Obama's father forced out at Harvard

what is very interesting about this article is that the POLITICO is a liberal website and never has negative articles about OBAMA

BOSTON — President Barack Obama’s father was forced to leave Harvard University before completing his Ph.D. in economics because the school was concerned about his personal life and finances, according to newly public immigration records.

Harvard had asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to delay a request by Barack Hussein Obama Sr. to extend his stay in the U.S., “until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him,” immigration official M.F. McKeon wrote in a June 1964 memo.

Harvard administrators, the memo stated, “were having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn’t seem to figure out how many wives he had.”

An earlier INS memo from McKeon said that while the elder Obama had passed his exams and was entitled on academic grounds to stay and complete his thesis, the school was going to try and “cook something up to ease him out.”

“They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home,” the memo stated.

In May 1964, David D. Henry, director of Harvard’s international office, wrote to Obama to say that, while he had completed his formal course work, the economics department and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences didn’t have the money to support him.

“We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that you should terminate your stay in the United States and return to Kenya to carry on your research and the writing of your thesis,” Henry’s letter stated.

Obama’s request for an extended stay was denied by the INS. He left Harvard and - divorced from president’s mother - returned to his native Kenya in July 1964. He did not complete his Ph.D.

The immigration memos, contained in the elder Obama’s Immigration and Naturalization file, were given to a Boston Globe reporter in 2009 through a Freedom of Information request. The papers were first made public Wednesday by The Arizona Independent, a weekly newspaper. The Associated Press obtained copies of them on Friday.

Harvard issued a statement Friday saying that it could not find in its own records anything to support the accounts given in the INS memos.

“While we cannot verify accounts of conversations that occurred nearly 50 years ago, a review of our existing files did not find any support for either the language or the implied intent described by the U.S. government official in the government documents,” the statement read.

When Obama was attending Harvard, the school faced serious constraints in financing research by international graduate students, the university also said.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler declined to comment Friday, saying the department does not comment on specific immigration cases.

Concerns about Obama’s personal life while he had been studying in the U.S. had been raised previously, according to the INS documents.

In 1961, while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii, the school’s foreign student adviser called an immigration official and said Obama had recently married StanleyAnn Dunham - the president’s mother - despite already having a wife in Kenya.

According to a memo written by an INS official in Honolulu, the adviser said Obama had been “running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways.”

Obama told the adviser that he had divorced his wife in Kenya.

He told the president’s mother the same thing, though she would later learn it was a lie.

Obama worked for an oil company and as a government economist after returning to Africa, but his personal and professional life would later deteriorate. He died in a car crash in 1982, when the future president was 21 and a student at Columbia University.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53968.html#ixzz1L0ePzpp0

Sen. Kohl to Geithner - "I want a Sweet deal"

Senator “Herb” Kohl is the senior senator from the state of Wisconsin. He’s a democrat. He was first elected to office way back in 1988. Twenty-two years in the senate comes with some important responsibilities. The good senator is on the Appropriations, Judiciary, and Banking Committees. He is the Chairman of both the Special Committee on Aging and the Agricultural Appropriations Committee.


Bottom line; Herb Kohl has clout in D.C. He is one of America’s elder statesmen. So when he asks for a favor it’s very hard to say “no”. I wonder what Tim Geithner is going to do with Herb’s recent letter asking for a change in the rules for retirement ages for cops and fireman from the great state of Wisconsin and every other state in the Union. Here’s what Senator Kohl is asking for:

I ask that you amend the regulations to make clear that the public safety employees safe harbor apply to WRS protective occupation participants. These participants put their lives on the line every day to protect our citizens and they deserve to retire with full benefits at the ages of 53 and 54.

I’ve got nothing against cops and I’ve always liked fireman. It’s not that I don’t think this group of people shouldn’t get a leg up. But at whose expense? What about those nurses, EMT folks, and ER Docs? What about everyone else?

The country is about to increase the Social Security retirement age and push back eligibility for Medicare to 67. And Kohl wants to cut the cops a sweetheart deal where they can retire with full benefits 12 years before anyone else.

We have two classes of workers in the USA; those that work for government and those in the private sector. There are two different sets of rules. The differences are in the number of holidays, benefits (far superior health care), job security and retirement benefits. Senator Kohl’s proposal makes the gap even larger.

Senator Kohl needs to understand that America is not the rich country that it once was. Our states, cities and municipalities simply can no longer afford the largess proposed by Kohl. The rules that he suggests are fair and reasonable actually aren’t fair or reasonable at all.

Senator Kohl is not blind. Nor is he uninformed. He must know that a suggestion like this is going to be received very badly by the folks who have to pay for it. That said, watch out for this one. Kohl’s clout makes even this proposal a possibility.

It’s an even money bet that this will happen. Special interest politics is the way of the land these days. But here’s my bet for the Senator: Those cops and fireman who will get this benefit will never see those checks. The government promises they are relying on will be broken at some point in the future. America does not have the resources to make these promises anymore. We will go broke because so many of these special interest promises have been made.

We can hope and even expect that our political leaders will do the “right thing” in these difficult times. There is a broad awareness that everyone is going to have to do a bit more and get a bit less in the New America. But that does not seem to be the case with this Senator. He is working against the best interests of the country. In the end, those that he is trying to curry favor from will be the losers. I suspect the Senator knows this. He doesn’t care.

Student Loan Debt Hell

Is going to college a worthwhile investment? Is the education that our young people are receiving at our colleges and universities really worth all of the time, money and effort that is required? Decades ago, a college education was quite inexpensive and it was almost an automatic ticket to the middle class. But today all of that has changed.

At this point, college education is a big business. There are currently more than 18 million students enrolled at the nearly 5,000 colleges and universities currently in operation throughout the United States. There are quite a few "institutions of higher learning" that now charge $40,000 or even $50,000 a year for tuition. That does not even count room and board and other living expenses. Meanwhile, as you will see from the statistics posted below, the quality of education at our colleges and universities has deteriorated badly. When graduation finally arrives, many of our college students have actually learned very little, they find themselves unable to get good jobs and yet they end up trapped in student loan debt hell for essentially the rest of their lives.

Across America today, "guidance counselors" are pushing millions of high school students to go to the very best colleges that they can get into, but they rarely warn them about how much it is going to cost or about the sad reality that they could end up being burdened by massive debt loads for decades to come.

Yes, college is a ton of fun and it is a really unique experience. If you can get someone else to pay for it then you should definitely consider going.

There are also many careers which absolutely require a college degree. Depending on your career goals, you may not have much of a choice of whether to go to college or not.

But that doesn't mean that you have to go to student loan debt hell.

You don't have to go to the most expensive school that you can get into.

You don't have to take out huge student loans.

There is no shame in picking a school based on affordability.

