Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/ted-kennedy-soviet-union-ronald-reagan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html?partner=email

08.28.09, 12:01 AM ET Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy. “On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.” Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.” Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers. First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda. Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.” Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism. Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives. “Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.” Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects. In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.” “The document,” Kengor continues, “has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I’ve ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy’s office did not deny it.” Why bring all this up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum–within eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead–and now that Kennedy himself has died even many of the former senator’s opponents find themselves grieving. Yet precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure–perhaps the most compelling liberal of our day–we need to consider his record in full. Doing so, it turns out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo. When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

If Guns Were Treated Like Cars

If Guns Were Treated Like Cars

——————————————————————————–

Reposted with Copright notice.

Copyright 2000 by Ron Miller. All Rights Reserved.

1. You could get a simple license from the State for a nominal fee and only have to take a test that any idiot could pass. You’d only have to renew it every 10 years for 40 years and maybe retake the test if you move out of state.

2. You could kill and injure people with your gun while drunk and still have your lawyer get your gun back because you need it for work.

3. You’d have half the tax burden of the county and State dedicated to improving the shooting ranges and facilities. The public agrees this is never good enough to suit them and with all the gunowners from California moving in, the range capacity will never catch up. Lines at the range are always shown on TV with the newsies deploring the crowding.

4. You could carry in any State at any time because carry and possession of your gun is honored nationwide and is considered a basic American civil right.

5. You would see commercials on TV pushing the newest, latest guns which you could lease for just $25 per month subject to the fine print.

6. You could finance a fancier gun than you can really afford by taking a 5 year loan with approved credit.

7. You would have a gun safe built into every house. In the upscale houses you would have 3 gun safes. Inexpensive houses and mobile homes would just have a gunrack by the door.

8. You’d have gun storage lockers at the shopping mall in which to store your rifle while shopping. This in order to free your arms for packages. The convenience of the shopper is paramount.

9. You could buy ammunition at the 7-11.

Full-service station means they’ll reload your magazines for you.

10. The news would stop reporting gun accidents unless more than 10 children were killed at one time. Onesy-twosey would only be notable in small towns or if Princess Di’s bodyguard shot her while aiming at paparazzi.

11. If the price of ammunition rose 20% the Federal Government would release war reserves of ammo to bring the price back down to the consumer’s comfort level.

Ammo would carry a 50% tax to finance public shooting ranges.

Teapot Dome scandal would have been about a lead mine.

12. We’d teach gunsmithing in vocational-education programs.

13. Every 16 year old would be looking forward to the day when he could take the family revolver to school. The rich kids would get a high-capacity semi-auto pistol on their 16th birthday and endanger everyone when they learn to use it in public.

14. High schools would have large gun lockers to store student’s arms while they attend classes. Administrators would try to charge for the service to discourage teen-age gun carrying to school.

15. Schools would have shooter’s education classes to make sure the kids could pass the test. They would show gory films of gunshot wounds. The squeamish would throw up.

16. Old people who can hardly see would still be permitted to shoot in public because to disarm them would be to damage their self- esteem. Families would wring their hands over holes in the walls and ceiling.

Occasionally an oldster would fire into a schoolyard when they mistake the trigger for the safety. Legislators would refrain from criticizing because of the AARP’s influence.

17. Congress would be debating alternative weapons systems for people who can’t afford their own guns.

18. There would be such a thing as “public weapons” for the masses.

19. Congress would be subsidizing weapons for people too limited in means to afford their own.

20. Congress would be willing to float a loan to Colt’s in order to ensure the survival of an American company against unfair foreign competition. (Think “Chrysler”)

21. We, except for Ralph Nader, would dismiss 40,000 deaths and 500,000 injuries per year as “the price of freedom.”

22. You would have MADS. Mothers Against Drunk Shooters (instead of HCI). MADS would conduct a campaign of public education instead of trying to use the force of government to prohibit irresponsible drinking and shooting.

23. You could rent a gun at any airport if you are over 25 and have a credit card.

24. You would have the fringe-greenies advocating bows and arrows because they think gunsmoke is damaging the environment.

Al Gore would write a book about the damaging effects of gunsmoke.

Al Gore would also claim to have been a handloader before his sister died in a powder fire.

