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FLIGHTS

August 21, 2010|By Dugald McConnell and Brian Todd, CNN


Venezuela's ambassador to the United States is defending his country's controversial airline service to the capitals of Syria and Iran -- both countries that are designated by the U.S. as state sponsors of terrorism.

The scheduled flights to Damascus and Tehran were cited by the U.S. State Department this month as a cause for concern, and U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, D-New York, raised questions about the flights in an interview last week with Voice of America.

According to the State Department's latest country report on terrorism, which covers 2009, "President [Hugo] Chavez continued to strengthen Venezuela's relationship with state sponsor of terrorism Iran. Iran and Venezuela continued weekly Iran Airlines flights connecting Tehran and Damascus with Caracas."

Hold on tight to your dream. You never know when it will end.

Giant hay bale kills former ELO cellist Mike Edwards

Musician's van collided with bale that tumbled down hill

David Batty
The Guardian, Monday 6 September 2010

A former member of the rock group Electric Light Orchestra has been killed by a giant hay bale that crashed into his van while he was driving.

Cellist Mike Edwards died instantly when the 300kg bale landed on the front of the white van after it tumbled down a steep hill in Devon, then smashed through a hedge and on to the road.

Police are now investigating whether the fatal accident on Friday afternoon happened after the bale fell from a tractor working on farmland next to the A381 in Halwell, near Totnes.

The musician, 62, is understood to have swerved into another vehicle as his van was struck at around 12.30pm. The second driver was unhurt in the collision.

Sergeant Steve Walker, of the Devon and Cornwall police traffic unit, said: "This was a tragic accident and we have now identified the victim as Michael Edwards, a founder member of ELO.

"We have used photographs and YouTube footage to identify him but we now need help contacting his family for formal identification. We don't believe he was ever married and we have identified an ex-girlfriend, but she is currently abroad."

Officers were hoping to contact a man named David in the Yorkshire area who is believed to be Edward's brother. The musician is understood to have no immediate family, but may have taught cello in Devon.

The police, who are liaising with the Heath and Safety Executive, have asked his students to contact them if they have any further information about his relations.

From 1972 to 1986, ELO enjoyed a string of top 20 hit singles on both sides of the Atlantic, and sold more than 50 million albums worldwide. Edwards left the band after their fourth studio album, Eldorado, which was released in 1974.

Grim Prospects for jobs and wages on Labor Day 2010

No defence left against double-dip recession, says Nouriel Roubini

The United States, Japan and large parts of Europe have exhausted their policy arsenal, leaving them defenceless against a double-dip recession as recovery slows to ‘stall speed’.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor in Cernobbio, Italy
Published: 9:49AM BST 05 Sep 2010
Telegraph

“The US has run out of bullets,” said Nouriel Roubini, professor at New York University, and one of a caste of luminaries with grim forecasts at the annual Ambrosetti conference on Lake Como.

“More quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the Federal Reserve is not going to make any difference. Treasury yields are already down to 2.5pc yet credit spreads are widening again. Monetary policy can boost liquidity but it can’t deal with solvency problems,” he told Europe’s policy elite.

Dr Roubini said the US growth rate was likely to fall below 1pc in the second half of the year, despite the biggest stimulus in history: a cut in interest rates from 5pc to zero, a budget deficit of 10pc of GDP, and $3 trillion to shore up the financial system.

The anaemic pace compares with rates of 4pc-6pc at this stage of recovery in normal post-war recoveries.
“We have reached stall speed. Any shock at this point can tip you back into recession. With interbank spreads rising, you can get a vicious circle like 2008-2009,” he said, describing a self-feeding process as the real economy and the credit system hurt each other.

“There is a 40pc chance of double-dip recession in the US, and worse in Japan. Even if it is not technically a recession it will feel like it,” he added.

Hans-Werner Sinn, head of Germany’s IFO Institute, said the US would have to purge its debt excesses the hard way.

“The bitter truth is that there is no way out of this with monetary and fiscal policy. They will just have to see their living standards go down. I see a decade of difficulties for the US,” he said.

Dr Sinn said the US the market for mortgage securities (CDOs) had collapsed from $1.9 trillion in 2006 to just $50bn last year, leaving the US property market reliant on federal agencies.

“The world is simply not willing to buy these dubious financial products again. Germany is leaving, China is no longer there, and Japan is pulling away. The US system of mortgage finance is on government life support and that cannot drive a sustainable upswing,” he said.

Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson said the US has exhausted fiscal stimulus given warnings from the Congressional Budget Office that interest payments as a share of tax revenues will reach 20pc by 2020 and 36pc by 2030 without drastic retrenchment.

“The fiscal crisis seems to be out of control. The 'big crossover’ is approaching when the US spends more on debt service costs than on security, and historically that is the tipping point for any global power,” he said.

Mr Ferguson said the “Chimerica” marriage of recent years is on the rocks. China is no longer willing to fund the US Treasury bond market, cutting its share of holdings from 13pc to 10pc of the total debt stock.

While China must find ways to recycle its trade surplus and hold down the yuan, it is doing this by stockpiling commodities, buying hard assets around the world, or rotating into Asian bonds.

