Peregrinating
2011

August

1 August
Pioneer RV Park
Lander, WY

Total discretionary spending in fiscal 2012 and 2013 will be capped at $1.043 trillion and $1.047 trillion, respectively, $7 billion and $3 billion below current levels. The House Appropriations Committee has been operating on the assumption that the number for 2012 is $1.019 trillion, a $31 billion cut from current levels. For all the worries on the left about deep cuts to government spending now, the actual bite up front is much less than the GOP has been pushing.

2 August
Pioneer RV Park
Lander, WY

One might think that the recent drama over the debt ceiling involves one side wanting to increase or maintain spending with the other side wanting to drastically cut spending, but that is far from the truth. In spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the real debate is over how much government spending will increase. No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it.
Instead, the "cuts" being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family "saving" $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini, and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. But this is the type of math Washington uses to mask the incriminating truth about their unrepentant plundering of the American people.
The truth is that frightening rhetoric about default and full faith and credit of the United States is being carelessly thrown around to ram through a bigger budget than ever, in spite of stagnant revenues. If your family's income did not change year over year, would it be wise financial management to accelerate spending so you would feel richer? That is what our government is doing, with one side merely suggesting a different list of purchases than the other.
In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of "cuts" that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to "cut". It would only take us 5 years to "cut" $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic.
A balanced budget is similarly simple and within reach if Washington had just a tiny amount of fiscal common sense. Our revenues currently stand at approximately $2.2 trillion a year and are likely to remain stagnant as the recession continues. Our outlays are $3.7 trillion and projected to grow every year. Yet we only have to go back to 2004 for federal outlays of $2.2 trillion, and the government was far from small that year. If we simply returned to that year's spending levels, which would hardly be austere, we would have a balanced budget right now. If we held the line on spending, and the economy actually did grow as estimated, the budget would balance on its own by 2015 with no cuts whatsoever.
We pay 35 percent more for our military today than we did 10 years ago, for the exact same capabilities. The same could be said for the rest of the government. Why has our budget doubled in 10 years? This country doesn't have double the population, or double the land area, or double anything that would require the federal government to grow by such an obscene amount.
In Washington terms, a simple freeze in spending would be a much bigger "cut" than any plan being discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best chance to catch its breath, recover and grow.

3 August
Fossil Valley RV Park
Vernal, UT

4 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

5 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

6 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 117,000 in July, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

7 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

"The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone," China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary.
In the Xinhua commentary, China scorned the United States for its "debt addiction" and "short sighted" political wrangling.
"China, the largest creditor of the world's sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China's dollar assets," it said.
It urged the United States to cut military and social welfare expenditure. Further credit downgrades would very likely undermine the world economic recovery and trigger new rounds of financial turmoil, it said.
The editorial called for “international supervision over the issue of U.S. dollars” and the introduction of “a new, stable and secured global reserve currency.” It also noted that as its largest creditor, Beijing has every right “to demand the United States to address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China's dollar assets.”

8 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

The July 25 speech was of a piece with most of the president's rhetorical leadership through the debt ceiling crisis. Some of his statements were patronizing: We have to "eat our peas." He was boring in the way that people who are essentially ideological are always boring. They bleed any realness out of their arguments. They are immersed in abstractions that get reduced to platitudes, and so they never seem to be telling it straight. And he was a joy-free zone. No matter how much the president tries to smile, and he has a lovely smile, one is always aware of his grim task: income equality, redistribution, taxes. Come, let us suffer together...
But speeches aren't magic. A speech is only as good as the ideas it advances. Reagan had good ideas. Obama does not. The debt ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama's speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.

9 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.
Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful.
But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

In other words, it's not just the way President Obama's policies have not worked out that invites the Jimmy Carter parallel. It's also the over-the-top praise each received before entering office. In both 1976 and 2008, each Democrat was presented as the kind of smart, cool, new politico who was going to—fill in the cliché—"transcend politics as we know it," "appeal across traditional lines," "bring America together," etc.
Ironically, here Mr. Romney has a case, for some of the differences between the two presidents favor Mr. Carter. Faced with raging inflation and a declining dollar, President Carter appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. He supported deregulation. Most of all, in contrast to President Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he wasn't George W. Bush, President Carter actually earned his, at least for the Camp David Accords that brought about peace between Israel and Egypt.
Mr. Obama can't be blamed for the excesses that saw him hailed as the new FDR, the new JFK or the new Lincoln, or for the Norwegian committee that bestowed upon him a Nobel. He can be held to account for encouraging them: by delivering a campaign speech in Berlin, by accepting a prize he hadn't earned, by breaking out not only a Lincoln quotation but the Lincoln china and the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration.
An American politician steeped in—dare we say it?—Niebuhrian realism would have appreciated that no president could live up to such hype. And such a man would not be surprised to find that people who once hailed him as the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln are now dismissing him as the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