The truth is that pretty much wherever you go to school the quality of the education is going to be rather pathetic. A highly trained cat could pass most college courses in the United States today.

Personally, I have had the chance to spend quite a number of years on college campuses. I enjoyed my time and I have some pretty pieces of parchment to put up on the wall. I have seen with my own eyes what goes on at our institutions of higher learning. In a previous article, I described what life is like for most "average students" enrolled in our colleges and universities today....

The vast majority of college students in America spend two to four hours a day in the classroom and maybe an hour or two outside the classroom studying. The remainder of the time these "students" are out drinking beer, partying, chasing after sex partners, going to sporting events, playing video games, hanging out with friends, chatting on Facebook or getting into trouble. When they say that college is the most fun that most people will ever have in their lives they mean it. It is basically one huge party.

If you are a parent and you are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars every year to pay for college you need to know the truth.

You are being ripped off.

Sadly, a college education just is not that good of an investment anymore. Tuition costs have absolutely skyrocketed even as the quality of education has plummeted.

A college education is not worth getting locked into crippling student loan payments for the next 30 years.

Even many university professors are now acknowledging that student loan debt has become a horrific societal problem. Just check out what one professor was quoted as saying in a recent article in The Huffington Post....

“Thirty years ago, college was a wise, modest investment,” says Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. He studies the politics of higher education. “Now, it’s a lifetime lock-in, an albatross you can’t escape.”

Anyone that is thinking of going to college needs to do a cost/benefit analysis.

Is it really going to be worth it?

For some people the answer will be "yes" and for some people the answer will be "no".

But sadly, hardly anyone that goes to college these days gets a "good" education.

To get an idea of just how "dumbed down" we have become as a nation, just check out this Harvard entrance exam from 1869.

I wouldn't have a prayer of passing that exam.

What about you?

We really do need to rethink our approach to higher education in this country.

Posted below are 21 statistics about college tuition, student loan debt and the quality of college education in the United States....

#1 Since 1978, the cost of college tuition in the United States has gone up by over 900 percent.

#2 In 2010, the average college graduate had accumulated approximately $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day.

#3 Approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans.

#4 Americans have accumulated well over $900 billion in student loan debt. That figure is higher than the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.

#5 The typical U.S. college student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics.

#6 According to very extensive research detailed in a new book entitled "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses", 45 percent of U.S. college students exhibit "no significant gains in learning" after two years in college.

#7 Today, college students spend approximately 50% less time studying than U.S. college students did just a few decades ago.

#8 35% of U.S. college students spend 5 hours or less studying per week.

#9 50% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to write more than 20 pages.

#10 32% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to read more than 40 pages in a week.

#11 U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying.

#12 Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of the full-time students who began college in 2001 received a bachelor's degree within four years.

#13 Nearly half of all the graduate science students enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States are foreigners.

#14 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates younger than 25 years old was 9.3 percent in 2010.

#15 One-third of all college graduates end up taking jobs that don't even require college degrees.

#16 In the United States today, over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.

#17 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.

#18 In the United States today, approximately 365,000 cashiers have college degrees.

#19 In the United States today, 24.5 percent of all retail salespersons have a college degree.

#20 Once they get out into the "real world", 70% of college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the "real world" while they were still in school.

#21 Approximately 14 percent of all students that graduate with student loan debt end up defaulting within 3 years of making their first student loan payment.

There are millions of young college graduates running around out there that are wondering where all of the "good jobs" are. All of their lives they were promised that if they worked really hard and got good grades that the system would reward them.

Sometimes when you do everything right you still can't get a job. A while back The Huffington Post featured the story of Kyle Daley - a highly qualified UCLA graduate who had been unemployed for 19 months at the time....

I spent my time at UCLA preparing for the outside world. I had internships in congressional offices, political action committees, non-profits and even as a personal intern to a successful venture capitalist. These weren't the run-of-the-mill office internships; I worked in marketing, press relations, research and analysis. Additionally, the mayor and city council of my hometown appointed me to serve on two citywide governing bodies, the planning commission and the open government commission. I used to think that given my experience, finding work after graduation would be easy.

At this point, however, looking for a job is my job. I recently counted the number of job applications I have sent out over the past year -- it amounts to several hundred. I have tried to find part-time work at local stores or restaurants, only to be turned away. Apparently, having a college degree implies that I might bail out quickly when a better opportunity comes along.

The sad truth is that a college degree is not an automatic ticket to the middle class any longer.

But for millions of young Americans a college degree is an automatic ticket to student loan debt hell.

Student loan debt is one of the most insidious forms of debt. You can't get away from student loan debt no matter what you do. Federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts, and many recent grads end up with loan payments that absolutely devastate them financially at a time when they are struggling to get on their feet and make something of themselves.

So are you still sure that you want to go to college?

Another open secret is that most of our colleges and universities are little more than indoctrination centers. Most people would be absolutely shocked at how much unfiltered propaganda is being pounded into the heads of our young people.

At most colleges and universities, when it comes to the "big questions" there is a "right answer" and there is virtually no discussion of any other alternatives.

In most fields there is an "orthodoxy" that you had better adhere to if you want to get good grades.

Let's just say that "independent thought" and "critical thinking" are not really encouraged at most of our institutions of higher learning.

Am I bitter because I didn't do well? No, I actually did extremely well in school. I have seen the system from the inside. I know how it works.

It is a giant fraud.

If you want to go to college because you want to have a good time or because it will help you get your career started then by all means go for it.

Just realize what you are signing up for.

April 28, 2011 Trump calls Krauthammer a ’sad fool’ for opposing seizure of Iraq’s oil Read more/trump-calls-kraut

During a Wednesday trip to New Hampshire, businessman Donald Trump told Fox News that Charles Krauthammer was a “sad fool” for dismissing his proposal to seize Iraq’s oil.

Trump re-stated his belief that Iraq’s oil should be taken by the United States. “We won a war. We’re in a war. We spent $1.5 trillion on this war. We lost thousands of soldiers, great military people, and thousands and tens of thousands are wounded,” Trump said. “And I say take the oil. ”

Trump was asked what he thought of Charles Krauthammer’s statement on the “O’Reilly Factor” that the proposal was unserious and was the type of suggestion made by “a guy at a bar at closing time with slurred speech.”

“Iran’s not taking the oil, not if I’m president,” said Trump. “And Charles said ‘that’s impractical’. So honestly, Charles is a fool. He’s a fool. I mean, I want to be respectful. He was very nice on the phone. But he’s really a fool.”

Before the latest spat between the two, Krauthammer called Trump the “Al Sharpton of the Republican Party – provocateur and clown, unserious.”

Wealthy Leaving Las Vegas Mansions as Foreclosure Pain Spreads

Nicolas Cage, the Oscar-winning star of “Leaving Las Vegas,” bought a seven-bedroom home with a panoramic view of the city’s casino-lined Strip in 2006 for $8.5 million. By January 2010, it was in foreclosure.

