Apr
04
2011

Questioning Obama Birth Certificate is Wasting Valuable Time and Money

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Its hard to believe that anyone spends any time, much less money, questioning President Obama’s birth certificate. Yet, there is a whole campaign to erect billboards to this effect. Now, on top of it, along comes Donald Trump, prospective Republican contender. (See this excellent article by Christopher Byron for background on that!)

What’s instructional about this is that Trump is smart enough (like Huckabee in a previous post) to know that the whole “birther” argument has been resoundingly debunked. Like Trump, and the people leading the aforementioned billboard campaign, its not that these smart people believe it either. Rather, they are purposely stoking up the lesser informed citizens. In other words, they are deceiving people.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You know an anti-Obama position is ridiculous when even Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly won’t support it. According to the NY Daily News,

During an interview with Trump earlier last week, O’Reilly called The Donald’s rhetoric a publicity stunt to capitalize on the views of birthers who believe Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

On top of that, there is very simple, readily available proof that President Obama’s birth certificate is in order:

If President Obama’s certification of live birth wasn’t legitimate, the Republican party would have been all over it years ago.  The RNC has an army of lawyers and media experts, and they would have completely blown President Obama out of the water during the 2008 campaign.  Senator McCain would have much rather had that in his quiver than his lame attacks on Ayers.

If you have to have more, an image of President Obama’ s Certification of Live Birth is provided at right. You can also visit the links below for definitive smashing of the birther argument.

Factcheck: The Truth about President Obama’s Birth Certificate

Snopes: It is not a forgery.

This birther argument is a huge disservice to getting important things done in the country. I was shocked at this CNN statement that 4 out of 10 Republicans have doubts about President Obama’s citizenship, even though “the allegations against him have been repeatedly discredited in investigations by CNN and other organizations.”

People who are really interested productive work on a better future need to bear in mind that the people who are perpetuating this myth are purposely peddling fear and myth. They are trying to manipulate people and that weakens the democratic process.

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Mar
03
2011

Huckabee: An Idiot or a Liar?

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Over the last few days, prospective Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been getting heat because he mistakenly claimed that President Obama was raised in Kenya. Huck says it was an honest mistake—he really meant Indonesia and Hawaii. But, hey, what’s the difference right?

As quoted on CNN, Huckabee says

“I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it’s in part, molded out of a different experience. Most of us grew up going to boy scout meetings and you know our communities were filled with rotary clubs, not madrassa.”

So here’s the thing: Not only did Obama actually attend secular and Catholic schools when he lived in Indonesia, he was also a boy scout in his youth!

Taken at face value, Huckabee’s comments are laughable just on the basis of logic alone. Obama lived in Indonesia from ages 6 to 10 years old–approximately 4 years–before returning to Hawaii. Is Huckabee trying to say that if an American child lives 4 years abroad the child has such a different worldview that they are un-American? Or what if an American child attended a madrassa in New York City? If we take this line of reasoning, probably millions of American children would be unfit to be president, and freedom of religion has gone down the tubes.

Huckabee’s view of being American is itself decidedly un-American, because being American is celebrating diversity and different worldviews. That is what has made America strong, not fearing and protecting ourselves from people who are different than us. What we need in America today are different worldviews, ‘cuz the ones we got aren’t working that hot.

If the issue was just about Huckabee’s apparent lack of logical thinking skills, I probably would not have taken time to write this piece. But Huckabee’s statements demonstrate a deeper issue.  That issue is about honesty. On the one hand, we could believe that Huckabee is making statements he believes are truthful. But, if that is the case, then he is grossly uninformed about his main opponent—one of the most fully investigated people in the world. If he really doesn’t know these things about Obama, one would have to question Huck’s competence to take on the battle for the presidency.

On the other hand, perhaps, as the CNN reporters suggest, he could be making a “dog whistle” to certain voting blocks (such as the “birthers”) who get riled up about this kind of thing. In that case, Huckabee is purposely manipulating information and claiming his mistakes are an accident. As we all know, intentionally misrepresenting information is, well, lying.

Now, Huckabee is a former governor, an author, and a TV pundit. Beside the fact that he works for Fox, Huck seems like he is probably an intelligent guy who has some degree of strategic sense. So you can figure where that leaves us. If he’ll lie to get the votes of grossly misinformed people, what’s to say he wouldn’t lie to us if he was the President?

