Several months ago I called your attention to an interview with Bernie Marcus - former founder,Chairman of Home Depot, on CNBC. Obama should have listened as well.
In the interview, Bernie pointed out the stupidity of Obama's policies and said they would ruin the economy. Oh well shoulda, coulda, woulda! (See 1 below.)
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In this PJTV.Com report we are reminded. once again, when government allocates labor and capital we get far more inefficiencies and lower productivity than when free markets are left to do the job.
Click on: "Instavision: Double Dip Recession: Will Obama's Policies Doom Our Economy and His Chances in 2012?
Dan Mitchell, of the CATO Institute, joins Glenn Reynolds to talk about the failure of Obamanomics and the theories of John Maynard Keynes. Obama is not worried about a double-dip recession. Should he be? Find out as Dan Mitchell looks at the economic policies of Obama, Bush and Clinton."
If Obama is as brilliant, as his Leftist supporters would have you believe, then his policies, which are destroying our nation, have to be considered purposeful.
If Obama is stupid, as his various policies would suggest, then his supporters are guilty for having sold the nation an empty suit and the voters equally, if not more so, guilty of being stupid for buying his campaign tripe.
Either way, we are in deep doo doo and it can only deepen because - Last week the economic news was decidedly unfavorable so our president sought to calm the waters and went on a trip telling the remaining employed we were experiencing a bump in the road. Metaphors become useful tools when one is neither able to explain or hasn't the slightest clue about what is happening.
This is the situation president Obama finds himself in as a consequence of his inane and destructive economic and social policies. He has spent trillions to accomplish higher unemployment, debt levels which will take generations to redeem, if one is Pollyanna and looks through rose colored glasses and a health care program everyone is running from as if it were a poisonous snake - which it is. Finally, instead of becoming more respected in the world , Obama has made America's allies question whether they can depend upon us,while our enemies and creditors have become more emboldened.
Iran is within weeks of producing nuclear material capable of making bombs, Qaddafi remains in power after NATO is about spent, Syria's Assad continues to slaughter its citizens, China is selling off their sinking dollar holdings fearing further losses and Russia continues to vote against us in the U.N. Meanwhile inflation is sapping the buying power of Americans as their home equity collapses.
To bring some emotional relief, I propose we learn a new dance entitled: "The Obama Bumps, Twists and Grinds!"
It is very simple to learn, takes no experience and the government will pay for your lessons. Its cost simply takes a printing press, lots of paper and red ink.
After having a free lunch you begin by putting one foot in front of the other then twist and grind until you collapse.
It is a new way to "Dance With America!"(See 2 and 2a below.)
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Turkey to show NATO how it's done? (See 3 below.)
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Should Bachmann gain traction will the liberal media and news folks turn their poisonous attacks from Sarah and start bashing her? I suspect it is only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, Stephen Moore gives an insightful analysis of what Bachmann thinks.(See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick
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1)Dow Plunge Beneath 12,000 Raises More Economic Fears
By Newsmax Wires
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged below the key psychological 12,000 level for the first time since March on Friday as fears spread that the global economic recovery is losing steam.
Meanwhile, a top Federal Reserve official warned that the pace of growth will remain "painfully slow" for many and the risks to recovery have increased.
Although financial conditions have improved and the pace of job creation has quickened in the last year, a recent run of disappointing data suggested the recovery is increasingly at risk, New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley said in a speech to business leaders in Brooklyn, N.Y.
High food and energy prices and a weak housing market were among the main factors likely to keep consumer budgets tight, he said.
"I anticipate economic growth will pick up enough in the second half of 2011 to sustain a moderate economic recovery," Dudley said. "Still, the pace of recovery will probably be painfully slow for the many unemployed and underemployed workers."
While non-food and non-energy price rises remain modest, he said it is crucial for the Fed to ensure inflation expectations remain in check.
Fears that the economic recovery has stalled weighed on markets Friday and drove the stock market lower for its sixth straight week.
