No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 23
Month: August 2012
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Investors Business Daily clearly is not (as I am not) part of the group in the headline:
CBS News’ Nancy Cordes pointed out to the president that his campaign “suggested that Mr. Romney might be a felon for the way that he handed over power of Bain Capital.” And she pointed out that “your campaign and the White House have declined to condemn an ad by one of your top supporters that links Mr. Romney to a woman’s death from cancer.”
So far, so good. But then the president threw some intimidation Cordes’ way.
“I’m not sure all those characterizations that you laid out there were accurate,” he said. “For example, nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon.”
False. Here are the exact words of Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter last month:
“Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony,” Cutter suggested to reporters, “or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments.”
It was Obama’s campaign that chose to use the “F” word. Is the president practicing some kind of Clintonesque wordplay? Accusing someone of “either” committing a felony or lying is not accusing him of a felony?
The press corps should have pounced right then and there. Instead, it let Obama ramble on about “the overall trajectory of our campaign.”
On the outrageous ad accusing Romney of the cancer death of the wife of a laid-off steel worker, the work of Obama super-PAC Priorities USA Action run by former White House aides, Obama claimed, “I think it ran once.”
Again, the reporters fell down on the job. None pointed out that the commercial ran repeatedly — and at no charge to the Obama campaign — on numerous cable news channels covering the controversy it ignited.
Add to this the fact that Obama has broken precedent compared to previous presidents by choosing by name the tiny handful of favored reporters who get to ask questions. This raises the issue of what point there is in having so many dozens of reporters present in the White House briefing room at all.
On top of all that, as White House Dossier’s Keith Koffler reported on Tuesday, the administration has been manipulating local TV news reporters, arranging what subjects they are allowed to ask. And no doubt threatening not to give them the interview otherwise.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto adds:
Nixon was famously paranoid, which didn’t mean his adversaries, including in the media, weren’t out to get him. By contrast, journalists are generally favorably disposed to Obama. “The media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants,” The Weekly Standard quotes Time’s Mark Halperin as having observed the other day. (As we’ve noted in the past, that’s very much true of Halperin himself.)
How could Obama be so out of touch? The Taranto Principle–the theory that approving coverage from liberal journalists encourages self-defeating behavior by liberal politicians–would not seem to apply here, at least not directly. Even admiring journalists have taken note (sometimes admiringly) of the nastiness and divisiveness of Obama’s re-election campaign. The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that the president “is an avid consumer of political news and commentary” in the form of newspapers and magazines, so he can’t actually be unaware that some people think his campaign is divisive. …
Obama’s “critique” of the media takes the Taranto Principle to a new level. He is not only taken in when liberal journalists give him unrealistically favorable coverage but insulated when they give him realistically unfavorable coverage.
The media has always, at least in my lifetime, treated Republicans harder than Democrats. U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R–Missouri) is being raked over the coals for his utterly stupid observations on whether a female victim of sexual assault can be made pregnant. Vice President Biden makes utterly stupid and racist comments, and the media criticizes him not.
Thomas Jefferson famously said that if the choice were between no government and no newspapers, he would choose the former. I would say that if the choice were between the media’s criticizing all politicians, even to the point of unfairness, or none, I would choose the former.
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The great blogger David Blaska (and I thought he was a great blogger before what you’re about to read) gives his top 10 of Wisconsin bloggers, which include …
Steve Prestegard, the Presteblog, … a rock ’n roll and classic cars aficionado … strong on business matters … Like the Beach Boys, he gets around … does “Presty the DJ” on his music faves from back in the day … blog sometimes so clogged with music videos the pages take forever to load. He’s so good he is featured at In Business/Wisconsin and, also like yours truly, appears on Joy Cardin’s WI Public Radio show, Week in Review.
(Note to self: Remember to do the “More” thingy so pages don’t take so long to load …)
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Today in 1964, the Supremes reached number one by wondering …
Today in 1968, the Beatles briefly broke up when Ringo Starr quit during recording of their “White Album.” Starr rejoined the group Sept. 3, but in the meantime the remaining trio recorded “Back in the USSR” with Paul McCartney on drums and John Lennon on bass:
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Due to some kind of horrible editing error, Newsweek‘s cover story reads: “Hit the Road, Barack”:
Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.
In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.
In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.
In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.
Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.
Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits. …
His much-vaunted health-care reform will not prevent spending on health programs growing from more than 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent in 2037. Add the projected increase in the costs of Social Security and you are looking at a total bill of 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now. That is only slightly less than the average cost of all federal programs and activities, apart from net interest payments, over the past 40 years. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.
