Long-term, Grinding, Deflating Federal Hooey.
Steve Moore, WSJ, makes the easy and correct case that the Obama administration's ballyhooed stimulus and budget and various housing magic maneuvers have delivered up a Recovery Summer that is anemic, mortal, corpse-like -- may be an animated flesh-eating zombie that is ravenous and relentless. POTUS spoke at Xavier University this news cycle, to commemorate five years after Katrina, and Sean Miller, The Hill, surprised by reporting on air that the event was listless and poorly organized by the White House. Too many VIPs jammed into too small a space. POTUS making exactly the same remarks he made recently during his few hours in Florida. POTUS avoiding the number one issue, which is not Katrina or the Deepwater Horizon spill but rather the moratorium on deepwater drilling. Louisiana wants to talk about jobs, and POTUS wants to play to the Dress Circle in California and Florida for the midterms and talk green and environment and renewable energy. POTUS puts in a subpar performance after his missing holiday week. POTUS also has little to say about the bad GDP revision on Friday 27 -- and not much about the "Recovery Summer" palaver: POTUS tells Brian Williams of NBC, "...a constant evolving debate about what are our obligations to each other..." Try to stay focused, Mr. President. Jobs debate is over. Your team is losing. And the remark about the "...birth certificate plastered to my forehead..." was just plain weird. Does he hate the job he's got? Is he ready to go back on vacation?
Jackson Hole.
The debate about the slowdown, a/k/a "The Great Stall," did not find any illumination at the Federal Reserve's annual confab at Jackson Hole. The deflationistas remain cocksure. The inflation hawks are silent and brooding. Ben Bernanke asserts he will do what he "can." No comfort. If Bernanke cannot, then it cannot be done. The limits of the Fed. The ski slopes will be especially uncrowded this winter. Bernanke may be in denial. Bernanke may believe that, if he holds his breath, he can fly like an eagle. Calculated Risk looks to the jobs number coming on Friday 3 September. Grim tidings. The Jackson Hole gang is out of big bullets. They are going to try small caliber stuff next. After that, we will try rocks.
Unemployment Benefits: At the end of July, the qualification dates for the various tiers of Federal unemployment benefits were extended through November 30th. This extension was also made retroactive to June 2nd. Some people who have given up might rejoin the labor force to collect additional benefits. If this happens, the participation rate might increase in August - and that would push up the unemployment rate. Although the number is uncertain, if 250,000 workers rejoin the labor force to collect benefits that would push the unemployment rate to 9.7%. If 500,000 workers rejoin the labor force, plus the 125,000 from the teen adjustment, the unemployment rate would increase to around 9.9%.
Recovery or no recovery - it depends on who you listen to. Even bad numbers can always be worse. I honestly don’t know any more. If Obama is such a disaster, how come roughly half the country still supports him?
There are people who I respect that continue to believe that Obama is leading us along a proper path. They acknowledge that there will be pain in the short run, but are confident that Obama has what it takes to lead us out of the woods - if those pesky Republicans just would let him do it.
Obama has yet to confess outright that he is a communist (or a Muslim) who wants to reduce our nation to ruins. Without that confession it’s hopeless I’m afraid. People no longer trust what they see. Any criticism of the president is seen in significant quarters as extreme, racist, homophobic, fringe.
The major media certainly is buying it. Case and point: Attendance at Glenn Beck’s Washington rally was either in the tens of thousands or upwards of a million. Not counted, of course, are the millions who wanted to but could not go.
We no longer trust numbers. Even science has been perverted. Everything is a lie. We’re flying blind.
Clearly, I remain of the old school. Aside from the numbers, I don’t see how centralized autocratic government can work. History has taught me that much. But history is being rewritten as we speak. The young are taught a different history than I was. They believe they are right. They trust their teachers. They trust their teacher's excuses, their misdirection, their lofty claims.
So, no matter how bad it gets, they’ll always have an out. The entirety of American history has brought us to this point. The chickens have come home to roost.
In my heart, I believe that most people believe as I do. But I can no longer be sure. It’s the ’sitting on the fence’ types that’ve got me stumped. Bill Clinton introduced the concept of ‘triangulation‘. By triangulating he sought to appear as being above the fray.
I don’t think this will work again. Either the Left or the Right - along with the triangulators - will be swept from the pages of American history. The time will come when triangulators will be asked to declare themselves. Those who refuse to, will be left homeless. High principles involving moral equivalency (or neutrality) will not save them. They will be despised by all sides as the sniveling cowards they are.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/
"Does he hate the job he's got? Is he ready to go back on vacation?"
