RWC Unfiltered 6-23-2011

• Christie and Perry Both Best Romney For GOP Nod
• Embarrassed Obama Ends ‘Billboard Boondoogle.’
• Most Feared” Huntsman Tosses Hat Into White House Ring
• New Generation of Economic Zombies
• Goldman Saks Lowers U. S. Growth Projection

Wednesday the Federal reserve sharply downgraded the U. S. economy for the rest of this year.

On October 28, 1980 Ronald Reagan asked are you better off today than you were four years ago? Bloomberg polling just found that 44% say they are worse off under Obama. 32% say they are better off. 55% say their children will have a lower standard of living than they have now.

Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion^[ or irrelevant thesis) is the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question. "Ignoratio elenchi" can be roughly translated by ignorance of refutation, that is, ignorance of what a refutation could logically be; "elenchi" (genitive singular of the Latin elenchus) is from the Greek ἔλεγχος, meaning an argument of disproof or refutation.

Mitt Romney, the supposed front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, would be trounced in a head-to-head race against either of two yet unannounced GOP candidates, Rick Perry and Chris Christie, a new IBOPE Zogby/Newsmax poll reveals.

In the survey of nearly 1,000 likely Republican primary voters, New Jersey Gov. Christie gets a resounding 62 percent of the vote to Romney's 19 percent, with the remaining 19 percent not sure.

Texas Gov. Perry gets 55 percent of the vote when matched against former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, who receives 22 percent, with 23 percent not sure.

"No matter which way you look at this, Romney's candidacy has holes within the core Republican base," pollster John Zogby tells Newsmax. "In simple head-to-head matchups against the two non-candidates, he gets drubbed."

Significantly, 62 percent of likely GOP primary voters who say they are independents support Christie, and 59 percent support Perry, according to the poll that ended on Tuesday.

A Pew Research poll released on Tuesday found a record 56 percent of Americans favor bringing U.S. forces in Afghanistan home as quickly as possible. So Obama announced the almost immediate withdrawal of 10,000 troop and 23,000 more by mid-year 2012. y his math he has reduced troop levels there. The costs there during the Obama presidency has exceeded a trillion dollars.

At the same time that First Lady Michelle Obama, her mother and two dauighters are flitting around the world costing  taxpayer tens of millions a day expense talking to foreign students and educators about reading such classics as 'The CAT In The HAT' spending tens of millions of dollars comes news that the Obama administration has ordered a halt to a multi-million dollar program that sent bureaucrats around the world to study foreign highways, and billboards but not before one group of officials completes an on-going taxpayer-funded foreign jaunt. Critics point out if he White House wants to encourage reading to it should do so in the U. S. in places like Detroit where illiteracy is approaching 50%.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said late Tuesday that he was suspending the program "while [he] personally reviews the way taxpayer dollars have been spent.” The statement came just hours after ABC News contacted LaHood’s office with questions concerning the program.

“The president has been clear: We must get rid of stupid spending and pointless waste,” LaHood said in an email to ABC News. “Each taxpayer dollar is precious, and there is no excuse for wasting a single one. That’s why … I have suspended this program.”

But LaHood’s order came while a group of transportation officials was already abroad and that group plans to continue their itinerary — studying pavement — while LaHood studies the value of the program. The group will return June 26, as scheduled, officials said.

“Taxpayers certainly should be outraged that their money is being spent on this type of activity when our roads are falling part, gas taxes and prices are at an all time high,” Tom Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste, said on “Good Morning America.” “It really is a ridiculous use of our money.” The boondoggle produced a 46-page report complete with snapshots of billboards. It is unclear who saw the report or for what puspose.

The longest jail sentence ever in the United States - is 10,000 years for a brutal, savage triple murder. Dudley Wayne Kyzer, who had brutally murdered his wife, mother in law, and a college student, was sentenced, in 1981 in Tuscaloosa, in the state of Alabama, to what remains the longest term in US history.

