Is Obama, Valerie's puppet? Is she his mommy? Is her significant influence determining how America is being run ? (See 1 below.)
==
Uwe was a consultant to my former brokerage firm if memory serves me correctly. (See 2 below.)
===
Must Republicans swing far to the right to enervate a core constituency and in doing so energize women and bring out black voters and thus, shoot themselves in the foot?
Time will tell. (See 3 below.)
===
What gives? (See 4 below.)
===
Build it and they will come . Give it to a crony and it might crash. Obama chose the latter.
"Very Interesting!" as a character on Saturday Night Live used to say. Where is the outrage?
===
Market rise built on Fed largess. (See 5 below.)
===
I have had extensive talks with Dr. Bob Johnson, who is running for Jack Kingston's seat in the 1st District. I am actively supporting his candidacy. After my knee surgery in December and after a recovery period I plan on having a meet and greet Bob at our home so I am alerting you.
Bob is a surgeon, served 22 years in the military, is bright, graduated 2d in his medical school class, is centrist on many issues, has a son at West Point and one who is a graduate of West Point. He has a brilliant daughter and is married to a lovely Asian who also is a doctor and Harvard graduate.
Bob is rational, owns a farm and understands balanced ecological issues. He is a thinking man's Republican who understands the principles of fiscal conservatism, the need for sustaining the American work ethic and getting a sound, rigorous education. He is committed to continue Jack's excellent constituent service.
He is opposed to government encroachment of the private sector and burdening our progeny with debt.
Bob does not intend being a career politician if elected and because of his age will probably serve two , maybe three, terms at most. He is, in my humble opinion, the kind of person who will make a fine replacement for Jack Kingston, who, also in my opinion, more than deserves to be our next Senator.
I am supporting both men, have made contributions to both and am trying to help them in their pursuit of their respective offices and candidacy.
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
President Obama’s aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers. Suspicion gradually centered on Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council. So at a meeting in which everyone was in on the scam an inaccurate but innocuous news tidbit was revealed. When Joseph used his anonymous Twitter handle #natlsecwonk to broadcast the tidbit he was caught and promptly fired. He was not fired for revealing any secrets, but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players ranging from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
What apparently intensified the campaign to identify the “snarker” was a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the senior Obama adviser who has her own Secret Service detail and appears to exercise an inordinate amount of power behind the scenes. Joseph tweeted “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”
Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.
Darrell Delamaide, a columnist for Dow Jones’s MarketWatch, says that “what has baffled many observers is how Jarrett, a former cog in the Chicago political machine and a real-estate executive, can exert such influence on policy despite her lack of qualifications in national security, foreign policy, economics, legislation or any of the other myriad specialties the president needs in an adviser.”
Delamaide believes the term “vacuous cipher” that was applied to Jarrett stung so much because it could be used as a metaphor for the administration in general. He writes that what “has remained consistent about the Obama administration is that vacuity — the slow response in a crisis, the hesitant and contradictory communication, a lack of conviction and engagement amid constant political calculation.” The stunning revelation that President Obama wasn’t kept properly apprised of problems with Obamacare’s website is just the latest example of how dysfunctional Obama World can be.
Whether Jarrett’s influence is all too real or exaggerated is unknowable. What is known is the extent to which she has long been a peerless enabler of Barack Obama’s inflated opinion of himself. Consider this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick’s interview with her for his 2010 book The Bridge.
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Up against a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to political guru David Axelrod to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. All are known to have crossed her, and all are gone. As one former Obama aide once told me: “Valerie is ‘She Who Must Not be Challenged.’”
When the revealing histories of the Obama White House are written it will be fascinating to learn just how extensive her role in the key decisions of the Obama years was.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)The Midterm Grade for HealthCare.gov
By UWE E. REINHARDT
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.
I was challenged by people who commented on my last post to opine on the troubled rollout of the federal health insurance exchange HealthCare.gov, and I will oblige.
The best place to start is President Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Monday.
He then promised that in a techno-surge he would recruit the best information technology talent in the country to come to the rescue and fix the problems. It made me wonder why the A-team, as the White House now calls it, was not enlisted in the first place.Shortly before the president’s appearance, White House officials let it be known that the “president will directly address the technical problems with HealthCare.gov – troubles he and his team find unacceptable.” But in that Rose Garden appearance, the president did not explain what the technical problems with HealthCare.gov were, though he did acknowledge their existence and stated “there is no excuse” for them.
President Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. How would he have graded a student’s performance on, say, a term paper or test that the professor viewed as “unacceptable,” especially when there was “no excuse” for the paper’s deficiencies?
One would hope that the grade would have been F, even under modern grade inflation. I certainly would affix that grade to such inexcusably deficient work.
But who exactly should be assigned the F for the troubled rollout of HealthCare.gov?
