Obama Double Speak: Drill, Brazil, Drill!

As the world burns, B. Hussein Obama and family bask in the Brazilian sun seemingly without a care in the world.  The Obamination did take a few minutes with Brazilian officials to reiterated that "offshore drilling is good" and that the U.S. supports it. What does that backstabbing SOB have up his sleeve this time? 

Wake Up America ... The rug is being pulled out from under you while you sit idly by!

While leaving U.S. oil and jobs in the ground, our itinerant president tells a South American neighbor that we’ll help it develop its offshore resources so we can one day import its oil. WHAT?!?

We will help Brazil develop its offshore oil so we can one day import it.

We have noted this double standard before, particularly when — at a time when the president was railing against tax incentives for U.S. oil companies — we supported the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s plan to lend $2 billion to Brazil’s state-run Petrobras with the promise of more to follow.

Now, with a seven-year offshore drilling ban in effect off of both coasts, on Alaska’s continental shelf and in much of the Gulf of Mexico — and a de facto moratorium covering the rest — Obama tells the Brazilians:

“We want to help you with the technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely. And when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.”

Obama wants to develop Brazilian offshore oil to help the Brazilian economy create jobs for Brazilian workers while Americans are left unemployed in the face of skyrocketing energy prices by an administration that despises fossil fuels as a threat to the environment and wants to increase our dependency on foreign oil.

Article courtesy of The Patriot Update

Psst. No shutdown During a Government Shutdown.

The US Government's bloated bureaucratic behemoth is in little danger of "losing out" during this recession. Its workers are practically guaranteed to keep their standard of living, regardless of the pain millions of taxpayers who pay their salaries are feeling. Say it aint so, O.

WASHINGTON – Social Security checks would still go out. Troops would remain at their posts. Furloughed federal workers probably would get paid, though not until later. And virtually every essential government agency, like the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, would remain open.
That's the little-known truth about a government shutdown. The government doesn't shut down.

And it won't on March 5, even if the combatants on Capitol Hill can't resolve enough differences to pass a stopgap spending bill to fund the government while they hash out legislation to cover the last seven months of the budget year.

Fewer than half of the 2.1 million federal workers subject to a shutdown would be forced off the job if the Obama administration followed the path taken by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And that's not counting 600,000 Postal Service employees or 1.6 million uniformed military personnel exempt from a shutdown.

So we're talking fewer than one in four federal workers staying at home. Many federal workers get paid on March 4, so it would take a two-week shutdown for them to see a delay in their paychecks.

The rules for who works and who doesn't date back to the early 1980s and haven't been significantly modified since. The Obama administration hasn't issued new guidance.

The air traffic control system, food inspection, Medicare, veterans' health care and many other essential government programs would run as usual. The Social Security Administration would not only send out benefits but would continue to take applications. The Postal Service, which is self-funded, would keep delivering the mail. Federal courts would remain open.

The cherry blossoms in Washington would bloom as usual, and visitors to the city would be able to park and see them in all their glory around the Tidal Basin.

But they wouldn't be able to take the elevator up the Washington Monument, visit museums along the National Mall or take a White House tour. National parks would be closed to visitors, a loss often emphasized in shutdown discussions.

The Capitol would remain open, however. Congress is deemed essential, despite its abysmal poll ratings.

The IRS wouldn't answer its taxpayer hotline — at the height of tax-filing season. Under IRS precedents, the agency would process tax returns that contain payments. But people getting refunds would have to wait. [Fancy that!]


All sides say they don't want a so-called shutdown like the two separate partial government closings in 1995-1996, when President Clinton and a then-new GOP majority in Congress were at loggerheads over the budget. Republicans took most of the political blame, and the episodes gave Clinton critical momentum on his way to re-election.

There haven't been any shutdowns since then. The politics stink.

But from a practical perspective, shutdowns usually aren't that big a deal. They happened every year when Jimmy Carter was president, averaging 11 days each. During President Reagan's two terms, there were six shutdowns, typically of just one or two days apiece. Deals got cut. Everybody moved on.

In 1995-96, however, shutdowns morphed into political warfare, to the dismay of Republicans who thought they could use them to drag Clinton to the negotiating table on a balanced budget plan.

Republicans took a big political hit, but a compendium of the other hardships experienced reads like a roster of relatively minor inconveniences for most Americans: closed parks, delays in processing passport applications, 2,400 workers cleaning up toxic waste sites being sent home, and a short delay in processing veterans' claims. A new government standard for lights and lamps was delayed.

To be sure, furloughs can be a major hardship for federal workers. Even those in essential jobs — and required to work — could see their paychecks delayed if a stalemate dragged on.

Lawmakers, however, typically provide back pay, even for employees who weren't required to work. A repeat of that could raise hackles with some in the tea party-backed House GOP freshman class. A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, wouldn't address whether furloughed federal workers would receive back pay if there is a shutdown this time.

Regardless, federal contractors would lose out. Many contract workers could be furloughed without pay and not receive lost wages retroactively, especially in an extended shutdown.

Under a precedent-setting memorandum by Reagan budget chief David Stockman, federal workers are exempted from furloughs if their jobs are national security-related or if they perform essential activities that "protect life and property."