The Dow fell 172 points, or 1.4 percent, to close at 11,952.
The S&P 500 index fell 18, or 1.4 percent, to 1,271. The Nasdaq dropped 41, or 1.5 percent, to 2,644. The Nasdaq has now given up all its gains for the year. The Dow is still up 3.2 percent for 2011 and the S&P 1.1 percent.
The losses were broad, with declines across all 10 of the S&P 500's industry groups.
Four stocks fell for every one that rose on the New York Stock Exchange. Trading volume was 3.9 billion shares.
Friday's plunge was the stock market's sixth straight weekly loss, the longest weekly losing streak since the fall of 2002. The market's last seven-week stretch of losses began in May 2001, as the dot-com bubble deflated.
Stocks have suffered this month after weak economic news dampened hopes for a speedy recovery. Traders fear that weaker hiring, industrial output, and a moribund housing market are reversing a bull market that has lifted the Dow 20 percent over the past year.
Analysts said the pullback reflects traders' insecurity about the pace of the recovery.
"Recent economic reports have been very weak and people are worried about the idea of a double-dip recession," said Janna Sampson, co-chief investment officer of OakBrook Investments LLC in Lisle, Illinois.
"I am still expecting to see second-half growth, and the market pick back up as we see that," Sampson told Reuters. "But are we going to see it before we get earnings reports for the second quarter? I doubt it. June is probably going to be pretty weak."
Financial markets widely expect the U.S. central bank to hold benchmark interest rates near zero until 2012 to help boost an economy still struggling with a high jobless rate.
Earlier this week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said accommodative policies are still needed. "Until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established," he said during a speech in Atlanta.
The annualized pace of U.S. growth slowed to 1.8 percent in the first three months of 2011, down from 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. Dudley said growth it is likely to remain sluggish in the April-to-June period.
FISCAL CONSOLIDATION
Dudley added that any attempt by Congress to tighten fiscal policy through spending cuts or tax increases would add to the short-term growth risks for the economy.
"I would emphasize, however, that a credible plan for long-term fiscal consolidation is sorely required and would have economic benefits," he said.
Congress and the White House are at odds over how to shrink a gaping U.S. budget deficit and a rising public debt burden. Several ratings agencies have warned that the country needs to address its public finances lest it risk losing its cherished AAA credit rating.
© Newsmax. All rights reserved.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
"There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery,'' President
Obama said at a Jeep plant in Toledo the other day. "We're going to pass
through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a tough time
with.'' His audience booed. They're un-fire-able union members with lavish
benefits, and even they weary of the glib lines from his 12-year-old
speechwriters.
We're not on the road to recovery. You can't get there from here, as they
say. Obama was in Toledo to "celebrate" the sale of the government's
remaining stake in Chrysler to Fiat. That's "Fiat" as in the Italian car
manufacturer rather than "an authoritative or arbitrary decree (from the
Latin 'let it be done')," which would be almost too perfect a name for an
Obamafied automobile. The Treasury crowed that Fiat had agreed to pay a
whopping $560 million for the government's Chrysler shares.
New Chet's Restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, will close its doors Sunday June 12,
2011, due to the economy and a smoking ban, the owners said. The restaurant,
located near an auto plant, was mentioned briefly by President Obama in a
speech to Jeep autoworkers during his recent visit to Toledo. "Without you,
who would eat at Chet's ..." the President told the workers.
Wow! 560 million smackeroos! If you laid them out end to end, they're
equivalent to what the federal government borrows every three hours. That's
some windfall! In the time it takes to fly Obama to Toledo to boast about
it, he'd already blown through the Italians' check. But who knows? If every
business in the U.S. were to be nationalized and sold to foreigners to cover
another three hours' worth of debt, this summer's "Recovery Summer" would be
going even more gangbusters. I'd ask one of Obama's egghead economists to
explain it to you simpletons, but unfortunately they've all resigned and
returned to cozy sinecures in academia. The latest is chief economic advisor
Austan Goolsbee, the genius who in 2007, just before the subprime hit the
fan, wrote in The New York Times that this exciting new form of home
"ownership" was an "innovation" that had "opened doors to the excluded" and
was part of an "incredible flowering of new types of home loans."
