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When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced last Friday that the economy lost only 36,000 jobs in February, the usual choristers took that as good news. Christina Romer, the Chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers said, “Today’s report on the employment situation is consistent with the pattern of stabilization and gradual labor market healing we have been seeing in recent months.”
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Just when the headline news about the economy was beginning to look good and the talking heads were beginning to sound good, along came a barrage of bad news that was so bad that it couldn’t be covered up. Gallup began with the news that in January nearly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce “lacked adequate employment”, which was worse than the numbers reported by the Labor Department. According to Reuters, these “findings appear to paint a darker employment picture than official U.S. data,” with about 30 million Americans “underemployed.” And Gallup misses the mark by at least 2 percent, according to John Williams of ShadowStats.com.
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The “Mount Vernon Statement” to be announced today at the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. is a “broad statement of principle aimed at giving a coherent framework” to the Tea Party and other activist movements on the right.
It also sounds eerily familiar.
The statement is available at www.themountvernonstatement.com, which declares:
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An Associated Press writer says “the crushing weight of its debt threatens to overwhelm everything the federal government does,” even under the best-case scenario. This theme of unsustainable debts and deep holes has been reviewed elsewhere on this site, and it’s small comfort that it is now making headlines in the controlled mainstream media:
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When he appeared on ABC News‘s This Week on February 7, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was quizzed about the risk of the United States losing its triple-A credit rating, the chances that foreign investors might start shunning US debt, and whether the economy would suffer a double dip recession.
Last week the credit rating agency Moody’s warned that weak economic growth and increasing debt burdens could “put pressure on the country’s triple-A status.” When asked to respond, Geithner said, “Absolutely not. That will never happen to this country.” One remembers the speaker’s rule to be very careful about using absolutes, such as “absolutely”, and “never happen.” History books are filled with examples of events that could “absolutely never happen.”
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Now that the GOP has all but shelved the litmus test for candidates to receive money and support for their mid-term election campaigns, a closer look at that “test” reveals a tepid attempt to reinvigorate “conservative” principles into the big tent GOP.
The Republican National Committee, meeting in Hawaii to hammer out their platform, briefly considered a resolution from James Bopp, an RNC vice-chairman from Indiana and general counsel for National Right to Life, requiring candidates to state publicly their agreement with at least eight of ten listed “conservative” positions. Bopp said that his resolution was “designed to bring conservatives, some of whom have gravitated to the independent ‘tea party’ movement, into the GOP fold.” He expressed concern that “disaffected conservatives” would back third-party candidates and take support away from Republicans running in the same race. He added:
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This change allegedly reflects the impact the Brown win in Massachusetts last week had on politics in general, but also that it had not been anticipated by Obama or the Democrats.
“The entire political community was caught a little bit unawares on that one,” said David Axelrod, White House senior advisor. The impact of Brown’s win on Obama’s healthcare bill was significant in that it deprived the Democrats of the opportunity to push the bill through the Senate without a Republican vote.
When Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin announced her support for three prominent Republicans, her Facebook statement entitled “Ride the Tide with Commonsense Candidates” resounded with laudibles such as supporting those who offer “commonsense government,” and those “who promise to fight FOR the people and AGAINST politics as usual.” She referred to the Massachusetts election as “truly amazing,” and a “demonstration of the momentum we all share in the fight for the values and policies that will get our country back to work. The commonsense conservative principles of liberty and fiscal responsibility are on the rise…”
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Yesterday the New York Times concluded that Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat resulted from Democrat complacency, Republican tentativeness, and Tea Party activism. Based upon interviews with more than 30 individuals involved in the race, the Times traced the rise of Brown from relative obscurity over the past month to victor on Monday.
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“The debt level of the United States is unsustainable, something has to give,” said the co-author of a new joint report released last week by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration. The committee that prepared the 268-page study, entitled Choosing the Nation’s Fiscal Future, included three former heads of the Congressional Budget Office.
A WorldNetDaily article by Jerome Corsi, entitled “Forecast: Debt to Dwarf GDP,” provided key quotes from the study as well as from Rudolph Penner, one of the former CBO heads. “The fundamental problem is that we have these three very large programs—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security— that…are growing faster than tax revenues and faster than the economy,” Penner told WorldNetDaily. This is creating an “unsustainable federal budget deficit [that continues to grow] ever onward and upward.”
