September 12, 2012



September 12, 2012

Here's a 9/11 recollection from Sarah Hoyt.

Has it really been eleven years?

It was a beautiful day.  I remember that.  I got up to check email, and the AOL homepage had something about a plane flying into a building.  I thought it was a goofy thing, like that idiot who had earlier flown into – was it the Empire State Building? – in a small plane.

It was a beautiful morning, and I had a kid to take to school.  His older brother could walk on his own the five blocks to elementary, but Marshall – in Kindergarten – went in an hour later, and at any rate was too little to walk alone. (And too sleepy.  I used to get him up, bathe him, shovel breakfast into his mouth and walk him to school and if I were very lucky, he’d wake up when we got there.)

So I walked him to school, waited till the teacher took him in and walked back home, under a cloudless sky, across our little mountain village, looking forward to our writers’ group meeting that Saturday, feeling financially stable for the first time in my adult life (I’d just sold my first book) and thinking “This is when we reached adulthood.  From now on, it’s the easy part.  Things will only get better.”

When I got home, I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee before going up to write.  And the phone rang.  It was Rebecca Lickiss and she was screaming for me to turn on the news. ...

... And as an author to an Author I have to admire the plotting touch, where the three burly and brave guys who spearheaded the fight back in flight 93 were a born again man, a Jewish man, and a gay man.  Can you imagine any group designed to give more heart burn to the enemies that brought down the towers and who tried to use flight 93 as a weapon?

I can’t either.  But, more importantly, I can’t imagine any other culture, any other country, any other place where those three would have banded together, immediately – instinctively – putting aside any perceived differences, thinking only of trying to save the defenseless, laying down their lives for others.

Their lives were forfeit, but they died free men.  They died heroes.  More importantly, they died Americans.

Surely a nation that produces such men will not perish from this Earth.

We will not go quietly into that good night.

We’re the land of the free and the home of the brave.  And we will stand.

 

 

Rolling Stone, in an effort to trash the Romney campaign, rolled out Matt Taibbi. A Fortune editor outlines Taibbi's errors.

Very few of my friends understand private equity, let alone care about it. But some of them wrote me this past weekend, after reading Matt Taibbi's new cover story for Rolling Stone about Mitt Romney's time with Bain Capital. For example, this was from my former college housemate Andrew:

"I read the Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Reading it you can obviously see that the guy has a fairly biased opinion on private equity and Wall Street dealings in general. What's the industry's defense of PE? I assume the truth is somewhere between Mitt's version of Bain as a massive jobs creator and Gordon Gekko-esque corporate raiders."

Andrew has good instincts. Taibbi took out the long knives for this one, which means he sacrificed a bit of accuracy for potency.

His overall thesis is correct: There is a fundamental hypocrisy in a former leveraged buyout investor railing against America's ballooning debt. Leveraged buyouts, by definition, add debt to a company's balance sheet -- weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term. Romney defenders point out that America is not the same as a private equity-backed company, a truism that only goes to underscore the flimsiness of using Romney's Bain Capital experience as a singular qualification for the Oval Office.

Unfortunately, Taibbi also takes a lot of wild swings at the broader private equity market that don't ring true. So many, in fact, that his valid critique of Romney's candidacy gets lost.

Here is an accounting: ...

 

 

Mark Steyn comments on Sandra Fluke's star turn at the DNC.

... Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.

So this is America's best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be "a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn't apply to our bodies and our voices" – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn't seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their "voices" ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over "our bodies" and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for "our" pancreases and "our" bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she'll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of "personal freedom."

America is so broketastically brokey-broke that one day, in the grim future that could be, society may even be forced to consider whether there is any meaningful return on investment for paying a quarter-million bucks to send the scions of wealth and privilege to school till early middle-age to study Reproductive Justice. But, as it stands right now, a Cornell and Georgetown graduate doesn't understand the central reality of the future her elders have bequeathed her. There's no "choice" in the matter. It's showing up whatever happens in November. All the election will decide is whether America wants to address that reality, or continue to live in delusion – like a nation staggering around with a giant condom rolled over its collective head. ...

 

 

Conn Carroll says the Obama recovery is turning into the Obama depression. 