10 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

Main Street Bank lends most of its money to small businesses and is earning decent profits. But the Kingwood, Texas, bank is about to get out of the banking business.
In an extreme example of the frustration felt by many bankers as regulators toughen their oversight of the nation's financial institutions, Main Street's chairman, Thomas Depping, is expected to announce Wednesday that the 27-year-old bank will surrender its banking charter and sell its four branches to a nearby bank...
The deal also calls for Green Bank, a unit of Houston-based Green Bancorp Inc., to acquire Main Street's four branches. Ascentium will acquire $150 million of Main Street's loans, with the rest going to Green.
Mr. Depping hopes the deal will close by October after receiving regulatory approvals and completing Main Street Bank's unwinding. "It's a lot easier to become a bank than to get rid of your bank charter," he says.

11 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.
He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” 
I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.
It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.
If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorized communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.
Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped...

12 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

The Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also ruled that the rest of the wide-ranging law could remain in effect.
The legality of the so-called individual mandate, a cornerstone of the 2010 healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration has defended the provision as constitutional.
"This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives," a divided three-judge panel said.

13 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.
The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems.
A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.
Or perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars — in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars. When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.
A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.

14 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

15 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

To: Interested Parties
From: White House Communications
Date: April 22, 2009
Re:The Obama-Biden economic plan: creating jobs, strengthening the economy for Massachusetts families
Facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, President Obama started his Presidency with decisive action -- proposing and quickly passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Since the bill went into effect, the ARRA has already helped put money back in the pockets of 95 percent of working Americans, created and saved jobs across the country and made key investments in our community to help kickstart the economy...
Thanks to the Obama Administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, real impact is already being felt across the state. Because of the Stimulus Bill and New Contracts, Green Energy Companies Are Looking to Hire Many New Employees... Evergreen Solar, the Marlborough-based maker of solar panels, also is hoping to hire 90 to 100 people at a manufacturing plant in Devens, said Gary Pollard, vice president of human resources.

Evergreen Solar Inc., the Marlboro clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies to build an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy.
Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The company announced today it is seeking a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and also reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and sell off certain assets.

16 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.
McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.
But more than a year later, Seattle's numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

17 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

During a sometimes-raucous session of what's being called the "For the People" Jobs Initiative tour, a key member of the Congressional Black Caucus told an audience in Detroit Tuesday that the CBC doesn't put pressure on President Obama because he is loved by black voters. But at the same time, Rep. Maxine Waters said, members of the CBC are becoming increasingly tired and frustrated by Obama's performance on the issue of jobs. Even as she expressed support for the president, Waters virtually invited the crowd to "unleash us" to pressure Obama for action.

18 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

19 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

20 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

21 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

22 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

Wells Fargo just announced that it will test a $3 monthly fee for those who use its debit card. The fee will be levied against customers in Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon beginning October 14, 2011. As a result, we can add debit card fees to the long list of bank fees we love to hate. To understand why Wells Fargo is testing a debit card fee, we need look no further than the fine folks in Washington.
Enter the Dodd-Frank financial reform law enacted in 2010. As part of that sweeping reform, Senator Durbin (D-IL) championed a provision that empowered the Federal Reserve to cap the "swipe" fees that merchants pay banks for every debit card transaction. And that's just what the Fed did this summer, limiting the fee to 21 cents per transaction.
In theory, retailers were expected to pass these savings on to their customers. But as just about everybody under the sun warned when Dodd-Frank was passed, the results are quite different. Instead of helping consumers, most expect banks to eliminate rewards and add fees to make up for the lost revenue. And that's just what is happening. Chase is already testing a $3 fee on its debit cards and considering limiting purchases to $50. And we can now add Wells Fargo to the list of banks that have added fees to their debit cards.

23 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

24 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

25 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

Vice President Joe Biden's talent for using many words to say little or nothing -- or worse -- was never more conspicuously displayed than during his trip to China.
At Sichuan University on Sunday, after Biden delivered a 4,600-word speech, a student asked him about the importance of public speaking. "That is a very good question," Biden said -- as he launched into an 863-word answer.
In the midst of those 863 words, Biden paid a tribute to brevity -- in an incoherent sentence of 68 words. The White House transcribed this Bidenesque brilliance as follows: "And so language, the ability not only to master the ability to put your ideas into words succinctly on a platform to communicate ideas to your own people, it is even more impressive when you have the capacity to do that and communicate your ideas, especially as future business and political and moral leaders of the world in the language of the people to whom you are speaking."
While lauding Chinese communists in China, Biden was tongue-tied in trying to explain the greatness of America and our people..."It's hard to define what an American is," Biden said in his speech at Sichuan. And apparently it is too hard for Biden.