In July 1997, the state Court of Criminal Appeals held that the grand larceny charge was double jeopardy on the robbery conviction and thus dismissed it. So the court cut Anderson’s sentence by 500 years, speeding up his release date to the year 12,744!

 ”For the first time in our history, we are about to pass down to the next generation a country that is less powerful, less compassionate, less competitive and less confident than the one we got,” tsaid 51-year-old John Huntsman as he announced his candidacy for the White House at the same Park overlooking Lady Liberty where Ronald Reagam announced his candidacy.

Huntsman is a former Utah Governor is a nominal Republican who had often supported Obama policies and politics. He was Obama;s envoy to China for the past two years raising lots of questions about his personal philosophy.

A variety of polls taken since fellow Mormon Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful run for President in 2008 seems to show a reluctance by as naby as three fourths of Americans to vote for a Mormon. Many site a Mormon backed campaign against Gay Marriage as their reason and some mention the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ban on black members as recently as the 1960s.

22 percent of Americans won’t vote for a Mormon Presidential candidate, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The poll found that Democrats are more likely to oppose a Mormon president than Republicans. 27 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats said they would not support one, as opposed to 18 percent among Republicans.

The poll comes as the GOP considers two Mormon candidates for 2012, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, widely-considered to be the party’s frontrunner, and former Utah Governor and ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman.

Huntsman is expected to officially announce his candidacy Tuesday.

Modern day concern over the two candidates’ religious beliefs has been compared to voters’ reluctance to vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960 due to his Catholic faith. According to Gallup, 25 percent of Americans refused to vote for a Catholic one year before the election, but Kennedy nevertheless was voted into the White House.

In addition to the 22 percent who wouldn’t consider a Mormon as President, 49 percent answered that they would not vote for an atheist and 32 percent said that they would not vote for a gay or lesbian candidate.

Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, has already said that Huntsman would be the strongest of all the prospective rivals. He is the only one who makes the president’s team “shake in their boots,” Plouffe told US News & World Report.

The Feds now own more homes than private banks and they are selling them at fire sale prices to favored speculators in a pattern that some say is ripe for fraud or worse including having foreign interest own a huge swath of America,

Economist and non-executive Morgan Stanley Asia chair Stephen Roach says the global economy is being hobbled by a new generation of zombies - the economic walking dead.

“American consumers are in the early stages of an unprecedented retrenchment,” Roach writes in the Financial Times. In the 13 quarters since the beginning of 2008, inflation-adjusted annualized growth in consumption has averaged just 0.5 percent, he says.

“Never before in the postwar era have U.S. consumers been this weak for this long.”

This zombie syndrome is the same one found in the first of Japan’s two lost decades, when Japanese banks kept extending credit lines for a broad cross-section of insolvent companies - postponing restructuring and inevitable failure.

“The lifeline of policy-driven bank lending allowed bankrupt companies to hang on to excess workers and redundant capacity. But that sapped post-bubble Japan of sorely needed vitality,” notes Roach.

Roach says Washington policymakers are “doing everything they can to forestall rational economic adjustments.”

The Federal Reserve has conducted two rounds of quantitative easing trying to get consumers to start spending the wealth effects of a policy-induced rebound in equities. Congress and the White House have embraced home-foreclosure containment programs and other forms of debt forgiveness.

“The aim is to get zombie consumers to ignore their festering problems and start spending again - irrespective of the wrenching balance sheet damage they suffered in the “great recession,” says Roach.

“The subtext is Washington condones a revival of reckless behavior.”

According to RTT News, Bank of Japan says that the Japanese economy is showing some signs of growth, upgrading its assessment for the first time since February.

Last Sunday was Father’s Day. It is the day where more collect calls are placed than any other.

NBC says it apologizes for its offensive editing - twice cutting the words “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance before its U.S. Open broadcast last Sunday, but some Christian groups are demanding a fuller explanation. Not only was the editing amatuerish but its intent is an outrage.