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Nov
08
2010

What Fiscal Restraint? Back to Republican Borrow and Spend

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This is the part I don’t get: Former President Bush brought us to financial ruin in eight years, and people think President Obama has failed because he couldn’t (yet) restore job growth in less than two years. On top of that, people think the problem is that Democrats are spending too much and the Republicans will restore fiscal responsibility. The facts don’t really support that dream.

First, President Obama has not expanded the federal government. And TARP, under his administration (see my previous post), has actually recovered most the of the money that was given out.

Second, and more importantly, Fareed Zakaria recapped it well recently when he said it is not the Democrat’s “tax and spend” that got us here but instead the Republicans “borrow and spend.” He points out,

During the Reagan administration,  there was a reform of the tax code “bringing marginal tax rates way down and eliminating hundreds of loopholes. But the spending cuts never took place. The result: from 1981 to 1985, the federal budget deficit more than doubled as a percentage of GDP, and it declined slightly in Reagan’s second term only because he agreed to tax increases.

As it turns out, during the Clinton administration there was an initial tax increase and the debt was reduced. Then, during the Bush administration things went totally kattywompus.  Zakaria states,

If Republicans were really serious about cutting spending, they had a golden opportunity after 2002, when they controlled all the levers of government in Washington. The result was the most reckless expansion of government spending and debt in two generations.

Bush made three big decisions: to cut taxes, give prescription drugs to the elderly and fight two wars. Crucially, he decided not to pay for them. (“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” Dick Cheney famously told Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill.) As a consequence, the U.S. went from having a large structural surplus in 2000 to a structural deficit that was close to 2.8% of GDP by the end of the Bush presidency. (A structural deficit is one that exists even in good times, as opposed to a cyclical one that is caused by a recession and the resulting drop in tax revenues.) After the 2008 recession came along and tax revenues plummeted, that deficit more than doubled. But the hole was created well before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

So, let us take a look at the graph at right. It points out that the budget deficit by percentage of GDP has actually fared worse under Reagan and the Bushes. It also points out that the deficit is not near as bad as during the Great Depression. See this fine site for more informative graphs.

Now, unlike former Vice President Cheney, I’m not saying that a big deficit doesn’t matter. But I am saying that the numbers don’t really align with the rhetoric.

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Oct
17
2010

TARP Worked!

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I imagine the prevailing belief is that the TARP bailout resulted in $700 billion lost. But recent reports have shown a dramatically different picture: The taxpayers have gotten almost all their money back!

Columbus Business First reports,

Few political issues have been so widely misunderstood by the public: While the government did bail out banks, the vast majority of that money has been returned with interest or significant capital gains to the public portfolio. The Treasury will make money on the banks, and it’s possible it could make a little on the help it gave to General Motors, the automaking stiff the administration saved from oblivion.

The article further notes,

The infusion of taxpayer capital stabilized the financial system by shoring up the most damaged banks’ balance sheets. The outcome for Citigroup may have been different without TARP, and Bank of America was drowning in toxic assets after its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

With all the sentiment against further infusions of cash into the economy out there, this is something to keep in mind.

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Sep
26
2010

The US Recession is Over–That’s a Fact, Not an Opinion

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A week or so ago, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) put out announcement stating that the recession had ended in June 2009. Subsequently, numerous articles were written with titles like, “For Many of Us, the Recession Lives On” and “Recession Not over for Most People.” Although I get the point that a lot of people are still suffering, the recession is over, because the NBER is the authority tasked with determining when it starts and stops, and they have measured criteria for determining that sort of thing.

The problem with this kind of headline is that, while catchy and dramatic, it confuses people about the facts. Today, CNN is reporting “Recession Not Over, Public Says.” The evidence presented is a CNN poll that found “seventy-four percent of Americans believe the economy is still in a recession.” What’s not clear from the article is whether the results are because people haven’t heard the NBER announcement or whether they don’t believe it.

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Dec
20
2008

Genocide in Darfur

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Sudan Darfur Map

Sudan Darfur Map

The genocide in Darfur is staggering: Since February 2003, as many as 200,000—and possibly as many as 400,000 people—have been murdered in Sudan’s Darfur region. More than two million victims have been displaced and many of these victims are women and children. In addition, thousands of women have been raped, and it is reported that almost 80 percent of children under five years old are malnutritioned. Despite these horrific statistics, reports continue to pour in about aerial bombings and genocidal attacks against Darfur civilians. U.N. peacekeeping forces are stationed in the area appear to be unable to stop this genocide in Darfur.

