CHINA & THE AMERICAN ECONOMY

I believed in free trade, but this news story is troubling. A US company is having to use Chinese technology to build wind turbines. US jobs might be created, but if we are dependent on the technology of China, America's future will face serious challenges. Obama's stimulus funds should be going to create future technologies and wealth and not just into jobs that consume wealth.

PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL RATINGS

The WSJ has an interesting graph on presidential job-approval ratings from Truman until near the end of George W. Bush's presidency. Job-approval tends to drop in the second term of a presidency, but it didn't for Clinton. Gallup has the actual tables.

FREE SPEECH AT COLUMBIA

Ahmadinejad can speak at Columbia, but not Nonie Darwish--her recent book details the horrors of living under Islamic law.

PEW NEWS SCORE

Take this simple 12 question quiz at the Pew Research Center--it tests your knowledge of current affairs. If you get 11 or 12 correct let me know.

THE RED GUARD AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

When I saw this I immediately thought of the Soviet Union, but the author's reference to the Chinese Cultural Revolution is more correct.

The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize -- and confess -- their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."

PALINOPHOBES

Jonah Goldberg describes someone criticizing the writing in Going Rogue only to confess that the quote came out of Obama's biography!

OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY TROUBLES

Obama's latest trip to Asia has not resulted in a lot of success according to Der Spiegel.

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.



The mood in Obama's foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The "first Pacific president," as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

TARP: A FAILURE?

Many questions are now being asked about whether TARP was worth it. . .and not just by Republicans.

As the Obama administration considers how to approach the next phase of the $700 billion financial bailout, questions are being raised on Capitol Hill about whether it is helping the economy.

GLOBAL WARMING TAKING TIME OUT

From Der Spiegel, hardly some anti-intellectual, anti-science organ, right-wing publication.

. . .not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

And here are some of the hacked emails indicating some kind of conspiracy to keep the global warming theory alive when the data is not supporting it.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

An Update (11/24/09).

More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the "trick" consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature "proxies" from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward "hockey stick" slope.

SECULAR ISLAM

Some English Muslims are renouncing their terrorist past and calling for a more secular Islam.

PALIN vs. OBAMA

Amazing! Palin more popular than Obama.

TAX CHEATS AT TREASURY

Another Obama appointee has not paid her taxes! This is getting tiring--I can't recall the exact number, but I will guess around 10 treasury or oversight appointees have not paid their taxes. Can't he find some honest people to appoint?

MOSSAD

The Mossad put spyware on a Syrian official's computer! Don't leave your computer in your hotel room.

GOING ROGUE

I feel I should collect some of the comments regarding Sarah Palin's political future.



Rod Dreher: I see him as a disillusioned early supporter. Sarah Palin is selling a personality, not a platform. That's not dumb. She's doing the best she can with what she has to work with. She quotes her father's line upon her resignation this summer as Alaska's governor: "Sarah's not retreating, she's reloading." On evidence of this book, Sarah Palin is charging toward 2012 shooting blanks.



A discussion of why the left fears her: What this country needs is a strong conservative leader with the courage of her convictions. Sensing those qualities in Sarah Palin, the liberal left is becoming frantic because they can't seem to halt her popularity. The reason they're panicking is because they're afraid of her connection with regular folks who work for a living, pay their taxes, attend a religious worship service regularly and believe that our country has lost the moral fiber that once united us.

An Alaska opponent: Palin neither organizes nor mobilizes. There is no Palin movement -- or organization of any depth and substance. There is no Palin philosophy beyond bromides about smaller government, the evils of abortion and the dangers of popular culture (which, right this moment, is making her a rich woman). While she easily won election as governor of Alaska in 2006, her victory was built largely on her fresh, attractive face and her predecessor's unpopularity.

Palin-Beck in 2012!

The media is really negative on Palin. 37 negative stories; 2 positive stories.

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: WHAT'S GONE WRONG?

Michael Barone looks at what has gone wrong with Obama's election promises of a better world if he were elected.

WALL STREET CASH

Of the top 15 recipients of Wall Street money, only 4 are Republicans. Now it is the Democrats who are the party of big corporate donations!

OBAMA'S MIDDLE EAST POLICY

Bill Clinton to the rescue! It is in "shambles."

ISLAM IN FRANCE

Sarkozy wants to restore French values in France.

At the heart of the identity crisis plaguing today’s France is a significant immigrant population that refuses to become French, and a multicultural left that has allowed them to live isolated in ghettoes for decades, where many have fallen prey to Muslim preachers of hate.

OBAMA HANDSHAKE

In Japan, Obama bowed to the Japanese emperor while shaking his hand--his opponents in America did not like it, but now there is the question of whether the Japanese approved. The emperor is no longer a god.

RADICALISM IN AMERICAN MOSQUES

An interview with Dr Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim. He is very critical about what is happening in mosques. Radicals have taken over in many cases and the media and government seems to be ignoring it.

