Rock makes an interesting tongue in cheek observation about Obama's decision to suspend drilling. Would Obama shut down all air travel were a plane to crash? (See 1below.)
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The second article was sent to me by another friend and memo reader who got it from his friend in New Mexico. (See 2 below.)
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Response to my "...Man From LaMoncha." memo: Right on target as usual. However,you need to make one small correction. The title is "Man OF LaMancha."
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My friend, Kyle-Anne Shiver, raises many same issues I did in a recent memo. (See 3 below.)
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If it is good for Obama can it possibly be good for America? John Griffing thinks not and concludes: "If past behavior is any indicator, what is good for Obama is not good for America. (See 4 below.)
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So what is new Sec. Gates? Russia is always paranoid when we suggest they consider matters as we see them. Russia consistently puts commercial interests ahead of any moral principles and so do most other nations. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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Even Margaret Carlson has begun to sour on Obama. (See 6 below.)
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We are so up to our necks in BP oil that we are not getting any blow by blows regarding the Blagojevich trial. Could it turn into an IED for Obama? Even if it does, after the oil spill, Obama is slicker than ever and should be able to avoid any repercussions.
It simply boils down to that's the way politics is done in Chicago. (See 7 below.)
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Giuliani appears on MSNBC and spews forth on what would be happening now if GW was president. (See 8 below.)
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While every species is drowning in Gulf oil we are drowning in debt. Kevin Williamson, calculates: "The Real National Debt is $130 Trillion, Give or Take . "
A day of reckoning is ahead.(See 9 below.)
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In 18 short months this president has done more harm to our nation than any I can remember and that goes for Carter who must be relieved to know he will now be the second worst president. It is as if Obama is hell bent on destroying our nation within a four year period and based on the past eighteen months I would venture he is even ahead of schedule.
Not only are Obama's ideas a disaster but his lack of leadership is beyond pale. He has proven to be a bully, a destroyer of long standing relationships and, worst of all, thoroughly untrustworthy. The Czars and other Cabinet Members he has surrounded himself with seem to have contempt for the truth and total disregard for the health and welfare of this nation.
It is becoming increasingly evident from all of the articles I cite that my views are no longer out of bounds and in fact more and more are coming to embrace my long held beliefs that Obama is a dangerous threat. Where his weakness and arrogance will lead is anyone's guess. While his long standing minister damned our nation I can only say 'God help our nation.'
The 2010 election cannot come soon enough.
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Dick
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1) Expert offers information on disaster in Gulf waters
By Arnold Dyre
Gary Rook has been my friend since childhood.
When he and I were boys, Gary lived right across the road from me on Highway 8 about eight miles from Grenada. Gary attended Gore Springs School, Jones Road Elementary School and a year at John Rundle High School in Grenada before moving to Duck Hill, where he played basketball and graduated Binford High School.
Gary also played basketball at Holmes Junior College before going on to Mississippi State University to earn a degree in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.
Today, the same Gary Rook, who robbed wasp nests with me, stole watermelons with me, and swam and fished in Red Grass Creek with me, is Technical Director of North American Shipbuilding, LLC, of Larose, La.
North American Shipbuilding is the shipbuilding design and building affiliate of Edison Chouest Offshore, a company that operates all types of maritime offshore vessels throughout the world.
Gary has figured prominently in the design and construction of a long list of offshore service vessels, as well a number of impressive “firsts” and “largest” such as the first U.S. Antarctic icebreaking research vessel, the largest and most powerful anchor-handling vessel in the U.S. fleet, the first dynamically positioned vessel in the U.S. fleet, and the world’s first floating production system installation vessel.
He’s also worked on the largest water throw capacity vessel in the U.S. fleet, the world’s first Offshore Petroleum Delivery Ship (OPDS), the world’s most powerful escort service tug (for assisting supertankers into the tight confines of harbors safely) as well as many other major projects.
He has also been instrumental in the development of new laws and regulations elevating the level of safety for offshore vessels (not drilling or drill rigs) by working directly with regulatory authorities such as the American Bureau of Shipping and the United States Coast Guard as well as the U.S. Congress.
Gary took everything that I taught him when we were growing up along the banks of Red Grass Creek and put it to good use.
From day one of the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, Gary has been my personal source of information and has interpreted for me the alarming things happening in the Gulf.
Vessels that his company owns and operates and that he designed were first on the scene of the Deep Water Horizon blowout. The vivid pictures of the firefighting efforts to save the rig prominently showed the orange and buff vessels of Edison Chouest Offshore providing the majority of the firefighting assistance on scene. Gary’s company continues to assist in all phases of the crisis on a daily basis.
Like me, Gary is appalled concerning the horrific impact the oil spill disaster poses from an ecological standpoint and in terms of the destruction of a way of life for fisherman along the Coast, but Gary believes that the harsh reaction to the very unfortunate Deep Water Horizon blowout incident by the present administration in Washington threatens the jobs of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, and will only bring the U.S. into a much more dependant state on foreign oil and will further drive an already depressed economy to possible bankruptcy.
The drilling ban imposed by President Obama is unprecedented!
Gary says, “Let’s say that a Southwest Airlines plane was to crash tonight (hopefully, there is never another plane crash, but this is hypothetical to emphasize a point). Would the administration ground every plane tomorrow until the cause of the crash was known? We all know the answer to that, which is NO.
“There was an unfortunate mining incident several months ago where there were quite a few lives lost. As I recall the mining company was seriously at fault with respect to safety. But did the government shut down ALL mining operations until more stringent regulations could be imposed? The answer is again NO. So why punish the oil and gas industry in this unprecedented manner?”
Gary continues, “Just for the record of anyone reading this who may have concerns about this industry and the environmental issues caused by this catastrophe, I would say to you that this is a horrible situation, but it is a situation that should have NEVER happened.