Origins of Genocide in Darfur

The roots of the genocide in Darfur begin with the ethnic and tribal conflict occurring between non-Arab rebel groups—the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement—and the Janjaweed, a primarily Sudanese Arab militia group consisting of camel and cattle herders who have joined with the Sudan’s People’s Armed Forces (although the Sudanese government denies any involvement or support for the Janjaweed).

Genocide in Darfur

genocide in Darfur

Although the genocide in Darfur has deep historical roots, it erupted in February 2003 primarily over water and land. Overpopulation, drought, and climate change resulting in desertification caused the camel and cattle herders to seek water and new territory. In the process, they moved their herds into territory already occupied by farmers. The government opposed these advances and non-Arab rebel groups accused the Sudanese government of oppression. The Sudanese government responded by launching vicious air assaults, which were also supplemented by slaughterous ground attacks staged by the Janjaweed. Initially, the conflict occurred in Darfur, although it has since spilled across the border into Chad and into the Central African Republic (CAR) because as refugees have fled into these areas the Janjaweed have followed. To understand the genocide in Darfur more viscerally, look at this civilian refugee camp known as Creida pictured to the left. This one camp contains a refugee population of 137,000.

Responses to the Genocide in Darfur

As early as 2003, United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, pronounced the Darfur situation “genocide.” But global foreign policy response has changed little. Currently, the United Nations and the African Union have installed small peacekeeping forces in the region but because they are restricted by the Sudanese government in what these forces can do, where they can go, and what equipment they can use, the Janjaweed still have free reign to attack, murder, and rape. As a result, public policy has largely been to ignore it.

Save Darfur

One high profile activist who has been involved in trying to change global public policy and save Darfur from the beginning has been actress, author, and activist Mia Farrow. She has visited the Darfur region three times—2004, 2006, and 2007. She has also published photographs of Darfur and written several articles discussing the plight of Darfur victims. Recently, she was also assisting in the “Dream for Darfur” campaign—a campaign to pressure China at the 2008 Olympic games into influencing the Sudanese government to halt the genocide and human right violations occurring in Darfur.

Genocide in DarfurFarrow is not only asking for a change in public policy toward genocide in Darfur, she is also asking for your personal help. If you want to save Darfur, the first step is to spread the word. Then, step up and do you part. She has established an organization, MiaFarrow.org, to inform concerned citizens and tell them how they can save Darfur. You can also learn more about Farrow’s articles, hear her speak out about Darfur, and view photos from her Darfur visits.

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Dec
20
2008

Obama Transparency Talk

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Apparently Obama’s response to Chicago Tribune reporter John McCormack’s questions about the Blagojevich affair have riled certain media commentators, who are now questioning Obama’s commitment to transparency. What a bunch of whiners. They either don’t understand the role of transparency in public policy, are desperate to make some news about something, or are just exaggerating the issue to pressure Obama into saying something that will excite them.

Here’s what happened during a recent news conference by President-elect Obama:

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Obama Transparency Questioned

To this, commentators offered numerous complaints. For example, here’s Ethel Fenig at the American Thinker,

In other words, asking a legitimate question about Obama’s relationship with his state’s governor, even though it was not the purpose of the press conference, indicates The Office of the President-Elect will cut off all reporters who probe too uncomfortably in sensitive areas. A troubling message.

And CNN’s Campbell Brown,

Mr. President-elect, this is the second time I have observed you doing this. Cutting off a reporter because the question didn’t suit you. Mr. President-elect, this sort of approach reminds a lot of us of the current administration now packing up to go, and it frankly doesn’t fly in a democracy. You don’t get to choose the questions you get asked at a news conference.

… You’ve made a deal with the prosecutor to keep a lid on certain information about this investigation until next week. Fine. But that doesn’t give you a blanket excuse to dismiss any and all questions associated with Blagojevich or anything else. You are the one who embraced openness, and you could stand to be a little more open to it.

..These are desperate times for many Americans and most of this country wants you to succeed. But you will not succeed if you discard the very ideals you promoted during your campaign: directness, honesty, candor, transparency, openness.

Wow, he declines to answer a question twice and he’s already being chided like small child for ruining democracy? But here’s the thing: Sure, you don’t get to choose the questions, but in democracy you can choose whether to answer them. Isn’t it reasonable to wait a week because the investigators had asked him not to say anything?