Where have all the flowers gone? Not to worry. By now, some organization of
which you're a member has already booked Professor Goolsbee to give an
after-dinner speech at your annual meeting where you'll be privileged to get
a glimpse of his boundless expertise for a mere six-figure speaking fee.
"I'm not concerned about a double-dip recession," Obama said last week. Nor
would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social
secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it's such a smart idea to let
one's breezy insouciance out of the bag when you're giving a press
conference. In May, the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs. For the
purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived
in America.
So what kind of jobs were those 54,000? Economics professorships at the
University of Berkeley? Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs? That
sort of thing? No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new
jobs created were at McDonald's. That's amazing. Not the Mickey D supersized
hiring spree, but the fact that there's fellows at Morgan Stanley making a
bazillion dollars a year analyzing fluctuations in minimal-skill fast-food
service-job hiring trends. What a great country! For as long as it lasts.
Which is probably until some new regulatory agency starts enforcing Michelle
Obama's dietary admonitions.
Until then, relax. That bump in the road is just a quarter-pounder with
cheese that fell off the counter on the drive-thru lane to recovery. Like
every other blessing, we owe the Big MacConomy to the wisdom of Good King
Barack. "This plant indirectly supports hundreds of other jobs right here in
Toledo," Obama told the workers at Chrysler. "After all, without you, who'd
eat at Chet's or Inky's or Rudy's? Manufacturers from Michigan to
Massachusetts are looking for new engineers to build advanced batteries for
American-made electric cars. And obviously, Chet's and Inky's and Zinger's,
they'll all have your business for some time to come."
A couple of days later, Chet's announced it was closing after nine decades.
"It was the economy and the smoking ban that hurt us more than anything,"
said the owner. But maybe he can retrain and re-open it as a
community-organizer grantwriting-application center. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics reports that the median period of unemployment is now nine months
- the longest it's been since they've been tracking the numbers. Long-term
unemployment is worse than in the Depression. Life goes slowly waiting for a
fast-food job to open up.
This is Main Street, Obamaville: All bumps, no road. But shimmering on the
distant horizon, beyond the shuttered diner and the foreclosed homes, is a
state-of-the-art electric car, the new Fiat Mirage, that should be wheeling
into town in a half-decade or so provided it can find somewhere to charge.
"We will be able to look back and tell our children," declared King Barack
the Modest of his own candidacy in 2008, "this was the moment when the rise
of the oceans began to slow." Great news for the oceans! Meanwhile, back on
dry land, a quarter of American mortgages are "underwater" - that's to say,
the home "owners" owe more than the joint is worth. In Harry Reid's Nevada,
it's 63 per cent. Perhaps Obama's Aquatic Bodies Water-Level Regulatory
Authority, no doubt headed by Jamie Gorelick or Franklin Raines or some
other Democrat worthy, could have its jurisdiction extended to the Nevada
desert.
"Hope"? "Change"? These are the good times. What "change" are you "hoping"
for in Obama's second term? The loss of America's triple-A credit-rating?
The end of the dollar as global currency? Or just a slight upward tick in
the same-old-same-old multi-trillion dollar binge-spending?
On what?
Random example from the headlines: The paramilitarization of the education
bureaucracy. The federal Department of Education doesn't employ a single
teacher but it does have a SWAT team: They kicked down a front door in
Stockton, California last week and handcuffed Kenneth Wright (erroneously)
in connection with a student-loan "investigation." "We can confirm that we
executed a search warrant," said Department of Education spokesperson Gina
Burress.