“The system DID NOT fail. The system worked fine. There were warnings of the problems that led to this incident evident in the weeks before the blowout occurred! The records of what happened are available for all to see as public information.
“It is a terribly unfortunate incident but it cannot be undone. Sadly, no matter how much BP does to rectify this tragedy or how much our government does to help alleviate the adverse impact of the situation, many, many people will suffer from this terrible incident.”
Gary points out that the current moratorium placed on offshore drilling by the administration hurts badly the American citizens who base their livelihoods on the oil drilling industry. Gary feels that the moratorium will also hurt every American who has to drive to work using gasoline that might well end up costing $5 or more a gallon. He believes that, in reality, it will actually hurt EVERY American citizen, even “tree huggers” because like it or not, we, as a society, are dependent on oil.
Until viable alternate energy solutions are possible, we are where we are and, unfortunately, that is not going to change for many, many years.
Gary suggests for each of you to just consider everything that is driven by the oil industry: gasoline, diesel, heating and cooling for your homes, your electricity, clothing, food, all plastics and building supplies, products for farmers, travel (car, bus, train, airlines, etc.), trucking, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and many others too numerous to mention.
The administration says, “Don’t worry, if those 33 drill rigs that this moratorium shuts down leave and go somewhere else to drill, they will come back.”
Gary says, “Well, I got news for the administration; if they leave they, ain’t coming back. At least not for a long time. They have long term contracts waiting in Brazil and Africa that they can go to NOW. Why would they wait around in the Gulf of Mexico for the ban to be lifted when they can immediately go to work elsewhere? At a day rate of around $500k (some more/some less) per day in revenue, I am sure they will wait. Say $500,000 x 6 months x 30 days/mo = $90,000,000 in lost revenues for each of these rigs.
“Yes President Obama, they certainly will wait for you to lift your ban. And the next time I come to visit my relatives in Mississippi I will save gasoline by flapping my arms really, really hard and flying up!”
Less sarcastically, Gary continues his argument with, “And there are those who say why should we drill for oil at all? They say, “We can get the oil we need from overseas.” Yes, we can, but at what consequence? If we depend on oil imports, doesn’t that mean we are at the mercy of the OPEC nations?
“Remember the gas shortage of the ’80s? I do. Doesn’t that mean the likelihood of more military conflicts over oil? Doesn’t that mean more young American men and women being sent to fight wars for oil?”
Gary still is not through. He goes on, “And also, how do we get the imported oil from overseas to the United States? There are NO pipelines, so we have to use supertankers. And I want everyone to look this up (please don’t take my word for it) -- of the 10 largest oil spills ever recorded, one was ‘our friend’ Sadam’s opening up all the valves in Kuwait as he left the country, one was a broken pipeline in Russia that no one even noticed for eight months (go figure), one was a well blowout in Mexico, and seven were incidents involving tankers. And of the 10 largest spills, absolutely NONE of them, occurred in the U.S.
“As information, the Exxon Valdez, the largest U.S. spill on record, is #33 on the list of size of spills. Now I would anticipate that the Deep Water Horizon spill will probably make the top 10, but the point is that the single most frequent cause of major oil spills is tankers. NOT DRILLING.
“So by being more dependant on foreign imports, we must increase the number of tankers coming into the United States, so we exponentially increase the possibility of a major oil spill near our shores due to a tanker incident. If in all of these past 40 years or so that the U.S. has been drilling for domestic oil offshore we had been more dependant on imports, with more tankers (current VLCC tankers can carry up to 100 million gallons of oil), I would expect that the U.S. well could have had one or more of the top 10 incidents because of the increased frequency of tanker visits to our ports.”
Gary concludes by stating, “The DWH is the only major spill incident to occur in the U.S. that was not a tanker. So ask yourself:
‘Is it fair to punish hard working American citizens because of one single incident, no matter how tragic?’”
I am hard-pressed to disagree with my friend Gary. He makes sense even though, early on, he did learn a lot of bad habits from me, and, second, he did go to Mississippi State.
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2)"Greener Pastures"
This is a stunning piece and is by Chuck Green, a life long Liberal DEMOCRAT! He writes a column called "Greener Pastures" for the DenverPost/Aurora Sentinel...one of the most liberal newspapers in the entire country! If he's had enough...maybe the rest of country finally sees it, too!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Are Liberals Breaking Up with Obama?
By Kyle-Anne Shiver
President Obama gave his big oil-spill speech Tuesday night, and I sat rather dumbfounded just after it as MSNBC's Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews virtually trashed a guy they've tingled and swooned over since early 2008. Hearing so much reality from the formerly dazzled was quite akin, I thought, to witnessing a teenage breakup, where a girl suddenly has the epiphany and sees the character defects in Mr. Cool. Teen-romance epiphanies, where the once-infatuated person now sees clearly the cause-for-grave-concern flaws that her friends saw all along, usually occur just after some especially revealing event.
For our liberal friends, the oil spill seems to represent the impetus for epiphany.
So, are liberals breaking up with Obama?
Now, liberals may wince mightily at having their sudden disdain for their own president compared to a teenage breakup, but it would take a rare ninny indeed not to admit that the entire Obama affair was always more fairytale -- as Bill Clinton surmised early on and was pitilessly pilloried for -- than it was based on reality.
The fairytale aspect of liberals' affair with Obama is, I think, that they -- like the infatuated teenage girl -- saw in him only what they wanted to see. The gaping holes in Obama's résumé got short shrift, while his teleprompted eloquence had them all a-swooning. Like the teenage girl who wants to hear or see nothing amiss about her new beau, liberals turned a deaf ear and blind eye to every troublesome bit of Obama's idealistic folderol and defended his lack of executive experience on the ridiculous notion that he was above those sorts of things because he was, after all, rather like a god.