The next owner, who property records show paid $4.2 million, has put the house on the market for $7.9 million -- an “unrealistic” price, according to Zar Zanganeh, the broker handling the listing.

“It’s sad,” Zanganeh said, his high-heeled boots clacking on the marble floor as he gave a tour of the 14,000-square-foot (1,300-square-meter) mansion featuring a six-person steam shower and a closet the size of a small apartment. “There’s a lot of inventory, a lot of homes like this waiting for an owner.”

A growing number of high-end homes are selling at a loss or facing repossession by lenders in Las Vegas, which already has the highest rate of foreclosure filings among large U.S. cities. The wave of defaults that began with subprime borrowers and the unemployed has spread to upscale homeowners who see no point of staying even if they can afford to.

In the 15 months through March, at least 25 houses in the Las Vegas area changed hands for more than $3 million, with at least seven doing so through foreclosure or by selling at a loss, according to the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors and Clark County property records. In 2009, 14 homes sold for more than that amount, with one trading at a loss.

‘A Sucker’

In the first quarter, 30 Clark County homes with loans exceeding $1 million were repossessed by banks or bought by third-parties in foreclosure sales, up from 20 homes a year earlier, according to ForeclosureRadar.com, a Discovery Bay, California-based company that tracks defaults. Short sales, in which the bank agrees to accept less than the loan balance, and bank-owned properties accounted for about three-quarters of all home sales, according to the Las Vegas Realtors.

“You feel like a sucker if you’re paying a $5 million mortgage on a house that’s worth $2 million,” Zanganeh, 28, said while showing the grounds of an 11-acre Las Vegas estate built by Prince Jefri Bolkiah, brother of the Sultan of Brunei. “These days, there are no traditional sales. They’re all short sales or bank-owned.”

The estate -- with 18 bedrooms, 36 bathrooms, a 20,000- bottle wine cellar, an 11-car garage and air-conditioned stables for 10 horses -- sold for $14 million in 2004 to Eric Petersen, who owned Consumer Credit Services Inc., a Las Vegas-based catalog-merchandising company that closed in 2008. Petersen, 44, said he spent $20 million to make the estate habitable.

Giving Up

It’s back on the block for $25 million -- $9 million less than his investment -- with an offer “for considerably less on the table,” Petersen said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas. He has slashed the listing price four times since October from an initial $37.5 million.

“I gave up on Vegas,” Petersen said. “There’s no opportunity for anything in this town that I can see.”

Another listing with Zanganeh’s firm, Luxe Estates Collection, is a never-occupied, bank-owned mansion overlooking a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course in the gated Ridges community west of Las Vegas. The asking price is $3 million for the 8,550-square-foot house, which was repossessed in 2010 and had a $3.2 million mortgage from the Community Bank of Nevada, a lender seized by regulators in August 2009.

About 100 homes in the county are listed for $3 million or more, according to the Las Vegas Realtors, a five-year supply at the current sales pace.

‘Rolled the Dice’

In Nevada, 23 percent of delinquent borrowers said they “strategically defaulted,” or walked away from their homes by choice rather than necessity, according to a January report by the Nevada Association of Realtors.

“It’s folks that feel the hopelessness of it all,” Rob Wigton, chief executive officer of the state association, said in a telephone interview from Reno. “They’ve rolled the dice and lost.”

The population of Clark County, home of Las Vegas, has fallen by about 16,000 from its estimated high of 1.97 million in 2008, according to the government-funded Nevada State Demographer. Almost 15 percent of homes in the county -- 125,000 residences -- were vacant, according to the 2010 Census, following a construction boom in the last decade that peaked with 39,000 housing permits issued in 2005.

Las Vegas home values have plunged 58 percent since the 2006 high-water mark, the most of the 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Prices fell 7.4 percent in March from a year earlier to a median $125,950, the Las Vegas Realtors reported April 8.

70% Underwater

Almost 70 percent of Las Vegas-area homeowners with mortgages were underwater at the end of 2010, meaning they owed more than the value of the property, according to CoreLogic Inc. (CLGX), a Santa Ana, California-based real estate information company. Among cities with a population of more than 200,000, Las Vegas has led the nation in the pace of foreclosure actions since November 2009, with one of every 31 homes receiving a filing in the first quarter of this year, RealtyTrac Inc., an information provider in Irvine, California, reported April 14.

About 20 percent of Las Vegas homeowners seeking short sales owe at least $750,000, said Jamie Cogburn, a Las Vegas plaintiff’s attorney who said he has handled 350 such sales and is working on 200 more. One client is a doctor with a home now valued at about half of its $1 million mortgage, Cogburn said. The doctor earns enough to save for a 20 percent down payment on his next home within a few months at current prices, he said.

“People with a higher income can go buy another house,” Cogburn said in a telephone interview. “You’ve got to cut your losses at some point, just like with a stock.”

Four Weekends

Cage, who won an Academy Award for 1995’s “Leaving Las Vegas,” in which he portrays an alcoholic who drinks himself to death in the city, stayed in the house now being marketed by Zanganeh for four weekends, according to the broker.

The actor sued his manager in October 2009 for placing him in “numerous highly speculative and risky real estate investments, resulting in Cage suffering catastrophic losses,” according to court filings. The manager, Samuel Levin, countersued, saying Cage ignored advice and “set off on a spending binge of epic proportions,” acquiring 15 homes, four yachts, an island in the Bahamas, a Gulfstream jet and millions of dollars of jewelry and art, according to a November 2009 complaint in state court in Los Angeles County. The case was settled out of court in August.

Cage, 47, who also starred in the 1992 film “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “is working and not doing press at this time,” his publicist, Samantha Hill, said in an e-mail. He was arrested in New Orleans on April 16 for domestic abuse and public drunkenness after arguing with his wife about the address of a house they are renting, according to a statement by the city’s police department.

Sales Pick Up

Las Vegas’s economic collapse has made it hard for many executives and business owners who own mansions to keep up with their mortgages, said Brian Gordon, a partner at Applied Analysis LLC, an economic-consulting firm in the city.

“People on the lower end were forced out a long time ago,” he said. “People on the high end had a longer staying power. Now they’ve chewed through their resources.”

While high-end homes fall in price, total residential- property sales have accelerated, rising 8.2 percent in March from a year earlier to 4,316 units, the Las Vegas Realtors reported. More than half of this year’s purchases were all-cash transactions, a sign that investors are finding bargains at the low end of the market, said Robert Lang, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Making Lemonade

“Prices are below the cost of materials and labor,” said Lang, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If you’re betting the U.S. economy won’t go back to Armageddon, you might see one-third appreciation if you buy now.”

Las Vegas’s affordable housing and warm weather will be the theme of a promotional campaign the city plans to use to attract out-of-town investors and potential new residents, Mayor Oscar Goodman said.

