Obama - Carter 2?

More from Stratfor regarding drug trade on our continent. (See 1 below.)

If you listen to this you should hear parallels. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs)

Israel tests rocket shield and apparently it was successful. (See 2 below.)

The Economist writes Obama's OJT has been painful for him. What about us peons? (See 3 below.)

Mark Salter sees Obama the way I do - disengenuous! (See 4 below.)

The below writer believes Obama is well on his way to becoming Carter 2. (See 5 below.)

A USA editorial - their editorial page is generally liberal - excoriates Obama and his spedning. (See 6 below.)

An economist who works for H.C. Wainright Economics, one of the oldest and most pretigious firms in Wall Street, believes Geithner gets it entirely wrong - again! (See 7 below.)

A little humor. The Obama government has not regulated laughing yet, but who knows.

What Obama's government controlled health care program could mean for us. (See 8 below.)


Dick




1) Central America: An Emerging Role in the Drug Trade
By Stephen Meiners

As part of STRATFOR’s coverage of the security situation in Mexico, we have observed some significant developments in the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere over the past year. While the United States remains the top destination for South American-produced cocaine, and Mexico continues to serve as the primary transshipment route, the path between Mexico and South America is clearly changing.


Tracking Mexico’s Drug Cartels
These changes have been most pronounced in Central America, where Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have begun to rely increasingly on land-based smuggling routes as several countries in the region have stepped up monitoring and interdiction of airborne and maritime shipments transiting from South America to Mexico.

The results of these changes have been extraordinary. According to a December 2008 report from the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center, less than 1 percent of the estimated 600 to 700 tons of cocaine that departed South America for the United States in 2007 transited Central America. The rest, for the most part, passed through the Caribbean Sea or Pacific Ocean en route to Mexico. Since then, land-based shipment of cocaine through Central America appears to have ballooned. Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Stephen McFarland estimated in an interview with a Guatemalan newspaper that cocaine now passes through that country at a rate of approximately 300 to 400 tons per year.

Notwithstanding the difficulty associated with estimating drug flows, it is clear that Central America has evolved into a significant transshipment route for drugs, and that the changes have taken place rapidly. These developments warrant a closer look at the mechanics of the drug trade in the region, the actors involved, and the implications for Central American governments — for whom drug-trafficking organizations represent a much more daunting threat than they do for Mexico.

Some Background
While the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere is multifaceted, it fundamentally revolves around the trafficking of South American-produced cocaine to the United States, the world’s largest market for the drug. Drug shipment routes between Peru and Colombia — where the vast majority of cocaine is cultivated and produced — and the United States historically have been flexible, evolving in response to interdiction efforts or changing markets. For example, Colombian drug traffickers used to control the bulk of the cocaine trade by managing shipping routes along the Caribbean smuggling corridor directly to the United States. By the 1990s, however, as the United States and other countries began to focus surveillance and interdiction efforts along this corridor, the flow of U.S.-bound drugs was forced into Mexico, which remains the main transshipment route for the overwhelming majority of cocaine entering the United States.

A similar situation has been occurring over the last two years in Central America. From the 1990s until as recently as 2007, traffickers in Mexico received multiton shipments of cocaine from South America. There was ample evidence of this, including occasional discoveries of bulk cocaine on everything from small propeller aircraft and Gulfstream jets to self-propelled semisubmersible vessels, fishing trawlers and cargo ships. These smuggling platforms had sufficient range and capacity to bypass Central America and ship bulk drugs directly to Mexico.

By early 2008, however, a series of developments in several Central American countries suggested that drug-trafficking organizations — Mexican cartels in particular — were increasingly trying to establish new land-based smuggling routes through Central America for cocaine shipments from South America to Mexico and eventual delivery to the United States. While small quantities of drugs had certainly transited the region in the past, the routes used presented an assortment of risks. A combination of poorly maintained highways, frequent border crossings, volatile security conditions and unpredictable local criminal organizations apparently presented such great logistical challenges that traffickers opted to send the majority of their shipments through well-established maritime and airborne platforms.

In response to this relatively unchecked international smuggling, several countries in the region began taking steps to increase the monitoring and interdiction of such shipments. The Colombian government, for one, stepped up monitoring of aircraft operating in its airspace. The Mexican government installed updated radar systems and reduced the number of airports authorized to receive flights originating in Central and South America. The Colombian government estimates that the aerial trafficking of cocaine from Colombia has decreased by as much as 90 percent since 2003.

Maritime trafficking also appears to have suffered over the past few years, most likely due to greater cooperation and information-sharing between Mexico and the United States. The United States has an immense capability to collect maritime technical intelligence, and an increasing degree of awareness regarding drug trafficking at sea. Two examples of this progress include the Mexican navy’s July 2008 capture — acting on intelligence provided by the United States — of a self-propelled semisubmersible vessel loaded with more than five tons of cocaine, and the U.S. Coast Guard’s February 2009 interdiction of a Mexico-flagged fishing boat loaded with some seven tons of cocaine about 700 miles off Mexico’s Pacific coast. Presumably as a result of successes such as these, the Mexican navy reported in 2008 that maritime trafficking had decreased by an estimated 60 percent over the last two years.

While it is impossible to independently corroborate the Mexican and Colombian governments’ estimates on the degree to which air- and seaborne drug trafficking has decreased over the last few years, developments in Central America over the past year certainly support their assessments. In particular, STRATFOR has observed that in order to make up for losses in maritime and aerial trafficking, land-based smuggling routes are increasingly being used — not by Colombian cocaine producers or even Central American drug gangs, but by the now much more powerful Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

Mechanics of Central American Drug Trafficking
It is important to clarify that what we are defining as land-based trafficking is not limited to overland smuggling. The methods associated with land-based trafficking can be divided into three categories: overland smuggling, littoral maritime trafficking and short-range aerial trafficking.