President Obama’s convention speech last week never mentioned “unemployment” or “unemployed.” Now we know why. Today’s Department of Labor monthly jobs report was an absolutely disaster for Obama and America. While U.S. employers did create 96,000 jobs last month, 368,000 Americans lost hope of finding a job and stopped looking for work entirely. Or as Paul Ryan said on CNBC, “For every net job created, nearly four people left the workforce.” Obama has now presided over a record 43 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

There simply was no good news in today’s jobs report. June and July job creation was revised down a total of 41,000. The manufacturing sector lost 15,000 jobs. If the size of the U.S. labor force rate had stayed the same as last month, unemployment would have risen to 8.4 percent. If the same number of Americans were looking for work today, as were looking for work when Obama came into officer, unemployment would have risen to 11.2 percent.

In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has the number of employed Americans. The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession.

 

 

 

Ed Morrissey has more on Woodward's book. This is a good read. Among other items you will learn Obama called Paul Ryan - Jack Ryan and you can see the White House try to lie its way out of the fact they trashed Ryan on purpose.

Bob Woodward’s new book The Price of Politics might make a lot of political trouble for Barack Obama in this election.  The book looks at the leadership failures that led to the debt-ceiling and budget crises last year, and the historic downgrading of US bonds in August 2011.  One of the reasons for the intense polarization was a speech given by Obama earlier in the year that attacked the House Budget Chair’s proposals as un-American — while he sat in the (room).  In interviews conducted by Woodward for the book, Obama admitted that the attack was “a mistake“: ...

 

[pic]

[pic]

[pic]

 

According to Hoyt

Eleven Years

by Sarah A. Hoyt

[pic]

Has it really been eleven years?

It was a beautiful day.  I remember that.  I got up to check email, and the AOL homepage had something about a plane flying into a building.  I thought it was a goofy thing, like that idiot who had earlier flown into – was it the Empire State Building? – in a small plane.

It was a beautiful morning, and I had a kid to take to school.  His older brother could walk on his own the five blocks to elementary, but Marshall – in Kindergarten – went in an hour later, and at any rate was too little to walk alone. (And too sleepy.  I used to get him up, bathe him, shovel breakfast into his mouth and walk him to school and if I were very lucky, he’d wake up when we got there.)

So I walked him to school, waited till the teacher took him in and walked back home, under a cloudless sky, across our little mountain village, looking forward to our writers’ group meeting that Saturday, feeling financially stable for the first time in my adult life (I’d just sold my first book) and thinking “This is when we reached adulthood.  From now on, it’s the easy part.  Things will only get better.”

When I got home, I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee before going up to write.  And the phone rang.  It was Rebecca Lickiss and she was screaming for me to turn on the news.

Over the rest of the day I alternated between watching the very grainy TV station and swigging Jim Beam from the bottle.  At some point I must have fried doughnuts, because I ate a pile of them.  My friend Charles was sent home from his job because it was in a tallish building.  The kids came home from school, and all through this – like a muffling fear – I couldn’t reach Dan who was, literally, working (as a contractor) at an undisclosed location somewhere near DC.  I knew of no reason he should be near the pentagon, (the company his company worked for was R. J. Reynolds, for crying out loud) but companies have weird contacts and contracts.

Turns out he was in a “Secure” — as in silent on purpose — meeting room, and didn’t know the news.  He called as soon as he heard.

I think he drove home two? Three days? Later.  Our friend Alan Lickiss drove to meet him in Hays, Kansas, and I went along as the designated swearer.  (Alan’s religion forbids swearing.)  The only way I slept until Dan got home was blotting everything with alcohol, then I got up with coffee to send the kids to school.  I sent them to school because Marshall thought Dan was dead.  He saw him leave on a plane.  He saw the plane crash.  Kindergartners have problems with the idea of more than one plane.

Has it really been eleven years?

On the one hand, part of me wants to laugh at the terrorists.  They thought they could break us.  They thought they could scare us.  They underestimated both the size of our territory and the mettle of my people.

And part of me thinks of the psychological twisting that has taken place since then: people who blame their own country for the actions of barbarians; people who kowtow to the barbarians and claim to be multiculturalists because that sounds so much better than vile cowards; people who think that a country the size of ours, as wealthy as we are should do nothing to deter attackers because we’d be protected by our halo of purity and goodness.

