was up in hiring this year. In retail there was a 10% increase in the job postings, and of course the financial and consulting sectors were strong across the board too".

Of course, to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, even at the worst point of the global financial crisis, reports of the death of M.B.A. hiring were greatly exaggerated. While the banking sector certainly cut back on the its previously high level of recruitment and consultancies took a much more cautious approach to candidates, relatively new entrants to the market, such as Google and Amazon, and the SME sector took up much of the slack. "The greater activities of consumer packaged goods and retail firms show that the recession is certainly over from the M.B.A. recruiting perspective," says Lisa Feldman at Haas.

And on the international stage several key markets remained virtually unscathed. "There was a slight drop in demand for our graduates in 2009," says Jane Prior of Australia's Melbourne Business School, "but on the whole the country hasn't been hit by the crisis in the same way as many other economies. And banks and consulting firms here are now recruiting more strongly than they ever did."

At the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, job offers for graduating students are up by 65% over a two year period. "Consulting and finance companies continue to be the mainstay", explains Sriram Gopalakrishnan. "However, new technology companies like Google and Facebook have generated significant interest among students, and luxury goods and energy sector companies also made their presence felt in campus."

What is significant about 2011 is that it appears to mark a shift in the balance of power between potential employer and potential employee. Since the demise of Lehman Brothers in 2008, M.B.A.s have been able to find jobs, but only by pursuing every opportunity with real energy and commitment. Now, however, it seems that McKinsey's famous description of a 'war for talent', which has been little more than a minor skirmish for several years, is breaking out once again. "We're seeing companies wanting to come on campus earlier and earlier because they are concerned about missing out on the candidates they want," says Marie-José Baudin of the Desautels Faculty at McGill in Canada. "And they're also investing in more internships to tie them in even before they hit the permanent jobs market."

This tilting of the balance may end up significantly altering the nature of the M.B.A. hiring landscape, at least over the next few years as graduating students take a long, hard look at the opportunities open to them. There are already signs that the colossal mess perpetrated by the financial services sector in the lead up to 2007 may have removed some of its attraction as a career option. A recent survey of M.B.A. students at top ranked schools suggested that Goldman Sachs may finally have lost the accolade of being the world's most sought after employer. The results showed that Goldman had slipped to fifth place with only 19.1% of the poll, clearly beaten by new kid on the M.B.A. block, Google, which took 27.8% of the vote to come in at second place, just behind McKinsey & Co. Places six, seven and nine were all taken by technology companies – Apple, Facebook and Amazon, while the tenth slot was occupied by the design consultancy, IDEO. "Students have a broader interest in mission driven organisations these days," says Tuck's Rebecca Joffrey. "They want to work for companies that have a soul, organisations that are striving to have a positive influence in the world."

2011 may be the year when the battle for the brightest and best in the M.B.A. community really starts to heat up.

Matt Symonds is chief editor of MBA50.com, and author of "Getting the MBA Admissions Edge", sponsored by Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. You can follow more of his business education coverage on Twitter and his blog.

Special Report: The Best Business Schools

The End of Keynes - Rich Lowry - National Review Online

2011-08-14T16:13:00.001-05:00

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/273386/end-keynes-rich-lowry#

The End of Keynes

Sen. Dick Durbin, the liberal lion from Illinois, pronounces the debt deal "the final interment of John Maynard Keynes."

The burial ceremony should be a nice, simple one after the violence done to the aged economist by the failure of the broad Obama stimulus program. The administration's serial overpromising in his name did more to discredit Keynes than a century's worth of broadsides by his intellectual enemies.

Nearly three years into the Obama administration, the unemployment rate is more than 9 percent, a grassroots movement devoted to cutting government has the upper hand in the House of Representatives, and the debt of the United States could well be downgraded by Standard and Poor's. If Durbin thought that in these circumstances Keynes was heading anywhere other than a pine box, he hasn't been paying attention.

The debt deal is austerity designed by committee. It's late. It's needlessly complex. It's inadequate to our challenges and may not prove particularly functional. But it's austerity. That a Washington with a Democratic Senate and president has to go through the exercise of at least appearing to cut $2.1 trillion from the deficit with no guaranteed tax increases is a humiliating reversal for Keynes's self-appointed heirs.

Every time Washington has a showdown, pundits and presidential historians gather on TV sets to lament the breakdown of our governing institutions and the end of compromise. But Congress is still perfectly capable of splitting differences. The debt deal gives a little something to all the major players in a jerry-built, two-part increase in the debt limit coupled with an initial $900 billion agreed-upon cut and at least a $1.2 trillion cut TBD.

House speaker John Boehner gets less spending. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell gets his cute trick of letting Congress disapprove a second debt extension while still giving it to Pres. Barack Obama. Senate majority leader Harry Reid and President Obama get a debt extension past the 2012 election and a special committee that could possibly recommend tax increases.

Washington doesn't lack for the ability to cut such clever deals; it lacks the collective will to transform the entitlement state. So, it perpetually kicks the job over to a commission. Last year, the Bowles-Simpson commission released a report that President Obama promptly filed away in a drawer in the Resolute Desk. Now, the debt deal creates an all-new special committee to find the unidentified $1.2 trillion second round of cuts.

Realistically, it would have to find them in entitlements. Rarely, though, has a bipartisan committee been so primed for failure. The proposed committee will have 12 members, six from each party. It needs a majority of seven to make a recommendation that goes straight to a vote on the floors of the House and the Senate. Unless either party slips up in one of its appointments, the committee is very likely to deadlock.

As a spur to action, automatic spending cuts equal to $1.2 trillion kick in if the committee fails. The idea is to make these backstop cuts so ham-fisted and distasteful to both parties that they will have an incentive to agree. Democrats will have to stomach even deeper discretionary cuts than in the first round and some Medicare reductions, while Republicans take it on the chin on defense.

The automatic cuts are divided in half between security and non-security. They would amount to a roughly $500 billion cut in defense, on top of whatever is wrung from it in the first part of the deal. In the new politics of austerity, Democrats can't spend more, but they can target the locus of the only spending to which they are reflexively opposed: the Pentagon. It is a sign of Republicans' fiscal hawkishness overcoming their national-security hawkishness that the party's leaders signed onto this deal.

The nation's debate has fundamentally shifted onto the ground of what kinds of spending to cut, and how fast and far. Keynes would be appalled, but as even Dick Durbin realizes, he's dead and gone.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2011 by King Features Syndicate.

The Small Government Establishment Joins the Establishment - Forbes

2011-08-14T16:12:00.001-05:00

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2011/07/31/the-small-government-establishment-joins-the-establishment/

The Small Government Establishment Joins the Establishment

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

About the debt deal struck yesterday, it should be said that we should have known. Put simply, we should have known that the small government wing of the political class and commentariat doesn't believe its own rhetoric.

How we should have known was explained in high resolution a few months back. It was then that the same small government establishment which told us for decades that "spending cuts" are merely reductions in future outlays, fell over itself to praise a budget plan by Rep. Paul Ryan that would massively increase the burden of government. Some would call it partisan hypocrisy, but the more realistic answer is that the commentariat that sides with the small government wing in Washington owes its living to the perpetuation of a federal government that will never shrink.

Indeed, if the small government establishment truly believed its voluminous columns about how small government and free markets are the path to prosperity, then it would have recommended that the GOP sit on its hands and maintain a legal barrier to increased spending which is itself the debt limit. It would have because as anyone with a pulse knows, we won't nor do we need to default.

So assuming maintenance of the existing debt ceiling, there's no default after which two parties that have never been able to cut spending would be forced by law to reduce spending by as much 40%. What's funny about a 40% reduction is that far from draconian or painful as both the big and small government wings would like us to believe, such "austerity" would simply bring us back to 2006 Bush era levels of spending. Back then Bush was correctly criticized for not vetoing budgets that were far too large. How quickly we forget.

Of course, all of the above assumes the Republican/conservative small government establishment really wants true cuts in spending. Apparently not. Instead, the small government establishment has hit us with increasingly absurd reasons for accepting an increase in the debt limit in return for future declines in government spending that history tells us won't ever materialize.

First they told us that real reductions would at this point be a bridge too far, that with a GOP that allegedly believes in small government only in control of the House of Representatives, we're asking too much.

That would normally be a good response, but then this same small government establishment has for years explained heavy spending during the Reagan years as a function of the Republicans not being in control of a House of Representatives where spending constitutionally originates. National Review's Rich Lowry, an advocate of a spending deal even if it "doesn't meet a test of absolute purity", wrote as much last week. Justifying nosebleed levels of spending under Ronald Reagan, Lowry wrote that Reagan's tough choices included confronting "a Democratic House". So while Democrats could apparently control spending during the Reagan years on the way to large deficits, we apparently can't ask Boehner et al to reverse the growth of government despite being in possession of similar constitutional powers over the purse.

Rather than request that Boehner and the GOP leadership do what they were elected to do, we have the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel mocking the "unrealistic wing of the conservative movement" for demanding the cuts that politicians never seem to get around to. Despite elections in 2010 that revealed a strong voter preference for smaller government, Strassel not long ago made plain that she would prefer that the GOP hand spending control over to President Obama so that he'll "own" his economic failures even more in the eyes of voters in 2012. Voters be damned.

The above might normally be acceptable given a Washington whose oxygen is government spending, but not for a small government establishment that for years has paid lip service to the importance of reducing its size.

For one, this same small government establishment has dined out on, written about, and commentated on television for all of Obama's presidency that "hope and change" had morphed into lots of the same old Washington-style dealmaking. If so, why then advocate similar dealmaking from the GOP that will explicitly increase the burden of government?

Second, how can a small government establishment that fully embraced the message of the 2010 elections support a deal that wholly ignores that message? Why have elections if the mouthbreathers in the electorate will have their desires dismissed?

The small government establishment's response to the above is probably what's most offensive about this whole exercise. Indeed, their "strategy" here is to quiet the "unrealistic" knuckle-draggers who populate the Tea Party with an eye on retaking the White House in 2012 after Obama's economic plan predictably fails. In short, the small government establishment is saying explicitly that we should let Washington's wise men on the right grow the federal government now so that they can shrink it after 2012.

To that, it's fair to say that the troglodytes who actually believe in limited government have heard this line of thinking before, and they're likely not sold on it. Indeed, to presume that a Washington fully controlled by the Republicans would actually reduce the size of government is to take naivete to hopelessly romantic levels. This sort of thinking ignores the basic incentives driving all politicians irrespective of ideology to always and everywhere increase the burden of government.

Knowing this, the cretins who truly believe in small government want to keep a legal barrier in place that will force on government a reduction in its size that the political class has never been able to achieve on its own.

Of course they didn't get their way, the aforementioned deal has materialized, government will continue to grow, and Obama will "own" the economy per the strategy of the insiders who mock those outside of Washington for their lack of sophistication about how the world works. But will it lead to an Obama loss, and Republican control of all three branches? Not so fast.

Not so fast because as evidenced by polls showing voters don't want a debt-ceiling increase, they're increasingly wise to the ways of Washington no matter the party in power. That being the case, they want to maintain the debt ceiling as a way of forcing the political class to reduce spending, and it's a fair bet that many on the right will sit on their hands in 2012 in response to a Republican deal that will allow the federal government's continued expansion.

Basically the big government industrial complex that animates the Republican Party and its enablers in the media has won this round, but they'd be wise to not be overly smug. Any deal that increases the debt ceiling is offensive to a small government base of voters that have been regularly scorned, and logic says that this base will reveal their unhappy countenance in 2012

What Business is Wall Street in ?

