Earmarks to the Rescue

Now that congress has passed Obama's 800 gazillion dollar Earmark Stimulus plan, will Obama stop talking down the economy? My guess is he and the rest of the democrats have only yet begun to spend, so the answer is probably not. That's too bad. Eight years ago the media openly ridiculed Bush for speaking out loud about how bad the economy was before he took office. That was the word in DC back then.... don't say anything bad about the economy because if you scare people it only becomes worse. People stop spending, CEO's stop hiring, and the house of cards falls down.

Today that is happening, but now the media is cheering the scare mongers onward. The Great Depression 2 scare is going full steam, and the Scare Monger in Chief is Barack Obama. Between Obama's scare tactics and the mindless spending coming out of congress, well things are probably about to get worse. Amazingly, Obama has said that tax cuts didn't work to stimulate the economy. Many others in the media are echoing this line. So now the democrats and the media are pretending 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 were all just a dream. Sadly this is a case where ignoring history will not lead to us repeating it. Too bad, because the economy was in great shape for most of this decade, thanks to tax cuts.

Before we have a depression, we need to have a really bad recession going, and that's where Obama has a problem. Right now this doesn't come close to 1982 or 1973-74. Much less the 1930's. During Hoover's term the economy dropped 35% from high to low, before it started recovering. Recovering while Hoover was still president I might add. So far, the Great Depression 2 has seen the economy drop by 1.1%. Yep... you might want to come in off that ledge. The Great Depression was 3000% worse than our current situation.

So how bad are things really. For a great comparison between now and the big bad recessions, neither of which came close to being a real depression, try this out for size: http://www.cnbc.com/id/29163654

In the mean time, sure this could be a bad recession. The last two were pretty mild, but they were fought off by real stimulus. This one is being met by the same wild out of control spending we saw when we saw our budget surplus of 1998 pop it's head out of it's mole hole, only to be whacked back to sleep by a money-drunken congress. But I digress.

When you hear a congressman say that wildly spending money will save us, that we are all Keynesian's now, well remember that Nixon was the last guy to say that and he gave us 1973-74. Also remember that Keynes insisted that the way to recovery was paying people to dig holes, and then paying people to fill the holes back in with dirt. When Nixon and Keynes are at bat, playing it play by play, maybe we'd better get back out on that ledge.

Geithner Followup

I ran across this this posting from Larry Kudlow with similar, though more diplomatic concerns about the new Treasury Chief.

I worry about posting links because they tend to disappear, so we'll see how long this lasts:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_lawrence_kudlow/is_tim_geithner_ready_for_prime_time


In addition to questioning whether Geithner is ready for Prime Time, we get the revelation of who Geithner was really taking advice from when he watered down details from his plan. It seems the dog didn't eat his plan after all, it was his friends fom wall street.

Spiro Agnew phones it in

You may remember the former VP leaving office in 1973. You see, he pleaded guilty to not declaring $29,500 in income, and didn't pay taxes on that income. That used to be against the law, and politicians used to leave Washington when they got caught.

Today in the Obama "This time it's different" Era, politicians don't mess around with such trivial amounts of money. Tom Daschle stole, I mean "failed to pay", $120,000 in back taxes. That's not the income he failed to declare, that is the amount of taxes he has owed the American people. So Obama's new Socialized Health Care Czar decided, maybe that was a tad much. After much thinking, he decided to decline the appointment, for Obama's sake. Next stop prison?? Don't be silly, it's the new Obama Era. Daschle Obama-Friend is back doing what he was doing before, making and taking huge amounts of money as a lobbyist.

Along comes Tim Geithner. Former NY Fed chief. Now Geithner, it turns out, only owed $35,000 in back taxes. Again.... Agnew agreed to leave office because of failure to declare less than that in income. Geithner failed to pay tax bills over several years of $35,000, owed from his time at the IMF. Guess what else... the IMF payed Geitner that money so he wouldn't have to pay social security taxes out of his own pocket, but that money wasn't forwarded to the IRS.

The IMF compensated Geithner for his Social Security taxes owed to the IRS, Geithner pocketed this extra money as if it were a bonus, didn't even declare it as income, shades of Hillary, and then probably lied under oath to Congress about not realizing that he did the same things in 2001, 20002, 2003, and 2004. You know what Obama said? Geithner was too big to fail. Only Geithner can save the country from the next great depression. Geithner.... he's just sooooo smart!

