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What has Obama done?

49,377

The flutter of a butterfly's wings. I guess I shouldn't fret, its not like he will try to use that to take credit for the recovery.
 
corplinx said:
49,377

The flutter of a butterfly's wings. I guess I shouldn't fret, its not like he will try to use that to take credit for the recovery.
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How much of the stimulus money's been distributed so far, corplinx? How many of the projects are in the hiring stages right now?

Caution: butterfly crossing.
 
corplinx said:
49,377

The flutter of a butterfly's wings. I guess I shouldn't fret, its not like he will try to use that to take credit for the recovery.
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Corplinx, I have read many of your posts, and I think of you as a conservitive, or even a Republican- definitly an "anti-Democrat". I hope I have not mis-interpreted your positions.

That said, It feels like a ray of hope to me -like the first Robin of spring even-to witness my first conservitive positioning himself to deny that Obama has anything to do with the "recovery".
Lets all hope you guys start crawling out of the woodwork right away to tell us how the stimulus package, and the Democrats had nothing to do with the recovery of the economy. :)
 
Please do not use incivilities, regardless of how well-crafted.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Tricky
 
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Alt+F4 said:
Being patient is one thing, I understand that the wars and the economy are more pressing but I lost so much respect for Obama when the administraionion compared gay marriage to incest and child rape when arguing for the constitutionality of the Defense Of Marriage Act.
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Agreed. But I would offer this weak justification. There are still huge numbers of political posts that have not been filled yet, the Justice Department being a notable one. Thus, I think many of the people and holdover policies from The Disasterous One still remain in place. My guess (and, to be honest, hope) is that this is the reason for the gaff you cite.
 
Distracted1 said:
Corplinx, I have read many of your posts, and I think of you as a conservitive, or even a Republican- definitly an "anti-Democrat". I hope I have not mis-interpreted your positions.

That said, It feels like a ray of hope to me -like the first Robin of spring even-to witness my first conservitive positioning himself to deny that Obama has anything to do with the "recovery".
Lets all hope you guys start crawling out of the woodwork right away to tell us how the stimulus package, and the Democrats had nothing to do with the recovery of the economy. :)
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Do you have any evidence that the stimulus package has accelerated economic recovery outside of the microcosms where the money thus far has been spent?

One of the key recovery indicators is the New Order Index. When this is up, this means inventories deplete faster and thus production resumes again.....

Wait a second, you don't really want to understand recession cycles or economics. You just want partisan tit for tat.

Sorry, you'll have to argue with Brainster or someone else for that. I am really not interested in these little republican pseudo skeptic versus democrat pseudo skeptic battles.

Now, your misframing of what I said into "Obama has nothing to do with the recovery" is laughable at best and dishonest at worst. Obama has had the following to do with the recovery thus far:
1. passed the stimulus bill which failed miserably in practice _but_ was an important mental victory (hint: part of a recession is mental)
2. didn't screw tarp up too badly

Now, there must be good and bad. Here are the parts which may prolong recovery.
1. protectionism
2. the GM/Chrysler oversight
3. passed the stimulus bill/multi-trillion budget.

Notice I put the stimulus bill in twice. The fact is that there is only so much investment money in the world. When times are bad, this money goes into "safe" investments. The Obama administration has been flooding the bond market with bond issues to pay for all the spending. Those tbills compete for money that might go into other investment otherwise (or hoarded). The point is, its difficult to measure.

Over a hundred years after the great depression, you find volumes and volumes full of the mistakes Hoover and FDR made that prolonged the great depression. I find the very idea you could naively proclaim a tangible effect from the stimulus bill other than mental, funny. For one thing, we are still watching these events unfold. It might be 10 or more years before we good a _good_ picture of what is going on this week.

One of my largest problems with taking credit for any recovery based on the stimulus/budget spending is, nobody can tell you how it works. Supposedly its due to Keynesian economics. However, if you look at much of the spending it is either not Keynesian or just really poor implementation thereof.