2011-08-14T15:40:00.001-05:00

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/08/what-business-is-wall-street-in-2/

What Business is Wall Street In ?

May 9th 2010 11:36AM

My last two posts were designed to stimulate discussion. But lets talk the real problem that regulators, public companies, investor/shareholders and traders face. The problem is that Wall Street doesn't know what business it is in. Regulators don't know what the business of Wall Street is. Investor/shareholders don't know what business Wall Street is in.

The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible.

The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market.

I recognize that one is illegal, the other is not. That isn't the important issue.

The important issue is recognizing that Wall Street is no longer what it was designed to be. Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings. What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days ?

I started actively trading stocks in 1992. I traded a lot. Over the years I've written quite a bit about the market. I have always thought I had a good handle on the market. Until recently.

Over just the past 3 years, the market has changed. It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in. Discussion in the market place is not about the performance of specific companies and their returns. Discussion is about macro issues that impact all stocks. And those macro issues impact automated trading decisions, which impact any and every stock that is part of any and every index or ETF. Combine that with the leverage of derivatives tracking companies, indexes and other packages or the leveraged ETFs, and individual stocks become pawns in a much bigger game than I feel increasingly less comfortable playing. It is a game fraught with ever increasing risk.

The Pimco (who I think are the smartest guys on the Street) guys talk about a new normal as it applies to today's state of the world economy. I think just as important is the new normal as it applies to Wall Street. Wall Street is now a huge mathematical game of chess where individual companies are just pawns. This is money in the bank for the big players like Goldman, Morgan, etc. Why ? Because the game of chess is far too complicated for 99pct of the institutions out there investing money. So to keep up, they turn to Goldman, Morgan and the like to invent products for them. "You don't know how to play the housing boom, let us show you". "You think the housing boom is about to crash, let us show you how to play that". "You think that PIIGS are in trouble because they can't print money to pay debt holders, let us create a product to allow you to play that game" The big houses have the best hackers in the business and they put together the games and sell them to the many, many institutions managing Billions and Billions of dollars. They are the ultimate Hackers selling their attacks to the highest bidder, regardless of which side they are on. That is a new normal.

Again, I'm not passing judgement one or the other. I'm just recognizing what is going on in the financial world today.

It's rare for companies to go public these days. Just as rare for secondary offerings. The only thing that keeps me in the market is that most of the stocks (not all) pay dividends or some other sort of cash payout. For the first time in my life, I bought outside the United States. I bought Australia in a big way because it is becoming increasingly hard to find new domestic investments that are not influenced by the "hackers" and the games being played on a macro level. It's hard to believe, but evaluating countries as an investment is now easier than evaluating companies . Even with all the unrest in Europe. Or maybe because of it.

So back to the original question. What business is Wall Street in ?

Its primary business is no longer creating capital for business. Creating capital for business has to be less than 1pct of the volume on Wall Street in any given period. (I would be curious if anyone out there knows what percentage of transactions actually return money to a company for any reason). It wouldn't shock me that even in this environment that more money flows from companies to the market in the form of buybacks (which i think are always a mistake), then flows into companies in the form of equity.

My 2 cents is that it is important for this country to push Wall Street back to the business of creating capital for business. Whether its through a use of taxes on trades, or changing the capital gains tax structure so that there is no capital gains tax on any shares of stock (private or public company) held for 5 years or more, and no tax on dividends paid to shareholders who have held stock in the company for more than 5 years. However we need to do it, we need to get the smart money on Wall Street back to thinking about ways to use their capital to help start and grow companies. That is what will create jobs. That is where we will find the next big thing that will accelerate the world economy. It won't come from traders trying to hack the financial system for a few pennies per trade.

And solutions won't come from bureaucrats trying to prevent the traders from hacking the system. The only certainty when bureaucrats step in is that the law of unintended consequences will smack us all in the head and the trader/hackers will find new ways to exploit the system that makes them big money and even more money for the big institutions that develop products for the other institutions that are desperate to play the game.

Regulators have got to start to recognize that traders are not investors and vice versa and treat them differently. Different regulations. Different tax structure. Different oversight. Individual investors and the funds that just invest in stocks and bonds are not going to crash the market. Big traders who are always leveraging up and maximizing the number of trades/hacks they make will always put the system at risk. We need to recognize that they do not serve much of a purpose other than to add substantial risk to the global economy. That their stated value add of liquidity does not compensate the US and World Economy nearly enough for the risk of collapse they introduce into the system.

Wall Street as a whole needs to be in the business of creating capital for companies and selling shares to investors who believe they are shareholders. The Government needs to create incentives for this business and extract compensation from the traders/hackers for the systemic failure level of risk they introduce.

There will be another crash, because there are too many players looking for the trillion dollar score. They can't all win, yet how many do you think wouldn't risk everything, even what is not theirs, for that remote chance to score big ? Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn't traders take the biggest risk possible ?

Update at 10pm 5.9.10

One more consideration. If there are traders of any kind that are unregulated or unmonitored, and trade for their own account, how do we know how big they are and how much of a threat they pose to the system, individually and in aggregate ?. For any High Frequency or big leverage derivative folks out there- is it possible there could be firms that have billions at risk with questionable ability to make a margin call or fulfill their side of the trade if things went against them ? Could there be hidden AIGs that few people know about or a bunch of AIG like situations ,which in aggregate fail and put the system at risk ? I have no idea. Just asking the question.

Update 8-9-2011

As a follow up from a comment, I found it interesting that Australia treats professional traders very differently than individual investors that invest in shares of companies. Traders pay regular income tax on their gains, investors pay capital gains and if held more than a year can even get a discount on the capital gains rate. Something that would make a ton of sense in the USA as well

From the site:

A 'business' for tax purposes includes 'any profession, trade, employment, vocation or calling, but does not include occupation as an employee'. This definition would include a business of share trading.

The question of whether a person is a share trader or a share holder is determined in each individual case. This is done by considering the following factors that have been used in court cases:

the nature of the activities, particularly whether they have the purpose of profit making
the repetition, volume and regularity of the activities, and the similarity to other businesses in your industry
the keeping of books of accounts and records of trading stock, business premises, licences or qualifications, a registered business name and an Australian business number
the volume of the operations, and
the amount of capital employed.

1. Nature of activity and purpose of profit making

The intention to make a profit is not, on its own, sufficient to establish that a business is being carried on.

A share trader is someone who carries out business activities for the purpose of earning income from buying and selling shares.

Shares may be held for either investment or trading purposes, and profits on sale are earned in either case. A person who invests in shares as a share holder (rather than a share trader) does so with the intention of earning income from dividends and receipts, but is not carrying on business activities.

It is necessary for you to consider not only your intention to make a profit, but also the facts of your situation. This would include details of how the activity has actually been carried out or a business plan of how the activities will be conducted.

A business plan might show, for example:

an analysis of each potential investment
analysis of the current market and various segments of the market
research to show when or where a profit may arise, and/or
the basis of decisions by you as to when to hold or to sell shares.

Last Modified: Monday, 23 June 2008

Two-year Treasury yield drops to a record low

2011-08-04T16:50:00.001-05:00

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CREDIT_MARKETS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-08-04-17-26-23

Two-year Treasury yield drops to a record low

NEW YORK (AP) -- Prices for Treasury securities jumped Thursday, sending the yield on the two-year note to a record low, as investors rushed to U.S. government debt in search of safety.

Stocks tumbled around the world on worries that the U.S. economy is weakening and that Europe's debt problems are getting worse. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 513 points, its biggest drop since December 2008.

The yield on the two-year Treasury note fell to 0.26 percent, a record low. Late Wednesday it was 0.34 percent. Bond yields fall when demand for them increases. That means traders are willing to accept smaller returns in exchange for investments they consider to be relatively stable.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.39 percent, the lowest level since October. That's down from 2.62 percent late Wednesday. Its price jumped $2.06 for every $100 invested. The 10-year yield is used as a benchmark for many other interest rates. When it drops, rates on mortgage and other consumer loans usually follow suit.

The yield on the 30-year bond fell to 3.66 percent from 3.90 percent. Its price leapt $4.66 per $100 invested.

Investors are becoming more worried as bad news on the U.S. economy keeps coming in. Economic growth through the first six months of the year was far weaker than economists expected.

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.4 percent in the first three months of the year, according to revised figures released last week. Manufacturing grew in July at the weakest pace since 2009. And economists expect Friday's jobs report to show the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.2 percent last month.

"Most of us thought that the economic weakness was transitory," said Kim Rupert, managing director of global fixed income at Action Economics. "But after some of the weakness in the July data that we've seen recently, that has just added to concerns that `transitory' is going to be longer than any of us expected."

Even if Friday's job report comes in better than economists expected, it may not be enough to end the worries, said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies.

"When you look around the world, there aren't a lot of places that are offering encouragement," he said. "This is a global event."

European stock markets fell Thursday on worries that Italy or Spain may be the next country to need help from the European Union to pay its debts. Italy's main stock index fell 5.2 percent, and Spain's fell 3.9 percent.

"I can't tell you how many people I spoke to today that had that same, distant stare that I saw in the September to December 2008 period," William O'Donnell, head of U.S. Treasury strategy at RBS Securities, wrote in a report. "It's that peer-into-the-unknown look that's quizzical and confounded."

The yield on the three-month T-bill was unchanged at 0.01 percent. Its discount wasn't available.

So now we are seeing the approach the Democrats are going to use in 2012....

2011-08-04T10:09:00.001-05:00

……And it reeks of desperation.

Exhibit A:

The FAA stalemate… The House (Republican majority) recently passed a short term bill that was pulled from a larger bill. It would have funded the FAA temporarily, until a final bill could be agreed upon… btw, the Senate (Dem majority) passed this same provision back in February as part of a larger bill. The House did make some (two) changes to the bill… one of which, was to roll back an executive order by the FAA (btw, by-passing Congress)…. The executive order changed a 76 year old process that governs the way the FAA could unionize… The 76 year old unionization law was designed for the simple majority of all the workers to approve (vote) via a private ballot… The executive order changed that method to simple majority of only the people that voted…. (NOTE: a much lower threshold)… A token payback to the UNIONs for their Democrat support… The Senate refuses to even bring the temporary bill to the floor for a vote… Demanding the House come back and change their “already approved” bill that passed the House. If the Senate doesn’t like the bill, they need to work within the process and make changes to the House Bill and send it back… The Democrat controlled Senate can’t bring it to a vote… because if they do, it will pass AS IS, which their union “partners” will not accept. So, the real question is, “Who is really holding the American people hostage?”

The Point:

The Democrats are grasping at straws in order to find a way to stop the growing tide against them… And they are pulling out all the stops. With the help of the MSM (Mainstream Media), they are trying to make the Tea Party look like they are holding the American Economy/American People hostage. They are trying so hard to now move the BLAME for a failed economic plan on the TEA PARTY… Also trying to make the Tea Party appear like they are willing to shutdown the government, hijack the economy, terrorize poor work families, all for the TEA PARTY’s EXTREME views on being fiscally responsible…. So let’s try to keep track of all the things the Democrats have called the Tea Party so far…. Racists, bigots, religious extremist, radicals, terrorists, extremists… NONE of these names are true… The Democrats don’t have answers to the real questions the Tea Party put in front of them… Their only answer is to create a “bogie man”… Who is being the adult?

