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From The Heritage Foundation regarding unemployment. (See 2 below.)
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My LTE :
Soon Obama will know what American voters think of his policies.
Obama won by running a 'chump change' campaign while selling snake oil.
Now those chumps are awakening to what Obama's brand of change was all about - a political mirage based on far left ideology that has fallen flat because it never works.
There are those who say, give Obama time to fix the problem as if government ever fixed anything on time and on budget.
Then there are those who defend him because of the mess he inherited. They seem to ignore the mess he has made is far worse and the cost of making it so has far exceeded the Iraq War's cost which they constantly decried when "Miss Me Yet" was in office.
What Obama has proven is that resumes do count for something. In fact his was thin enough to see through and you would have thought those 'chumps' would have seen through him as well.
Never too late though for chumps to change!
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Now for some humor. (See 3 below.)
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Last week the Obama Administration gave a reprieve to some 30 corporate entities in order to save face before the election. Why did Obama allow these corporations to keep their current health programs? Because Obamascare is not working, that is why. It is creating all the problems and more that we were warned would occur.
Obamascare is a bitter pill even for campaigning Democrats to swallow. They are gagging as they run away from it while running for office.
Now that we are getting a look see into this 2000 plus page monstrosity we find it is a carrier pigeon for all kind of special interests matters.
Here is one example. Any business doing $600 in revenue with another will have to file a 1099. This means the IRS will be flooded with billions of documents they will not be able to process and which will cost American companies, large, small and tiny, precious money which they would be better throwing down a rat hole.(See 4 and
4a below.)
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I repeat myself but I believe it bares repeating: Obama seemingly does not care about his re-election because he is out to change our nation. He said so, he campaigned accordingly and should be taken at his word.
Ideologues are committed if not lost,confused souls. They are willing to go down with the ship. Narcissists are more so and love drinking their own bath water.
Obama is now out blaming Obamamaniacs for letting him down. How disconnected from reality can one get? About as much as Jimmy Carter. The below article is a must read.
because it is one of the most hilarious and insightful attacks on Jimmy Carter I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
One would hope, by now, Jimmy would get writers cramp but he just keeps on writing.
Where is that attack rabbit when we need it? (See 5 below.)
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Mauldin on the employment figures. Rather bleak. (See 6 below.)
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Netanyahu's block and tackle effort. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)MOLLIFYING MUSLIMS, AND MUSLIFYING MOLLIES
By Mark Steyn
While I've been talking about free speech in Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here's a few thoughts for what they're worth:
Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.
Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.
Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama's famous "teaching moments"? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where's the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights?
When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.
So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for "respect" and "sensitivity" toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.
Maybe Pastor Jones doesn't have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:
[Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater... Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?
This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I've said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it's worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes' argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic - they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, Justice Breyer's remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.
More importantly, the logic of Breyer's halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans' constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama's opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC's free-speech rights would be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn.com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving "some government commission" control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it's demanding bloggers pay a $300 "privilege" license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don't formally take it over, look at the people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.
But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She's the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up "Everybody Draws Mohammed" Day, and then, when she realized what she'd stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark's Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:
You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.
On the advice of the FBI, she's been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization's sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine's Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris' own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: "There is no more Molly"? That's all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:
Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?
Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that's the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he's just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.
Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we're headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the President", and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President." Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west's inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own.
It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ "bad cop". Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.
While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I'm happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn't want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling "Fire!" over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn't like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening. No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you.
ELECTION NOTE
I'm looking forward to getting back to the U.S. and weighing in on November's fun and frolics. But a quick word on Christine O'Donnell, the GOP Senate candidate from Delaware whom the politico-media establishment have decided is this season's easiest conservative target. If I understand their current plan to save the Dems, it rests on the proposition that America is about to be delivered into the care of a coven of witches who want to take away your right to masturbate. Two thoughts: First, any young woman (as she then was) willing to go on MTV, before a live audience, and attack masturbation certainly doesn't want for courage. As to her alleged dabbling with "witchcraft", so what? Several readers suggest Ms O'Donnell use Sinatra's "Witchcraft" as her campaign theme song. No, no, no. She should use the theme from "Bewitched": All she had to do was twitch her nose, and Mike Castle vanished. If it's a choice between Elizabeth Montgomery and Democrats cackling as they toss another trillion dollars into their bubbling cauldron, it's no contest.
Always loved the lyric to "Bewitched", which you never hear. If Ms O'Donnell wins, I'll be singing it on election night.
Thank you to everyone at the Danish Free Press Society who helped make my trip to Copenhagen such fun - especially Lars, Eva, Kit and Katrine.
Afterwards, I nipped across the water to enjoy a livelier-than-usual Swedish election campaign, despite the best efforts of the dreary enforcers of its one-party media. As I always tell my Danish pals, Sweden is insane even by Scandinavian standards.