This has been a frustrating thing for me as a Muslim activist. Many Muslims disagree with political Islam, but they're not pressured to take on the mosque leadership. So you have discussions in the mosque going far beyond theology and the example of the Prophet; imams use the pulpit, or minbar as it's called in Arabic, to discuss politics. I've sent this over and over again in mosques I've attended.

Remember that mosque in Phoenix? There were 500 people there that day. I was the only one who publicly criticized the imam for that. And yet, every Muslim I talked to was offended by what the imam did. But they have this sheep mentality. They don't want to fight the tribe. They don't want to rock the boat. They don't understand that showing that we can criticize ourselves is not a weakness, it's a strength.

And Rod Dreher also wonders where the media is when dealing with radical Islam in America.

When it comes to investigating and exposing radical Islam in America, the media see their job as managing the story, not telling it. Six years ago, the then-head of the Islamic Society of North America came in for an editorial board meeting. He talked about peace, friendship and tolerance. But when I calmly asked him how he reconciled that rhetoric with the record of support for radical causes among ISNA board members, he shook his fist at me and called me a Nazi.

When anti-Semitic, anti-Christian hate literature is found at a mosque, or radical speakers give a program praising a Muslim fanatic, or Muslim children are taught the philosophy of the foremost philosopher of Islamist terror – all of which have happened in the Dallas area in recent years – few care to notice.

"Connecting the Dots" -- Stephen Hayes tries pull together the trail of Hasan.

AIDS IN AFRICA

An interesting article describing how abstinence and a one-partner sex emphasis has curtailed AIDS in Uganda. Other African countries using the western emphasis on condoms have not been as successful. The African value system relates to abstinence according to the writer. An evangelical Christian moral ethos seems to work better.

The vast majority of Africans hold a worldview of causation very different from our own. Most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real.

A natural corollary of viewing the spirit-world as the source of human suffering is the belief that man is (or thinks he is) under the thumb of God. If a person genuinely believes this, he will work to please the spirit-world through his actions. Morality has a practical emanation in this sense, because the goodness of a man's actions is tied to perceived material benefits. Evangelical Christianity encourages Africans to view their problems in this spiritual-moral frame of reference. The rhetorical pattern that emerges from African churches today is a lamentation, but not self-pitying, asking, "How can we change to better please God?"

The public health lobby answers this question by saying, essentially, "Start using condoms." This is the narrow-minded response, much more so than the call for behavioral change. As long as this attitude persists, Western policy will remain discordant with the realm of cause and effect within which Africans are operating. Christianity, as well as Islam, is a huge force whose day-to-day impact on African lives cannot be ignored. Any successful HIV/AIDS strategy will have to enlist churches, their moral authority and their enormous memberships.

HEALTH CARE REFORM

This sounds like a common sense way to solve the US health crisis. Business Week gives 10 ways to cut health costs.

Major problems exist for the elderly in the current bill. Where is the AARP?

The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.

MORE HASANS?

A study on the number of Muslims in the military.

Officials said the Defense Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to discuss an examination of the Muslim presence in the U.S. military and the threat of Al Qaida influence.



Officials said the Pentagon has been receiving reports of Muslim soldiers who expressed opposition to the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. They said the opposition was encouraged by Islamic clerics as well as Muslim officers such as Hasan, who warned Muslims against harming co-religionists.

MUSLIMS ADVISING US GOVERNMENT

This doesn't sound good to me--Dreher questions where the government is getting advice on Islam. Qutb is a radical Islamicist in my opinion. If Muslims advising the government believe and teach utb's philosophy, isn't this somehow influencing the advice they give.

Given that Qutb thought any Muslim that didn't share his bloodthirsty totalitarian view of Islam was no better than an infidel, you'd think that a Muslim who wanted to help the US government flag potential extremist threats domestically would be alarmed by discovering that Qutb was being taught to kids at a large local mosque. You would be wrong.

OBAMA'S TRADE POLICY

It appears to be drifting. . .and at a time our economy is in shreds. A view from Asia:

Across the region, concern is rising about the absence of US leadership on trade since Mr Obama took office. Few believe that he has the will or power to restart the Doha round of global trade talks – and he has not asked Congress for a renewal of the president’s fast-track negotiating authority.

UNEMPLOYMENT HEADED TO 20%

It might even reach 13%--this is not a good sign for Obama and the Dems. 12 reasons are given for this projection.

Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, thinks the unemployment rate is going to at least 12 percent, maybe even 13 percent. Optimists, Rosenberg explains, underestimate the incredible damage done to the labor market during this downturn. And even before this downturn, the economy was not generating jobs in huge numbers. If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate. I think you would also be talking about the rise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

WASTE AT THE UN

From Volokh:

Indeed, when one raises even a handful of the many, many scandals surrounding the UN and money, the reaction among international law observers tends to be, in my experience, not shock and a resolution that the organization needs to be better held to account, but a general sense that those who dwell on the sordid details are somehow demeaning the institution.