Now what we don’t want is the President of the United States making all kinds of misstatements and half-baked guesses about what happened. It would probably make headlines and keep the reporters awake, but it would be horrible presidential leadership. A little information control is reasonable. Its not like the Obama team has “lost” basically all the emails of two presidential terms, like Bush did.

What is Transparency?

These reporters are confusing the importance of transparency in pubic policy with answering every question asked. But it is ridiculous to think that the President of the United States has to answer every question immediately. Moreover, its petty to start whining that transparency, and in fact democracy, is gone because a few questions weren’t answered. This perverts the meaning of governmental transparency and also distorts the facts.

Transparency in government is about making information known to people about the operations of government. Obama has been a leader in this area. He has stated his goals as such things as:

  • Lifting the curtain on connections between lobbyists and Members of Congress by creating a centralized database of lobbying reports, congressional ethics records, and campaign finance filings available on the internet in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format,
  • Expanding lobbying disclosure rules to include lobbyists seeking government contracts and presidential pardons,
  • Enforcing congressional lobbying laws and ethics rules through an independent entity,
  • Creating an “contracts and influence” database which will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and ensuring citizens have easy access to contract details and contractor performance.

As part of his effort to improve transparency, President-elect Obama also contributed to The Coburn-Obama transparency Act, which established a database for citizen’s to explore how government money is spent and where it comes from. This is a good example of what transparency in government means.

If one wanted to look at the evidence, rather than a couple of selected incidences, one would also see that Obama’s team has been relatively better than others about providing transparency.

Jennifer LaFleur in article posted on the Huffington Post lists many cases where “President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team seems to be following through with its promise of transparency by posting documents from its meetings with industry and advocacy groups.”

Further, according to the Washington Post,

There is one important area where Obama and Bush differ on the issue — in the court of public opinion. In a recent national poll conducted by the Post/ABC, two-thirds of the sample said that Obama was “honest and trustworthy” while just 22 percent said he was not. Those numbers compare very favorably with Bush of whom, in a January 2007 Post/ABC survey, 40 percent said he was “honest and trustworthy” while 57 percent said he was not.

Not only are voters willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt on the transparency issue but he has also drawn praise in many circles for the number (12) of press conferences he has held and questions (51) he has taken since winning the presidency.

Reporters are Bored

I think the underlying complaint is that Obama’s message control discipline keeps the sensationalism out of the headlines, and that bores news reporters. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank quotes Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard as saying that Obama is “trying to be so boring that no one will notice that he has avoided taking a position on virtually every issue that we’ve seen arise over the past three months.” Milbank goes on to say

The whole thing [the aforementioned press conference] might have ended in snores if McCormick hadn’t piped up about Blagojevich.

I’m kind of thinking that the real problem here is that all that talk about public policy issues, changing government, and cabinet appointments are boring the reporters.

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Nov
23
2008

Where is Presidential Leadership in the Economic Crisis?

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Like many people, I’ve been wondering, “What is President Bush doing about the economic crisis?” Apparently, not leading. Maybe hiding under his desk. CNN suggests that nobody is really stepping up to provide direction.

As the United States writhes in a collapsing economy, analysts and observers are wondering: Who’s skippering the ship? President Bush has been noticeably absent from the machinations aimed at righting the nation’s financial course.

Although the CNN article weakly cites President-elect Obama for not stepping into the limelight, the article also allows that the Obama camp is likely working behind the scenes and would show should leadership by naming a Secretary of the Treasury, which now appears done in the form of Tim Geithner.

President Bush should really have been front and center during the last few months. He at first did go on television to urge the passing of the bailout, but since then he has been largely in hiding. He should have been regularly reassuring Americans that everything possible was being done and outlining the steps that he was taking. At least the President-elect is moving in that direction with his weekly broadcasts on change.gov.

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Nov
21
2008

Bleak Predictions in the ODNI Global Trends for 2025 Report

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This was recently released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

News Release No. 19-08
November 20, 2008

ODNI Releases Global Trends Projections

By 2025, the accelerating pace of globalization and the emergence of new powers will produce a world order vastly different from the system in place for most of the post-World War II era, according to a projection by the federal government’s top intelligence analysts.

The projection, prepared by the National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was made public by the ODNI today.

The ODNI report, “Global Trends 2025 – A Transformed World” projects a still-preeminent U.S. joined by fast developing powers, notably India and China, atop a multipolar international system. The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons, the report says. Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the uneven impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions, “Global Trends 2025” concludes.

The report extrapolates from current and projected trends. It is not a prediction, and the authors stress that “bad outcomes are not inevitable.”

