The Super Majority

Geithner Says US Will Never Lose AAA Debt Rating, Despite $1.6 Trillion 2010 Deficit

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its Aaa debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast yesterday whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

Geithner said investors around the world turn to U.S. Treasury securities and dollar-denominated assets whenever they are worried about global stability. That reflects “basic confidence” in the U.S. and its ability to bounce back from the global recession, he said.

Moody’s Investors Service Inc. last week said the U.S. government’s bond rating will come under pressure in the future unless additional measures are taken to reduce budget deficits projected for the next decade.

Read the full article at Bloomberg

Rahm Emanual’s ‘Retarded’ Comment Flares Up Limbaugh, Palin

Rush Limbaugh has pounced on Rahm Emanuel’s “retarded” blunder and is using the same offensive term to bludgeon his enemies on the left.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” the right-wing icon used the firestorm surrounding Obama’s chief of staff as cover to blast liberal activists as “retards,” and suggest a “retard summit” is in the offing at the White House.

The embattled Emanuel sat down yesterday afternoon at the White House with a group of advocates for the disabled to apologize for hurling the phrase “f—ing retarded” during a closed-door strategy session in August.

The slur, reported last week, was thrust in the spotlight after Sarah Palin called for Rahm to be fired in a Facebook post.

Palin, whose son has Downs syndrome, likened Rahm’s expletive to use of the N-word.

Read the full article at NY Post

Reid Unhappy as Obama Continues to Knock Las Vegas

President Obama is catching heat from Nevada lawmakers and business leaders regarding his comments Tuesday criticizing trips to Las Vegas.

During the president’s town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, he discussed the need to curb spending during tough economic times. “When times are tough, you tighten your belts,” the president said. “You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

The president’s comments come nearly a year after he criticized companies that received federal money for taking corporate junkets to Las Vegas. “You can’t go take that trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on taxpayers’ dime,” he said at the time. Local business leaders say Nevada tourism suffered last year in part because companies canceled trips to Las Vegas in the wake of the president’s comments.

Read the full article at Las Vegas Now

Deficit Soars Unchecked in Obama’s $3.8 Trillion Budget

President Obama sent Congress a $3.8 trillion budget Monday for fiscal year 2011, pushing a plan that includes new jobs-creation programs but is projected to add $1.3 trillion in deficit spending on top of the current year’s projected $1.6 trillion deficit.

President Obama sent Congress a $3.8 trillion budget Monday for fiscal year 2011, pushing a plan that includes new jobs-creation programs but is projected to add nearly $1.3 trillion in deficit spending on top of the current year’s projected $1.6 trillion deficit.

According to the plan, the 2011 deficit of $1.267 trillion would fund nearly the entirety of the year’s discretionary spending, which is $1.415 trillion or 37 percent of the government’s total outlays. Mandatory spending on items such as entitlements and interest payments make up the rest.

Read the full article at Fox News

Small Business Tired of Being Obama’s Last Priority

Politicians trying to figure out why the electorate is so angry and frustrated will find answers in a simple chat with shopkeepers and small-business owners on Main Street.

When it comes to small business, the disconnect between reality on the ground and what policymakers are talking about is enormous. Even worse, the aspirations of small-business owners are being eroded not only by economic jitters but also by massive uncertainty about deficits and future government policies.

Many small-business owners feel they’ve been financially and politically redlined — starved of debt and equity capital, shut out of the political conversation and put at the bottom of the priority list while big companies and unions get huge financial and tax breaks.

Read the full article at the Denver Post

Obama’s State of the Union: He Still Doesn’t Get it

Justice Samuel Alito let a pained expression pass his face and muttered, “Not true.” His reaction to Pres. Barack Obama’s demagogic attack on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision aptly summed up the entire State of the Union address.

Obama warned that the decision striking down restrictions on corporate spending opened “the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.” But the court explicitly left untouched a statute that bans election spending by foreign corporations, even “indirectly.” There isn’t even a “loophole” for U.S. subsidiaries of foreign firms, as the White House claimed in damage-control mode.

Since Massachusetts, the Left has been badly disoriented. It can’t process the fact that the cradle of contemporary liberalism elected a Republican in a contest that was a referendum on health care. So, it has thrown up a thick cloud of rationalizations and delusion from which Obama emerged briefly to man his teleprompters before the nation.

He spoke for more than an hour, but the quick gloss might have been, “It’s not my fault, and please ignore your lying eyes.” Obama did everything in the speech – reach out to the middle class, feel people’s pain, try to recapture the stirring magic of past oratory – except acknowledge what people dislike about his agenda and recalibrate accordingly.

Read the full article at the New York Post

Obama’s Spending Freeze Deception Doesn’t Trick Voters

One of the key new initiatives in President Obama’s State of the Union speech is a three-year freeze on discretionary government spending, but voters overwhelmingly believe the freeze will have little or no impact on the federal deficit.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just nine percent (9%) think the freeze will reduce the deficit a lot.

Eighty-one percent (81%) disagree, including 42% who say it will have no impact. Another 39% say the freeze in nearly all areas except defense, national security, veterans affairs and entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will reduce the deficit a little.

Read the full article at Rasmussen Reports

DOJ Drops the Ball on LiveNation/Ticketmaster Merger

At first blush, it looked like a slam-dunk antitrust case for the government.

Ticketmaster, a company that came to dominate the live-music ticketing business by buying up seven of its rivals, was suddenly facing a challenge to its 83 percent market share. Its largest customer, Live Nation, a big venue manager and concert promoter, had decided to launch its own ticketing subsidiary and quickly grabbed 16 percent of the market. Ticketmaster responded in kind by purchasing Front Line Management, which manages tours for 200 of the country’s top music artists.

By early 2009, Ticketmaster vs. Live Nation was turning into one of those price-reducing, service-improving rivalries that benefit consumers much more than shareholders. So in February, the two companies called a truce and announced they were merging. The Obama administration, eager to demonstrate that the era of no-touch antitrust enforcement was at an end, put the deal on hold, launched a wide-ranging investigation and told company lawyers it was prepared to block the transaction.

Read the full article at Washington Post

Senate Approves Additional $1.9 Trillion in Debt Spending

Senate Democrats needed all the 60 votes at their disposal Thursday to muscle through legislation allowing the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper in debt.

Democratic leaders were able to prevail on the politically volatile 60-39 vote only because Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts has yet to be seated. Republicans had insisted on a 60-vote, super-majority threshold to pass the measure. An earlier test vote succeeded on a 60-40 vote.

The measure would would put the government on track for a national debt of $14.3 trillion – about $45,000 for every American – and it served as a vivid reminder of the United States’ dire fiscal straits.

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Economists Say Obama’s Job Bill ‘Grasping at Straws’

President Barack Obama’s job-creation program could produce a short-term political boost, but it’s unlikely to significantly stem job losses and reduce the unemployment rate anytime soon, according to economists.

“People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help. I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay,” the president said during his State of the Union speech.

But even he acknowledged, that “the truth is, these steps won’t make up for the 7 million jobs we’ve lost over the last two years.”

Specifically, the president wants to give a tax break to businesses that hire workers, eliminate the capital gains tax on small business investments and use $30 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program money to encourage community banks to lend to small businesses.

“He’s trying to turn his microeconomic policies into some macroeconomic solution. He’s grasping at straws,” said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland.

Read the full article at POLITICO