Conditions at Fort Bragg

DNC: McCain wants 100 year war

It’s All About the Dollar…

Like you, I have been bombarded with headlines and stories about rising gas and food prices.  On the way to work this morning I saw gas priced over $3.35 a gallon.  Wheat prices are up.  The price of rice has caused riots in parts of the world.  I have been wondering how something so drastic can happen so quickly.  Several signs point to the falling value of the dollar.

John Tamny writes on RealClearMarkets:

No doubt the dollar price of wheat, corn and soybeans has increased respectively 136, 203 and 205 percent since 2001. It seems like a lot, and in isolation would make their worries…understandable.

But what all three left out of their analysis is the dollar’s near singular role in the above. Indeed, over the same timeframe the objective benchmark that is gold is up 244 percent in dollar terms. Rather than expensive, food in real terms hasn’t kept pace with a severe dollar devaluation that has spread to currencies around the world.

When inflation outside the U.S. is considered, it’s seemingly hidden owing to the desire of currency experts to compare the interplay of paper currencies lacking any market definition. But in truth, dollar devaluations going back to 1971 have historically occurred in concert with inflationary outbreaks worldwide. And that’s what’s happened over the last several years.

Maybe we should be paying more close attention to the dollar.

Bill Steigerwald of Townhall.com recently interviewed Steve Forbes about the falling dollar.

Q: The stock market seems to fall a percent and half a day. Oil prices just set a new record. The dollar is falling. Inflation is going up. The subprime troubles don’t seem to end. What has suddenly happened to our economy?

A: What’s happened is twofold. One is the weak dollar policy of the Federal Reserve and particularly the Bush administration. I’m a Republican, but I think they have made a grievous mistake here. When you debase your currency — you print too many dollars — strange and unpleasant things happen, such as soaring commodity prices. Since 2004 oil, copper, lumber, steel — they’ve all gone up. The housing market, which was booming, went on steroids. The same thing with a lot of the hedge and equity funds. We’re paying the price for that today.

Then with the credit crisis last summer, what has made that protracted is, first of all, the people don’t know where the bad stuff is. It’s similar to getting a health warning that bags of lettuce are tainted. It may be only a small number, but nobody buys lettuce until they know where the bad stuff is. That’s what’s happening with the subprimes.

But we also have a modern version of a bank panic. Lenders are reluctant to lend, even to solvent customers. The system is frozen up. That’s why even solvent companies in the mortgage business are having a very, very tough time these days. So we have a panic and we have the unknown.

Q: In layman’s terms, why is the fall of the dollar so important?

A: Why it’s important? Every time you go to the gas pump, you’ll see why. Every time you go to the grocery store — why are those prices rising like that? You see it in the impact on the housing market. Why did lenders behave so bizarrely? Well, one of the reasons is that a lot of new players came in with the easy money and lending standards went out the window. When you have that situation with excess money — it’s the equivalent to flooding the engine of a car with too much fuel — what you also have is that businesses are investing more outside the U.S. than inside the U.S.

Q: Is it simple enough to say that the dollar is falling in value because too many have been printed up and are in circulation?

A: Too many dollars out there. Especially when the Fed prints a dollar bill these days, with all the borrowing and exotic instruments, it can multiply pretty quickly — just like rabbits. So you stop breeding the rabbits.

Makes you wonder why this is all happening, doesn’t it?

ASU Artists Protest Treatment of Illegal Aliens…

A few ASU students held a protest on campus Tuesday by erecting a cage.  The performance was called “aliens in a cage” and it was to protest the treatment of illegal immigrants in this country. 

One of the students involved, Renato Ramos said, “We want to get people to see what is going on with all the anti-immigration rhetoric that we’re hearing these days.”  More from the article: On the wire cage hung slips of paper with “Sheriff Joe Arpaio” and other names written on them - all representing groups or individuals Ramos and his friends consider unfriendly to the cause of undocumented workers.

I wonder if Ankarlo’s name was put on the cage?  Speaking of Ankarlo, remember he was banned from the ASU campus buses.  The reason he was banned was because one student found him to be offensive and distasteful.  Couldn’t some consider the “aliens in a cage” performance offensive?  ASU seems to have no problem with it though since I haven’t heard of any performance art bans on campus. 

I’ll point to another part of the article: Theater Professor David Coffman also stopped by and dropped some change on a table set up beside the cage.

“I support any free expression of ideas,” Coffman said. “There are students at ASU who through no fault of their own are undocumented and are suffering from other people’s political posturing. We’ve had students stop coming to school because of that.”