FT. HOOD SHOOTING

Viktor David Hanson's view.

In other words, the narrative after 9/11 largely remains that Americans have given in to illegitimate "fear and mistrust" of Muslims in general. A saner approach would be to acknowledge that there is a small minority of Muslims who channel generic Islamist fantasies, so that we can assume that either formal terrorist plots or individual acts of murder will more or less occur here every three to six months.

Bruce Bawer's take.

Most of the people in the mainstream media, I suspect, could also see early on exactly what was going on — but to an outrageous degree, they, too, spent Thursday evening doing their best to turn away from the obvious truth. Throughout the evening military and other authorities kept saying, and the talking heads on CNN kept repeating, that there was no sign that this was “a terrorist act” — as if Nidal Malik Hasan had to be officially connected to al-Qaeda to be a jihadist, a pious Muslim who saw the infidel as his enemy.

From Hot Air: Hasan attended a radical mosque in Great Falls, Virginia.

The issue of political correctness in dealing with terror is analyzed by Ralph Peters.

How could the Army allow an obviously incompetent and dysfunctional psychiatrist to treat our troubled soldiers returning from war? An Islamist whacko is counseled for arguing with veterans who’ve been assigned to his care? And he’s not removed from duty? What planet does the Army live on?

Hasan psychotic according to Walter Reed officials. Doctors questioned his behavior. He wired money to Pakistan. Pam Geller's view.

REPUBLICAN HEALTH CARE BILL

The Republicans certainly have a much lower price tag on their bill. I will be watching to see how the critics deal with it.

The Congressional Budget Office Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.



The Republican plan does not call for a government insurance plan but rather attempts to reform the system by creating high-risk insurance pools, allowing people to purchase health insurance policies across state lines and instituting medical malpractice reforms.



"Not only does the GOP plan lower health care costs, but it also increases access to quality care, including for those with pre-existing conditions, at a price our country can afford," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

GOLD & US ECONOMY

This report in the Financial Times that India is buying a massive amount of gold indicates a lack of faith in the dollar.

GLOBAL WARMING QUESTIONED

I am seeing more "academic" articles questioning global warming as just a current phenomena. When I saw this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education questioning it, I began thinking that the questions have moved far beyond those so-called "right-wing," anti-intellectuals. I like the historical perspective of this scientist.

People have changed the planet's climate, warming the atmosphere by churning out greenhouse gases.

But that process didn't start during the Industrial Revolution. It began thousands of years ago, according to a controversial hypothesis, before anyone uttered the phrase "global warming."

The warming, triggered by a relative handful of farmers, some cutting and burning forests and others planting rice paddies, could be the best way to explain one of the strangest oddities in earth's climate record. The notion has admirers but also adamant detractors, who say it has major holes and—just as seriously—provides an excuse for skeptics of current global warming to say that climate change is a long-term trend that has little to do with car tailpipes and modern industry.

PROBLEMS WITH STIMULUS SPENDING

Reason.com has an interesting graph showing that the stimulus money is being spent disproportionately. The states with the highest unemployment are receiving fewer funds per person than states with lower employment. If one accepts the premise of the stimulus it should be spent in places where you need to jump-start the economy. And it looks like Congress and the administration are most focused on Washington D.C. where unemployment is less of an issue because of all the government jobs available. Poor Michigan and California.

And once again Business Week had an interesting article about the lack of investment in research and development. Both business and the federal government are very short-sighted, because it is r & d that creates future jobs. Stimulus money spent to keep some people hired in a day-care center has much less impact than money spent to develop innovations that lead to the jobs of the future. Washington and businesses are just focused on the present and not the future. But the future will come at some point.

OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY

A discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of Obama's foreign policy. Is he just engaged in community organizing at the international level?

CONGRESS vs. UFOS

. . .more Americans believe in UFOs than approve of the job done by Congress. Wow!

HOLLYWOOD'S PORTRAYAL OF SOVIET COMMUNISM

Tim Cavanaugh wrote an interesting analysis of how Hollywood presented the Soviet system and values (as well as America's). He summarizes a number of films produced since WWII and tries to assess a variety of reasons Hollywood did this, including that Soviet society was "boring" or "dull" to the ideological left bias of Hollywood. However one views Cavanaugh's assessments, I find Hollywood's shortcomings to be quite significant when you contrast this with the richness of both Soviet and East European filmmakers as they dealt with life in the Soviet system.

An aside: I think Ninotchka and The Russians Are Coming are must sees when you want to raise your spirits.

MURDER BUSH

Gore Vidal wishes he had murdered Bush. (video)

DEATH OF THE DOLLAR

Another, what some call a pessimistic perspective, but he seems to conclude on a positive note. I haven't seen many positive comments about the future of the dollar. Most people seem to feel the dollar is in decline, but there is debate on what will follow.