25. You’d have huge outcry in the Press and Congress over our dependence on cheap, imported, foreign ammunition.

26. Ted Kennedy would have shot Mary Jo Kopekne instead. Ted would be a few thousand dollars richer (bullet:$0.25 vs car:$3000)

Ted would stop carrying his own gun and instead, hire bodyguards to carry fully-automatic weapons under their coats for him.

27. You’d have businesses like “Jiffy Gun-Clean” to make life convenient. But you’d always worry that they might not have gotten the magazine fully seated afterwards.

28. You’d have “Classic Gun Events” with parades on public roads as everyone with such a classic carries it for all the public to see.

29. You’d have huge eyesores where piles of guns are left to rust in the open at “Gun Junk Yards”. They would charge you outrageous prices to go out back and pick off a hammer or sear which is probably also worn out like the one you want to replace.

30. There would be a booming business and debate about substituting non-OEM parts in the gun repair business.

31. You’d have TV news crews going under cover with hidden cameras to ferret out “unscrupulous gun smiths.” This story would be “old reliable” and works every year.

32. The Japanese would be trying , and succeeding at taking over the market for efficient, reliable high-quality guns.

The Koreans would be trying to sneak in at the low end of the market.

The Germans would be selling premium brands based on better workmanship, longer life, and brand cachet. But their guns would require you to take it to a gunsmith every 3 months for a complete tear-down and dimensional inspection at outrageous labor rates.

The Italians would paint their guns flaming red and they would have a reputation for being finicky.

The State Department would be applying pressure to get Japan to allow more US-built guns into their country.

The Japanese would resist the US by saying that Japanese shooters have extra-special safety requirements that only Japanese manufacturers can meet.

33. You’d have an entire section of the Saturday Coloradoan devoted to ads for new and used guns.

34. You’d have a pair of fun-loving gunsmiths on Public Radio doing a show on gun problems. They’d be named “Tap & Rack”

35. There would have been a terrible TV show back in the black & white days named “My Mother – The Gun” It starred Jerry Van Dyke and ran just one season.

36. Dean Jones would have made a series of stupid movies starring Herbie the Love-Gun. Herbie was an adorable anthropomorphized cheap German Saturday Night Special. Dean Jones would never show his face in public again after these movies.

37. Competition would be carried on TV all day on Saturdays. The Daytona 500 would be round-count instead of miles. There would be speed contests, endurance contests, and off-range marksmanship events.

NASGUN would create big heroes in the South and extravagant marketing opportunities.

38. High-schools would paint up a gun in the colors of the opposition and charge $.25 for you to swing a sledge hammer at that gun during pep rallys.

39. John Elway would own half the gunstores in the Denver Metro area.

40. Wellington Webb’s wife would be carrying the finest English Double shotgun money can buy while Wellington has body guards to carry his semi-auto pistols for him.

41. Back in the 1970’s during the ammo crisis, Congress would have set a maximum cyclic rate for autos and semi autos in order to conserve ammo.

42. After Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait, the national cyclic rate was raised to something all semi-autos can be comfortable with.

43. The Coloradoan would be publishing the locations of range repair work every week to be sure no one would be inconvenienced.

44. The Beachboys would have released some songs about guns:

“Spring little Cobray gettin’ ready to strike….. Spring little Cobray with all your might…..”

“She’s real fine my Wonder Nine, she’s real fine my Won-der Nine.”

“Fun, fun, fun ’til Daddy takes her Kel-Tec away……”

45. Letters to editors would be written decrying that all those Soccer Moms are lugging .50 cal machine guns around town, wasting ammo and getting in everybody’s way.

46. Letters to editors would be written responding that putting one’s beginning driver son or daughter behind a .50 cal would mean that the writer’s offspring would survive any conflict with lesser armed individuals.

47. Al Gore would claim he invented the .50cal cartridge and say he was sorry.

48. Cities would be experimenting with electric guns but would be surprised to find that people would step in front of them at the range because they were too quiet so no one knew the electric gun was there.

49. President Clinton would demand that electric gun manufacturers put a cowbell on each one to prevent senseless accidents.

50. The National Rifle Association would be reduced to selling travel insurance for your guns because the rest of society will have seen to it that there would be no chance that firearms would ever be banned.

