Rotary Plow and Bulldozer Clear Sylvan Pass 2011 Yellowstone National Park
Here in the Mountain West a state Government and the private sector are working together to do what is right for the people and right for the economy.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Gov. Matt Mead on Tuesday approved providing state snow plows and crews to clear roads inside Yellowstone National Park and told communities in northwest Wyoming to go ahead and raise money for the effort.
The Cody Country Chamber of Commerce is ready to do just that, as soon as it gets a total estimated cost, Executive Director Scott Balyo said.
"Before we can fund raise we need to know how much we need to raise," Balyo said. "It has to be reasonable."
Spring plowing in Yellowstone has been postponed two weeks to save money amid federal budget cuts. Plowing was scheduled to begin March 4 but is delayed two weeks with the idea of letting warmer weather do much of the work in the weeks ahead.
Businesses near Yellowstone fret that the park won't fully open to automobiles until one to two weeks later than usual this May.
Stateside in Wyoming, no one is out to maximize disruption and pain to score political points. In real America there are no games, no presidential spite. Screw you Barack Obama.
You might wonder why I am leading off with a chart of Greek unemployment. Well, the
way deleveraging works is it breaks one weak link, then another and another,
until it cracks a link so large and so crucial that it brings down most of what
was chained to it, as well as many links distantly connected. That’s what
happened in the 2008 financial meltdown.In the investment banking world, first it was Bear Stearns, then Fannie
Mae, then Freddie Mac, then Lehman, and if it had not been for massive and
controversial interventions, the next failures would have been Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley,
and even ultimately, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.In the commercial banking sector major banks
like Wachovia, WAMU and Countrywide disappeared along with hundreds of regional
and community banks, and zombie too-big-too-fail banks like Citibank and Ally
(nee GMAC) were put on continuous life support.Financial sector collapses seeped into the general economy, causing the
worst recession in generations and morphing, with a big assist from the Obama
administration’s economically antagonistic policies, into the weakest economic recovery
in decades.
Now
in Europe we are beginning to see the impacts of more profoundly damaging countrywide
(actual countries, not the bank) deleveraging, with Greece taking the lead. Meanwhile, US debt is building to Greek proportions.
Obama
doesn’t see any crisis, no cause for concern.Young people, Barack Obama could not have made it clearer yesterday that
he doesn’t give a damn about you or your future.He is going to roll the dice, mortgaging your
future, betting everything on the here and now.Obama’s goal is to build a false prosperity, certain to collapse, structured
on debt burdens that stretch into your pockets for decades to come.
The United States is roughly $17 trillion in debt, but President Barack Obama says there’s no reason to worry.
Speaking with ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos this week, Pres. Obama downplayed concerns of an impending financial catastrophe, claiming quite to the contrary that the country is on track to turning the economy around.
"We don't have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,"Pres. Obama told Mr. Stephanopoulos during an interview that aired Wednesday on the television program Good Morning America.
"In fact,” added the president, “for the next 10 years, it's gonna be in a sustainable place."
This
isn’t rocket science.The only way to
avoid deleveraging is to not pile up the mountain of debt in the first place. Say no, and whatever hole you have worked your way into, work your way out of it.
Greek Stock Market Residue of Deleveraging
Obama says not immediate? When forced deleveraging is an immediate threat it is far too late to react in a productive way.Look at the unstoppable reckoning that ensues.Greek unemployment hit 26.2 percent last
quarter. For Greecian youth the jobless rate is
an astounding 57.8 percent – a metric defining a generation that is not merely lost
but utterly destroyed.In pre-crisis years (when the debt crisis was
inevitable if not immediate to use Obama’s irrelevant adjective) Greece’s
unemployment rate was comparable to unemployment in the US today. As for older folks who saved and invested for
retirement, there’s no Easy Street for them either when countrywide
deleveraging kicks in.The Athens stock
market index is down by more than 80 percent from pre-recessionary levels. Yes,
no immediate crisis today -- nothing but economic desolation and destroyed lives
in the future.That’s Barack Obama’s
legacy to the next generation.
I'm not Catholic and there are plenty of things the Catholic Chuch does that irk me to no end (like not permitting me to take communion in their environs) so in a sense the new Pope is none of my business. But I like religions, churches, and sects and beliefs of all manner to be good and strong and moral. The Catholic Church has inflicted itself (I'm being kind here) with horrific wounds. It needs to hit bottom on the way to recovery. Perhaps it is ready. I kind of like this guy. He's real. No limos, not even street cars -- he takes the bus. There are widespread reports that Pope Francis was the runner up in the last go around. The Catholic Church sure wasted eight years. It had best get moving down the new path.