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2)At the Mercy of the Obama Tax Hikes
When will the Obama administration admit their economic stimulus plan, which cost more than the Iraq war, failed? The stimulus has already failed to create the 3.5 million jobs President Barack Obama promised it would. It has already failed to keep unemployment below the 8% the President's top economists predicted it would. And now, the Department of Labor reported today, a full 15 months after the National Bureau of Economic Research certified that the recession ended, that the U.S. economy lost another 95,000 jobs in September.
Total employment in the United States economy now stands at 130.2 million. This is 7.6 million jobs short of where the President promised the economy would be by December 2010 if Congress adopted his economic policies. 9.6% unemployment. A 7.6 million jobs gap. Unemployment is actually higher now than when the recession ended in June. If this is not the definition of failure, then what is?
By contrast, when the 1980s recession ended in December 1982, unemployment stood at 10.8%. Fifteen months into President Ronald Reagan's economic recovery, and unemployment had already fallen three full points to 7.8%. Why was the Reagan recovery such a success? And why is the Obama recovery such a failure? Well, for starters, President Reagan did not saddle our children with a brand new $1 trillion entitlement. But more urgently, President Reagan also did not threaten the U.S. economy with the largest tax hike in American history.
There still is time for Congress to act to prevent the Obama tax hikes. Tax hikes that include higher rates on individual income, capital gains and dividends. No Americans will escape the damage from the Obama tax hikes including: 1) Destroying an average of 693,000 jobs every year through 2020; 2) Draining $726 billion from disposable income, $38 billion from personal savings and $33 billion from business investments; 3) costing the average non-farm small-business owner $3,500 more in taxes, and much, much more.
But the economic harms from the Obama tax hike are already being felt. The Washington Post reports today that because of Congress' failure to take action on the tax hikes before the November election, millions of businesses will have trouble issuing everyone's paycheck this January. The Post reports that if no action is taken, "millions of low- and middle-income taxpayers would see significant tax increases." Former president of the American Payroll Association Dennis Danilewicz told the Post: "People are starting to say, 'What are we going to do?' Everyone is kind of at Congress' mercy."
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3)
THE BOTTLE OF WINE
For all of us who are married , were married, wish you were married, or wish you weren't married, this is something to smile about the next time you see a bottle of wine:
Sally was driving home from one of her business trips in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking on the side of the road.
As the trip was a long and quiet one, she stopped the car and asked the Navajo woman if she would like a ride.
With a silent nod of thanks, the woman got into the car.
Resuming the journey, Sally tried in vain to make a bit of small talk with the Navajo woman. The old woman just sat silently, looking intently at everything she saw, studying every little detail, until she noticed a brown bag on the seat next to Sally.
'What in bag?' asked the old woman.
Sally looked down at the brown bag and said, 'It's a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband.'
The Navajo woman was silent for another moment or two. Then speaking with the quiet wisdom of an elder,
she said:
'Good trade.....'
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4)Condition Critical Let's hope ObamaCare doesn't do for medicine what it's doing for the Democrats
By JAMES TARANTO
You'll find this hard to believe, but we were struck the first time we encountered an article by Elizabeth Drew. It was the late 1980s, and she wrote for The New Yorker. We have no recollection of the subject matter, but we remember quite vividly how vivid it wasn't--the interminable length, the dreariness of the prose, the dearth of originality or insight. We slogged it all the way through, assuming that it had to get better. How young and foolish we were!
Drew seems to have gotten worse, which means she's gotten more entertaining. Here's an excerpt from a piece of hers, published yesterday on Politico.com, sizing up President Obama's political predicament:
That Obama is on the defensive after successfully, and against the odds, ringing up a long list of significant victories--a health care bill of historic importance--is due, in part, to Republicans' repetitive lies (they're far more disciplined at "messaging"), plus an alarmingly ill-informed public (the media play their part) and Obama's own role in allowing the Republicans to win the arguments.
Come to think of it, maybe it's the material, not Drew, that's gotten more entertaining. Partisan hackery on behalf of the Democrats was much easier in the waning days of the Reagan presidency than it is now, when it entails defending the indefensible.
But savor the defense! There's absolutely nothing wrong with Obama's policies, to hear Drew tell it. The problem is that the Republicans are liars and the voters are ignoramuses. Obama comes in for some vague blame for his "role in allowing the Republicans to win the arguments." The trouble with the World's Greatest Orator is he doesn't talk good.
Here's why this is hilarious: Drew's cheerleading for ObamaCare reminds us of Mark Halperin's--in March. Elizabeth Drew gives you yesterday's hackneyed liberal wisdom today. The comic effect is a function of the passage of time.
.Just to review, Halperin, writing the day after the House passed ObamaCare, predicted that the law would be a boon for Democrats in the midterm elections. The media would call attention to "extreme attacks on the President and his law" and tell "stories of real Americans whose lives have been improved by access to health care"--and they would be "pushed, no doubt, by Democrats from every competitive congressional district and state."
How's that going? Let's check in with the Hill:
The Obama administration is grappling with implementing the unpopular healthcare reform law in the weeks leading up to the midterm election.