This Information Is From Ron Miller

How Timothy Geithner’s Bailout Plan Created the AIG Bonus Scandal

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/workplace/132421/how_timothy_geithner’s_bailout_plan_created_the_aig_bonus_scandal/

Remember Timothy Geithner is Obama’s tax cheat that runs the United States Secretary of the Treasury…for you liberals that don’t know that.

The failure of a public-private bailout strategy.       

In order to protect its bailout plan, the Obama administration protected the bonuses.

Back in January and February, there were some votes to try and block excessive employee compensation at financial institutions receiving bailout money. In the Senate, this took the form of the Snowe amendment, which was supported by all 58 Democrats, and also by three Republicans. In the House, it took the form of the TARP Reform Act, which was favored by 242 Democrats and 18 Republicans. Overall, across the House and the Senate, only 10 Democrats, compared to 193 Republicans, voted against legislation that might have stopped the bonuses.

Unfortunately, despite overwhelming Democratic support for limiting executive compensation, in order to save their public-private partnership bailout plan, the Obama administration worked against these limits:

As word spread Friday about the new and retroactive limit — inserted by Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut — so did consternation on Wall Street and in the Obama administration, which opposed it.(…)
The administration is concerned the rules will prompt a wave of banks to return the government’s money and forgo future assistance, undermining the aid program’s effectiveness. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who heads the National Economic Council, had called Sen. Dodd and asked him to reconsider, these people said.

 

 

This story is widespread now: Dodd weakened the language at the urging of Treasury officials. It has leaped from the blogosphere to places like CNN.

Tim Geithner’s public private partnership plan caused the AIG bonus scandal. This is because Geithner’s plan needs voluntary private participation and, as many of those private investors and institutions have made clear, they won’t join in if their compensation packages are threatened:

Officials at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department are increasingly worried that the controversy could discourage investors from joining a new government effort to revive consumer lending as well as a separate plan that relies on private money to buy toxic assets from banks, sources familiar with the matter said.(…)A senior executive at one of the nation’s largest banks said he had heard from several hedge funds that they would not partner with the government for fear that lawmakers would impose retroactive conditions on their participation, such as limits on compensation or disclosure requirements.

As such, on behalf of the Obama administration, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers joined with congressional Republicans to block legislation that would have retroactively blocked the bonuses. This was done in the hope of securing more private participation in the administration’s public-private partnership bailout plan.

This scandal is the direct outcome of Geithner’s bailout plan. Because the Obama administration is pursuing a public-private partnership bailout strategy, and because Wall Street wouldn’t participate in this plan if their bonuses were threatened, the Obama administration blocked legislation that would have blocked Wall Street bonuses. They really should have pursued temporary nationalization instead.

 

AIG Anger: House Passes Heavy Tax on Bonuses
Steve Benen Washington Monthly

Approaching a Depression? New Twist in the Old Saga of Under-Counting the Unemployed
Joshua Holland AlterNet

Jon Stewart Nails Bernanke on AIG Bonuses
Staff The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

 

Go 48 years without releasing any documents and you too can be President!

Obama has lived for 48 years without leaving any footprints — none!

There is no Obama documentation — no records — no paper trail — None.

Original, vault copy birth certificate — Not released

Certificate of Live Birth — Released — Counterfeit

Obama/Dunham marriage license — Not released

Soetoro/Dunham marriage license — Not released

Soetoro adoption records — Not released

Fransiskus Assisi School School application — Released

Punahou School records — Not released

Selective Service Registration — Released — Counterfeit

Occidental College records — Not released

Passport (Pakistan) — Not released

Columbia College records — Not released

Columbia thesis — Not released

Harvard College records — Not released

Harvard Law Review articles — None (maybe 1, unsigned?)

Baptism certificate — None

Medical records — Not released

Illinois State Senate records — None

Illinois State Senate schedule — Lost

Law practice client list — Not released

University of Chicago scholarly articles — None

Clownish Rachel Maddow Rewrites History of Great Depression

Clownish Rachel Maddow Rewrites History of Great Depression, Reinforces Liberal Creation Myth
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jack-coleman/2008/12/15/clownish-rachel-maddow-rewrites-history-great-depression-reinforces-li
By Jack Coleman (Bio | Archive)December 15, 2008 – 15:13 ET