There's a huge moral lesson in here, and I, for one, just hope that every good liberal is still open-minded enough to engage the lesson and still has enough integrity to own up to it. The purely golden moral lesson at hand has less to do with ideology than it has to do with keeping one's head about him. It has far less to do with who is president than with why he is president. If we, as a nation, are able to absorb the true lesson of Obama in time, we just might save our country for the next generation. We very well might be able to show our young people something so important that it will become next to impossible to elect another pure knave on the strength of emotional attachment and fantastical wishful thinking to the presidency.
By now, every single reasonable, sentient, in-charge-of-his-own-thoughts adult ought to know exactly where this is going.
When a republic elects an executive leader and commander in chief based on little more than an ethereal charisma, that nation gets what it deserves -- a celebrity president who takes his office about as seriously as the fawning crowds took their votes. Upon such idiotic decisions great civilizations do indeed fall.
However, all is not lost. One of the most wondrous, yet inherently sound, facets of the American form of government is that mistakes -- even of this magnitude -- last only four years. And even though the damage of Obama's incompetence has been exacerbated greatly by a lapdog congressional majority willing to sell themselves and the country out to make the president's day, the country is still redeemable. When all is said and done, the Obama presidency fades into the sunset, and another presidential election comes around, Americans once again will have the chance to take their votes seriously and elect a proven, competent executive to fill the office of the presidency.
There is the chance that Obama's election will have a spectacular silver lining for our republic.
Many candidates, mostly of the hollow political sort that Obama has proven to be, may think long and hard now before putting their names in contention. Without the requisite experience to handle huge national crises, or even the kind that occur in every city hall and governor's office in the country, legislators may see the debacle of Obama and stop themselves from making a similar mistake.
The presidency does not lend itself to vainglorious appraisals of one's own abilities; all is laid bare when push comes inevitably to shove. In light of Obama's historic failure to steer our ship of state, there is a lesson for every single would-be candidate of the future, a chance to see Obama's ignominious defeat at the cruel hand of reality, and a clear opportunity to take the hard, long look before leaping into the fires of a presidential campaign. Men and women of sound reason who might be candidates in 2012 should heed the lesson of Obama and not assume that just because they've been elected to office, they would make a good president.
A CEO job is a CEO job is a CEO job, and if one has never had one before -- either private or public -- then one ought to approach the candidate's ring with far more apprehension and humility than did either Barack Obama or any of his swooning party backers.
As for liberal ideologues in particular, the golden lesson of Obama ought to be that indulging in identity politics to the exclusion of demonstrated competence is a recipe for disaster at almost any level. When Chris Matthews gushed some months ago that he had "forgotten the president was black for an hour," he pretty much gave away his own penchant for identity politics. Liberal media elites, celebrities, and white guilt-ridden pols never let the public think much beyond this president's skin color for the entire campaign, when going beyond the book's cover is always -- every single time -- the duty of every voter, but most especially the duty of the fourth estate and all those who would use their positions to make endorsements.
At the end of the day, every one of these folks who rallied the votes for Obama -- based on nothing but his skin color and teleprompted eloquence -- have done far more damage to the cause of African-American parity than if they had refused to indulge their identity politics and had looked at the candidate's bona fides with a skeptical, purely investigative eye. As Walter Williams wrote recently, due only to the liberal bent to encourage character and ability judgments based upon one's skin color, gender, or any other artificial label, future black candidates will indeed be judged -- whether rightly or wrongly -- by the incompetency of Barack Obama.
This is inherently unfair. Obama is not a flailing president because he is half-black. His skin color has nothing whatsoever to do with his failure to lead coherently and competently. It has to do with him as an individual. Obama's failure is the result of biting off a bigger job than he was ready to chew. What is happening to Obama is precisely what would happen to anyone in so far over his head in any job. It's no more a black thing than it is a white thing; it's no more a man thing that it is a woman thing. It's an individual thing.
President Obama still has a couple of years to go in his term. Liberals may not be breaking up with him yet. They may require more epiphanies still. But once the spell cast by identity and charisma begins to fade, it's a sure bet that the gut-wrenching, self-examining morning after is well on its way.
And in that, I think I see hope for America's restoration.
It won't be easy or fast, but at least it seems possible now that liberals are showing that they might be willing to go all the way and break up with Mr. Cool.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
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4)Obama and Oil: Greasing America's Decline
By John Griffing
President Obama has consistently pursued environmental policies designed to forward his socialist agenda at the expense of American economic power. Very few, if any, of Obama's environmental policies have anything to do with the environment, but instead, they all serve as a cover for economic sabotage.
As an example, the original cap-and-trade legislation favored by President Obama would have reduced U.S. GDP by $9 trillion and lowered emissions past a point where no industrial nation could endure. This is consistent with President Obama's pledge to bankrupt the coal industry, despite the fact that coal accounts for 50 percent of U.S. energy consumption. When combined with the no-sale Copenhagen Treaty, which sought to achieve global wealth redistribution under the banner of "climate debt," the Obama agenda appears to be about more than a clean environment.
But where climate change hysteria failed, President Obama will use the BP oil spill, an irregularity in a decade with a track record of declining spills, to attack American wealth and prosperity. As with cap-and-trade, the prevention of future drilling will force Americans to make unnatural choices, e.g. between driving and food, and cause a spike in unemployment. This is not hyperbole. In the 2008 gas crisis, Americans were forced to curb driving in order to save money. And current information indicates that President Obama's proposed ban on drilling of all kinds will cost as many as 20,000 badly needed jobs in Louisiana alone.
At issue is a simple matter of supply and demand.