Some regulations establishing the rules of the various pieces of the health overhaul passed by Congress have been issued, and others will be released in the years to come. But the threat of employers dropping their coverage because of the new law has emerged as a thorny political problem this fall.
Haha, those Republicans and their lies! Tell us, Mrs. Drew, was it Jim DeMint or Sarah Palin who said, "If you like your plan, and you like your doctor, you won't have to do a thing, you keep your plan, you keep your doctor"?
Another Hill report tells us that a candidate for governor "said Thursday that the new health reform law could hurt Nevada." No, it wasn't Republican Brian Sandoval, the heavy favorite. It was the gov that dare not speak his name, Rory:
"I don't deny, however," Rory Reid said, "that Nevada needs to be vigilant on this issue. The law that was passed gives time for the new system to go into effect, but there is potential for it to put significant pressure on states because Medicaid rates could go up significantly."
That's Rory Reid as in the son of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, who's also in a tough race. TalkingPointsMemo reports that GOP challenger Sharron Angle is running an ad criticizing Reid for voting against an ObamaCare amendment that would have barred insurance coverage of Viagra to convicted child molesters and rapists.
The Obama presidency may be a bust for the economy as a whole, but it's a boon for political writers. Those of us who aren't sympathetic to the president's agenda have an endless supply of material. Even those who are, like Elizabeth Drew, are more entertaining than ever, if unwittingly.
Of course, one should acknowledge that this isn't all fun and games. ObamaCare will do real damage to people's health. We can only hope its effect on medicine isn't quite as bad as its effect on the Democratic Party.
But let's end on a cheery note, a report from the Associated Press on an Obama rally in Maryland:
About three dozen people were treated for illness during a rally featuring President Barack Obama at Bowie State University.
Prince George's County Fire and EMS spokesman Mark Brady tells WTOP numerous ambulances were sent to the rally after people started fainting and became dizzy. . . .
Two people were taken to the hospital, Brady says. The rest were treated at the scene. A triage area was set up inside the gymnasium at Bowie State.
The bad news is, President Obama made them sick. The good news is, they can still get insurance even though they have a pre-existing condition.
4a)Revolt of the Accountants Washington is turning America into Paperwork Nation.
By PEGGY NOONAN
If you write a column, you get a lot of email. Sometimes, especially in a political season, it's possible to discern from it certain emerging themes—the comeback of old convictions, for instance, or the rise of new concerns. Let me tell you something I'm hearing, in different ways and different words. The coming rebellion in the voting booth is not only about the economic impact of spending, debt and deficits on America's future. It's also to some degree about the feared impact of all those things on the character of the American people. There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.
This is part of what's driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.
The most vivid illustration of the fear comes, actually, from another country, Greece, and is brilliantly limned by Michael Lewis in October's Vanity Fair. In "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds," he outlines Greece's economic catastrophe. It is a bankrupt nation, its debt, or rather the amount of debt that has so far been unearthed and revealed, coming to "more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek." Over decades the Greeks turned their government "into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums" and gave "as many citizens as possible a whack at it." The average government job pays almost three times as much as the average private-sector job. The retirement age for "arduous" jobs, including hairdressers, radio announcers and musicians, is 55 for men and 50 for women. After that, a generous pension. The tax system has disintegrated. It is a welfare state with a cash economy.
Much of this is well known, though it is beautifully stated. But all of it, Mr. Lewis asserts, has badly damaged the Greek character. "It is simply assumed . . . that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. . . . Government officials are assumed to steal." Tax fraud is rampant. Everyone cheats. "It's become a cultural trait," a tax collector tells him.
Mr. Lewis: "The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. . . . Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible."
Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole.
And what I get from my mail is a kind of soft echo of this. America is not Greece and knows it's not Greece, but there is a growing sense—I should say fear—that the weighty, mighty, imposing American government itself, whether it meant to or not, has for years been contributing to American behaviors that are neither culturally helpful nor, as we now all say, sustainable: a growing sense of entitlement, of dependency, of resentment and distrust, and an increasing suspicion that everyone else is gaming the system. "I got mine, you get yours."
People, as we know, are imperfect. Governments, composed top to bottom of imperfect people wielding power, are very imperfect. There are of course a million examples, big and small, of how governments can damage the actual nature and character of the citizenry, and only because there was just a commercial on TV telling me to gamble will I mention the famous case of the state lotteries. Give government the right to reap revenues from the public desire to gamble, and you'll soon have government doing something your humble local bookie never had the temerity to try: convince the people that gambling is a moral good. They promote it insistently on local television, undermining any remaining reserve among our citizens not to play the numbers, not to develop what can become an addiction. Our state government daily promotes what for 2,000 years was understood to be a vice. No bookie ever committed a crime that big.
Government not only can change the national character, it can bizarrely channel national energy. And this is another theme in my mailbox, the rebellion against what government increasingly forces us to become: a nation of accountants.