The non-intellectual descendants of the conservative movement have this mantra "tax cuts always create more revenue" based on an improper understanding of the Laffer curve. Now we have a chorus of non-intellectual descendants of the American liberal movement who thinks government spending is panacea based on poor understanding of Keynesian (or neo-Keynesian) economics.

It reminds me of homeopathic medicine. The person with a normal sickness has it recede. He claims the homeopathic remedy cured him and not the natural sickness/response cycle of his body. He can't tell you how the remedy cured him but he is sure it did. I predict that a large amount of Obama supporters will take such a stance, even if the underlying economic theories that the stimulus/budget are supposedly based on don't match what's in the bills.

Republicans of course, will claim that Obama did nothing/made it worse. Of course, their economic prescriptions of "tax cuts" are also useless in retrospect. The new order index is up. August/September should start to see factory production up. Tax cuts wouldn't have sped up or slowed down anything. Taxes are at historic lows. There is no Laffer effect left to have with them really except at the corporate level.

I've been reading a lot of work by Fedex's internal economics people who read the supply chains and watch the flow of materials and such from a good vantage point. Shipping volumes for Fedex/UPS are an early indicator of economic progress/problems. Its amusing to watch the partisans bicker about claiming credit or the latest snake oil idea for "fixing" the economy when you have a larger vantage point. You read their talking points and think "who believes this crap?". Apparently you.

Here is the scam. Boom and bust is a natural cycle. It happens with or without fraud (junk bonds, junk loans). Due to globalization and stable financial systems, there is more resiliency in western economies in this era. When new markets are created through technology, people invest in those markets and some people win, some lose. When the money push into that market recedes and goes into say commodities, the ripples spread out and the economy adjust downwards. Eventually, demand depletes the system and things get back online feeding the new growth industries.

Boom and bust isn't always bad. Here is a business to be in right now. Iphone apps. I hate the phone, but have a friend who owns a company in Denver that makes apps. Plenty of sales, plenty of investment. Eventually, that gold rush will dry up, but it won't take the economy down with it.

When we encounter recession, the following will happen:
1. laying of blame
a. Dems: the republicans de-regulation did it!
b. Reps: the Cuomo HUD, Fannie, Freddie, and Ashton Kutcher did it!

2. Snake oil prescriptions
a. Dems: a few road projects and earmarks will fix it! OOH, and an LAX to Vegas high speed rail!
b. Reps: TAX CUTS!!!!

3. economy recovers
a. Dems: despite the other parties' interference, we pulled through
b. Reps: despite the other parties' interference, we pulled through
 
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He also lifted restrictions on sending money to family in Cuba, as well as other actions geared towards normalizing relations with Cuba.
 
SezMe said:
Agreed. But I would offer this weak justification. There are still huge numbers of political posts that have not been filled yet, the Justice Department being a notable one. Thus, I think many of the people and holdover policies from The Disasterous One still remain in place. My guess (and, to be honest, hope) is that this is the reason for the gaff you cite.
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That may very well be and if it was the case I wish the President had just come out and said that. His silence leds me to believe (unfortunately) that he agreed with the Justice Department on this matter.
 
Molinaro said:
He also lifted restrictions on sending money to family in Cuba, as well as other actions geared towards normalizing relations with Cuba.
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Yeah, he said Americans can travel to Cuba only if they have relatives in Cuba. Let's see ICE try to enforce that one. :boggled:
 
Edited by Tricky: 
Edited to remove response to modded post.
 
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Biscuit said:
I think it is a noble idea but it may not be that practical to implement without some serious beta testing. With everything else on his plate I don't know that this is taking priority.
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It's precisely because he has so much on his plate that this should be priority 1 if he's sincere about transparency and it's not just a talking point.

We've got Senators and Congressmen voting on extremely important pieces of legislation that none of them have actually read. The only thing that can fix the problems of corruption, waste, and fraud is transparency.