Coffman might support “any free expression of ideas,” but does that include allowing Ankarlo (or any other radio station) to be aired on the campus buses?  Does ASU support the same philosophy?  Or do they only support it in some cases?

One final part of this story stood out to me: Student Carlos Garcia, 24, was part of the project on the mall and said the cage symbolized “not just the literal cage that ‘illegal aliens’ might be put in, but there are many undocumented people at ASU who don’t come out about their status and they’re in a psychological cage. It’s a bad place to be.”  Give me a break Carlos.  If an illegal immigrant feels he is in a psychological cage he put himself there.  What ever happened to that personal responsibility?  Every illegal immigrant knows they are breaking the law.  True, they are trying to earn a better life for themselves and their families.  But, if you sneak across the border and struggle, who’s fault is it really?

A caller on my Sunday show threw a hypothetical at me.  A illegal immigrant meets and falls in love with an American woman.  They have three kids (who are all American citizens).  The illegal immigrant has a job and isn’t on any government assistance.  But, he gets deported and now the wife and kids end up on welfare.  The caller asked me if it was better to keep the illegal immigrant here to take care of his family.  I said it’s a heart breaking situation.  But, did this illegal immigrant steal a social security number to get his job?  This could have potentially ruined someone else’s life.  I also said that he was taking personal responsibility out of the equation.  This man knew he was here illegally and he knew he was breaking the law.  He knew that at any moment he could be deported.  He then got married and had children knowing he could be shipped home.  This man might be the greatest father to his kids in the world, but shouldn’t he have tried to become a legal citizen for his family?  Maybe he have thought about doing things the right way and he wouldn’t be in this situation or in a psychological cage. 

Seth’s UFO video

What the pundits say

Dick Morris: Hillary’s big Pennsylvania win, “doesn’t mean anything.”

He continues:

Because of the Democratic Party’s arcane proportional-representation rules, her win stands to give her a net gain of 10 to 15 delegates when all is counted. That means that Barack Obama will fall from a lead of 161 in elected delegates to about 145 or so. Big deal.

The primaries coming up in the next two weeks - Indiana and North Carolina - are likely to give Obama back a goodly portion of those delegates. By the time all the primaries have been held, after June 3, there is no doubt that Obama will lead by more than 100 elected delegates, and likely 150. From there, it will be an easy route to the nomination.

Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard says Hillary is making the case that Obama can’t win the general election:

Forget delegates and the popular vote for the Democratic presidential nomination. The most important thing Hillary Clinton gained by winning the Pennsylvania primary yesterday was a better argument–indeed, a much better argument.

Chances are, Clinton will trail Obama in the delegate count when the primaries end on June 3, as she does now. And while she may cut into his lead in the popular vote in the Democratic contests, she’s not likely to exceed his vote total. So the only way she can capture the nomination is by convincing roughly 300 uncommitted super-delegates that Obama cannot defeat Republican John McCain in November but she can.

This isn’t an easy case to make, especially with the super-delegates who will provide the margin of victory for whoever captures the 2,025 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. And at the moment, they appear strongly inclined to back Obama if he leads in delegates when the primary season is finished.

But after Pennsylvania, Clinton’s argument that she’s a stronger opponent against McCain will be impossible to ignore or dismiss. And it’s not just because Clinton was outspent by nearly 3 to 1 by Obama and got tougher coverage from the media, yet trounced him by a substantial margin in a state that the Democratic presidential nominee must win in November.

John B. Judis in The New Republic says Obama could be the next George McGovern,

…If you look at Obama’s vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the ’70s and ’80s, led by college students and minorities. In Pennsylvania, Obama did best in college towns (60 to 40 percent in Penn State’s Centre County) and in heavily black areas like Philadelphia.

Its ideology is very liberal. Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as “very liberal.” In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among “very liberal” voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost “somewhat conservative” voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.

The Democrat Delegate Count

Hillary wins Pennsylvania, 54.3% to 45.7% (with 99% reporting).  She wins 80 delegates, Obama wins 66.  12 more are still to be awarded from the Keystone state.

Here are the delegate breakdowns:

ABC:

Obama, 1715   Clinton, 1583

CBS:

Obama,  1710   Clinton, 1584

NBC:

Obama, 1720    Clinton, 1589

CNN:

Obama, 1714    Clinton, 1584

FOX News:

Obama, 1703    Clinton, 1573

AP:

Obama, 1714    Clinton, 1589

Politico:

Obama, 1720    Clinton, 1588

NY Times:

Obama, 1636    Clinton, 1481

Democrat Group: McCain’s sugarmamma

Where were they in 2004 with Sen. John Kerry?

Bush hits Deal or No Deal

Hillary New 3AM Ad

Next Page »