The most straightforward of these is simple overland smuggling. As a series of investigations in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua demonstrated last year, overland smuggling operations use a wide variety of approaches. In one case, authorities pieced together a portion of a route being used by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel in which small quantities of drugs entered Costa Rica from Panama via the international point of entry on the Pan-American Highway. The cocaine was often held for several days in a storage facility before being loaded onto another vehicle to be driven across the country on major highways. Upon approaching the Nicaraguan border, however, the traffickers opted to avoid the official port of entry and instead transferred the shipments into Nicaragua on foot or on horseback along a remote part of the border. Once across, the shipments were taken to the shores of the large inland Lake Nicaragua, where they were transferred onto boats to be taken north, at which point they would be loaded onto vehicles to be driven toward the Honduran border. In one case in Nicaragua, authorities uncovered another Sinaloa-linked route that passed through Managua and is believed to have followed the Pan-American Highway through Honduras and into El Salvador.

The second method associated with land-based trafficking involves littoral maritime operations. Whereas long-range maritime trafficking involves large cargo ships and self-propelled semisubmersible vessels capable of delivering multiton shipments of drugs from South America to Mexico without having to refuel, littoral trafficking tends to involve so-called “go-fast boats” that are used to carry smaller quantities of drugs at higher speeds over shorter distances. This method is useful to traffickers who might want to avoid, for whatever reason, a certain stretch of highway or perhaps even an entire country. According to Nicaraguan military officials, several go-fast boats are suspected of operating off the country’s coasts and of sailing outside Nicaraguan territorial waters in order to avoid authorities. While it is possible to make the entire trip from South America to Mexico using only this method — and making frequent refueling stops — it is believed that littoral trafficking is often combined with an overland network.

The third method associated with land-based drug smuggling involves short-range aerial operations. In these cases, clandestine planes make stops in Central America before either transferring their cargo to a land vehicle or making another short flight toward Mexico. Over the past year, several small planes loaded with drugs or cash have crashed or been seized in Honduras, Mexico and other countries in the region. In addition, authorities in Guatemala have uncovered several clandestine airstrips allegedly managed by the Mexican drug-trafficking organization Los Zetas. These examples suggest that even as overall aerial trafficking appears to have decreased dramatically, the practice continues in Central America. Indeed, there is little reason to expect that it would not continue, considering that many countries in the region lack the resources to adequately monitor their airspace.

While each of these three methods involves a different approach to drug smuggling, the methods share two important similarities. For one, the vehicles involved — be they speedboats, small aircraft or private vehicles — have limited cargo capacities, which means land-based trafficking generally involves cocaine shipments in quantities no greater than a few hundred pounds. While smaller quantities in more frequent shipments mean more handling, they also mean that less product is lost if a shipment is seized. More importantly, each of these land-based methods requires that a drug-trafficking organization maintain a presence inside Central America.

Actors Involved
There are a variety of drug-trafficking organizations operating inside Central America. In addition to some of the notorious local gangs — such as Calle 18 and MS-13 — there is also a healthy presence of foreign criminal organizations. Colombian drug traffickers, for example, historically have been no strangers to the region. However, as STRATFOR has observed over the past year, it is the more powerful Mexico-based drug-trafficking organizations that appear to be overwhelmingly responsible for the recent upticks in land-based narcotics smuggling in Central America.

Based on reports of arrests and drug seizures in the region over the past year, it is clear that no single Mexican cartel maintains a monopoly on land-based drug trafficking in Central America. Los Zetas, for example, are extremely active in several parts of Guatemala, where they engage in overland and short-range aerial trafficking. The Sinaloa cartel, which STRATFOR believes is the most capable Mexican trafficker of cocaine, has been detected operating a fairly extensive overland smuggling route from Panama to El Salvador. Some intelligence gaps remain regarding, for example, the precise route Sinaloa follows from El Salvador to Mexico or the route Los Zetas use between South America and Guatemala. It is certainly possible that these two Mexican cartels do not rely exclusively on any single route or method in the region. But the logistical challenges associated with establishing even one route across Central America make it likely that existing routes are maintained even after they have been detected — and are defended if necessary.

The operators of the Mexican cartel-managed routes also do not match a single profile. At times, Mexican cartel members themselves have been found to be operating in Central America. More common is the involvement of locals in various phases of smuggling operations. Nicaraguan and Salvadoran nationals, for example, have been arrested in northwestern Nicaragua for operating a Sinaloa-linked overland and littoral route into El Salvador. Authorities in Costa Rica have arrested Costa Rican nationals for their involvement in overland routes through that country. In that case, a related investigation in Panama led to the arrest of several Mexican nationals who reportedly had recently arrived in the area to more closely monitor the operation of their route.

One exception is Guatemala, where Mexican drug traffickers appear to operate much more extensively than in any other Central American country; this may be due, at least in part, to the relationship between Los Zetas and the Guatemalan Kaibiles. Beyond the apparently more-established Zeta smuggling operations there, several recent drug seizures — including an enormous 1,800-acre poppy plantation attributed to the Sinaloa cartel — make it clear that other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are currently active inside Guatemala. Sinaloa was first suspected of increasing its presence in Guatemala in early 2008, when rumors surfaced that the cartel was attempting to recruit local criminal organizations to support its own drug-trafficking operations there. The ongoing Zeta-Sinaloa rivalry at that time triggered a series of deadly firefights in Guatemala, prompting fears that the bloody turf battles that had led to record levels of organized crime-related violence inside Mexico would extend into Central America.

Security Implications in Central America
Despite these concerns and the growing presence of Mexican traffickers in the region, there apparently have been no significant spikes in drug-related violence in Central America outside of Guatemala. Several factors may explain this relative lack of violence.

First, most governments in Central America have yet to launch large-scale counternarcotics campaigns. The seizures and arrests that have been reported so far have generally been the result of regular police work, as opposed to broad changes in policies or a significant commitment of resources to address the problem. More significantly, though, the quantities of drugs seized probably amount to just a drop in the bucket compared to the quantity of drugs that moves through the region on a regular basis. Because seizures have remained low, Mexican drug traffickers have yet to launch any significant reprisal attacks against government officials in any country outside Guatemala. In that country, even the president has received death threats and had his office bugged, allegedly by drug traffickers.

The second factor, which is related to the first, is that drug traffickers operating in Central America likely rely more heavily on bribes than on intimidation to secure the transit of drug shipments. This assessment follows from the region’s reputation for official corruption (especially in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama and Guatemala) and the economic disadvantage that many of these countries face compared to the Mexican cartels. For example, the gross domestic product of Honduras is $12 billion, while the estimated share of the drug trade controlled by the Mexican cartels is estimated to be $20 billion.