But then I think of the other side of it, too.  Our friends who pitched in to help me meet Dan on his way home.  Our friends who gathered in our ratty movie room so we could be together.  I think of our troops who fought the enemy there, so we wouldn’t fight them here.  I think of the brave young men and women willing to lay down their lives for this country — for the last, best hope on Earth.

And I think of those who died, even on 9/11, to save others: the people who went into the towers, to help total strangers down.  On 9/11 on the Jane Austen board, a woman who worked with Rick Rescorla was telling us all about his heroism.  You could hear her tears through her typing, but she was awed and humble as people should be who met a hero face to face.

Then there are the people of flight 93.  I know a lot of you aren’t believers, and my deepest beliefs are none of your business,  but like many writers I end up thinking of G-d as an author.  Impossible not to, of course, since it’s the mind set I know best.  (Though standing in the middle of the yard, looking up at the sky and going “Does THAT sound like a good plot development?  Seriously?  Why don’t you join a workshop already?” tends to baffle the neighbors.)

And as an author to an Author I have to admire the plotting touch, where the three burly and brave guys who spearheaded the fight back in flight 93 were a born again man, a Jewish man, and a gay man.  Can you imagine any group designed to give more heart burn to the enemies that brought down the towers and who tried to use flight 93 as a weapon?

I can’t either.  But, more importantly, I can’t imagine any other culture, any other country, any other place where those three would have banded together, immediately – instinctively – putting aside any perceived differences, thinking only of trying to save the defenseless, laying down their lives for others.

Their lives were forfeit, but they died free men.  They died heroes.  More importantly, they died Americans.

Surely a nation that produces such men will not perish from this Earth.

We will not go quietly into that good night.

We’re the land of the free and the home of the brave.  And we will stand.

 

 

 

Fortune

Greed, debt and Matt Taibbi

What Rolling Stone got right, and wrong, about Bain Capital.

by Dan Primack

[pic]

FORTUNE --  Very few of my friends understand private equity, let alone care about it. But some of them wrote me this past weekend, after reading Matt Taibbi's new cover story for Rolling Stone about Mitt Romney's time with Bain Capital. For example, this was from my former college housemate Andrew:

"I read the Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Reading it you can obviously see that the guy has a fairly biased opinion on private equity and Wall Street dealings in general. What's the industry's defense of PE? I assume the truth is somewhere between Mitt's verision of Bain as a massive jobs creator and Gordon Gekko-esque corporate raiders."

Andrew has good instincts. Taibbi took out the long knives for this one, which means he sacrificed a bit of accuracy for potency.

His overall thesis is correct: There is a fundamental hypocrisy in a former leveraged buyout investor railing against America's ballooning debt. Leveraged buyouts, by definition, add debt to a company's balance sheet -- weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term. Romney defenders point out that America is not the same as a private equity-backed company, a truism that only goes to underscore the flimsiness of using Romney's Bain Capital experience as a singular qualification for the Oval Office.

Unfortunately, Taibbi also takes a lot of wild swings at the broader private equity market that don't ring true. So many, in fact, that his valid critique of Romney's candidacy gets lost.

Here is an accounting:

Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. 

Taibbi is using Romney here as a stand-in for Wall Street, but it's unfair. Private equity firms played virtually no role in the global financial crisis. Remember, private equity neither underwrote home mortgages nor securitized them. Private equity firms did not require federal bailouts under TARP or any other program. In fact, the one big concern about private equity's pre-crisis activities -- the so-called debt maturity wall -- has proven unfounded.

Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. 

While perhaps there have been certain leveraged buyouts that involve just 5% equity, the typical contribution is significantly higher. For example, S&P Leveraged Commentary & Data reports that average LBO equity contributions since 1997 have come in between 28% and 45%. Still a debt game, but not quite so severe.

So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Or perhaps the company has enough cash flow to cover both in the short-term, while future growth (based on changes enacted by the PE firms) helps bump up profit. There are no hard and fast rules. Even when a PE firm does lay off portfolio company employees post-acquisition -- not an uncommon occurrence -- it isn't always for financial reasons. Sometimes it's because the new strategy is to de-emphasize or shut down a non-core part of the business, or a unit with declining growth (albeit one that is still profitable). Taibbi makes it sound like buy-then-fry is private equity's modus operandi. It is not. And, in the long-term, private equity ownership does not have a significant impact on a company's payroll.