Oil has been crippled by regulations that shrink available supply and drive up gas prices, which affects every area of the economy. Oil companies are barred from much of the Outer Continental Shelf, and known sources of oil are kept out of reach, e.g. ANWR, via government environmental regulations protecting organisms that have thrived in areas where oil is currently drilled. Government is at the heart of America's energy woes.
The same trend is apparent in America's dwindling refinery capacity. From 1981-2008, the number of refineries shrank steadily from a peak of 324 to an unacceptable low of 150. This dramatic decline mirrored a huge increase in demand for gasoline. In 1981, U.S. refineries could process over 18 million barrels per day at a time when Americans consumed an average of 16 million barrels per day. By 2008, this number had dropped to 17 million barrels per day, despite the fact that Americans then consumed over 20 million barrels per day. This gap in capacity forced domestic oil suppliers to import highly expensive pre-refined gasoline. Demand surpassed supply. Prices went up, and Americans suffered.
Why are Americans without a suitable number of refineries? The answer is simple: government-encouraged environmental radicalism. Every time an oil company tries to build a new refinery, environmental activists initiate lawsuits, even in cases where proposed refineries have passed every state and federal environmental test. In other words, it's not about the ecosystem. It's about a virulent, anti-capitalist, anti-prosperity agenda, and it is not presumptuous to say that President Obama and his minions are part of this agenda, as evidenced by their statements and actions.
Why else does Obama pursue crippling tax increases during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Why else does President Obama pursue legislation that would more than halve U.S. GDP and raise electricity prices so that Americans would be forced to live like Europeans? Why else does President Obama advocate government-imposed compensation caps and, when he can, even go as far as to force certain executives to get permits for luxury items such as club membership and personal jets? It is becoming clear that Obama seeks nothing less than the eradication of the American Dream. Obama even wants to control air conditioner usage. As he said during the campaign, "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK."
All of President Obama's environmental policies seem to be built on the shaky foundations of "spread the wealth." In other words, Obama has no problem with a serious reduction in the U.S. standard of living as long as all Americans share the misery. That is the inevitable result of Obama's policies. America, having been deprived of its once-vibrant economy, will turn to government for survival, joining the list of countries opting for a slice of government cheese over a chance at prosperity.
But beyond the economic insanity inherent in Obama's environmental policies is the fact that the supposed benefit of these policies to the environment is either superfluous or nonexistent. American air is already substantially cleaner than it was twenty years ago, and air conditioner usage has no tangible effect on the environment whatsoever. The ozone "hole" is by all indicators a seasonal event, at the end of which ozone is replenished. Global warming, the genesis of many of Obama's environmental policies, is a dead issue. The alleged link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and global warming has been exposed as a hoax, both by scientists from inside the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and by intercepted communications demonstrating substantial scientific fraud.
And then there's the legal problem with Obama's view. By what right does Obama presume to tell Americans how to live and drive? Where in the Constitution is the authority for this breathtaking assumption of power?
We should expect that the same radical agenda lurks behind Obama's self-righteous and sanctimonious platitudes regarding bans on future drilling. The BP disaster is likely just what Obama was looking for, the crisis on which to hang America's economic decline. To listen to Obama rant, the uninformed would think that large oil spills are a common occurrence, and that no technology exists to prevent them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Spills involving sea-based rigs account for only 2 percent of all oil spills, making the BP disaster indeed rare. And oil spills have dramatically reduced over the last two decades.
Surely President Obama is aware of this information. Therefore, his actions must be seen as those of an opportunist. But what opportunity is he pursuing, if the result is the destruction of American wealth and badly needed jobs? The answer: dependency. Just as the lack of refinery capacity was felt at the pump and all over the economy, a cessation in drilling will shift supply almost completely to foreign sources in order to meet demand, increasing gas prices to punitive levels and again affecting all areas of the economy. Obama knows this, and yet he proceeds at breakneck speed. Oil and gas well-drilling companies employ over 60,000 Americans, jobs that would surely be threatened if Obama's moratorium on drilling goes forward. High prices combined with the ripple of unemployment that will be the consequence of any ban on drilling will make yet more Americans utterly dependent on President Obama for their very sustenance.
If past behavior is any indicator, what is good for Obama is not good for America. Energy is wealth, and oil is America's primary source of energy. Eliminating drilling eliminates potential American wealth. Speak out in support of business and freedom. Reject Obama's thinly disguised attack on American prosperity.
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5)Russia 'schizophrenic' on Iran, says U.S. defense secretary
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells congressional commitee that Russia is balancing the security threat posed by Iran against commercial interests.
By Reuters
Russia's approach to Iran has been "schizophrenic," pursuing commercial ties while acknowledging that a nuclear-armed Tehran would pose a major security threat, the U.S. defense secretary said on Thursday.
Russia voted in favor of a fourth round of UN sanctions against Tehran because of its nuclear program this month. But Moscow signaled on Thursday its support had limits, criticizing the United States and the European Union for imposing additional sanctions beyond those approved by the UN Security Council.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, testifying before a congressional committee, acknowledged one lawmaker's concerns about Russia's long-standing commercial links to Tehran.
"You've just put your finger on a kind of schizophrenic Russian approach to this," Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"When I was in Moscow three years ago, then-President Putin told me that he considered Iran Russia's greatest national security threat ... and yet they have these commercial interests in Iran that go back more than 20 years."
During a 1992 trip to Moscow, Gates as then-head of the CIA, said he raised questions about Russia's support for an Iranian nuclear reactor. Gates said his Russian counterpart at the time replied: "It's all about the money."
"So I think that it is this balancing act. And Russia, they recognize the security threat that Iran presents," Gates said. "But then there are these commercial opportunities, which, frankly, are not unique to them and Europe."