NOTE:

It is time to start noticing the way Democrats have passed MOST of their bills in Congress since 2008. It ALMOST ALWAYS has been last minute, in the middle of the night, on Christmas Eve night, etc…. And the bills they have passed, haven’t been presented until the last minute…. And MOST of those bills have had major ramifications throughout our country.

QUESTION.....

2011-08-02T08:56:00.001-05:00

Question: Is it moral to open a credit card in your kids and grandkids name; then maxing it out……..????

Landmark Health Bill Goes to Obama's Desk - WSJ.com

2011-07-30T08:09:00.001-05:00

NOTE: ***** FLASHBACK***** PREDICTED BILL WOULD KILL JOBS IN THE MEDICAL INDUSTRY… NOTE THE FOLLOWING LINE:

A large swath of the business community opposed the changes, arguing the legislation was too broad and had too many taxes. "This will make us one of the highest-taxed regions in the world, and that's going to have an impact on the appetite for people to invest in medical innovation," said Bill Hawkins, chief executive of Medtronic Inc., which makes medical devices. He said his company could cut at least 1,000 jobs to absorb a new 2.3% excise tax on medical-device makers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704117304575137572695022244.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

By GREG HITT And JANET ADAMY

WASHINGTON—The transformative health-care bill is slated for President Barack Obama's signature this week in the culmination of efforts by generations of Democrats to achieve near-universal health coverage.

The focus now shifts to the Senate, which will take up a companion bill as early as Tuesday.

The House gave final passage Sunday to the Senate's health legislation in a 219-to-212 vote, as Democrats muscled the measure through on the strength of the party's big majority. In the final roll call, no House Republican voted for the bill, and 34 Democrats voted no, many of them representing Republican-leaning districts.

A short while later, the House, voting 220 to 211, approved a companion bill making changes to the Senate bill, a measure necessary to attract support in the House. All Republicans voted against the companion bill, as did 33 Democrats.

Mr. Obama, who staked his presidency on the health-care overhaul, helped push it toward passage with a last-minute promise to issue an executive order making clear that no money dispensed under the $940 billion bill would pay for abortions. That persuaded Rep. Bart Stupak, a holdout Michigan Democrat, to vote yes and bring at least seven colleagues with him.

The president spoke late Sunday night at the White House. "At a time when the pundits said it was no longer possible, we rose above the weight of our politics," he said in hailing the vote. "We proved that this government…still works for the people."

It was a tumultuous sprint to the finish for legislation that has brought Washington many dramas in the past year, ranging from a Christmas Eve Senate vote to the surprise January election of Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown that upended Democrats' plans.

"You will be joining those who established Medicare and Social Security and now, tonight, health care for all Americans," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), urging Democrats to pull together. "This is an American proposal that honors the tradition of our country."

Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) condemned the legislation and said Democrats were moving against the will of the public. "Shame on this body. Shame on each and every one of you who substitutes your will and your desire above your fellow countrymen," he said. "By our actions today we disgrace their value."

Republicans hope to use the health overhaul to drive Democrats into the minority, citing polls that show a plurality of Americans oppose it, while Democrats believe the immediate benefits brought by the bill will work to their credit.

The legislation will extend health coverage to 32 million Americans now without insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It will mandate that almost every American carry health insurance—a provision that opponents are set to challenge in the courts. To help people get covered, the legislation expands Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor, and gives subsidies to families making as much as $88,000 a year.

Democrats are highlighting popular provisions, such as one that requires insurance companies to accept all comers, even people who are already sick. Republican critics are stressing new taxes in the bill and trims to Medicare spending needed to fund the subsidies.

The broad Senate bill was set to become law quickly following House passage. Some uncertainty remained over the package of changes now headed to the Senate. Democratic leaders there said they had the votes to approve it, but Republican efforts to torpedo it or change it could complicate passage. The changes would boost the value of the subsidies and nullify special deals for some senators that caused a storm of protest.

The CBO estimates the package will hold the federal budget deficit $143 billion lower over 10 years than it would otherwise be. Republicans called the estimate unrealistic. The CBO also estimated that 95% of legal U.S. residents would have insurance by 2019, up from 83% today.

The march toward action Sunday was greeted by protests from hundreds of Tea Party activists, who filled the Capitol grounds, and Republican complaints about the last-minute bargaining among Democrats. "Where has the transparency been? Why all the back-room deals?" asked Rep. Jack Kingston (R., Ga.).

The legislation, nearly left for dead in January after Democrats lost the 60-vote majority in the Senate needed to overcome Republican filibusters, fueled grass-roots anger. Tea Party activists chanted "kill the bill" at Democratic lawmakers as they walked through the hallways of Congress.

The focus Sunday was largely on resolving the abortion dispute. Several Democrats, led by Rep. Stupak, had been withholding support, saying the legislation didn't go far enough to keep federal funds from being used to pay for abortions. They praised Mr. Obama's executive order, while Roman Catholic bishops and other antiabortion groups said it wasn't good enough.

Brooks Kraft for The Wall Street Journal

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi walked to the House Chamber at the Capitol.

Someone from the Republican side of the House floor called out, "Baby killer!" at Mr. Stupak late Sunday as he defended the bill on the House floor.

Insurers will see the heaviest regulations, with new rules that dictate how much they can reap in profit and whom they must cover.

Hospitals, doctors, drug makers and the seniors group AARP backed the overhaul, saying it will reduce the growth of health costs and make sure no one goes without care.

"This is not about health care," said Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Democratic whip. "It's about trying to extend a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful."

Francee Levin, a 57-year-old artist in Columbia, S.C., said she couldn't get health insurance after she was hit by a drunk driver. "I think I'll be able to get some kind of health insurance, which would be a godsend," she said.

But Catherine Calhoun of Saint Francisville, La., said she worried her husband's employer might drop coverage and force the family to go into newly created health-insurance exchanges to get coverage. That might force her to find new doctors for her 7-year-old son, Billy, who has a rare bone disease, she said.

"I might end up having to negotiate with someone who doesn't have any idea what he needs just to get out of bed in the morning,'' said Ms. Calhoun.

In the run-up to the vote, Mr. Obama urged House Democrats to focus on those helped by the bill and not worry about the difficult politics. "Good policy is good politics," he said.

Republicans said they expect big gains in the fall. "I'd rather be a Republican running against his bill and saying, 'Let's start over,'" said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "This will be the defining issue in November 2010, and if it passes, in 2012 when the president runs for re-election."

Under the legislation, consumers will see changes within months. Insurers won't be able to place lifetime limits on coverage. Children will be able to stay on their parents' insurance policies until their 26th birthday. The changes could be bumpy, because insurers warn they won't be able to make them so quickly.

The bulk of the legislation wouldn't take effect until 2014. Once the tax credits and Medicaid expansion are in place, most Americans will be required to carry health insurance or pay a fee, topping out at either $695 a year or 2.5% of income.

Employers would have to provide affordable insurance or pay a penalty of up to $3,000 per worker. Those figures assume the Senate ultimately adopts the package of changes the House approved.

Tax increases needed to finance the program would hit a range of industries, from insurers to tanning services. Over the next decade, $108 billion in new fees will fall on insurers, drug makers and medical-device companies. Families earning more than $250,000 a year will pay a higher Medicare payroll tax, and see that tax expanded to investment income such as dividends. High-value insurance plans would be hit with a 40% tax starting in 2018.

As part of the second bill, headed to the Senate, Mr. Obama was poised to accomplish another big goal: overhauling the federal student-loan program. It would end subsidies to banks and shift lending responsibilities to the federal government. That is part of the package of changes still requiring Senate approval.

—Louise Radnofsky and Amy Dockser Marcus contributed to this article.

Write to Greg Hitt at greg.hitt@wsj.com and Janet Adamy at janet.adamy@wsj.com

Boston Scientific to lay off 1,200-plus - Boston.com

2011-07-30T08:05:00.000-05:00

http://articles.boston.com/2011-07-29/business/29830200_1_latest-job-cuts-boston-scientific-investments

Boston Scientific to lay off 1,200-plus

Boston Scientific Corp. said yesterday that it plans to eliminate 1,200 to 1,400 jobs worldwide during the next 2 ½ years to free money for new investments, the Natick medical device maker's second major round of cuts since last year.

The company would not say how many jobs will be lost in Massachusetts, where fewer than 2,000 of its 25,000 employees are based. In February 2010, Boston Scientific said it would pare 1,300 jobs worldwide, but similarly did not say where.

Yesterday's move, a day after Boston Scientific disclosed it was investing $150 million and hiring 1,000 people in China, raised fears that the company will gradually shift more work to foreign sites with less government oversight and lower costs than the United States.

"I've asked for information on where they are cutting jobs,'' said state Senator James B. Eldridge, an Acton Democrat. He has proposed so-called clawback legislation that would allow the state to recover money from businesses that receive tax breaks here - including Boston Scientific - and then reduce their workforces.

"My sense is, sadly, that like many other American companies, they are shedding jobs in Massachusetts and adding jobs overseas,'' Eldridge said. "And this is a company making greater profits, so it's even more outrageous.''

Boston Scientific has been under intense US regulatory scrutiny in recent years because of defects in a pair of its best-selling cardiac products: tiny mesh tubes known as stents that are used to keep cleared arteries open and implantable defibrillators that send electric shocks to restore heart rhythm.

And earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration said it was investigating whether plastic mesh made by Boston Scientific and other companies should be banned for a procedure to treat a gynecological condition called pelvic organ prolapse.

Despite those setbacks - and the surprise departure of chief executive J. Raymond Elliott, scheduled for the end of this year - the company yesterday posted stronger-than-expected second-quarter earnings of $146 million, or 10 cents a share, up from $98 million, or 6 cents a share, in the corresponding period last year.

Shares of Boston Scientific climbed 8.5 percent yesterday to $7.28, a gain of 57 cents.

Boston Scientific officials said the latest job cuts, which will involve layoffs and leaving open positions vacant, are part of a broader effort to save between $225 million and $275 million annually. That will enable the company to invest in new products and geographic markets as growth flattens in the United States and other Western countries.

Who’s Really Disenfranchised?

2011-07-29T10:22:00.001-05:00

http://americanmajority.org/uncategorized/whos-really-disenfranchised/

WHO'S REALLY DISENFRANCHISED?

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Disenfranchised. The very word evokes strong reactions in us: we peer back through American history, thinking of young people, minorities, suffragettes, and even slaves. None of which, at one time or another, had the right to directly participate in our system of self-government. Heck, the Founding Fathers intentionally didn't give the vote originally to anybody who wasn't a white, land-owning male (though I'm guessing "powdered-wig-wearing" might have been a negotiable category).

And because of the power of this one word (and the sins of our forefathers), we are doomed to hear it each and every election cycle from now until the end of the republic (yes, my Star Wars-loving self just spazzed out as I wrote that last part). We see it on TV, we hear it in what passes for political debate. Leftists of all stripes invoke it, endlessly demagogue it and never, ever let any of us forget that there are disenfranchised among us (they're kind of like that kid in The Sixth Sense: "I see dead people!)

Only now these downtrodden (note to self: be sure to trod someone down very soon) have somehow expanded to include not only all the usual suspects listed above, but also such groups as illegal aliens, who I suppose by the Left's tortured logic somehow just had to be on the Framers' white-male-lovin' minds during that stuffy summer stretch of weeks in Philadelphia 235 years ago.