Arguably one of the most corrupt presidencies in history, Richard Nixon's set ethical standards far exceeding those of Barak Obama's presidency with regard to all the president's men. Spiro Agnew resigned. Geithner, is welcomed to the fold as a hero.

Ironically, if that word applies to such a sad state of affairs, the heroic James Tiberious Geithner went on TV to tell America his little genius of a plan for saving our economy. It was such a sophomoric, generalizing speech that anyone could have given that the stock market just about crashed. Minute by minute, traders waited for the meat. The details of what the hero genius Geithner had planned. Especially after the speech had been delayed a day.... maybe the same dog that ate his tax returns also ate his recovery plan. So Geithner droned on with banal generalities, and the market crashed. Over 500 points from top to bottom. For days we had heard he would be proposing a fix to the "mark to market" accounting rules that in a very real way led to our current economic mess. Nothing.... nothing even close to that specific. In other words, there is no plan. In other words he's just guessing. He didn't finish his homework in time for class. The hero Geithner owed America a plan, and as usual Geithner didn't pay up. He phoned it in.

Note to Obama, I'd have someone double check Geithner's tax returns the next four years, cause he's still the same old fraud.

Obama accussed of failure to properly vet Richardson

Where is that headline? Can't find it? See... that headline criticizes the vetted, as well as the vettor. We did see this headline when the teenage pregnancy story broke after Sarah Palin was picked by McCain to be her running mate. The headline in that case was complete fiction, because McCain had been told about the pregnancy during vetting, and picked Palin anyway. Yet for weeks the story lines questioning John McCain's vetting process kept coming. The mythology once created, is treated as fact by news and entertainment media to this day.

In this case of course, well Bill Richardson was kind of an "odd" fit anyway. That's NBC's cover story. Evidently, according to NBC, he was just picked because he was Hispanic. Golly, I must have missed it last week when NBC was reporting that!

All of the discussion will be about Bill Richardson. This morning Obama gave a press conference with Nancy Pelosi on unrelated issues, but no questions were allowed. I didn't even hear questions shouted out to Obama. My... the press is so well mannered around him. The press may ask Obama, later today, about his vetting process. If they do, it will be only to put their own stamp of approval on it. There will be no lingering questions about Obama's vetting process.

I guess this is prediction #3 for 2009.

Predictions for the New Year

The new year doesn't start for another 3 weeks of course. Sure it's 2009, already Jan 3 in fact, but nothing really changes until Obama swears in as president. Then things will change. Overnight.

Here are one or two predictions to start with. The Guantanamo thing will suddenly become more complex. Well, we can't just release them... because some of these people are hardened terrorists sworn to kill Americans! Oh sure.... it was handled wrong by the Bush Administration, could have been handled differently. Oh and the torture.... the torture!

Torture at Gitmo of course consists of a marine touching a copy of the Koran in full view of a Muslim prisoner, or I suppose, in full view of another marine who happens to be Muslim. Liberals believe the prisoners should have been charged with crimes or released, you know... like on CSI:Miami. They do it twice week on CSI... why not Gitmo? I really never saw the left explain how we go about charging people from the middle east with breaking the law as it's written in New York City. But that was the problem with Bush, evidently. Enemy combatants indeed!

All that changes when Obama becomes president. Suddenly the media starts to have an honest discussion about actual terrorists being held in Guantanamo. Instead of worrying about holding them illegally, the left will worry about what would happen if just one of them made their way to Manhattan.

The discussion changes from "What ARE YOU going to do with them President Bush", to "what SHOULD WE do with them". It's about time.

On a related note, the country will experience it's first serious thwarted terror attack in 2009 or 2010. Up until now, of course, the last 7 years, attack plans have been drawn up by Keystone Terrorists. The plans are laughable, simple minded, fantasy laden, amateur hour attempts that sources say were not to be taken seriously.

The media, including the NY Times, has minimized and ridiculed every attack plan. In every case the plan is derided as being a pipe dream of a lone nut wannabe terrorist that could never have succeeded. High school kids drawing up an attack on home room are treated with far more seriousness than terrorists by our media. Had the CIA or FBI been able to ferret out the 911 conspirators and prevent that attack... that plan would have been just as ridiculed by the NY Times. Imagine the absurdity... cutting through cable to topple the Brooklyn Bridge,,, running planes into buildings as if they were missiles.