The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest
Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education
secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion
dollars in college debt, I'll bet it's got no plans to downsize.
Nor has the TSA. A 24-year old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350
after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi
Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. "We
regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience," said a TSA
spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps
on the road, lady!
The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between
your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic,
grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future
at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that
confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education
Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead,
our elites worry about sea levels.
The oceans will do just fine. It's America that's drowning.
2a)Americans with no abilities act
The Obama Administration is urging Congress and the Senate to pass sweeping legislation that will provide new benefits for many Americans: The Americans With No Abilities Act (AWNAA). President Obama said he will sign it as soon as it hits his desk.
The AWNAA is being hailed as a major legislative goal by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition.
'Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society,' said California Senator Barbara Boxer. 'We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no longer be able to grant special favors to a small group of workers, simply because they have some idea of what they are doing.'
In a Capitol Hill press conference, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) pointed to the success of the U.S. Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. Approximately 74 percent of postal employees lack any job skills, making this agency the single largest U.S. employer of Persons of Inability.
Private-sector industries with good records of non-discrimination against the Inept include retail sales (72%), the airline industry (68%), and home improvement 'warehouse' stores (65%).. At the state government level, the Department of Motor Vehicles also has an excellent record of hiring Persons of Inability (a whopping 83%).
Under The Americans With No Abilities Act, more than 25 million 'middle man' positions will be created, with important-sounding titles but little real responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.
Mandatory non-performance-based raises and promotions will be given so as to guarantee upward mobility for even the most inept employees. The legislation provides substantial tax breaks to corporations that promote a significant number of Persons of Inability into middle-management positions, and gives a tax credit to small and medium-sized businesses that agree to hire one clueless worker for every two talented hires.
Finally, the AWNAA contains tough new measures to make it more difficult to discriminate against the Non-abled, banning, for example, discriminatory interview questions such as, 'Do you have any skills or experience that relate to this job?'
'As a Non-abled person, I can't be expected to keep up with people who have something going for them,' said Ken Cox, who lost his position as a lug-nut twister at the GM plant in Flint , Michigan , due to his inability to remember 'righty tightey, lefty loosey.' 'This new law should be real good for people like me,' Cox added. With the passage of this bill, Cox and millions of other untalented citizens will finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Said Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL): 'As a Senator with no abilities, I believe the same privileges that elected officials enjoy ought to be extended to every American with no abilities. It is our duty as lawmakers to provide each and every American citizen, regardless of his or her inadequacy, with some sort of space to take up in this great nation and a good salary for doing so.'
2b) Obama's Phone-It-In Economy
By Kevin Jackson
According to Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller, home prices in twenty U.S. cities are at an eight-year low, down an average of 29% across the country. Democrat pundits spin is that "home prices threaten economic recovery." Recovery? Really?
Obama's economy has wiped out most people's largest savings plan: their home equity. Around $6.2T has evaporated from the housing marketing during Obama's War on Achievement. That's a lot of "green" that is not spurring economic growth in the economy. This is potentially more devastating than the other economic snafus created by America's Ivy League man-child. Why?
In the seven years before its peak in July 2006, the home-price index surged 155 percent. Since then, it's fallen 33 percent. During the Great Depression, prices fell 31 percent, and it took nineteen years for the market to regain those losses. If it takes almost two decades to get back to the status quo this time around, that doesn't bode well for Obama's legacy.
To put this in simple terms: If you don't like the home you are in, change your attitude, because you aren't changing your residence. That is, unless you get foreclosed on, which is a distinct possibility these days.
Obama vowed to end homelessness within ten years; however, his actions appear to be having the opposite effect. One report said that homelessness is up 6%, and this doesn't include those still living in their foreclosed properties or squatting in others.
What does Obama do? Obama has shifted focus to fight homelessness, this time targeting gay teens for homes. According to the Huffington Post, homelessness for gay teens has hit crisis levels. Here comes O to save the day!