Finally, Mexican cartels currently have their hands full at home. Although Central America has undeniably become more strategically important for the flow of drugs from South America, the cartels in Mexico have simultaneously been engaged in a two-front war at home against the Mexican government and against rival criminal organizations. As long as this war continues at its present level, Mexican drug traffickers may be reluctant to divert significant resources too far from their home turf, which remains crucial in delivering drug shipments to the United States.

Looking Ahead
That said, there is no guarantee that Central America will continue to escape the wrath of Mexican drug traffickers. On the contrary, there is reason for concern that the region will increasingly become a battleground in the Mexican cartel war.

For one thing, the Merida Initiative, a U.S. anti-drug aid program that will put some $300 million into Mexico and about $100 million into Central America over the next year, could be perceived as a meaningful threat to drug-trafficking operations. If Central American governments choose to step up counternarcotics operations, either at the request of the United States or in order to qualify for more Merida money, they risk disrupting existing smuggling operations to the extent that cartels begin to retaliate.

Also, even though Mexican cartels may be reluctant to divert major resources from the more important war at home, it is important to recognize that a large-scale reassignment of cartel operatives or resources from Mexico to Central America might not be necessary to have a significant impact on the security situation in any given Central American country. Given the rampant corruption and relatively poor protective security programs in place for political leaders in the region, very few cartel operatives or resources would actually be needed if a Mexican drug-trafficking organization chose to, for example, conduct an assassination campaign against high-ranking government officials.

Governments are not the only potential threat to drug traffickers in Central America. The increases in land-based drug trafficking in the region could trigger intensified competition over trafficking routes. Such turf battles could occur either among the Mexican cartels or between the Mexicans and local criminal organizations, which might try to muscle their way into the lucrative smuggling routes or attempt to grab a larger percentage of the profits.

If the example of Mexico is any guide, the drug-related violence that could be unleashed in Central America would easily overwhelm the capabilities of the region’s governments. Last year, STRATFOR considered the possibility of Mexico becoming a failed state. But Mexico is a far stronger and richer country than its fragile southern neighbors, who simply do not have the resources to deal with the cartels on their own.

2) Israel successfully tests 'Iron Dome' anti-rocket shield
By YAAKOV LAPPIN

The Iron Dome anti-rocket shield passed a critical test in the past 48 hours, the Defense Ministry said on Thursday evening, in a message that will be welcomed by residents of the rocket-battered western Negev.


During the test, a number of rockets were launched, "of the same type that were fired in recent years at Israel," and the Iron Dome system responded "accordingly," the Defense Ministry said, using terminology indicating a successful interception of the projectiles.

The Iron Dome system is slated to defend southern and northern Israel from Hamas and Hizbullah rockets, and be a key component in a multi-layered missile defense system that includes the Arrow anti-ballistic missile shield.

Iron Dome is being developed by the Defense Ministry's Administration for the Development of Weapons and the Technological Industry (Maf'at) in conjunction with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Sources in the ministry expressed satisfaction with the test, describing it as a "milestone" and adding that the trial had verified simulations and research work.

Pinchas Buchris, director-general of the Defense Ministry, congratulated Iron Dome engineers on the successful test, and said that accelerated work would enable its installation in the near future.



Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the development of a multi-layered missile defense system was a "national mission aimed at reaching the stage in which a clear majority of missiles do not reach their targets."

Earlier this month, Danny Gold, head of Research and Development at Maf'at, said work on the Iron Dome had reached its "final stage" and was running "ahead of schedule."

"This system can be developed in a fifth of the time it would take to develop other systems, and at a tenth of the cost," Gold said. "It is the cheapest system in the world."

3) Learning the hard way
From The Economist

Barack Obama may at last be getting a grip. But he still needs to show more leadership, at home and abroad

HILLARY CLINTON’S most effective quip, in her long struggle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination last year, was that the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training. It went to the heart of the nagging worry about the silver-tongued young senator from Illinois: that he lacked even the slightest executive experience, and that in his brief career he had never really stood up to powerful interests, whether in his home city of Chicago or in the wider world. Might Mrs Clinton have been right about her foe?

Not altogether. In foreign policy in particular Mr Obama has already done some commendable things. He has held out a sincere hand to Iran; he has ordered Guantánamo closed within a year; he has set himself firmly against torture. He has, as the world and this newspaper wanted, taken a less strident tone in dealing with friends and rivals alike.

But at home Mr Obama has had a difficult start. His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped. Many of his strongest supporters—liberal columnists, prominent donors, Democratic Party stalwarts—have started to question him. As for those not so beholden, polls show that independent voters again prefer Republicans to Democrats, a startling reversal of fortune in just a few weeks. Mr Obama’s once-celestial approval ratings are about where George Bush’s were at this stage in his awful presidency. Despite his resounding electoral victory, his solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and the obvious goodwill of the bulk of the electorate, Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble.

Empty posts, weak policies
There are two main reasons for this. The first is Mr Obama’s failure to grapple as fast and as single-mindedly with the economy as he should have done. His stimulus package, though huge, was subcontracted to Congress, which did a mediocre job: too much of the money will arrive too late to be of help in the current crisis. His budget, though in some ways more honest than his predecessor’s, is wildly optimistic. And he has taken too long to produce his plan for dealing with the trillions of dollars of toxic assets which fester on banks’ balance-sheets.

The failure to staff the Treasury is a shocking illustration of administrative drift. There are 23 slots at the department that need confirmation by the Senate, and only two have been filled. This is not the Senate’s fault. Mr Obama has made a series of bad picks of people who have chosen or been forced to withdraw; and it was only this week that he announced his candidates for two of the department’s four most senior posts. Filling such jobs is always a tortuous business in America, but Mr Obama has made it harder by insisting on a level of scrutiny far beyond anything previously attempted. Getting the Treasury team in place ought to have been his first priority.

Second, Mr Obama has mishandled his relations with both sides in Congress. Though he campaigned as a centrist and promised an era of post-partisan government, that’s not how he has behaved. His stimulus bill attracted only three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House. This bodes ill for the passage of more difficult projects, such as his big plans for carbon-emissions control and health-care reform. Keeping those promises will soon start to bedevil the administration. The Republicans must take their share of the blame for the breakdown. But if Mr Obama had done a better job of selling his package, and had worked harder at making sure that Republicans were included in drafting it, they would have found it more difficult to oppose his plans.

