Just some rambling to start off the day...
So... how do you like your gas mileage, folks? It's only money... right? Oh, yeah... sure... the extreme cold is part of the equation, but so is that "winter mix" you're likely being forced to run on so as to cut down on...
(*COUGHING FIT*)
...global warming.
(*SNORT*)
Speaking of... er... "global warming"... schools, courts, and government offices throughout the western Florida panhandle plan to close because of anticipated snow and ice...
(*HEADACHE*)
Notice, folks... nothing about Walmart closing.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
8 comments:
http://www.humanevents.com/2014/01/24/dr-pangloss-free-trader/
Seems that, despite the academic consensus that free trade is win-win for all, free trade is not free.
Great nations that have risen to global power by protecting their manufacturing, like Britain in the early 19th century, have begun their relative decline when they embraced free trade. Between 1870 and 1914, protectionist America and Germany both shoved Britain aside.
Since Y2K, China, which protects its industrial base by keeping its currency artificially cheap, has surged past Italy, Britain, France, Germany and Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. And they are gaining steadily on us.
Free trade appears to be the policy of fading nations.
Perhaps it is time for a profit and loss statement of its costs and benefits.
Undeniably, free trade has been a bonanza for the top 1% and many among our top 10%. After having shifted production overseas and dramatically lowered costs, U.S. transnationals saw a surge in profits. These were used to push corporate salaries into the stratosphere, increase dividends to shareholders, and keep the Washington lobbyists working the Hill day and night for fast track and free trade.
And the lifestyle of our corporate elites changed.
Where their fathers walked sooty factory floors in smokestack towns in World War II, these masters of the universe fly Gulfstream Vs to Davos and Dubai to dine with titled Europeans, Saudi princes and Chinese billionaires.
These are America’s winners from free trade.
The losers? Middle Americans.
The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I.
Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit.
Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.
And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses — bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies — that rose around the factory; they die, too.
The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade.
Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”
The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes.
If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy.
(And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?)
Whatever happens from free trade is what should happen, free traders say. As Dr. Pangloss explained to Candide, whatever happens, happens for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Sure.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-lone-survivor-and-our-quagmire-in-afghanistan/2014/01/27/cbe4fc16-8784-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html
* BY RICHARD COHEN
While watching the utterly gripping movie “Lone Survivor” recently, I comforted myself by noting that the four Navy SEALs engaged in a desperate firefight with the Afghan Taliban were all volunteers.
They asked for this, I told myself.
They were not draftees yanked out of civilian life and compelled to fight a war they could neither understand nor win. They had asked for this, I insisted, but I knew all the time that this was a lie. They had volunteered, but certainly not to die and certainly for no purpose.
* I AGREE WITH COHEN... HOWEVER... I ALSO KNOW THAT MANY (ACTUALLY... PROBABLY MOST) ACTIVE DUTY MILITARY PERSONNEL AND VETERANS WOULD DISAGREE WITH COHEN AND MYSELF.
Okay, I know this is only a movie. But it is [fairly] faithful to the book of the same name , which is faithful to the 2005 mission called Operation Red Wing that was intended to take out a Taliban commander. The title “Lone Survivor” pretty much says what happened, but you owe it to the SEALs and to their families to see the movie. The ending is not in doubt, but the reason for their sacrifice undoubtedly is. Afghanistan is a war searching for a reason.
(*NOD*)
* NO ONE IS SAYING WE SHOULDN'T HAVE GONE IN AND SMASHED THE TALIBAN AND OF COURSE AL QAEDA... BUT AFTER DOING SO AND INSTALLING A FRIENDLY GOVERNMENT WE SHOULD HAVE LEFT. PERIOD.
All through the movie, I kept asking myself, "Why?" What are these men fighting for?
Once, I knew the answer. After Sept. 11, 2001, I wanted to wipe out al-Qaeda and kill its Afghan hosts, the Taliban. Even before the terrorist attack, reports of the Taliban’s treatment of women — stonings, public executions in the soccer stadium, etc. — and beheadings of men convinced me that it simply had it coming: Send in the Marines.
But U.S. fighting units have been there since 2001.