Winter leaching into spring hasn't only been happening along the Front Range of the Rockies, across the Midwest and into New England, it is also tieing up and battening down Europe. France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom are all hunkered down, suffering in the aftermath of a late season snow storm. French authorities are advising 7 million daily public transit users to stay home. Thousands of cars have been abandoned on roads in Normandy and Brittany in the North of France. Travel delays and cancellations have been experienced throughout southern England, Belgium and the Netherlands and into Germany.
Eiffel Tower Paris France
Tourists are experiencing the unexpected.
Under the Eiffel Tower, two Canadian tourists were among those braving the soggy chill. It's cold. Really cold," Heidi Nelson of Toronto said. Fellow visitor from Toronto, Laura Martin, added: "Yes, kind of like Canada."
Meanwhile here in Bozeman the midday sun has been doing its work, raising high temperatures into the 40's, eating away each day at the winter-long snow cover. Late week forecasts are for highs in the 50's -- known in Montana as t-shirt weather. At Cottonwood Hills Golf Course, the greens and tees have been cleared and treated to fend off fungus. The outlook is hopeful.
There is a crisis in the progressive utopia known to the rest of us as New York City. Despite the best efforts of teachers unions, special programs for the poor and layers of non-classroom administrators, eighty percent of New York high school graduates cannot
read.
The political leadership in New York recognizes crisis, it is up to the challenge. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hanging in there. He is going to fight. Bloomberg says, “This is not a
joke.This is about real lives.”
Oh, wait – wrong crisis.People are drinking Pepsi and Coke, some A&W Root Beer too. Pay no attention. Move on.
This week's award goes to John McCain and his mini-me, Lindsey Graham, for attacking Rand Paul's filibuster in defense of the United States Constitution. It is not "ridiculous" or "simply false" that a guilt by association, unfettered assassination scheme runs afoul of the constitutional right that life not be taken without due process of law. It's right there, guaranteed by the 5th Amendment. The Constitution requires that lines be drawn between war powers and domestic governance and yields rights to Americans against the government. That's a beauty of the Constitution and the checks and balances among the judicial, legislative and executive branches. This is the stuff of principled government, not the stuff of backroom deals that John McCain and Lindsey Graham, big government power brokers to the core, hold near and dear.
(I)t is too soon to tell whether these bold creations of the Affordable Care Act will actually bring “affordable” care to consumers. Some observers say that escalating health care costs will still find ways to tap and drain the bank accounts of small businesses, individuals and families.
But it's not too soon to answer if you are a young person, who has essentially no need for prepaid medical services (which medical insurance has been regulated into) that you won't use.
Among the 2,500-page law’s myriad provisions, individuals with pre-existing conditions who have been unable to purchase health insurance no longer will be excluded for chronic illness or a history of medical claims. Insurers won’t be able to drop coverage when someone gets sick. Plans will have to offer more generous benefits, such as capping out-of-pocket expenses and providing free preventive care. Premiums for older consumers cannot be more than three times the cost for younger consumers.
Everything is set up to lessen costs for the old folk who haven't committed themselves to plans and employment throughout their lives that would have provided continuous coverage. Then pass the costs along to the younger generation. AARP is an extraordinary lobby. The baby boomers are quite the selfless crowd.
On top of that, young people, you are going to be paying for the subsidies too. Good luck!
Laura Albina (Bina) Foster, Florence Foster King, Adams Foster, Grace Foster, Lyndon (Red) Foster, Herbert Foster, Margaret Foster Cameron, Bryant Foster, Jimmy Foster, Charlotte Foster Von Allman and George Washington Foster
My grandfather, Isaac Jarvis Foster, emigrated from Canada and homesteaded a claim in Bathgate North Dakota as a young man in 1879. In the ensuing decade he met, wooed and married Laura Elizabeth "Lizzie" Armstrong. On a farm at the turn of the 20th century it paid to have a large family. The result in terms of offspring were my dad plus ten aunts and uncles. When Grandpa Ike ran for county sheriff, his campaign slogan was "Head of a Family of Thirteen, VOTE FOR US." He won. In the lineup above, Dad is the little guy, the youngest of 11; he looks to be maybe three years old, which would date the family photo to 1912. His siblings posed at an angle. Dad is turned squarely ahead, a free and independent spirit from the beginning.
