Corruption is surprisingly resilient.
Old Time Religion Politics: Rahm Emanuel is sent from the White House to be mayor of Chicago. Wall Street (JP Morgan Chase) counters by sending a Chicago Daley to the White House.
Words, Words, Words: Now the GOP says the $100 billion figure was “hypothetical.” A hypothetical promise. Did they have their fingers crossed? And they're going to raise the debt ceiling, too.
Er, Not so Fast: Amid yesterday's delirium over the ADP December jobs numbers, you may have missed the special caution put out by the economic advisory firm that helps compile the data: “There are reasons to be suspicious of this figure.”
Keeping Atheists out of Foxholes: The Army is running an “experimental” religious mental-health program that is designed to identify soldiers who are not “spiritually fit” to kill people and blow things up. The program, designed by the same guy who designed the Bush torture program, has been run 800,000 times during this “experiment.”
Bathwater: Rep. Steve King (R-IA) claims the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because people who put their babies in trash cans are not engaged in interstate commerce. The Republicans need more like Steve.
Out of Sight, Out of Mines: One-third of Australia's coal output has been halted by the Queensland flooding. China will turn elsewhere to buy replacement tonnage, driving up the price of energy around the world - and down the street from your house.
Contempt by Congress: If I understand the plan, the House GOP is going to pass a budget of some sort, only to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Bizarre. This means they could (and will, because for all the big talk they are not going to cut much from the budget) tell the Treasury to spend money it does not have and cannot borrow. And they think we're dumb enough to applaud.
A Cross To Bear: California's Blue Shield wants to hike its rates 59% - because of fast-rising healthcare costs. The cost that has increased the fastest is, of course, is the cost of insurance.
Good Idea: The FDIC is preparing to sue over 100 former executives of failed banks for “gross or simple negligence” in an attempt to recover $2.5 billion in payments the FDIC made cleaning up and closing down the institutions they supervised. Now if we could work the criminal negligence idea in and jail them. And apply the same concept elsewhere.
Echo: The US is sending 1,400 more Marines to Afghanistan because the previous surge forced the insurgents to spread out from their traditional strongholds into once peaceful areas in the north and west. We’re supposed to believe this is a sign the surge worked.
Worse Than Suspected: The single study that gave rise to the long-disproven claim that something (mercury) in vaccines caused autism was retracted by The Lancet last year and the head researcher barred from medical practice. Now the British Medical Journal has “unearthed clear evidence of falsification” in the research. Not one of the 12 cases cited in the original study accurately reflected the children's official medical records. It is time to put this canard away and to stop endangering our children by not vaccinating them.
The Pause that Refuses: The GOP took a break from posturing about cutting spending and reading the Constitution to deprive the 600,000 mostly black residents of the District of Columbia from representation in Congress.
Eppur si muove: In defending religion from the charge that it is a scam, Bill O'Reilly's trump card was this “I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that.”
Porn O'Graph: Because of this the land mourns...
7 comments:
This means they could (and will, because for all the big talk they are not going to cut much from the budget) tell the Treasury to spend money it does not have and cannot borrow.
Isn't the Treasury is different from you and me? - as I understand it, when I print money, it's counterfeit; when the Treasury prints money, it's money. Why not just go ahead and spend it? One wouldn't want to overdo this, of course - "all things in moderation."
Covering the debt by printing is, in small amounts, inflationary and expansionist. In larger amounts it is indistinguishable from counterfeiting. But if the Treasury borrows without the intent (or ability) to repay, that too has the same effect as simple counterfeiting.
Or so it seems to me.
ckm
re "keeping atheists out of foxholes" - those of us of a certain age, who had a reasonable fear that they might be drafted and sent to Vietnam, required to be in the Army for two years or the rest of their life (whichever came first), can recall Arlo Guthrie's tale of Alice's Restaurant - how, at his draft physical, he was sent to the Group W bench because of his arrest record - the Army wasn't sure he was moral enough to kill people because of his conviction for littering.
Martin Seligman, psychologist whose experiments torturing dogs led him to the concept of "learned helplessness", didn't really discover anything new. Before his work was published, Tom Paxton's 1966 song "Mr. Blue", put it as follows:
What will it take to whip you into line?
A broken heart? A broken head?
It can be arranged. It can be arranged.
$3.657,394,113.84
That's a big number, right? Let's round it off to $3.66 billion. Now, what is that number? That is the amount of money spent PER DAY under Nancy Pelosi's reign as Speaker. As Speaker of the House, she amassed more debt than the first 49 speakers combined, for a total of $5.343 trillion.
Think about it like this .. the Republicans are vowing to immediately start cutting spending. They want to start off by cutting $100 billion to return us to a 2008 spending level. Now $100 billion seems like a lot, until you realize that it took Nancy Pelosi and her congress a mere 33 days to rack up that amount of spending.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitherner Admits We Are Bankrupt
For those 17% of people who think the economy is in recovery and the other 33% who believe it will happen soon, we point you to the latest statement from current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitherner, who outlines the severity of the problem in a January 6, 2011 letter to Congress writes:
I am writing in response to your request for an estimate by the Treasury Department of when the statutory debt limit will be reached, and for a description of the consequences of default by the United States.
Never in our history has Congress failed to increase the debt limit when necessary. Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States. Default would effectively impose a significant and long-lasting tax on all Americans and all American businesses and could lead to the loss of millions of American jobs. Even a very short-term or limited default would have catastrophic economic consequences that would last for decades. Failure to increase the limit would be deeply irresponsible. For these reasons, I am requesting that Congress act to increase the limit early this year, well before the threat of default becomes imminent.
…
Treasury would prefer not to have to engage again in any of these extraordinary measures [suspension of the issuance of certain types of government debt and government investment vehicles]. If we are forced to do so again, these measures could delay the date by which the limit is reached by several weeks. Once these steps have been taken, no remaining legal and prudent measures would be available to create additional headroom under the debt limit, and the United States would begin to default on its obligations.
(SNIP)
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitherner Admits We Are Bankrupt
For those 17% of people who think the economy is in recovery and the other 33% who believe it will happen soon, we point you to the latest statement from current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitherner, who outlines the severity of the problem in a January 6, 2011 letter to Congress writes:
I am writing in response to your request for an estimate by the Treasury Department of when the statutory debt limit will be reached, and for a description of the consequences of default by the United States.
Never in our history has Congress failed to increase the debt limit when necessary. Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States. Default would effectively impose a significant and long-lasting tax on all Americans and all American businesses and could lead to the loss of millions of American jobs. (SNIP)
You are very wrong about the mercury poisoning of vaccinated American children having been disproved. There is much information you are apparently not aware of. I am a pediatric nurse and have been vitally interested in this subject since the 1970s when we first started seeing increased incidence of autism. Please research this issue further and refrain from making comments until you are much better informed. I am disappointed to see how readily you accept the obvious attempts by the MSM and "scientific" bureaucracy to discredit all who point out the glaring omissions and inconsistencies in their method. I am a faithful reader and was frankly shocked by your knee jerk deferral to the so-called authorities on this one. Try this site for a thorough explication of a study undertaken at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, School of Public Health and Community Medicine,
Washington National Primate Research Center,
Center on Human Development and Disability, and
Departments of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280342/ I think you will begin to appreciate the complexity of this problem and the difficulty scientists and the concerned public have encountered from vested interests in trying to find answers.
Post a Comment