And boy, is it ever happy talk. Here is the White House Press Secretary today.
“I think by virtually any measure our economy is in a better place than it was two years ago,” he said.
Well, unemployment is a lot worse, so there is that. The unemployment rate in September 2008 was 6.1%. Home prices have dropped substantially, that’s true. So have home sales so if you are trying to sell your house, well… Oh, and the foreclosure rate is higher today than two years ago. And new car sales, they are way below two years ago. And two years ago the DJIA was a thousand points higher than today.
So other than employment, consumer confidence, foreclosures, sales and the stock market, the economy is better by virtually any measure. Well, except business failures. They are higher than two years ago too.
Paul Krugman has written yet another piece warning us that we have not borrowed enough (after we took his advice to borrow massively and got little results). We are facing a 1938-like downturn, he says, and so we need to borrow massively as if we were in something like World War II — the assumption being that, in the 1940s, the economy was jump-started by the war, got into high gear, and created the sort of revenues that make massive debt manageable.
I’m not an economist, but as an historian, I consider this an abject misreading of the postwar period, at least through the early 1950s. The war years were characterized by frenetic hyperactivity: Americans worked long hours, women were brought into the work force, new towns and manufacturing centers sprang up, and people gave up necessities — all on the assurance that this furious pace and consumer scarcity would be short-lived.
As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods. Given the wreckage in Europe, Japan, and Russia and the underdevelopment of India, Asia, and South America, we were about the only ones with the industrial and commercial wherewithal to supply the world rebound — often receiving cheap oil, gas, minerals, and interest in exchange, which supplemented our own vast supplies of comparatively cheap and easily recoverable resources. Nor should we forget the psychological element: Americans, after winning two wars, were enormously confident about their newfound international stature and influence.
Krugman needs to wake up. World War II wasn’t an improvement over the depression. It sucked. If you were a man, you had to do a crappy job that you didn’t want to do that would likely get you maimed or killed. If you didn’t have to do that, you had to do without. The rationing of everything from food to shoes was a part of life. Aggregate demand remained unfulfilled. You were under constant pressure to pay more taxes in the form of war bonds and travel, education, recreation and healthcare were minimized. The only difference between World War II and the Great Depression was a sense of shared suffering during the war.
There is nothing like war except war and it isn’t a good thing. Krugman and others who dream of a program that replicates Word War II are just dreaming.
America’s most senior soldier in Afghanistan, Gen David Petraeus, has condemned plans by a church in the US to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
The general’s comments followed a protest yesterday by hundreds of Afghans over the plans by Gainesville, Florida-based Dove World Outreach Center – a small, evangelical Christian church that espouses anti-Islam philosophy – to burn copies of the Koran on church grounds to mark the 2001 attacks.
“Images of the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence,” Gen Petraeus said.
Muslims consider the Koran to be the word of God and insist it be treated with the utmost respect, along with any printed material containing its verses or the name of Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. Any intentional damage or show of disrespect to the Koran is deeply offensive.
For the record, I agree with the general. The church that is burning Korans is doing it as a publicity stunt and are going to unnecessarily anger Muslim masses. It is a stupid and un-Christian act.
The media, of course, is playing a typically stupid role as well. The cretins burning the Korans should have been ignored. Of course that wasn’t going to happen. This act plays perfectly into the narrative the MSM wants to promote regarding evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists. It makes Christians look like hateful Neanderthals and the media absolutely loves that. By giving these people air time, they play a critical role in angering Muslims and creating greater danger for US troops. The book burners would have nothing without their partners in the media.
I don’t want you to think I am defending the Islamic animals who will be driven to violence by this. Any attacks by Muslims to avenge this act are 100% the blame of those who engage in the violence. Their decision to act out violently is theirs alone.
Have you noticed that when the Taliban blew up sacred Hindu statues in Afghanistan Hindus didn’t attack? The Saudis destroy every Bible and Christian item that enters their country. They burn Bibles every day and Christians aren’t mobbing the streets over it. No, the Koran burners are morons but the real criminals are Muslims who will undoubtedly kill and maim in revenge for the act of a few idiots in Florida.
When it took office in 2009, many of us advised the Administration to focus on nurturing the recovery first and postponing social-policy priorities that would only add more economic uncertainty. All the more so given this recession’s unusual financial roots.
Instead, Democrats embarked on the most sweeping expansion of government since the 1960s, imposing national health care, rewriting financial laws from top to bottom, attempting to re-regulate the telecom industry, and imposing vast new costs on energy, among many other proposals. Not to stop there, in January it plans to impose a huge new tax increase on “the wealthy,” which in practice means on the most profitable small businesses.