“International leadership and cooperation will be necessary to solve the global challenges and to understand the complexities surrounding them,” the report concludes.

“By laying out some of the alternative possibilities we hope to help policymakers steer us toward more positive solutions.” Other projections in “Global Trends 2025”: include:

  • Russia’s emergence as a world power is clouded by lagging investment in its energy sector and the
  • persistence of crime and government corruption.
  • Muslim states outside the Arab core – Turkey, Indonesia, even a post-clerical Iran – could take on
  • expanded roles in the new international order.
  • A government in Eastern or Central Europe could be effectively taken over and run by organized crime.
  • In parts of Africa and South Asia, some states might wither away as governments fail to provide security
  • and other basic needs.
  • A worldwide shift to a new technology that replaces oil will be under way or accomplished by 2025.
  • Multiple financial centers will serve as ‘shock absorbers’ in the world financial system. The U.S. dollar’s
  • role will shrink to ‘first among equals’ in a basket of key world currencies.
  • The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a
  • widening range of options for limited strikes.
  • The impact of climate change will be uneven, with some Northern economies, notably Russia and
  • Canada, profiting from longer growing seasons and improved access to resource reserves.

The Global Trends series examines geopolitical trends and analyzes their likely outcomes, in an attempt to prompt public discussion of possible responses. The projections have covered five-year intervals, beginningwith Global Trends 2010 issued in November 1997.

A full copy of the report is available online at: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html

# # #
The Director of National Intelligence oversees 16 federal organizations that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The DNI also manages the implementation of the National Intelligence Program. Additionally, the DNI serves as the principal adviser to the president, the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council on intelligence issues related to national security.

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Nov
16
2008

What Are the Indicators of the Financial Crisis?

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It would be nice to have a concrete way to know if the financial crisis is getting better or worse. Or course the indicators would probably include the housing market, asset-backed securities, commercial paper, interest rates, GDPs, and the availability of credit.

I couldn’t come up with a complete picture, but here’s what’s out there as of today,

1. Banks are lending. According to Jon Hilsenrath at The Wall Street Journal,

Banks actually are lending at record levels. Their commercial and industrial loans, at $1.6 trillion in early November, were up 15% from a year earlier and grew at a 25% annual rate during the past three months, according to weekly Federal Reserve data. Home-equity loans, at $578 billion, were up 21% from a year ago and grew at a 48% annual rate in three months.

2. Bank depost interest rates are going. Up as a result of the demand for bank loans, banks are waging a rate war for deposits. This could be good news for small investors or other people with cash.

3. Home inventories are decreasing. This is one of the big indicators of how the economy is doing: whether home prices continue to fall or have reached a low point and are going up. Lately, I have seen both anecdotal evidence (some of my relatives bought first homes) and some other articles (one about increased buying in central California) suggesting that buying is beginning to happen. However, as the referenced article points out, the backlog is still huge. So prices may not move yet.

4. Some key interest rates have returned to their pre-crisis state. In particular, the 3-month LIBOR that had risen sharply to 4.7% or so has fallen back to the range of 2.8 to 3.1%. Similarly, commercial paper rates for top-tier corporations have fallen below their pre-crisis levels. So the Federal Reserves’ actions in that market appear to have thawed the ice for now.

According to David Goldman at CNN Money,

The credit environment has been slowly improving. Borrowing rates are retreating from historical highs, the commercial paper market is expanding and market gauges are showing a return of confidence.

5. Central banks around the world have lowered interest rates. This should make credit easier for at least somebody.

6. Money is flowing back into money markets. One of the precipitating factors of the great panic was when the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck.” The outflow of money from the money market funds that are critical to financing business operations threatened to bring the economy to a halt. While the net inflow helps, it doesn’t mean all their problems are solved.

7. Alan Greenspan says the best indicator is the LIBOR-OIS spread. Again from CNN Money,

Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chief, has said that we will know the credit markets have returned to normal when the Libor-OIS spread returns to just a hair above the anticipated Fed funds rate. That will show that banks are confident about the market conditions and have resumed normal lending practices. Libor-OIS was less than 0.8 percentage points before Lehman collapsed. It reached a record high of 3.64 on Oct. 10, and sits at 1.74 today. So according to Greenspan, we’re only about half-way to recovery.

The good news for the little investor is that it could be argued that many investments are now cheap. See the article. But you’ll have to make your own call on whether to “buy” it.

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