Let the Internet view the contents of every bill possible and I'll bet the boondoggles will virtually disappear within weeks along with the politicians who voted for them. As a libertarian even I'd be perfectly fine with larger government provided it was fully transparent, efficiently run, and unquestionably beholden to the negative rights laid down by the founders.
 
I'd say probably the biggest disappointment (or worst accomplishment) of the Obama administration so far for me has been maintaining and even EXPANDING the Bush administration's stance on executive power, notably around transparency and the state secrets privilege - often despite explicit campaign promises to the contrary. Ed Brayton's done a good job of tracking this (my apologies for the long post, I went back through my feeds and pulled interesting snippets):

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/obama_blasted_over_state_secre.php
The first signs have come just weeks into the new administration, in a case filed by an Oregon charity suspected of funding terrorism. President Obama's Justice Department not only sought to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that it implicated "state secrets," but also escalated the standoff -- proposing that government lawyers might take classified documents from the court's custody to keep the charity's representatives from reviewing them...

In the al-Haramain case, Obama has not only maintained the Bush administration approach, but the dispute has intensified, with the Justice Department warning that if the judge does not change his mind, authorities could spirit away the top-secret documents.
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http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/obama_invokes_state_secrets_pr_1.php
The Justice Department also holds that the lawsuit can't proceed because of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They assert that the US government has "sovereign immunity" against statutory claims that it illegally wiretapped or accessed communications data.

...

But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the "state secrets" privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications.

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned...
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http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/appeals_court_rejects_state_se.php
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/obama_atrocious_answer_on_state.php
Some have argued that the state secrets privilege, once invoked, means a lawsuit has to be dismissed completely. That was Bush's position. Others have argued, and the courts have agreed in most cases, that the privilege can only be used to challenge the introduction of particular evidence in a case. So there is a broad version and a narrow version. The Bush DOJ argued for the broadest possible application. The Obama DOJ could have rejected that broad application, but they not only reasserted it, but in the two ongoing cases over warrantless wiretaps (Al Haramain and EFF) they actually went far beyond the claims that Bush made.
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http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/05/feingold_gives_obama_a_d_on_st.php
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/06/obama_appeals_jeppesen_datapla.php
The position taken in this brief is incredibly broad, arguing that "a case must be dismissed regardless of its stage if it cannot be litigated further without risking disclosure of state secrets."
...
The government wants the ability to use the privilege to dismiss the entire case before it reaches the phase where specific evidence is exchanged and argued about.
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http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/06/meet_the_new_bosspartwhat_27_n.php
The response from the administration to the FOIA request repeats that they are taking the exact same position Bush did, that visitor logs are "presidential records" rather than "agency records" and therefore exempt from FOIA.

And while the administration notes that this issue is currently a matter of litigation, it does not note that a federal judge has already ruled on the issue and said that those visitor logs are public records and must be made public under FOIA. That ruling is being appealed and the Obama administration is taking the same position that Bush did. This isn't a matter of it being "under review," the Obama administration has already declared its position in that court case.

On his first day in office, Obama issued an executive order that agencies must process FOIA requests with a focus on more transparency and accountability. His actions since then, however, show just how empty those orders were.
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http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/07/obama_administration_post-acqu.php
Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that "as a matter of legal authority," the administration's powers to detain someone under the law of war don't expire for a detainee after he's acquitted in court. "If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone" under the Supreme Court's Hamdi ruling, "that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side."

Martinez looked surprised. "So the prosecution is moot?" he asked.

"No, no, not in my judgment," Johnson said. But the scenario he outlined strongly suggested it is. If an administration review panel "determines this person is a security threat" and "for some reason is not convicted of a lengthy prison sentence, I think we have the authority to continue to detain someone" under "law of war authority" as granted by the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, Johnson said.
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http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/07/more_obama_lies_on_transparenc.php
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/07/obama_releases_some_visitor_in.php
 
I was reading in a local paper that the dems have put a stop to uranium mining on public land around the grand canyon and are reviewing a law from the 1800's that allows companies to mine public land without paying royalties or cleaning up their mess. Goodbye corporate welfare.
 
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