At the Rose Garden ceremony, President Obama noted, “There’s no sugar coating it, the Web site has been too slow, people are getting stuck during the application process, and I think it’s fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than I am.”
That makes it sound as if the president was surprised and then angered by the poor performance of HealthCare.gov. Indeed, in a television interviewTuesday with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN, the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, appears to suggest as much, even though HealthCare.gov is reported to have crashed days before the start on Oct. 1 when only 100 people tried to register simultaneously.
As someone who has lectured on corporate governance and served on corporate boards, I find Secretary Sebelius’s statement astounding. Is this how the project was managed? They knew the Web site was not working and yet decided to go ahead with it anyway, without the president’s personal O.K. for so strategic and risky a decision?
Once elected, a president becomes chief executive of a giant federal enterprise. Anyone familiar with corporate management would have thought that for as ambitious and technically a complex project as the initial rollout of HealthCare.gov – so important to many uninsured Americans and so politically important to the White House – the chief executive would have remained in very close touch with the management team overseeing the project and thus would have been briefed daily or at least weekly on the progress of the project and especially on any problems with it.
Woe to the members of the management team in a corporation if problems with a project are hidden from the chief executive when they become known, exposing the chief executive to embarrassing public relations surprises. Heads would roll. The board, however, would assign the blame for such problems not primarily to the management team and instead to the chief executive himself or herself. He hired and supervised the team.
From that perspective, the blame for the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov goes to its entire management team, to be sure, but primarily to the chief executive on top of that project. In my view, not only the proverbial buck stops on the chief executive’s desk, but, for the management of this particular project, the grade of F goes there as well.
It is worth reminding readers, however, that grades on midterm papers or tests do not constitute the overall grade in a course. Students receiving an F on a midterm paper or test often end up with a respectable overall course grade, spurred on in part by that very failure.
Similarly, with enormous effort and, one hopes, constant future supervision by the chief executive, there is hope that the technical problems encountered so far can be fixed in time, with the celebrated A-team of software experts now on the scene.
Finally, it bears emphasizing that the ill-fated rollout of HealthCare.gov should not be taken as a commentary on the concept of health insurance exchanges in general, nor on the Affordable Care Act.
The idea to use means-tested public subsidies to assist low-income Americans to purchase competitively offered private health insurance sold through health-insurance exchanges has been popular among policy analysts and policy makers of both political parties since the 1970s. Any such exchange will have to have roughly the same kind of architecture and tasks as those required for HealthCare.gov, as is shown in the sketch below.
Particular versions of this general construct were built into the Clinton health plan in the 1990s and the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (Part D of Medicare). It was also part of the health reform plan proposed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, during the presidential campaign of 2008 and of the Patients’ Choice Act proposed by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, in 2009.
Indeed, it has been the foundation of every health reform proposal in the United States other than the single-payer Medicare for All idea since the 1970s. And it would be the core of the defined contribution plan now being proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, for the Medicare program.
Now, it may be argued that private electronic health insurance exchanges – for example, eHealthInsurance.com – have long been available to Americans in the market for individually purchased private health insurance, obviating the need for a new HealthCare.gov. That would imply an unfair comparison.
EHealthInsurance.com is a purely passive exchange that merely lists the policies and estimates of their premiums for sundry health insurers listing on the exchange. It does not grant subsidies toward the purchase of health insurance and establish eligibility for those subsidies, nor does it guarantee prices. It simply refers interested individuals to insurers to purchase policies, which are not community rated but actuarially priced. Such an exchange can be quite simple.
If one wants to couple means-tested federal or state government contributions toward private coverage – as the health-reform plans proposed by both parties do – then by necessity the insurance exchange must ping and interact with numerous other Web sites, each with its own software language of various vintages.
The sketch below illustrates that construct, but only for the most important linkages that must be pinged. HealthCare.gov probably has to ping still other sites. Such an exchange is incomparably more difficult to establish and prone to computer glitches than is, say, eHealthInsurance.com.
But several states did manage to establish on time such complex health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, with only minor rollout glitches of the sort one would expect. Somehow they managed.
With proper management and more energetic work earlier on, and untainted by the political desiderata reported to have affected the architecture of HealthCare.gov, that Web site’s management team should have been able to achieve the same success. It did not, hence the midterm grade F.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Campaign 2013
Candidates for governor draw stark contrasts at forum
BY OLYMPIA MEOLA
The three Virginia gubernatorial candidates shared a stage in Richmond this afternoon in a rare joint appearance that offered them a platform to pitch their plans 10 days out from Election Day.
Despite event rules stipulating that each candidate answer the same question without rebuttals, they drew stark contrasts for voters on a wide range of issues as the campaign enters its final stretch.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican nominee for governor who recent polls have shown trailing his Democratic opponent, emphasized his experience in Virginia government and stressed his opposition to the federal health care law and the Medicaid expansion allowed under it.