And even that figure understates the real debt burden. The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues—what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true “fiscal gap”—is $222 trillion.
Those paragraphs answer my favorite question …
The story further explains why no one can expect things to get better with another four years of Obama: Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing:
On paper it looked like an economics dream team: Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee, not to mention Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, and Paul Volcker. The inside story, however, is that the president was wholly unable to manage the mighty brains—and egos—he had assembled to advise him.
According to Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men, Summers told Orszag over dinner in May 2009: “You know, Peter, we’re really home alone … I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes [of indecisiveness on key economic issues].” On issue after issue, according to Suskind, Summers overruled the president. “You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)
This problem extended beyond the White House. After the imperial presidency of the Bush era, there was something more like parliamentary government in the first two years of Obama’s administration. The president proposed; Congress disposed. It was Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts who wrote the stimulus bill and made sure it was stuffed full of political pork. And it was the Democrats in Congress—led by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank—who devised the 2,319-page Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank, for short), a near-perfect example of excessive complexity in regulation. The act requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies, and issue 22 periodic reports. It eliminates one regulator and creates two new ones.
It is five years since the financial crisis began, but the central problems—excessive financial concentration and excessive financial leverage—have not been addressed.
Today a mere 10 too-big-to-fail financial institutions are responsible for three quarters of total financial assets under management in the United States. Yet the country’s largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new “Basel III” accords governing bank capital adequacy.
And then there was health care. No one seriously doubts that the U.S. system needed to be reformed. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the “fee for service” model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers. …
A much more accurate term would be “Pelosicare,” since it was she who really forced the bill through Congress.
Pelosicare was not only a political disaster. Polls consistently showed that only a minority of the public liked the ACA, and it was the main reason why Republicans regained control of the House in 2010. It was also another fiscal snafu. The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.
The president just kept ducking the fiscal issue. Having set up a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Obama effectively sidelined its recommendations of approximately $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in added revenues over the coming decade. As a result there was no “grand bargain” with the House Republicans—which means that, barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output.
The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States. …
America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement. Small wonder 46 percent of Americans—and 63 percent of Chinese—believe that China already has replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower or eventually will.
It is a sign of just how completely Barack Obama has “lost his narrative” since getting elected that the best case he has yet made for reelection is that Mitt Romney should not be president. In his notorious “you didn’t build that” speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the Internet, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo moon landing, and even (bizarrely) the creation of the middle class. Sadly, he couldn’t mention anything comparable that his administration has achieved.
Now Obama is going head-to-head with his nemesis: a politician who believes more in content than in form, more in reform than in rhetoric. In the past days much has been written about Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s choice of running mate. I know, like, and admire Paul Ryan. For me, the point about him is simple. He is one of only a handful of politicians in Washington who is truly sincere about addressing this country’s fiscal crisis. …
Mitt Romney is not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine. But he was clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination. He brings to the presidency precisely the kind of experience—both in the business world and in executive office—that Barack Obama manifestly lacked four years ago. (If only Obama had worked at Bain Capital for a few years, instead of as a community organizer in Chicago, he might understand exactly why the private sector is not “doing fine” right now.) And by picking Ryan as his running mate, Romney has given the first real sign that—unlike Obama—he is a courageous leader who will not duck the challenges America faces.
The voters now face a stark choice. They can let Barack Obama’s rambling, solipsistic narrative continue until they find themselves living in some American version of Europe, with low growth, high unemployment, even higher debt—and real geopolitical decline.
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Investors Business Daily doesn’t believe the Obama campaign’s rhetoric about the middle class:
The president has positioned himself as a “warrior for the middle class,” fighting against a ruling class of one-percenters. But a new book says Obama is really at war with middle America.
In fact, Obama hates the American middle class and all it represents, according to Spreading the Wealth by Stanley Kurtz. The president is secretly scheming to destroy it where it lives: the suburbs.
Of course, we don’t hear that from the campaign. …
“I believe that the way you grow the economy is from the middle out,” Obama said, adding he will tax “millionaires and billionaires” to help out the struggling middle class. “I believe in fighting for the middle class.”
Baloney, says Kurtz.
“Re-elect him and you’ll see that he is after the pocketbooks of a whole lot more than just 1% of us,” he warned in the book. “His real target is America’s middle class, suburbanites in particular.”
Added Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center: “Many suburban voters now planning to support him will find their incomes and their children’s schools the targets of his redistributive schemes in a second term. The 1% slogan is a sham. If your income is in the top 50%, Obama is after you.”