The network opened its broadcast of the final round of the golf tournament with a video montage that included children reciting the pledge, but the words “under God” and “indivisible” were edited out.

Three hours later, announcer Dan Hicks told viewers,”Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out.” But, it could not have been an innocent omission but an intentional commission.

Disingenuously he said “It was not done to upset anyone, and we’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, however, called the statement “a pathetic apology” for what he believes was an intentional omission.

Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice said the apology was “too little, too late.” Someone’s at NBC needs fired, and every advertiser should be brought to account and Americans should boycott it and those advertsers.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades - King David; Hearts - Charlemagne; Clubs -Alexander, the Great; and Diamonds - Julius Caesar

The President’s Jobs Council-staffed by some of the top executives in U.S. business-hoped to sound the bugle charge Monday when it published its interim recommendations for fixing unemployment.

Instead, it hit less glorious notes.

“I’m underwhelmed,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“A big yawn,” adds Allan Meltzer, a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Uninspiring,” says Investor’s Business Daily.

So much for a rallying cry. The report was written by CEOs Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Ken Chenault of American Express, and it was published as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a reminder that if you’re going to raise expectations-these “fast-action” steps can “accelerate job creation immediately” to the tune of more than a million jobs, the report boasts-it may help to have some new, fire-breathing ideas in your arsenal.

To be sure, this was only an interim report. The President’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council has been operating for just three months and plans to deliver a more thorough analysis in September.

The group also doesn’t see its mandate as having to define new ideas. Instead, it says it wants to identify good, productive ones-new or old-that can be put into action with a minimum of bureaucratic delay. It sees itself as a catalyst in this way between the private and public sectors, starting with some short-hit initiatives and working up into the bigger problems. Gene Sperling, the White House National Economic Council Director, says the jobs Council has already had a positive influence

President Obama and the CEO of GE in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Monday.

The 26 members of the Council include academics and labor leaders and a raft of CEOs. Among them: Ursula Burns of Xerox; Ellen Kullman of DuPont; Jim McNerney of Boeing; Paul Otellini of Intel; Antonio Perez of Eastman Kodak; Brian Roberts of Comcast; and Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. As Mr. Immelt, the Council’s chairman, noted in his op-ed Monday, there’s no single idea that’s going to solve the unemployment problem.

President Barack Obama has given the Jobs Council a high profile. After what seemed like a protracted fist fight with the business community during his first two years in office, he now wants to show he has corporate America inside the tent. On Monday, he met with the group during a much publicized jobs-related trip to Durham, N.C. Fairly or not, much was expected of the Council’s first report.

The Council proposed five actions:

• “Train workers for today’s open jobs.” The private sector should team up with schools to match training with current needs;
• “Streamline permitting.” Snip the red tape that gets in the way of big construction and infrastructure projects.
• “Boost jobs in travel and tourism.” Skinny down the process for getting a visa to the U.S.
• “Facilitate small-business loans.” Make it easier to access Small Business Administration funding.
• “Put construction workers back to work.” The private and public sectors should retrofit their buildings to become more energy efficient.

The yawn-o-meter spiked into the red zone in part because these ideas have been around for some time, proposed in various forms by think tanks and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable (both of which endorsed the Council’s recommendations). Each of those idea have been tried and failed raising the question is anybody paying attention?

Then there is the usual debate about the ideas themselves. Training workers is a good objective but takes time, organization and money and therefore won’t affect employment in a big way anytime soon, argues Mr. Meltzer. (The Council sees training happening in months not years.) As for adding construction projects: “Where are they going to get the money?” he asks.

Tourism groups, which have fought the visa fight since the application process got tightened in the days after Sept. 11, 2001. are still running up against homeland security concerns.

And goosing Small Business Administration lending? “The government’s not a great lender,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin contends. (The Council believes there are ways to make the SBA a more effective asset to small businesses.)

Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union, sees the Council’s report differently. It doesn’t matter if the ideas are old or new, he says, it only matters if they make sense, and they do to him. President Obama now has “the validation of the business community to get this done,” says Mr. Stern. “He’d be missing an opportunity if he didn’t put his foot on the gas.”

“This is the low-hanging fruit, a positive first step,” adds Bruce Josten, the No. 2 executive at the U.S. Chamber. “Any business organization you speak to would say we’ve made these same points for years. And we’d like to see some outcomes.”

Which, at the end of the day, doesn’t bode well for the more troublesome fruit hanging higher in the trees.

Next up on the Council’s agenda: Bigger, more complicated issues such as taxes, regulatory reform, infrastructure, competitiveness, R&D, and innovation - “a more strategic view” designed to “truly bend the curve over the longer term,” write Messrs. Immelt and Chenault. Immelt has been a big Obama fan and supporter and that has apparently benfited GE and its stockholders since the company pays no U. S. taxes receiving numerous sweetheart deals and breaks from Obama.

Cue the trumpet fanfare.

It is a myth that many years ago in Scotland , a new game was invented. It was ruled ‘Gentlemen Only…Ladies Forbidden’..and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language. Fun but false.

Buffeted by glum economic news and frustrated by chronic joblessness despite $1 trillion in stimulus spending, the Obama administration has begun exploring a plethora of new proposals aimed at jump-starting the economy.

Cuts in payroll taxes, reductions in the corporate tax rate, opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to reduce gas prices, and persuading Republicans to buy into more stimulus programs are just a few of the concepts reportedly being discussed.

The administration has been battered by a spate of bad economic reports. Among them: Unemployment in May jumped to 9.1 percent, its highest level this year; real estate values have dropped to levels not seen since 2002; new jobless claims continue to be higher than expected.

Also, the National Federation of Independent Business reported Tuesday that a majority of small businesses plan to trim their payrolls — the first time that’s happened since September 2010. And the core measure of inflation rose .03 in May, the largest one-month increase since July 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

How much the bad economic numbers are hurting President Obama’s standing with voters depends on which poll you read. His personal likeability remains strong: 75 percent of respondents in a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll said they like him personally. But in that same poll, only 48 percent approved of his actual job performance as president.

A Gallup poll released Friday showed Obama trailed an unidentified, “generic” Republican presidential opponent by 44 percent to 39 percent.

That suggests voters are increasingly skeptical of Obama’s ability to turn around the lackluster economy. But Obama comes out on top when matched in the polls against specific Republican alternatives, such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Polls aside, the White House clearly understands Obama’s biggest political vulnerability in 2012 stems from chronic unemployment. And despite the lack of support in Congress for further Keynesian spending programs, the administration continues to cast about for ways to get people back to work.

On Tuesday, the president met with his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in Durham, N.C., to discuss how collaborations between private companies, community colleges, and universities could be leveraged to add jobs to the economy.

Another proposal was reforming the federal permitting process to expedite construction of new infrastructure projects.

When Council members informed the president that getting federal permits is so difficult constructions projects “in many cases” are abandoned, Obama replied “Shovel-ready was not as . . . uh … shovel ready as we expected.” Obama carried North Carolina by only 15,000 votes in 2008. The Tar Heel state currently has 9.7 percent unemployment — the 10th highest in the nation.

Some conservative economists are already voicing skepticism over the new Beltway schemes to boost the economy, predicting that they will fail to reverse the slide in consumer confidence.

A CNN/Opinion Research poll reported the stunning news recently that nearly half of all Americans — 48 percent - expect the country to fall into another Great Depression within the next year.

On Wednesday, President Obama said he’s interested in extending stimulus measures that were included in December’s compromise of tax cuts “to make sure that we get this recovery up and running in a robust way.”

