What Goes Around, Comes Around

By Alan Caruba

The cliché, “What goes around, comes around”, will prove its worth as the abortion known as the Democrat “Stimulus” bill begins to fail of its own dead weight to stimulate anything more than a larger federal government capable apparently only of devaluating the U.S. dollar while piling more debt upon debt on you, me, our children and grandchildren.

How difficult is it to understand that, if you are deeply in debt, you cannot spend your way out of it, even if you have a machine that prints paper money?

As Alyssa A. Lappen, a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of ‘Institutional Investor’ and other magazines, and a former associate editor of ‘Forbes’, pointed out in a commentary on FrontPageMag.com, “While the bill will vastly increase the federal government’s reach, it is noteworthy that the government has never profitably managed a single enterprise.”

She noted a few government failures, starting with the mortgage giants, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government sponsored enterprises”, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the U.S. Postal Service. Is there anyone left who does not know that the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems are insolvent? Also insolvent, noted Lappen, “are 40 out of 50 States…”

So, while the Democrat majority in Congress is rubbing its hands in anticipation of political power based on massive handouts of public funds, when the “stimulus” does not reverse job losses in a year or so, these same folks will be loudly shouting “you’ve got to give it time.” If they had done nothing at all, this recession would on its own have played itself out in anywhere from six to eight months, maybe a year. This is the normal cycle for these financial events.

Now there is literally no end in sight for the recession along with the possibility it will hemorrhage into a full-fledged depression.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, one trillion dollars is about one-third of annual U.S. government spending and 13% of the U.S. economy. It is more than the GDP of all but twelve nations in 2007. It is roughly one-sixth of the entire outstanding U.S. federal debt held by the public and one-tenth if you factor in intra-government debt such as Social Security IOUs.

The Democrats will argue that every $1 dollar injected into the economy will yield 1.5 times that in greater output. It is an utterly false assertion that assumes that the government can, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “create wealth out of thin air.”

The stimulus bill will, in both the short and long term, come back to bite the Democrat Party and President Obama. In the long term, your great grandchildren will still be paying it off.

In the meanwhile, $18.5 billion (based on the ever-changing figures in the bill) will be spent on “energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Another $2.4 billion will be set aside for “demonstrations of how to safely remove atmospheric greenhouse gas” but the catch to that is that the Earth is cooling and carbon dioxide plays almost no role whatever in either a cooling or warming cycle. In short, more than $20 billion will be utterly and totally wasted.

A classic example of why the stimulus bill, before it is signed into law by President Obama, will fail is the $1 billion allocated to Amtrak. In 1971, the National Railway Passenger Corporation was a federal government rescue of the former Penn Central. Amtrak has never shown a profit in the past thirty-eight years.

If the economy and, indeed, the United States, can survive the massive wastefulness of this bill, another bill will come due for the Democrats and President Obama. It will be a political one demanding they explain why, other than greed, arrogance, and the pursuit of power, they foisted this monstrosity on Americans?

How soon will that be? As soon as the unemployment figures, around 7% at this writing, fail to come down and, in all likelihood, increase. Six months? A year? By the 2010 elections?

A population that, throughout the 1990s, managed to borrow more and spend more than they could afford, is inclined toward instant gratification. The polls already show that a significant majority of them, having sobered up, do not like the stimulus bill. In a year or so they are going to dislike it even more.

Bits & Pieces of News

By Alan Caruba

There is so much news coming at us from all directions that it is easy to let some important aspects of it slide by. Here are some bits and pieces of recent news items.

Associated Press: “Last week’s Iraqi elections appear to have been a rousing success—a major step toward a stable democracy that will hasten the day when U.S. troops can leave.” That was the first paragraph of a Feb. 4 story, but in my daily newspaper the headline read: “One peaceful election hardly testifies to stability in Iraq.” Give me a break! President Bush said it was vital to the Middle East that more democracy be encouraged there and, guess what, in addition to Turkey and Israel, it’s called IRAQ!

EnergyTribune.com: “Ethanol Bankruptcies Continue, 14 Studies Have Exposed the High Cost of Ethanol and Biofuels.” That’s the Feb 4 headline. It turns out that “about nine percent of all the ethanol plants in the U.S. have now filed for bankruptcy and some analysts believe the numbers could reach as high as twenty percent.” That’s because the whole ethanol thing is a scam. It has driven up the costs of corn so high even the producers can’t afford it any more. And ethanol does nothing to reduce dependency on imported oil. Producing and using it puts more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions into the environment.

The Middle East Media Research Institute: Reporting on “The Reality of Oil Import by the United States”, it turns out that we are not sending billions entirely to the Middle East as is commonly reported. Figures for 2007 reveal that, although Saudi Arabia remains second among the nations from which the U.S. imports oil, Canada was number one, Mexico was number three, and Venezuela was number four. We imported oil from England as well and, with the exception of Iraq and Kuwait, the rest were either African or South American nations.

Numbers USA: They sent a notice on Feb 2 that addressed some statistics the mainstream (or is that lamestream?) press have neglected to report. Among the figures cited was the fact that 2.5 million Americans lost jobs in 2008 at the same time the federal government was permitting the immigration of 1.5 million new foreign workers! To put it another way, 138,000 new foreign workers continue to arrive each month while Americans are filing for unemployment benefits!

Agence France Presse: Would you believe that the forthcoming Durban II United Nations racism conference has Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya chairing the planning committee and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran as the vice-chair? You can’t make up stuff like this. UN Watch, an independent group, said, “it’s heart-wrenching though not surprising that Durban II is hijacking the noble cause of human rights and anti-racism, with the aim of legitimizing an agenda of hate and extremism that targets innocents in Mumbai, Madrid, Israel, and elsewhere.” The UN is a place where totalitarian governments get together to undermine the most fundamental tenets of Western civilization.

Star-Ledger (NJ): The headline on a Feb 6 four-paragraph story read “Activist gets 22 years for Michigan State fire.” The real story however is that she was a member of the Earth Liberation Front, never mentioned at all in the report, and had caused a million dollars damage and destroyed years of valuable research on New Year’s Eve 1990. She also admitted to a dozen other acts of property destruction. Describing her as an activist is comparable to saying that Osama bin Laden is an “activist.”

All Media: The big news is, of course, the impending breakdown of the national and international financial system. If calmer heads prevail, we may just avoid it, but with President Obama bad-mouthing the economy and breaking out in a public sweat, there isn’t much hope of a happy outcome.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.” Obama’s new theme is “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Obama Scares the Heck Out of Me!

By Alan Caruba

Having been around since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, I have seen twelve Presidents come and go prior to the $160 million coronation of Barack Hussein Obama.

I have got to tell you this guy scares the heck out of me.

I am used to guys like Harry Truman who, when the job was done, got on the train and went home without any fanfare. He was so broke Congress had to vote him a pension so he could afford to buy postage stamps. He turned away offers to sit on the boards of corporations because, as he put it, he wasn’t President anymore and he wasn’t going to sell the title for a few bucks. It’s called integrity.

It’s not that we haven’t had our scary Presidents before. Nixon scared me because he just looked like a creep. In fact, CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, was the actual name of the group that got him his second term. Unknown to the rest of was another group working out of the White that was called “The Plumbers.” You can read about it in the dozens of books that were written about the Watergate scandal, most of them by Woodward and Bernstein who have dined out on it ever since and several by the perpetrators themselves.

Carter gave me the creeps, too. He was barely halfway through his term in office before a whole bunch of people came to the same conclusion and then we all had to wait around to get rid of him and get our diplomatic hostages back from Iran.

Reagan, God bless him, made us all proud to be Americans. He wasn’t a saint, but he sure was a happy warrior. He was so good at it the Russians pretty much threw in the towel.

I’m going to give both of the Bush’s a pass because they have been so beat upon that it would be gratuitous to say anything. Let history do that and my bet is it will be a lot kinder than that howling, raving pack of liberals that want to blame them for everything short of the War of 1812.

Obama is a whole different creature. He’s half black and half white. He spent the early part of his life being raised by a Muslim stepfather in Indonesia. His actual father was from Kenya where he had another wife, was Muslim, and ended up dying in a drunken car crash because he had blown a promising career. Later Obama’s mother divorced and came home, handed the kid off to be raised by her parents, and, well, who knows?

We’re supposed to know a lot about Obama because he wrote, before the age of 50, two books about himself. Two! Then, after getting elected Senator from the great State of Illinois where everything is strictly on the up-and-up (like Minnesota), he decided he’d rather spend his time running for President before even serving half of his first term!

His mission, he kept telling us was to "change" D.C. so that all those lobbyists weren’t running everything and only people with impeccable resumes would solve the great problems of our times. Only he picked most of his administration from the failed Clinton debacle (saved only when voters put Republicans in charge of Congress) and, it turns out, a whole bunch of former lobbyists! Plus a couple of tax cheats.

By the end of his first two weeks, Obama was so punch-drunk from the reality of being President, he and the wife snuck out of the White House to go read stories to second graders. Never mind that his predecessor, George W. Bush, found out about the 9/11 attacks doing the very same thing!

Obama doesn’t think that cutting payroll or corporate taxes will get us out of the present crisis. Instead, he wants to blow a trillion dollars on what everybody knows is pure political pork. Meanwhile governors, mayors, and everybody else are lining up to get a piece of the Great American Taxpayer Handout Jamboree!

History tells us that Obama’s “solutions” are the same failed ones that FDR tried. Ten years after the Crash of ‘29, they still weren’t working and the soup kitchen lines were around the corner and down several blocks. Yet, in a February 5 opinion published in The Washington Post, he said “the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems” was “misguided”, adding that “I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”

No, just barely over 50% of the voters elected him and, as usual, some 50% of all those eligible to vote stayed home. So there’s no overwhelming mandate for change. The election was a vote to blame George W. Bush for all our current problems when, in fact, Congress gave its blessing to his agenda, rarely opposing any of it including the Iraq war. Bush had warned against the disastrous actions of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, but Congress refused to listen.

Obama’s acolytes keep babbling about “green jobs” and a “green economy” when the only kind of green anyone wants to see is a paycheck that can be turned into greenbacks.

His Washington Post opinion promised “more than three million jobs over the next two years” but neglects to mention that most would be government jobs. The claim is absurd. The demand for quick action echoes the same demand by former Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, when he asked for $700 billion in bail-out money. Half of it is now largely unaccounted for and word from Capitol Hill is that they overpaid for a lot of whatever it was they purchased.

Meanwhile, Obama also called for “energy independence”, decrying “Our dependence on foreign oil" and calling for wasting more money on “renewable energy” (solar, wind and ethanol). No nation on Earth is or can be energy independent. We import the bulk of our oil from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela, along with Saudi Arabia. We have billions of barrels of our own oil, but Congress will not allow companies to drill for it.

At last count fourteen ethanol producers had filed for bankruptcy and the use of corn for fuel had driven up the cost of food and feed stocks around the world. His “solutions” are stupid.

He’s surrounded himself with loonies that want to take away our guns, that think coal-fired plants to generate electricity are evil (they provide over 50% of all the electricity!), wants Detroit to make cars that no one wants to buy, and to make nice with Iran while they kick sand in his face.

This guy is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. To be charitable, let’s give him a whole month in the White House and then find a way to impeach and remove him.

Annoying Science

By Alan Caruba

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairwoman of the House Environmental and Public Works Committee, has pledged to “follow science” when it comes to drafting legislation and one of the first new laws she wants passed is one that would impose a cap-and-trade limit on greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the dreaded global warming that is NOT happening.

I must confess I am always perversely impressed with the ability of politicians to lie through their teeth, be obscenely ignorant, and do both at the same time. The problem for politicians and the environment organizations is that the real science of climatology and meteorology can be very annoying.

According to Sen. Boxer, “The surest way to create good jobs in this country is to mobilize for clean energy” (wind and solar). What California needs is real jobs, not green ones, but considering how spectacularly mismanaged its budget has been under the current green Governor, it’s a wonder that Sen. Boxer can say such things with a straight face.

“The whole world,” says Sen. Boxer, “is doing cap-and-trade, so we need to be consistent.” Oh yeah? Well, China isn’t doing it. India isn’t doing it. It’s not being done throughout Africa or most of Asia. A handful of European nations that signed onto the UN Kyoto protocol have tried it and they are trying to find a way out because cap-and-trade is a great way to weaken businesses and industries by sucking money away from their need to compete and grow.

Capping greenhouse gas emissions and trading “carbon credits” (the business that Al Gore happens to be in) to avoid a global warming that is NOT happening is criminally stupid.

Based on the notion that carbon dioxide and humans are the driving force behind global warming, it ignores the fact that CO2 is 0.0038 of the Earth’s atmosphere and six billion humans exhale CO2 daily. Do humans change the climate? Or does the Sun have something to do with it? Oceans, too. And clouds!

Meanwhile, on February 5, Greenpeace will release the results of a “carbon footprint analysis on the economic recovery package” via a teleconference whose participants will assert that “global warming will create a major drag on the U.S. and world economies…” No, it is all those idiotic UN environmental treaties that do that. And, again, there is NO global warming.

All this talk of “green jobs” ignores the fact that the more than a half million job losses that have been announced in recent weeks have nothing whatever to do with the environment. If you have lost your job with Home Depot, Starbucks, Microsoft or Caterpillar the last thing on your mind is global warming or the environment. You weren’t laid off because the Earth is supposedly getting warmer.

We do not have a “green economy”, currently the popular Obama administration buzzword. We have an economy in crisis because banks are not financially stable and people are not buying cars, not able to sell their homes, eat out as often, and all the other countless decisions that mean formerly thriving industries and businesses are in big trouble.

The next time you hear someone talk about a “sustainable environment”, keep in mind they are talking about stopping the construction of roads, bridges, coal-fired or nuclear plants, and just about anything else that represents more energy, jobs, and development of any kind.

There’s a reason that Barbara Boxer’s California is an economic disaster area. It’s because they have passed so many “environmental” laws that businesses, industries, and people cannot leave fast enough.

While President Obama and some members of Congress try their best to ignore the vast amount of actual science that demonstrates there is NO global warming the truth will continue to manifest itself until it can no longer be denied.

The Shortest Honeymoon on Record

By Alan Caruba

This is likely to be the shortest “honeymoon” on record for a new administration.

The news that former Senator Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name from consideration to be the Secretary of Health is another bombshell to hit. The news that the new Secretary of Treasury, Timothy Geithner, had problems doing his own tax return just barely skated by the confirmation process. Grownups knew that he had cheated on his taxes until he was caught.

Whoever is nominated for Health and Human Services, they are going to have to convince Americans that a government that couldn’t respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina is perfectly competent to take over the nation’s health care system. Good luck with that!

Meanwhile, just below the radar screen, Nancy Killefer, who failed for a year and a half to pay employment taxes on household help, withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government.

The only comparable meltdown I can recall was Bill Clinton’s first weeks in office when he set off the “gays in the military” bomb that went so terribly wrong for him so terribly fast that he scrambled to come up with “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to get away from it.

President Obama’s decision to give his first formal interview to Al-Arabia, a major Middle Eastern television channel, did not go well. He came off as so weak that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fell all over himself to get to the nearest microphone to demand that the new administration apologize for past “crimes” against Iran. Not a good start for a man who had already been described as “a house Negro” by Osama bin Laden’s right hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Overriding everything else, however, is the astonishing $819 billion “stimulus” bill that doesn’t promise to stimulate anything except the Democrat’s penchant for “earmarks” galore. Economists have denounced it along with anyone else who could find a media outlet.

Even the European Union let it be known that its “buy American” mandate was a very bad idea in the era of globalization where every nation’s economy depends on its ability to export goods, especially to the United States of America.

Nancy Pelosi has been running around defending millions for a program about sexually transmitted diseases and, by extension, insuring that fewer new Americans are born because in her view it would put a strain on the economy. Grandma Pelosi’s pronouncements have not been well received.

Cutting the Defense Department’s budget at a time the U.S. is still engaged in two wars has struck some people as a very bad idea, too. All we need now is another announcement by Sen. Harry Reid that “The war is lost.”

Just how tone-deaf are Obama and the Democrat leadership in Congress? And just how smart are those Republicans who have finally discovered their backbones by unanimously opposing the so-called stimulus bill? We may know soon enough when the 2010 elections are held.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these events has been the sudden collapse of Obamamania that extends even to the mainstream media who saw it as their duty to get him elected. Buyer’s remorse has set in very swiftly except among the totally brain-dead.

If the feeling spreads that Obama is simply unqualified for the job or overwhelmed by it, it is going to be one of the most difficult presidencies since that of Abraham Lincoln who wasn’t even sworn into office by the time several southern States had already met to declare they were seceding from the union.

The ultimate irony of all this is that Obama’s mastery of the Internet to raise gobs of money for his campaign is that he is only now discovering that the Internet community is equally capable of examining every aspect of every proposal he makes to “change” America into something most Americans don’t want.

Putin v. Obama: Change is Stressful

By Alan Caruba

New times, we’re told, call for new thinking. Out with the old and in with the new. In America’s case, the new is President Obama. For the Russians in charge of the former Soviet Union it means figuring out who the new guy is.

For someone who spent most of his life during the Cold War, I have an almost nostalgic feeling about it. One knew who the enemy was and it was the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union there was a feeling that a new, democratic Russia would replace it and, in many ways a new Russia has emerged.

I have a friend who visited Moscow in 2004 and again in 2008. Jim Camp is an internationally recognized negotiation coach. He described the difference that four years made as that of night and day. It was a grim place in 2004 but by 2008 he felt like he was in New York, a bustling city where Russians in the streets were smiling. CNN, he told me, is watched by everyone and English is a second language to Russians right down to taxi drivers.
(Read his commentary here)

In a recent article published in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, Alexander Goltz asked “Why is Russia’s leadership so annoyed with Obama?” Given his commentary’s open criticism of the Putin regime, one can see that some progress has been made.

Speaking of the televised inauguration of President Obama, Goltz reported that “I observed Russian journalists from the four government-controlled, nationally syndicated channels racking their brains, trying to outdo each other in slinging mud at the inaugural ceremonies.” Americans were described as “airheads” who had been duped by the Obama campaign propaganda. “Which begs the question: how has Obama—who has yet to do anything, good or bad—managed to irritate the Russian elite?”

Even a former foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, no fan of the U.S., was “amazed at the fact that nobody in Moscow is rejoicing over the complete absence of Neoconservatives (who swarmed around Bush and informed his foreign policy) in Obama’s circle.”

“As ridiculous as it might seem,” concluded Goltz, “I think it is because he is black.”

Whew! How politically incorrect can you get, but Goltz pushed on to say that the Russian governing elite have “an abiding conviction” that everything in the U.S. is the same as in Russia, i.e., “manipulated elections, strict control over the media, corruption, and nationalism. The Americans are just better at covering it up.”

Putin, like Bush, was operating from a Cold War frame of mind and both, in that respect, thought that they understood each other though Bush became less enamored of Putin over the years. It may account for why the invasion of Georgia caused so little alarm in U.S. foreign policy circles. The Russians were being Russians! And, having invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. was in no position to criticize,

It will probably require another generation or two of Russians before they finally let go of their fantasies about America and engage us and the rest of the world as a normal nation among nations. “Trust, but verify” said Ronald Reagan when dealing with the Russians. It’s still a good policy.

Whether President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can establish some new diplomatic rapport with Putin and his colleagues will be interesting to watch.

The Groundhog Named Gore

By Alan Caruba

Like the proverbial groundhog that shows up on February 2 to announce that there will be six more weeks of winter, Albert Gore shows up in Congress to announce that the world is coming to an end and that we’re all doomed because of global warming.

He did this most recently on January 28 in front of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by John Kerry. As usual, he did so in the midst of a winter storm that dumped inches of snow on Washington, D.C. and coated the streets with ice. This has actually become known as “the Gore effect.”

Gore reminds me of a character created by the Li’l Abner cartoonist, Al Capp. “Joe Btfsplk” was a walking jinx. He walked around with a perpetual dark rain cloud over his head and every time he showed up anywhere, bad luck would happen to anyone in the vicinity.

The ability to hold two totally opposite thoughts in one’s head, a winter storm and imminent destruction by sizzling hot weather, is a kind of schizophrenia or just plain stupidity. In Gore’s case, it has a lot more with lining his pockets with millions of dollars in the sale of “carbon credits” purchased to continue emitting carbon dioxide, the gas that Gore insists will destroy the world.

Carbon dioxide is the gas on which all plant life on Earth depends for growth. Without CO2 every single piece of vegetation dies and we die with it because a lot of critters we eat are herbivores. Happily, humans exhale about two pounds of CO2 every day. Burning anything, including calories, produces CO2. Even if there is more CO2, it has little to do with climate change.

Which begs the question why President Obama and the U.S. Congress wants to pass laws requiring cars to emit less CO2 and other laws to impose a cap-and-trade or carbon tax on anything that produces CO2. This is nothing less than pure thievery.

The other question, of course, is what global warming or climate change has to do with foreign relations? Since we cannot do a thing about the climate which, by the way, has been cooling since 1998, why is a Senate committee not only listening to Al Gore bloviating about it, but falling all over themselves to lavish praise upon this bulbous charlatan?

This is particularly true in light of the way Americans now rank the environment dead last on a list of priorities to which the government should attend. That’s not going to happen because President Obama is a Green zealot and, as more Americans gain awareness of this, there is likely to be a backlash.

This is the first Groundhog day President Obama is in office. He has at least three more to go and, who knows, after that he may be unemployed again like a lot of Americans recovering from Obamamania.

Gore, like the Energizer Bunny, however, will just keep going and going and going.