No matter what level of life in which you operate, you are likely overwhelmed by forms, by a blizzard of regulations, rules, new laws. This is not new, it's just always getting worse. Priests are forced to be accountants now, and army officers, and dentists. The single most onerous part of ObamaCare is the tax change whereby spending $600 on goods or services will require a 1099 form. Economists will tell you of the financial cost of this, but I would argue that Paperwork Nation is utterly at odds with the American character.
Because Americans weren't born to be accountants. It's not in our DNA! We're supposed to be building the Empire State Building. We were meant—to be romantic about it, and why not—to be a pioneer people, to push on, invent electricity, shoot the bear, bootleg the beer, write the novel, create, reform and modernize great industries. We weren't meant to be neat and tidy record keepers. We weren't meant to wear green eyeshades. We looked better in a coonskin cap!
There is I think a powerful rebellion against all this. It isn't a new rebellion—it was part of Goldwaterism, and Reaganism—but it's rising again.
For those who wonder why so many people have come to hate, or let me change it to profoundly dislike, "the elites," especially the political elite, here is one reason: It is because they have armies of accountants to do this work for them. Those in power institute the regulations and rules, and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn't have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.
Washington is now to some degree the focus of the same sort of profound resentment that Hollywood liberals inspired when they really mattered, or seemed really powerful. For decades they made films that were not helpful to our culture or society, that were full of violence and sick imagery. But they often brought their own children up more or less protected from the effects of the culture they created. Private schools, nannies, therapists, tutors. They bought their way out of the cultural mayhem to which they'd contributed. Their children were fine. Yours were on their own.
This is part of why people dislike "the elites" and why "the elites," especially in Washington, must in turn be responsive, come awake, start to notice. People don't like it when they fear you are subtly, day by day, year by year, changing the personality and character of their nation. They think, "You are ruining our country and insulating yourselves from the ruin. We hate you." And this is understandable, yes?
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5)Jimmy Carter: Can't Stop the Typing
By Joe Queenan
In November 1980, the American people made a disastrous decision whose reverberations are still being felt today. Rather than biting the bullet and re-electing the glum, uncharismatic, hopeless Jimmy Carter to the White House—thereby ensuring that he would return to Plains, Ga., at the conclusion of his second term and keep his blabberpuss shut—they turfed him out into the street.
That made him mad. Really mad. By giving one of America's dopiest presidents the bum's rush, the American people ensured that Mr. Carter would spend the rest of his life trying to even the score, trying to persuade them that they had made a huge mistake when they cast their lot with Ronald Reagan, trying to convince them that they were a bunch of jerks.
The particular form of retribution Carter chose was as sinister and cruel as any known to man. He took his pen in hand and began to write books. Long books. Boring books. Dour books. Yes, long, boring, dour, numerous books. Books with sanctimonious names like "Keeping Faith" and "Living Faith" and "Leading a Worthy Life." Books with pompous names like "Turning Point," "Our Endangered Values" and "Always a Reckoning." Books with hokey names like "Christmas in Plains" and "Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life." And yes, even books with names like "The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer" that defy classification.
He has not set his pen down since.
With the recent release of the exquisitely pointless "White House Diary," his 25th entry in the literary sweepstakes, Mr. Carter has now written more books than James Joyce, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Virgil, Homer and Jonathan Franzen. He has also written more books than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and a whole lot of other presidents who got more points on the scoreboard than he ever did. Most ex-presidents have the good grace to stop at a single publication after they leave office, though more than a few have obligingly opted for the public's favorite number in this lethal genre: zero.
Not Jimmy.
The Oval Office equivalent of the Edsel, Mr. Carter has spent three decades in the wilderness retrofitting his image as the best, the brightest, and the noblest ex-president of them all. This is like trying to get credit for touchdowns 30 years after the clock has run out, with the score reading Eureka College 50, Navy 0.
Being history's most admired ex-president is like being the most beloved former skipper of a torpedoed aircraft carrier. If the ship sank while you were at the helm, it doesn't really matter what a great job you did manning the inflatable lifeboat afterward. Mr. Carter inhabits some weird parallel universe with people like George Foreman, who were despised when they were at their peak and then manufactured a touchy-feely post-career aura that made some people forget how much they disliked them when they were famous. But George Foreman, unlike Jimmy Carter, is funny. And George Foreman could throw a punch.
Carter's extraneous exhumation of the musty old diary he kept during his four long, horrid years in office suggests that he is scraping the bottom of the barrel for material. Publishing a diary describing the four years in office that were so awful they got you booted out into the street is like George Pickett publishing "Gettysburg Diary" or Mike Brown publishing "Quiet Days in Katrina: A FEMA Diary." And if Carter's gone back to the dismal years 1977-80 to exhume diary material, what comes next? "Tuesdays with Bert Lance"?
This is a classic case of being careful what you wish for. The American people wanted Jimmy Carter out of office in the worst way, and to this day they are paying the price. If we had to do it all over again, I think a lot of people would vote to amend the Constitution and allow presidents to run for five, six—as many terms as they wanted. That wouldn't leave them much spare time to write books.