If Mr Obama cannot work with the Republicans, he needs to be certain that he controls his own party. Unfortunately, he seems unable to. Put bluntly, the Democrats are messing him around. They are pushing pro-trade-union legislation (notably a measure to get rid of secret ballots) even though he doesn’t want them to do so; they have been roughing up the bankers even though it makes his task of fixing the economy much harder; they have stuffed his stimulus package and his appropriations bill with pork, even though this damages him and his party in the eyes of the electorate. Worst of all, he is letting them get away with it.

Lead, dammit
There are some signs that Mr Obama’s administration is learning. This week the battered treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, has at last come up with a detailed plan to rescue the banks (see article and article). Its success is far from guaranteed, and the mood of Congress and the public has soured to the point where, should this plan fail, getting another one off the drawing-board will be exceedingly hard. But the plan at least demonstrates the administration’s acceptance that it must work with the bankers, instead of riding the wave of popular opinion against them, if it is to repair America’s economy. And it’s not just in the domestic arena that Mr Obama has demonstrated his willingness to learn: on Iraq, he has intelligently recalibrated his views, coming up with a plan for withdrawal that seeks to consolidate the gains in Iraq while limiting the costs to America.

But Mr Obama has a long way to travel if he is to serve his country—and the world—as he should. Take the G20 meeting in London, to which he will head at the end of next week. The most important task for this would-be institution is to set itself firmly against protectionism at a time when most of its members are engaged in a game of creeping beggar-thy-neighbour. Yet how can Mr Obama lead the fight when he has just pandered to America’s unions by sparking a minor trade war with Mexico? And how can he set a new course for NATO at its 60th-anniversary summit a few days later if he is appeasing his party with talk of leaving Afghanistan?

In an accomplished press conference this week, Mr Obama reminded the world what an impressive politician he can be. He has a capacity to inspire that is unmatched abroad or at home. He holds a strong hand when it comes to the Democrats, many of whom owe their seats to his popularity at last year’s election. Now he must play it.

4) Obama's Persistent Disingenuousness
By Mark Salter

At his press conference Tuesday, President Obama was his usual assured and nimble self. He is one of the most graceful and appealing political communicators to appear on the national stage in my lifetime. He is, also, one of the more artfully dishonest ones.

He used a question about the uncertain prospects for a resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to emphasize his persistence. According to the President, he professes a "whole philosophy of persistence," and he cited several of his initiatives in which he calmly adhered to that philosophy while impatient critics carped about their lack of immediate success. Among the examples, this:

"When it comes to Iran . . . we did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, well, they did not immediately say that they we're eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism."

Now, there are certainly critics of the President's approach to Iran who worry it is based more on wishful thinking than the hard headed realism he promised to restore to America's foreign policy. And some of those might have seen his videotaped Nowruz greetings to Iran as evidence of his naiveté. But to the best of my knowledge not even his most outspoken and implacable detractors insisted it produce Iran's immediate disarmament and a cessation of its support for terrorists.

Nor has anyone criticized the President because he has not "immediately eliminated the influence of lobbyists in Washington." No one of adult judgment would believe such a Utopian achievement were possible in the near or long term without first suspending the First Amendment. The President was criticized for promising repeatedly that his administration would not permit officials who previously were lobbyists to work on issues they once lobbied on, and then immediately proceeded to allow several former lobbyists to do so. Nor has he been criticized because he has "not immediately eliminated wasteful pork projects." He has been criticized because he accepted without resistance an omnibus spending bill that was loaded with earmarks.

We had an indication of how the President favors this kind of red herring during debate over the stimulus bill, when he denounced Republicans who balked at the price tag or felt it wasn't sufficiently stimulative as advocates of doing nothing in the midst of a global recession. Yet, Republicans opposed to the bill offered an alternative that was different in size and kind, but was, arguably, more stimulative and responsible than the bill the President supported.

He also likes to dismiss his opposition as biters of the hand of bipartisanship he has generously offered them. Yet, he declined to pursue genuine bipartisan compromise on the stimulus bill because it was needed so urgently he couldn't spare the time to negotiate seriously. He ignored Republican concerns about earmarks in the omnibus bill because it was last year's unfinished business. And he threatens to circumvent the traditional supermajority needed to pass major legislation in the Senate, and the bipartisan negotiations it requires, by putting the most sweeping, expensive and controversial policies proposed in his budget submission into budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority of 51 votes to pass. His excuse: Republicans had similarly abused the process to pass the Bush tax cuts.

Perhaps, the President is a persistent man because, when it comes to this kind of disingenuousness at least, persistence pays off. Few in the press have been stirred to point out the many obvious discrepancies between the President's declarations of his intentions and the reality of his actions anymore than they were inclined to do so during the campaign. He gets away with it. And it runs counter to the deepest instinct of most politicians to cease prevaricating when there is no penalty for continuing to do so.

When Ed Henry of CNN asked the President why he waited two days to express his outrage over the AIG bonuses, the President dismissively responded, "because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak." I doubt there was a single reporter in the East Room that night who believed the President's explanation for his delayed reaction. They knew the administration had been surprised by the fierceness of the public's reaction, and belatedly raced to catch up to it.

But there was nary a hint of skepticism offered. They all laughed in appreciation of the surefooted artfulness of the President's putdown, no doubt offering him further assurance that when it comes to employing red herrings and other deceptions to promote policies that might very well bankrupt the United States, he would be smart to remain a persistent man.

5)wheels are already coming off Obama’s Trojan horse revolution. Will he, like Jimmy Carter, be seen as a one-term disaster?
By Bartle Bull


Barack Obama was always going to disappoint. When you promise almost everything to almost everybody—I’ll stop the fighting in Iraq but I’ll also keep going after al Qaeda there; I’ll make the economy grow more but I’ll spread the wealth around, and so on—you will inevitably let many people down. Human beings, even those who read fluently from teleprompters, simply cannot walk on water.

