Not by unemployment, or by Know Nothing recalcitrance, but by the Governor of Jakarta!
Seems the famous statue “Barry As A Boy With Butterfly” made some Indonesians angry, because our President, although attending elementary school in Jakarta and more popular in the country than he is in America, hasn’t done much for Indonesians so far.
Gorilla says: “Hopefully Barry will stop being a statue and start being a leader!”
Deficits, deficits, deficits!!!
It’s so horrible, and so laughable. The President has bought in, lock, stock, and barrel, to the mantra of reducing deficits at a time when the US economy is having its worst performance since the Depression. This is coming from the Know Nothing Party mostly, and no one seems to remember the huge deficits created by their President from 2001-08.
The government, of course, should be running much larger deficits, given that consumer and private sector demand has more or less fallen off a cliff. There’s an output gap exceeding $2 trillion, and what we get from our leaders is fretting about non-existent inflation and miniscule additional stimulus packages.
Much more interesting than the deficit blather is the assumption about employment contained in the President’s budget submission:
If his budget was passed in its entirety, the President assumes the unemployment rate in 2012 would still be 8%!!!
That is, the unemployment rate will not have fallen at all during his Presidency.
Gorilla says: “A surer recipe for one and done you would be hard pressed to find!”
It’s another great day for American exports as President Obama proposes to send $6.7 billion of arms to Taiwan.
Hypocrisy? Of course!
But no more so than say all these supposed Know Nothing deficit hawks refusing en masse to vote for Congressional PAYGO budget rules.
Or not being brave or rich enough, if you’re New York’s billionaire mayor, to have a terrorist trial in the Big Apple, while Wichita manages very nicely to try and convict the domestic terrorist who killed the abortion doctor.
Gorilla sums it all up on a bipartisan basis for a country steeped in ungovernable sophistry: “You can’t spell proliferation without pro-life!”
Farewell, Obama!
Fonz, can you believe it?
A 3-year freeze on discretionary spending, other than the wasteful Pentagon, Homeland Security, Veteran’s spending, guess that’s why they call it the blues…
What’s it all about, Barry?
Trying to be a deficit hawk, trying to be a middle class champion, trying to be anything other than a leader?
It’s certainly not about economics, it’s certainly not about being bold, it’s all about panic, polls, and pandering!
Last week was the worst of this Presidency, followed this week by the beginning of the end of this Presidency…
Reviewing the situation:
1) Republicans will not do anything other than sit back, vote no, and relax.
2) Democrats remain divided, the governing party of the ungovernable.
3) Obama, who’s run a campaign from day one, now starts another one, and he is toast.
Gorilla says: “It’s all over but the shouting, and nobody’s listening!”
A Bozo Pastiche Song
I heard a young man speaking out just the other day;
I stopped just to listen to what he had to say;
He spoke straight and simple-but I was depressed.
He said, “Once and for all, why not regress?”
He said his name was Barack Obama and he is for now our President
And he laid out a plan of action-which had no past tense!
He talked about the government, but not how it could be for you and me
That’s the way it just isn’t right now:
Once and for all, why not regress?
He spoke like a lawyer and I began to understand
I was listening to the latest polls, talking to me
I began to see…
He’s our Jimmy Carter
He always seems to settle for less
America: Once and for all
Why not depress?
The Administration’s back with another round of minor, pointless middle class handouts.
We’re all pretend populists now!
A child care tax credit? Great if you have income, not refundable if you’re unemployed.
Allowances for caregivers? Wow, $102 million, less than 20% of a Citibank trader’s bonus, guess we’ll all be better off throwing grandma from the train.
Student loan caps? More people can go to school, graduate, and be unemployed, now that’s an outcome devoutly to be wished.
Meanwhile, things like health care reform, which would immediately benefit millions of people, or aid to the states, which would prevent millions of teachers, police officers, and fireman from being laid off, seem to be stuck in a doom loop of Democratic fear and Republican obstruction.
Meanwhile, the deficit, which should be climbing since the federal government is about the only place left in the economy where demand can be created, has become the latest bugaboo.
Meanwhile, the Fed does absolutely nothing about unemployment, nonexistent inflation is what makes phony hawks fly.
It’s difficult to know what to say about a government that doesn’t govern, leaders who don’t lead, and a citizenry that vacillates between pig ignorance and anger as their dreams, livelihoods, and families are destroyed.
Gorilla says: “There are more elephants in the room than we care to imagine, and the dung will keep rising steadily to the top!”
“I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn’t produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”
The speaker is President Obama, but a more difficult task for the casual reader is figuring out which lack of breakthrough and which high expectation raising he’s talking about:
Climate change? Nope.
Health care reform? Nope.
Reining in Wall Street? Nope.
Afghanistan? Nope.
Unemployment? Nope.
Iran? Nope.
Nuclear non-proliferation? Nope.
North Korea? Nope.
Gorilla chimes in: “The correct answer is peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and alas the President’s not any more serious about that than he is about any of the others!”
It’s clear now that health care reform is finished.
The Democrats don’t have the votes in the House to pass the Senate version of the bill.
Absent a firm commitment to use reconciliation, the White House has effectively signalled that it’s giving up; starting over as they now suggest means more time wasting and more defeats at the polls in 2010.
It’s a shameful performance and a failure of leadership that guarantees President Obama will serve only one term.
And now that the Supreme Court has enabled America’s plutocracy to control the campaign finance process, the middle class can look forward to another 35 years of nothing.
Gorilla sums it up: “No hope, no change, all bullshit, it’s business and politics as usual!”
President Obama has at last decided that something needs to be done about large US banks.
His ideas, to limit proprietary trading, while giving regulators the power to break up “too big to fail” banks and forbid excessive risk-taking, come straight from former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, perhaps the only senior figure on Wall Street or in the Administration with any credibility on this issue.
Whether these ideas can be passed by a Congress that’s wholly owned by Wall Street remains to be seen, but it’s good to see the President recognize that the financial services industry has not been doing much to reinvigorate the floundering US economy.
Gorilla says: “Now if the President would also propose a public works program and guarantee the states’ debt for three years, you could say he finally gets it!”
$117 billion over 10 years in new fees for the banks or until the TARP’s paid back?
Surely, our President must be joking!
The taxpayer’s on the hook currently for several trillion dollars in loan guarantees, hedge fund managers are still paying only 15% tax on their incomes, and Helicopter Ben remains in the sky showering the banks with cheap money for their next bubble.
Oh, and the longer-term fiscal outlet is dire, there’s little or no chance of the Congress raising taxes, or cutting back spending on things like the Pentagon and health care, but boy, nearly $12 billion/year or 0.004 percent in new revenue will be coming into the coffers of a Treasury that spends $3 trillion/year!!!
Gorilla asks: “Why not go for a toaster and a coffeemaker, too?”