Citing recent White House policy meetings with radical community organizers, Kurtz warns that Obama is saving his most jarring initiatives for a second term, when he no longer has to court the middle class.
They’ll see “concerted moves to force regional tax-base sharing on the states,” he said, “and federal pressure to equalize urban and suburban school funding.” …
[Saul] Alinsky’s followers believe the middle class is racist and greedy. This notion, Kurtz notes, is what drew Obama to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church and its attacks on the “the pursuit of middleclassness.”
Kurtz says Obama’s stealth plan to abolish the suburbs includes:
• Forcing bedroom communities to build subsidized housing units under the threat of HUD lawsuits.
• Forcing regional tax-redistribution plans on the states by conditioning receipt of federal funding on such “regional equity plans,” which are now being formulated under the administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative.
• Using the carrot of federal funds to usurp state and local control of schools.
• Forcing public schools to adopt politicized curricula and lower education standards, which are now being formulated under the administration’s Common Core Initiative.
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We begin with two forlorn non-music anniversaries. Today in 1897, Oldsmobile began operation, eventually to become a division of General Motors Corp. … but not anymore.
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Louis Woodhill of Forbes.com:
President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. That’s good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again. The company is once again losing market share, and it seems unable to develop products that are truly competitive in the U.S. market.
Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.
Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow.
It’s doubtful that the Obama administration would attempt to sell off the government’s massive position in GM while the stock price is falling. It would be too embarrassing politically. Accordingly, if GM shares continue to decline, it is likely that Obama would ride the stock down to zero.
GM is unlikely to hit the wall before the election, but, given current trends, the company could easily do so again before the end of a second Obama term.
Woodhill uses the Chevrolet Malibu to show how bad things are for GM:
Because the D-Segment is the highest volume single vehicle class in the U.S., and the U.S. is GM’s home market, it is difficult to imagine how GM could survive long term unless it can profitably develop, manufacture, and market a vehicle that can hold its own in the D-Segment. This is true not only because of the revenue potential of the D-Segment, but also because of what an also-ran Malibu would say about GM’s ability to execute at this time in its history.
GM is in the process of introducing a totally redesigned 2013 Chevy Malibu. It will compete in the D-Segment with, among others, the following: the Ford Fusion (totally redesigned for 2013); the Honda Accord (totally redesigned for 2013); the Hyundai Sonata (totally redesigned for 2011); the Nissan Altima (totally redesigned for 2013); the Toyota Camry (refreshed for 2013); and the Volkswagen Passat (totally redesigned for 2012).
Uh-oh. At this point, it appears that the 2013 Malibu is not only inferior to the 2012 Volkswagen Passat, it’s not even as good as the car it replaces, the 2012 Chevy Malibu.
If you follow the automobile enthusiast press, you know that, under the leadership of then product czar Bob Lutz, GM went all out to develop a competitive D-Segment car for the 2008 model year. The result was the 2008 Chevy Malibu, which managed to get itself named by Car and Driver magazine as one of the “10 Best Cars” for 2008.
However, when tested head to head against six other D-Segment sedans in the March 2008 issue of Car and Driver, the 2008 Malibu came in third, behind the Honda Accord and the Nissan Altima. Adjusted to the points scale that Car and Driver uses today, the 2008 Malibu scored 187 points, 6% lower than the winning 2008 Honda Accord’s 198 points. …
In their March 2012 issue, Car and Driver published another D-Segment comparison test, pitting the 2013 Chevy Malibu Eco against five competing vehicles. This time, the Malibu came in dead last.
Not only was the 2013 Malibu (183 points) crushed by the winning 2012 Volkswagen Passat (211 points), it was soundly beaten by the 2012 Honda Accord (198 points), a 5-model-year-old design due for replacement this fall. Worst of all, the 2013 Malibu scored (and placed) lower than the 2008 Malibu would have in the same test.
Uh-oh.
Digging deeper, the picture just gets worse. Despite its mild hybrid powertrain, which is intended to provide superior fuel economy (at the cost of a higher purchase price and reduced trunk space), the 2013 Malibu Eco delivered the same 26 MPG in Car and Driver’s comparison test as the Passat, the Accord, and the Toyota Camry. …
Chevrolet is not a premium brand, like Mercedes or BMW. Since the 1920s, Chevy’s essential market positioning has been “more car for your money”. Unfortunately, the 2012 Volkswagen Passat is more car for the money than is the 2013 Malibu. There will not be anything that GM will be able to do about this for the next five years other than to reduce the price of the Malibu by offering “incentives”. This will eat into the company’s profitability, which is already weak. …
“The game isn’t over until it’s over”, but if President Obama wins reelection, he should probably start giving some serious thought to how he is going to justify bailing out GM, and its unionized UAW workforce, yet again. And, during the current campaign, Obama might want to be a little more modest about what he actually achieved by bailing out GM the first time.