Central to Mr. Obama’s political strategy for passing these priorities has been trashing business and bankers as greedy profiteers. His Administration has denounced or held up as political or legal targets the Chrysler bond holders, Wall Street bonuses, Goldman Sachs, health-insurer profits, carbon energy investors, and anyone else who has dared to oppose any of its plans to “transform” U.S. society.
Only yesterday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee, Mr. Obama was at it again, declaring that “anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it’ll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster just to keep up—they just haven’t studied our history. We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness.”
The $75.5-million Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences will open Sept. 13 for about 675 students. As he was with Bill Clinton (who has an L.A. middle school named after him), Gore is second on the ticket to Rachel Carson, the late author credited with helping launch the modern environmental movement.
“Renaming this terribly contaminated school after famous environmental advocates is an affront to the great work that these individuals have done to protect the public’s health from harm,” an environmental coalition wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Unified School District. Making sure the school is safe “would be an even better way to honor their contribution to society.”
Construction crews were working at the campus up to the Labor Day weekend, replacing toxic soil with clean fill. All told, workers removed dirt from two 3,800-square-foot plots to a depth of 45 feet, space enough to hold a four-story building. The soil had contained more than a dozen underground storage tanks serving light industrial businesses.
Additional contamination may have come from the underground tanks of an adjacent gas station. A barrier will stretch 45 feet down from ground level to limit future possible fuel leakage.
An oil well operates across the street, but officials said they’ve found no associated risks. Like many local campuses, this school also sits above an oil field, but no oil field-related methane has been detected.
Groundwater about 45 feet below the surface remains contaminated but also poses no risk, officials said.
It is the perfect honor for these two. Rachel Carson is the author of that tribute to junk science “Silent Spring,” the book considered to have been the major player that led to the ban of DDT. Every single bit of “information” in her book was completely disproven. DDT has been proven to be completely safe, yet it was banned because of her dubious, emotional book. Tens of millions of people have died as a result of the banning of DDT.
Second – Al Gore. Look up junk science and his picture is next to the definition. How completely appropriate, that the school that sits on toxic land is named after these two. I can’t decide if the people who named the school are clueless idiots or masters of irony.
Those following President Obama’s prepared remarks during a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Monday were thrown a bit of a curveball when it came to a description of his critics:
“Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true,” he told a crowd largely consisting of union members.
We talk about him in the same terms and tone that he and the rest of the Alinskyites spoke of the last president. The vile, hateful, angry rhetoric he and his ilk used to describe George Bush and Dick Cheney was unprecedented. They lowered the bar. It is pathetic that, after setting the standard, he and the rest of the left whine when the standard is maintained.
By the way, that is some interesting grammar. Is he saying that his critics talk like a dog? Are they barking?
What happens when a nation spends money on social programs but doesn’t create wealth? What happens when a nation builds a huge government sector of overpaid government workers on debt with no reasonable means to pay the debt? Greece is what happens. Greece is on the edge of disaster. There is probably no way to fix it at this point. There is active talk of revolution and of a coup in the works. Greece is in a death spiral.
This dire prognosis comes even despite Athens’ massive efforts to sort out the country’s finances. The government’s draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country’s budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.
The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country’s economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country’s gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.
Where does it lead?
“They only organize strikes to serve their own interests!” shouts one man, whose name is Panayiotis Peretridis. “The only thing that interests me anymore is my daily wage. A loaf of bread is my political party. I want to help my country — give me work and I’ll pay taxes! But our honor as first-class skilled workers, as heads of families, as Greeks, is being dragged through the dirt!”
“If you take away my family’s bread, I’ll take you down — the government needs to know that,” Meletis says. “And don’t call us anarchists if that happens! We’re heads of our families and we’re desperate.”
He predicts the situation will only become more heated. “Things are starting to simmer here,” he says. “And at some point they’re going to explode.”
Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.
It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.
The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.
Sunday’s hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army’s 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.
Two of the four attackers even managed to fight their way inside the compound and were only killed after running out of ammunition and detonating explosives belts they were wearing.
The American troops who joined the fight and provided cover fire for Iraqi soldiers pursuing the attackers were based at the compound to train Iraqi forces, said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom. Iraqi forces also requested help from U.S. helicopters, drones and explosives experts, he said. No American troops were hurt, Bloom said.