Must have been that full moon. Or “fool full moon” as Rachel Maddow stumbled in referring to it.
If the Newseum is accepting suggestions for exhibits, a possibility comes to mind — the Pantheon of Unfortunate Punditry. First submission — Maddow’s hilarious revisionism of Herbert Hoover on her MSNBC show Friday. I’ve watched the segment several times, each time in awe at Maddow’s supreme confidence, unrivalled since Ted Baxter in his heyday. I plan to preserve it for posterity, to share with my children as a cautionary tale — This is what happens when a person makes an utter fool of herself in public.
Maddow told of Vice President Dick Cheney visiting Capitol Hill earlier in the week and warning congressional Republicans that if the GOP blocks the auto bailout, “… We will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Here’s where Maddow kicked into gear, emboldened by the keen awareness that nearly all her viewers and hardly anyone at MSNBC know enough history to refute her assertions –
That’s a bad thing! Hoover is a political epithet in bad economic times because his response to the Depression (pause) was to first do nothing and then do stuff that made it worse. The country needed massive federal spending to stimulate demand and keep people working.
Hoover cut spending.The government had an economic responsibility to borrow some money and get credit moving. Hoover picked that awesome time to balance the budget. Everything was going the wrong direction economically, so the government needed to make some big, bold moves in the opposite direction.
Hoover picked that time to proclaim his own impotence, telling Congress in 1930, ‘Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement.’ (Maddow holds photo of Hoover to her face and mimics him) I’m Herbert Hoover, I can’t do anything helpful. How about I hurt the economy some more instead because of my dumb, moralistic, ideologically-driven, ignorant, short-term, self-serving, bad ideas? I’ll take this Depression and make it not just good, but great! That’s the ticket — the Great Depression!
What made Maddow’s puppetry all the more insipid is that she’s been on a tear of late condemning — you guessed it — revisionist history, specifically where she sees it emanating from the Bush administration on Iraq. Maddow has apparently decided to fight firefighters with fire, responding to her fantasies of revisionism where none exist and providing examples of the real thing.
For example, her claim that Hoover “cut” spending. By this, Maddow must mean Hoover did not increase federal spending at a rate preferred by liberals, who have resorted to this rhetorical sleight of hand for decades.
But as conservatives and Republicans are well aware, Hoover did the opposite — he increased spending, and not by a little.
In his book “The Herbert Hoover Story,” written by Reader’s Digest senior editor Eugene Lyons and published in 1959, Lyons wrote this about Hoover’s alleged tightwad tendencies –
He sought to provide jobs through public works; more was spent for this purpose in his administration than in the preceding thirty-six years, including the building of the Panama Canal. (emphasis in the original)
Surely Maddow has heard of at least one of these projects, which bears the name of the man instrumental in initiating it — the Hoover Dam — the largest public-works behemoth of the era. Other public projects begun by Hoover include the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
How’s this for irony? Hoover’s response to the stock market crash in 1929 was to call for massive federal spending on public works, which is exactly what Maddow wants Obama to do (though Maddow prefers to fetishize it as “infrastructure,” a word she can’t utter without squirming in her seat).
In an Oct. 5 article for National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg wrote –
William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some years ago, “Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a ‘do-nothing’ president is inaccurate.”
After the stock market crash in 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR’s Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.
Some of Hoover’s interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.
In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge’s tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.
That Maddow knows little of Hoover is not surprising, despite the fact she earned a doctorate — in political science at that — from Oxford. For many liberals, American history starts on March 4, 1933 with Roosevelt’s inauguration and FDR uttering the words, “We have nothing to fear …”
But you’d think their knowledge of history would extend a tad earlier, to include the 1932 campaign and Roosevelt’s criticism of Hoover — as a spendthrift hellbent on enlarging the breadth and cost of goverment. Doing so, however, could prove problematic for liberals’ foremost creation myth — that Hoover caused the Great Depression, “Did Nothing” in response, and Roosevelt rode to the rescue. As mythology goes, this one is Homeric in its longevity and as accurate in its depiction of actual events.
Here’s what Roosevelt said in accepting the Democratic presidential nomination –
I know something of taxes. For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government — federal and local and state — costs too much. As an immediate program of action we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government — functions, in fact, that are not definitely essential to the continuance of government. We must merge, we must consolidate subdivisions of government, and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.
Roosevelt’s concern was understandable, given the nation’s economic crisis and federal spending under Hoover. As pointed out by former Business Week bureau chief Andrew W. Wilson in a Nov. 4 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Five Myths About the Great Depression” –
After declining or holding steady through most of the 1920, federal spending soared between 1929 and 1932 — increasing by more than 50 percent, the biggest increase in federal spending ever recorded during peacetime.
I mentioned Maddow’s commentary to a friend over the weekend, who told me he’d also seen it. That’s the perception of Hoover, he sighed, and my friend was right. Just as it was global “perception” for millennia that the world was flat. Agreed, perception often trumps reality in politics, but perception cannot trump truth. This remains as true today it was in 1774 when a Boston lawyer named John Adams pointed out the stubborn nature of facts while defending British soldiers from an earlier pernicious perception.
Updated by N. Sheppard at 2:50 PM: To confirm what Andrew W. Wilson wrote on November 4, and to demonstrate just how wrong Maddow is about spending under Hoover, all one need do is examine the Historical Tables of the U.S. Budget available at OMB. 
What most folks — especially liberals! — don’t understand today is that prior to the Great Depression, the U.S. government didn’t like to spend a lot of money except in times of war. As such, spending declined precipitously in the years following World War I, and then basically remained flat from 1924 through 1928.
Then, contrary to Maddow’s assertion, in 1929 spending rose $166 million, or 5.6 percent. This may not seem much, but it was the biggest increase in spending since the end of World War I.
The following year, spending increased $193 million, or 6 percent. In 1931, it increased $257 million, or 7.7 percent. In 1932, it increased $1.08 billion, or 30 percent. 
Add it all up, and annual spending increased by almost $1.7 billion dollars or 57 percent while Hoover was President.
Is this what Maddow believes to be a spending cut?