Some comments on Woodhill’s piece believe his analysis is excessively pessimistic because, they claim, GM has $40 billion in cash on hand. If that’s the case, then GM should buy back the $10.1 billion in government stock and remove itself from the 2012 presidential campaign.
Another comment brings up another GM product Woodhill didn’t even mention:
Nissan and VW put their best engineers into working on their most popular cars. GM has every bit as good, if not better, engineers than do these companies. Unfortunately, they were put into developing the Volt. They did a very nice job, however this car should never have been built. They pushed the envelope with this car, however the technology to make a cost efficient electric car is still a good ways off. What they ended up with was a beautiful little car that gets great gas mileage, but is far too expensive, even with the subsidy, for value conscious driver’s looking for good gas mileage. It lacks the power performance oriented driver’s are looking for and it’s too small for families. There is no rational reason for anyone to buy it. Why would any company devote their best and brightest to develop a vehicle with no market? GM still makes great trucks – if they lose this, they’re screwed.
Having seen the Volt, I disagree with the commenter’s view of the car, but I suspect his view of the process is right on.
Others claim that GM’s future isn’t going to be based on one car, even though that car is in the highest-volume sales class on the U.S. They point to GM’s profitable pickups and SUVs. Those are vehicles that will be going away with the Obama-mandated 54.5-mpg standard. There is no pickup truck, full-size or smaller, that will ever get 54.5 mpg. And GM is incapable of selling enough small cars to offset trucks’ worse fuel economy.
Profit is the biggest issue not just for GM, but for all of the Big Three. Given the economy and the increasing costs of vehicles, plus the fact that vehicles last longer, GM, Ford and Chrysler need to be focused on selling cars profitably, not just making money through volume. GM has failed to sell small cars profitably for decades, and the Volt is a money-loser. If GM’s more profitable vehicles go away, guess what happens to GM.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States (as observed by National Review):
Vice President Joe Biden has made a long career out of saying crude and stupid things, and now he has outdone himself by affecting a southern accent and telling a substantially black audience in Virginia (he seemed to think he was in North Carolina) that if Romney has his way “he gonna put y’all back in chains.”
The Obama campaign already has established its reputation as a lowlife operation, trafficking in risibly and plainly untrue statements — Mitt Romney killed my wife! — but the latest from Biden is so grotesque and morally illiterate that it deserves a special mention. It bears noting, first, that Mr. Biden spent his Senate years comfortable in the company of a Democratic lion who had borne the title “Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan” and who used the term “white n****r” on national television, and, second, that Mr. Biden represented a highly segregated state. His party has undermined the economic and educational interests of African-Americans at every turn, among other ways by fighting the D.C. scholarship program that benefits the children served by Washington’s failed public schools.
This is the sort of thing that we’re accustomed to hearing from Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan. To hear it from the vice president of the United States is something else altogether. Romney was right to hit back hard at the Obama campaign in the wake of these outrageous remarks, but, given the administration’s lack of a policy success story to tell, such outrages are likely to come thick and deep, and Romney will have to rise above them.
Mitt Romney has an impeccable record on civil-rights issues, having learned at the knee of his father, a Republican who campaigned on civil rights in the 1960s. To suggest as Biden did that Romney’s program has something — anything — in common with slave-trading is vile even by the standards of Democratic campaign rhetoric. That no Democrat of note has spoken up against it is a testament to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the party and the political movement it represents. …
An honorable president would dismiss Biden. Barack Obama probably will buy him a beer.
If Biden were a Republican, and Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, Biden would have been impeached by today. The fact that this embarrassment will continue as vice president after Nov. 6 tells you everything you need to know about Obama and the Democratic Party.
Biden is number two in the federal government. The Democratic Party’s traditional symbol is a jackass. Biden matches the perfect metaphor and the perfect symbol.
Anyone who votes for Biden’s boss Nov. 6 fully deserves what will happen next.
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Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones released the song that would become their first number one hit, and yet Mick Jagger still claimed …
An august group of acts is represented in birthdays today, beginning with James Pankow, trombone player of Chicago:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 