But few expected the wheels to come off the new administration so quickly. Just weeks into its existence, the Obama White House is in trouble. The US stock market has lost a quarter of its value since Obama’s election. While a Rasmussen poll in early March had his approval rating at 56 per cent, his net approval (the number of people who strongly approve of what he’s doing subtracted from the number who strongly disapprove) had contracted from 28 per cent the day after his inauguration to around 6 per cent for March—worse than Bush at the same time in his first term. The administration is in a fully fledged staffing crisis: having lost a record ten high-profile picks, it has scores of senior executive jobs unfilled—including every single treasury position below the department’s top job. The head of Britain’s civil service, Gus O’Donnell, has complained about the trouble he’s had finding key administration personnel ahead of the G20 conference in April. “There is nobody there,” he said. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.” Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner looks terrified before executives and television cameras alike. Five months after the election he has yet to deliver a plan for the banking system, much less restructure a single financial asset.

Even the sympathetic press is starting to speak of an “incompetence” crisis. Abroad, North Korea, Russia, China and Iran have all turned up the heat, as have Hamas and Chavez. At home, Obama’s Trojan horse agenda—using the economic crisis as an excuse to advance radical social change in areas unrelated to returning growth to the economy—threatens to pull his government into ideological quicksand when all the public really want are jobs. Centrist Democrats are deeply concerned about what Obama’s poor start means for the long-term, moderate Democratic majority whose possibility was glimpsed in the Clinton years.

A president with historic ambitions was never going to be content with tackling a mere recession. Thus in his televised address before both houses of congress in February he delivered a special history lesson: “Our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank.” The current recession and housing and financial problems have deeper causes, he said. What are these underlying maladies that so badly need the shaman’s touch? The president named four: energy, healthcare, education and debt. The “day of reckoning” for ignoring these issues—and for exacerbating this failure with excessive borrowing—has arrived, he said.

Americans who concentrated on the president’s words rather than on their characteristically sonorous delivery found the diagnosis baffling. Education, energy and healthcare policy in the US, as almost anywhere, all need help. But are America’s flaws in these areas really the causes of the housing bust and the paralysed banking system? What about the cyclical contractions that follow all economic booms? What about a decade and more of absurdly cheap money? How about all that Fannie and Freddie-fuelled lending to inappropriate borrowers? What happened to lax oversight? What about greed, that comforting straw man? No, according to Obama, we are losing our jobs and being kicked out of our excessively mortgaged houses because America lacks universal healthcare, federally sponsored nursery school, university for all, and a progressive emissions-oriented energy policy.

Two days after the congressional speech the president submitted a 150-page outline of his budget, which at $3.6 trillion already represents the largest and most ambitious expansion of the US state since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It is likely to become even bigger as it clears a spending-crazed congress managed from the left by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And despite promises to the contrary, it calls for a deficit that—at 12.7 per cent of GDP—is four times greater than any of the huge deficits under George W Bush.

Driven by mammoth commitments to Obama’s three social priority areas, his budget proposes to take the federal government’s spending from 21 per cent of the economy in 2008 to 28 per cent in 2009. Added to spending at state and local level, this would take the total government share of the US economy to about 45 per cent, roughly the same level as in Britain. Obama’s budget outline presents the additional $634bn for healthcare as a down payment on the full cost of universal healthcare, which he estimates to be double the sum that he is providing; the rest of the money, he says, congress must find. Publicly Obama does not want to admit that state healthcare is his aim, but his system is designed to price the current private insurance-dominated market out of business. He would pay much of the extra cost by cutting tax breaks for charitable giving and mortgage borrowing. (Yes, the same mortgage borrowing that is at the heart of the housing and banking crises.)

Education in the US is a matter for the individual states, not the federal government. The constitution is clear on this, but Washington, especially under the Bush regime, has inexorably encroached. And now Obama has made an unprecedented grab on behalf of central government, calling for universal standards in schools, for Washington-sponsored higher learning for every single American and for a federal role in education that starts, in his words, “at birth” and continues “from the cradle up through a career.” The numbers for this are not yet public, but they will be huge.

Regarding energy, it is expected that Obama will raise $600bn by selling tradable rights to emit carbon. This is in essence a large additional tax on all private sector activity —$800 per annum in new taxes for every American. The president also plans to spend $15bn a year picking winners in the alternative energy field, despite every indication that no advances on any known front can generate anything like an economically compelling alternative to fossil fuels. Steven Chu, the new energy secretary, has called energy prices in America “anomalously low.” The new carbon tax is designed to make the traditional energy economy so expensive that the alternatives become viable.

Even if you like Obama’s liberal direction, this is the exact opposite of a policy designed to deal with the crisis at hand, which is very simply that Americans need jobs. Overall he intends to increase the size of the federal government by a third, financed with an additional trillion dollars of deficit spending. He wants to increase the role of the state in the US economy to levels not seen since 1945.

Obama’s call for federal spending to fall to a still high 22 per cent of GDP by 2011 is illusory. The entitlement nature of most of the programmes, including $1 trillion on healthcare; the risibly rosy 4 per cent GDP growth projections for those distant years; the aggrandising nature of Washington itself; and the statist inclinations revealed in the current spending plans, render such projections hopelessly dishonest. Particularly egregious—in size and disingenuousness—is the $1.6 trillion “saving” until 2019 that Obama claims for not continuing Bush’s surge in Iraq. 2019? The surge ended in 2008 and Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government calling for combat troop withdrawal by 2010.

The president’s hasty and undebated $800bn “stimulus” bill, 1,073 pages long and passed with only a few hours for review as both parties admitted that not a single congressman or senator had even tried to read it, was the largest single spending measure in the history of the US government. At 5.8 per cent of GDP, it was three times larger than any European package. It has little to do with fixing today’s economy, and everything to do with a big state social agenda: 80 per cent of the bill’s spending comes after this year, by which time even Obama’s office is predicting healthy 3 per cent GDP growth. Over ten years, the total cost of the expanded welfare spending will amount to $127,000 for every income tax-paying household, according to estimates from the Heritage Foundation. Joe the Plumber is one person Obama did not lie to during the campaign: this administration is spreading the wealth around. It is no wonder that, despite two weeks of courting Republican congressmen, Obama was unable to attract a single one of them to his “stiulus,” rendering his campaign promises of bipartisanship hollow.

