Make a Difference

Day: February 4, 2009

Obama Charges World Into Debt

I was in the airport in Auckland the other day and saw this headline. Well, it didn’t actually say that. The magazine was upside down, and that’s what it looked like. It actually read ‘Obama Changes Words Into Deeds’.

I think my version is truer. The proposed stimulus programme will not, cannot, do anything to improve the economy. Simply increasing spending cannot help. What will help is increasing productivity. To do that you need measures which increase business confidence, and make it easier to employ people. This will increase business investment and raise employment levels, and this increases spending in an appropriate, affordable and sustainable way.  Simply increasing spending will only increase debt, and prolong and deepen the recession. Richer countries may be able to cope. But this is a disaster for developing nations, and will not win friends for the US in the long run.

As for changing words into deeds, well, what exactly?

90,000 Sex Offenders Booted Off MySpace

Given the well documented use of the internet by sexual predators, I don’t know whether to be alarmed that so many registered sex offenders were users of just one of many social networking sites, or delighted that they have been identified and removed.

A little of both I think.

Interesting that before MySpace commissioned a private firm to create one, there was no national US database of registered sex offenders.

‘MySpace said on Tuesday the technology had enabled it to identify 90,000 users as registered sex offenders – people who have been found guilty of sex crimes and ordered to register with law enforcement officials – and had removed and blocked them from the site.

“We can confirm that MySpace has removed these individuals from our site and is providing data about these offenders to any law enforcement agency including the Attorney-General’s in Connecticut,” MySpace’s chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.’

Good.

Daschle Out

This is a good thing, not just for Obama’s administration, but for the credibility of the US overseas. Daschle may be talented, but his appointment would not have passed the ‘smell test’.

Tax issues with Killefer, who was to ‘be a chief performance officer’, allegations of corruption in the form of favourable treatment for political donors by Bill Richardson, who was to be Commerce Secretary, and other tax issues for Timothy Geithner, whose role would have included oversight of  the Internal Revenue Service…

There were suggestions from the press that the McCain campaign had fellen down in its vetting processes because Sarah Palin’s daughter was pregnant. I could never make any sense of this. It always seemed like unseemly gloating. How did that very human and normal family situation that didn’t involve anything she herself had done, diminish Sarah Palin’s capacity to function as vice-president?

But favours for mates, taxes unpaid, and goodness knows what hasn’t made it into the media? Unless backhanders to political donors and cheating on your taxes are not considered anything unusual in some circles, it is hard to understand how these things were not picked up before the nominations were made public.

Britney Spears Sued by Former Manager

Poor Britney. She has made some very foolish choices.

But it seems to me she is basically a decent person, who like most decent people, assumes everyone else will do the right thing. She does not seem to have had much luck in choosing her friends and advisors, many of whom seem to have seen her and their association with her as an  opportunity to enrich themselves at her expense. Especially that human sewer Ghalib.

I am not making any comment on the rights or wrongs of any particular legal matter. I just wish they’d leave the poor girl alone.

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