“We’re going to make lemonade out of this ‘crisis’ by promoting our foreclosures here,” Goodman, who’s stepping down in July after 12 years in office, said during an April 5 campaign party for his wife, Carolyn Goodman, a candidate to succeed her husband.

The city, he said, will be “showing the opportunities to people who are freezing to death in the middle of the country in the worst winter imaginable -- that they can come out here and buy a home at one-third what it cost five years ago and have a wonderful quality of life.”

T

Facebook launches Deals against Groupon and LivingSocial in five major cities

Facebook is kicking off its long-awaited Deals program to users in five major cities starting Tuesday with plans to expand in other cities soon after.

Facebook Deals, which will offer online discounts and deals from businesses to its users, marks the company’s entrance into what’s becoming a crowded group-buying deal market that already includes Groupon and LivingSocial.

Facebook will best competition from others by leveraging its massive user base and diverse social platform, the company told the New York Times.

As previously stated on the Facebook Deals landing page, the company is launching the program as a test in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. Users in those cities will get notified of special deals via e-mail and by using Facebook’s diverse communication options. So Deals will behave much like status updates and links that are shared between friends and acquaintances. And thus, Deals will appear in users’ news feeds and personal wall activities, which can be “liked” and shared with others.

While Groupon and LivingSocial may be good at putting together attractive daily deals from a variety of local businesses, their options for sharing those deals with a person’s social circle pale in comparison to what Facebook can do.

The deals themselves will come from two sources. Facebook will have its own sales force reaching out to local businesses, and it’s also partnering with smaller, more specific deal-offering companies, including OpenTable (restaurants & dinning), PopSugar City (focused on offers appealing to women) and Zozi (activities and events).

The Deals launch will also be the first major push for Facebook’s virtual currency, Facebook Credits. Users will use credits to purchase offers from its Deals service.

Trump: Obama a "Terrible Student" Not Good Enough for HarvardMogul questions how Obama was accepted to Harvard and Columbia

Mogul questions how Obama was accepted to Harvard and Columbia

Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate.

"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."

Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California. He went on to Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude 1991 and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's 2008 campaign did not release his college transcripts, and in his best-selling memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama indicated he hadn't always been an academic star. Trump told the AP that Obama's refusal to release his college grades were part of a pattern of concealing information about himself.

"I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard," Trump said. "We don't know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president."

Multimedia

Famous Feuds: Donald Trump Vs. The World

LOOK

Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Obama's re-election campaign, declined to comment.
Trump, a wealthy businessman and reality TV host on NBC, has risen to the top of many polls in part by his outspoken call for Obama to release his long form birth certificate.

The state of Hawaii has released a certificate of live birth indicating Obama was born there on August 4, 1961, but that has not quelled critics who believe Obama was born outside the United States and is therefore not qualified to be president.

The so-called "birther" controversy has dominated the early stage of the 2012 GOP nominating contest, with Trump leading the charge.

"I have more people that are excited about the fact that I reinvigorated this whole issue," Trump said, adding "the last guy (Obama) wants to run against is Donald Trump."

Trump is scheduled to travel to the early primary states of New Hampshire and Nevada this week and said he will make a final decision about a presidential bid by June.

Also in the AP interview, Trump:

— Said Republicans had made a mistake by embracing a budget proposal crafted by Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan that included deep cuts in Medicare. "The seniors are afraid. The plan Paul Ryan put forth has made the Democrats so happy," Trump said.

— Declined to disclose his net worth, saying he'll do so if he decides to run. "You'll see what it is, possibly, very likely, in the next 4 weeks. I don't want to say because I don't want to ruin the press conference," he said.

— Expressed surprise that the 2008 GOP nominee, John McCain, had suggested Trump's effort was a publicity stunt. "I congratulate him for getting the attention he's getting," McCain told NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday.

Trump said he had been a big supporter of McCain. "I would find it hard to believe he would say anything bad because I raised a fantastic amount of money for him," Trump said.

Copyright Associated Press

Iran suggests new computer virus

Stars' virus is second serious computer worm to hit Iran in past eight months; Iran accuses Israel, U.S. of being behind last year's virus which targeted nuclear power plants.

Iran has been hit by a second computer virus, a senior military official said Monday, suggesting it was part of a concerted campaign to undermine the country's disputed nuclear program.

Gholam Reza Jalali, the head of an Iranian military unit in charge of combating sabotage, said that experts discovered the espionage virus, which he called "Stars."

"The Stars virus has been presented to the laboratory but is still being investigated," Jalali said in a report posted Monday on his organization's website, paydarymelli.ir. "No definite and final conclusions have been reached."

He did not say what equipment or facilities the virus targeted, or when experts first detected it.

Stars is the second serious computer worm to hit Iran in the past eight months. Late last year, a powerful virus known as Stuxnet targeted the country's nuclear facilities and other industrial sites.

Iran has acknowledged that Stuxnet affected a limited number of centrifuges - a key component in the production of nuclear fuel - at its main uranium enrichment facility in the central city of Natanz. But Tehran has said its scientists discovered and neutralized the malware before it could cause serious damage.

Jalali downplayed the impact of Stars, but said it is harmonious with computer systems and inflicts minor damage in the initial stage and might be mistaken for executive files of governmental organizations.

Jalali heads a military unit called Passive Defense that primarily deals with countering sabotage. The unit was set up on the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

A separate unit has also been set up by Iran's Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications to decode incoming computer viruses and neutralize them, Jalali said.

Last week, Jalali said Stuxnet could have caused large-scale accidents and loss of life and claimed that Iranian experts have determined that the United States and Israel were behind the malware, which can take over the control systems of industrial sites like power plants.

The U.S. and its allies suspect Iran's nuclear program aims to develop atomic weapons. Iran denies the charges, and says the program is only for peaceful purposes.

NATO fails in bid to kill Muammar Qaddafi

Hours after US and British figures called for "the head of the snake" in Libya to be cut off, NATO warplanes early Monday, April 25, pulverized a building in Muammar Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah working compound in Tripoli. His offices and conference room was wrecked. A government official called the strike an attempt on the Libyan ruler's life which coalition spokesmen did not deny.