In 1995, that meant 571,000 Defense Department civilian employees, some 69 percent, remained at post, while 258,000 other Pentagon workers were furloughed. Eighty-five percent of Veterans Administration employees went to work as did 70 percent of Transportation Department workers.

But just a handful of Environmental Protection Agency employees and only 7 percent of NASA workers were on the job, according to Clinton administration data.

This year, NASA would face widespread furloughs that suggest a shutdown could interrupt preparation for space shuttle flights this spring — though the "life and property" rules would almost certainly be invoked so that the Space Shuttle Discovery could land as scheduled on March 7. It took off Thursday afternoon.

Just 4 percent of employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development went to work in the 1995 shutdown, as did 11 percent of Department of Education employees. The National Archives shut down completely, as did the tiny Selective Service System.

Then there's Social Security. Current beneficiaries need not worry; their payments wouldn't be affected. And given the most recent precedent from the Clinton administration, those eligible to apply for benefits would be able to do so.

During the first shutdown in 1995, the Social Security Administration initially furloughed 93 percent of its workers and stopped enrolling new beneficiaries. But it reversed course in the second shutdown and kept 50,000 additional workers on the job.

If the federal government is shut down for several days, the Census Bureau could miss its April 1 legal deadline to provide 2010 redistricting data to the states. The bureau is currently in the midst of checking its population tallies, which are broken down by race and ethnicity down to the neighborhood level, for many states.

By the March 4 deadline, the bureau expects it will have distributed the data to about roughly half the states, with big states such as California, New York and Florida potentially left hanging if the government closes down.


Article by Andrew Taylor, Courtesy of Associated Press

Fed Hides Major Accounting Change. Is This What Is Meant By "Fuzzy Math"?

Just another reason to ban the Federal Reserve! Wake up America... this (and every other) action by an independent banking cartel is bankrupting our country and that of our future generations!

  

Reuters has a very hot story out tonight on an accounting change the Fed snuck into a regular weekly report. It will move off the capital part of its balance sheet any losses the Fed may have on paper it purchased from Goldman Sachs, or anybody else for that matter. Here's Reuters via CNBC (My emphasis):

Concerns that the Federal Reserve could suffer losses on its massive bond holdings may have driven the central bank to adopt a little-noticed accounting change with huge implications: it makes insolvency much less likely.

The significant shift was tucked quietly into the Fed's weekly report on its balance sheet and phrased in such technical terms that it was not even reported by financial media when originally announced on Jan. 6.

But the new rules have slowly begun to catch the attention of market analysts. Many are at once surprised that the Fed can set its own guidelines, and also relieved that the remote but dangerous possibility that the world's most powerful central bank might need to ask the U.S. Treasury or its member banks for money is now more likely to be averted.

But they are averting asking the Treasury for money in the future by an accounting gimmick that will simply dump the debt off the capital part of the balance sheet, so it won't be reported as a loss, and make it a liability to the Treasury. More from Reuters:

[According to]Raymond Stone, managing director at Stone & McCarthy in Princeton, New Jersey, "An accounting methodology change at the central bank will allow the Fed to incur losses, even substantial losses, without eroding its capital."

The change essentially allows the Fed to denote losses by the various regional reserve banks that make up the Fed system as a liability to the Treasury rather than a hit to its capital. It would then simply direct future profits from Fed operations toward that liability...
 "Any future losses the Fed may incur will now show up as a negative liability as opposed to a reduction in Fed capital, thereby making a negative capital situation technically impossible," said Brian Smedley, a rates strategist at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch and a former New York Fed staffer.

"The timing of the change is not coincidental, as politicians and market participants alike have expressed concerns since the announcement (of a second round of asset buys) about the possibility of Fed 'insolvency' in a scenario where interest rates rise significantly," Smedley and his colleague Priya Misra wrote in a research note.

Bottom line: We all knew the Fed was going to have to do some kind of monkey business to deal with all the junk securities it purchased, here it is: Negative liabilities. Yes, only at your local Fed.

Note: I hasten to add this does not appear to resolve the problem of the Fed going cash flow negative as a result of having to raise interest rates on excess reserve to a point where they are higher than most of the income earning debt they hold. Expect future monkey business on this front.

Article by: Robert Wenzel, Economy Policy Journal 

What's Black and White and "Red" All Over?

Obama and Holder have demonstrated again that they will impose their Socialist will wherever and whenever they find an opportunity!

Q:What's black and white and "red" all over? 

A: The Department of Justice's newly designed website. 

Gone are the standard red, white, and blue motifs, replaced by an all-black backdrop. And prominently placed on virtually every page of the site is a quote credited to a man who facilitated a greater role for socialists and communists at the U.N., and the global "workers rights movement."

The redesigned website was launched without fanfare, but was noticed internally by several career lawyers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of political reprisals. 

"We were told that the media team and the senior leadership that signed off on the design thought that the patriotic shtick from the Ashcroft days was a bit much for an agency that isn't supposed to be political," says a DOJ lawyer, who inquired about the redesign. 

"It was a real effort not to laugh at that."

 Courtesy of VisiontoAmerica