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6)The Ride of the Keynesian Cowboys
By John Mauldin
To ease or not to ease? That is the question we will take up this week. And if we do get another round of quantitative easing (QE2), will it make any difference? As I asked last week, what if they threw an inflation party and no one came? We will take as our launching pad today's unemployment numbers, which serve to demonstrate just why the Fed may in fact be ready for some monetary shock and awe.
Teachers Don't Count?
As the jobs report came out a number of headlines trumpeted the "strong" private-sector job growth of 64,000 jobs, trying to soften the overall loss of 95,000 jobs. If you exclude the loss of census workers, the job losses were "only" 18,000. However, for the first time since December of last year, we lost jobs in a month. That is not the right direction.
"Moreover, when you adjust for the slide in the participation rate this cycle, the byproduct of a record number of discouraged workers withdrawing from their job search, the unemployment rate is actually closer to 12% than the 9.6% official posted rate in September, which masks the massive degree of labour market slack in the system. This is underscored by the broad U6 jobless rate measure, which spiked to a five-month high of 17.1% from 16.7% in August." (David Rosenberg)
Let's go to Table A-1 in the BLS website. You find that the total number of "civilian noninstitutional population" has risen by exactly 2 million over the last year to 238,322,000. That is the number of people over 16 available to work. But the actual civilian labor force has only risen by 541,000. Over the last 12 months we have added only about 344,000 jobs, according to the data from the Establishment survey, or just about a month's worth in the good old days.
Here's an interesting note I picked up while looking at employment data by age and education (with seven kids, these things are important to me!). There is a cohort that has seen its employment level rise. That would be men and women over 65. The total number of people over 65 who are employed has risen by 318,000 over the last year, accounting for nearly all the job growth (although one bit of data is from the establishment survey and the other is from the household survey, but that should be close enough for government work).
Think about that. Almost all the job growth has come from those who have reached "retirement age" (whatever that is) continuing to work or going back to work. The unemployment rate for young people 16-19 is 26%. The unemployment rate for black youth is an appalling 49%. (This is not an abstract piece of data. I have two adopted black sons, so this figure means something in the Mauldin household.) Next time you go into malls, Barnes and Nobles, fast food places, notice again the work force. These are the jobs that traditionally went to those starting out.
As my friend Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist of the National Federation of Independent Business, wrote yesterday:
"Officially, the recession ended in June, 2009 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, historical arbiters of recession and recovery dates. But in July, 2009, Congress raised the minimum wage by over 10% and 580,000 teen jobs were lost in the second half of the year even as GDP posted growth of 4% (annual rate). This was more than double the losses in the first half of the year when GDP declined at a 4% rate and fewer workers were needed. This was one of many policies implemented or proposed by Congress that made no sense as a measure to blunt the impact of the recession. The minimum wage determines the minimum value an unskilled worker must add to a business to justify employment. Congress has made this hurdle higher and more teens find they cannot get over it. This is just one of many barriers to hiring that are institutionalized in our economy, for example restrictions in the stimulus legislation that required union labor on projects."
Let's hear it for unintended consequences.
The Rise of the Temporary Worker
17,000 jobs in the latest survey were from new temporary jobs. I caught this graph from uber data slicer and dicer Greg Weldon ( www.weldononline.com). Notice that part-time workers "for economic reasons" is the highest on record at 9.4 million. My take on this is that part-time workers are no longer a leading indicator but simply a manifestation of the new reality that employers don't want to take on the burden of a full-time employee who may not be needed or who comes with costly benefits under the new regulatory and health-care regimes.
State and local governments shed 39,000 jobs, the largest percentagewise loss since 1982. Those jobs mean something, and as state and local governments lose their stimulus money they will continue to shed jobs as they are forced to work with less revenue. Even after many places have raised taxes, revenues are down 3%. The consumption that government workers contribute to final consumer demand is just as important as that resulting from private jobs.
20% of personal income is now coming from the US government, and wages are flat. If you take into account the tax that is rising energy prices, that means many workers are falling behind the disposable-income curve.
Where Will the Jobs Come From?
Back to Dunk from the NFIB: "The percent of owners with unfilled (hard to fill) openings remained at 11% of all firms, historically a weak showing. Over the next three months, 13 percent plan to reduce employment (up 3 points), and 8 percent plan to create new jobs (unchanged), yielding a seasonally adjusted net -3 percent of owners planning to create new jobs, 4 points worse than August. The urge (based on economic factors) to create new jobs is clearly missing in the current economy and expectations for future business conditions are not supportive of job creation. Plans to create new jobs have lagged other recovery periods significantly.
"Overall, the job creation picture is still bleak. Weak sales and uncertainty about the future continue to hold back any commitments to growth, hiring or capital spending. Economic policies enacted or proposed continue to fail to address the most important players in the economy - the consumer. The President promised to continue to push his agenda for higher energy costs, few believe the health care bill will actually help them, and there is huge uncertainty about a VAT tax and the fate of the "Bush tax cuts". Deficits are at "trauma" level, incomprehensible to the average citizen. No relief, just promises that the consumer sector will be asked to pay more of their income to support government spending. This has left consumer and business owner sentiment in the "dumpster", unwilling to spend or hire."