Aunt Bina's Headstone
Aunt Grace's Headstone
The older siblings, born before 1900, were not well known to me. Numbers one through five are Laura Albina (Bina) Foster, Florence Foster King, Adams Foster, Grace Foster, and Lyn (Red) Foster. Bina attended North Dakota Agricutural College in Grand Forks and earned a two-year degree in pharmacy in 1915. Grace attended business school in Winnebago Minnesota, then took a course in watchmaking and engraving in Peoria Illinois. Aunt Bina was a "druggist" working in North Dakota hospitals, frequently exposed to infectious disease. They died young in 1928 and 1927 respectively. I never met Lyn. He enlisted in the army in 1916 and fought in 5 battles during World War I in France. Florence also attended the University in Grand Forks. I but dimly recollect Aunt Florence as a gray haired woman who died when I was young.
With the farm gone, his parents dead and the remaining family scattered to the four winds during the Great Depression, Uncle Adams went to live in a home for the handicapped in Grafton, North Dakota, as he was unable to care for himself. The Sisters there were wonderful caretakers. We would visit Adams and take him out for a picnic along a nearby creek. After a couple of hours he would tire and ask to go home. He had no sense of or ability to manage money. We would contribute to his commissary account so he could buy himself a Coke, a candy bar or personal items from time to time. My dad said that Adams hit his head as a youth when he was thrown from a horse (or he suffered from a debilitating fever, I'm not sure). Adams led a long life; he is buried alongside his parents in Bathgate Cemetery.
Barack Obama is a brat, a petulant child who foams at the mouth, holds his breath, sputters and mutters and refuses to cooperate or restrain himself, who uses anything and anyone, until his will is done. In the latest, the President elects to freeze out sixth graders from Iowa to implement his obligations under the sequester, closing the White House to public tours. Obama could have saved that much money by canceling one golf trip. Obama's decision is a surprising about face from the type of tour surprises that he was up to in January.
Meanwhile, the House side up on Capitol Hill has adult leadership -- the (much longer, more interesting and historically important) tours go on.
Boehner said House officials had been preparing for sequestration cuts and made sure that Capitol Hill tours would continue.
"While I’m disappointed the White House has chosen to comply with sequestration by cutting public tours, I’m pleased to assure you that public tours of the United States Capitol will continue," Boehner said. "Under the leadership of the House officers and their teams, who oversee daily operations in the Capitol in consultation with the Office of the Speaker, planning for the possibility of sequestration has been underway for some time. Consequently, alternative spending reductions have been implemented within the Capitol complex to ensure public tours and other regular activities can proceed as they normally would.
"I encourage you and your family to visit the U.S. Capitol during your trip to Washington, D.C. If you haven’t already made arrangements through my office for a Capitol tour, I encourage you to do so," Boehner concluded in the letter.
White House spokesman Jay Carney has yet to respond to questions on whether big donors will have their White House access curtailed in concert with the Iowan sixth graders.
View from the Virginia side, across the Potomac River, and down the National Mall in Washington DC at 10:45 this morning. Federal Government is shut down, by order of the executive (that guy in the White House and his minions) for snow.
The Government You Pay For
Lest there be any confusion, the scientific cartel (uh, I mean consensus) was that Washington DC had to shut down today.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared to a new all time intra-day high today.
Meanwhile, west of the Hudson River, the number of Food Stamp recipients is at a record high, tens of millions of people are unemployed, underemployed or stopped looking for work. Taxes are rising, incomes are declining and real wages are falling. The President has nominated as his OMB fiscal watchdog and management director a woman whose career and experience are in giving away money. He's put forward names of people to lead the EPA and the Energy Department who will move heaven and earth to make sure you pay more for energy over the next four years. Obama's Vice Chairman of the Fed is assuring the country that the central bank will run its currency printing presses indefinitely. Remember, it is all Bush and Boehner's fault. What a wonderful world!
The replays of and commentaries on Chris Wallace's interviews with Mitt
Romney popping up here and there reminded me of a letter to the editor I sent
to the Bozeman Chronicle in November.
The Chroniclepublished my letter under their (not my) headline "GOP
must nominate real person to win presidency" where I offered unsolicited
political advice on how an opposition party has to define itself and nominate
someone who can take on the destructive Democratic juggernaut. That was before
my blogging, so I thought I'd republish the letter, in full, here:
Posted: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 12:15 am
There are plenty of Romney “campaign failure” post
mortems. But I think Romney did about as well as he could. The problem was the
person and his experience.
This election was about the economy. But Romney
never labored, operated a business or was an entrepreneur; he was a financier
with drive-by exposure to working, operating and entrepreneurial guys. Romney’s
resume helped him grasp the value of capitalism but not so much the power of
free markets and the value creating-proposition of economic process.