The initial mission — the destruction of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan — was completed long ago. The Taliban and its allies remain, but unlike al-Qaeda they are indigenous and, seemingly, undeterred. They apparently have an unlimited supply of suicide bombers (who are these people?), and they continue to inflict mayhem on Afghans and foreigners alike. This month, the Taliban struck a Kabul restaurant that draws a Western clientele and killed at least 21 people. The attack by gunmen was preceded by a suicide bombing.
Bob Gates, in his memoir “Duty,” depicted Barack Obama as a commander in chief whose policy in Afghanistan was to do as little as possible — simultaneously ordering a surge and announcing a pull-out date. Gates, then defense secretary , was appalled: “The president doesn’t . . . believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his.”
* THE PRESIDENT IS A PIECE OF SHIT...
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Well, the war is not Obama’s. It is George W. Bush’s — one he interrupted to mindlessly chase after Saddam Hussein. But Obama embraced the Afghanistan mission and then, apparently, never knew what to do with it.
I don’t blame him.
* OF COURSE NOT; YOU'RE A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT. (PLUS... WHITE GUILT...)
Afghanistan is an arid Vietnam, a quagmire presided over by the petulant and unpredictable Hamid Karzai. For Obama, Gates wrote, “it’s all about getting out.”
* BUT OBVIOUSLY IT WASN'T... OR WE'D BE OUT.
(*SHRUG*)
The quote is pithy, but the observation is banal. It was clear back in 2009, when Obama ordered his surge in Afghanistan, that he had no stomach for continuing the war. The war goes on and on and has now become fused with the futility of Iraq — 2,307 Americans dead in Afghanistan, 4,489 dead in Iraq, an incomprehensible waste of lives.
* AND TREASURE... AND STATURE...
The administration wants U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan (the Pentagon has suggested 10,000). It has its reasons. The country was once a terrorist base and could revert.
* BLAH, BLAH, BLAH... THE SAME APPLIES TO MOST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD - PARTICULARLY THOSE IN THE THIRD-WORLD.
The necessary pursuit of the remaining Sept. 11 terrorists is best based in the region — as are U.S. drones — and without an American spine, the Afghan army could collapse.
* SO...??? LET THE AFGHANS KILL THE AFGHANS!
That would permit the return to power of the Taliban...
* BULLSHIT. WHENEVER AND WHEREVER THE TALIBAN WERE TO REGAIN POWER WE'D BE ABLE TO TAKE THEM OUT AT WILL FROM AFAR. FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES THEY'D BE JUST AS POWERLESS (OR FLIP SIDE, ONLY AS POWERFUL) AS THEY ARE NOW.
...and the abandonment of women and girls to frenzied misogynists. That, though, has nothing to do with realpolitik, just real life. Soon, the music will die and we will have to avert our eyes.
* THE WORLD IS WHAT THE WORLD IS.
But as Gates insisted, Obama has failed to make these or other arguments. “He needed to say publicly why the troops’ sacrifices were necessary,” Gates said of the president. Gates made that point several times, and he is right. Maybe, though, Obama is cautioned by the experience of Lyndon Johnson. On July 28, 1965, LBJ began a news conference by addressing the question of “why we are in Vietnam.” He never supplied a satisfactory answer.
* OBAMA CARES FOR MORE FOR OBAMA THAN HE CARES FOR THE NATION... LET ALONE FOR INDIVIDUAL MEN AND WOMEN IN UNIFORM. (GIVE BUSH HIS DUE; HE ALWAYS THOUGHT HE WAS DOING THE RIGHT THING... SACRIFICING FOR THE BIG PICTURE.)
In the movie theater, I watched two films at once — “Lone Survivor” on the screen and Vietnam in my head. On the screen, as in reality, men fought and died — and, as with Vietnam, I no longer knew why. One man survived the battle. The rest were lost — as is the reason for the war itself.
* FOUR-PARTER... (Part 1 of 4)
http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/r14/USA/Politics/2014/0126/Is-Barack-Obama-an-imperial-president/%28page%29/3
President Barack Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer, was once skeptical of the aggressive use of presidential power.
During the 2008 campaign, he accused President George W. Bush of regularly circumventing Congress.