Since the budget was announced, the annualised rate of economic contraction for the last quarter of 2008 has been revised from 3.8 per cent to 6.2 per cent: this year’s unprecedented trillion dollar deficit is thus likely to be closer to two trillion dollars. With two salivating houses of congress, and the president’s proud personal commitment to aggressive Keynesian spending, these deficits will stretch deep into the future until a Gingrich or Reagan swings the pendulum back.


***


President Obama’s plan, then, represents a radical realignment of America’s political economy. His challenge today is to sell this big debt, big government revolution to a public that thought—or rather hoped—that it was electing a post-partisan centrist. To make his programme acceptable to what remains a majority centre-right nation, Obama makes aggressive use of comparisons with the great depression. The comparison is false.

Today’s recession is in severity and duration (only three or four quarters of negative growth) a normal economic contraction by historical standards. With economic growth predicted by all sides to be returning in the second half of this year, the US economy is doing substantially better than it did in the 1981-82 recession, when unemployment, currently 8.1 per cent, reached 10.8 per cent. The 1990-91 and 2001 recessions were unusually brief and mild. The slowdown, 15 months old in March and with the end visibly in sight, will be slightly longer than the 16-month downturns of 1975-76 and 1980-81, similar in terms of GDP contraction (GDP actually rose in 2008, despite the bad final quarter), and substantially less severe than both where it really matters: unemployment.

So despite the president’s constant invocations, today’s situation does not remotely compare to the great depression. Automobile production fell 90 per cent in 1932 compared to 25 per cent in 2008 (with no foreign competition in the 1930s), over 10,000 banks failed in 1931-32 compared to a few score in 2008-09 (and 3,000 in 1987-88), and unemployment exceeded 25 per cent in 1932. The only way America will find itself anywhere near a great depression today is if the president’s assault on business and investment and his rush towards national insolvency continue long enough to make his auguries come true.

The American economy might not be as bad as Obama says it is, or as bad as it would have been without his history-making debt binge, but it is indeed in pain. He certainly should be doing something about it; that is what he was elected to do. Instead, however, he is using it as an opportunity to advance what is (by US standards) a massively ambitious and ideological agenda. From the New York Times on the left to the Wall Street Journal on the right, Obama’s budget has been called the biggest change in US politics since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Bill Clinton’s signature piece of economic policy was a contraction of the welfare state, making him an heir to Reagan much as Blair was to Thatcher. Obama’s revolution completely overturns the Clinton settlement, both on the micro level by specifically reversing Clinton’s epochal welfare reforms, and on the macro level by rejecting outright the fiscal discipline and growth-oriented private sector philosophy of the last Democratic White House.

Obama did signal some of these huge policy initiatives during the 2008 campaign. But he promised so many contradictory and impossible things—green energy and fiscal responsibility, for example—that it would be hard to find a position in mainstream politics that was not covered by his words in one speech or another. But the greatest moment of candour to emerge from this administration to date came when chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief handler within the Chicago political machine that groomed this brilliant political phenomenon, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Hillary Clinton, the other great power in the administration, made the same point in Brussels recently: “Never waste a good crisis… Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.”

This is breathtaking stuff. Obama’s top people are publicly (if inadvertently) confessing to precisely the sort of cabalistic secret agenda that was most loathed about the Bush administration. Imagine the apoplexy of Obama’s political base if Dick Cheney had called 9/11 a “good crisis” because it provided cover for a long-intended invasion of Iraq.
The administration’s Trojan horse agenda—using a standard, near-finished recession as an excuse for radical social interventions and a fundamental expansion of the state—hurts the economy and markets in a crucial area: trust. Combined with the prospect of high inflation and high taxes, this means that money is put on ice.

Obama’s alarmist rhetoric is very different from the tone of his economic hero, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR). Washington’s challenges today are small compared to those faced by FDR. The nature of the American state has changed; in 2008, after huge fiscal expansion under Bush, the federal government accounted for 20 per cent of the economy. In 1930 it was 3 per cent. And unlike Roosevelt, Obama has had the benefit of 80 years of history, and knows something that FDR could not have known. With the Keynesian multiplier (the effect on economic growth of $1 of government spending) proven over time to be well below $1, the spectacular borrowing required to pay for his spending places a huge burden on our children, making the debt binge unethical as well as unaffordable.

Obama has promised to try to tax his way out of the spending hole he is creating with increased levies on those making more than $250,000 a year. This cannot work. Quite apart from the damage to investment and small businesses of such disincentives, Obama-style soak-the-rich taxes simply don’t raise enough money to pay for Obama-style spending. According to Brian Riedl at the Heritage Foundation, under the president’s plans those paying no income tax will reach 50 per cent—the infamous “tax tipping point” at which democracy becomes a mechanism for the majority to live off the property and work of various minorities. Unable to plug the hole with taxes, Uncle Sam will be forced to print money on a scale not seen since Jimmy Carter.


***


Obama invokes Reagan almost as often as he invokes FDR, but if we want an appropriate comparison for the situation America faces to today, it is not the great depression or the Reagan revolution but rather the Carter malaise: appalling weakness and gloom both at home and abroad. Obama, returning to the mindset of the brief (1931-39) New Deal experiment that was itself an anomaly in the 240 years of the republic, is reversing the philosophical direction of the American state. This is the opposite of what moderate Americans thought they were getting when they voted for him.

A post-partisan centrist: it was the lie of the century. It did not matter that Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was one of the most bipartisan national leaders of the last 20 years or that Obama was the single most partisan Democrat in the US senate. It did not matter that upon declaring his run for the presidency after only 142 days in Washington, Obama was only months removed from a career in the infamously corrupt Chicago Democratic political machine. Through aspiration or guilt, the backstory of this grandson of a Kenyan goatherd flattered many Americans, who, presented with a visibly aged and handicapped alternative in McCain, knew exactly what Joe Biden had meant when he called Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Messianic scenarios are deeply symbiotic. They are based on a compact with the believer. Obama’s believer compact went like this: “You wash away my historic sins and I’ll wash away yours.”

Now the real Obama has stood up. The moderate and sustainable version of the Democratic party personified by Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, based on personal responsibility and low tax, high growth economics, is under the bus with Reverend Wright, Obama’s 20-year religious mentor. Ideology is back. Coming from the most radical presidential candidate in the history of either party, this is no surprise. But to practical Democrats in a politically moderate country that is still based on a philosophy of robust individual freedom, this revolutionary expansion of the federal government is very worrying. Obama’s seizure of so much money and so much decision making in such basic areas of everyday life implies too much debt, too much inefficiency and too much control for a corrupt and distant political class. This is not the change that we sought.