26 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

At the center of the Panic of 2008 were defaults on cheap mortgages for Americans with poor credit. The latest idea to reverse the resulting recession is for the government to offer cheap mortgages to Americans with poor credit.
There have been rumblings for weeks that the economic plan to be offered by President Obama after he returns from his vacation would be aimed, at least in part, at trying to re-inflate the American housing market.
The trial balloon in today’s New York Times puts the earlier leaks in perspective. The idea is to have the government offer to refinance the mortgages of millions of Americans whose credit scores prevent them from grabbing the lower-than-5-percent commonly available to qualified buyers today.
The administration is envisioning an $85 billion instant stimulus as those with poor credit see their rates drop dramatically. But to do it, the government would likely need to take over Fannie and Freddie.
One of the criticisms on the left of the Obama efforts to revive the housing markets have failed is because they have been modest and voluntary. This would be large and mandatory.
But part of the reason the president resisted something with, as they say at the White House, “bigness” has been that Americans who pay on time and keep their credit in good shape would deeply resent a subsidy for the credit unworthy.
Another problem: If the government will give cheap money to almost anyone, banks may get out of residential lending altogether. That could have the same effect as the president’s health care law is forecast to have on insurance: a massive shift to public rolls.

27 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

It’s fine that NBC made a strategic decision to move to the left, adding blatant bias to its overall coverage. It’s where most of the networks are anyway, only NBC is a little further over on the spectrum. Fox News is conservative – I’d say unabashedly so, except that it pretends to be fair and balanced, which it’s not – and being a conservative network is fine too.
But what’s very disconcerting is having a major TV news network in the tank for a specific politician. This is unprecedented and a little frightening, giving off the noisome air of a nationalized, official government network.

28 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

One day climate change skeptics will be seen in the same negative light as racists, at least so says former Vice President Al Gore.
In an interview with former advertising executive and Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky broadcast on UStream on Friday, Gore explained that in order for climate change alarmists to succeed, they must “win the conversation” against those who deny there is a crisis.

29 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

President Barack Obama said Monday he would unveil proposals next week aimed at spurring job growth in part through infrastructure improvements.
Obama made the comment as he announced he had picked Princeton economist Alan Krueger as the new chief of the Council of Economic Advisers.
He said next week he would lay out a series of steps that the U.S. Congress can take immediately to put more money in the pockets of middle class families and put construction crews to work.

30 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

"The VFW has had a long-standing tradition of inviting the sitting president to address our convention," Richard Eubank, national commander of the organization, said in a statement, adding that the White House typically chooses a "high-level administration official" to speak if the president cannot attend.
The veterans group is accustomed to playing host to the nation's most powerful people at its national conference. Obama addressed the VFW in 2009, followed by Vice President Biden in 2010.
The senior administration official said the White House did offer several potential speakers, including U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. The Air Force pitched its secretary and chief of staff; the National Guard offered the Army National Guard director.
"It is an insult of the highest magnitude that for the first time in the history of the VFW, the White House has apparently decided that this great and iconic organization of combat veterans and all of its members are not worthy of its notice by not at least offering a first-tier speaker from the administration."
Perhaps incidentally, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was speaking at that conference Monday. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, another top GOP presidential candidate, is also scheduled to address the group this week.
Deputy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that W. Scott Gould, deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs, will be addressing the convention. He noted that Obama will address the American Legion -- on Tuesday -- but explained that the president simply can't honor every speaking request.

31 August
Cedar Creek RV Park
Montrose, CO

President Barack Obama will make his long-awaited speech about jobs Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress at the same time that the Republican presidential candidates are scheduled to debate at the Reagan Presidential Library in California.

Solyndra -- a San Francisco Bay area solar company that he touted as a gleaming example of green technology has announced it will declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than 1,100 people will lose their jobs.
During a visit to the Fremont facility in spring of 2010, the President said the factory "is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. "
It's not his statements the administration will regret; it's the loan guarantees. The President was celebrating $535 million in federal promises from the Department of Energy to the solar startup. The administration didn't do its due diligence, says the Government Accountability Office. "There's a consequence if you don't follow a rigorous process that's transparent," Franklin Rusco of GAO told the website iWatch News.