Yet as president, Obama has grown increasingly bold in his own use of executive action, at times to controversial effect.
The president (or his administration) has unilaterally changed elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA); declared an anti-gay-rights law unconstitutional; lifted the threat of deportation for an entire class of undocumented immigrants; bypassed Senate confirmation of controversial nominees; waived compliance requirements in education law; and altered the work requirements under welfare reform.
* THIS PRESIDENT HAS TIME AND AGAIN SPIT ON THE CONSTITUTION AND BROKEN THE LAW... AND GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT!
This month, the Obama administration took the highly unusual step of announcing that it will recognize gay marriages performed in Utah – even though Utah itself says it will not recognize them while the issue is pending in court.
Early in his presidency, Obama also expanded presidential war-making powers, surveillance of the American public, and extra-judicial drone strikes on alleged terrorists outside the United States, including Americans – going beyond Mr. Bush's own global war on terror following 9/11.
To critics, Obama is the ultimate "imperial president," willfully violating the Constitution to further his goals, having failed to convince Congress of the merits of his arguments. To others, he is exercising legitimate executive authority in the face of an intransigent Congress and in keeping with the practices of past presidents.
* THE CRITICS ARE RIGHT; THE "OTHERS" ARE WRONG.
On the eve of Obama's fifth State of the Union message, on Jan. 28, the president faces a steep challenge. His job approval has plummeted to the low 40s, following the disastrous rollout of his health-care reform and public outrage over massive data collection by the National Security Agency. Unemployment is falling steadily but remains high, at 6.7%.
* NO... UNEMPLOYMENT ISN'T "FALLING STEADILY." IT'S "EMPLOYMENT" WHICH IS FALLING STEADILY! THE "STAT" IS A REFLECTION OF THAT, NOT OF JOBS BEING GAINED!
"We're 4-1/2 years into an alleged recovery, and most Americans still think we're in a recession," says William Galston, a Clinton White House veteran and scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
* I AGREE. WHILE TECHNICALLY IT'S NOT A RECESSION UNLESS THERE'S TWO QUARTERS OF NEGATIVE GROWTH, BUT SINCE MUCH OF THE "POSITIVE" GROWTH HAS BEEN INFLATION FUELED...
(*SHRUG*)
* ANYWAY... ANYONE WELL-READ AND KNOWLEDGEABLE (OR ANYONE WHO SIMPLY READS USUALLY RIGHT) IS WELL AWARE OF THE ACTUAL SITUATION.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 4)
Even though Obama will never face the voters again, he has plenty of incentive to boost his game. Now he's playing for his legacy, and the judgment of the history books. Politically, he's playing for the final national election of his presidency – next November's midterms, in which Democratic control of the Senate is at risk. Reclaiming the House from the Republicans is close to impossible. Divided government is Obama's near-certain reality for the rest of his presidency. Still, keeping the Senate in Democratic hands remains critical to Obama's legacy: It will allow him to confirm presidential nominees – including most judges, who have lifetime tenure – with a simple majority after Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid engineered a rule change last November.
Restoring public confidence in Obama's trustworthiness and competence as an executive is also critical, as the president tries to move beyond the "ObamaCare" fiasco and National Security Agency snooping.
But one point is certain: It's a new day for Team Obama. John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and a turnaround artist, has put on his cape and swooped into the West Wing for a one-year tour as a counselor. The president has also brought back the highly regarded Phil Schiliro to oversee the continuing health-care rollout and made deputy communications director (and Capitol Hill insider) Katie Beirne Fallon his legislative affairs director.
But it's the arrival of Mr. Podesta that has Washington buzzing.
He ran the Obama transition after his first election and then repaired to his think tank, the Center for American Progress, resisting entreaties to join the administration. Most important, his passion is climate change...
* GLOBAL... er... WARMING...
...and he's a big believer in executive action – by the president himself, as well as via agency rules and regulations.
"I think [White House officials] were naturally preoccupied with legislating at first, and I think it took them a while to make the turn to execution. They are focused on that now," Podesta told Politico last year before agreeing to his new White House gig. "They have to realize that the president has broad authority, that he's not just the prime minister. He can drive a whole range of action. They always grasped that on foreign policy and in the national security area. Now they are doing it on the domestic side."