Whichever path we take, like it or not, we will be moving away from current arrangements, the dollar-reserve system. There are only two questions: will the movement away be orderly or disorderly, and will America play a part in shaping the new system that will emerge? I believe that the transition to the new system will be smoother and that both the United States and the world will benefit if we stop putting our heads in the sand and help create the worldwide reserve system that the globalization of financial markets requires. Keynes recognized the need for such a global reserve currency seventy-five years ago. At the Bretton Woods meeting of 1944, in a costly act of self-interest, the United States blocked the full implementation of Keynes’s scheme. This is an old idea whose time has finally come.

STIMULUS MONEY

CBS is beginning to sound like Foxnews! Misspent stimulus money--who would have dreamed this would happen? It's just Chicago politics.

HONDURAS

I find it interesting that Senator Kerry (D, Massachusetts) is trying to "withdraw" a Library of Congress study that he and the Obama administration do not agree with regarding the recent Honduran revolution.

BUSH, THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER

This is not the comment of a leftist Democrat! Here's the reasons:

• No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.
• Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.
• Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities laws since the ’30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public outside the U.S.
• Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.
• Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush’s encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.
• Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in U.S. history (until OBAMA!).
• Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they’re now used to herd in opponents.
• The Patriot Act. This 401-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects. Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.
• The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It’s become a cause of mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.
• Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.
• Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a police state.
• Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an "enemy combatant" to be completely deprived of any rights at all.
• Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals, Bush made it a U.S. policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a guard’s whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the reputation of the U.S. ever. It says to the world, "We stand for nothing."
• The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on this list, and it’s still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other purposes in the future…
• The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow citizens’ dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God forbid you’re not polite to them…
• Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.
• Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president in history.

In the October 25, 2009 Parade there is an interesting account of a day in the life of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. It is written by Leslie Gelb. Obviously it is a "puff" piece, but what caught my attention was the following statement about the leadership of President Obama:

Concerning a staff meeting: Though they don't talk about it, they seem ever aware of President Barack Obama's iron-handed control of decisions. [emphasis mine]

Also he describes Clinton as more moderate than others in the administration: Clinton has a hard edge to her foreign-policy views and generally positions herself to the right of her colleagues in national security.

SOLUTIONS TO THE ECONOMIC DOLDRUMS

Steve Wynn and Tom Baron interviewed on CNBC. I haven't heard of him, but I think Steve Wynn has great economic sense. We need to create productive jobs, not just give money away to banks or ACORN.

From the Atlantic: I think we finally have hit the wall of deficit spending.

TALIBAN & RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Chris Matthews sees them as one and the same.

MODERATE DEMOCRATS

Moderate Democrats are worried about Obama's attacks on Foxnews and the Chamber of Commerce. I think they sense that if Obama win's these attacks, he is coming after them next.

LIST OF OBAMA ENDORSED JOURNALISTS

Read the list here.

A COMING DEPRESSION?

The worst is not over. I don't recall hearing on the media that the IMF has such a pessimistic view of the US economy.

What I am saying is that the government's actions to date have not fixed the underlying problems or helped stabilize the economy. The government has been doing all of the wrong things and made the situation worse by, among other things:

(1) Throwing trillions of dollars at the "too big to fails", instead of admitting that many of them are insolvent

(2) Undermining trust of nations all over the world in the American economy

(3) Failing to restore Glass-Steagall, reign in credit default swaps, or do anything else necessary to stabilize the financial system

(4) Attempting to restart high levels of leverage and securitization

(5) Failing to take real measures to decrease employment and increase manufacturing

(6) Creating an enormous debt overhang and trashing our currency

JOB LOSSES CONTINUE

I will wait and see how the administration responds to these terrible numbers. The stimulus money is not living up to the promises made.

US IN DECLINE

Niall Ferguson's comments on the decline of America.

"People have predicted the end of America in the past and been wrong," Ferguson concedes. "But let's face it: If you're trying to borrow $9 trillion to save your financial system...and already half your public debt held by foreigners, it's not really the conduct of rising empires, is it?"

Given its massive deficits and overseas military adventures, America today is similar to the Spanish Empire in the 17th century and Britain's in the 20th, he says. "Excessive debt is usually a predictor of subsequent trouble."

Frontline has a program on how Greenspan and Congress helped cause the breakdown of the go-go 1990s.

In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."

Born's battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President's Working Group vehemently opposed regulation -- especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.

Also see "How did America fall so fast?"

In 2000, America was described as the sole remaining superpower - or even the world's "hyperpower". Now we're in real trouble (at the very least, you have to admit that we're losing power and wealth in comparison with China).