The private equity business in the early Nineties was dominated by a handful of takeover firms, from the spooky and politically connected Carlyle Group (a favorite subject of conspiracy-theory lit, with its connections to right-wingers like Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush) to the equally spooky Democrat-leaning assholes at the Blackstone Group.

Blackstone Group co-founders Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson would be very surprised to be described as "Democrat-leaning," given their long-standing support for Republican candidates and causes. They probably also disagree with the "assholes" part, although at least they've heard that one before.

The only ones who profited in a big way from all the job-killing debt that Romney leveraged were Mitt and his buddies at Bain, along with Wall Street firms like Goldman and Citigroup. 

Well, plus all of the limited partners in Bain Capital funds. You know, the university endowments, corporate pension funds, teachers unions, etc. Taibbi makes a case that Bain's returns weren't terribly good, but the fact is that LPs re-invested in fund after fund. Even if it was just for the sake of reducing risk via diversification, it's not fair to say that the only people making millions off of Bain Capital were those who worked for Bain Capital. Taibbi addressed this criticism in a follow-up post.

In the Bain model, the actual turnaround isn't necessary. It's just a cover story. It's nice for the private equity firm if it happens, because it makes the acquired company more attractive for resale or an IPO. But it's mostly irrelevant to the success of the takeover model, where huge cash returns are extracted whether the captured firm thrives or not.

This just isn't true. The reference here is to dividend recaps, a noxious private equity practice through which firms can actually generate profits off of investments in portfolio companies that later go bankrupt. But the reality is that, for the most part, dividend recaps alone do not generate the types of returns that bring limited partners back for follow-on funds. Moreover, too many post-recap failures and banks are unlikely to make new loans to fund a private equity firm's future deals (original LBOs or recaps). In other words, the more legitimate wins matter, so long as the private equity firm wants to stick around.

After Milken and his junk bond scheme crashed in the late Eighties, Romney and other takeover artists moved on to Wall Street's next get-rich-quick scheme: the tech-Internet stock bubble. 

Huh? There simply weren't leveraged buyouts of dotcom companies in the late 1990s. These were young companies, most of which weren't generating significant cash-flow. Is this where Taibbi confuses venture capital with private equity? Or is he saying that the tech boom helped indirectly finance private equity, by swelling the paper values of endowment and pension fund coffers (many of which direct 8-10% of their assets to PE)? I'm really not sure.

The new owners of American industry are the polar opposites of the Milton Hersheys and Andrew Carnegies who built this country, commercial titans who longed to leave visible legacies of their accomplishments, erecting hospitals and schools and libraries, sometimes leaving behind thriving towns that bore their names. 

"We try to hide religiously," explained Steven Feinberg, the CEO of a takeover firm called Cerberus Capital Management that recently drove one of its targets into bankruptcy after saddling it with $2.3 billion in debt. "If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person," Feinberg told shareholders in 2007. "We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it."

Steven Feinberg is the closest thing private equity has to J.D. Salinger, so it's hardly a fair representation. Steve Schwarzman has his name on the New York Public Library. Henry Kravis juast put his name on a new building at Columbia Business School. The nonprofit organization City Year has named its headquarters for Bain Capital's Josh Beckenstein. And many private equity executives appear regularly at financial conferences and on financial television networks like CNBC. If they're hiding, they're doing so in plain sight.

Dan Primack joined in September 2010 to cover deals and dealmakers, from Wall Street to Sand Hill Road. Previously, Dan was an editor-at-large with Thomson Reuters, where he launched both and the peHUB Wire email service. In a past journalistic life, Dan ran a community paper in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

Orange County Register

Choice not part of this future

by Mark Steyn

According to Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, invited to address the Democratic convention and the nation, America faces a stark choice this November. "During this campaign, we've heard about two profoundly different futures that could await women in this country – and how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past," she cautioned. "That future could become real."

In one of those futures, women will be "shut out and silenced," rape victims will be "victimized all over again," pregnant women will "die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms," and "access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it." If you're wondering where all that is on your ballot form, just check the box marked "R."