The poverty rate under Obama has risen 1.8%, and this was from a report back in 2009. This increase is the highest since the days of Jimmy Carter, better known as The Peanut Era. This is no way to treat the 3.5M fraudulent 2008 Obama voters who had no homes. The unions got theirs; so should the poor folks. Obama certainly throws enough money at the problem, upping the ante to the homeless 24% in the latest budget.
Whether it's homelessness or the unemployment figures, I'd like to inform Obama: You're going the wrong way!
Obama has invested almost $2T in his strategy, and unemployment is going up. If you think Obama has learned anything, think again.
Job growth in right-to-work states from 1993 to 2009 was 37.9%; in "forced union" states, it was only 19.6% during the same period. You don't need a Harvard degree to understand that you get twice the job growth in right-to-work states compared to forced union states. Guess where Obama gambled our money.
Add to this the staggering statistic that the private-sector growth in the last decade was a paltry 1%, but government grew 15% during the same time period. Even with Obama's Big Government, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 14.8 million Americans remain unemployed, 6.1 million of them having been out of work for 27 weeks or over.
This figure has been challenged by the Union of the Unemployed, who provide statistics that the actual number of unemployed Americans is 31 million. I'm inclined to agree with the Union of the Unemployed.
Even teens are finding it difficult -- according to this report, over 24% of teens can't find summer jobs. In the black community, this statistic is easily double. College graduates are moving back home, because they can't find jobs. And the news in the Era of O just keeps getting better.
The U. S. Census Bureau shows that the median household income for Americans has fallen to $49,777 -- a decline of 0.7% in the past year. One in seven Americans can no longer feed himself, and according to The Wall Street Journal, 14.3% of the American people live in abject poverty.
How much evidence does one need to figure out that Obama doesn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his butt? Obama won't create jobs because socialism creates victims. And Obama has a list of strategies:
1.Blame Bush.
2.Sell the concept of "enjoy unemployment; it's really not that bad."
3.Lower expectations of life as an American.
4.Live like a third-world nation, go green, and sacrifice.
5.Help each other out -- just don't blame Obama
6.Our policies need more time.
7.Blame Bush again.
8.Blame the Japanese tsunami.
9.Just get over it.
As Herman Cain said [pp], "Obama couldn't run a pizza joint."
That's my rant!
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3)Turkey to send troops into Syria.
A new and dramatic turn in the Syrian crisis: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Friday night, June 10, ordered his army to move into northern Syria where battles were blazing in Idlib, Maarat al-Numaan and Jisr al-Shuhour. debkafile's exclusive sources report that the prime minister's office and high command in Ankara are still working out how to define the Turkish military mission in Syria. One proposal is to evoke UN Security Council's 1973 resolution which mandated the NATO operation in Libya to protect civilian lives against Col. Qaddafi.
Turkey would be acting to defend Syrian civilians against a crackdown which Erdogan called barbaric.
Ankara decided on military intervention Friday night, two days before Turkey's general election, after learning about the latest turn in the showdown between the Syrian government and the opposition.
Most of the day's reporting focused on the small northern town of Jisr al-Shughour near the Turkish border, where tanks blasted residential areas Friday night and killed an estimated 28 civilians to punish its residents for the 120 officers and soldiers killed in clashes with protesters Monday, June 6.
Away from the limelight, heavy fighting also raged in Idlib, west of Syria's second largest town Aleppo, and Maarat al-Numaan, a small western market city located on the highway between Aleppo and Hama.
In these places, the Syrian army encountered the guns of a Muslim Brotherhood militia fighting alongside a group of defecting soldiers, according to our military sources.
In the late afternoon, Assad sent tanks and attack helicopters armed with heavy machine guns to strike rebel positions. The casualty toll in this northern battleground is believed to be the highest of any day since the start of the uprising in early April.