Ah, liberal guilt. It's the Holy Grail of Leftists and Statists everywhere, the cup from which all social programs flow, magically and perpetually replenishing itself, and serving as the rationalization for all sorts of stupid things we as a country end up doing that have absolutely zero basis in reason. If you could somehow capture its energy, it'd be the ultimate Green Jobs program.

Does anybody else have what they call compassion fatigue here yet?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, 80 million ordinary citizens take the one extraordinarily conventional step every single day that makes the U.S. economic engine actually run. They go to work. Monday through Friday, and even sometimes on Saturdays.

They've been labeled the Silent Majority by Nixon (and 'masses leading lives of quiet desperation' before him by Thoreau), the middle class, the consumer class, the bourgeoisie. And yet their unfailing habit of playing by the rules, putting in overtime to put food on the table and pay their taxes has created the financial wonder of the modern world: the American economy.

This is to say nothing of those millions of mom-and-pop proprietors, the legal immigrant shopkeepers, those entrepreneurs who take the biggest financial and personal gambles and start their own small businesses. I'll never forget the story from a friend in the Korean community who had to have his wedding reception first, prior to the ceremony that weekend, so the bulk of his guests could return to their dry cleaning businesses, their small corner markets, their stores.

Which brings us back to the whole concept of disenfranchisement. Just how much injustice is there still out there—much less every time the polls open? I mean, we've extended the right to vote and have your voice heard to pretty much every demographic group possible, and voter turnout still clocked in at right about sixty percent of the registered electorate (and that was considered high!). Barring (get it?) those illegal aliens, there simply aren't any blocs of people remaining out there who aren't allowed to pull a lever on Election Day.

Yet we have to hear these "dog-whistle"-type stories continually via the dying Leftist-run media: comparisons between having to show a government I.D. and Jim Crow laws; having to simply sign and attest to the fact that you are who you say you are somehow becoming the equivalent, I suppose, of literacy tests once administered to Reconstruction-era blacks. As George Orwell said, control the language and you control the debate.

So we see the constant narrative of large numbers of people (poor people, brown people, black people, 'undocumented' people, you fill in the blank) being disenfranchised discussed obsessively every couple of years. This particular conceit happens to fit particularly well with the already-existing idea that all conservatives are racists. Rinse, repeat.

But if I can be so heretical and bold—who are the truly disenfranchised within our existing political system?

Beyond these calculated, cynical sideshows thrown up by the Left to make middle America uncomfortable with its past for immediate electoral/partisan gain, who is being taken advantage of here? It's not ethnic groups, most of whom are represented coalitions, and part and parcel of urban political machines today. And it's not the corrupt, crony capitalist class, who no matter what outrageous item on the menu they order, never have to pay the bill.

You know who does?

You do.

You're part of that grand American tradition of holding up your end of the bargain. You're that proud parent who works extra hours to give your child the best education available. You're that citizen who foots ever-increasing taxes on everything from the car you drive to the property you "own".

All the while believing that the men and women you send to your city council, your county board or commission, your state capital, or even Washington, D.C. are actually going to do what they said they would do. Then you watch and listen, year after year—it seems helplessly—as your voice gets drowned out by the chorus of shouts and cries…always for more spending, more government programs.

And on your dime.

Call me crazy but I'd say that's the textbook definition of disenfranchised.

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About the Author

Matt Robbins is the national Executive Director for American Majority. Matt has personally trained thousands of political activists nationwide and in several foreign countries on campaign management, communications and candidate development.

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Obama's Dangerous Debt Ceiling Strategy

2011-07-29T10:16:00.000-05:00

http://blog.heritage.org/2011/07/25/morning-bell-obamas-dangerous-debt-ceiling-strategy/

Morning Bell: Obama's Dangerous Debt Ceiling Strategy

President Obama kicked off the weekend with a testy Friday night press conference warning of the drastic consequences of failing to raise the debt limit, the havoc it would wreak on financial markets, and the disastrous repercussions for the poor and middle class. That message of fear was reiterated throughout the weekend, bookended this morning by a senior White House official who says there's a 50/50 chance that the standoff in Washington will not be resolved by the August 2 deadline.

But it's not fear for fear's sake. The White House is employing the same cynical, irresponsible political strategy to force Congress' hand that it started in January, using Wall Street as its foil. This morning, NPR—as usual and unsurprisingly—had the zeitgeist of the Obama White House just right. Cokie Roberts, its long-time commentator, said:

[T]here's a certain element of waiting for the markets to weigh in and show Congress that they have to get serious here…You see the Administration almost kind of, almost daring the markets to respond, yesterday saying that the Congress had to act by 4:00 yesterday afternoon before the Asian markets started to open.

How true, and how irresponsible. The Obama Administration spent all weekend trying to talk down markets, hoping to make use of any artificial drop for political purposes.

Never mind that the financial security of hundreds of millions of Americans and others would be injured in the process. The Administration needs what it has already dubbed "the Boehner drop"—named after Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner—to try to get its way in the debt ceiling negotiations.

The attempt by senior members of the Administration, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, to make markets even more nervous than they are was noticed by other journalists. Veteran financial journalist Charles Gasparino vented his frustration on ABC's This Week with Christian Amanpour by saying "it's irresponsible for Geithner to go out there to talk about default. If he's worried about the Asian markets tonight, why does he mention default? We are not going to default. We have cash on hand to pay bond holders."

But that is the political game the White House is playing—and it's a dangerous one. Investment adviser James Rickards wrote to Politico's Playbook, "Geithner and Obama are foolish to try to 'scare' markets over the debt ceiling. Markets are already scared. They're looking for reassurance and a more mature dialogue."

Instead, we have the President and his legion of foot soldiers running amok, hoping to threaten the markets to achieve their political ends.

But amid the maneuvering, there have been some moments of unvarnished honesty, if only accidental. Yesterday, White House deputy press secretary Dan Pfeiffer admitted on Twitter that President Obama will likely sign any debt deal Congress sends his way. Heritage's Rory Cooper writes:

This revelation came in an exchange with Stephen Gutowski, the blogger known as The College Politico. Gutowski asked Pfeiffer: 'Do you see a scenario where the house & senate pass a deal but the President doesn't sign it?' and Pfeiffer responded: 'No, bc only something that has R and D support can pass both bodies.'

With those words, Pfeiffer highlighted a truth that has become increasingly clear. Obama is not the mediator of a grand bargain the White House has attempted to portray him to be, Cooper explains. Instead, his role in the debt ceiling debate has been subordinated to the House and the Senate, leaving him with nothing but veto threats, ultimatums, and rhetoric designed to force a resolution that suits his political ends.

Since Congress holds the cards, it's up to them to get the job done. Now they should listen to their employers—the American people—and deliver a solution that meets the test of Moody's and Standard & Poor's to bring down our debt ratio through spending cuts, not tax hikes, and preserves our nation's ability to defend itself.

Quick Hits:

U.S. taxpayer dollars have been indirectly funneled to the Taliban under a $2.16 billion transportation contract to promote Afghan business, according to a Washington Post report.
Greece has a new bailout package, but Moody's Investors Service has slashed the country's debt ratings and warns that it's virtually 100 percent certain it will default on its debt.
Anders Behring Breivik, the man accused of killing 93 people in Norway on Friday, will appear today in a closed-door arraignment in which he is expected to explain his motivation for the massacre.
The Chinese government has ordered journalists not to question official accounts of a high-speed train crash that killed at least 38 people on Saturday night.
President Obama will speak to Latinos today at the National Council of La Raza. Click here to find out what he won't tell them.

Widest wealth gap between US whites, minorities - Taiwan News Online

2011-07-29T10:11:00.001-05:00

NOTE: IT'S NOT ABOUT RACE… IT'S MANY OTHER FACTORS… ie. HIGHER EDUCATION, SINGLE FAMILY PARENTING, ETC ETC…

http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=1663005

Widest wealth gap between US whites, minorities - Taiwan News Online

The wealth gaps between whites and minorities have grown to their widest levels since the U.S. government began tabulating them a quarter-century ago. The recession and uneven recovery have erased decades of minority gains, leaving whites on average with 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Hispanics, according to an analysis of new Census data.

The analysis shows the racial and ethnic impact of the recent economic meltdown, which ravaged housing values and sent unemployment soaring. It also offers the most direct government evidence yet of the stark wealth divide, a disparity between predominantly younger minorities whose main asset is their home and older whites who are more likely to have 401(k) retirement accounts or other stock holdings.

"I am afraid that this pushes us back to what the Kerner Commission characterized as `two societies, separate and unequal,'" said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, referring to the 1960s presidential commission that examined U.S. race relations. "The great difference is that the second society has now become both black and Hispanic."

The median wealth of white U.S. households in 2009 was $113,149, compared to $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks, according to the analysis released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Those ratios, roughly 20 to 1 for blacks and 18 to 1 for Hispanics, far exceed the low mark of 7 to 1 for both groups reached in 1995, when the nation's economic expansion lifted many low-income groups to the middle class.

The white-black wealth gap also is the widest since census began tracking such data in 1984, when the ratio was roughly 12 to 1.

"What's pushing the wealth of whites is the rebound in the stock market and corporate savings, while younger Hispanics and African-Americans who bought homes in the last decade, because that was the American dream, are seeing big declines," said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in income inequality.

Stock holdings play an important role in the economic well-being of white households. Stock funds, IRA and Keogh accounts as well as 401(k) and savings accounts were responsible for 28 percent of whites' net worth, compared with 19 percent for blacks and 15 percent for Hispanics.

"There's a good chance the wealth gap will widen further," Smeeding said, citing the stalled housing market. "What we need to do is help lower-income people move up."

According to the Pew study, the housing boom of the early to mid 2000s particularly boosted the wealth of Hispanics, who were disproportionately employed in the thriving construction industry. Hispanics also were more likely to live and buy homes in states such as California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were in the forefront of the real estate bubble, enjoying early gains in home values.

Those gains quickly shriveled in the housing collapse. After reaching a median wealth of $18,359 in 2005, the wealth of Hispanics _ who had derived nearly two-thirds of their net worth from home equity _ declined by 66 percent by 2009. Among blacks, who now have the highest unemployment rate at 16.2 percent, their household wealth fell 53 percent from $12,124 to $5,677.

In contrast, the median household wealth of whites dipped a modest 16 percent from $134,992 to $113,149, cushioned in part by a stock market recovery that began in mid-2009.

"The findings are a reminder, if one was needed, of what a large share of blacks and Hispanics live on the economic margins," said Paul Taylor, director of Pew Social & Demographic Trends. "When the economy tanked, they're the groups that took the heaviest blows."

The latest data come as President Barack Obama and congressional leaders face an Aug. 2 deadline to figure out a deal to cut deficits and raise the debt ceiling or risk seeing the U.S. default on its financial obligations. Democrats and Republicans have been wrangling over proposals that could cut trillions of dollars from programs such as the Medicare health plan, mainly for older Americans, and the government's retirement plan, Social Security; they also are divided over whether to bring in new tax revenue, such as by closing corporate tax loopholes or increasing taxes for the wealthy.

In a White House meeting last week, the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and other black groups urged Obama to resist deep cuts such as in housing assistance or safety net programs including Social Security and Medicaid, a medical program mainly for the poor and uninsured, saying it would disproportionately hurt urban areas with some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment. The U.S. poverty rate currently stands at 14.3 percent, with the ranks of the working-age poor at the highest level since the 1960s. Some analysts believe the poverty rate will climb higher when new figures are released in September.