The employment surveys mentioned above are basically completed by the middle of the month. But yesterday a Gallup poll suggested that unemployment may be headed back to over 10%, and that the latter half of September was weaker than the first half. From the release:
"The rate of those 'underemployed' - mostly part-time workers - increased slightly to 18.8 percent, suggesting that the number of workers employed part-time but seeking full-time work is declining as the unemployment rate increases. Gallup explains 'this may reflect a reduced company demand for new part-time employees.'
"This rate is likely to not be reflected by federal numbers to be released Friday, Gallup says, because the government numbers are based on conditions around the middle of September.
"Nevertheless, Gallup says the trend shows continuing high unemployment which does not help the economy, and could hurt retail sales during the holiday season.
"Gallup concludes by saying, 'The jobs picture could be deteriorating more rapidly than the government's job release suggests.'"
OK, the job picture is terrible. GDP is clearly slowing down. Consumer spending and retails sales are abysmal. Consumer credit creation is visibly falling, down for seven months in a row. Housing construction is not coming back any time soon. Commercial real estate is sick, with mall vacancy rates at almost 10%. Inflation (except in commodity and energy prices) is under 1%. The approximately 3% GDP growth we have seen the last four quarters was almost 2/3 inventory rebuilding, not a sustainable growth source.
It is pretty clear there will not be much more coming from the US government in the way of new stimulus. If you're a Keynesian and in charge of the Fed or Treasury (which is the case), what are you to do?
The Ride of the Keynesian Cowboys
The Fed is basically down to one bullet in its policy gun. It cannot lower rates beyond zero, although it can pull down longer-term rates if it so chooses. But lower rates so far have not been the answer to creating jobs and inflation. All less-subtle instruments of monetary policy have been tried. The final option is massive quantitative easing, the monetization of US government debt. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. And after the last FOMC meeting, the markets have openly embraced quantitative easing. And for good reason: that is the talk coming from the leadership of the Fed.
Since my friend Greg Weldon has so thoughtfully collected some of the more salient parts of some recent Fed speeches, let's turn the next few paragraphs over to him.
"We note the following quotes, starting with the would-be-hero, maybe-headed-for-monetary-hell, Fed Chairman, Ben Boom-Boom Bernanke himself ...
... "'I do think that additional purchases, although we do not have precise numbers for how big the effects are, I do think they have the ability to ease financial conditions.'
"Next we note commentary that sparked Monday's extension lower in US Treasury Note yields, from New York Fed President William Dudley:
"'Fed action is likely to be warranted unless the economic outlook evolves in a way that makes me more confident that we will see better outcomes for both employment and inflation before too long.'
"Indeed, the Fed will keep pumping, until it sees the proverbial whites-of-their-eyes, as it relates to inflation, and job growth.
"More from Dudley ...
... "'The outlook for US job growth and inflation is unacceptable. We have tools that can provide additional stimulus at costs that do not appear to be prohibitive.'
"Indeed, when we first used the word 'deflation' in the Money Monitor, back in the nineties, and into the first part of the last decade, people scoffed, as this was a word equated to 'monetary blasphemy'... and I might have been 'charged' as a 'heretic' for suggesting that, someday, the Fed would PURSUE INFLATION as a POLICY GOAL.
"Now, the New York Fed President openly states that subdued inflation is ...
... 'UNACCEPTABLE'!!!!
"Welcome to the new world order, where deflation is openly discussed, and inflation is, in fact, pursued by the Federal Reserve, as a policy goal."
Greg goes on to quote Chicago Fed president Charles Evans as favoring easing, and you can bet vice-chair Janet Yellen is on board.
But there are voices that question the need for QE2. From the Bill King Report:
"Hoenig Opposes Further Fed Easing, Warns About Prices
"Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig said the central bank shouldn't expand its balance sheet by purchasing more Treasury securities in an effort to spur economic growth... The Kansas City Fed official repeated his view that the Fed should raise its short-term target rate to 1 percent, then pause to assess the economy's recovery. He also rejected the idea of raising the Fed's informal inflation target above 2 percent because of concern over the possibility of falling prices.
"'I have to tell you it horrifies me,' Hoenig said, responding to an audience question. "It assumes you can fine-tune things like interest rates." 'I have never agreed to' an informal inflation target, he said. 'Two percent inflation over a generation is a big impact.'" http://www.moneynews.com/StreetTalk/HoenigOpposesFurtherFed/2010/10/07/id/372979
And then we have a speech from Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher that he gave yesterday at the Minneapolis Economics Club. I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read it in its entirety. It is well-written and thoughtful. We need more men like him on the Fed. ( http://www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2010/fs101007.cfm)
Let me give you a few paragraphs (all emphasis mine!):
"... In my darkest moments I have begun to wonder if the monetary accommodation we have already engineered might even be working in the wrong places. Far too many of the large corporations I survey that are committing to fixed investment report that the most effective way to deploy cheap money raised in the current bond markets or in the form of loans from banks, beyond buying in stock or expanding dividends, is to invest it abroad where taxes are lower and governments are more eager to please. This would not be of concern if foreign direct investment in the U.S. were offsetting this impulse. This year, however, net direct investment in the U.S. has been running at a pace that would exceed minus $200 billion, meaning outflows of foreign direct investment are exceeding inflows by a healthy margin. We will have to watch the data as it unfolds to see if this is momentary fillip or evidence of a broader trend. But I wonder: If others cotton to the view that the Fed is eager to "open the spigots," might this not add to the uncertainty already created by the fiscal incontinence of Congress and the regulatory and rule-making 'excesses' about which businesses now complain?