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Tea Party activists are trying to take over the Republican Party from the ground up, according to the New York Times.
There are many pieces to the Tea Party puzzle, described as a “diverse, rambunctious and Internet-connected network of groups.” This includes Tea Party Nation which describes itself as a “user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God-given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers, [who] believe in Limited Government, Free Speech, the 2nd Amendment, our Military, Secure Borders and our Country.”
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From obscurity to prominence to possible victory, Massachusetts State Senator Scott Brown’s campaign for Teddy Kennedy’s seat in a special election on Tuesday, January 19, is receiving national attention. From a 30-point underdog, Brown has campaigned for the seat—which he says “With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedys’ seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat” — with his pledge: “I will send this [Obama healthcare] bill back.” And in so doing he has closed the gap so that several prominent pollsters are saying the race is too close to call.
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According to Newsweek, the dollar isn’t weakening, and even if it is, it isn’t Obama’s fault. On Tuesday, Daniel Gross iterated all the reasons that, according to conservatives, the American dollar should weaken. Conservatives, he said, blame the actions of the Federal Reserve with the lowering of interest rates to zero, printing money, and expanding the monetary base. They also blame the Obama administration for running up huge deficits in its efforts to restart the faltering economy.
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The Republican primary in Florida, which pits Governor Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio, is being watched carefully as a harbinger for the impact the Tea Party may have on the midterm elections. Six months ago Crist was leading all challengers, according to Rasmussen Reports, but now Crist is tied with former state House Speaker Marco Rubio.
On social issues, Crist takes traditional conservative positions including support for gun rights and capital punishment, and opposition to elective abortion and same-sex marriage. He supported John McCain’s candidacy for President in 2008, but got in trouble by supporting Obama’s stimulus bill.
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The announcements by Democrat Senators Chris Dodd (Conn.) and Byron Dorgan (N.D.) last week that they will not be running for reelection in 2010 raised both concerns by Democrats and hopes of Republicans.
Senator Dodd’s announcement has been examined thoroughly elsewhere on this site, but Senator Dorgan’s announcement was an unexpected bombshell that followed announcements by Alabama Representative Parker Griffith that he was switching parties from Democrat to Republican, along with the retirement announcements from two Democrats from Tennessee and another one from Kansas. The battles that are currently raging in Nevada for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s seat and in Pennsylvania for Democrat Senator Arlen Specter’s seat, along with the battles in Illinois and Delaware to fill the Senate seats formerly held by Democrats Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden, indicate more than just a midterm election shift.
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Regulatory failures and not low interest rates were responsible for the housing bubble, implosion and current recession, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke asserted on Sunday.
“Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lender’s risk management would have been…more effective [in] constraining the housing bubble [rather] than a general increase in interest rates,” Bernanke told the American Economic Association. Bernanke, while awaiting Senate confirmation for another term as Fed Chairman, defended recent and continuing charges that the Fed contributed significantly to the current financial crisis by keeping interest rates too low for too long.
More than $16 billion of investors’ money evaporated in Ponzi schemes in 2009, according to the Associated Press. Although the names Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford were in the headlines in 2009, many other Ponzi schemes were uncovered as the economy declined, making continued payouts to investors impossible.
As Warren Buffet said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
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Alabama Representative Parker Griffith announced on Tuesday that he is changing his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican.
Griffith, a member of the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition, previously asked to be called just a Blue Dog, and now prefers to be called Republican, after changing party affiliations last week. He says he made the change because he can no longer align himself “with a party that continues to pursue legislation that is bad for our country, hurts our economy and drives us further into debt.”
When the New York Times announced in their lead article on the front page of their Christmas Eve edition that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Goldman Sachs for allegedly self-dealing, it was a moment of surprise for many and, for others, a moment of clarity and confirmation.
It was a simple announcement, really: The Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating some potential self-dealing by a large financial services company. But, like Toto pulling away the curtain to expose the imposter behind the Wizard of Oz, the world could see, however briefly, the inner workings of how business is really done at Goldman.
When MSNBC headlined the report that existing home sales surged by 7.4 percent in November (according to the National Association of Realtors), it suggested that such an improvement boosted “recovery hopes.” Others jumped on the recovery bandwagon, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Blinder.
According to Geithner, it’s now reasonable to expect “positive job growth” by spring and correct to assert that people should have confidence in an improving economy. “I think most people would say the economy actually is strengthening now,” he added.
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