"Typically in recessions, minorities suffer from being last hired and first fired. They are likely to lose jobs more rapidly at the beginning of the recession, and are far slower to gain jobs as the economy recovers," said Harrison, who is now a sociologist at Howard University. "One suspects that blacks who lost jobs in the recession, or who have tried to help family members or relatives who did, have now spent whatever savings or other cashable assets they had."

Other findings:

_About 35 percent of black households and 31 percent of Hispanic households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15 percent of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares were 29 percent for blacks, 23 percent for Hispanics and 11 percent for whites.

_Asians lost their top ranking to whites in median household wealth, dropping from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009. Similar to Hispanics, many Asians were concentrated in states like California that were hit hard by the housing downturn. More recent arrivals of new Asian immigrants, who tend to be poor, also pushed down their median wealth.

_Across all race and ethnic groups, the wealth gap between rich and poor widened. The share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of U.S. households increased from 49 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2009. The threshold for entry into the wealthiest top 10 percent, however, dipped lower: from $646,327 in 2005 to $598,435.

The numbers are based on the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, which sampled more than 36,000 households on wealth from September-December 2009. Census first began publishing wealth data from this survey, broken down by race and ethnicity, in 1984.

___

Online:

http://pewsocialtrends.org/

http://www.census.gov

Carney Gets Hit for Ten Minutes on the Obama Plan - By Daniel Foster - The Corner - National Review Online

2011-07-29T10:06:00.003-05:00

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/272768/carney-gets-hit-ten-minutes-obama-plan-daniel-foster

Carney Gets Hit for Ten Minutes on the Obama Plan - By Daniel Foster - The Corner - National Review Online

Or the lack thereof. After bobbing-and-weaving for nine minutes, Carney finally says what everybody knows: The president won't put his plan on paper because he doesn't want it to become "politically charged" before a compromise can be reached. In other words, you've got to pass it to find out what's in it:

UPDATE: So POTUS doesn't have a plan, as such. The Republicans, for their part, have several. But the president's senior advisers are recommending that he veto the latest.

APNewsBreak: Arctic scientist under investigation - Yahoo! News

2011-07-29T10:06:00.001-05:00

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-arctic-scientist-under-investigation-082217993.html

APNewsBreak: Arctic scientist under investigation

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Just five years ago, Charles Monnett was one of the scientists whose observation that several polar bears had drowned in the Arctic Ocean helped galvanize the global warming movement.

Now, the wildlife biologist is on administrative leave and facing accusations of scientific misconduct.

The federal agency where he works told him he was on leave pending the results of an investigation into "integrity issues." A watchdog group believes it has to do with the 2006 journal article about the bear, but a source familiar with the investigation said late Thursday that placing Monnett on leave had nothing to with scientific integrity or the article.

The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation, wouldn't comment further.

The watchdog, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, filed a complaint on Monnett's behalf Thursday with the agency, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Investigators have not yet told Monnett of the specific charges or questions related to the scientific integrity of his work, said Jeff Ruch, the watchdog group's executive director. His group released excerpts of interviews investigators conducted with Monnett and fellow researcher Jeffrey Gleason, in which they were questioned about the observations that led to the article.

Whatever the outcome, the investigation comes at a time when climate change activists and those who are skeptical about global warming are battling over the credibility of scientists' work.

Members of both sides, however, said that it was too early to make any pronouncements about the case, particularly since the agency has not yet released the details of the allegations against him.

Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the case reinforces the group's position that people should be more skeptical about the work of climate change scientists.

Even if every scientist is objective, "what we're being asked to do is turn our economy around and spend trillions and trillions of dollars on the basis of" climate change claims, he said.

Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she's not alarmed by the handling of the case so far.

Grifo said the allegations made in the complaint filed by Ruch's group are premature and said people should wait to see what, if anything, comes of the inspector general's investigation.

Beyond the climate change debate, the investigation also focuses attention on an Obama administration policy intended to protect scientists from political interference.

The complaint seeks Monnett's reinstatement and a public apology from the agency and inspector general, whose office is conducting the probe.

The group's filing also seeks to have the investigation dropped or to have the charges specified and the matter carried out quickly and fairly, as the Obama policy states.

BOEMRE, which oversees leasing and development of offshore drilling, was created last year in the reorganization of the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which oversaw offshore drilling.

The MMS was abolished after the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The agency was accused of being too close to oil and gas industry interests. A congressional report last year found MMS Alaska was vulnerable to lawsuits and allegations of scientific misconduct.

The agency announced steps to improve.

On July 18, BOEMRE told the longtime Anchorage-based Monnett that he was being put on leave, pending the investigation, according to the complaint. BOEMRE has barred Monnett from speaking to reporters, Ruch said.

Monnett could not immediately be reached Thursday.

His wife, Lisa Rotterman, a fellow scientist who worked with Monnett for years, including at BOEMRE's predecessor agency, said the case did not come out of the blue.

Rotterman said Monnett had come under fire in the past within the agency for speaking the truth about what the science showed. She said the 2006 article wasn't framed in the context of climate change but was relevant to the topic.

She feared what happened to Monnett would send a "chilling message" at the agency just as important oil and gas development decisions in the Arctic will soon be made.

"I don't believe the timing is coincidental," she said.

Rotterman said Monnett's work included identifying questions that needed to be answered to inform the environmental analyses the agency must conduct before issuing drilling permits.

"This is a time when sowing doubt in the public's mind about whether those findings can be trusted or not, that makes people think, I don't know what to believe," she said.

Monnett coordinated much of BOEMRE's research on Arctic wildlife and ecology, had duties that included managing about $50 million worth of studies, according to the complaint.

The agency said other scientists would manage the studies in his absence.

According to documents provided by Ruch's group, which sat in on investigators' interviews with Monnett, the questioning focused on observations that he and researcher Jeffrey Gleason made in 2004.

At the time, they were conducting an aerial survey of bowhead whales, and saw four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm. There were other witnesses, according to Ruch, and low-resolution photos show floating white blobs.

Monnett and Gleason detailed their observations in an article published two years later in the journal Polar Biology. In the peer-reviewed article, they said they were reporting, to the best of their knowledge, the first observations of the bears floating dead and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances.

Polar bears are considered strong swimmers, they wrote, but long-distance swims may exact a greater metabolic toll than standing or walking on ice in better weather.

They said their observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds. They also added that the findings "suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

The article and presentations drew national attention and helped make the polar bear a symbol for the global warming movement. Former vice president and climate change activist Al Gore mentioned the animal in his Oscar-winning global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

The complaint said agency officials harassed Gleason and Monnett, and that they received negative comments after the journal article. Gleason took another Interior Department job; he didn't respond to an email and a BOEMRE spokeswoman said he wouldn't be available for comment.

In May 2008, the bear was classified as a threatened species, the first with its survival at risk due to global warming.

According to a transcript, provided by Ruch's group, Ruch asked investigator Eric May, during questioning of Monnett in February, for specifics about the allegations. May replied: "well, scientific misconduct, basically, uh, wrong numbers, uh, miscalculations."

Monnett said that alleging scientific misconduct "suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or to, to change it. Um, I sure don't see any indication of that in what you're asking me about."

Don’t Blow It - Mona Charen - National Review Online

2011-07-29T10:00:00.001-05:00

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/273000/don-t-blow-it-mona-charen

Don't Blow It - Mona Charen - National Review Online

It is true — so true — as Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, argues in the Washington Post, that the doyens of the liberal press have been attempting to paint the Tea Party as the villains of the debt-ceiling confrontation. But this shouldn't surprise. From the inception of the movement, liberals and Democrats have purported to see dark and dangerous trends afoot. The movement has been insulted as stupid and radical — and slandered as racist and nativist.

Perhaps liberals have a hard time understanding the tea-party phenomenon because it's so at odds with the spirit of the times. Those funny 18th-century costumes they sport at rallies have a deeper meaning than simply a reference to the original Boston Tea Party. Unlike most 20th- and 21st-century political activists, tea-party members are not asking for anything from the federal government — not "full funding" for this or that program, not more research for this or that disease, not more tax exemptions for this or that industry. They simply ask that the federal government not spend more than it collects in taxes and not continue its suicidal expansion.

The tea-party activists are excellent patriots, but during the debt-ceiling confrontation, some have displayed an obtuse and even vain rigidity.

Judson Phillips, for example, argues that "Boehner is not listening to those who elected him and is now pushing a plan with almost nonexistent budget cuts." He urges a no vote. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) vowed that he would not vote to raise the debt ceiling until a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution passed. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) explained his unwillingness to back Boehner's bill this way: "I really truly worry that the debt is one of the single greatest threats to the United States of America. That we're talking about a problem that is multitrillion dollars in its depth and I think we ought to be cutting more. I just don't think it goes far enough."

Of course the Boehner bill doesn't solve the debt problem. The debt is 98.6 percent of GDP. A debt of that magnitude will take years to tame. Unlike debt-ceiling increases in the past, this one at least sets the precedent of requiring dollar-for-dollar cuts.

The Democrats control the Senate. The presidency is occupied by a Democrat. Those two uncomfortable realities severely limit the good that can be accomplished at this moment.

But precisely because the stakes are so high — Chaffetz is right about the threat — the overriding concern must be to change those realities. And so the first responsibility of members of Congress as well as grassroots activists should be to do nothing that will impede the election of a Republican president and Republican-majority Senate in 2012. If Republicans control Congress and the presidency after 2012, they will have unlimited opportunities to cut the budget, decrease the debt, change the rules that permit government spending to increase on autopilot, and (one hopes) adopt the kind of pro-business policies that will encourage rather than impede economic growth.

Bill Buckley famously (did he say anything that wasn't famous?) declared that he would always support the most-right-leaning candidate who could win. Similarly, we should support those policies and tactics (yes, it's not a dirty word) that are most likely to lead to good outcomes for the country.

Speaker Boehner, dealing with a remarkably ideological president, could not get a compromise. Despite dueling primetime speeches, it remains unclear how voters will interpret the impasse. But the president has got to be worried that he seems quite prepared to bring down economic ruin on the country if he is denied a tax increase on "millionaires and billionaires" (by which he means those earning more than $200,000, by the way). He owns the lousy economy, the budget deadlock, and the debt. Unless . . .

Unless Republicans play into his hands by seeming equally indifferent to the results of a failure to raise the debt ceiling. And for what grand purpose? Because it doesn't solve our problems all at once? That would be a Republican default in many senses of the word. It would permit Obama to share blame about the state of the economy with them. He and a compliant press will use every opportunity to attribute anything that goes wrong in American life from now until November 2012 to Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling.

One of the ways Democrats operated over the years was to pocket what they could get and circle back for more later. They didn't get Hillarycare, but they got expansions of Medicaid, and then S-CHIP, and finally Obamacare. It was a successful tactic. Republicans should learn from it.

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism - Yahoo! News

2011-07-28T17:10:00.001-05:00

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Call his bluff - The Washington Post

2011-07-15T14:26:00.001-05:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/call-his-bluff/2011/07/14/gIQAfzFyEI_story.html?hpid=z4

Call Obama's bluff

President Obama is demanding a big long-term budget deal. He won't sign anything less, he warns, asking, "If not now, when?"

How about last December, when he ignored his own debt commission's recommendations? How about February, when he presented a budget that increases debt by $10 trillion over the next decade? How about April, when he sought a debt-ceiling increase with zero debt reduction attached?