In contrast, Ronald Reagan learned economic lessons
from working independently as an actor, years of touring the country to speak
with legions of ordinary people, and pull-himself-up-by-the-bootstraps life
experience. He learned what doesn't work as a union activist and president of
the actors’ guild. Reagan knew that individuals, not big government and big
labor, are the driving force behind the U.S. economy. The great communicator
spoke of economic issues in personal terms that connected with people.
Listening to Romney on economics was like
eavesdropping on a conversation among options traders about puts or calls –
strange and off putting. Romney wasn’t prepared to communicate with ordinary
people.
Republicans, get smart. Nominate someone who is
neither MBA nor lawyer (or is not defined by that education). Choose someone
who led a real life – a nominee who can speak sincerely and confidently on how
nanny-state government gets in the way while free market economic processes
work. Messages delivered from a candidate’s heart on the debilitating impacts
of dependency and debt, and in favor of the real economy over the hollowness of
the monetary establishment (ala Ron Paul), are messages that resonate. This
candidate believes in the people. Then you might have a chance, and if you won,
would actually make a difference.
Winter set in around Veteran's day and hasn't let up. I'm ready for an end, itching to get out on the links. For the first time, I was thinking, for a moment, wouldn't it be nice to be back in Virginia. Then I saw this.
We only have about 6 inches of snowcover left now most places in the valley. I can be patient.
I blogged the first week in January on how Obama's, tax, print, borrow and spend strategies are helping the rich while hammering the ordinary working stiff. It seems the Wall Street Journal and a talking head economist are catching on,
As taxes rise, prices climb and incomes fall, it's the wealthiest U.S. households that are driving spending. Meanwhile, middle-class and poorer households are feeling the economic brunt.
Behind that seeming paradox lies a consumer sector that is increasingly split in two: Wealthier households, buoyed by improving home values and a rising stock market, are spending more. Poorer ones, hammered by higher taxes and rising gas prices, are holding back.
"People in the top half of the income distribution are doing just fine. They're spending enough to keep the economy moving," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. "But the lower half is having a difficult time keeping their heads above water."
You get what you vote for, even if it's not what you wanted.
Since 2008 there have been tales of woe nationwide of
householders forced to default when they couldn’t refinance their mortgaged underwater
homes, who abandoned their depreciating and overpriced homes in despair, who stopped making mortgage payments and suffered foreclosure and eviction, or spent years begging for and
negotiating short sales with lenders to escape properties that had become a
yoke on their finances and their families.Not so in the Washington DC area. Huge surges in federal expenditures made the
National Capitol Region recession proof and enriched hundreds of thousands of
federal employees and contractors.Households throughout the region, despite in many cases being deeply in debt and highly leveraged, never
felt the pain.
Washington DC The Toast of Obama
I lived in and around the area for 34 years and can personally vouch how Easy Street inside of the Capital Beltway works. I bought
our little brick colonial house a mile from the Pentagon and a mile and
one-half from DC on a 5,600 square foot lot in Arlington, Virginia for $209,900
in 1998.The house sold June of last
year for $737,500.It pays to live where
Bernanke prints the money, Geithner borrows the money and Obama spends it.And guess what?No real economic activity, no manufacturing
and no pollution except from those pesky government commuters puttering about.It’s a wonderful life! Now that Obama's vapid sequester lies (Obama is still saying janitor's at the Capitol are getting a pay cut even though their boss says no layoffs are anticipated) have been silenced, the ever present "economists" and some of the mainstream media offer a surprisingly realistic report on the sequester,
The
nation's capitol and nearby Virginia and Maryland will likely feel the worst of
the impact. States heavily-reliant on federal spending - as far away as New
Mexico - are also in for some rough weather.With half of the roughly $85 billion in cuts targeting the Pentagon, the
impact will be heavily concentrated in D.C., Virginia and Maryland, where
defense spending accounted for about 10 percent of the three states’ combined
economies in 2010, according to a report last month from Wells Fargo economists
Mark Vitner and Michael Brown.
Let's look at the affected areas. The following lists the top ten median income counties in the U.S. – 7 of the top ten nationwide are in the DC area.
The Washington Post has headlined “Government dollars fuel wealth: D.C. enclaves reap
rewards of contracting boom.”Bloomberg has reported the DC Metropolitan area is “the wealthiest
U.S. Metropolitan area,” even “richer than Silicon Valley.”
So 1, 2, 3, let’s cry great big crocodile tears for the
poor souls who will be most affected by the sequester. All together now! Boohoo!Boohoo!Boohoo!
