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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RinConRon who wrote (297923)	3/24/2009 2:30:27 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

Dick Morris had it right. Obama's weakness is weakness. Jennifer Rubin expounds on the theme laid out by none other than the WaPo's Richard Cohen, who as I am sure you all know already, is very, very liberal: We Really Did Get a Woman President Jennifer Rubin - 03.24.2009 - 10:02 AM Like just about every other Beltway pundit Richard Cohen is not delighted with what he’s seen of the Pelosi Presidency. Yes, that’s right. She seems to be running the show two-thirds of the time in the First 100 Days. While Obama was cracking unfunny jokes with Jay Leno, what was Madame President up to? Using the tax code to exact punishment for political reasons is both bad policy and bad law — why not put gun-shop owners and cigarette manufacturers in the 100 percent bracket? — but it hurtled through Pelosi’s branch of the government with nary a hearing and few discouraging words, and only the mildest suggestion from the president that the bill was really a dumb idea. Likewise the stimulus pork-a-thon was largely her doing, as was the $410 billion earmark-stuffed omnibus spending bill. Cohen frets that Republicans are using Pelosi’s excesses to seize the high ground and that Obama’s poll numbers are slipping. But it’s not like we don’t have an actual president, right? He could have sent up his own stimulus plan, threatened to veto the omnibus spending bill and declared that the House can rant all it likes but in America we don’t go after citizens to grab what the Congress itself has secured by law. That would be leadership — bold, bipartisan and mature. So why hasn’t he done any of that? You got me. Maybe he actually likes Pelosi’s radicalism and is hiding behind her skirts. Maybe he doesn’t have the force of will or the legislative acumen to head her off. Or maybe he simply prefers to campaign and hold summits, leaving the governing to others. But the result is a far left agenda and a nice juicy target for his opponents to aim at. Oh — and mounds and mounds of debt. commentarymagazine.com

To: RinConRon who wrote (297923)	3/24/2009 3:04:57 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793955

UPDATE 1-IMF says clean up banks to tackle dire world crisis Mon Mar 23, 2009 6:45am EDT reuters.com By Jonathan Lynn GENEVA, March 23 (Reuters) - The world is in a dire economic crisis, but no recovery is possible until the financial sector is cleaned up, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Monday. The crisis will push millions into poverty and unemployment, risking social unrest and even war, and urgent action is required, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said. "Bluntly the situation is dire," he told a meeting on the crisis at the International Labour Organisation, a United Nations agency representing unions, employers and governments that studies labour issues. Strauss-Kahn was talking less than two weeks before a summit of the G20 leading nations on April 2 to tackle the crisis. As the crisis spills over into developing countries, millions of people will be pushed back into poverty and hardship, Strauss-Kahn said. "All this will affect dramatically unemployment and beyond unemployment for many countries it will be at the roots of social unrest, some threat to democracy, and may be for some cases it can also end in war," he said. REVERSAL Strauss-Kahn confirmed that the IMF would shortly update its economic forecasts to show the world economy contracting by between 0.5 and 1.0 percent this year -- the first reversal in more than 50 years of sustained growth. Developed countries would shrink by a post-war record of about 3 percent, he said. But the IMF still believed recovery was possible in 2010 provided bold policies were followed. Firstly this involves boosting demand, but monetary policy -- moving interest rates -- has reached its limits, even with the unconventional tools central banks are using, he said. That is why the IMF had called for governments around the world to pump money in the economy to the tune of 2 percent of gross domestic product, he said. He noted that this did not mean that all countries should provide this fiscal stimulus, as some were in too fragile a financial position to increase spending. But so far those countries that could afford it had pumped in about 1.6-1.7 percent of world GDP. "I do believe there is still some room to go further in some countries, but taking it all round it's not that bad," Strauss-Kahn said, adding this showed that international coordination was working well. But the prerequisite for success was the restoration of a healthy financial sector, he said. Although bailing out banks was politically unpopular, businesses and households could not survive without a working banking system, he said. The IMF's experience of 122 banking crises around the world had taught it that economic recovery was impossible until banks were cleaned up, whether this was done quickly or slowly. "You can put in as much stimulus as you want. It will just melt in the sun as snow if at the same time you are not able to have a generally smaller financial sector than before but a healthy financial sector at work," he said. Despite the need for many countries to run huge deficits, emerging countries must not ignore the importance of rebuilding confidence in order to attract private capital in a globalised world, he said. (Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by xxx)