All of a sudden he's a born-again budget balancer prepared to bravely take on his own party by making deep cuts in entitlements. Really? Name one. He's been saying forever that he's prepared to discuss, engage, converse about entitlement cuts. But never once has he publicly proposed a single structural change to any entitlement.

Hasn't the White House leaked that he's prepared to raise the Medicare age or change the cost-of-living calculation?

Anonymous talk is cheap. Leaks are designed to manipulate. Offers are floated and disappear.

Say it, Mr. President. Give us one single structural change in entitlements. In public.

As part of the pose as the forward-
looking grown-up rising above all the others who play politics, Obama insists upon a long-term deal. And what is Obama's definition of long-term? Surprise: An agreement that gets him past Nov. 6, 2012.

Nothing could be more political. It's like his Afghan surge wind-down date. September 2012 has no relation to any military reality on the ground. It is designed solely to position Obama favorably going into the last weeks of his reelection campaign.

Yet the Olympian above-the-fray no-politics-here pose is succeeding. A pliant press swallows the White House story line: the great compromiser ("clearly exasperated," sympathized a Post news story) being stymied by Republican "intransigence" (the noun actually used in another front-page Post news story to describe the Republican position on taxes).

The meme having been established, Republicans have been neatly set up to take the fall if a deal is not reached by Aug. 2. Obama is already waving the red flag, warning ominously that Social Security, disabled veterans' benefits, "critical" medical research, food inspection — without which agriculture shuts down — are in jeopardy.

The Republicans are being totally outmaneuvered. The House speaker appears disoriented. It's time to act. Time to call Obama's bluff.

A long-term deal or nothing? The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term debt-ceiling hike of $500 billion containing $500 billion in budget cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something larger.

The fat-cat tax breaks (those corporate jets) that Obama's talking points endlessly recycle? Republicans should call for urgent negotiations on tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles commission that, in one option, strips out annually $1.1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes while lowering tax rates across the board to a top rate of 23 percent. The president says he wants tax reform, doesn't he? Well, Mr. President, here are five months to do so.

Will the Democratic Senate or the Democratic president refuse this offer and allow the country to default — with all the cataclysmic consequences that the Democrats have been warning about for months — because Obama insists on a deal that is 10 months and seven days longer?

That's indefensible and transparently self-serving. Dare the president to make that case. Dare him to veto — or the Democratic Senate to block — a short-term debt-limit increase.

This is certainly better than the McConnell plan, which would simply throw debt reduction back to the president. But if the House cannot do Plan A, McConnell is the fallback Plan B.

After all, by what crazy calculation should Republicans allow themselves to be blamed for a debt crisis that could destabilize the economy and even precipitate a double-dip recession? Right now, Obama owns the economy and its 9.2 percent unemployment, 1.9 percent GDP growth and exploding debt about which he's done nothing. Why bail him out by sharing ownership?

You cannot govern this country from one house. Republicans should have learned that from the 1995-96 Gingrich-Clinton fight when the GOP controlled both houses and still lost.

If conservatives really want to get the nation's spending under control, the only way is to win the presidency. Put the question to the country and let the people decide. To seriously jeopardize the election now in pursuit of a long-term, small-government, Ryan-like reform that is inherently unreachable without control of the White House may be good for the soul. But it could very well wreck the cause.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

STOP SPENDING MONEY YOU DON:T HAVE......

2011-07-08T15:10:00.000-05:00

An Establishment in Panic - RealClearPolitics -

2011-07-08T13:25:00.001-05:00

NOTE: We are seeing the Non-Tea Party "Conservatives" shake in their boots... They knew it was coming (THEY being "Conservatives" and IT being smaller government)... CHANGE IS AH COMING.... 2012 will make 2010 look like the top of Nancy Pelosi's head.....

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/07/08/an_establishment_in_panic_110501.html

An Establishment in Panic

By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like "fanatics," writes David Brooks of The New York Times.

Anti-tax Republicans "have no sense of moral decency," he adds.

They are "willing to stain their nation's honor" to "worship their idol." If this "deal of the century" goes down, as he calls the Barack Obama offer, "Republican fanaticism" will be the cause.

"The GOP has become a cult" that has replaced reason with "feverish" and "cockamamie beliefs," writes Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. The Republican "presidential field (is) a virtual political Jonestown," the Guyana site where more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple drank the Kool-Aid that Rev. Jim Jones mixed for them.

Does anyone think this an appropriate description of such mild-mannered men as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman?

"The GOP's Hezbollah Wing Is Now Fully in Control," screams The New Republic over a recent lead editorial.

Other columnists charge the GOP with holding America "hostage" by refusing to accept tax hikes to avert a default on the debt.

What to make of this hysteria?

The Establishment is in a panic. It has been jolted awake to the realization that the GOP House, if it can summon the courage to use it, is holding a weapon that could enable it to bridle forever the federal monster that consumes 25 percent of gross domestic product.

To bully and blackmail the GOP into surrendering the weapon and betraying its principles and signing on to new taxes, that establishment has unleashed rhetoric more befitting a war on terror than a political dispute.

For how, exactly, are Republicans threatening the republic?

The House has not said it will not raise the debt ceiling. It must and will. It has not said it will not accept budget cuts. It has indicated a willingness to accept the budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations.

Where the GOP has stood its ground is on tax increases.

Is fanaticism behind this stance? Does this manifest insanity? How does this imperil the nation's honor and future?

Behind the GOP opposition to tax hikes is the party's word given to the country that elected it in 2010, its political principles, its traditional view of what not to do when the nation is in a slump, and party history.

Fully 235 Republican House members signed a 2010 pledge not to raise taxes. And by giving their word they were rewarded with victory.

Should they now dishonor that pledge, what would differentiate them from George H.W. Bush, who famously promised in 1988: "Read my lips! No new taxes!" then went back on his word and took the party down to defeat with him?

Second, the GOP is the party of small government and low taxes.

Why would it agree to raise taxes on the private productive sector when federal spending, now at a peacetime record of 25 percent of GDP, is the problem?

Third, America is in a slump, with 9 percent of the workforce unemployed, another 7 percent underemployed and the economy growing at a tepid 1.8 percent.

What school of economic thought -- Keynesian, supply-side or monetarist -- says raising taxes in a slumping economy is the recipe for a return to prosperity? There is no such school.

Why, when the whole country is talking about the need to create jobs, would Congress raise taxes on a private productive sector that employs six in seven Americans and is the creator of real jobs?

In 1982, President Reagan agreed to the same deal being offered the party today: three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases to which he assented. As he ruefully told this writer more than once, he was lied to. He got one dollar in spending cuts for every three in tax increases.

What of the charge that the Republican House is holding America hostage, blackmailing the nation with a suicidal threat to throw us all into national default if it does not get its way?

This smear is the precise opposite of the truth.

The Republican Party has not said it will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It has an obligation to do so, and will.

The House has simply said it will not accept new taxes on a nation whose fiscal crisis comes from overspending.

If the GOP keeps its word, raises the debt ceiling and accepts budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations, the only people who can prevent the debt ceiling's being raised are Senate Democrats or Obama, in which case, they, not the GOP, will have thrown the nation into default.

It is the establishment that is resorting to extortion, saying, in effect, to the House GOP: Give us the new taxes we demand, or Obama will veto the debt ceiling and we will all blame you for the default.

They're bluffing.

The GOP should stand its ground -- and fix bayonets.

Stengel-gate Spreads: Why Was Richard Stengel Presented as an Expert on the Constitution on NPR? - Big Journalism

2011-07-08T12:50:00.001-05:00

http://bigjournalism.com/aworthing/2011/07/08/stengel-gate-spreads-why-was-richard-stengel-presented-as-an-expert-on-the-constitution-on-npr/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigJournalism+%28Big+Journalism%29

Stengel-gate Spreads: Why Was Richard Stengel Presented as an Expert on the Constitution on NPR?

To give a quick review, on June 23, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story* for Time Magazine rife with factual errors. On June 29, I published a piece here recording fourteen clear factual errors in that story. I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared at Time Magazine as its cover story, and ever since I have been crusading to embarrass them into a correction.

But what is also embarrassing is that other media outlets have treated Mr. Stengel as though he was an expert on the Constitution. Consider, for example, this blurp for a show on NPR entitled "Talk of the Nation" that aired on July 4:

In the fierce debates over health care, Libya, debt, gay marriage and other issues, Americans have been getting a lecture on the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of its authors. Andrea Seabrook speaks with Richard Stengel of Time magazine and Yale law professor Akhil Amar about the political divide over the Constitution and how an 18th-century document applies in a 21st-century world. [emphasis added]

Now, I may not like Professor Amar personally, and I may vehemently disagree with him on many points, but I think it is fair to consider him an expert on the Constitution.

But as the other "expert," we have Richard Stengel. Really, Andrea Seabrook? You actually read that article, and thought he was an expert? Because it is important to stress is that many of these errors are obvious to any lay person. You don't need three years of law school to know it is simply incorrect to say "[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn't say so." You only have to know that there is such a thing as the First Amendment or the Second. Nor do you need complicated legal instruction to know that it is incorrect to say that the Constitution is not law—most people learn in elementary school that the Constitution is the supreme law of this land. And one doesn't need a particularly deep understanding of the Constitution to become concerned when they see Stengel declare that "[i]n drafting the 14th Amendment, Congress … wanted to emancipate blacks and allow them to vote." I consider it fairly common knowledge that it was actually the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery, and the Fifteenth that outlawed racial discrimination in the franchise. These errors should have been obvious to anyone reading Stengel's piece, and utterly undermined any claim he could make to be an expert.

A reasonable radio host, doing due diligence, would have realized that they only had two options with Mr. Stengel. She could either grill him about the serial inaccuracies in his article. Or, she could drop him as a guest entirely and find a true expert on the Constitution to replace him.

And while they were at it, they could have added a conservative expert on the Constitution to balance the debate.

So if you listen to the whole program (and seriously, dear reader, don't do that psychological damage to yourself) you get Richard Stengel consulted on issues such as gay marriage:

Michael [A Caller]: I'm a gay person in a committed relationship of 10 years, and although we've done all the legal paperwork to make our relationship as legal as possible, we're traveling to Vermont this summer to become married.

My question is: As I understand Article IV of the Constitution and the 14th Amendment, how possibly could a conservative court uphold the DOMA, as I see it just clearly – despite what anybody feels morally or socially – clearly DOMA is unconstitutional.

SEABROOK: DOMA meaning the Defense of Marriage Act. Let's turn to you, Richard Stengel. What do you say?

STENGEL: Well, it's a good question. I don't know the answer to it, because the court can decide whatever it wants. But I would put your question in the context of what we were talking about in terms of originalism and the limits of originalism, because I think the framers would certainly not really understand the idea of same-sex marriage.

Marriage, of course, is not mentioned in the Constitution, nor is privacy, as Akhil mentioned it. And I do think that we have evolved socially, in terms of different things that we now believe are morally correct and morally true, and we have to – the Constitution has to adapt.

I mean, I would say that the original vision of the framers, as interpreted, is that they did want equity for all Americans and that they wanted, you know, fairness before the law. And you could argue that, you know, if Madison or Washington or Jefferson were alive today, they would be in favor of same-sex marriage.