LAW SCHOOL SELECTIVITY

2010 Princeton Review: Most Selective and Least Selective.

JOB GROWTH & DECLINE

A very interesting chart. And then The Hill states that only 30,000 jobs were saved or created by the first stimulus bill.

The data posted Thursday was the result of the government's initial attempt at counting actual stimulus jobs. Obama administration officials stressed that data was partial -- it represented just $16 billion out of the $339 billion awarded -- but they said it exceeded their projections.

This mean there will be a total of around 650,000 jobs created if my math is correct when all of the money get spent. There could be a multiplier effect resulting in more jobs, but this doesn't give a lot of hope to the unemployed.

Michigan has only created 397 jobs from 650 million in stimulus, not the 19,500 claimed.

The Bureau of Labor has made a mistake and the job losses are worse than first estimated.
When we combine the weak job numbers with declining wages, tight credit, record household debt and the impending explosion of home foreclosures, the chances of a sustainable economic recovery looks exceedingly slim. Yet, for the third time in this decade the stock market is off on another binge not based on reality. Such flights into fantasy always end badly.

ECONOMY: SEPTEMBER 2009

The real Dow should be around 7,500! Larry Kudlow thinks 2011 will be the year of reckoning. Maybe the gold bugs will be right. Even Robert Reich is a pessimist.

IRAQ: CLINTON vs. BUSH

Clinton's policies = 1,000,000 dead.
Bush's policies = 85,000 dead.

Gateway Pundit has an interesting video on what Secretary of State Albright said in 1996.

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

GLOBALWARMING?

It looks like the critics of global warming are right--it's not happening.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

And the Antarctic ice melt is at its lowest level in history.

US ECONOMIC Decline

The World Economic Forum ranks U.S. financial stability 38th and currency stability 50th. But Obama did win the Nobel Peace Prize.

HINDUS FACE JIHAD

An interesting report on Kashmir and the complicity of Benazir Bhutto in the killing of Hindus. And another on why Pakistanis believe apostates from Islam should be killed. The killing of apostates was occurring in Egypt in the early 19th century.

CRITIQUE OF OBAMA PRESIDENCY, FALL 2010

From Sense of Events. Summarizes some of the criticism.

PESSIMISM IN THE US

Rasmussen reports that only 30% of voters say America will be a great nation by the end of the century. Maybe non-voters are more optimistic. It can just be Republicans who are pessimistic.

OBAMA, ANOTHER GORBACHEV

This comparison is intriguing and not one I had thought about, although it apparently has been discussed in some circles. It is from a Canadian columnist. He ended with a rather dismal projection.

With an incredible rapidity, America's status as the world's pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the "new physics" of hope and change

IT'S NOT CHICAGO

I wonder if Obama's prestige will suffer because Chicago was not chosen for the Olympics? He personally went to persuade the IOC in Copenhagen and evidently Chicago didn't even make the first cut.

It is Bush's fault according to Senator Burris (D, Illinois)

RANTERS

I thought this was a good column by Peggy Noonan--there are media ranters on the left and right who really have gone too far. I don't think Obama should be depicted as he sometimes is by the radical right, but I didn't think George Bush should have been depicted by the left as he was. This was a debated that should have begun years ago, but the media never seemed to be concerned at that time so it never drew any lines of what was appropriate or not appropriate.

Two examples from just the past week. A few days ago, I was sent a link to a screed by MSNBC's left-wing anchorman Ed Schultz, in which he explained opposition to the president's health-care reform. "The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They'd rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don't have anything for us." Next, a link to the syndicated show of right-wing radio talker Alex Jones, on the subject of the U.S. military, whose security efforts at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh show them to be agents and lackeys of the New World Order. "They are complete enemies of America. . . . Our military's been taken over. . . . This is the end of our country." Later, "They'd love to kill 10,000 Americans," and, "The republic is falling right now."

WHAT DID WE GET for $2 TRILLION?

I see more and more questions raised about the spending policies of the Obama administration. I saw this song on YouTube. I believe it captures a lot of the sentiments and fears of the middle class. Democrats just haven't realized the fears and worries their policies have created among the retired (medicare cuts) and the middle class (whose standard of living is falling and job security is disappearing with 10% unemployment). The "Cash for Clunkers Program" evidently has not helped because people just bought cars early and now the auto industry is facing one of the worst months and quarters in history. So everyone sees money being spent, but nothing seems to be resolved. The Democrats may pull this off, but it looks like a hard year ahead.

47% PAY NO INCOME TAXES

Pretty soon no one will be paying income taxes!

POLITICAL HUMOR

From Austin Goolsbee, economic advisor in the Obama administration.

Goolsbee peppered an otherwise expected stump speech on the Obama administration's goals with subtle asides that constituted a humorous, sarcastic, self-deprecating and conspiratorial insight into the administration's most accessible punchlines. The targets? Hillary Clinton, Sen. Ben Nelson, Rod Blagojevich, Sarah Palin and Fox News.