As you know, there is a lot of anger out there and there exists the potential for an electoral tsunami that will wipe out Democratic majorities in the House and Senate this fall. Why should this be? Why the current opposition to Obama?
We might argue that so many people are disgusted with Obama because he and the Democratic party controlled government have gone on a wild spending spending spree that will saddle our children with an unsustainable debt burden.
Or maybe it is because the Democrats forced a health care proposal on the people against their will. Using bribery, extortion, parliamentary tricks and flat out lies, the Democrats passed a health care bill that Americans roundly opposed and begged them not to pass.
Or maybe it is because of the socialist take over of the means of production in the American auto industry and the de facto socialism that controls banks and traders.
Or maybe it is because the government is threatening to expand it reach even further with draconian controls on energy production.
Maybe it is because Obama refuses to even use there term “war on terror” to describe our battle with the Islamists.
Or maybe we are just tired of the increasing expansion of government that, more and more, invades every nook and cranny of our public lives including constantly growing IRS requirements.
Or maybe it is simply because the economy remains on life support even after the much vaunted “Recovery Summer.”
It could be any or all of these reasons. Americans oppose Obama and the Democrats because they don’t approve of his socialist agenda, right?
Wrong. You oppose Obama because you are a filthy, mouth breathing racist. Cynthia Tucker, jouralist with the MFM MSM says you don’t care about any of the above. That isn’t what drives you.
CYNTHIA TUCKER, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION: Well I think it may help the Democrats in some races this time, Chris, because some of the Tea Party candidates are so extreme. But there is another issue. There is, as Norah said, a whole lot of voter anger, discontent out there. We haven’t talked about the elephant in the room, and I don’t mean the Republicans: race. Changing demographics. Fear of a white minority.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: That’s so interesting.
TUCKER: Obama’s election has suddenly made many white Americans aware of the loss of a white majority.
MATTHEWS: That’s so interesting.
TUCKER: That’s what this crazy summer has been all about. Anti-mosque construction. Anti-immigrant ravings. It, that fear is very difficult for Obama to overcome.
See? You are scared animals and filthy racists that can be ignored. You need not be taken seriously, you are nothing but the underbelly of society; racists and simpletons living in fear. Tucker thinks there is no room for people of good will to disagree with Obama on policy, therefore, opposition is necessarily racism.
If they can convince America that the tea party types are racists, they can easy relegate them to the trash heap of history. Expect your betters in Washington and their fellow travelers in the MSM to continue to attempt to marginalize and thus ignore the cries of the majority of America.
The landing at Nadzab was The first major airborne assault in the Pacific Theater. Lieutenant General John J. Tolson described the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s operation at Nadzab as “probably the classic text-book airborne operation of World War II.” Coming after the less than impressive performance of the airborne arm in the Allied invasion of Sicily, Nadzab influenced thinking about the value of airborne operations.
It also signaled a turning point in the war in the Pacific. After this campaign, the Japanese gave up on the idea of total victory and their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and entrenched in a more defensive posture.
A good question. Commentary Magazine takes it on in a long dissertation. Here is a sample.
“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed,” he told CBS’s Katie Couric. “But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
Whereas Ronald Reagan saw the answers to our problems in the private sphere (“in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”), Obama seeks to expand confidence in, and reliance on, government wherever and whenever he can, albeit within the confines of a generally Center-Right nation and the “unfortunate” demands of democracy.
As with Webb’s Fabian socialism, one will never be able to say of Obama’s developing doctrine, “now socialism has arrived.” On the night the House of Representatives passed the health-care bill, Obama said, “This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction.” Then, speaking specifically of another vote to be taken in the Senate but also cleverly to those not yet satisfied with what had been achieved, he added, “Now, as momentous as this day is, it’s not the end of this journey.”
Apparently bloggers think William Shatner is cool. That makes sense because I think William Shatner is pretty cool.
He put his hand on my knee, squeezed gently, then said with breathless intimacy: “I said this one line for Priceline 20 times. I struggled to get the nuance. My silence reverberated in the ether.” His face was close to mine, as if imparting a great secret. “If you add a car and a hotel room, you will get an even better price from Priceline.com.” I nodded. “See! You got it!” Then, matter-of-factly, he straightened up and emphasized how much satisfaction that one line gave him. “A pro takes the job knowing it’s not a great role, just a paying job. But every word has music in it. My satisfaction is trying to reach that music.”
I asked if he regrets anything about his career. “Regret is the worst human emotion,” he said. “If you took another road, you might have fallen off a cliff. I’m content.”