Now this caller, Michael, knows something of what he is talking about, but Stengel is clearly clueless. That is right, the caller seems to know more about the Constitution then this so-called expert. First, the reference to Article IV, is almost certainly a reference to what is known as the Full Faith and Credit Clause. It reads:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.

In other words, the caller wanted to know how, consistent with the Constitution, Texas could refuse to recognize a gay marriage performed in Connecticut. That is a good question and Mr. Stengel utterly fails to even recognize that this is the question being asked. Instead he launches into a discussion about what he imagines Washington, Jefferson and Madison would say about gay marriage generally. The problem with that analysis it twofold.

First, Jefferson is not one of the framers of the Constitution. He was in France at the time. The closest he came to contributing to the process was to convince Madison that it was wise to add a Bill of Rights. He didn't write any of it.

(Washington is also a dubious choice in "framer" but I will give Stengel a mulligan on that given that Lincoln once did the same thing.)

But more importantly, Madison and Washington are not the correct framers to consult when discussing how they would "feel" about gay marriage because they would tell you that the original Constitution said nothing on the subject of marriage—it was primarily dominion of the states and to a minor degree, the Federal territories. The part of the Constitution that allows Federal courts to pass judgment on state marriage laws, to a degree, is the Fourteenth Amendment (which the listener also alluded to), which was written after Madison and Washington and the entire original founding generation was long dead. The "founders" on that topic were men like Thaddeus Stevens (one of my Constitutional heroes), Charles Sumner and John Bingham, to name only a few. So in Stengel's attempt to channel the spirits of the founders he wasn't even talking about the right people.

Later on we get his wisdom on the Constitutionality of banning pot:

SEABROOK: Okay. Let me try you on this one, Richard Stengel. A man from the Marine Corps – he's Darryl(ph) in Bend, Oregon – writes that he uses cannabis daily to treat both his symptoms of PTSD and chronic pain, no narcotics, no alcohol. He wants to know, he uses it responsibly, and he believes that cannabis is – the prohibition of it is unconstitutional for many reasons. Your thoughts?

STENGEL: Well, of course the high court did prohibit the use of alcohol as an amendment, and then that was overturned. I'm not sure that the Constitution says very much about that. But if you look at the use of alcohol and medication, you know, state courts right now, you know, have the predominant opinion about that. And if the states can legalize marijuana, as some states have, then, you know, that's – you should probably live in one of those states.

Oy vey, where do I start with that answer? First, contrary to his suggestion, the prohibition of alcohol was not enacted by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court didn't ratify the Eighteenth Amendment. "We the people" did. Nor was the Eighteenth Amendment "overturned." The correct answer is that it was repealed, again by "we the people," by ratifying the Twenty-First Amendment.

Secondly, the current Supreme Court says that even if a state legalizes pot, the Federal Government can still outlaw it and arrest people for violating those laws even if the state specifically makes that usage legal. That was determined in a recent case entitled Gonzales v. Raich, a fact that Stengel is apparently blissfully unaware of. He seems to think that states can prevent federal enforcement of anti-drug legislation. He is, as a matter of black letter law, wrong.

In order to reach that conclusion in Gonzales, the Supreme Court relied on … (drum roll please) … the Commerce Clause. So it is useful to compare what Stengel said on the application of the Commerce Clause to the growth and consumption of pot, to his view of the application of the Commerce Clause to the "act" of not buying health insurance in his Time cover story:

One would like to think that the decision to buy health insurance — or not — is a private one. If you're young and healthy, you might just say, I'd rather spend my money on something else. That's your right — and it may well be a rational decision. But it's hard to argue that not buying health insurance has no interstate economic consequences.

So according to him, all you need are interstate economic consequences in order to justify federal regulation. So how is that not present in the growing or consumption of cannabis? His own enunciated principles, if he managed to remember them and apply them evenly, would have led him to the same conclusion reached by the Supreme Court: the Federal Government can stop you from growing or using pot, even if your state purports to legalize it.

Later on, in discussing Citizens United, he makes this clueless statement:

Again, another area where the originalist vision is not necessarily perfectly 20/20. I mean, there were – there was no money in politics in the 18th century.

But actually that wasn't the case. Mass media wasn't suddenly invented in the twentieth century with the advent of radio. In the 1700's, politicians needed cash to start newspapers to praise their side and smear the competition (the ideal of an unbiased press didn't come until much later), and that was indeed money in politics.

Next, he talks about the public debt and the debate over the debt ceiling:

STENGEL: Well, yes. The – these – I think a little-known clause of the 14th Amendment, Section 4, basically says that the public debt of the U.S. can't be violated. It's one of the only kind of full, you know, 100 percent prescriptions in the Constitution, and it's not something that people pay that much attention to. And I believe that the president could say that in fact the U.S. defaulting on its public debt is unconstitutional, and therefore I, as president, will take these extraordinary measures to avoid that from happening.

And I think certainly if you, again, look at the original intent of the framers, I think, they certainly didn't want the U.S. defaulting on its debt, and part of the reason that the Constitution was created in the first place was to have an organization, a central government that could actually pay off the debts from the Revolution.

First, he is misstating what the Fourteenth Amendment says. What it actually says, in relevant part, is this:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Saying the debt shall not be questioned has very little to do with whether Congress must pay it and by what means. If you fail to make your mortgage payment, you haven't denied the validity of the underlying loan; you have simply failed to make a payment on it, potentially even defaulting on it.

Building on this fundamental misunderstanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, in the original Time magazine article,* he argued that the President could take extraordinary measure to see to it that the payments are made on our debt:

But if in the end Congress seems intent on allowing the U.S. to default on its debt, the President can assert that that is unconstitutional and take extraordinary measures to avoid it. He can use his Executive power to order the Treasury to produce binding debt instruments that cover all of the U.S.'s obligations around the world. He can sell assets, furlough workers, freeze checks — heck, he could lease Yellowstone Park. And it would all be constitutional. [emphasis added]

So, according to him, this clause empowers the president not merely to pay the debt, but to incur more debt. I mean that is the crazy place we are in, where somehow Washington has agreed that it is impossible to make our payments on our debt without borrowing more money. It is Alice-in-Wonderland logic. As I wrote several months ago:

Try this sometime. Go to your local bank. Tell them that you need a loan. They will ask why, in one way or another. When they ask why, explain to them that you already have a massive loan to someone else that you will not be able to repay unless you get this loan from them. When they ask how you got that loan in the first place, then explain to them that this loan was taken out because otherwise you couldn't have paid a previous loan [without it].

And when they ask how you plan to pay off this [new] loan, explain to them that surely someone else will loan you that money.

Then, let me know in the comments when they stop laughing at you.

But besides that little bit of Washingtonian unreality, what Mr. Stengel failed to notice is that another part of the Constitution specifically reserves the right to Congress and Congress alone to put us into debt. In Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 2, the Constitution states that "Congress shall have the power … [t]o borrow money on the credit of the United States[.]" That means Presidents don't have the power to do so, and the Courts don't—only Congress does. And nothing in the language of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment suggests that they were altering this clause of the Constitution so as to give the President the power to take us further into debt without Congress' consent.

Now, none of these errors are as egregious as the fourteen errors I found in his Time cover story. But still any person who tuned in to that show was positively miseducated by Stengel's clueless commentary. Despite his evident incompetence on the subject of the Constitution—obvious to anyone who read his Time cover story—he was held up as an expert on the Constitution, and his disinformation was launched on unsuspecting listeners as gospel.

Which makes the message of the last caller they had on the show unintentionally ironic:

MIKE: First of all, I just got to give you guys a big shout-out and thanking you for this sort of civic discussion. This is the sort of thing that, frankly, some little bit of public funding is appropriate because it's the sort of civic discussion you just don't get in any other media. So thumbs up to NPR on Fourth of July. It's very appropriate. [emphasis added]

That's right, dear reader, Richard Stengel was allowed to spew his nonsense on the radio and you had the privilege of paying for it.

At the very least, NPR owes its listeners (and the taxpayers) an apology and a correction for each of his errors.

I have already written to NPR's ombudsman about this. You can see the letter I wrote to him, here.

————————-

* Please note that I am no longer going to link to Stengel's Time story directly. You can find a link in the post listing the serial errors he made if you want to fact check them, but I am no longer going to increase that site's traffic directly.

————————-

Please also note that this post was adapted from a post that first appeared at Patterico's Pontifications.

Only 24% Say They Share Obama's Political Views - Rasmussen Reports™

2011-06-08T18:23:00.000-05:00

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/june_2011/only_24_say_they_share_obama_s_political_views

Only 24% Say They Share Obama's Political Views - Rasmussen Reports™

Most voters still believe President Obama is more liberal than they are, while just one-out-of-four say they share the same ideological views as the president.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters think Obama is more ideologically liberal than they are, while only 13% view him as more conservative. Twenty-four percent (24%) say their political views are about the same as the president's. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The number who see the president as more liberal than they are stayed at 57% in three-out-of-four previous surveys conducted since August of last year. That number climbed to 61% in late February. The number who view the president as more conservative ranged from nine percent (9%) to 12% in that same period.

The number of voters who say they share about the same political views as the president ties the lowest result measured since August and, interestingly, compares exactly with the number who say the same of Congress. Only 24% of voters hold about the same ideological views as the average Republican member of Congress, and another 24% feel that way about the views of the average Democratic congressman.

Forty-five percent (45%) of Democratic voters, however, say their views are about the same as the president's, although that ties the lowest finding to date. The number of Democrats who felt this way peaked at 60% in late February. Twenty-four percent (24%) of Democrats say the president is more conservative than they are, while 22% think he is more liberal.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 2-3, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

An overwhelming number (84%) of Republicans and 57% of voters not affiliated with either major political party feel the president is more liberal than they are. Twenty percent (20%) of unaffiliated voters share about the same ideological views as the president.

Sixty-one percent (61%) of investors see Obama as more liberal than they are. Forty percent (40%) of union members say their political views are about the same as the president's, compared to 22% of non-members. But nearly as many union members (38%) say the president is more liberal than they are.

Most Mainstream voters (65%) say Obama is more politically liberal than they are, while those in the Political Class tend to view the president's views as more liberal or about the same as theirs.

Fifty-four percent (54%) of voters believe Obama is qualified to be president. Among those who hope to take his place, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is the only Republican 2012 hopeful that a sizable number of voters considers qualified to be in the White House.

Yet for the second week in a row, a generic Republican candidate edges President Obama 45% to 42% among Likely U.S. Voters in a hypothetical 2012 election matchup.

For the first time, voters feel the agenda of congressional Republicans is nearly as extreme as that of Democrats in Congress.

Republican voters are slightly less critical of the job their representatives in Congress are doing, but most still think the legislators are out of sync with the party base. Democratic voters, by contrast, are not as happy with the performance of their congressmen as they were a year ago.

Recent polling shows that voters remain more conservative when it comes to fiscal issues than they are on social policy, but 29% still say they are conservative in both areas.

In January, "conservative" was viewed as the most popular political label one can put on a candidate, while "liberal" and "progressive" lost ground even among Democrats.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

Please sign up for the Rasmussen Reports daily e-mail update (it's free) or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Let us keep you up to date with the latest public opinion news.