Earlier in the same hearing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was pleased about a Russian decision to freeze delivery of S-300 missiles to Iran, announced earlier this month.
The United States and Israel have long fiercely opposed a sale of the defensive missile system because it could give Iran the means to withstand air strikes aimed at knocking out its nuclear sites.
Clinton said she was not sure if Russia had officially canceled the contract.
"What they said is that they would not deliver the system. So, is that cancellation? Or is that an indefinite suspension? Either way, it's good news because they will not deliver the system," Clinton said.
5a)Russia slams US, EU sanctions
Moscow 'extremely disappointed' by additional Iran sanctions, says they're 'unacceptable'
Russia told the United States and European Union Thursday it was extremely disappointed they were imposing additional sanctions on Iran beyond those approved by the UN Security Council with Moscow's backing.
Moscow called the US and EU sanctions "unacceptable" and warned the West it risked losing Russian support for concerted efforts to rein in Tehran's nuclear activity.
"We are extremely disappointed that neither the United States nor the European Union is heeding our calls to refrain from such steps," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, according to the Interfax and Itar-Tass news agencies.
EU leaders agreed tighter sanctions Thursday targeting Iran's oil and gas sector, a day after the US Treasury imposed sanctions on some Iranian banks, companies and Revolutionary Guard Corps members.
Before joining the United States, Britain and France in supporting a fourth round of sanctions in the Security Council last week, Russia had urged Washington and the EU not to hit Tehran with additional measures.
"For us, attempts to place oneself above the Security Council in this way are unacceptable," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its website
'The same story time and again'
The Russian remarks darken the backdrop for President Dmitry Medvedev's trip next week to the United States, which is meant to build on recent improvements in ties.
The Foreign Ministry said the additional sanctions would harm joint efforts to press Iran to halt suspect nuclear activities and ensure that it does not acquire atomic weapons.
The US and EU moves "undermine the foundations for our dialogue and interaction in seeking optimal ways to resolve the situation surrounding Iran's nuclear program," it said.
"The same story is repeated again and again: as soon as we reach a common understanding in the UN Security Council on a package of finely calibrated measures to influence Iran through sanctions, the United States and EU don't stop at that and, strictly speaking, display political disregard for their partnership with Russia," the statement said
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6)Al Pacino Wouldn’t Need to Talk Tough to BP.
ByMargaret Carlson
A president should give no speech before its time. The one that Barack Obama delivered Tuesday night was too small for such a big problem, the Oval Office setting too august for mere updates.
Obama spoke as if we are at war, but without any discernable plan of battle. He missed a chance to call for sacrifice, whether from a new conservation corps or from his party’s senators, who at some point face a tough vote on energy legislation. Obama said he’s going to get to that “in the months ahead” -- which means after the midterm election in November.
In a choice of whether to save the planet or Blanche Lincoln, he went with the latter. Talk about wasting a crisis.
Obama, who surely would have liked to announce some breakthrough on Gulf oil spill compensation, was at the mercy of BP Plc’s timetable. News of the company’s $20 billion commitment came the day after the speech.
On the face of it, Obama couldn’t ask for a more perfect adversary. The day of his speech, oil companies called to testify before Congress said they wouldn’t have built a rig in such a shoddy manner.
Evidence of BP’s corner-cutting, to the point of intentional negligence and reckless endangerment, is everywhere. According to lawmakers, BP used six instead of the usual 21 centralizers before cementing the well, didn’t test the cement bond, chose a cheaper method to prevent gas from rising unchecked to the surface, and stinted on a backup blowout preventer -- all to “save time/money,” to borrow a phrase from one internal BP e-mail.
Press Conference Partners
And yet for weeks, the administration has treated BP as an equal, a partner at press conferences, rather than a breaker of laws, scores of them. Eliot Ness didn’t share a podium with Al Capone.
A strong leader bides his time, keeps the culprits at arm’s length and acts like the boss. And he doesn’t invite them into the White House. Meetings with BP should be held in a windowless conference room at the Justice Department. That would prevent scenes like the one yesterday, when BP executives leaving the West Wing met the press as if they were heads of state.
Obama’s Oval Office address was the latest in a series of actions that seem overly reactive to the drumbeat that he’s not showing enough fury. The public, which likes to see its leaders in control, is clamoring for no such thing.
Just because the press likes nothing more than an angry outburst -- I’m guilty, too -- doesn’t mean the president should oblige. Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino as Michael Corleone -- they shared a cool stare and a steady voice. They meant business and didn’t have much to say.
Kicked Himself
After days of being told he was insufficiently upset, Obama flashed some temper when NBC’s Matt Lauer prodded him about butt-kicking and the president was ready to play a tough guy on TV. Score one for the press, and take one away from the president, who was diminished by it.
For weeks, Obama’s been making up for listening to aides determined to distance him from the oil spill’s political spillover. He’s been overcompensating ever since. Stop him before he wastes valuable presidential time on another trip to the Gulf to hug a local resident. Once is enough.
Obama didn’t use the speech to fix what’s under his control. He could have told the country that, contrary to the reigning Republican ethos, government -- sometimes big government -- is needed to regulate the BPs of the world. Otherwise, corporations run amuck and cause harm that can never be fixed.
He also could have declared he will replace Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for not doing a heck of a job.
Excuse You
Since 2008, when Congress got a report from Interior’s inspector general, we’ve known that the Minerals Management Service was beset by financial self-dealing, cocaine use, gifts and sex. While Salazar didn’t create the corruption -- three decades of regulatory coziness took care of that -- he had 18 months to fix it, and didn’t, other than adopting some new ethics guidelines. In his speech, Obama basically excused Salazar for not knowing “the problem there ran much deeper.”