"... In performing a cost/benefit analysis of a possible QE2, we will need to bear in mind that one cost that has already been incurred in the process of running an easy money policy has been to drive down the returns earned by savers, especially those who do not have the means or sophistication or the demographic profile to place their money at risk further out in the yield curve or who are wary of the inherent risk of stocks. A great many baby boomers or older cohorts who played by the rules, saved their money and have migrated over time, as prudent investment counselors advise, to short- to intermediate-dated, fixed-income instruments, are earning extremely low nominal and real returns on their savings. Further reductions in rates earned on savings will hardly endear the Fed to this portion of the population. Moreover, driving down bond yields might force increased pension contributions from corporations and state and local governments, decreasing the deployment of monies toward job maintenance in the public sector.
"My reaction to reading that article [what Fisher called that eye-popping headline in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: "Central Banks Open Spigot"] was that it raises the specter of competitive quantitative easing. Such a race would be something of a one-off from competitive devaluation of currencies, a beggar-thy-neighbor phenomenon that always ends in tears. It implies that central banks should carry the load for stymied fiscal authorities - or worse, give in to them - rather than stick within their traditional monetary mandates and let legislative authorities deal with the fiscal mess they have created. It infers that lurking out in the future is a slippery slope of quantitative easing reaching beyond just buying government bonds (and in our case, mortgage-backed securities). It is one thing to stabilize the commercial paper market in a systematic way. Going beyond investment-grade paper, however, opens the door to pressure on a central bank to back financial instruments benefiting specific economic sectors. This inevitably leads to irritation or lobbying for similar treatment from economic sectors not blessed by similar monetary largess.
"In his recent book titled Fault Lines, Raghuram Rajan reminds us that, 'More always seems better to the impatient politician [policymaker]. But any instrument of government policy has its limitations, and what works in small doses can become a nightmare when scaled up, especially when scaled up quickly.... Furthermore, the private sector's objectives are not the government's objectives, and all too often, policies are set without taking this disparity into account. Serious unintended consequences can result.'"
Hear. Oh, hear!
Can Fisher and Hoenig stand athwart the Keynesian tide at the Fed and get it to stop? Or for that matter, can the growing chorus of noted economists and analysts who openly question the need or wisdom of a QE2?
I doubt it. The Keynesian Cowboys are saddling their QE horses and they intend to ride. They have no idea what the end result will be. This is all a guess based on pure theory and models (like the broken money multiplier). And I really question whether the result they hope for is worth the risk of the unintended consequences (more later). As I wrote a few weeks ago:
"If it is because they don't have enough capital, then adding liquidity to the system will not help that. If it is because they don't feel they have creditworthy customers, do we really want banks to lower their standards? Isn't that what got us into trouble last time? If it is because businesses don't want to borrow all that much because of the uncertain times, will easy money make that any better? As someone said, 'I don't need more credit, I just need more customers.'"
How much of an impact would $2 trillion in QE give us? Not much, according to former Fed governor Larry Meyer, who, according to Morgan Stanley, "... maintains a large-scale macro-econometric model of the US economy that is widely used in the private sector and in public policy-making circles. These types of models are good for running 'what if?' simulations. Meyer estimates that a $2 trillion asset purchase program would: 1) lower Treasury yields by 50bp; 2) increase GDP growth by 0.3pp in 2011 and 0.4pp in 2012; and 3) lower the unemployment rate by 0.3pp by the end of 2011 and 0.5pp by the end of 2012. However, Meyer admits that these may be 'high-end estimates'.
"Some probability of a resumption of asset purchases is already priced in, and thus a full 50bp response in Treasuries is unlikely. Moreover, a model such as Meyer's is based on normal historical relationships and therefore assumes that the typical transmission mechanisms are working. For example, a drop in Treasury yields would lower borrowing costs for consumers and businesses, helping to stimulate consumption, business investment and housing. But there is good reason to believe that the transmission mechanism is at least partially broken at present, and thus the pass-through benefit to the economy associated with a small decline in Treasury yields (relative to current levels) would likely be infinitesimal." (Morgan Stanley)
It is clear, at least from the speeches I read, that if the economy continues to sputter and looks like it may fall into recession, that the need to DO SOMETHING will overwhelm all caution. Not trying the last tool in the box if the economy is rolling over is just not something that will be considered by those of the Keynesian persuasion. Never mind that Congress is getting ready to raise taxes (and has already done so in the case of Obamacare, to the tune of almost 1% of GDP!); in the face of a slowing economy, the Fed is going to step in and try to do something.