The Turkish expeditionary force in Syria will have three missions:
1. To stem the swelling stream of Syrian refugees fleeing massacre at the hands of government forces. Ankara has accepted over 3,000 refugees from Jisr al-Shughour who are desperate to escape certain slaughter; it is not prepared to take on tens or possible hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing from larger towns like Idlib, Maarat al-Numaana and the Kurdish regions abutting the Turkish border.
2. To mark out a military zone on the Syrian side of the border where the Red Crescent will set up camps for Syrian refugees to shelter under Turkish army protection;
3. Next week, the Turkish army will establish a military buffer zone in the Kurdish region of northern Syria near its main town, Qamishli.
The Erdogan government will be taking the chance of Assad deciding that the Turkish military incursion is an act of war. Fighting would then break out between the two armies.
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4)'On the Beach, I Bring von Mises'
The tea party favorite on her start in politics, where she learned her economics, and why she disagrees with Reagan on the War Powers Resolution.
By STEPHEN MOORE
"If I'm in, I'll be all in," says Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, artfully dodging my question of whether she's running for president. Given that she just hired campaign strategist Ed Rollins, whose past clients include Ross Perot and Mike Huckabee, rumors abound. "We're getting close," she says, "and if I do run, like all my races, I will work like a maniac."
That's pretty much how she does everything, and it helps explain how the relatively junior congresswoman has become a tea party superstar—and uniquely adept at driving liberals bonkers.
After spending a good part of two days with her in Washington as she scurries from one appointment to another, I have no doubt that Ms. Bachmann will announce her presidential bid soon. And it would be a mistake to count her out: She's defied the prognosticators in nearly every race she's run since thrashing an 18-year incumbent in the Minnesota Senate by 20 points in 2000. Says Iowa Congressman Steve King, "No one has electrified Iowa crowds like Michelle has."
Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "I'm also an Art Laffer fiend—we're very close," she adds. "And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises," getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like "Human Action" and "Bureaucracy." "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises."
As we rush from her first-floor digs in the Cannon House Office Building to the House floor so she can vote, I ask for her explanation of the 2008 financial meltdown. "There were a lot of bad actors involved, but it started with the Community Reinvestment Act under Jimmy Carter and then the enhanced amendments that Bill Clinton made to force, in effect, banks to make loans to people who lacked creditworthiness. If you want to come down to a bottom line of 'How did we get in the mess?' I think it was a reduction in standards."
She continues: "Nobody wanted to say, 'No.' The implicit and then the explicit guarantees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sopping up the losses. Being on the Financial Services Committee, I can assure you, all roads lead to Freddie and Fannie."
Ms. Bachmann voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) "both times," she boasts, and she has no regrets since Congress "just gave the Treasury a $700 billion blank check." She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. "During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury's actions, and his response was, 'Well, Congress passed the law.'"
Insufficient focus on constitutional limits to federal power is a Bachmann pet peeve. "It's like when you come up to a stop sign and you're driving. Some people have it in their mind that the stop sign is optional. The Constitution is government's stop sign. It says, you—the three branches of government—can go so far and no farther. With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided 'Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.'"
Does this mean she would have favored allowing the banks to fail? "I would have. People think when you have a, quote, 'bank failure,' that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It's called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes."
She also bristles at the idea, pushed of late by the White House, that the auto bailouts were a big success for workers and taxpayers. "We'll probably be out $15 billion. What was galling to so many investors was that Chrysler's secured creditors were supposed to receive 100% payout of the first money. We essentially watched over 100 years of bankruptcy law thrown out the window and President Obama eviscerated the private property interests of the secured creditors. He called them 'greedy' for enforcing their own legal rights."
So what would she have done? "For one, I believe my policies prior to '08 would have been much different from [President Bush's]. I wouldn't have spent so much money," she says, pointing in particular at the Department of Education and the Medicare prescription drug bill. "I would have advocated for greater reductions in the corporate tax rate and reductions in the capital gains rate—even more so than what the president did." Mr. Bush cut the capital gains rate to 15% from 20% in 2003.