Congress has shown no interest in additional stimulus measures, but that could change if employment continues to deteriorate.

Now that the administration’s $800-plus billion stimulus package, along with a second money-supply expansion by the Federal Reserve, have failed to hold unemployment below 8 percent as initially projected, economists and White House officials are casting around for other approaches.

One complication for Team Obama: Almost anything they do would require the consent of the same GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Even Democrats are sounding alarms over the deteriorating economic indicators. Former Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich called the May jobs report “a disaster” on his blog.

He also warned that another recession would doom Obama’s hopes of winning re-election.

“The recovery has stalled,” said Reich. “We’re not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.”

Among the last-ditch alternatives to resuscitate the economy now being discussed:

• Temporarily cut payroll taxes for business by 2 percent. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” CATO tax-policy expert Chris Edwards tells Newsmax. “It’s pushing up the debt and pushing more taxes into the future. And if it’s temporary, which is what Obama and Republicans propose, what company is going to go out and hire someone for just a year? That doesn’t make much sense to me.”
• Begin releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down gasoline prices. The real problem, Edwards says, is a hodgepodge of regulations that different formulations of gasoline in different parts of the country. “The SPR is going to be a small drop in the ocean of the global oil supply, and global oil supply determines world oil prices,” Edwards says.
• Enact more stimulus. Even if Democrats call stimulus by another name, there’s not much chance it can win much support. “That idea’s completely silly,” Edwards tells Newsmax. “[President Obama] has had deficit spending of $1.5 trillion three years in a row now, and yet unemployment is still over 9 percent. The Obama stimulus idea has so dramatically failed, it’s astounding that anybody still supports it.”
• Prop up failing European economies, so America’s economy isn’t dragged down by their defaults. On Tuesday, Obama called Greece’s economic problems a “disastrous” risk to the global economy, and pledged to work with the International Monetary Fund to help. But Edwards says bailing out Greece would be a big mistake. “The lesson here is that governments borrow too much money,” he says. “So if Greece defaults and has a hard time doing any new borrowing in the future, that’s probably a good thing — because it will teach them to not borrow so much money. So absolutely we should not bail them out. Because essentially you’d just be bailing out the European bond holders who hold Greek government debt, and that’s really none of our business. We shouldn’t be involved in that.”
• Cut the corporate tax rate. At 39.2 percent, the U.S. has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world behind only Japan’s 39.5 percent. Edwards applauds proposals to reduce that rate. “I can’t think of a single free-market proposal that has come out of this White House, with the one possible exception that [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner is starting to discuss corporate tax reform,” Edwards tells Newsmax. “Good for them — that would be a real way to boost jobs and the economy.”

  The administration did get some good economic news last Thursday: U.S. exports appear to be gaining strength, with the U.S. trade deficit unexpectedly shrinking in April.

  The $175.6 billion in goods and service the United States sold abroad that month represented the highest level of exports on record. April’s trade deficit of $43.7 billion was 6.7 percent less than the trade gap reported in March.

Honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil. It will, however, crystallize (become thick and cloudy) over time. If this happens, just remove the lid from the jar; place it in a pan of water; and heat over low heat until the honey returns to its original consistency.

A NEWSMAX magazine feature article graphically describes the bloody battle between ruthless Mexican drug cartels threatens to turn America’s southern neighbor into a failed nation-state - and has spilled deep into U.S. territory, threatening American citizens as well.

The raging drug wars have claimed nearly 40,000 lives since 2006 in a civil nightmare of beheadings, mass graves, kidnappings, and endemic corruption at the highest levels of Mexican society, as cartels rake in an astronomical $12 billion a year in illicit revenue.

Newsmax magazine’s eye-opening special report, “The Collapse of Mexico - Its Civil War Comes to America,” delves into the people and politics along the treacherous border.