Dr Roubini said US companies have plenty of cash but are boosting profits by a policy of “slash and burn” on labour costs. “We’ve lost 8.4m jobs and if you include the loss of hours worked it is equivalent to another 3m. We need to generate an extra 450,000 jobs every month for three years to get it back,” he said.

The US non-farm payrolls data released on Friday was better then expected but still showed a net loss of 54,000 jobs.

Dr Roubini said average public debt in the rich countries would rise to 120pc of GDP by 2015 in the rich countries, leaving no scope for a further fiscal stimulus. If they push their luck, they too risk the sort of bond crises seen in Southern Europe this year.

In the US, the fiscal boost has faded, switching to tightening over coming months The lift from the inventory cycle is finished. Capex spending by companies has held up well, but this slowed sharply in July. Housing is already in a double dip. The last support for the US economy is consumption, barely growing at 1pc.
“All we did was kick the can down the road and stole demand from the future,” he said.

Obama's economic policies have failed

Barack Obama is locked in a lose-lose situation
The president seems incapable of tackling either unemployment or the deficit, says Jeremy Warner.

By Jeremy Warner
Published: 6:27PM BST 03 Sep 2010
Telegraph

Barack Obama promised a new beginning when he became president in 2008. After the ideologically driven incompetence of the Bush years, we were mainly prepared to believe him. Yet politicians that promise root and branch change will nearly always disappoint and, with Mr Obama, disillusionment has been swift to arrive.
Judged by his legislative output, the new president has been extraordinarily successful. From healthcare reform to financial services, he's already up there with Lyndon Johnson and Franklin D Roosevelt. And, of course, this week, he's managed to deliver on his campaign pledge to end the war in Iraq; believe it if you will.

Yet on the most important issue facing ordinary Americans – the economy – Mr Obama is shaping up to be one almighty let down. As mid-term elections loom, there is visible panic among Democrats at the administration's failure to get to grips with deep-seated economic problems.

Tony Blair, who came to power on a similarly intoxicating wave of public euphoria, at least had the following wind of "The Great Moderation" – a virtually unprecedented period of economic stability and growth – to disguise the disappointments and repeated policy mistakes of his premiership. There was no such golden windfall to act as a prop for Mr Obama: the economy he inherited was toxic from top to bottom. The country was on the brink of a potentially severe depression; it was fighting two, essentially unaffordable wars; the budget deficit was spiralling out of control; jobs were being shed at the rate of nearly one million a month; public debt was on a catastrophically unsustainable trajectory.

Nobody could have expected Mr Obama to fix all these problems in the 20 months he has been in the job, but they might by now reasonably have expected at least a glimpse of the promised sunlit uplands.

There is no such vision on the horizon. Joblessness remains stubbornly high and, far from becoming self-sustaining, the recovery shows signs of stalling. In short, Mr Obama's economic policies have failed, or at least that is the growing public perception.

For me, it is still too early to make that judgment; as it happens there was modest encouragement from yesterday's US employment data. But many investors have made up their minds. Rightly or wrongly, yields on Treasury bonds are at levels that discount a depression.

Rarely have Americans felt so down in the dumps; collectively, they seem to have lost their innate sense of self-belief and optimism. Not since the 1930s has the American dream looked so forlorn. What's gone wrong, and why has the patient proved so unwilling to respond to the extraordinary fiscal and monetary medicine applied?

To supporters of deficit spending, it's not that the fiscal stimulus isn't working, but that it was always insufficient to do the trick. To them, Mr Obama should have done much more in his early months when he still had the political credit to take bold steps.

Most of us have something of a problem with this argument. The near $1 trillion fiscal stimulus Mr Obama applied could hardly be described as underwhelming. Indeed, it was without precedent in terms of size; very probably it was the most that was politically feasible at the time, too.

How much good it has done is anyone's guess. Supportive economists claim it averted a depression, but it doesn't seem to have done much for jobs. Beyond the ever widening deficit, there has been little discernible effect.
You can argue until the cows come home on the merits of further deficit spending, but even if Mr Obama were to take the view that he has to do more – as the White House's departing chief economist, Christina Romer, said he should this week – he almost certainly won't get that chance. Mr Obama is not just down in the polls; on present voting intentions, the Democrats will lose the House in the coming mid-terms, and possibly the Senate, too. Even if he wanted to spend more, he's not going to be allowed to. Anxiety about the deficit is stymieing the White House's jobs agenda.

Even Democrats shrink from overt support for more spending, and beyond some targeted measures which would carry no net costs, the president seems to have accepted there's virtually no room for manoeuvre. Already evident political stalemate will turn into gridlock after the mid-terms. Mr Obama won't be allowed more fiscal stimulus, and nor, despite their demands for deficit reduction, will his Republican opponents allow him to raise taxes to put public debt on a sustainable footing.

Now it may well be that the severity of the economic headwinds renders almost any further policy response ineffective, but politicians are not forgiven for impotence. On the main challenges facing his administration, Mr Obama falls between two stalls – he seems incapable of tackling either unemployment or the deficit.