The speech shows that this White House is fighting the last one’s mistakes. It wasn’t George W. Bush’s infamous flight over Hurricane Katrina damage that ruined his presidency. It was his failure to do what he could to relieve the human suffering visible on the ground.
People don’t want an emotional president. They want the president to bring the power of the government to bear on the bad guys, alleviate the suffering of people and the planet and punish those who could have done something but didn’t.
Do that, and there’s no need to give a speech.
(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
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7)How Illinois is that?
By John Kass
Hopium smokers might consider it a buzzkill, but Wednesday's testimony in the Blagojevich corruption trial sure gave me the munchies.
What could be tastier than two Democrats — President Barack Obama and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich — hanging out with the treasurer of the Republican National Committee at a Wilmette fundraiser hosted by a political fixer who would soon be in federal prison?
According to testimony by businessman Joseph Aramanda (who later wrote a $10,000 campaign check to Obama), it happened in 2003 as Obama was mounting a campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Obama was there. So was Gov. Dead Meat. And their buddy, the political fixer they had in common, Tony Rezko, was there, too, because it was Tony's house.
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It's not unusual to see a bunch of suave Democrats at a Democratic fundraiser. But what about the chunky Illinois Republican boss, just chillin', shaking Aramanda's hand?
It was Big Bob Kjellander (pronounced $hell-an-der), the national Republican committeeman from Illinois, a behind-the-scenes Combine boss out of Springfield, who would later help plan the Republican National Convention that nominated Arizona Sen. John McCain.
No wonder Republicans have trouble.
"I met Kjellander at Tony's house," Aramanda said. "It was an Obama fundraiser. … I told (Tony) that I needed to borrow some money. It was for 10 percent interest."
Aramanda said Kjellander did not require any security for the loan. And why would he? He's Rezko's friend.
Kjellander loaned $600,000 to Aramanda a few weeks later. Prosecutors argue the loan was part of a kickback scheme to Blagojevich and his pals after Kjellander received an $809,000 finder's fee in a $10 billion state bond deal.
Kjellander has not been charged. He insists the loan was not illegal and that he did nothing wrong. That's his story, and he should probably stick to it.
It wasn't easy for Aramanda in court Wednesday. In an excellent cross-examination, Blagojevich defense attorney Michael Gillespie got him to admit he'd received hundreds of thousands of dollars in finder's fees on other inside deals even though he did no work.
Meanwhile, the defense is using the Rod-Is-An-Idiot Theory, with Rezko as some evil genius who tricked naive little Chicago politicians who are as bendable as Gumbys.
We're so focused on the criminal aspects, but what about the fascinating political aspects?
Big Bob Kjellander, Republican bigwig and buddy of Bush White House Rasputin Karl Rove, was hanging at Tony's crib with Obama and Dead Meat. How cool is that?
Was it the appetizers? Maybe fresh figs wrapped with prosciutto? Empanadas? A pitcher of Peach Bellini?
Whatever the refreshments and sweet meats, Illinois political bosses are always hungry to cross party lines in order to score. Just the other day, in writing about the trial, I said party affiliation means nothing to them.
Apparently I wasn't clear enough because some blogger affiliated with my friends at the Chicago News Cooperative reported that I "dismissed the notion of political identity having any impact on a juror."
Really? I wasn't writing about jurors not caring about party identification. I was talking about the insiders, not jurors. So let's make this simple for foreign correspondents covering the Blagojevich trial here in the "Heartland."
We voters get tribal every election. Party affiliation is important for many of us. We shriek at each other on talk radio, in the blogs or in the comments section under newspaper columns.
But as testimony in the Blagojevich trial makes clear every day, Illinois political big shots don't care about party. They care about deals. So here's an equation, so we won't have any further misunderstandings:
GOP Boss + Democratic Gov. + Soon-to-be Democratic President + Convicted Influence Peddler = How Illinois Works x (Peach Bellinis + Figs Wrapped with Prosciutto).
Get it?
On Wednesday we called Illinois Republican Party Chairman Pat Brady to ask about Kjellander hanging out with Barack, Tony and Rod.
"It is what it is," Brady said. "It's not good. But the good news for us is that Kjellander is the old school. He's the last generation. We got rid of him a long time ago and we've power-scrubbed the party."
Then late on Wednesday, prosecutors called the Democratic National Committee's former finance chairman, Joseph Cari.
Cari was a player. And if it weren't for a few handfuls of hanging chads in Florida in 2000, Cari just might have been U.S. secretary of commerce under Al Gore. Later, Cari the Democrat found himself supporting Republican Jim Ryan for governor of Illinois, but after Blagojevich won, he was hanging with Blago's boys.
On Wednesday, Cari testified that in 2002, Blagojevich told him of his plans to use government muscle to squeeze state contractors, fill his campaign coffers and run for president.
Unfortunately, Cari was scheming with Republican insider and soon-to-be-FBI-informant Stuart Levine. The bipartisan pair later pleaded guilty to extortion and other crimes, including shaking down a pension investment firm.
Cari demanded $850,000 from the firm, offering a classic line: "This is how things are done in Illinois."
He's correct. That's how things are done here. Cari's problem was the FBI got it on tape.
With all this cross-pollination, and all those scrumptious bipartisan Combine appetizers served here daily, who wouldn't get the munchies in Illinois?
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8)Giuliani: If This Was Bush, He Would Have Been Impeached By Now
Rudy Giuliani on MSNBC's "Morning Joe":
"Boy, you guys really give this guy a break that is beyond...They'd have been working on impeachment of Bush by now. If Bush were the president and handled it this way, there'd be like a movement to throw him out of office." "Just try to be fair."
Mika Brzezinski asks Giuliani "What would you do?"