She's also no fan of the Federal Reserve's decade-long policy of flooding the U.S. economy with cheap money. "I love a lowered interest rate like anyone else. But clearly the Fed has had competing goals and objectives. One is the soundness of money and then the other is jobs. The two different objectives are hard to reconcile. What has gotten us into deep trouble and has people so perturbed is the debasing of the currency."
That's why, if she were president, she wouldn't renominate Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman: "I think that it's very important to demonstrate to the American people that the Federal Reserve will have a new sheriff" to keep the dollar strong and stable.
As for foreign policy, she joined 86 other House Republicans last week in voting for the resolution sponsored by antiwar Democrat Dennis Kucinich to stop U.S. military action in Libya within 15 days. Is she a Midwestern isolationist? "I was opposed to the U.S. involvement in Libya from the very start," she says. "President Obama has never made a compelling national security case on Libya."
Even more striking, she says the 1973 War Powers Resolution, requiring congressional approval for military action after 60 days, is "the law of the land" and must be obeyed. That's a notable difference from every recent president of either party, including Ronald Reagan.
Ms. Bachmann attributes many of her views, especially on economics, to her middle-class upbringing in 1960s Iowa and Minnesota. She talks with almost religious fervor about the virtues of living frugally, working hard and long hours, and avoiding debt. When she was growing up, she recalls admiringly, Iowa dairy farmers worked from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Her political opponents on the left portray her as a "she-devil," in her words, a caricature at odds with her life accomplishments. She's a mother of five, and she and her husband helped raise 23 teenage foster children in their home, as many as four at a time. They succeeded in getting all 23 through high school and later founded a charter school.
She got started in politics after seeing the failures in public schooling. "The kids were coloring posters in 11th grade algebra class," she says. "I decided to do my duty, go to the Republican convention. I had on jeans, a sweatshirt with a hole in it, white moccasins, and I showed up in this auditorium and everyone said, 'Why are we nominating this guy [Gary] Laidig every four years?'"
"I thought, 'I'm nobody from nowhere but maybe if I challenge the guy, he'll shape up a little bit.' So I gave a five-minute speech on freedom, economic liberty and all the rest. And no one could believe it, but I won a supermajority on the first ballot and he was out on his keister."
She ran for Congress in 2006, the worst year for Republicans in two decades. "Nancy Pelosi and all her horses spent $9.6 million to defeat me in that race"—almost three times what Ms. Bachmann had raised. She won 50% to 42%. In 2010, the Democrats and their union allies raised more than $10 million to try to defeat her. "My adversaries have certainly been highly motivated," she says.
But her adversaries—or, at least, rivals—aren't limited to the left. There's Sarah Palin, with whom journalists are convinced she has frosty relations, and fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty, now running for president. About Ms. Palin the congresswoman shrugs, "People want to see a mud-wrestling fight. They won't get it from me because I like Sarah Palin and I respect her." As for whether Mr. Pawlenty was a good governor, "I really don't want to comment."
Ever ready to cite stories from American history, Ms. Bachmann notes with a grin that the last House member to be elected president was James Garfield in 1880. If she were to take her shot, she'd run on an economic package reminiscent of Jack Kemp, the late congressman who championed supply-side economics and was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. "In my perfect world," she explains, "we'd take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we're the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax."
The 3.8 million-word U.S. tax code may be irreparable, she says, a view she's held since working as a tax attorney at the IRS 20 years ago. "I love the FAIR tax. If we were starting over from scratch, I would favor a national sales tax." But she's not a sponsor of the FAIR tax bill because she fears that enacting it won't end the income tax, and "we would end up with a dual tax, a national sales tax and an income tax."
Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that "gets rid of all the deductions." A system in which 47% of Americans don't pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, "because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something."