 

 

 Rachel Maddow Still Can’t Get it Right About Hoover
 

 http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jack-coleman/2009/03/10/rachel-maddow-still-cant-get-it-right-about-hoover

By Jack Coleman (Bio | Archive)March 10, 2009 – 08:48 ET

How can you tell when MSNBC cable-show host Rachel Maddow utters falsehoods about Herbert Hoover? If she talks about him.This is becoming enough of a pattern for Maddow, as I’ve described previously at NewsBusters, to border on the pathological.Here she goes again, this time during her show Friday night while condemning Republicans calling for a “freeze” on federal spending for the rest of the fiscal year –
You know who else had the excellent idea to freeze government spending during a recession? This guy! (holds up photo of Hoover) H.H., President Herbert Hoover. His fundamental misunderstanding of how to shore up a failing economy was so celebrated that the great armies of homeless and jobless Americans gave him naming rights for the shanty towns where they all lived in cardboard boxes and burned-out cars during the Great Depression — Hoovervilles. Hoovervilles. And now, (House Minority Leader) John Boehner and congressional Republicans are advocating the same policy.
Enboldened by smarm, Maddow went on to say –
In this context (referring to the recession), the Republicans are proposing a spending freeze. They’re saying the government should stop spending. And also, rather than put your house fire out with water, they’re going to switch the liquid in the firehose over to gasoline.
Much like that alleged tightwad Hoover during the Depression. Maddow at the same fire resolutely douses the blaze with water, regardless of whether it was electrical in origin. 
Certain left-wing myths are so impervious to reality — McCarthy chasing phantom communists, Reagan as amiable dunce, the doomed surge in Iraq — that arguing with liberals about these sacrosanct beliefs is like trying to convert house plants. The best you can do is open them to sunlight.
When it comes to federal spending during Hoover’s single term in office, 1929 to 1933, what actually happened? According to the Office of Budget and Management Web site, Table 1.1, just the opposite of what Maddow repeatedly claims.
Federal spending increased $166 million in 1929, or 5 percent. In 1930, it rose by $193 million over the preceding year, at 6 percent. The pattern continued in 1931, with an increase of $257 million, nearly 8 percent. And for 1932, it rose a whopping 30 percent, by $1.08 billion. All told, federal spending increased 57 percent in this four-year period, according to the OMB. 
It was a “freeze” on spending much the way bitter cold is evidence of global warming, another laughable claim from the left. Not surprisingly, Maddow relies on anecdote to make her shabby claim — shanty towns dubbed “Hoovervilles” during the Depression — instead of the “empirical evidence” she touted but never produced, given its pie-in-face potential for besmirking her dogma.
Maddow also gets it wrong about what current-day Republicans in Congress are proposing — they want to “freeze” spending, which beyond MSNBC is universally understood to mean maintaining spending at current levels. This is hardly suggesting we “stop” spending.  An actual example of a politician determined to follow Hoover’s lead by vastly increasing federal spending in an economic slump? Barack Obama.