What makes him content, besides the money, is the adulation he gets from his fans. People thank him for the years. Six-year-olds, 20-something bloggers, old ladies. “Bloggers think I’m cool,” he said. “I wish I knew what it was about me that was cool so I can repeat it. I’ve been in front of people their entire life. Oh, there are so many iterations of William Shatner.”
The best news? He is going to play the old man on a show called “Shit my fathers says.” That will be good.
A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes beyond the beige.
President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama.
..the decision to festoon the new carpet with quotes from Lincoln, F.D.R., J.F.K., Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King seems a tad Hallmark-y, and a little prepubescent — something Sasha’s fellow fourth graders might suggest (Malia’s seventh-grade friends would probably find it “lame”). What’s next, adding the doodle of a heart with “Barack + Michelle”? And isn’t falling back on F.D.R.’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and Lincoln’s “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” a bit lacking in imagination? Perhaps the Oval Office bookshelf could use a copy of Bartlett’s Book of Less Familiar Quotations.
If you were a Marxist totalitarian and wanted to increase control of the population, what would you do? Well, many things but most effective would be rationing and controlling their ability to purchase food. In the post modern age, you could put different levels of control on each individual based on their behavior. You would issue electronic rationing cards that need to be swiped in electronic readers before purchases could be made.
Good comrades could buy what they wanted when they wanted. Trouble makers and dissidents would have severe curtails placed on the food allowance of their families. The best part of the program would be that you could reward and punish behavior almost immediately. When someone showed any sign of defiance, a simple change of status at the central server would mean the children of the deviant would go hungry. When the cries of his children get to be too much and he falls back into line, the children would be allowed to eat. The response to the stick and carrot would be Pavlovian. An entire population would be controlled.
Understanding the power of Orwellian speech, what would you call the rationing card? A natural choice would be to call it the “Good Life Card.”
Presented by President Hugo Chávez as an instrument to make shopping for groceries easier, the “Good Life Card” is making various segments of the population wary because they see it as a furtive attempt to introduce a rationing card similar to the one in Cuba.
The measure could easily become a mechanism to control the population, according to civil society groups.
“We see that in short-term this could become a rationing card probably similar to the one used in Cuba,” Roberto León Parilli, president of the National Association of Users and Consumers, told El Nuevo Herald. “It would use more advanced technological means [than those used in Cuba], but when they tell you where to buy and what the limits of what you can buy are, they are conditioning your purchases.”
Chávez said Tuesday that the card could be used to buy groceries at the government chain of markets and supplies.
“I have called it a Good Life Card so far,” Chávez said in a brief statement made on the government television channel. “It’s a card for you to purchase what you are going to take and they keep deducting. It’s to buy what you need, not to promote communism, but to buy what just what you need.”
Most “green” advocates are extraordinary hypocrites demanding that the masses cut back travel, be cold in the winter, hot in the summer and basically scale back their standards of living. Ad Jesse Jackson to the list, he loves government mpg mandates, government subsidized green jobs and stratospheric UAW wages to go with them. Karma nailed Jesse this week.In Detroit to advocate for more green cars, he had his massive Cadillac Escalade stripped.
Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend with the UAW’s militant President Bob King leading the “Jobs, Justice, and Peace” march promoting government-funded green jobs.
Read that again: Jackson’s Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.
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Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large.
You gotta love the irony. The theives simply did to Jesse what Jesse does to America.
It isn’t our anger. It isn’t our guns. It isn’t that we have adopted Alinsky’s tactics. It is, quite simply, this.
The much-analyzed speeches at the Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally weren’t as notable as what the estimated 300,000 attendees did: follow instructions, listen quietly to hours of speeches, and throw out their trash.
Just as stunning as the tableaux of the massive throngs lining the reflecting pool were the images of the spotless grounds afterward. If someone had told attendees they were expected to mow the grass before they left, surely some of them would have hitched flatbed trailers to their vehicles for the trip to Washington and gladly brought mowers along with them.
This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society. The spark that lit the tea-party movement was the rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who inveighed in early 2009 against an Obama-administration program to subsidize “the losers’ mortgages.” He was speaking for people who hadn’t borrowed beyond their means or tried to get rich quick by flipping houses, for the people who, in their thrift and enterprise, “carry the water instead of drink the water.”
The left wants desperately to believe that tea party types are radicals, racists, haters, freaks… We aren’t that. We are the mainstream. We are America. They know that. The Real Revo won’t be about revolution, it will be about restoration.