"I know exactly what I would have done. The first thing I would have done is to bring in outside experts who knew as much or more about this than BP because I wouldn't trust just BP to run it for me. I wouldn't want my fate, the fate of my people, the fate of the southern part of this country in the hands of BP. I would have gone and I'd have called up the people you're talking about, the people I talked about the other night. Are there people that are better than BP, I would have asked. The answer is "yes." Are there people that are far better than BP? Yes. Is BP good at this? No. Then give me the people that are the best. After all, I'm the President of the United States or the Mayor of New York City. You can get anything you want. Give me the people that are the best. I want them here-- He hasn't called any of these people. Not a single one. Go ask them. He has not talked to them, he doesn't like them, he doesn't trust them. He's gone to academics because that's what he trusts."
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9)The Other National Debt
By Kevin Williamson
About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number: Fourteen trillion seconds ago, Greenland was covered by lush and verdant forests, and the Neanderthals had not yet been outwitted and driven into extinction by Homo sapiens sapiens, because we did not yet exist. Big number, 14 trillion, and yet it doesn’t even begin to cover the real indebtedness of American governments at the federal, state, and local levels, because governments don’t count up their liabilities the same way businesses do.
Accountants get a bad rap — boring, green-eyeshades-wearing, nebbishy little men chained to their desks down in the fluorescent-lit basements of Corporate America — but, in truth, accountants wield an awesome power. In the case of the federal government, they wield the power to make vast amounts of debt disappear — from the public discourse, at least. A couple of months ago, you may recall, Rep. Henry Waxman (D., State of Bankruptcy) got his Fruit of the Looms in a full-on buntline hitch when AT&T, Caterpillar, Verizon, and a host of other blue-chip behemoths started taking plus-size writedowns in response to some of the more punitive provisions of the health-care legislation Mr. Waxman had helped to pass. His little mustache no doubt bristling in indignation, Representative Waxman sent dunning letters to the CEOs of these companies and demanded that they come before Congress to explain their accounting practices. One White House staffer told reporters that the writedowns appeared to be designed “to embarrass the president and Democrats.”
A few discreet whispers from better-informed Democrats, along with a helpful explanation from The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle under the headline “Henry Waxman’s War on Accounting,” helped to clarify the issue: The companies in question are required by law to adjust their financial statements to reflect the new liabilities: “When a company experiences what accountants call ‘a material adverse impact’ on its expected future earnings, and those changes affect an item that is already on the balance sheet, the company is required to record the negative impact — ‘to take the charge against earnings’ — as soon as it knows that the change is reasonably likely to occur,” McArdle wrote. “The Democrats, however, seem to believe that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are some sort of conspiracy against Obamacare, and all that is good and right in America.” But don’t be too hard on the gentleman from California: Government does not work that way. If governments did follow normal accounting practices, taking account of future liabilities today instead of pretending they don’t exist, then the national-debt numbers we talk about would be worse — far worse, dreadfully worse — than that monster $14 trillion–and–ratcheting–upward figure we throw around.
Beyond the official federal debt, there is another $2.5 trillion or so in state and local debt, according to Federal Reserve figures. Why so much? A lot of that debt comes from spending that is extraordinarily stupid and wasteful, even by government standards. Because state and local authorities can issue tax-free securities — municipal bonds — there’s a lot of appetite for their debt on the marketplace, and a whole platoon of local special-interest hustlers looking to get a piece. This results in a lot of misallocated capital: By shacking up with your local economic-development authority, you can build yourself a new major-league sports stadium with tax-free bonds, but you have to use old-fashioned financing, with no tax benefits, if you want to build a factory — which is to say, you can use tax-free municipal bonds to help create jobs, so long as those jobs are selling hot dogs to sports fans.
Also, local political machines tend to be dominated by politically connected law firms that enjoy a steady stream of basically free money from legal fees charged when those municipal bonds are issued, so they have every incentive to push for more and more indebtedness at the state and local levels. For instance, the Philadelphia law firm of Ballard, Spahr kept Ed Rendell on the payroll to the tune of $250,000 a year while he was running for governor — he described his duties at the firm as “very little” — and the firm’s partners donated nearly $1 million to his campaign. They’re big in the bond-counsel business, as they advertise in their marketing materials: “We have one of the premier public finance practices in the country, participating since 1987 in the issuance of more than $250 billion of tax-exempt obligations in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and three territories.” Other Pennsylvania bond-counsel firms were big Rendell donors, too, and they get paid from 35 cents to 50 cents per $1,000 in municipal bonds issued, so they love it when the local powers borrow money.
So that’s $14 trillion in federal debt and $2.5 trillion in state-and-local debt: $16.5 trillion. But I’ve got some bad news for you, Sunshine: We haven’t even hit all the big-ticket items.
One of the biggest is the pension payments owed to government workers. And here’s where the state-and-local story actually gets quite a bit worse than what’s happening in Washington — it’s the sort of thing that might make you rethink that whole federalism business. While the federal government runs a reasonably well-administered retirement program for its workers, the states, in their capacity as the laboratories of democracy, have been running a mad-scientist experiment in their pension funds, making huge promises but skipping the part where they sock away the money to pay for them. Every year, the pension funds’ actuaries calculate how much money must be saved and invested that year to fund future benefits, and every year the fund managers ignore them. In 2009, for instance, the New Jersey public-school teachers’ pension system invested just 6 percent of the amount of money its actuaries calculated was needed. And New Jersey is hardly alone in this. With a handful of exceptions, practically every state’s pension fund is poised to run out of money in the coming decades. A federal bailout is almost inevitable, which means that those state obligations will probably end up on the national balance sheet in one form or another.
