Clueless

This is not good.

President Barack Obama said he believes the global financial system remains at risk of implosion with the failure of Citigroup or AIG, touching off “an even more destructive recession and potentially depression.”

His remarks came in a “60 Minutes” interview in which he was pressed by an incredulous Steve Kroft for laughing and chuckling several times while discussing the perilous state of the world’s economy.

“You’re sitting here. And you’re- you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he’s sitting there just making jokes about money-’ How do you deal with- I mean: explain. . .” Kroft asks at one point.

“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft says.

“No, no. There’s gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” Obama says, with a laugh.

 The psychiatric term “inappropriate affect” comes to mind here.

 There are two possibilities here. Either Obama is intentionally, malignantly causing a meltdown in the economy or he is completely – and I mean completely – clueless about how his words and actions impact the economy.

These are not the words or affect of a leader with the skills to stem the economic crisis. 

Either way, we have a problem.

Via Memeorandum

Turning

Has the Obama administration already passed its expiration date? Well, the New York Times has turned on Obama this weekend. The columnists and the editorial board at the Times have been pounding Obama and his plans mercilessly this weekend. People are beginning to notice.

It’s not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it’s perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd-and in the paper’s lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail.

The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.

Unlike with President Bush, the Obama administration is less apt to dismiss such commentary, at least publicly, as so much carping from an out-of-touch peanut gallery. These are voices that have been sympathetic, and at times gushing toward Obama, during the campaign and in his administration’s early days.

The president and his top aides read the Times closely and react quickly to its reporting and commentary. Tom Daschle, for example, withdrew from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary amid back tax issues on the same day that the paper ran a tough front-page piece and editorial on what keeping Daschle would mean to the Obama brand.

Does this mean the Times will shift gears and do its level best to unseat Obama as it did to George Bush? No, it is far too early to draw that conclusion. But this got to have Obama worried. Or Obama’s staff worried. This is a big deal. If they lose the Times completely, they lose a lot of their cover.

Via Memeorandum

“Thin” Ice

Arctic “explorer” surprised to find it’s cold.

With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”.

Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening”, reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day”, you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started”. Last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner.

Good thing the Otter was handy or this story wouldn’t be particularly funny from their point of view. The most disturbing thing about this story is not this story but the other item included in the article:

Mr Nicholson had fallen out with his colleagues over his attempts to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against Mr Nicholson under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”

As the article points out, the true believers have been trying to demonize and criminalize “deniers” in their beliefs. So it is more than a bit disconcerting to hear that true believers are protected while it is open season on “deniers. 

Do read the whole thing, it is rather entertaining.

Welcome To Post-Prosperity America

Senator Judd Gregg warned today that Barack Obama’s plans for spending in the next decade will bankrupt the country:

“The practical implications of this is bankruptcy for the United States,” Gregg said of the Obama’s administration’s recently released budget blueprint. “There’s no other way around it. If we maintain the proposals that are in this budget over the ten-year period that this budget covers, this country will go bankrupt. People will not buy our debt, our dollar will become devalued. It is a very severe situation.”

Gregg, known as one of the keenest fiscal minds on Capitol Hill, also told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King that he thought it was “almost unconscionable” for the White House to continue with its planned course on fiscal matters with unprecedented actual and projected budget deficits in the coming years.

“It is as if you were flying an airplane and the gas light came on and it said ‘you 15 minutes of gas left’ and the pilot said ‘we’re not going to worry about that, we’re going to fly for another two hours.’ Well, the plane crashes and our country will crash and we’ll pass on to our kids a country that’s not affordable.”

Not affordable and not sustainable. If you are in a hole financially you simply cannot spend your way out of it. It doesn’t work in personal finance and it will not work in government finance, either.

Congressional Democrats are spending like a drunken sailors. No, wait, that’s unfair to drunken sailors. Drunken sailors stop spending when they are out of money. Congress and Obama passed a “stimulus bill” that, to date, has “saved” – for a year – 25 jobs so far. Have you seen Obama flying off to tout his success since March 6th?

Do you really want this bunch deciding on what health care you are allowed to have? Do you really want this bunch spending even more?