"We know what this America would look like," warned Miss Fluke sternly. "In a few short months, that's the America that we could be. But that's not the America that we should be. And it's not who we are."

Fortunately, the America that we could be that isn't the America that we should be doesn't have to be the America that we would be. The good news is that "we've also seen another America that we could choose. In that America, we'd have the right to choose," said Miss Fluke. This would be "an America in which our president, when he hears that a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters, not his delegates or his donors. And in which our president stands with all women. And strangers come together, and reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here, and you give me this microphone – to amplify our voice. That's the difference."

So, if you're looking for an America where strangers lift up Sandra Fluke and amplify her voice, that would be the box marked "D."

"I've seen what these two futures look like," she said. "And six months from now, we're all going to be living in one future, or the other. But only one." Because you can't have two futures simultaneously, even under Obamacare.

With respect to Sandra Fluke, I think there's a third future looming. The paperback edition of my book comes out in a week or so, and you can pretty much get the gist of it from the title: "After America." For me, the likely scenario isn't that the Republicans will be terrorizing rape victims or that the Democrats will finally pass the necessary legislation to make contraception available for the contraceptively starved millions crying out for it, but that America will be sliding off the cliff – literally, as Joe Biden would literally say. And when America slides off the cliff it lands with a much bigger thud than Greece or Iceland. I'm not certain that the Republicans will be able to prevent that happening. But I know that the Democrats can't. America owes more money than anybody has ever owed anyone in the history of the planet. But millions of Americans don't see it, and millions of those who do see it don't see it as a problem.

Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.

So this is America's best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be "a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn't apply to our bodies and our voices" – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn't seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their "voices" ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over "our bodies" and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for "our" pancreases and "our" bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she'll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of "personal freedom."

America is so broketastically brokey-broke that one day, in the grim future that could be, society may even be forced to consider whether there is any meaningful return on investment for paying a quarter-million bucks to send the scions of wealth and privilege to school till early middle-age to study Reproductive Justice. But, as it stands right now, a Cornell and Georgetown graduate doesn't understand the central reality of the future her elders have bequeathed her. There's no "choice" in the matter. It's showing up whatever happens in November. All the election will decide is whether America wants to address that reality, or continue to live in delusion – like a nation staggering around with a giant condom rolled over its collective head.

Any space aliens prowling through the rubble of our civilization and stumbling upon a recording of the convention compatible with Planet Zongo DVD players will surely marvel at the valuable peak airtime allotted to Sandra Fluke. It was weird to see her up there among the governors and senators – as weird as Bavarians thought it was when King Ludwig decided to make his principal adviser Lola Montez, the Irish-born "Spanish dancer" and legendary grande horizontale. I hasten to add I'm not saying Miss Fluke is King Barack's courtesan. For one thing, it's a striking feature of the Age of Perfected Liberalism that modern liberals talk about sex 24/7 while simultaneously giving off the persistent whiff that the whole thing's a bit of a chore. Hence, the need for government subsidy. And, in fairness to Miss Montez, she used sex to argue for liberalized government, whereas Miss Fluke uses liberalism to argue for sexualized government.

But those distinctions aside, like Miss Fluke, Miss Montez briefly wielded an influence entirely disproportionate to her talents. Like Miss Fluke, she was a passionate liberal activist who sought to diminish what she regarded as the malign influence of the Catholic Church. Taking up with Lola cost King Ludwig his throne in the revolutions of 1848. We'll see in a couple of months whether taking up with Sandra works out for King Barack. But what's strange is that so many people don't find it strange at all – that at a critical moment in the affairs of the republic the ruling party should assemble to listen to a complacent 31-year-old child of privilege peddling the lazy cobwebbed assumptions of myopic narcissism. Lola Montez was what botanists would call a "sport" – morphologically distinct from the rest of the societal shrub. The tragedy for America is that Sandra Fluke is all too typical.

