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.