BUSH VILIFICATION COMPARED TO THAT OBAMA IS RECEIVING

Powerline has a critique of Friedman's recent column concerned with the rhetoric used by opponents of Obama with what was being said about Bush.

DEMOCRAT'S PROBLEM

I think this comment correctly assesses the problem liberal Democrats face. They are trying to push more government programs at a time when people are very suspicious of government. The left has completely misread the Tea Parties.

VIDAL AND OBAMA

Another liberal supporter of Obama seems to be having a change of heart. Gore Vidal had great hopes for Obama, but now he is questioning his leadership.

How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”



Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

A moderate conservative also is criticizing Obama. Rollins considers Obama's criticism of the Bush administation in his UN speech as tasteless

HOSPITAL PRICES

You can negotiate them.

West's company – Group & Pension Administrators Inc. of Dallas – is defying this trend. When a hospital submits a claim, GPA staffers ignore the charges. They check the data hospitals report to Medicare, where hospitals show their actual costs for each procedure. Then GPA pays those costs, plus 12 percent for the hospital's profit.

For a patient who stayed three days in an Austin hospital after knee surgery, that payment method reduced the bill from $69,000 to $15,000. For another patient, the bill fell from $11,000 to $1,000, West said.

A LIBERAL QUESTIONS THE PRESIDENT'S LEADERSHIP

Richard Cohen writes:

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.



No one should believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran seems intent on developing a nuclear weapons program and the missiles capable of delivering them. This -- not the public revelations of a known installation -- is the real crisis, possibly one that can only end in war. It is entirely possible that Israel, faced with that chilling cliche -- an existential threat -- will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. What would happen next is anyone's guess -- retaliation by Hamas and Hezbollah, an unprecedented spike in oil prices and then, after a few years or less, a resumption of Iran's nuclear program. Only the United States has the capability to obliterate Tehran's underground facilities. Washington may have to act.

SOCIALISM IN EUROPE

The Left is losing power in Europe while it is gaining in influence in the US according to The New York Times.

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

2007 NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT

Nothing to worry about in 2007 regarding Iran--what went wrong?

Will all the pundits who relied on the discredited 2007 NIE on Iran now admit that they were wrong? That they bought into and kept citing, without any serious questioning, the now clearly politically skewed analysis in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate of that year? You remember: the considered consensus wisdom of the entire U.S. intelligence community, which misled the world into believing there was nothing to worry about Iran’s nuclear program, that it had virtually ceased. When, in fact, out of the three components of a nuclear weapons program, at most one might have been suspended, if that.

GLORIFYING LENIN

I like the song glorifying Lenin. . ."we are his little potatoes!"

Chanting kids summary.

MASS THINKING

I admit that having experienced communist societies and having friends who had to live through them in Eastern Europe, this kind of school kid Obama glorification concerns me. I wouldn't have appreciated it if Bush or anyone else were president. Maybe Vermont is the first socialist state of the fifty.

OBAMA'S INTERNATIONAL CLOUT DECLINING

I have been noticing increasingly critical treatment of Obama in the foreign press. The foreign press is far more critical of him than the mainstream media. It is hard to find critical assessments of his policies, actions, or goals in the US unless you listen to FoxNews or right wing talk show commentators. But I have wondered if some of them are more in tune with world opinion than the mainstream media and David Letterman.

Now I see some others noticing this attitude abroad. Reihan Salam, "Can He Wow the World Again." The weak US economy does play a role in this, but I don't think this is the complete picture.

DEMOCRAT RACISM

I was wondering when this accusation might arise. Democrats and Obama are trying to get the black governor of New York not to run for reelection, because he may lose. But are they doing that with white Democrat governors that may lose?

BRZEZINSKI ON SHOOTING DOWN ISRAELI WARPLANES

Zbig was President Carter's NSC guru: he raises the possibility of US planes in Iraq attacking Israeli warplanes flying over Iraq on their way to attack Iran. Thus we become a defender of Iran!

Another account.

OBAMA'S PRESIDENCY

I haven't seen anything like this in a US newspaper. From the London Telegraph: "President Obama Is Beginning to Look Out of His Depth."

The President's domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world's top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

OBAMA'S ECONOMIC POLICY

Daniel Drezner in the National Interest.

Obama’s tire tariff isn’t your everyday sort of protectionism. It could end up causing a serious ripple effect. Due to a loophole in the 2001 agreement that allowed China to join the WTO, if any one member decides to impose safeguards on Chinese imports, all others can follow suit. It doesn’t take a genius to see how bad it could get.


Obama has largely decided to become a domestic-policy president. His supporters, his base and the politicking of his underlings indicate things will only get worse. With the global economy in deep crisis, protectionism is a terrible way to build a recovery.

PAYING FOR HEALTHCARE

An Althouse post. Young people who voted for Obama will be paying for Obamacare.