He touted his education plan, part of which he said is targeted at lower performing schools and would “allow parents for the first time to take control of their children’s educational destiny.”
Cuccinelli's K-12 plan includes allowing parents to close, reform or convert a struggling school into a charter school; legalizing public funding of religious schools and revamping the Standards of Learning – the latter being something that Democrat Terry McAuliffe also supports.
McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, touted his support for the health care law and expanding the state’s Medicaid rolls at the Gubernatorial Community Forum hosted by the WRIC 8 News and Radio One Richmond at the Virginia War Memorial.
He said he wants to reform the SOLs to de-emphasize memorization and encourage cognitive thinking, and he advocated for early childhood education.
“At birth, let’s not be picking winners and losers,” Mcauliffe said. “Let’s make sure all of our children have an opportunity for early childhood development, for pre-K.”
Libertarian nominee Robert C. Sarvis, who has pulled as much as 10 percent of the vote in recent polls, said he would eliminate the SOLs. He would also scrap some discretionary funding the governor has to lure business.
“What happens there is we end up using taxpayer money, working families’ taxpayer money, to subsidize millionaires and billionaires,” he said.There were some areas of agreement, including on the issue of restoration of voting rights.
Both Cuccinelli and McAuliffe said they would continue the work of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s administration on streamlining the restoration of rights process for nonviolent felons.
“If this is justice and we’re trying to provide justice for everyone why should it be dependent on who the elected governor is?” McAuliffe said of his support for automatic restoration of voting rights for nonviolent felons.
He said he would push for a legislative fix. Cuccinelli has urged the General Assembly to amend the constitution so some nonviolent felons can have automatic restoration of rights.
Virginia is one of four states that permanently disenfranchise people with felony convictions unless they are individually approved for rights restoration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In Virginia, only the governor has the right to restore the voting rights of felons.
In his final pitch, Sarvis asked for support from voters “if you want to leave the voting booth on Nov. 5 proud of who you voted for.”
But in his closing remarks, Cuccinelli said “a vote for anyone other than me is a vote for Terry.”
Amid the forum crowd of more than 100 attendees, many festooned with campaign stickers, was Michael Turner, a Cumberland County resident serving on active duty with the U.S. Navy in Virginia Beach. He was undecided on who to vote for at the beginning of the forum and undecided when it ended.
“It’s important to me that we have someone in office who can bring the left side and the right side together,” he said.
The forum gave Turner a better idea of where each candidate stands and he said he would do more homework before Election Day.
“I vote for the person that I believe will do the best job,” he said. “I feel that if the person can do the job and do the job well than it doesn’t matter their political affiliation.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4) OBAMA's Purge of the Military
Courtesy of George Mellinger. This is a purge, and there can be no mistake about it. y.
This strange chain of firings from the Military is so bizarre and so unheard of that even Dianne Sawyer of ABC news reached out to cover it when the 9th, yes 9th, Military Commanding Officer was relieved of duty in less than a year. This doesn’t include the long list last year, this is just the nine individuals this year alone.
Don't forget to add McCrystal, Patraeus, and Allen to the list.
General Carter Hamm, United States Army-Served as head of the United States African Command. Was in charge of the US African command during the fateful night of September 11, 2012 when the lives of four American citizens was taken in the Embassy in Benghazi. Hamm was extremely critical of our Commander and Chief and stated he lied about not having reinforcements in the area on that night. Hamm “resigned and retired” on April of 2013.
Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette/United States Navy-Commander of Carrier Strike Group Three. His most recent activity served as Deputy Commander of the US Naval Forces, US Central Command. He was in charge of Air Craft Carriers in the Mediterranean Sea the night of September 11, 2012. He testified before the hearing committee and said that there may not have been time to get the flight crews there but left the door open on if told when the events took place if that he could have had the aircraft launched upon cross-examination by Rep. Tray Gowdey. Recently fired from the Administrative post and relieved of Duty by the Obama Administration for “utterance of a racial slur”.
Major General Ralph Baker, United States Army- Major General Baker served as the Commander of the Joint Task Force-Horn at Camp Lamar, Djibouti, Africa. Was also involved in some aspect with the incident September 11, 2012, being under the African Command. Had said he believed attack helicopters could have made it in time. Relieved of command and fired for groping a civilian (no assault charges or sexual misconduct charges filed with JAG).
Brigadier General Bryan Roberts, United States Army-General Roberts took command of Fort Jackson in 2011. Was considered a rising star in his field. He served in Iraq during his service as the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, and was the Deputy Commanding General of the United States Army Recruiting Command, Fort Knox, KY. Relieved of Duty and Fired for Adultery. While this is still on the books in the United States Code of Military Justice, it has rarely been used since President Bill Clinton’s indiscretions.