***


Thus the big question in Democratic circles today: “What does Hillary do about this?” Her supporters still feel that the election was stolen from her. With capital on strike, states rebelling against the president’s dependency agenda, the treasury secretary probably soon to be replaced, many top jobs still unfilled, the liberal press anxious and poll numbers plummeting, Hillary Clinton’s departure could sink an administration that already feels like a listing ship, leaving her a clear path to the Democratic nomination for 2012.

Her relationship with the president, inherently unstable personally, erodes every day that he takes his swinging axe to the remarkable bipartisan achievements of the Clinton presidency, especially welfare reform and fiscal discipline. While the biggest shocks of this presidency to date have been at home, in the foreign sphere Hillary’s job as secretary of state is made more difficult by a distracted and inexperienced president.

Serious people do not like being associated with a White House that, eight weeks after the inauguration and four months after the election, in a time of genuine economic distress, did not have one single nominee for the various treasury jobs, much less a single actual appointee sitting behind a single desk. Paul Volcker, the head of Obama’s economic advisory council, recently called the situation at treasury “shameful.” This staffing fiasco is repeated across defence, state and many other departments. Nothing like it has ever been seen in Washington.

Also severely impinging on Hillary’s credibility and ability to do her job is the cession of a huge part of her responsibilities to Richard Holbrooke, who is seen on all sides in Washington as an empire-building elephant whom no secretary of state wants in his or her backyard. If Holbrooke succeeds with the poisoned chalice of “AfPak,” Obama gives him Clinton’s job; but if Holbrooke fails, she fails. She is too big a force in America to be bullied into the box she’s in.

And the president’s sour relationship with a military with which Hillary enjoys mutual respect is well known. Obama repeatedly denied that General Petraeus’s surge was working while it was proceeding, and continued to do so long after it had succeeded. The president’s cynical warmongering in Afghanistan to compensate for his perceived softness on Iraq is alarming many people. Meanwhile, at a time of gigantic new federal spending in every other arena, the military is being promised the largest spending cuts since the late 1940s.

Obama’s constant signals of weakness abroad—from the embarrassing hope that adversaries like Putin and Ayatollah Khamenei will change behaviour as a result of friendly overtures, to big reductions in defence spending, to schizophrenia over Palestine—are already inviting a frightening range of challenges and rebuffs around the globe. Chinese vessels never used to bully the US Navy as they did the USNS Impeccable in March. North Korea had never before ripped up its agreement with the south or offered the calculated challenge as publicly pre-announcing the date of an illegal ballistic missile test. Not since Jimmy Carter has the world seen Russia laugh at Washington as it did over the recent request to swap eastern European missile defence for co-operation in Iran, or the cheap ($2.1bn) Russian buyout of America’s base in Kyrghizstan (forcing vital Nato supplies for Afghanistan overland through Russia and Iran, and giving Putin and the mullahs huge leverage). And even worse than the tragic Vietnam that Obama is digging in Afghanistan is the fact that, in two years, Iran will probably have a nuclear weapon. This would be one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history. Obama has time to do something about it but will not.

The Republican party is in such disarray that it is letting Obama’s crisis go to waste. The 37-year-old Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a rising Republican star, delivered a wooden speech in response to the president’s congressional address. The new head of the Republican national committee, Michael Steele, recently had a public spat with conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are dividing the working class and religious right between them and Mitt Romney is staying quiet for now. A few congressmen, senators and governors have begun to make hay out of the natural antipathy of their constituents towards huge increases in welfare, debt, and state interference, but none has so far managed to stand out from the crowd. General Petraeus, perhaps the brightest star on the Republican horizon, is speaking in Iowa, the first stop in the party nomination process, later this spring. In the long term, an Obama administration might be rescued by a Newt Gingrich figure bringing growth-oriented economic policies back to Washington from the right. In such an event, many Democratic senators and congressmen would be voted out of office. For the moment, though, the president’s real threat is from within his own increasingly restive party.

Obama’s dismantling of President Clinton’s economic legacy is injurious. For moderate Democrats who recognise the national mainstream as the party’s best hope of a long-term majority, it is highly dangerous to be associated with such an ideological presidency. It is even worse when the ideology is the one least likely to work. Weakness and inexperience abroad is already causing a dangerous escalation in tensions. At home, the president’s policies represent a history-making, debt-fuelled arrogation of vast territories of private life and the economy. More war and less growth is bad leadership and bad politics.

6) Huge deficits put nation on unsustainable course

Assume for a minute that you earn $22,000 this year and spend $40,000. Next year, you earn $23,000 and spend $37,000. You'd be on the fast track to bankruptcy.

Now add eight more zeros to those numbers, and you get a sense for the federal government's dire financial situation. This year, Washington is on track to spend nearly two dollars for every dollar it takes in. Under President Obama's budget for 2010, the government would spend about three dollars for every two coming in.

Unlike you, of course, the federal government has no credit limit and can print money. And temporary deficit spending is necessary to bail out the financial system and jump-start the economy. In the long run, though, huge deficits are no more sustainable for a government than for a household.

This brings us to Wednesday's start of budget season on Capitol Hill, which featured an underwhelming display of short-term tinkering to whittle down the cost of President Obama's $3.7 trillion spending plan for 2010, coupled with some of the same old backsliding on the long-term problem.

Among other things, the Senate Budget Committee abandoned the useful discipline of laying out budget numbers for the next 10 years, opting instead for a five-year display that conveniently masks the fact that deficits are projected to rise after 2013.

There are limits to how much the government can borrow without consequence — a fact underscored Wednesday when the Treasury had unexpected trouble selling five-year notes to cover Washington's enormous borrowing. It might have been a hiccup, but it roiled the stock market and sent a worrying signal that Treasury might have to offer higher interest rates, which could throw a wrench into the recovery.

Obama has promised to cut the deficit in half by 2013 — a low bar, given its current enormity. Pressed at his news conference Tuesday night, he asked for time and acknowledged that he'll have to make a "whole host of adjustments" in future budgets to bring the red ink under control. We'll see.