 

 

Washington Examiner

The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession

by Conn Carroll

President Obama’s convention speech last week never mentioned “unemployment” or “unemployed.” Now we know why. Today’s Department of Labor monthly jobs report was an absolutely disaster for Obama and America. While U.S. employers did create 96,000 jobs last month, 368,000 Americans lost hope of finding a job and stopped looking for work entirely. Or as Paul Ryan said on CNBC, “For every net job created, nearly four people left the workforce.” Obama has now presided over a record 43 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

There simply was no good news in today’s jobs report. June and July job creation was revised down a total of 41,000. The manufacturing sector lost 15,000 jobs. If the size of the U.S. labor force rate had stayed the same as last month, unemployment would have risen to 8.4 percent. If the same number of Americans were looking for work today, as were looking for work when Obama came into officer, unemployment would have risen to 11.2 percent.

In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has the number of employed Americans. The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession.

 Hot Air

Obama: Hey, no one told me Jack Ryan was going to be at that speech

Reminder: Paul Ryan was invited by WH to speech

by Ed Morrissey

Bob Woodward’s new book The Price of Politics might make a lot of political trouble for Barack Obama in this election.  The book looks at the leadership failures that led to the debt-ceiling and budget crises last year, and the historic downgrading of US bonds in August 2011.  One of the reasons for the intense polarization was a speech given by Obama earlier in the year that attacked the House Budget Chair’s proposals as un-American — while he sat in the (room).  In interviews conducted by Woodward for the book, Obama admitted that the attack was “a mistake“:

President Obama told author Bob Woodward that he didn’t know Rep. Paul Ryan was going to attend at a major speech he delivered last year on spending and debt, and says in retrospect that it was “a mistake” to dress down Ryan and his budget plans to his face in that setting. …

“I’ll go ahead and say it – I think that I was not aware when I gave that speech that Jack Ryan was going to be sitting right there,” the president told Woodward according to audio transcripts of their conversations, provided to ABC News.

“And so I did feel, in retrospect, had I known – we literally didn’t know he was going to be there until – or I didn’t know, until I arrived. I might have modified some of it so that we would leave more negotiations open, because I do think that they felt like we were trying to embarrass him,” Obama continued. “We made a mistake.”

It’s not the only one.  Jack Ryan is either the candidate who withdrew from the 2004 Senate race that Obama won, or the fictional character in the Tom Clancy series of novels about a CIA agent who rises to the office of President, as ABC notes parenthetically:

(Jack Ryan is the name of a famous Tom Clancy character, and also the name of the Republican who was slated to run against Obama in his 2004 Senate campaign before he withdrew in the wake of a sex scandal.)

Mr. President, please let us introduce you to the House Budget Chair, and a member of Congress since 1999.

We’ll come back to this in an OOTD later this week.  However, the excuse doesn’t quite cut it, either.  Whether or not Paul Ryan attended that speech, Obama’s words were incendiary and hyperbolic.  It’s not as if Ryan wouldn’t have noticed had he not been in attendance.  Obama gave that speech to score political points through partisan attacks rather than make an argument or reach a compromise.  The Wall Street Journal wondered at the time whether the President had abandoned any pretense at seriousness with that speech, explicitly noting Obama’s attack on Ryan’s plan as un-American as the end to any hint of compromise.

The speech itself was the mistake, not the lack of attention to the guest list.  This excuse doesn’t pass the smell test.

Update: Thanks to the commenters, let’s recall what Paul Ryan said the previous time the White House tried the “gee, we didn’t know he’d be there” excuse:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was invited by the White House to attend President Obama’s combative speech on the deficit last April, Ryan’s office said Monday, contradicting a report that he showed up unannounced.

On Monday, The New York Timesreported that the White House did not know that Ryan planned to attend the speech at George Washington University, where Obama delivered a blistering rebuke of the House GOP’s 2012 budget plan.

Before the speech began, according to the Times, then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley “spied an unexpected guest in the audience: Rep. Paul D. Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, whose budget plan Mr. Obama was about to shred.”

The story says Daley told an aide to try to warn Obama and appears to imply that Obama might have toned down his rhetoric had he known Ryan was in the audience.

The problem with this account, Ryan’s office says, is that the White House invited Ryan to the speech.

“Chairman Ryan was invited by the White House. Ryan RSVP’d in the affirmative to the White House, and he was given his seating assignment by the White House,” spokesman Conor Sweeney said.

Perhaps Barack Obama really doesn’t know Jack about this.

 

 

 

[pic]

[pic]

 

[pic]

 

[pic]

 

[pic]

 

[pic]

[pic]

 

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download