He did not disclose Qaddafi's whereabouts. About 45 people were hurt in the strike, 15 of them seriously and some still missing. The ruler's son Saif al Islam said such attacks would achieve nothing since the West was losing the war in Libya in any case.
There was no word about which nations took part in the Bab al-Aziziyah air strike. Targeting the life of Muammar Qaddafi was not mandated in UN Security Council resolution 1973. However, debkafile's military sources report that coalition leaders are increasingly frustrated by their failure to break the deadlock in the Libyan war and Qaddafi's ability to stand up to whatever they throw at him and even gain ground.
West European banking circles confirm that Security Council economic sanctions against the Libyan government are not biting. Qaddafi is using billions of dollars held in funds in the west to bankroll his war although those funds were supposedly frozen.
The pace of coalition bombardments of Tripoli was intensified in recent days when the rebels' celebration of victory in Misratah proved premature. By Monday, it was clear that the rebels were only in control of the port and a few streets, while most of the city remained under the guns and rockets of pro-Qaddafi forces. The rebels moreover faced a 48-hour ultimatum from local tribes to hand in their weapons and surrender.
Qaddafi tightened his stranglehold on the opposition facing him in Misratah by the paradoxical maneuver of apparently withdrawing his troops and handing the town over to local tribes loyal to him. This puts NATO in a quandary: The Western allies cannot attack those tribes without laying themselves open to charges of attacking Libyan civilians whom the UN resolution obliges them to defend.
Sunday, US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, member of the Armed Services Committee, called for the head of the snake to be cut off. "The people around Qaddafi need to wake up every day wondering, 'Will this be my last.''" UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said he would not rule out the use of US Predator drones for assassinating the Libyan ruler.

The drone aircraft the US sent last week to Libya fired for the first time Saturday. Its target was not disclosed then, but shortly after the Hague statement, a NATO headquarters source revealed that the pilotless aircraft had destroyed a Libyan army rocket launcher.

The US, France and Britain have vowed to continue their air campaign until Qaddafi is out of power.

However, in Washington, US President Barack Obama faces rising criticism of the inconsistencies in his military policy for Libya. The most common is that America should never have gone in on the side of the rebels in the first place, but once it was launched, the administration should have acted with determination and not seen to be wavering back and forth.

The military commentator Anthony H. Cordesman called the administration's military decisions - starting from a fly zone over Libya up until the deployment of drones - farcical. Other military pundits indicated that the Pentagon's approval for sending the Predators to Libya was only obtained because Defense Security Robert Gates and armed forces chief Adm. Mike Mullen felt the need to obscure the Commander-in-Chief's inability to chart a clear American military course in the Libyan war. Both firmly opposed American military intervention in Libya from the start. But now, they have come to appreciate that Obama's inability to stick to any decision, including the one to bow out and hand over to NATO, is doing American more strategic harm that full intervention would have done.
Some Washington sources quote Chinese diplomats as reporting that North Korean interlocutors told them bluntly that if Libya is an example of American prowess, then Pyongyang has nothing to fear from Washington.

How Would You Like Your Parabola?

Gee, what do you see here in Silver? (Dollar is white line)

Or how about gasoline?

And, of course.... stock prices.

Hmm..... you don't think this is some sort of intentional thing, right? I mean, you'd never see The Fed declare on its own that it has a "third mandate" (supporting asset prices), which it then manifests through intentional dollar debasement... would you?

Oh wait...... perhaps it's not universally The Fed that's doing this. Maybe it's The Fed and both Congress and The Administration together!

After all, exactly how do you have a $1,700 billion deficit without interest rates going much higher unless The Fed is monetizing your paper?

Now who is it again that we, the people, should hold to account for those skyrocketing commodity prices....including, of course, gasoline and the already-happened loss of stability due to food and commodity price ramps in other countries? I think I know - let's review it again.... and remember, Bernanke denied that he would monetize the debt under oath:

PS: For those who are short in the memory department, parabolic charts nearly always end in tears. Indeed, if you think these won't, your challenge is to go find some that haven't - then ponder the odds......

Collateral Damage: Tenant Victims of Foreclosed Properties

Preposterous rules in Florida do not allow renters to pay water bills of foreclosed landlords who have closed accounts. The result is many surprised tenants wake up one morning, find their water shut off, and have no way to get it turned back on.

Please consider Collateral damage: Tenants of foreclosed properties

Whenever Michel Joseph wants to shower, cook or use the bathroom, he has to leave his Little Haiti apartment and drop in on a neighbor who has running water.

Water has not run in Joseph’s derelict apartment since his landlord abandoned the four-unit building to foreclosure, and skipped town in November. The landlord’s absence led to a water shutoff, and for the past four months, Joseph has not been able to turn it back on because of a long-standing rule at the Miami-Dade Water & Sewer Department.

That rule — which restricts renters from re-opening a closed account — has come under increased scrutiny as more landlords have fallen prey to the foreclosure crisis, some leaving tenants without basic utilities.

“The tenants have become the hidden victims of the foreclosure crisis,” said Purvi Shah, a Florida Legal Services attorney who defends tenants of foreclosed properties. “There are hundreds of tenants in Miami-Dade County living in really serious conditions.”

Earlier this month, the Miami-Dade County Infrastructure and Land Use Committee voted to create a bridge account program that would allow tenants to open a temporary Water & Sewer account. The full county commission is set to vote on the bridge account next month.

For Shah’s team at Florida Legal Services, getting to this point has been a long, difficult battle.

Her team defends tenants going through foreclosure, and has litigated issues like water and electricity shutoffs, illegal evictions, tenant intimidation and landlord abandonment. Of the various issues that tenants face during foreclosure, water shutoff has been the most problematic, Shah said.

Water service was discontinued at Hilda Bustos’ North Miami-Dade rental last year before Legal Aid lawyers filed suit in order to force the landlord to pay the bill. However, after the property went into foreclosure, the bank repossessed it and shut off the water, sparking another lawsuit from Legal Aid. The water was eventually turned back on, but tenant advocates do not have the resources to litigate against every landlord that abandons a property, Shah said.

In the past three years, more than 400 multi-family properties have had water service discontinued because a landlord defaulted on payments, county statistics show.

Imagine wanting to pay money for a service and being unable to do so. Imagine being without water for four months.

In other cases, in other states, tenants have been given as little as an hour or less to pack their belongings and leave.

Some states have passed laws to deal with these situations but this is 4 years into the crisis. How long does it take bureaucrats to think and act?

The answer obviously is 4 years an counting.

Don't Let Alinsky Win

Conservatives itching for an all-or-nothing showdown with Barack Obama risk playing right into his hands. A crisis is exactly what he wants. To understand this, it is necessary, once again, to understand that most of his playbook comes from radical organizer Saul Alinsky, and that his playbook also assuredly draws on the work of professors he encountered at Columbia University, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

"The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength," wrote Alinsky in Rules for Radicals. "The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step…."

Cloward and Piven, meanwhile, called for "a political crisis… that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty." They propose actions that "would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions…. [B]y the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level." And: "Advocacy must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of militancy."

A crisis is Obama's friend. An angry reaction is his ally. Disorder is his goal.

His mortal enemy (speaking tactically), on the other hand, is steady, sober, thoughtful, rational pressure by political adversaries who are willing to take the time to consolidate gains, explain themselves, reassure the public that it (the public) has nothing to fear from them (Obama's adversaries), and which constantly calibrates their words and actions to make it evident that they are keeping the moral high ground. A government shutdown does not fit this model. Forcing a debt crisis does not fit this model. Incendiary rhetoric doesn't fit the model, nor do all-or-nothing ultimatums.