Republican critics, meanwhile, call the Obama deficits "unconscionable," but their outrage rings hollow considering that GOP President George W. Bush and a GOP Congress squandered the surpluses they inherited and doubled the national debt.

This isn't an insoluble problem. Everyone knows what has to happen. Democrats have to show spending restraint and make tough choices among competing priorities. Republicans have to overcome their hostility to any and all tax hikes. The economic crisis won't be an excuse to put this off for much longer.

7) Once Again, Tim Geithner Gets It Exactly Wrong
By John Tamny


The Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied 6 percent on Monday after the announcement of Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s latest bank relief plan. The stock surge might point to significant positives within his initiative, but then going back to the fall, shares have regularly rallied on the news of government help, only to decline once the harsher realities of government aid set in.

Indeed, stocks rallied for weeks in 1971 after President Nixon announced the dollar’s de-link from gold, combined with price controls, but eventually markets caught up to the major economic negatives that would result from Nixon’s flawed attempts to revitalize the U.S. economy. It seems the same applies here.


Geithner began by blaming Americans in total for the nation's economic difficulties. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, “as a nation we borrowed too much and let our financial system take on too much risk.” No, some Americans borrowed too much, and some banks acted in risky ways that were inimical to their health.

Geithner’s desire to foist collective guilt on all Americans in many ways strikes at the heart of our problems today. That's the case because in analyzing how we got here, we should make no mistake about the causes. This financial crisis we’re experiencing is a failure of collectivism rather than a failure of capitalism as so many assume.

Within a capitalist system there would never have been the dollar debasement that drove the rush into property, but that was imposed on the American economy as a way of helping failing manufacturers. Similarly within a capitalist system, loans would have been issued solely based on the borrower’s presumed ability to pay them back. And banks would have lent with the certain knowledge that a failure to lend with profit in mind would be an economic decision that could result in bankruptcy.

But thanks to the collectivist thinking that got us here, government subsidy of the Fannie/Freddie variety made mortgages accessible to those who could not pay them, while some banks chased risky returns based on a belief that any failure would be backstopped by a political class that irrespective of party thinks home ownership is a public good that should be subsidized. The Constitution be damned.

And while Geithner argued in one sentence that “every policy we take be held to the most serious test,” he soon contradicted himself with his line about government initiatives meant “to stabilize the housing market by encouraging lower mortgage rates.” Simplified, lots of Americans bought houses they couldn’t afford and that are presently millstones around their necks, so now we’ll subsidize more of the bad choices that helped get us here.

What remains to be explained is how government subsidies that create even greater incentives to consume property can help the economy. Indeed, with credit tight as is, will it be easier or harder for future Googles and Microsofts to sprout up if government intrusion in the marketplace means more capital will be shifted into the proverbial ground? More to the point, where are the Adam Smith disciples in politics or the commentariat who might innocently suggest that housing is the consumptive reward for productive economic activity, not the driver of same. Basically, Geithner gets what drives economies exactly backward.

Some say a better housing situation will aid the gasping banks, but the very assumption is contradictory in nature. It was the vibrant housing market that made banks comfortable lending to bad credit risks to begin with. That being the case, how will we improve the economy if banks repeat the very mistakes that have them on their backs? Wouldn’t the true economic boost result from banks learning the lessons of the past such that they make less in the way of home loans in the future? Geithner doesn’t seem to think so.

To help ailing financial institutions, Geithner noted that “we established a new capital program to provide banks with a safeguard against a deeper recession.” Translated, we’re going to prop up the banks that should have gone bankrupt, and in doing so, we’ll weaken the many responsible institutions that didn’t need government help, but that will have to compete against banks using money not their own.

A real-world example of the faulty nature of the above was actually revealed in the Wall Street Journal just this week. AIG, now serving federal investors who want said investment to be profitable, is now undercutting its competitors with non-economic prices made economic by federal loans. In the future we should expect the same from the supposed beneficiaries of TARP, who will undercut their competition with full federal approval in the name of “getting taxpayers their money back.” Won’t mergers handled by TARP-funded banks get less scrutiny than those overseen by firms not on the federal dole?

And with banks “still burdened by bad lending decisions”, Geithner, rather than let those same banks pay for their mistakes, is forming a “Public-Private Investment Program” that “will purchase real-estate related loans from banks.” The message here is for banks to lend in non-economic ways given the certainty that their mistakes will be absolved. The government response to today’s crisis is authoring future ones.

Once we’ve established the obvious moral hazard here, we can then point out what a sham the notion of “Public-Private” is. Geithner is of course including private sector investors to attach credibility to a plan that lacks it, but no one should be fooled. Taxpayers will largely fund these “private” purchases of bank securities which means that private sector investors will not “establish the value” of loans and securities weighing on bank balance sheets. Instead, the market for “toxic” bank assets will become even more uncertain thanks to private investors playing with money not their own.

Geithner concluded by saying that we must “start the process of ensuring a crisis like this never happens again.” So despite the fact that regulators have always proven unequal to the regulated, Geithner will take his own whack at creating what he presumes will be a foolproof system.

Sadly, it is there that he showed the greatest naivete in a piece that spoke to a Treasury Secretary not up to the job. Indeed, the failure of companies big and small means that capitalism is working. It is only when governments feel the need to act that we actually experience what he deems crises. Geithner’s inability to comprehend these basic truths foretells an austere future where he will seek to outlaw failure, and in doing so, he’ll blunt the essential market lessons that tell us how to achieve.

8)TOP TEN INDICATORS OF WHAT OBAMA'S HEALTH CARE PROGRAM MIGHT MEAN FOR YOU:

(10) Your annual breast exam is done at Hooters.

(9) Directions to your doctor's office include "Take a left when you enter the trailer park."

(8) The tongue depressors taste faintly of Fudgesicles.

(7) The only proctologist in the plan is "Gus" from Roto-Rooter.

(6) The only item listed under Preventive Care Coverage is "an apple a day..."

(5) Your primary care physician is wearing the pants you gave to
Goodwill last month.

(4) "The patient is responsible for 200% of out-of-network charges," is not a typographical error.

(3) The only expense covered 100% is "embalming."

(2) Your Prozac comes in different colors with little M's on them.

(1) You ask for Viagra and they give you a Popsicle stick and Duct Tape.