On the stump she emphasizes an "America-centered energy policy" based on "drilling and mining for our rich resources here." And she believes that repealing ObamaCare is a precondition to restoring a prosperous economy. "You cannot have a pro-growth economy and advise, simultaneously, socialized medicine."
Her big challenge is whether the country is ready to support deep spending cuts. On this issue, she carries a sharper blade than everyone except Ron Paul. She voted for the Paul Ryan budget—but "with an asterisk." Why? "The asterisk is that we've got a huge messaging problem [on Medicare]. It needs to be called the 55-and-Under Plan. I can't tell you the number of 78-year-old women who think we're going to pull the rug out from under them."
Ms. Bachmann also voted for the Republican Study Committee budget that cuts deeper and faster than even Mr. Ryan would. "We do have an obligation with Social Security and Medicare, and we have to recognize that" for those who are already retired, she says. But after that, it's Katy bar the door: "Everything else is expendable to bring spending down," and she'd ax "whole departments" including the Department of Education.
"I think people realize the crisis we face isn't in 25 years or even 10 years off. It is right now. And people want it solved now—especially Republican primary voters."
Mr. Moore is a member of The Journal's editorial board.
4a)Critics Fume Over Intensity of News Coverage for Palin’s Messages
By JEREMY W. PETERS
News organizations mobilized teams of reporters and even recruited online volunteers to scan more than 24,000 pages of e-mails from Sarah Palin that were released on Friday, prompting some critics to accuse the news media of overkill at best and vigilantism at worst.
The debate over the exhaustive efforts to analyze the e-mails by news outlets like MSNBC.com, The New York Times and The Washington Post erupted on Friday with the kind of partisan ferocity that tends to accompany anything related to Ms. Palin.
Another near certainty whenever Ms. Palin is involved: a media spectacle.
Scores of journalists descended on Juneau this week in preparation for the release of the e-mails. MSNBC.com deputized 40 volunteers, chosen with the help of the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska. They were the reinforcements for the team of two journalists from the Web site and six more from NBC News who flew to Juneau.
The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the documents, as one editor described it. The Washington Post initially asked for 100 volunteers to sift through the documents. They were quickly overwhelmed with too many applicants. Unable to screen all of them, the paper abandoned the plan late Thursday, opting instead to invite reader comments.
Were news organizations Dumpster diving, as one outraged reader of The Washington Post put it?
News outlets insisted that they were trying to be as thorough and efficient as possible while reporting on information that the public was entitled to know.
“This is not a witch hunt,” said Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at The Times. “There are 25,000 documents here, and we can use all the eyeballs we can get.”
The Times, like The Post and others, uploaded the e-mails onto its Web site and invited readers to sift through them and comment on anything compelling they found. (Because the state of Alaska made the e-mails available only on paper, news organizations had to scan them to make them viewable online.)
“From our perspective, we’re just providing the public records to the public, who own them,” said Bill Dedman, a reporter for MSNBC.com who was helping lead his Web site’s effort. “The people of Alaska will figure out what news or insights they find in their public records.”
The scope of the coverage led one close Palin associate to equate it with a mass attempt at “gotcha journalism,” using a favorite characterization the former governor often uses to criticize the news media’s taste for blood.
Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, asked if all the fuss amounted to a “media colonoscopy,” and pointed to comments from her readers who asked whether news organizations had devoted such energy to the 2,800-page health care overhaul bill that passed last year.
Charles Mahtesian, national politics editor for Politico, said he was sympathetic to critics who said the news media went into unnecessary overdrive on anything Palin-related. “I think there’s some truth in what the critics on the right say about a double standard for Sarah Palin,” he said. “Having said that, she is an incredibly compelling character. And anything she says or does will have a bearing on the 2012 presidential election cycle. So it’s a pretty easy call as a news story.”
Others said they hoped news outlets would use such vast resources on more urgent stories.
“It seems to me like some kind of swarm,” said Jane Hall, a professor in the School of Communication at American University. “This is not WikiLeaks. This is not the conduct of the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq.”
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