Zing! Times Asks Obama: “Are You a Socialist?”

Quoted from http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2009/20090309151758.aspx:

Zing! Times Asks Obama: "Are You a Socialist?"

Zing! Times Asks Obama: “Are You a Socialist?”
Reporter Peter Baker defends the question from outcry from the Angry Left: “The point is not the label, per se, but the question of whether the times and the solutions under consideration represent some sort of paradigm shift in our national thinking about the role of government in society. In a moment of taxpayer bank bailouts and shifting tax burden proposals and exploding deficits and expansive health care and energy plans, what is the future of American-style capitalism?”

Posted by: Clay Waters
3/9/2009 3:31:12 PM

Immediately after his big interview with the Times that dominated the front of Sunday’s paper, President Obama took issue with one of the questions from the Times regarding whether or not he was a socialist. The Times had asked Obama:

The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?

Obama responded:

You know, let’s take a look at the budget — the answer would be no.

Later, Obama called the Times to expound further, chiding the Times for asking the question, Jeff Zeleny reported in a sidebar, “The President Is on the Line To Follow Up on an Answer.”

Less than 90 minutes after Air Force One landed, the telephone rang. President Obama was on the line, wanting to add one more point to a response he gave during an interview with The New York Times.

On a flight from Ohio to Washington on Friday, Mr. Obama was asked whether his domestic policies suggested that he was a socialist, as some conservatives have implied.

“The answer would be no,” he said, laughing for a moment before defending his administration for “making some very tough choices” on the budget.

As the interview progressed, Mr. Obama never returned to the question. When he called, he said he had been thinking about it as he boarded the helicopter taking him back to the White House.

“It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question,” Mr. Obama said from the Oval Office.

Zeleny laid out the groundwork for the question:

But his budget plan prompted criticism suggesting that he was intent on undoing the dominance of conservative ideas that started under Ronald Reagan, and that he had revealed himself as a free-spending liberal.

Indeed, the Times itself made the point, favorably, in a column by David Leonhardt on the February 27 front page:

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.

Liberal blogger Greg Sargent at the Plum Line blog wondered what the Times was thinking when it asked Obama if he was a socialist and noted the paper was taking fire from the left for it. Sargent got a tart response from Times reporter Peter Baker (for background, the Plum Line is hosted on whorunsgov.com, a product of the Washington Post, which owns Newsweek). Sargent:

I emailed a Times political editor to ask what the rationale behind the question was and got back the following from Baker, the Times reporter:

The goal of the question was to get at the same issue your sister publication, Newsweek, was addressing with its recent cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

The point is not the label, per se, but the question of whether the times and the solutions under consideration represent some sort of paradigm shift in our national thinking about the role of government in society. In a moment of taxpayer bank bailouts and shifting tax burden proposals and exploding deficits and expansive health care and energy plans, what is the future of American-style capitalism?

We were also interested in exploring how a new president defines his political philosophy, something that has been the subject of intense debate. We wanted to draw him out on all of that and I think his answers, both in the interview itself and the follow-up phone call, were interesting and important.

Cavuto Talks Stimulus Pork With the Dumbest Woman Ive Ever Seen

Over $200 billion of Stimulus Plan will be spent on Pork Projects

OBAMA GRANTS EMINENT DOMAIN RIGHTS TO AMERICAN LAND TO CHINA

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/02/obama-grants-eminent-domain-rights-to-american-land-to-china.html

China Needs U.S. Guarantees for Treasuries, Yu Says

By Belinda Cao and Judy Chen

Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) — China should seek guarantees that its $682 billion holdings of U.S. government debt won’t be eroded by “reckless policies,” said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to the central bank.

The U.S. “should make the Chinese feel confident that the value of the assets at least will not be eroded in a significant way,” Yu, who now heads the World Economics and Politics Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in response to e-mailed questions yesterday from Beijing. He declined to elaborate on the assurances needed by China, the biggest foreign holder of U.S. government debt.