NATO MISSILES

HEADLINE: TREASON. THE US HAS SOLD US OUT TO THE RUSSIANS

If Obama didn't get a quid pro quo for this decision from Putin, it shows remarkably weak leadership in foreign affairs for the future. He is not sending a strong signal to East European countries. And he announced it on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland!


The US is to abandon its controversial plan to build a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, the Czech prime minister has announced.


One British foreign affairs analyst sees it as a surrender.

This is bad news for all who care about the US commitment to the transatlantic alliance and the defence of Europe as well as the United States. It represents the appalling appeasement of Russian aggression and a willingness to sacrifice American allies on the altar of political expediency. A deal with the Russians to cancel missile defence installations sends a clear message that even Washington can be intimidated by the Russian bear.

Senator Schumer may agree with me!!!! Where's the quid pro quo?

Other Democrat questions.

If this is how Obama is conducting foreign policy, the US is in for a difficult road ahead.

ACORN

Jon Daly, "The Audacity of Hos." If the previous link does not work, try this one.

NORMAN BORLAUG

A forgotten hero.

Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.

AMERICAN JEWS

An interesting discussion of why American Jews are liberal on Volokh. Is it the religious right they fear? But Russian Jews in America fear the consequences of atheistic communism even more.

HEALTHCARE

Obamacare is being pushed in Congress while at the same time medicare cuts are planned for January 2010 which will hurt cardiac and cancer patients. Medicare will not be paying doctors enough to cover the treatments if the new policy passes. Okay, so we promise universal health care while at the same time depriving some people of health care. . .Washington.

If enacted as scheduled on Jan. 1, 2010, policy changes recommended by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) -- the government's insurer for the elderly and disabled -- will severely cut current Medicare reimbursements to cardiologists and oncologists for critical care services that are provided to patients in physicians' offices or other out-of-hospital setting, such as chemotherapy to treat cancer, and various cardiac procedures to monitor and treat heart disease, such as nuclear imaging and heart catheterization.

And this is interesting from Newsweek, "The Case for Killing Granny." Werent' we told Palin was all wrong about death panels?

Even Obama supporters question the feasibility of his plan.

SUCCESS IN COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY

An interesting list of factors based on recent research.

Two things caught my eye:

1. Don't go to a junior college.
2. Get involved with an honors group or learning community.
   

REPUBLICAN FAILURE ON HEALTH CARE

I wholeheartedly agree that the Republicans failed when they had the chance to make many improvements in health care and other areas. Lott, Hastert, Fritts, et. al. were just asleep or incompetent to lead. Bush failed to respond to so many issues early in his presidency--the country was just drifting. It is easy to fault Iraq and the War on Terror as the cause, but I do think the administration had a one-track focus. The energy was just not expended on so many other political, economic, and social issues.

OBAMACARE

Another reason why people are so suspicious of the Obama health care initiative: some senators are proposing a $40 billion excise tax on medical technologies. This would certainly raise prices for anyone using one of these devices and may even include a tax on such things as eyeglasses.

AMERICA'S FUTURE

"Can the Future be Built in America?"--Business Week seem to indicate the answer is, "no." The U.S. has dropped to #2 behind Switzerland int eh global competitiveness rankings.

• America is losing its high-tech lead.
• If America can't keep industries, they are lost forever to other countries.
• America no longer has a "base of suppliers, factory managers, and skilled technicians."
• American industry faces one of the highest tax rates of all advanced countries (in spite of what you hear from liberal Democrat politicians). Other countries (and even places like Germany) have low tax policies and other financial incentives that encourage industry.

!!!!!

Tall people are happier!


The findings support a hypothesis put forth in 2008 that tall people are more likely than shorter people to have reached their full cognitive potential, the researchers said. Poor nutrition and childhood diseases may stunt growth and limit mental development in some cases, they said.

And, "How to Use Math to Choose a Wife."

WAR ON TERROR AND 9/11

Fouad Ajami sees terror emanating from the Arab world, not Afghanistan.

This is not a war of choice; it is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda could plot to kill more Americans."



To begin with, a policy that falls back on 9/11 must proceed from a correct reading of the wellsprings of Islamist radicalism. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him.



Wars are great clarifiers. Barack Obama's trumpet is uncertain. His call to arms in Afghanistan does not stir. He fears failure in Afghanistan, and nothing more. Having disowned Iraq, kept its cause at a distance, he is forced to fight the war in Afghanistan. So he equivocates and plays for time.

OBAMA HEALTH CARE SPEECH

The president is a great orator--I know critics say it is all in the teleprompters, but I disagree.

Obama has said there are no options out there. I have seen a number of options mentioned, but I haven't seen any media analysis of whether other health care proposals are better or worse. Here is one of the options.