Starting with George Washington, American presidents have used executive orders, proclamations, and other techniques to wield power...
* LEGAL POWER! CONSTITUTIONAL POWER! THE POWERS WITHIN THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL PEROGATIVES...!!!
...usually without controversy. These moves can be as important as the Emancipation Proclamation, and as trivial as an executive order allowing federal workers to leave work early on Christmas Eve.
* THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION WAS MADE DURING A TIME OF CIVIL WAR AND APPLIED ONLY TO THE STATES IN REBELLION.
They carry the force of law, but are ill-defined. Legal scholars disagree even on whether there's a constitutional "bright line" that defines what a president can do on his own and what requires congressional action.
"It gets controversial when a president simply states that he's acting under the power granted to him by the Constitution and laws of the United States," says Phillip J. Cooper, author of the book "By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action."
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 3 of 4)
Bush invited controversy with his aggressive use of "signing statements," written pronouncements during bill signings that explain the president's view of a law – including at times the constitutionality of some aspects of it.
* THERE'S NOTHING UNCONSTITUTIONAL ABOUT SIGNING STATEMENTS. (NOR DO THEY HAVE ANY INHERENT LEGAL POWER!)
In his first presidential campaign, Obama decried Bush's practice, but as president, he has continued it.
* BECAUSE HE'S OBAMA...
(*SMIRK*)
In their use of executive orders, Bush and Obama are virtually tied: In his first five years in office, Bush issued 165 orders, versus 167 by Obama. But a bean-counting approach doesn't capture the scope of a president's approach to executive power. "It's really the character of the actions, and their subject," says Jonathan Turley, a constitutional scholar at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "In my view, Obama has surpassed George W. Bush in the level of circumvention of Congress and the assertion of excessive presidential power. I don't think it's a close question."
Many of Obama's most controversial power plays have come through means other than executive orders. Here are some examples:
1) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This policy, announced by the Department of Homeland Security in 2012, came via a memorandum that directs authorities to exercise "prosecutorial discretion" in dealing with some young undocumented immigrants. If they meet the criteria for eligibility, they are shielded temporarily from deportation and allowed to work. The DACA program enacted many of the goals of the failed DREAM Act legislation, though it does not create a path to citizenship. Critics say that waiving deportation laws for more than a million people is not "prosecutorial discretion" – it's policymaking by executive fiat, usurping the role of Congress.
* AND THESE "CRITICS" ARE CORRECT! (OBVIOUSLY THEY'RE CORRECT...!!!)
(Politics also infused how both sides handled DACA. For Obama, it was an obvious play for the Latino vote ahead of the 2012 election. For congressional Republicans, even if they could have attained "standing" to sue – a major problem in efforts to challenge executive action – acting to undo a policy that helps sympathetic young immigrants would have been bad politics. So they chose not to fight it.)
* AGAIN... BOEHNER, MCCONNELL, AND THE RINO LEADERSHIP ARE SCUM. ABSOLUTE CRETINS!
2) ObamaCare. Last July, when the president delayed the mandate for large employers to provide health coverage for their employees by a year, his critics cried foul. "Obama's not interpreting the law; he's changing the law," says Mr. Turley. "He's changing deadlines that were the subject of intense legislative debate."
* YEP. (AGAIN... HOW CAN YOU ARGUE THIS?! THE LAW SAID WHAT IT SAID! ONLY CONGRESS CAN CHANGE EXISTING LAW VIA NEW LAW VIA CONSTITUTIONAL LAWMAKING!)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* NOT CONCLUDING...!! (Make this part 4 of 5)
The Obama administration also did an about-face on the requirement that members of Congress and their staff get their health insurance via the government exchanges, without the government subsidy they were receiving under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Under the ACA, they would not have been eligible for subsidies – leading to fears of a brain drain from Capitol Hill.
* BULLSHIT!
Last August, the Office of Personnel Management issued a rule allowing Hill employees to keep their federal subsidy for health insurance. The plans offered through the exchanges qualified as "health benefit plans" for the purposes of the subsidy, OPM said.
* AGAIN... ILLEGAL... UNCONSTITUTIONAL... THIS IS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION!