Let me be clear. We do NOT have a monetary problem. And whatever solutions we need are not monetary. This is on Congress and the Administration. The Fed needs to step aside.
Let Us Count the Unintended Consequences
Is there a chance that it could work? The short answer is, "Yes, but I doubt it." The whole purpose of QE2 is to try and get consumers and businesses spending. For a Keynesian, it is all about stimulating final consumer demand. That is tough in a world coming out of a credit crisis, where consumers are wanting to deleverage.
But what if they push a few trillion into the economy and it shows up in the stock market? Or the market just feels good that "Daddy" is doing something and runs up on its own? Can that change consumer sentiment? Will we feel like spending more? Could that be the catalyst? Maybe, but I doubt it. But you can bet your last trillion they are going to try.
It is doubtful that any QE2 that is enough to really do something in the way of reflating assets will be good for the dollar. Now, cynics might say that is the point, as a falling dollar is supposed to help our exports (and for my international readers, I get it that this is at the expense of other countries). Do we really want to open the first salvo in a race to the currency bottom? If the Fed does it, it gets legitimized everywhere.
(By the way, as I noted a few weeks ago, my call for parity for the euro and the pound is temporarily on hold. Stay tuned. We will get back to it.)
But QE2 also drives up commodity costs. Rising oil prices have the same effect on spending as a tax increase. As do rising food costs, etc.
How does one control inflation by printing money on the order of 10% or more of GDP? Is 3% ok? Do you really want to get to 4% and then have to start taking off the stimulus to get inflation under control, and push us back into recession?
You don't get inflation without a rise in interest rates. What about the increased costs of financing an ever-rising government debt? And aren't higher rates what the Fed is fighting? Talk about confusing the market.
Does the Fed really want us to get our animal spirits back up and go back in and borrow more money? Isn't too much leverage what got us into this problem to begin with? Does the Fed really want to persuade us to go out and buy mispriced assets? Should we buy stocks now in hopes that QE2 somehow finds a transmission mechanism and keeps us from recession? If it doesn't work, then all those buyers will get their heads handed to them, making matters even worse.
What if, as I think likely, the QE money simply makes a round trip back to the Fed balance sheet? Do we go for QE3? At the Barefoot Economic Summit I just attended (see more below), one very well-connected economist said he would start getting interested about QE when it approached $6 trillion. That is the number he thinks would be needed to actually have an effect. It raised a few eyebrows when he told that to David Faber on CNBC.
If the money makes a round trip back to the Fed, the markets will get spooked. All kinds of markets.
The only way I think they do not pursue QE is if the economic data in the next few months suggests the economy is beginning to heal itself. That will make the next few months worth of data more critical than usual. The stock market seems convinced that QE2 will be good for the economy and the markets, and thus bad news will be perversely considered good.
Sadly, if we go down that path I think this is going to end in tears. There are just too many unintended consequences that can reach up and bite us in our collective derrieres. I am not sanguine about 2011. I dearly, truly hope I am wrong. For your sake, gentle reader, and for my seven kids.
John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore
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7)STATING IT'S A JEWISH STATE
The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel's Cabinet today passed a proposed amendment to the country's Citizenship Law "requiring those who seek to acquire citizenship to swear their loyalty to Israel as a 'Jewish and democratic state.'"
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought before the cabinet today the wording of a new loyalty oath to Israel as a 'Jewish and democratic state' that naturalized citizens not making aliya under the Law of Return will be asked to make. (Aliya refers to Jews moving to Israel to make the Jewish state their home.) The measure passed 22-8," the Post added.
Much ado is being made about this measure. However, as the Associated Press noted in its coverage, "Few non-Jews apply for Israeli citizenship...if the bill passes into law, the legislation would not directly affect Arab citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the population."
Moreover, in an editorial, the Jerusalem Post noted, "The modern sovereign state (of Israel) is the culmination of millennia of Jewish yearning and exile. The Jewish people are connected by a common religion, culture, history and national identity. Like other peoples, including the Palestinians and the nearly two dozen Arab countries, Jews have the right to self-determination in their own sovereign state that protects its unique national attributes."
Added the Post, "The US comes close to being a nation without a single dominant culture. But even there, prospective citizens are expected to make a pledge of allegiance. As part of the naturalization process they are requested to 'renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign' entity and 'support and defend the Constitution and laws of the US against all enemies.'"
In addition to the eight members of the Cabinet who voted against it, others have been critical of the measure as well. However, in his remarks to the Cabinet before the vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining his support for the measure, said, "To my regret, today, there are those who are trying to blur not only the unique connection between the Jewish People and its homeland, but also the connection between the Jewish People and its state."
"The State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish People and is a democratic state in which all its citizens -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- enjoy fully equal rights," he also stressed.
The measure will now come before Israel's Knesset.
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