This is not -- repeat, not -- to advocate a weak cautiousness. Boldness in trying times is definitely a strength. But it should be a well-planned boldness of considered actions -- preferably "gamed out" in advance -- rather than a reactive or (even worse) angry recklessness. Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan, for instance, is probably the boldest proposal put forth with unified Republican support in well over a decade. Yet it didn't come out of nowhere. It was carefully crafted, carefully rolled out, and sold by a man of high intelligence whose looks and demeanor are more that of the reliably do-gooder brother than they are of the ogre the liberals want to portray. It is exactly the right sort of gambit.

Tea Partiers may not yet recognize it, but Obama knows he lost a bit more than he won on the $38 billion deal on the Continuing Resolution, and he knows he has been outflanked in the short term at least by Ryan's plan as well. Obama is rattled. His own budget speech last week showed it. His tone was hostile, petulant, incendiary/demagogic and, in a word, unpresidential. NBC's Chuck Todd, an astute observer but hardly a raging conservative, wrote Tuesday that Obama's speech seems to have backfired. (This is in marked contrast to some of Todd's earlier impressions of or interviews with Obama and.) Todd's political antennas usually are pretty well attuned. He rightly senses that Obama is off his game. The reason Obama is off his game is that Republicans did not force things to a crisis level: Obama knew that if he turned down Speaker Boehner it would be he, the president, who looked radical -- but he knew that if he went along, he would both anger his base and cede the rhetorical ground of saying that "investments" by government should outweigh short-term deficit concerns. He suffered a similar narrow loss when he was forced by Mitch McConnell in December to renew the Bush-era tax cuts.

For a guy who thrives on crises, it must really gall him that he hasn't found a way to force a crisis from which he can benefit, while meanwhile realizing that the tide continues to flow (albeit slowly) in the direction away from his government-corporatist/semi-socialist (at least) proclivities.

Conservatives should keep the pressure on. Conservatives should use all the weapons in our arsenal. But we should not play into his hands by firing wildly, or by rushing Pickett-like over open ground. Perhaps an NFL analogy will help: For the last four years in the aggregate, the New Orleans Saints have produced more yards of offense than any other team. But the Saints aren't known for being particularly reckless in throwing the long ball; they mix dink-and-dunk passes with just enough "bombs" to make the "big play" a real and effective threat. That model should serve conservatives, too. Keep the pressure on, keep gobbling up ground, and then look for the right opportunity for the deep strike rather than forcing a big play that just isn't available.

Conservatives may worry that there is no time to waste. They are right that time is somewhat short -- but wrong to think we'll go belly-up within months or even a year if we don't achieve massive savings. There's still enough "play in the joints" for the bond markets not to panic, and for the international markets not to abandon the dollar as the world's reserve currency, for another two or three years. The key thing is to avoid the panic. Think back to the "economic crisis" of 2008. Yes, the underlying fundamentals were weak. Yet there was no reason for an immediate collapse. A softer landing could have been engineered, if only Messrs. Bernanke and Paulson hadn't started running around yelling that the sky was falling. When panic ensued -- and only when panic ensued -- it was then that the big-government advocates seized their chance. It was then that they passed TARP, and took over the car companies while giving major ownership to the unions, and upended the banking system in favor of Goldman Sachs, and passed $800 billion of misnamed "stimulus" spending.

Panic and crises play into the hands of the left. Reason and a firm steadiness of purpose play into the hands of conservatives. Obama wants to goad us into a huge mistake. We must not let him do so. The Tea Parties collectively are the best thing that has happened to American politics in at least 16 years, and maybe since the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the White House three full decades ago. But they will remain the best thing only if they don't succumb to the downside risks of precipitous action. Let the unions be the ones who look like thugs: We'll beat them at the polls, as conservatives did in 2009, 2010, and in the Wisconsin judicial race. Let the left, not the right, lose its cool. Let Obama be the one who loses his equilibrium. In short, learn Alinsky's lessons, without adopting his immoral tactics. When an Alinskyite like Obama can't goad his opposition into mistakes, when his simplistic stratagems don't work, then he has little of substance or tactics to fall back on.

This government needs major shrinkage. The way to do that is for conservatives not to throw Hail Mary passes, but instead for them to move down the field and then win at the polls in 2012 -- in all branches of government. That's how James Madison and company designed the system. That is the system's genius and glory: It resists radical change in any direction, while usually requiring several election cycles for full course corrections. Conservatives should be Madisonians: indefatigable, determined, but flexible enough to see that long-term goals can be achieved in zig-zag fashions. Ordered liberty is our watchword. Disorder is Obama's preferred solution, one which puts our liberties at risk. We must not give it to him.

American Spectator senior editor is a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom.

California Descends Deeper Into Self-Destruction

California -- it's the best place to live and it's the worst place to live. The physical climate is almost ideal and the political climate, if you're a conservative, is surreal. Through their politicians and bureaucrats Californians seem hell bent on destroying the state's vast potential. It's a painful sight to witness.

The latest, all too typical, example is a law signed by Governor Jerry Brown last week mandating new renewable energy requirements for electric utilities in the state. The new law requires that 33 percent of electricity generated be done with "renewable" sources, essentially wind mills and solar panels, by the end of the year 2020. What's the objective of this "ambitious" new regulation?

To answer that question you first need to understand that California has a wildly inflated sense of self-importance. Californians actually believe they have the ability and duty to save the planet. Humility is clearly not their strong suit.

California has a population of roughly 37 million. That is barely half of one percent of the world's population. If Californians reduce their "carbon footprint" by a third (a very tall order), that will reduce humanity's carbon footprint by one sixth of one percent. I hate to tell my fellow Californians, but there is no way on earth that will make an iota's worth of difference.

Some Californians will point out, however, that that misses the point. Because they think California is the center of the universe, what happens here will change behavior and attitudes throughout the world. California is a place where self-esteem has run amok.

At the signing ceremony Governor Brown said, "It's about California leading the country. It's America leading the world. There are people who think we can drill our way to happiness and prosperity. Instead of taking oil from thousands of miles away, we're taking the sun and converting it." Brown went on to say quite proudly, "I didn't get my name 'Governor Moonbeam' for nothing."

A recent Public Utilities Commission study found that previously imposed renewable energy regulations have added $6 billion to what utilities have had to spend generating electricity since 2002. Has there been any measurable or identifiable benefit for spending that unnecessary $6 billion? The benefit-cost ratio of those expenditures is a close to zero as it's possible to get. This has been absolute folly and we are about to multiply it by who knows how much.