“We’re facing a full-fledged state-level debt crisis later this decade,” says Prof. Joshua D. Rauh of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who recently published a paper titled “Are State Public Pensions Sustainable?” Good question. Professor Rauh is a bit more nuanced than John Boehner, but he comes to the same conclusion: Hell, no. “Half the states’ pension funds could run out of money by 2025,” he says, “and that’s assuming decent investment returns. The federal government should be worried about its exposure. Are these states too big to fail? If something isn’t done, we’re facing another trillion-dollar bailout.”
The problem, Professor Rauh explains, is that pension funds are used to hide government borrowing. “A defined-benefit plan is politicians making promises on time horizons that go beyond their political careers, so it’s really cheap,” he says. “They say, ‘Maybe we don’t want to give you a pay raise, but we’ll give you a really generous pension in 40 years.’ It’s a way to borrow off the books.” The resulting liability runs into the trillions of dollars.
Ground Zero for the state-pension meltdown is Springfield, Ill., and D-Day comes around 2018: That’s when the state that nurtured the political career of Barack Obama is expected to be the first state to run out of money to cover its retirees’ pension checks. Eight years — and that’s assuming an 8 percent average return on its investments. (You making 8 percent a year lately?) Under the same projections, Illinois will be joined in 2019 by Connecticut, New Jersey, and Indiana. If investment returns are 6 percent, then 31 U.S. states will run out of pension-fund money by 2025, according to Rauh’s projections.
States aren’t going to be able to make up those pension shortfalls out of general tax revenue, at least not at current levels of taxation. In Ohio, for instance, the benefit payments in 2031 would total 55 percent of projected 2031 tax revenues. For most states, pension payments will total more than a quarter of all tax revenues in the years after they run out of money. Most of those pensions cannot be modified: Illinois, for instance, has a constitutional provision that prevents reducing them. Unless there is a radical restructuring of these programs, and soon, states will either have to subsidize their pension systems with onerous new taxes or seek a bailout from Washington.
So how much would the states have to book to fully fund those liabilities? Drop in another $3 trillion. Properly accounting for these obligations, that takes us up to a total of $19.5 trillion in governmental liabilities. Bad, right? You know how the doctor looks at you in that recurring nightmare, when the test results come back and he has to tell you not to bother buying any green bananas? Imagine that look on Tim Geithner’s face right now, because we still have to account for the biggest crater in the national ledger: entitlement liabilities.
The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare — in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we’ve totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that’s about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.)
Suffice it to say, we’re a bit short of that $106 trillion. In fact, we’re exactly $106 trillion short, since the total value of the Social Security “trust fund” is less than the value of the change you’ve got rattling around behind your couch cushions, its precise worth being: $0.00. Because the “trust fund” (which is not a trust fund) is by law “invested” (meaning, not invested) in Treasury bonds, there is no national nest egg to fund these entitlements. As Bruce Bartlett explained in Forbes, “The trust fund does not have any actual resources with which to pay Social Security benefits. It’s as if you wrote an IOU to yourself; no matter how large the IOU is it doesn’t increase your net worth. . . . Consequently, whether there is $2.4 trillion in the Social Security trust fund or $240 trillion has no bearing on the federal government’s ability to pay benefits that have been promised.” Seeing no political incentives to reduce benefits, Bartlett calculates that an 81 percent tax increase will be necessary to pay those obligations. “Those who think otherwise are either grossly ignorant of the fiscal facts, in denial, or living in a fantasy world.”
There’s more, of course. Much more. Besides those monthly pension checks, the states are on the hook for retirees’ health care and other benefits, to the tune of another $1 trillion. And, depending on how you account for it, another half a trillion or so (conservatively estimated) in liabilities related to the government’s guarantee of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and securities supported under the bailouts. Now, these aren’t perfect numbers, but that’s the rough picture: Call it $130 trillion or so, or just under ten times the official national debt. Putting Nancy Pelosi in a smaller jet isn’t going to make that go away.
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In an addendum at The Corner blog, Williamson adds one more harsh note:One thing I didn't include [in my article]: private debt. The household debt picture is pretty rough... Given Uncle Sam's precedent for relieving troubled banks of distressed assets, it's not impossible that a lot of that private credit-card debt will end up as part of the public debt, on Washington's books somewhere. I suppose debt is debt, but I'm going to feel a little better about debt financing an aircraft carrier than debt incurred by a late-night nacho run.
In my last print piece, which our benevolent overlords have made available to the nonsubscribing public here, I try to count up the real national debt, i.e., all the money owed by the federal government, state and local governments, entitlement liabilities, government retiree pension obligations, etc. The number I came up with: about $130 trillion, which is to say, nine or ten times the "national debt" we usually talk about. (Over at the New York Post, Michael Tanner has similar questions on his mind.)
One thing I didn't include: private debt. The household debt picture is pretty rough, too, and the news there is mixed: The good news is that Americans are actually reducing their household debt. The bad news is that they are not doing that by saving their pennies and paying down their bills, but by defaulting on their mortgages and credit cards.
There's about $1 trillion in U.S. credit-card debt out there, much of it securitized. The charge-off rate (the portion of defaulted debt credit-card companies abandon as unrecoverable) doubled from 2006 to 2008, and just about doubled again from 2008 to 2010. Asset-backed securities based on credit-card debt are kind of an interesting creature, to my mind, anyway. Mortgage-backed securities ultimately have a house attached to them: an asset that can be repossessed, held, sold, etc. It's not like credit-card companies can repossess that $200 bar bill you put on your Visa.
Given Uncle Sam's precedent for relieving troubled banks of distressed assets, it's not impossible that a lot of that private credit-card debt will end up as part of the public debt, on Washington's books somewhere. I suppose debt is debt, but I'm going to feel a little better about debt financing an aircraft carrier than debt incurred by a late-night nacho run.— Kevin D. Williamson is deputy managing editor of National Review, in whose June 21, 2010, issue this article first appeared.
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