Whatever his other achievements, Mr Obama will go down in history as the worst president since Jimmy Carter if he cannot make headway on either of these issues. It's hard to be optimistic. Mr Obama looks like a beached whale. As Tony Blair observes in his new autobiography, there is nothing quite so painful as high expectations dashed by harsh political and economic realities.

Do Continue

Change or Close? The same is not an option.

Whit and I have been unhappy with the boring bickering and single note response regardless of the topic. I would like to hear some suggestions about where we go from here, if anywhere. Things end and maybe that is the answer, but boring is tedious. I would like to hear from of the lurkers as well. We will decide how to proceed but would appreciate your input.

Robert Shiller Interview

Obama Style

“There are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation.” - Barack Hussein Obama

I suppose Obama still cannot believe that he is President and needed an oversized presidential seal emblazoned in the middle of his new shagged carpet. Shades of Starbuck's cocoa mocha are relieved by gold striped wallpaper, harkening back to Michelle's Big Bird inaugural outfit.

I am not sure what the green hedge is doing over the mantle; It must be a green thing, however, we were reminded that the mocha latte rug is made from recycled something or another.

I am uncertain of the selection of the skid of plywood shaped coffee table is doing in the elegant yet powerful colonial Oval Office but hey, focus on the fruit bowl, picture Joe "this is a big fucking deal" Biden munching on an apple with his porcelain whitened choppers.

Mmm mmm mmm, Barack Hussein Obama.

_____________________________









August 31, 2010
Not-So-Magic Carpet Ride
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
NY Times

HATTIP: Quirk

If we had wanted earth tones in the Oval Office, we would have elected Al Gore.

(Oh, yeah, we did.)

On the night we were reminded that George W. Bush ended up in the White House and heedlessly, needlessly started the war with Iraq, President Obama did his Mission Relinquished address from his redecorated man cave.

The Oval Office was done over by the chichi decorator Michael Smith, who was previously paid $800,000 for his part in refurnishing the lair of the former Merrill Lynch C.E.O. John Thain (a $1.2 million project featuring the notorious $35,000 antique cabinet, or commode).

The Oval Office, the classiest, most powerful place on earth, is now suffused with browns and beiges and leather and resembles an upscale hotel conference room or a ’70s conversation pit with a boxy coffee table that even some Obama aides find ugly.

It almost made me long for the Technicolor Belle Watling swagging and swathing style of the Clintons’ Little Rock decorator, Kaki Hockersmith.

The recession redo, paid for by the nonprofit White House Historical Association, was the latest tone-deaf move by a White House that was supposed to excel at connection and communication. Message: I care, but not enough to stop the fancy vacations and posh renovations.

As Obama himself said in February 2009 when he released his first budget: “There are times where you can afford to redecorate your house, and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding the foundation.”

It might have been wise, given America’s slough of despond, to hark back to a time when presidents just went to work and took their office pretty much as they found it, without the need to make a personal statement. As the former White House curator Rex Scouten once told me, in the era from Taft to Truman, the green rug in the president’s office was changed only once, when it wore out, to a new green rug.

The new cream-of-wheat-colored rug is made of 25 percent recycled wool and features 100 percent recycled quotes around the border that have significance for President Obama. (Which means, of course, that the next chief executive will want to carpet copy-edit and put his or her own special quotes on the Oval rug. If the Tea Party triumphs, it might be “Don’t Tread on Me.” If Sarah Palin ascends, it will no doubt be a mama grizzly bear rug, personally bagged by her.)

The quotations chosen by Obama include F.D.R.’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”; Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”; Lincoln’s “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”; J.F.K.’s “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings”; and Teddy Roosevelt’s “The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.”

Given the cunning tableau created on the Mall over the weekend by Glenn Beck and Palin, in their artful and frightening mix of theology and Tea Party ideology, the president might be better served by a carpet that prompts him to get his groove back.

The first thing the once inspirational orator should embroider around the rug, the maxim that sums up so much of what’s wrong with the administration now, is the immortal line from “Cool Hand Luke”: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Sidetracked by the mosque fight and now admirably plunging into brokering a Middle East peace, Obama clearly needs a reminder about what really counts as the Democrats prepare to get their clocks cleaned. The rug should quote James Carville’s famous admonition: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

There should be a special message for John Boehner, the Republican leader who has been strutting around as the Speaker-in-Waiting and who led the Republicans on Tuesday in their inane effort to deny Obama credit for anything by spending the day reminding people that it was W.’s war. The president should emblazon Kathleen Turner’s line from “Body Heat”: “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.”

Obama needs his rug to remind him to toughen up. When the self-styled Republican “Young Guns” — Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy — pull their wacky ideas out of their policy holsters, they should have to look down and read the warning from Al “Scarface” Pacino about his machine gun: “Say hello to my little friend.”

While he’s at it, the president who naïvely yearned for unanimity when he had a majority might put this legend around the border of his carpet: “Post-partisanship doesn’t work with Mitch McConnell.”

And for all of us who have that sinking feeling that the economic rug is being pulled out from under us, the president might stitch in the famous warning from “Jaws”: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”