Such costs are even worse than increasing taxes. Taxes at least have the potential to create value when spent on, for example, teachers' salaries. Taxes redistribute wealth, mandates destroy wealth.

When the utilities are forced to buy several times more power generated by windmills and solar panels, the price is bound to go through the roof. Not to worry, however. The new law further requires the utilities commission to place limits on how much can be spent on renewable power. When one kind of coercion isn't enough, follow up with another kind of coercion. Of course, the only real result of a price ceiling is to create shortages. Shortages do even more economic damage than rising prices. Keep passing laws until the entire economy is in a straightjacket. One interference with the market always necessitates another, as Fredrich Hayek demonstrated long ago in The Road to Serfdom.

As is usually the case (Obamacare, for example), the spineless lawmakers left the ugly details to the bureaucrats. According to public utilities commissioner Mike Florio, "Our staff is already figuring out what we'll need to do. It's clearly a priority for the state, so we'll get it done as fast as possible." The politicians and the bureaucrats have not the vaguest idea what they're doing. They know nothing about what's involved in providing electricity to the state's residents and businesses, and they don't really see why they need to.

The legislation demonstrates the liberal faith in and willingness to use force. The assumption is that solar panels and windmills can suddenly increase their output just because a law has been passed. It's not that simple. The politicians have no more understanding about how technology works than they do about how the economy works.

If it's California's responsibility to save the world, and if force works, why such a modest target? Why not, for example, a 100 percent renewable requirement by 2015? The 33 percent mandate by the end of 2020 is totally arbitrary. How was it arrived at? When you're operating in a realm where costs don't matter and objectives are utopian, numbers are a mere afterthought. The targets are unlikely to be achieved even after billions of dollars have been squandered. According to Gino DiCaro, spokesman for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, industry in California already pays electricity rates about 50 percent higher than the rest of the country. That, of course, is one of the reasons for the exodus of businesses from the state.

Although California politicians fail utterly in their basic responsibilities—balancing a budget, for example—they arrogantly believe they can save the planet. Their attitude is, "We can't possibly focus on the state's economy. We're too busy stopping global warming!" Just as they recklessly overpromise on government-employee pensions, they overpromise on their ability to cure the world's maladies.

In a spot-on Wall Street Journal column last year entitled "California: The Lindsay Lohan of States," Allysia Finley (a former resident of California) pointed out that our government here is being "run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums." Her article followed the November elections that made California a one-party state. She said the state is like "a prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it." I fervently wish her words weren't so true. As a resident of California, it breaks my heart to see the state's vast potential being squandered. As an economist it pains me to see resources so grossly misallocated and wasted on such a massive scale.

I wish this self-destructive behavior were confined to California. Ominously, the renewable mandate signing ceremony was attended by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. It isn't often a state-level bill signing is attended by a U.S. cabinet officer. The Obama administration obviously believes California's lunacy is just what the rest of the country needs. God help us.

IPAB Is an Acronym for 'Death Panel'

Contemplating the 2012 election that can already be seen looming on the distant horizon, the President's advisors were no doubt hoping that the "death panel" debate was… well… dead. But Obama himself inadvertently resurrected it when, in response to Republican budget proposals, he claimed that Medicare costs will be kept under control by the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). Obamacare opponents have been screaming about this committee since it was first added to the "reform" bill. And, since that time, anyone with the temerity to call it by its proper name -- death panel -- has been vilified by the Democrats and the "news" media. Nonetheless, that's precisely what IPAB will be. Its sole purpose is to cut funding for some health care services seniors now take for granted. And those cuts will kill people.

IPAB was created pursuant to section 3403 of the ironically named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and its ostensible purpose is to "control costs." In reality, it will do nothing at all about costs. Instead, the board's fifteen "experts" will impose old-fashioned price controls. Before Obamacare was signed into law in March of 2010, only Congress had the power to make changes to Medicare's reimbursement rates. But PPACA, for all intents and purposes, transfers that power to this tiny cadre of presidential appointees who will have no accountability to the voters. In theory, IPAB can only propose changes to Medicare's payment rates. In practice, however, the board's proposals will take effect automatically unless Congress passes contrary legislation and the President signs it into law.

This concentrates a huge amount of power in the hands of these fifteen people. As Obama's former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, phrased it last year in a discussion at the Economic Club of Washington: "This institution could prove to be far more important to the future of our fiscal health than, for example, the Congressional Budget Office. It has an enormous amount of potential power." This comment suggests that the Obama administration always intended to maintain the country's "fiscal health" by stinting on Granny's physical health. Hyperbole? Consider Orszag's description of the automatic implementation feature of IPAB's proposals: "So the default is now switched in a very important way on the biggest driver of our long-term costs, which is the Medicare program."

Considering that IPAB's mission involves Medicare cuts, one can't help but wonder if Obama's political team was comfortable with how much emphasis he put on it during last week's budget discussions. He made it abundantly clear that, if spending rises faster than expected, he "will give the independent commission the authority to make additional savings by further improving Medicare." But the relevant provision of PPACA was obviously written to keep IPAB below the radar until the President, and the Democrat majority in the Senate, have survived the 2012 election cycle. The law doesn't require the board to produce its first recommendations until 2014. Thus, a safely reelected Obama would have time to submit even controversial nominations for IPAB membership, which a friendly Senate would happily confirm.

Such political considerations notwithstanding, Obama probably wasn't worried. He no doubt sees PPACA's death panels as a feature rather than a bug. This sentiment is shared of most advocates of socialized medicine. In a piece titled, "Why 'death panels' are a necessary evil," columnist Jay Bookman captured this progressive consensus when he wrote that "Death panels exist, they will exist in any conceivable system of health-care delivery, and we all know they are necessary but prefer to ignore it." For these people, it's either us or Granny: "Somebody has to say no to the terminal patient who refuses to acknowledge that he or she is terminal and demands hopeless if expensive treatment.… Somebody has to have the power to rule that Procedure A or Drug A is more cost-effective than Procedure B or Drug B.… Even Heaven has a gatekeeper."

With this last snide flourish about St. Peter, Bookman inadvertently stumbles upon the thing that makes many people, of all political persuasions, uneasy about the amount of power that has been given to IPAB. The members of this board will be mere mortals, installed by a president whose choice of appointees thus far has shown little divine inspiration. Thus, even some Democrats have grave concerns. Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz (D-PA), for example, is among the co-sponsors of a bill that would repeal IPAB. In a statement released last week she said, "Congress must assume responsibility for legislating sound health care policy for Medicare beneficiaries.… Abdicating this responsibility, whether to insurance companies or an unelected commission, would undermine our ability to represent the needs of the seniors."