One thing that I find very interesting about the linked CNN story is the comments. I just scanned them, but there is a lot of dislike for Obama’s proposals and for the behavior of Congress. And nothing like the full-throated attempt to shout down the opposition that is the hallmark of the left.

I don’t think Obama has anything like the support he thinks he has.

Meanwhile In (T)Hugo’s Banana Republic

(T)Hugo Chavez, all-but-declared-president-for-life of Venezuela, has ordered his military to seize control of all ports and airports in the country. Or at least all of those located in states with opposition leaders.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has ordered his military to seize all major ports and airports, and threatened opposition governors with arrest if they resisted the move.

“We are going to recover the ports and airports of the republic, no matter what opposition,” he said Sunday during his weekly television broadcast.

Chavez said he had told the commander of the navy to take the northeastern Port Cabello this week, and warned that the governor for that region, Enrique Salas, “will be arrested” if he makes good on a vow to use police to block the confiscation.

The president said he had also ordered the military to take the ports of Maracaibo and Nueva Esparta, in regions also controlled by opposition governors.

I am not seeing this on the news aggregators I normally use yet. Not a good sign for Venezuela. Especially since the law passed by their legislature to allows this is against Venezuela’s constitution. Where would they get the idea to pass an unconstitutional law?

Oh, yeah.

Banana republics, they’re everywhere.

Depression

No, not an economic one. Not yet, at any rate. Although that is appearing more likely with each day that passes with inaction from Obama and the daily antics of the Democrats running wild with America’s money.

No, this is depression:

Why are so many Americans so depressed about things these days? It is perhaps not just the economy.

I think the answer is clear: all the accustomed referents, the sources of security, of knowledge and reassurance appear to be vanishing. Materially, we still enjoy a sumptuous lifestyle in comparison with past generations-and the world outside our borders. America remains the most sane and successful society on the planet.

But there is a strange foreboding, a deer-in-the-headlights look to us that we may be clueless Greeks in the age of Demosthenes, played-out Romans around AD 450, or give-up French in late 1939-with a sense it cannot go on. Why? Let us count the ways.

1) About Broke. The collective debt is simply staggering, $1.7 trillion in borrowing this year alone. $3.5 trillion is our annual budget, and by 2012 what we all owe will be well over $15-17 trillion. (No fears: the President promises to triple the Bush deficit, but by the end of his “first” term “halve” the deficit, as if tripling and then halving it is not increasing it.)

There is quite a lot more, of course. More about the coarsening of American culture, the collapse of trust. So very much to be depressed about. There’s more than depression, there is some outright despair from some folks:

My mood is not exactly depression; instead I am completely pessimistic about America’s future. For the first time in my life, I can say that with certainty.

I simply see no way out of this economic and moral disaster.

Cheer up, Fausta. All of you. Yes it is bad right now. It will get worse for a while. I remember the despair of the Carter administration as inflation roared in, the economy foundered and third world, tin-pot maniacs dared to take American diplomats hostage.

We seemed to be flailing and failing then, too.

Whatever we do, those of us in opposition have got to keep working. Keep pointing out the obvious failures, keep pointing out who is actually responsible for this mess we are in right now. We must hold to our values and show there is an alternative.

Time to get off the soapbox.

Via Memeorandum. Others:  American Power, Maggie’s Farm, Powerline,

Free Fall

The dollar is declining.

The dollar dropped the most against the currencies of six major U.S. trading partners since the Plaza Accord almost a quarter-century ago as the Federal Reserve’s plan to purchase Treasuries spurred speculation that it’s debasing the greenback.

“What it introduces is the problem of the currency to the extent that the Fed is buying what isn’t desired by foreign holders,” said Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., in an interview on Bloomberg Television on March 19. “The Fed can keep interest rates where they want to keep them, at least for a 6- to 12- to 18-month period of time, but it will have consequences down the road.”

The U.S. currency weakened beyond $1.37 per euro this week for the first time since January as the central bank’s decision to increase its balance sheet by $1.15 trillion lowered yields, making American assets less attractive. The Norwegian krone and the New Zealand dollar rallied as the Fed’s move spurred advances in commodities.

 More bad news. With a declining currency, a stupidly vindictive Congress, organized harassment of private citizens  and no apparent workable plan to help stabilize the economy in the White House, foreign investors are looking elsewhere to park their money.