Benchmark 10-year Treasury yields climbed above 3 percent this week on speculation the government will increase borrowing as President Barack Obama pushes his $838 billion stimulus package through Congress. Premier Wen Jiabao said last month his government’s strategy for investing would focus on safeguarding the value of China’s $1.95 trillion foreign reserves.

China may voice its concerns over U.S. government finances and the potential for a weaker dollar when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits China on Feb. 20, according to He Zhicheng, an economist at Agricultural Bank of China, the nation’s third-largest lender by assets. A People’s Bank of China official, who didn’t wish to be identified, declined to comment on the telephone.

Clinton Talks

“In talks with Clinton, China will ask for a guarantee that the U.S. will support the dollar’s exchange rate and make sure China’s dollar-denominated assets are safe,” said He in Beijing. “That would be one of the prerequisites for more purchases.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu said yesterday that talks with Clinton would cover bilateral relations, the financial crisis and international affairs, according to the Xinhua news agency.

The dollar fell 0.6 percent to 89.96 yen today on concern that the U.S. government’s bank-rescue plan will fail to revive lending. Treasuries declined as investors prepared to bid for a record $21 billion sale of 10-year notes today. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note rose three basis points to 2.83 percent.

Currency Reserves

“These comments are some sort of a threat but of course China can never get such a guarantee,” said Thomas Harr, a currency strategist at Standard Chartered Plc in Singapore. The U.S. may assure China that it will clean up the financial system and that it “won’t push for a weaker dollar but they can’t promise not to increase the fiscal deficit,” he said.

U.S. government bonds returned 14 percent last year including price gains and reinvested interest, the most since rallying 18.5 percent in 1995, according to indexes compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co. Concern that the flood of bonds would overwhelm demand caused Treasuries to lose 3.08 percent in January, the steepest drop in almost five years, Merrill data show.

China’s loss of more than $5 billion from investing $10.5 billion of its reserves in New York-based Blackstone Group LP, Morgan Stanley and TPG Inc. since mid-2007 may increase its demand for the relative safety of Treasuries.

“The government will be a net buyer of Treasuries in the short term because there’s no sign they have changed their strategy,” said Zhang Ming, secretary general of the international finance research center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “But personally, I don’t think we should increase holdings because the medium- and long-term risks are quite high.”

Fed Buying

Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., said on Feb. 5 the Federal Reserve will have to buy Treasuries to curb yields as debt sales increase. Fed officials said Jan. 28 they were “prepared” to buy longer-term Treasuries.

“The biggest concern for China to continue buying U.S. Treasuries is that if Obama’s stimulus doesn’t work out as expected, the Fed may have to print money to cover the deficit,” said Shen Jianguang, a Hong Kong-based economist at China International Capital Corp., partly owned by Morgan Stanley. “That will cause a dollar slump.”

China’s foreign-exchange reserves grew about $40 billion in the fourth quarter, the least since mid-2004, as an end to yuan appreciation since July prompted investors to pull money out.

The world’s third-biggest economy grew 6.8 percent in the fourth quarter, the slowest pace in seven years. Policy makers announced a 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) economic stimulus plan in November to spur domestic demand.

Linking Disputes

Yu said China has no plans to channel its reserves toward stimulating its own economy because its trade surplus is sufficient to fund any import needs. China’s trade surplus was $39 billion in January.

China “should diversify its reserves away from U.S. Treasuries if the value of China’s foreign-exchange reserves is in danger of being inflated away by the U.S. government’s pump- priming,” he said.

China may try to link trade and currency policy disputes to its future investment in Treasuries, said Lu Zhengwei, an economist in Shanghai at Industrial Bank Co., a Chinese lender partly owned by a unit of HSBC Holdings Plc.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner accused China on Jan. 22 of “manipulating” the yuan to give an unfair advantage to its exporters. The currency has dropped 0.16 percent this year to 6.8342 per dollar, following a 21 percent gain since a peg against the dollar was abandoned in July 2005.

“China can also use this opportunity to get a promise from the U.S. not to make inappropriate requests on bilateral trade and the Chinese yuan,” Lu said. “We can’t afford more yuan appreciation as the economy is facing a serious slowdown.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Belinda Cao in Beijing at lcao4@bloomberg.net; Judy Chen in Shanghai at xchen45@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 11, 2009 04:04 EST