Decline and fall of the American empire | Business | The Guardian

2011-06-06T21:46:00.001-05:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/06/us-economy-decline-recovery-challenges

Decline and fall of the American empire | Business | The Guardian

America clocked up a record last week. The latest drop in house prices meant that the cost of real estate has fallen by 33% since the peak – even bigger than the 31% slide seen when John Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Unemployment has not returned to Great Depression levels but at 9.1% of the workforce it is still at levels that will have nerves jangling in the White House. The last president to be re-elected with unemployment above 7.2% was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The US is a country with serious problems. Getting on for one in six depend on government food stamps to ensure they have enough to eat. The budget, which was in surplus little more than a decade ago, now has a deficit of Greek-style proportions. There is policy paralysis in Washington.

The assumption is that the problems can be easily solved because the US is the biggest economy on the planet, the only country with global military reach, the lucky possessor of the world's reserve currency, and a nation with a proud record of re-inventing itself once in every generation or so.

All this is true and more. US universities are superb, attracting the best brains from around the world. It is a country that pushes the frontiers of technology. So, it may be that the US is about to emerge stronger than ever from the long nightmare of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The strong financial position of American companies could unleash a wave of new investment over the next couple of years.

Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. The high levels of violent crime, epidemic of obesity, addiction to pornography and excessive use of energy may be telling us something: the US is in an advanced state of cultural decadence.

Empires decline for many different reasons but certain factors recur. There is an initial reluctance to admit that there is much to fret about, and there is the arrival of a challenger (or several challengers) to the settled international order. In Spain's case, the rival was Britain. In Britain's case, it was America. In America's case, the threat comes from China.

Britain's decline was extremely rapid after 1914. By 1945, the UK was a bit player in the bipolar world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union, and sterling – the heart of the 19th-century gold standard – was rapidly losing its lustre as a reserve currency. There had been concerns, voiced as far back as the 1851 Great Exhibition, that the hungrier, more efficient producers in Germany and the US threatened Britain's industrial hegemony. But no serious policy action was taken. In the second half of the 19th century there was a subtle shift in the economy, from the north of England to the south, from manufacturing to finance, from making things to living off investment income. By 1914, the writing was on the wall.

In two important respects, the US today differs from Britain a century ago. It is much bigger, which means that it benefits from continent-wide economies of scale, and it has a presence in the industries that will be strategically important in the first half of the 21st century. Britain in 1914 was over-reliant on coal and shipbuilding, industries that struggled between the world wars, and had failed to grasp early enough the importance of emerging new technologies.

Even so, there are parallels. There has been a long-term shift of emphasis in the US economy away from manufacturing and towards finance. There is a growing challenge from producers in other parts of the world.

Frenzy

Now consider the stark contrast between this economic recovery and the pattern of previous cycles. Traditionally, a US economic recovery sees unemployment coming down smartly as lower interest rates encourage consumers to spend and the construction industry to build more homes. This time, it has been different. There was a building frenzy during the bubble years, which left an overhang of supply even before plunging prices and rising unemployment led to a blitz of foreclosures.

America has more homes than it knows what to do with, and that state of affairs is not going to change for years.

Over the past couple of months, there has been a steady drip-feed of poor economic news that has dented hopes of a sustained recovery. Optimism has now been replaced by concern that the United States could be heading for the dreaded double-dip recession.

In the real estate market, which is the symptom of America's deep-seated economic malaise, the double dip has already arrived. Tax breaks to homeowners provided only a temporary respite for a falling market and millions of Americans are living in homes worth less than they paid for them. The latest figures show that more than 28% of homes with a mortgage are in negative equity. Unsurprisingly, that has made Americans far more cautious about spending money. Rising commodity prices exacerbate the problem, since they push up inflation and reduce the spending power of wages and salaries.

Macro-economic policy has proved less effective than normal. That's not for want of trying, though. The US has had zero short-term interest rates for well over two years. It has had two big doses of quantitative easing, the second of which is now ending. Its budget deficit is so big it has led to warnings from the credit-rating agencies, in spite of the dollar's reserve currency status. And Washington has adopted a policy of benign neglect towards the currency, despite the strong-dollar rhetoric, in the hope that cheaper exports will make up for the squeeze on consumer spending.

Policy, as ever, is geared towards growth because the great existential fear of the Fed, the Treasury and whoever occupies the White House is a return to the 1930s. Back then, the economic malaise could be largely attributed to deflationary economic policies that deepened the recession caused by the popping of the 1920s stock market bubble. The feeble response to today's growth medicine suggests that the US is structurally far weaker than it was in the 1930s. Tackling these weaknesses will require breaking finance's stranglehold over the economy and measures to boost ordinary families' spending power and so cut their reliance on debt. It will require an amnesty for the housing market. Above all, America must rediscover the qualities that originally made it great. That will not be easy.

Daily Kos | Anthony Weiner | Markos Moulitsas | The Daily Caller

2011-06-06T21:43:00.000-05:00

http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/03/daily-kos-sticks-up-for-weiner-by-publishing-identities-of-underage-girls/

Daily Kos sticks up for Weiner by publishing identities of underage girls

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas allowed the publication of underage girls' identities on his blog in an attempt to vilify Andrew Breitbart and exonerate New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner. Tommy Christopher, an openly left-wing journalist at Mediaite, reported Friday morning that Moulitsas's site published personally identifiable information about two young women who have become somewhat involved in the #Weinergate scandal.

Christopher refers to the two 16-year-old girls as "Betty" and "Veronica" in order to protect their identities. Christopher said Betty approached him on Sunday with information about how Dan Wolfe or @PatriotUSA76, would regularly harass Weiner and young women who follow the congressman on Twitter. Betty never wanted to be a public part of the story.

Betty's friend Veronica then approached Christopher with a made-up story about Weiner sending her lewd pictures on Twitter. Several conservative Twitter users, such as Wolfe and @GoatsRed (Mike Stack), had been encouraging people to come forward with such stories. But Christopher told TheDC that no one was asked to lie and Veronica's story was not published before being debunked. Daily Kos bloggers, however, alleged that the conservative Twitter users were soliciting false stories about Weiner.

Christopher writes in his story that these Kos bloggers were able to track down Betty and Veronica based on clues left behind in his Twitter feed. Christopher contacted Moulitsas to ask him to stop publication of information that could be used to identify the young girls. An email back-and-forth between Christopher and Moulitsas shows the two liberals disagreeing on whether or not the young girls' identities should be published. Christopher told TheDC he's "really livid" with Moulitsas's actions.

"He's a fucking asshole," Christopher said of Moulitsas. "Anyone who defends him is a piece of shit."

(Echoes of Weiner's womanizing past ring in his present day package predicament)

Breitbart is equally sickened by Moulitsas's actions. "The fact that NBC entertains him and puts him on 'Meet the Press' when his tactics on a day-to-day basis are sub-human," Breitbart told TheDC. "It speaks to what has happened in the mainstream media in these crazy times."

What's Moulitsas's defense for allowing the publication of the underage girls' personally identifiable information in an attempt to exonerate the scandal-plagued Weiner? "Daily Kos is a community site with tens of thousands of diarists," he told TheDC. "We do not exert editorial control over community content."

Moulitsas said Daily Kos will only remove information in certain obscure circumstances and that it's a "community site" where the bloggers decide what they want to write about. "We'll remove copyright violations when we get a DMCA takedown notice," Moulitsas said in an email. "We'll remove any direct calls to violence (I can count the instances in one hand). That's it. If anything else has been removed, it has been removed by the diarists themselves."

Moulitsas threw in one last dig at conservative bloggers. He said if people didn't probe the #Weinergate story, underage girls' identities wouldn't have gotten published in connection to the scandal. "Of course, none of this would've happened had conservatives not employed an 'anything goes' effort to destroy Rep. Anthony Weiner," he said.

Breitbart said liberals will do anything they can to protect Weiner instead of trying to find out what really happened in this scandal. "There is a standing policy on the organized left when it comes to Breitbart stories. That tactic is to just shoot and not aim," he said "This tactic worked in creating a provably false meme of selectively editing for ACORN, Sherrod and the University of Missouri labor studies course."

Breitbart points to Salon.com editor Joan Walsh's appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC this week. When Matthews asked her why Weiner doesn't just say he did not appear in the photo and he had nothing to do with it, Walsh revved up the spin machine. "You know, I don't know Chris," she started. "I'm a good Irish-Catholic girl. I'm not going to sit here and talk about what pictures he may or may not have of himself on his computer. It's none of my business. But, he said that he didn't send the pictures out and, you know, my position from the beginning is I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt because this originated with Andrew Breitbart."

Breitbart told TheDC that "Chris Matthews, perhaps mindful that he was witnessing this happen once again, stopped Salon's editorial liar-in-chief Joan Walsh in her tracks of the big Sherrod lie."

"There is no love lost between me and Matthews, but he showed immense integrity to point out the obvious that Walsh was digging in once again to try to bury a political enemy with a barrage of malicious lies," he said.

On her Salon.com blog, Walsh attacked Matthews's line of questioning. "Chris Matthews came at me hard today with a question I didn't expect: Why can't Rep. Anthony Weiner say 'with certitude' that the racy crotch-shot seen 'round the world isn't his?," Walsh wrote. "Matthews pretty much challenged NY 1's Errol Louis to reassure him that no such photos exist on Louis's own computer; he didn't pose that question to me. I can safely say I have no suggestive photos of myself on my computer."

The Kos blogger has since removed the young girls' personally identifiable information, but, according to Christopher, without any intervention from Moulitsas.

James Carville | Obama | The Daily Caller

2011-06-06T21:30:00.001-05:00

http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/06/carville-2012-could-be-very-rough-for-obama-says-civil-unrest-imminently-possible/

Carville: 2012 could be 'very rough' for Obama, says civil unrest 'imminently possible'

Who ever thought the saying, "It's the economy stupid," from James Carville in 1992 would become a staple in presidential elections 20 years later?

That expression made its way into the campaign in 2008, and according to Carville, it could be the theme of the 2012 campaign as well as President Barack Obama seeks reelection. In an appearance on Monday's "Imus in the Morning" on the Fox Business Network, the former Clinton adviser said that, based on the May jobs number, if the unemployment picture doesn't improve, 2012 could be rough for the president.

"[L]ook, I don't think anybody — if 54,000 new jobs is the new standard, it's going to be a very, very rough 2012 for President Obama," Carville said. "But the three-month average was 160,000. If that is the case, then he will do OK. I can't tell you what will happen. But yes, if this, if this last jobs number is an indication of future job numbers, it's going to be very, very rough."

Carville cited a 2009 book by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff called "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly." According to the book, the current economic situation, as with similar crises of this magnitude, will take time to work itself out and there may be little Obama can do.

"It is going to be very difficult," Carville said. "But the country, if that is what we are doing, this is gruesome on people. This unemployment rate for this long is a humanitarian crisis of the first magnitude. This financial crisis, people have studied this by the way, they know that the things take this long to work their way through. The aftermath of these things — kind of an academic book that is dry entitled 'This Time is Different.' What it concluded is that it is not different this time. They studied it, the aftermath of the financial crisis. What we are going through is imminently predictable. But this is a terrible thing that has happened to people's lives. I think the president at one level understands that, you know. But he is limited in what he can do. So we'll just have to see. But it's going to be hard. If 54,000 jobs is the new norm — this is going to be very, very tough. Some people say it just might be one more thing. We don't know."

Watch:

But Carville said the consequences aren't limited to politics alone. He warned of heightened risk of civil unrest with the bleak economic picture.

"You know, look — this is a humanitarian — you know, you're smart enough to see this," Carville said. "People, you know, if it continues, we're going to start to see civil unrest in this country. I hate to say that, but I think it's imminently possible."