Newsmax spent two months conducting more than 20 interviews during visits to border areas in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and found that despite the administration’s reassurances, Mexico’s drug cartels have penetrated deep into our nation’s heartland, striking fear in ordinary Americans.

Frightening fact: Even the Government Accountability Office concedes that the United States can prevent or interrupt illegal entry along only 129 miles of our 1,954-mile southern border.

What is not being said isthat by refusing to deal with its southern border the U. S. has become complicit in Mexico’s disoder and these murders.

24% of  Africa is wilderness 38% of North America is wilderness. There is more wilderness in the lower 48 states than in Africa.

Goldman Sachs has cut its second-quarter economic growth estimate to 2 percent from 3 percent due to high unemployment, weaker manufacturing data and economic sluggishness in general.

Weak economic indicators and economic sluggishness in general mean the Fed will probably stick with its current loose monetary policies.

“The Federal Open Market Committee is therefore stuck between a rock (slow growth) and a hard place (higher inflation),” Goldman economist Sven Jari Stehn writes in a research note to clients, according to CNBC.

“We expect Chairman (Ben) Bernanke to indicate at Wednesday’s FOMC press conference that there is little prospect of either monetary tightening or monetary easing anytime soon.”

Goldman is still expecting the economy to pick up some time in the third quarter, for now.

“At this point, we still expect a bounce back in Q3 and beyond, but will need to see significant improvement in the data over the next few weeks to maintain that view,” Stehn says.

Goldman Sachs isn’t the only one cutting U.S. growth estimates.

The International Monetary Fund, a multilateral lending institution, recently lowered its 2011 growth forecast to 2.5 percent from 2.8 percent.

Leaders in the U.S. and Europe have to solve their debt problems to better ensure greater economic stability.

If Goldman is correct that means the U. S. will enterthe 2012 election campaign with a continued stagnant economny and continuing high national un and underemployment. This wekk business people lambasted Obama Chief of Staff William Daley saying “Get out of the way” and business will hire/ But, the White House remains intransigent desp[ite repeated failures to turn the eononomy around. Polls almost universally show the honeymoon is over.

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon.

The Supreme Court of the U. S. (SCOTUS) on Monday blocked the nation’s largest-ever sex discrimination case, ruling in favor of Wal-Mart in a decision that raises significant hurdles for other class-action suits brought against big corporations.

The lawsuit, like the antics to block Boeing from building a new plant in “right -to-work-state) North Carolina is a reflection of how desperate U. S. lkabor union leaershiup has become as it loses its grip everywhere except in public employees- wven there voters are yelping are local governments are being bankrupted.

On an average day 61,000 people are in the air over America for some part of it..

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s popularity has plunged by double digits from her previous re-election ratings, according to a new Field Poll survey, demonstrating the toll that the anemic economy is taking on incumbent Democrats, including President Obama, heading into next year’s elections.

Campaigning for a fourth full term, Feinstein enjoys a four-point edge, 43 to 39 percent, among registered California voters asked if they would vote for her - even as a strong majority, 46 to 31 percent, approves of the job she is doing. Eighteen percent of voters have no opinion on whether they’d vote for her, leaving a wide opening among swing voters for a potential challenger.

Stunning result, twice

The result stunned poll director Mark DiCamillo, who said he initially dismissed as an aberration a similar outcome in a March poll that had one of the state’s most-popular politicians falling so far from favor. The nonpartisan Field Poll is considered one of the most reliable surveys in the state.

Levi Strauss made the first pair of blue jeans in 1850. The pants were intended as work trousers for American miners looking for gold.

Most people consider May 20th of 1873 the official birthday of blue jeans because it was then that U.S. Patent #139,121 was issued for the manufacturing of Levi Strauss Jeans. In 1853 Levi Strauss, a German immigrant, set his sights on the California gold rush. He traveled to California from New York with a load of dry goods, mainly fabrics for his brother, and he planned on opening a store out west.

Levi traveled via boat and sold most of his fabrics on the boat