The AMA is supporting Obamacare so it must think that doctors will gain some advantage from it. Some think this is a bad sign. . .for patients. The AMA has created a doctor shortage which boosts the salaries of doctors.

And did Obama misrepresent a medical case in his speech of September 9? Also I am skeptical that any plan won't result in some kind of cut in medical practices, especially for the aged. If there is all this cost-saving in making cuts in medicare, why haven't these cuts been made?

The non-politically active people I have visited with would feel more comfortable if congress would give themselves the same health care plan it wants to give to the rest of America. Even the AP felt Obama's speech was filled with misrepresentations.

Tucker Carlson saw a grumpy old man whose demeanor has changed from the hope and change positivism of the campaign.

He did give credit to Bush once. He supports the same policy -- which his Democrat colleagues in the congress voted down when it was Bush. That's politics.

I discovered Republicans do have health care proposals in spite of what the president said.

TRAINED SNAKES

Palestinians are charging Israel with training snakes to attack Palestinians! This is a big jump from attack pigs or even "anti-Arab" super rats.

OBAMA, PALIN, AND DEATH PANELS

Obama took a jab at Palin in tonight's speech (Larry Sabato calls the speech very partisan -- the lines are drawn in the health care debate). Here is Palin's response.

I also discovered a Cato Institute article that supports Palin in her charges.

No one ever accused Palin of being a health policy expert, and many found her hyperbolic term “death panel” off-putting. But that should not distract voters from this reality: President Obama has proposed a new body that would enhance Medicare’s ability to deny care to the elderly and disabled based on government bureaucrats’ arbitrary valuations of those patients’ lives.

It is right there in the legislation now before Congress, and it is called the Independent Medicare Advisory Council.

Medicare already has the statutory authority to reduce the amount it will spend on elderly and disabled patients, but largely cannot exercise that authority. Federal law says that Medicare may deny coverage for services that are not “reasonable and necessary,” but gives no guidance on what “reasonable” and “necessary” mean. That effectively leaves the issue in the hands of the bureaucrats at the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

PROPHETS OR PARROTS?

Edward McShane Waits, A College Man's Religion and other Studies in Religion and Life (Ft. Worth, Texas: Stafford-Lowdon, 1929). Waits was president of Texas Christian University in a difficult time.

Our generation is like a despairing ship tossed upon an angry sea. Industry, politics, international relations, even religion unite to produce a panicky world. Our colleges are the storm centers, the citadels from which a conquering and prophetic leadership must come. take out of our brotherhood the men produced by our colleges and we would at once become a disappearing brotherhood.



You who have assembled here in this school of the prophets, you have chosen the task golden. It is to you that our oncoming generation must look for its prophetic leadership. Are you going to be prophets or parrots? It is going to be your task to look after the vastnesses, the immensities, the imponderables of our lives and keep us to our bigness. It is yours to tell us of the majesty we are and the majesty we shall be. To do this your soul must be kept in tune with the infinite. You must tarry upon the mountain like Moses until your soul is aflame with God. You must take up the harp of life, smite upon its chords with might, smite the chord of self and selfishness until they too pass in music out of sight.

Written in 1929--it almost sounds like 2009. I like his challenge to education--will we be prophets or parrots?

THE LEFT AND RACISM

The left using the race card.

VAN JONES

On his education:

I had a professor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard and Yale [for law school], which was almost unheard of for students coming from the kind of public schools that I was coming from in the rural South. I was accepted to both places, and decided to go to Yale because Yale didn't have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enroll I'm guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hell raiser student, and they can't do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.

GLOBAL CURRENCY

The UN demand for a global currency indicates the economic weakness of America. If our economic power is challenged, America's international political leadership will soon be reevaluated and probably diminish. It looks like America's day in the sun is ending fast. The change may not happen immediately, but it will come unless there is a radical change in Washington's thinking. The dollar will join the English pound in the graveyard of world currencies.

In a radical report, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said the system of currencies and capital rules which binds the world economy is not working properly, and was largely responsible for the financial and economic crises.

AMERICA, ANOTHER ARGENTINA

A nobel laureate economist believes Obama's policies will result in the US becoming another Argentina.

His policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says.

There are "troubling similarities" between the US President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

PALIN'S FAITH, A VIEW FROM THE LEFT

Max Blumenthal's attack on Palin. My understanding is that she left the Assembly of God church for a Bible church. Newsweek has another perspective.

OBAMA'S LEADERSHIP

The Harvard Business School weighs in on the topic.

REID BULLYING THE PRESS

I have been surprised at how often I have seen the Senate Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid (D, Nev) make so many unwise comments. He doesn't have the class or political shrewdness of Lyndon Johnson who served as a great majority leader in my opinion--Johnson had his agenda but he worked with opposition members in his own party and with Republicans as well.

I was going to start collecting all of Reid's mistatements and untactful comments, but never undertook the challenge. Obama has been poorly served by both Reid and Pelosi in the House.