 This is not a recipe for a recovery.

Damage

This Wall Street Journal piece by Jonathan Weisman and Dan Fitzpatrick reports that Obama is trying to ’soften’ the AIG reprisal bill in Congress. It doesn’t sound as if he is trying all that hard.

The White House has yet to publicly criticize the bonus tax proposals. But administration officials say privately they are concerned the House and Senate bills could lead to an exodus of employees or whole companies from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, as well as other government-sponsored financial rescue efforts.

He’d better dial Congress back on this unconstitutional mess or real trouble is going to break out in the financial sector:

Meanwhile, Obama aides are focusing on recrafting the Senate bill so, at the least, it won’t discourage firms from participating in a separate federal effort to unlock credit markets — a consumer-lending program known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF. They also fear scaring off investment firms they need to help in a future public-private partnership to purchase from banks mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets.

To liken this law to a banana republic is to do grave injustice to banana republics. This is, bluntly, economic suicide. Scaring off investors with ex-post-facto, confiscatory reprisal laws in an already wounded economy is insane.

Congressional Democrats (and three Republicans) passed the bill specifically allowing the AIG bonuses. Obama signed it into law. They are the ones who caused this. Now they are trying to divert attention from themselves by punishing the firm that was bound by that law to pay its contractual obligations.

That’s a series of actions bound to attract investors.

How’s that hope and change holding up?

Right about now you’d better hope you’re left with a little spare change after these fools collapse the economy completely.

Moving Pictures

This is neat. An artist, Rufus B. Seder, creates something he has named Lifetiles. He uses them to create murals in which images appear to move, or change into another image entirely.

A huge mural greets visitors to the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in Boston. It’s a memorial to the building’s namesake, who died unexpectedly in 1993.

A young Reggie Lewis, wearing his No. 35 Boston Celtics jersey, dominates the middle of the 11-foot-by-14-foot artwork. At the bottom left is a picture of him and his wife. To his right, the face of legendary Celtic Larry Bird.

But as young men in sweats and sneakers make their way into the gym, something strange happens. The mural comes alive. The photo of a beaming Lewis in formal attire transforms into Lewis the basketball player, streaking down the court.

Larry Bird’s picture morphs into that of another famous player, Robert Parrish.

With each step, the mural transforms, representing the many scenes in one man’s life.

You simply have to click over and watch the CNN video of these murals. You can see more videos at the Eye Think website.

While lenticular images have been around for a while, I can’t recall ever seeing anything as ambitious as what Seder is doing.

“Smart” Grid?

Barack Obama and other politicians have been pushing for “smart” power grids. It turns out this isn’t all that smart. The “smart” electrical devices used in the “smart” grid turn out to be pretty dumb when it comes to being hacked.

Is it really so smart to forge ahead with the high technology, digitally based electricity distribution and transmission system known as the “Smart Grid”? Tests have shown that a hacker can break into the system, and cybersecurity experts said a massive blackout could result.

Until the United States eliminates the Smart Grid’s vulnerabilities, some experts said, deployment should proceed slowly.

“I think we are putting the cart before the horse here to get this stuff rolled out very fast,” said Ed Skoudis, a co-founder of InGuardians, a network security research and consulting firm.

 But never fear, despite the risks, Barry O. has provided a bunch of money to get on with the installations:

The Smart Grid will use automated meters, two-way communications and advanced sensors to improve electricity efficiency and reliability. The nation’s utilities have embraced the concept and are installing millions of automated meters on homes across the country, the first phase in Smart Grid’s deployment. President Obama has championed Smart Grid, and the recent stimulus bill allocated $4.5 billion for the high-tech program.

It turns out that security consultants have created a worm that mutates its way through these “smart” meters and pwns them.

The researchers created a computer worm that could quickly spread among Smart Grid devices, many of which use wireless technology to communicate, according to Travis Goodspeed, an independent security consultant who worked with the team. “It spread from one meter to another and then it changed the text in the LCD screen to say ‘pwned’,” he said. Pwned is hacker-speak meaning “taken over.”

Imagine the havoc a hacker could wreak with nothing more than a laptop and some bad intentions.

There’s your cheerful thought for today. Politicians rushing headlong into funding a program with serious security issues.