Story #1 tells the story of what really happened in September when Obama was looking for a big deal. He blamed the failure on the Republicans, but the truth is now out. #2 is a look at the Republican war on women from a member of the fairer sex. #3 has a 30 second ad from the RNC on the Obama war on women. #4 is an update on Obama’s “we can’t wait program.” #5 is a realistic view of manufacturing in America.
1. Boehner was telling the truth
The verdict is in: Team Boehner has taken Round One of the great journalistic reconstruction of last year’s failed debt talks.
Eight months after deficit talks between the nation’s top two elected officials collapsed, a 4,600-word inside-the-room narrative by The Washington Post on Sunday — the first of several sweeping accounts in the works — paints the Obama administration as walking away from a nearly done agreement with Boehner. And when the president eventually came around and wanted to cut a deal, Boehner said it was too late….
Hmmm, and the left likes to paint Obama as a compromiser and the Republicans as the parties guilty of failing to compromise. It seems the truth is just the opposite.
If you want to read the Washington Post article you can look at it here.
2. Female blogger: If this a war, it is a war on men
…In minus three seconds, someone brought up that a worse tyranny than this was the “War on Women.”
Let me point out right now that if I hear that phrase once more I’m going to lose it. No, forget that. I’m going lose it right NOW.
Let me tell you what war is, okay?
War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.
War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.
War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.
In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.) Women live longer than men. Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men. Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays. (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.) And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail. Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly. Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.
If this is war it is war on men. And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise….
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/03/18/war-is-hell/
It’s good to hear from the other side on the other side.
3. The RNC strikes back with Obama’s war on women
http://www.mediaite.com/online/rnc-goes-for-jugular-in-new-obamas-war-on-women-ad/
Not a bad 30 second ad.
4. Obama’s We Can’t Wait
…Obama blamed Republicans for blocking education reform and declared in November that the administration would “take matters into our hands” and overhaul the rules for funding Head Start. Left unsaid at Obama’s event in Philadelphia: He was implementing a law that Congress had already passed on a bipartisan basis — nearly five years earlier.
• The administration announced in October a one-stop website where businesses can access federal programs, and a bare-bones version of BusinessUSA.gov formally launched in February. But the Small Business Administration now says it needs $6 million to develop and market the site.
• Obama announced in December that he would extend minimum wage and overtime protections to certain health care workers. But relief may still be months off: It can’t be implemented until the government finishes the rule-writing process.
• The White House made a major push in early January to highlight “insourcing” with Obama hosting a forum and announcing steps that encourage companies to bring jobs back to the U.S. What that entailed: a brochure on how small businesses can tap into a loan program, a joint cable from the Commerce and State Departments announcing a partnership to promote U.S. investment and field-based training for staff in key foreign markets. The more consequential steps, such as new tax incentives, show no signs of passing Congress any time soon.
• The White House launched Ethics.gov this month under the We Can’t Wait banner. But the effort, which brought together seven databases already available on the Internet, was just as much about fulfilling a campaign pledge from 2008 to create a centralized Web platform for ethics data.
Obama never claimed the We Can’t Wait push is a substitute for persuading Congress to pass more sweeping legislation….
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74159.html#ixzz1pasdgHxB
We can’t wait for something meaningful to happen. It’s a pretty good article.
5. U.S. Manufacturing
…But if nostalgia were a sound guide to economic policy, we should be building Studebakers and rotary telephones. Neither Santorum nor Obama seems to grasp the realities of manufacturing in 21st-century America.
The first is that it's not declining in the ways that matter. Compared to1990, the total value of U.S. manufacturing output, adjusted for inflation, was up by 75 percent in 2010 -- despite a drop caused by the Great Recession.
It has declined as a share of gross domestic product only because other industries have expanded even more rapidly. Economist Mark J. Perry of the University of Michigan-Flint points out that in 2009, the total value of America's manufacturing output was nearly 46 percent greater than China's. Over the past two decades, our share of the world's manufacturing has been pretty stable.
The decline in the number of manufacturing jobs is taken as evidence that the sector is sick or uncompetitive or the victim of unfair trade practices. In reality, the change indicates sound health. Our manufacturing workers have become so much more productive that they can churn out more goods with a far smaller workforce.
The same pattern, by the way, is evident in American agriculture. In 1900, 39 percent of all Americans lived on farms. Today it's 1 percent. It's a good thing, not a bad thing, that we need fewer people to produce our food. Likewise with manufactured products.
Manufacturing accounts for a shrinking slice of the total economy mainly because as we grow wealthier, we spend a smaller portion of our income on physical products, like cars and appliances, and a bigger one on services, from health care to cellphone contracts to restaurant meals. That phenomenon holds across the developed world.
It's the result of the free market at work, endlessly shifting resources to accommodate changes in consumer demand. Politicians don't think they should tell Americans to eat at Burger King instead of Chipotle, or buy baseball bats instead of soccer balls. They didn't insist we keep our typewriters when personal computers came along.
For the most part, our leaders take it as normal and sensible to defer to consumer demand, rather than try to dictate it. Given that, why do they think they ought to rig the tax code to push consumption dollars from services, which Americans want, to goods, which they don't want quite so much? Why should they divert investment from more popular businesses to less popular ones?
That's what the measures offered by Santorum and Obama would do….
The whole manufacturing argument is based on ignorance and liberal dreams. There was a brief time when someone who didn’t have any real education could get a high paying manufacturing job. With the rise of the underdeveloped world many of those jobs disappeared. But then automation started to take those jobs. Today we have a highly skilled workforce that produces much more than their fathers did. Look at the numbers. This is not a sign of decay, but a sign of success.
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