3) Gay marriage. Another bracing move by the Obama administration came in 2011, when the Department of Justice announced it would no longer defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that banned federal recognition of same-sex marriages.
* THE PRESIDENT SWEARS AN OATH TO FAITHFULLY EXECUTE THE LAW... THE LAW THAT EXISTS... NOT JUST THE LAW AS HE APPROVES OR DISPROVES...
(*SIGH*)
The Supreme Court went on to strike down part of the law last June, but that does not lessen the highly unusual nature of an administration declaring on its own that a law was unconstitutional, before the court had ruled.
4) Recess appointments. In yet another aggressive use of executive action – bypassing the Senate in making recess appointments to key executive branch positions when the Senate is technically still in session – Obama may be on the verge of getting slapped down by the Supreme Court. On Jan. 13, the high court heard arguments over Obama's three controversial recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012.
* AS ALL OF YOU FAMILIAR WITH MY FEELINGS ON THIS ISSUE KNOW, I'M ACTUALLY LEANING TOWARDS OBAMA'S SIDE ON THIS ONE. (BUT AS ALWAYS, I COULD BE WRONG.) I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE HIGH COURT'S RULING.
Looking across the landscape of Obama's bold record of executive action, Turley of George Washington University doesn't mince words. "President Obama meets every definition of an imperial presidency," says Turley, who notes that he voted for Obama. "He is the president that Richard Nixon always wanted to be."
(*NOD*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 5 of 5)
The Constitution states that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Critics say that in decreeing changes to laws – such as the delay of the employer mandate under the ACA – Obama has repeatedly violated that constitutional command.
* WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE "CRITICS SAY?" THAT'S WHAT OBAMA HAS DONE! IT'S NOT IN QUESTION! THERE'S NO DEBATE! HE'S DONE WHAT HE'S DONE!
Others defend Obama, saying that the president's critics are using the Constitution as a political weapon.
* AND IF SO... THAT'S FINE! SOMETIMES THE CONSTITUTION IS GOING TO BE ON THE SAME SIDE AS ONE PARTY, AT ANOTHER TIME IT'LL BE ON THE OTHER SIDE. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS WHAT THE CONSTITUTION SAYS AND MEANS!
Democrats defend Obama's changes to the ACA with a list of ad hoc changes the Bush administration made to the Medicare prescription drug program when it went into effect in 2006. But when he was asked directly about the delayed employer mandate in a New York Times interview last July, Obama didn't argue for the legality of his moves or raise the precedent of the rollout of Bush's drug plan. Instead, he lashed out at his critics. "There's not an action that I take you don't have some folks in Congress who say that I'm usurping my authority," Obama said. "Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency."
* AND IN AN CASE, IF BUSH DID VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN CALLED ON IT AND HIS ACTIONS PREVENTED! (TWO WRONGS DO NOT MAKE A RIGHT!)
Constitutional scholar Lou Fisher is baffled by Obama's personal response. He believes Obama was justified in delaying the employer mandate on constitutional grounds as well as by "the practical need to avoid harming the program through effective and premature implementation," as he put it in a December article in the Boston Review.
* I'LL READ THAT ARTICLE. (BUT I DOUBT IT'LL SWAY ME... AFTER ALL, NOTHING I'M FAMILIAR WITH IN THE CONSTITUTION GIVES A PRESIDENT SUCH POWER WHEN SAID PRESIDENT FEELS "A PRACTICAL NEED." IF THERE'S A PRACTICAL NEED THEN THE LAW MUST BE AMENDED! ACCORDING TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROCESS!)
Obama's frequent use of executive action has only whetted activists' appetite for more, squeezing the president from the Left even as his critics scream tyranny and, along the fringe, talk about impeachment.
Year six holds the key to the rest of Obama's presidency. Can he regain the trust of the American people? Will the ACA begin to work? Can Democrats hold onto the Senate?
Obama's three immediate predecessors all endured crises in their second terms. Presidents Reagan and Clinton recovered politically and left office with strong economies.
* NO... PRESIDENT CLINTON LEFT OFFICE IN THE WAKE OF THE DOTCOM BUBBLE BLOWING UP!
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