The next thwarted plan will be big, big news. Page 1 Headlines. Like coach Jimmy Johnson once said... print it in 3 inch headlines. We will be treated to what Obama is doing different that allows us to catch the "real" terrorists now, instead of the Keystone Terrorists. The media will paint him such a hero, it will almost embarrass him. When reporters in New York decide that Obama has personally saved their lives, well, look out. They could go overboard. Just a bit. They could make Chris Matthews' leg tingles sound tame.

Well that's just two glimpses into the future. When the new year starts, just three weeks away, look for these and other non-subtle changes in news coverage, as the American press demonstrates that they are the ones with short memories.

non-stick Blagojevich

That title almost rhymes.

Does anyone wonder why they keep doing it? The news reports on Blagojevich's attempts to sell off Obama's senate seat continue to mis-label him as having no party affiliation. Oh but yes... leaving out that information is a mis-label, because if it's a republican doing bad things, the "R" is ever-present. We know that Blagojevich is a democrat simply by observing the lack of the party affiliation tag, and the media knows we know because they have played this little game for years. We've known for years, they know we know, and yet they keep doing it.

Are they fooling anybody? Well, probably somebody, some of the time. That however, is not the reason they leave out the "D" next to Blagojevich's name.

They leave it out, because of basic marketing principles. Successful marketing is a series of little hits. Not the one big superbowl commercial, it is seeing the product name and placements over time. Giving up on true reporting, the news media markets a product we call the democratic party. Even if we see there is no "D", and we know the "R" is always there, we also see the "R". The mind will store information associating the R to bad people, but the "D" will be less besmirched. Because we do not SEE the D. Even if we know all this, our minds are being conditioned over time to associate the R with bad, but not the D. It works too, just watch any poll on the subject.

Don't think they do that on purpose. They can't be that conniving. calculating? Then you need to answer for yourself, why do they leave off the "D". Every time, a new scandal breaks, why not identify when they know we know the lack of a label means democrat. Why keep doing it year after year?

They do it because it works.

The Campaign for 2012

If stories are true we are about to get Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense. I think Clinton's creds for being Secretary of State is that she has been a senator a few months longer than Obama. I'm not sure I get it really, from her point of view, isn't she better off as a Senator. I mean aside from the slightly better health plan, she has an agenda of her own that she wants to get back to. Right? Doesn't she? Being Secretary of State means you get to do a lot, as long as it is what the President tells you to do. Clinton is not just trading in a Senate seat, she's trading in a lifetime appointment to the senate. As long as she wants it, New Yorkers aren't giving it to anyone else. What is in it for her... and for Obama?

That's the other thing, Obama had won this one. Throwing a bone to Clinton supporters is one thing, just to make peace. This is adopting the dog. Well, that's the metaphor. So Hillary is not here for her expertise. If Obama wanted that he would keep Condi Rice. She 's the real deal when it comes to expertise. Like Kissinger, except maybe much more popular. Is Hillary an "enemy" to keep closer? I think they qualify as two comrades who simply wanted the exact same job at the same time. There may be animosity between the "camps", but not between the two individuals. They are both radical leftists who do a good job of acting centrist. Why Hillary. Why now, and by the way, if now, then why not last summer?

I think he wants to get his approval rating as high as it can go. That's the only reason for her being there. See, if virtually all democrats support either her or him, then if they are both working in the same administration, almost all dems will vote yes... fantastic job Mr President. In fact, he wraps up a chunk of the independent vote as well. Republicans... well, you really can't please all the people. However Gates will help a lot both with republicans and independents who see him as the catalyst to changing our fortunes in Iraq. He could, by the way, hint hint, be the most popular republican around these days.

So lets say in bad times your poll numbers are about 60% approval, and in good they are 85%. That's pretty good. Easily good enough to get re-elected. That's all there is to it. Stuffing the ballot box so the media will report month after month what great poll numbers he has, even if the editors & reporters have grown disallusioned with his decisions.

The future Mr. President has realized something I don't he think had figured out when he picked Crazy Joe Biden as his running mate last summer. The real 2012 campaign has already started, and the approval ratings are the thing. He is worried about the same thing I am, that the media made him president and they will elect the next president too. Good approval ratings make that a lot harder to do. Iraq until 2011? Baby steps in Universal Health Care? Four more years of Bush after all? Maybe those tax increases on the wealthy (ie- people with jobs) will not be so big after all. Under cover of the monthly Approval Ratings bonanza of Obama & Clinton & Gates supporters, this new president might just take that honeymoon through to 2012.