Major General Gregg A. Sturdevant, United States Marine Corps-Director of Strategic Planning and Policy of for the United States Pacific Command and Commander of the aviation wing at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. Highly decorated soldier with two Naval and Marine Commendations and two Naval and Marine Good Conduct medals. He also has an Air Medal with a gold star. He served honorably and distinctively. He had asked about supplies to his command. He was one of two commanding officers suddenly relieved of command and fired from the military for failure of proper force protection.
Major General Charles M.M. Gurganus, United States Marine Corps- Regional Commander in the Southwest and I Marine Expeditionary Force (a forward or frontal division) in Afghanistan. Also Highly decorated with a Defense Superior Service Medal, two Legion of Merritt w/Valor, and three Meritorious Service Commendations. Major General C.M.M.Gurganus had questioned the use of Afghanistan patrols along side American patrols after two officers were executed at their desk and a platoon was lead into an ambush on the front lines. Was the other commander relieved of duty for failure of proper force protection.
Lieutenant General David Holmes Huntoon Jr, United States Army-Served as the 58th Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY. He had graduated from the same academy in 1973 and had served in Senior Planning and Education Services through the majority of his career. He was “censored” for “an investigation” into an “improper relationship” according to The Department of Defense. Nothing was released to the nature of the improper relationship. Nothing was even mentioned if an actual investigation even took place.
Vice Admiral Tim Giardina, United States Navy-Deputy Commander of the United States Strategic Command. Commander of the Submarine Group Trident, Submarine Group 9 and Submarine Group 10, where every single one of the 18 Nuclear Submarines with Nuclear Trident Missiles of those three groups were in his command. This commander earned six Legions of Merit, Two Meritorious Service Medals, two Joint Service Commendation Medals, and several other medals, ribbons and decorations in his illustrious career. He was removed from service and fired from the military for the charge of using counterfeit poker chips (not making that up).
Last on the list, Major General Michael Carry, United States Air Force-Commander 20th Air Force in charge of 9,600 people and 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) at three operational wings and served in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. He was Fired October 11, 2013, for “Personal Misbehavior” is what was told to ABC News. He and Giardina were both the two top Commanders over the United States Nuclear Arsenal before their dismissal within 48 hours of each other.
As ABC News reports, this is an extremely alarming rate and one of the biggest and fastest purges of military personnel ever recorded. It apparently is such a shock at the rate even for a long time veteran of reporting the news as Dianne Sawyer, because at one point she gets heated saying two Commanders of the Nuclear Command.
You don’t put people who are not very intelligent and without a squeaky clean record over that area of the Military. It is enough to make the hardest and staunchest of supporters as the ABC news crew to pause and ask themselves, “what step is he planning?”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Financial Times: The 2013 Stock Rally Is Built on Federal Reserve Quicksand
The health of third-quarter earnings may be irrelevant because massive Federal Reserve monetary stimulus continues and investors can ignore fundamentals, according to the Financial Times.
U.S. stocks have already risen 21.5 percent this year, which the newspaper compared to the 2013 run-up in Japan’s stock market, a country where the central bank has been even more accommodating than here, and Greek debt.
“If the Fed declined to even slightly back off from its current policies in September, when the stock market reached record highs, it clearly has no intention of doing so any time soon,” the Times predicted.
Wall Street’s earnings estimates for the current quarter are beneath the second quarter’s actual results, and average earnings per share for the S&P 500 have dropped from more than $30 to less than $27, JPMorgan data showed. During the same time period of diminishing results, the S&P 500 has ascended more than 10 percent.
Moreover, net margin debt has hit an all-time high, the Times noted, even while highly leveraged, i.e. overpriced, stocks are outperforming the broad market.
“Both of these data points serve to underscore that Fed policy is less about investment than speculation, built on the quicksand of leverage,” the Times declared. “The events of the past two months give more ammunition to those who contend that the Fed can never taper and that to hedge bullish positions is just foolish.”
Jeffrey Saut, managing director at Raymond James & Associates, was decidedly optimistic this week in a commentary for clients, saying many obstacles to a rising stock market have been overcome.
“According to the weight of the evidence, the primary stock market trend remains 'up!' ” he declared.
Saut predicted investors will ignore government economic reports, many of which have been delayed for the next few months, and that GDP growth will jump to 3 percent in 2014.
“Finally, with Janet Yellen at the helm of the Fed it should be steady as you go. That implies no tapering and plenty of liquidity.”
Bob Doll, chief investment strategist at Nuveen Asset Management, predicted the Fed’s decision to delay tapering its massive asset purchases will encourage continued risk-taking by investors. In that environment, he said, stocks will likely continue to outperform bonds.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment