Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, April 6, 2010


What a beautiful frigg'n day!

Hell... it almost seems a shame to reflect upon bad news on a day such as today... but duty calls!
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11 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2010/4/6/study-california-public-pensions-underfunded-by-over-500b.aspx

California's three major public pension funds are underfunded by more than half a trillion dollars, according to a report released Monday...

* TO THOSE WHO CRITIQUE BARKER'S NEWSBITES AS SOMETIMES REPETITIOUS... (*SMILE*)... DAMN STRAIGHT! THIS KIND OF NEWS - THE MESSAGE INHERENT IN THE NEWS - DESERVES REPETITION! (OR... JUST STICK YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND AND REPEAT, "NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH..."

The study examined the California Public Employees' Retirement System; the California State Teachers' Retirement System; and the University of California's retirement system. The three systems serve about 2.6 million retirees.

The Stanford report estimates that California's shortfall for government pensions and health care benefits is about $535 billion. Researchers tallied CalPERS' unfunded liabilities at $239.7 billion and CalSTRS' liabilities at $156.7 billion. The new figures are significantly higher than previous estimates from the pension funds.

* NO... (*SMIRK*)... I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT... HOW COULD GOVERNMENT COST ESTIMATES EVER TURN OUT TO BE... er... UNDERSTATED?

In July 2008, CalPERS estimated its unfunded liabilities at $38.6 billion and CalSTRS estimated its liabilities at $16.2 billion.

* WHOA! NOW THAT'S ONE HELL OF AN UNDERESTIMATION - EVEN BY GOVERNMENT STANDARDS!

The Stanford report suggests that California would need to put $360 billion into its pension and health benefit systems immediately to have an 80% chance of meeting 80% of the obligations within 16 years.

(*SNICKER*)

* YEAH... I'M SURE THEY'LL GET RIGHT ON THAT.

(*SMIRK*) (*SNORT*)

* YEAH... MAYBE THOSE OF YOU WHO TEND TO AVERT YOUR EYES FROM REALITY HAVE THE RIGHT IDEA AFTER ALL; THE PICTURE I'M SEEING REALLY IS ENOUGH TO MAKE ONE SICK.

April 6, 2010 at 3:28 PM
William R. Barker said...

TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/06/the-914-presidency/

[T]he president’s speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era. ... But these differences in style mask a sameness in substance that should worry civil libertarians. When it comes to the legal framework for confronting terrorism, President Obama is acting in no meaningful sense any different than President Bush after 2006, when the Supreme Court overturned the view that the president’s war time powers were effectively unlimited.

The U.S. [under President Obama, Speaker of the House Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Reid] still reserves the right to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charge, try them via military tribunal, keep them imprisoned even if they are acquitted, and kill them in foreign countries with which America is not formally at war (including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan).

When Obama closed the secret CIA prisons known as “black sites,” he specifically allowed for temporary detention facilities where a suspect could be taken before being sent to a foreign or domestic prison, a practice known as “rendition.”

* WHICH BY THE WAY BILL CLINTON WAS A HUGE FAN OF.

And even where the Obama White House has made a show of how it has broken with the Bush administration, such as outlawing enhanced interrogation techniques, it has done so through executive order, which can be reversed at any time by the sitting president.

(*SMIRK*)

The font of this extraordinary authority is a congressional resolution passed just three days after the 9/11 attacks. It says, “The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Just as President Bush said the 9/14 resolution gave him the wartime powers to detain, interrogate, capture, and kill terrorists all over the world, so too does President Obama. On March 13, 2009 Justice Department lawyers said in a Habeas brief before the D.C. Federal Court that this resolution, known as the AUMF, or authorization of the use of military force, granted the administration detention authority. While it’s true that President Obama appears more reluctant to use these extraordinary powers than his predecessor, he is nonetheless asserting, enthusiastically at times, that he has such powers. And because so much of the American war on terror is conducted in secret, it is difficult to know what Obama is and is not doing to wage it.

* To be continued...

April 6, 2010 at 4:16 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Unlike other wars in American history, a global war on a terrorist network has no geographic boundaries and no clear endpoint. FDR interned Japanese Americans until the end of World War II, an extraordinary assault on civil liberties. But at least there was no doubt what the end of that war would look like.

“The danger of a war that takes place everywhere and lasts forever is that it gives the president almost limitless authority to detain or even kill U.S. citizens and civilians anywhere in the world,” says Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

On February 3, Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, confirmed that power in congressional testimony, telling lawmakers that the administration had the right to kill American citizens who joined Al Qaeda without court involvement or consultation with Congress. The only legal authority required, Blair said, was “special permission,” which amounts to presidential approval on a case-by-case basis. This position troubles Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur for targeted killings, whose requests for information on CIA drone strikes has been stonewalled by the Obama administration. “The U.S. under President Obama has apparently maintained the Bush administration’s view that, because it is involved in a global armed conflict against Al Qaeda, it is permitted to target and kill relevant individuals anywhere in the world,” Alston says.

The White House has repeatedly defended using the same powers that were frequent targets of Democratic criticism when Bush and Cheney were exercising them.

* BUSINESS AS USUAL. (*SMIRK*)

In a December speech at West Point announcing a surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, Obama underscored that the action was authorized by the September 14 resolution, which, he noted, passed by a vote of 98 to 0 in the Senate.

* MEANING NOT ONE DEMOCRAT SENATOR OF THE TIME VOTED AGAINST PASSING THE BUCK TO BUSH (AND NOW OBAMA).

* AT LEAST THE REPUBLICANS ARE BY AND LARGE CONSISTENT IN WANTING AMERICAN PRESIDENTS TO BE RECOGNIZED AS VIRTUAL WARLORDS WHEN IT COMES TO THE USE OF MILITARY POWER. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GETTING WITH THEM!

As for overseeing the intelligence community’s surveillance of Americans, the Obama administration has failed to appoint members to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a panel formed in 2004 and modified in 2007 to prevent the government from spying on U.S. citizens. As former New Jersey Republican Gov. Thomas H. Kean, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, said in January, “We have now a massive capacity in this country to develop data on individuals, and the board should be the champion of seeing that collection capabilities do not intrude into privacy and civil liberties.”

[W]e must be honest with ourselves. Obama, like Bush, is committed to a long war against an amorphous network of terrorists. In at least the constitutional sense, he is no harder or softer than his predecessor. And like his predecessor, he has not come up with a plan for relinquishing these extraordinary powers once the long war ends, if it ever does. If change is going to come to U.S. policy on terrorism, it will have to come from a bipartisan recognition that Americans cannot trust their government to tell them when they are safe again.

April 6, 2010 at 4:16 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVEOvxzdfoOQ

Canada’s dollar was worth more than the U.S. currency for the first time since July 2008 on the back of the rising price of crude oil and the prospect of higher interest rates.

April 6, 2010 at 4:17 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0517093120100405

The Internal Revenue Service could tap individual tax returns to collect fines against people who fail to buy health insurance as required under recently enacted healthcare legislation, the U.S. tax commissioner said on Monday.

* "...COULD..." HUH?

People who do not comply [with federal mandates concerning individual health insurance] would be levied penalties, and if they don't pay them the penalties could be taken out of their tax refunds.

* AGAIN WITH THAT "COULD" BUSINESS...

Under the new law, the IRS cannot seize assets or levy fines, so Shulman said refunds were the most obvious option to collect penalties.

* UMM... IF THE REFUND IS OWED YOU THEN WHETHER OR NOT THE CHECK HAS BEEN MAILED THE "ASSET VALUE" OF THE REFUND REMAINS LEGALLY YOURS. RE-READ THE ABOVE EXCERPT... IT'S TOTAL DOUBLE-TALK!

The new law aims to expand coverage to about 32 million uninsured Americans.

* YA EVER NOTICE HOW THAT NUMBER KEEPS CHANGING...? ONE DAY IT'S 40 MILLION, THE NEXT 48 MILLION, THE NEXT 19 MILLION (THAT FROM AN EARLY PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS...)... AND NOW IT'S 32 MILLION. OH, YEAH... I TRUST THESE FOLKS AS NUMBERS CRUNCHERS! (*SNORT*)

Representative Dave Camp, a senior Republican on the tax-writing Ways and Means committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, issued a report shortly after its passage arguing that law "dangerously expands IRS authority."

"The individual mandate would create millions of captive customers for health insurance companies, with the IRS acting as the enforcement agency for those companies," Camp's report asserted.

April 6, 2010 at 4:17 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35421.html

[President] Obama promised to expand health care coverage by 32 million people and add not one dime to the deficit.

He promised Americans who wanted to keep their coverage that the government would leave it alone.

He promised the bill would help the economy and grow jobs when millions of unemployed Americans are looking for hope.

He promised not to add to states' debts.

But those promises won't come true.

The law will not pay for itself. In a New York Times op-ed piece, former Congressional Budget Office head and American Action Forum President Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimated it could put the country about $560 billion in the hole.

The law could cost jobs, hurt economic growth and hamper innovation. Verizon, AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, 3M and other companies have filed SEC reports saying that this bill will cost them a combined $10 billion.

Beacon Hill Institute, the fiscally conservative economic research group of Boston's Suffolk University, estimates 700,000 jobs will be lost, as small and medium-sized businesses try to provide health care for their employees.

The law does not allow seniors to keep the insurance they have. By 2019, 4.8 million seniors will be squeezed out of Medicare Advantage.

The law does not help states with the high cost of health care. It makes the states' budget situations worse. By 2014, states will be required to pay 50% of the administrative costs that come with expanding Medicaid.

This law will not let the middle class keep its plans. The CBO projects that by 2016, the basic plan, covering only 70% of a family's medical expenses, will cost $14,100 a year. Families making $88,000 or more won't qualify for the government subsidies. This means a family making $100,000 could spend as much as one-fifth of annual income to keep private insurance.

This issue cried out for a bipartisan approach. We should have worked together and done things differently. In fact, Obama promised during the campaign that he would do things differently - with change we could all believe in. The American people believed that he would change how Washington does business - that he would seek consensus, that he would genuinely listen to the other side, find the best ideas and move forward in such a way as to unify the country. But he didn't. Instead, he decided to jam legislation down the throats of the American people.

And it is not just on health care. On issue after issue, Obama campaigned one way and is governing in a different way. He said he would fight waste, but he signed a pork-filled stimulus bill. He said he would cut taxes on the middle class, but they face tax increases with health care reform. He said he would be Israel's strongest supporter, but we all now know that isn't true.

[In short... the President] is not living up to his promises.

April 6, 2010 at 10:18 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/271051

I suspect [President Barak Obama] will be judged quite harshly by history and his countrymen for not simply avoiding but dramatically accelerating the major domestic concern facing the United States: our unsustainable and soon-to-be debilitating deficit and debt.

I don’t lay all, or even most, of the blame on President Obama for the debt he faced upon taking office. While his party, like the GOP, was clearly complicit in the situation, and Obama’s own actions in the Senate (especially blocking reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which played a role in the collapse of the housing market) contributed to what went wrong, much of the river of red ink he inherited was due to a financial and credit implosion for which he wasn’t chiefly responsible.

* FAIR ENOUGH! AND... PROPERLY CONTEXTED!

What I do hold President Obama responsible for is that he took office when it was clear that our debt and deficit had reached crisis proportions. While that situation wasn’t the case when he decided to run for the presidency, it was the situation when he assumed the presidency. And rather than rethink the core purpose of his presidency, he decided to pursue his agenda in a state of denial, as if the financial collapse that began in September 2008 never happened, as if our ominous new fiscal reality had never occurred.

At the moment when history demanded one thing of Mr. Obama, he did another. What the president should have done, in the wake of market collapse, was to create his own Nixon-to-China moment: trimming and reforming our middle-class-welfare state. It is the type of thing that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress have much greater latitude to do than a Republican president and a Republican Congress. Instead, Obama used this moment to create a new middle-class entitlement, ObamaCare, at precisely the moment when our other ones are falling into bankruptcy. On top of that, of course, was the president’s $860 billion-plus stimulus package, his $410 billion omnibus spending bill, and his decision to spend hundreds of billions of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) repayment dollars rather than to pay down the deficit.

Consider where we are and where we are headed. The deficit in 2009 was $1.4 trillion - the equivalent of 10% of the nation’s economic output and the highest percentage since the end of World War II. The president’s 2011 budget will generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade. Our publicly held debt, which was $6.3 trillion when Obama entered office, now totals $8.2 trillion. According to the CBO, it’s headed to more than $20 trillion in 2020, equaling 90% of the estimated gross domestic product that year. (As a reference point, nations that comprise the European Union are required to keep their debt levels below 60 percent.) Interest rates alone would consume some $900 billion per year, almost five times what they were last year. In addition, the total unfunded liability (the gap between projected assets and benefit obligations) for Medicare and Social Security is $43 trillion; in five years, the total is estimated to grow to $57 trillion.

Confronting figures like this, Mr. Obama should have made spending restraint and entitlement reform his top domestic priority. And yet the president has taken us in exactly the opposite direction, engineering the passage of ObamaCare (over its first ten years of full implementation, it will cost at least $2 trillion). That is the equivalent of dropping plane loads of lighter fluid onto a fire that is raging out of control.

* I HIGHLY RECOMMEND READING THE FULL ESSAY. IT'S NOT LONG.

April 6, 2010 at 10:18 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2010/04/06/obama-kipling-and-the-bomb/?singlepage=true

So, Barack Obama, in pursuit of a world in which nuclear weapons are “obsolete,” just announced that he is “revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions” under which the United States would use such weapons. To set an “example” to other nations, the president also announced that the United States was renouncing the development of any new nuclear weapons.

[As] reported in The New York Times: "For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack."

[Continuing, the President] said in the next breath that any such threats could be deterred with "a series of graded options," a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure.”

Are you feeling safer now? 1) We are going to renounce the development of new nuclear weapons even as our enemies around the world eagerly pursue every possible refinement for use in their arsenals; 2) We are abandoning our policy of deliberate, and deliberately off-putting, ambiguity about when and how we would retaliate, stating boldly that we would not respond to a biological, chemical, or cyberattack with nuclear weapons; 3) But we are also going “To preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure.”

(*FEELING THE NEED FOR A STIFF DRINK*)

Has no one in Obama’s inner clique heard of the Roman military historian Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum“: “if you want peace, prepare for war.”

* APPARENTLY NOT.

April 6, 2010 at 10:18 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/karzai_new_low_JfRxe6UV6zXCjdEalGAsLM

Our government continues to insist that imminent magic will make President Hamid Karzai reform and make his Afghan government perform.

Ain't gonna happen.

We're married to an abusive spouse and keep going back for more. We give Karzai lavish presents (an entire country), but he just keeps demanding more - while cheating on us.

President George W. Bush tried to be pals. Didn't work. President Obama tried charm. Didn't work. Last week in Kabul, Obama finally gave Karzai a shape-up lecture. Didn't work.

As soon as Obama went wheels-up, Karzai delivered a speech damning Western - meaning US - interference. A thousand dead Americans and billions of dollars poured into a cesspool? That's just meddling to Karzai.

Mortified, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the line to Kabul. The conversation boiled down to this:

Hillary: "How could you? After you promised."

Hamid: "I didn't mean you, sweetheart. I love you."

Hillary: "Oh. OK -- but don't do it again."

(*SNICKER*)

The next day, Karzai damned us in public a second time. But he's still cashing the checks. (We shoulda got a prenup.)

In Marjah, our Marines did a super job eliminating active resistance. Now they face paralyzing passive resistance, thanks to the corrupt Karzai government's unpopularity. Once the Marines took Marjah - a collection of towns and villages - the Afghan government was supposed to "step up" and deliver order and aid. But the handful of Afghan officials who've arrived are unwelcome, frightened and hiding behind high walls. What's being done is still being done by frustrated Americans.

The city of Kandahar (population 350,000) is next on our to-do list. We're supposed to drive out the Taliban (with minimal bloodshed, thanks) so the Afghan government can step up to an even greater challenge.

Ain't gonna happen.

The locals aren't willing to stand with Karzai's gang of thieves against the Taliban - or their relatives. Our prissy counterinsurgency doctrine is wildly out of place in Afghanistan: It assumes a popular government exists that cares about its citizens. In Kandahar, we've got Karzai's hated opium-king brother in the governor's chair.

[Karzai's] recent public abuse of us is aimed at regaining street cred with the locals.

[T]hat ain't gonna happen, either. If Karzai should be popular anywhere, it's Kandahar. Born into an illustrious family in the nearby village of Karz, he's a leader of the influential Pashtun Popazai tribe. He worked with the anti-Soviet Mujaheddin in the 1980s, served as a deputy foreign minister in an ill-fated Kabul government in the early '90s, then flirted with the Taliban before running like hell. He wasn't an unknown quantity to Afghans. But when we backed him, we didn't know when to back off. We refused to recognize how xenophobic Afghan tribal culture remains.

Contrary to the nonsense of the left, Bush's mistake wasn't that he did too little in Afghanistan - but that, from 2002 onward, he did too much. We didn't have a clue. Our tens of billions in aid money merely enriched well-connected Afghans. The poor were left in the dirt, seething with envy.

Now we're doing much too much. To preserve the regime of an Afghan president whose betrayals grow more flagrant every week, we're sending another 30,000 US troops.

Over the years, I've heard plenty of horror stories of women who fell for Middle Eastern men living in the West. The males seemed so considerate, promising the moon and the stars. But, after the marriage, on returning "home," they reverted to the patterns of their own repressive culture.

Our problem with Hamid Karzai is that he's Afghan.

April 6, 2010 at 10:19 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/wild_time_in_midtown_jg31Vk8JDWSxpb4u8OorvI

Mayor Bloomberg plucked a word from an inglorious period in New York City's recent history - wilding - to describe Sunday night's violent rampage through Midtown that left four people with gunshot wounds and 56 under arrest.

"Wilding," of course, is a word that most New Yorkers thought had been permanently retired - at least as it applied to the five boroughs.

* MIDTOWN... FRIGG'N MIDTOWN...

It's the phenomenon of gang-related mayhem that left New Yorkers rightly convinced that police had lost control of the streets to the gangs and hoodlums.

* WHICH OBVIOUSLY THEY HAVE! AGAIN... MIDTOWN...!!!

[W]hat occurred Sunday night and into early Monday morning is a stark reminder - and a clear warning: New York could well backslide.

* WELL... IT IS AFTER ALL THE AGE OF OBAMA...

It follows the first real, sustained uptick in crime figures - shootings up 19 percent and murders up 22 percent over the same period last year - which even Bloomberg has conceded is "worrisome."

* AGAIN... AGE OF OBAMA...

It's true, as Bloomberg said afterward, that police "can't be everywhere." But it's also hard for them to be anywhere - given the NYPD headcount is down a whopping 6,000 from its high.

Bloomberg needs to establish budget priorities that mirror current imperatives -- and keeping New Yorkers safe both from new-wave "wilders" and garden-variety gunsels must be right at the top of his list. If that means more file clerks and Education Department paraprofessionals must go, tough.

* FORGET THE FILE CLERKS... LET'S GO AFTER UPPER MIDDLE MANAGEMENT AND POLITICAL APPOINTEES!

The idea that a spasm of street violence after the Javits car show is so acceptable that it's considered a regular occurrence is beyond bizarre. "We're not going to tolerate it," said Bloomberg yesterday.

"Anymore," he might have added.

(*SNORT*) (*DISGUSTED SHAKE OF THE HEAD*)

April 6, 2010 at 10:19 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-travel-briefcase5-2010apr05,0,5684552.story

Chief executives of some of the nation's biggest firms have increased spending about 9% on the personal use of corporate jets over the last year, according to a new study of corporate expenses. The findings, published last week by the Corporate Library, an independent research firm, are based on data from nearly 340 major U.S. companies' expense reports for personal jet use in the last two fiscal years.

The biggest corporate jet expenses were filed by Gary Convis, the former CEO of Dana Holding Corp., an auto parts and systems supplier in Toledo, Ohio. Dana Holding paid nearly $1.2 million in aircraft bills for Convis and reimbursed him almost $25,000 for the personal taxes he paid, the study said.

No. 5 on the study's list of top spenders was Howard Lester, outgoing chairman and CEO of Williams-Sonoma Inc., the report said. It said the San Francisco-based retailer paid more than $675,000 in expenses for a jet leased from a company owned by Lester.

Representatives for Williams-Sonoma could not be reached for comment.

(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)

April 6, 2010 at 10:19 PM

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