The tragic irony here is that costs can be controlled without pulling the plug on Granny. There are market-based alternatives to government rationing. Despite what we have been repeatedly told by progressive policy wonks, health care is not a unique universe in which economic forces fail to operate properly. It is, in reality, possible to utilize the market to control costs. One plan for doing so has been put forward by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who would introduce competition among insurers, realign tax incentives and remove some of the regulatory morass that reduces the efficiency of health care providers. This market-based approach was used with success in the Medicare Part-D program, which was actually starting to drive down drug costs until the Democrats began meddling with it after retaking Congress in 2006.

Another alternative is the "Purple Health Plan," proposed by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff. As David Hogberg reports at Investor's Business Daily, this plan seeks to "achieve the liberal goal of universal care via a market-oriented voucher." A lot of prominent economists have endorsed it, including Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Thomas Schelling. Kotlikoff's basic idea is to "trade in" outmoded ideas, like the employer-based tax exclusion and the major federal health programs, and use the money thus saved to provide Americans with vouchers that we would use to buy our own health insurance plans. There are features to this plan that will incur the displeasure of free market purists, including its own panel of physicians who would make arbitrary decisions, but the point is that it is another choice.

Unfortunately, choice is not a popular concept with the President and his health care apparatchiks at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). For them, "cost control" means government-imposed rationing of care to the elderly. Obama's CMS administrator and lead health czar has often praised IPAB's deadly British prototype, the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) and has famously averred that "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care; the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open." The problem is that Obamacare's death panel, as Sarah Palin correctly dubbed IPAB in the Wall Street Journal, will end up closing a lot of aging eyes -- permanently.

Mainstream Media LIES Re: Default And Debt Ceiling

I'm getting very tired of this - isn't there some sort of law about intentionally misleading people to their detriment? Isn't doing that called fraud?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has never defaulted on its debt and Democrats and Republicans say they don't want it to happen now. But with partisan acrimony running at fever pitch, and Democrats and Republicans so far apart on how to tame the deficit, the unthinkable is suddenly being pondered.

No it's not.

The government now borrows about 42 cents of every dollar it spends. Imagine that one day soon, the borrowing slams up against the current debt limit ceiling of $14.3 trillion and Congress fails to raise it. The damage would ripple across the entire economy, eventually affecting nearly every American, and rocking global markets in the process

That's not a default. Watch the (intentional) misdirection here:

A default would come if the government actually failed to fulfill a financial obligation, including repaying a loan or interest on that loan.

Uh, no.

"Including"? No, not at all.

In fact a default is only the failure to pay interest or principal on a loan. Nothing else is a default.

If the U.S. starts missing interest or principal payments, borrowers would demand higher and higher rates on new bonds, as they did with Greece, Portugal and other heavily indebted nations

The United States takes in about $2 trillion in taxes a year. The total interest paid last year was about $180 billion, a ridiculously low blended rate, but that's what ZIRP (zero interest rates by The Fed) get you.

Let's assume for a moment that the blended rate was to more than double, to 4%. That would be about $560 billion in interest a year, including interest on the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds" (which aren't trust funds, but I've been over that before.)

$560 billion is about one quarter of the tax revenues that the government takes in. So even were interest rates to more than double The United States would not default.

Investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase recently concluded that any delay in making an interest or principal payments by the Treasury "even for a very short period of time" would have large "long-term adverse consequences for Treasury finances and the U.S. economy." The analysis is being circulated on Capitol Hill by supporters of raising the debt limit.

There is no risk of default. What JP Morgan is putting forward would be a default, but a failure to raise the debt ceiling would not cause one, because the Government takes in far more money in taxes than it must spend on interest. JP Morgan knows this.

Therefore, running this line of crap is an intentionally false claim and those who are doing so must be identified by specific name, title and position and then be PERMANENTLY EJECTED by the people from the public conversation and debate on this issue.

Even though GOP leaders say they want to avoid more economic chaos, there is a large crop of tea-party aligned Republicans threatening to refuse to raise the cap under almost any circumstance. Polls suggest a large percentage of Americans oppose raising the debt limit.

The people are smarter this time around. They were lied to last time; we were told that "Armageddon" would occur if TARP wasn't passed. The people said "bullcrap!" to the tune of three hundred to one among callers to Congress, but Congress passed TARP anyway.

Now the banks are running the same lie that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke ran in 2008: Either do this or the United States will "default."

No it won't. A default only occurs if you can't make the interest and principal payments.

The United States Federal Government takes in more than ten times the amount of interest paid in fiscal 2010 in the form of taxes. It is therefore more than able, without any increase in the debt ceiling, to meet its lawful obligations to creditors.

What it cannot do without an increase in the debt ceiling is continue to increase the amount of borrowed money that it does not have.

In other words, a refusal to raise the debt ceiling is a Congressionally-imposed balanced budget amendment.

Since people like Jim DeMint have said they will not vote for the increase without a Constitutional Amendment requiring a balanced budget, the simplest way to get what they claim they want is to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

Such a refusal is a balanced budget mandate that can be imposed by Congress right now and which cannot be avoided or otherwise tampered with.

STOP LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE YOU BAND OF BANKSTER JACKALS!

If there IS such a thing as a fiscal responsibility party (whether it is called "Tea" or not) they must rise right now and refuse to pass ANY increase in the debt ceiling - period.

They must make clear that ANY lawmaker who votes for such a thing will be targeted for defeat in 2012 and will lose their job - no exceptions, no ifs, no ands, no buts and no maybes.

Refusing to raise the debt ceiling will not cause a default - it will, instead, force the government to live within its means.

View this entry with comments (registration required to post)

Share12

---

Posted 2011-04-23 12:52
by Karl Denninger
in Corruption

Banking Double Standard - Again

This is the sort of legal ruling that makes you see red:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC) was dismissed from a lawsuit brought by investors who bought mortgage-backed securities sold by Countrywide Financial Corp., the home lender Bank of America acquired in 2008.

U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer granted Bank of America’s request to dismiss the claim against it on grounds that it can’t be held liable for actions of a unit, according to an April 20 order filed in Los Angeles.

Here's the problem with this ruling: It appears to apply only to these sort of too-big-to-fail banks.

Why do I say that? Because there is a long line of decisions that say otherwise in other industries. Asbestos, for example, where there were firms that were nearly bankrupted by acquisition of a company that had unknown-to-them at the time liabilities in this regard.

This is a more-egregious set of circumstances in that Bank of America was well-aware of the conduct of Countrywide prior to the acquisition. Indeed, the entire purpose of the acquisition was to prevent Countrywide's collapse as the firm's stock and debt were essentially deemed worthless by the market due to the company's prior conduct.

So when Bank of America took over Countrywide, it did so with full knowledge that the firm had engaged in these questionable acts.

It's simply amazing, isn't it, that when ordinary firms take over one another and there's a successor liability issue, they get stuck with it. But when it's a big bank that takes over a company that they know was engaged in questionable conduct before they consummate the purchase, the courts say "oh that's ok, you're not responsible."