THIS is how our vice president talks historic moments. | As the crowd applauded just before Obama took the microphone, a television camera for Fox News picked up Biden as he leaned into the president. Biden can be heard telling the president, “This is a big f— deal.” Read more at blogs.wsj.com |
His pitch to those waffling health care votes...
What happens when a disgruntled auto dealer employee is software smart.  More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
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Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots. |
| The dealership used a system called Webtech Plus as an alternative to repossessing vehicles that haven’t been paid for. Read more at www.wired.com |
Instead of paying start-ups to hire overseas, cut taxes on businesses here. That would make our industries more competitive, and give managers the choice to hire here or abroad.
Following through on a pledge to double exports over five years, Mr. Obama said he would try to ease restrictions on selling goods abroad and provide $2 billion each year to small- and medium-sized businesses to help pay for start-up costs in foreign markets. |
Mr. Obama framed the proposal as a means of jump-starting the sluggish economy and said it would create two million jobs. He appointed a panel made up of members from several agencies to lead the effort. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
This is one more reason the government often does a lousy job of putting taxpayers' dollars to work. Agencies responsible for administering stimulus dollars told the Government Accountability Office that complying with aspects regulating the use of the funds—such as requiring contractors to pay local prevailing wages, strict "Buy American" rules for materials, and a mandate that federal agencies must consider a project's effect on any historic site—were preventing them from moving more quickly to put stimulus money to work. |
And Buy American rules complicated efforts, for example, by the Chicago Housing Authority to buy new security cameras because the systems it wanted weren't made in the U.S. Read more at online.wsj.com |
Basically, if you're old, you've got job security -- no matter if you're doing a decent job educating America's children. And we wonder why our high school graduation rates are so abysmal. In a shrinking school system, which has resulted in the loss of 1,300 teacher jobs since 2001, "terrific teachers have been laid off, and [some of those remaining] are depressingly, relentlessly mediocre," Ms. Mickelsen said. "People are so frustrated about this." |
Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis teachers union, said the union and the system already work together to remove ineffective teachers, pushing out between 400 and 500 teachers in the past 10 years. With poorly performing teachers already being addressed, "seniority gives us a fair way of saying how do we lay people off in a way that's equitable," she explained. Read more at online.wsj.com |
| FDR was inaugurated in March 1933 and died in April 1945. He is thus responsible for the 12 fiscal years from 1934 to 1945. During those years of depression and world war, according to OMB, federal spending averaged 19.35 percent of GDP. During Obama’s four fiscal years, OMB estimates spending will average 24.13 percent of GDP. That is about 25 percent more than under FDR.Read more at cnsnews.com |
The latest concessions in the health care bill reveal the Democrats giving big breaks to unions. Who suffers? Taxpayers. | The 87% of Americans who don't belong to a union will now foot the bill for a $60 billion giveaway to those who do. |
Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO says this and other concessions mean the excise tax will raise some $60 billion less than the original Senate version. Democrats are probably going to charge investors for this political perk, by extending the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to capital gains for the first time ever—on top of all the other taxes. Just what the economic recovery needs. |
| The new union deal follows a similar one with Harry Reid that exempted the 17 states in which health costs are highest, plus longshoremen, construction workers, some farmers and sundry other liberal allies.Read more at online.wsj.com |
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