I would swear the man has AADD. He holds a job for 6 months and he wants out. He was groomed from 2004 to run for Pres. He held the state senate job a couple of years before running for Congress. He was a US senator for what? 5 minutes before he started running for pres. Scuttlebutt has it he was supposed to wait till 2016, but the guy redefines job-hopping. He got no gravitas, still the left fawns on him like empty speeches=governing.
Ben Bernanke and the Fed can do little if Congress keeps spending more than we can ever pay in taxes. Washington Chatterati Still Pooh-Poohing the Tea Party's ideas and candidates, even using the term "Tea Baggers" a perveted and disgusting sexual slander.
It has become quite clear that Washington cares little about the people beyond the beltway, it appears everyone's goal in DC to extract as much tribute as possible, consequences be damned!
Bailouts for the UAW, Goldman Sachs, Fannie and Freddie are not helping most Americans, just keeping the elite and their friends in power.
August 30, 2010
Dear Leader Obama:
I know that is what you want us to refer to you as, but keep dreaming brother, yours stinks as bad as mine, stop pretending it doesn’t.
The topic for todays letter is the hamster ball. You know those little florescent orange balls that hamster owners put their little pets in to let them roam the living rooms of America in a constant state of mental masturbation, as they continue on their never ending journey to get absolutely friggen nowhere. Well, sometime I mouse on over to the debt clock to check on the financial health of the nation and, Mr. Obama, we are in deep trouble, kind of like New Orleans without the levies. Back to the hamster, Americans essentially feel like they are the hamster in a government constructed and FDA approved fluorescent ball. We try to get somewhere, and no matter what we do there is some bureaucrat waiting to stick us in a different size ball.
All of this talk of hamsters reminds of a story of my absolutely abnormally normal family that I would like to share with you as a way to hammer this point truly home; as only I can. Well, so there we all are, sometime between ’79 to ’81 sitting at home with nothing else to do; so we elect to torture the hamster in the fluorescent ball. We pick the little tike up, and place him safely in the ball, then we set him in motion on his journey to nowhere. The little hamster, happy at this first whiff of freedom, begins to roll out of the den into the dinning room to the kitchen; then to the top of the basement steps. Now he is in deep excrement, and doesn’t know it. All the hamster knows is this is gonna be some ride baby! So he goes for it, we run after him, and at the bottom of the steps we find the florescent hamster ball open.
“Holy Crap” was all my old man could manage at this turn of events.
Now we got real problems, see the hamster was my sisters, and she was away on a trip. So we hatch a plan to trap the hamster. We find a deep lobster pot, we fashion a ramp, cook the little furry escapee some bacon, and put it in an area we think the hamster is likely to be. We awake the next day to find the hamster at the bottom of the pot, deader then yesterdays junk mail. My father debates the replacement scenario, (did I ever tell you about the gold fish that lived for 10 years?), being Sunday, no dice. “We’re going to have to face the music . . .” my father says with some gravity. So Monday rolls around my sister comes home, she asks with concern about her now deceased pet. Then my father, in a dead pan voice, said the following, “He committed suicide, we did everything we could to stop him, but living in that fluorescent orange ball proved too much for the little guy.”
Mr. Obama “The Glenn Beck Rally to Restore Honor” and the liberty movement is not just about God; it is also about the fluorescent orange hamster ball. We are tired of living in the orange fluorescent hamster ball going in the wrong direction, heading for the basement steps of economic life, at light speed. We are done with you, and the rest of your liberal democratic pinko commie friends, and in 64 short days we are going to wrap you up, put a bow on you, and make you President of the UN with Al Gore and his favorite massage therapist - maybe the two of you can go halves on a hamster, and have some real fun. That even I would pay for, just don’t tell your wife, then you’ll be doing the divorce thing, and the hamster will be called as a witness.
In that case I recommend a deep pot, some bacon, and a ramp.
Respectfully,
I'm sure I'd be better off not confessing this on the internet, but I used to give my hamster rides in the coal cars on my model train set. He didn't seem to mind too much. He would escape all the time, but he would always nest in the cotton at the back of my Dad's reclining chair and I'd just reach in, receive the obligatory bite, and put him back in his cage. He used to sit in my Mom's rocking chair and eat sesame seeds and watch Petticoat Junction. I think he liked Betty Jo the best, or maybe that was just my projecting myself onto him.
Reminiscing about Petticoat Junction, paper routes and boyhood hamsters... ARRRGGHHH!!! I'm turning into a Zombie Republican. Help!!! HELP, I SAY!!
Whitehuse.gov still has their "Summer of Recovery" site up:
"...This summer is sure to be a Summer of Economic Recovery."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/06/17/a-summer-recovery
This White House is not on the ball. Like typical elites, they all took August off.
Back to Beck for a moment. Defensive players like Beck are important. They can stop some of the silly stuff that floats out of DC from going too far. The country needs more grown-ups to tell the children when they've gone too far.