Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he sees the U.S. economy slowing next year as the surge in stocks comes to an end.  “The odds are we flatten out,” Greenspan said today in a Bloomberg television interview, referring to the equity market. “That flattening out will put some sort of dull face on 2010.”

Greenspan said he expects the economy to grow at a 3 percent to 4 percent annual pace in the next sixth months before slowing down. As a result, unemployment isn’t likely to decline much from last month’s 9.7 percent rate, he said. Even so, he doesn’t expect the economy to relapse into recession next year.

The world’s largest economy shrank at a 0.7 percent annual rate from April through June, the best performance in more than a year, revised figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. U.S. gross domestic product contracted at a 6.4 percent pace in the first three months of 2009.

Growth will be boosted in coming months by the inventory cycle as companies bring stockpiles of goods into line with sales, Greenspan said. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has jumped 55 percent since its low for the year on March 9, an ascent that’s had a “very positive” impact on the economy, he said.

While stopping short of predicting hyperinflation, the former Fed chief said the economic recovery won’t prevent continued downward pressure on consumer prices.

For the rest of the article please go here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVSDHcHHwkBE#

Face Fwd Comments: Sarcasm Alert

But Mr. Greenspan, what about all of that money Mr. Bush just had to get approved to bail out all of those banks? And what about the fear of God Mr. Obama tried to put into the public about a horrible 8% unemployment rate if we didn’t pass the stimulus package. Please don’t tell me the politicians lies to me. Please Mr. Greenspan say it ain’t so.

Okay America, have you had enough yet? Are you still so enamored with this administration and the liberal set of lawmakers now in office, that you enjoy the tax burden that’s been put on you and your grandchildren. Is the Cult of personality for Obama so big that you cannot see that he has to go and take Pelosi with him.

Socialism is the least of our worries if we don’t put a stop to our government’s spending. Try unemployment at 30 to 40 percent when the money that is being printed has less value than the paper it is printed on. Wait until the cities and charities run out of money and the poor (you and me) have no way top provide food for our family. Wait until the government has no way to help you because the interest on the money that they owed is more than the GDP of our country. Wait until the scenes around a relief truck of rice that you see in Africa, arrive here. Just wait…..or do something in 2010 and 2012 to change the look of our politicians in power.

I strongly urge you to check the voting record of every elected official in DC. If they have voted for the TARP, Stimulus or any other government spending program, vote them out. This country needs a political revolution and it starts with you voting.

From the American Spectator

For example, as it stands, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod’s firm, AKPD Message and Media, which employs his son, and which owes Axelrod money, is one of the contractors on the Chicago Olympics bid. Senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett has been deeply involved in the strategizing for the Olympics bid since before the 2008 election, and until accepting her job in the White House she was a deputy chairwoman of the Chicago Olympics Host Committee. Both have close ties to a number of Chicago 2016 committee members. 

Crain’s Chicago Business reported Monday that Jarrett and Chicago 2016 committee president (and recent chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley) Lori Healey met with officials of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to discuss financing options for construction of the Olympic Village. According the HUD sources, the Obama Administration will seek to use low-income housing grant funding options to help the city build the Olympic Village, and when the Olympics are over, some portions of the village will be used for low-income rental and purchased residences.

Healey and Jarrett’s relationship goes back years to Healey’s times as a senior staffer on the city’s planning and development department in the 1990s, around the same time that Jarrett would have been running one of the city’s largest low-income housing projects. Healey was also vice chair of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) Board of Commissioners, which would have overseen Jarrett’s company’s projects.

Another member of the Chicago committee is Martin Nesbitt, who the New York Times last December identified as one of President Obama’s “closest friends,” and whose wife is a close friend to Michelle Obama. Nesbitt, the godfather to one of the Obamas’ daughters, was also the Obama presidential campaign’s treasurer, and is credited with introducing Obama to Penny Pritzker, one of the most influential fundraisers for Democrats in the United States. His ties to Pritzker go back to a time when he worked for Pritzker’s real estate companies, and she later invested in Nesbitt’s airport off-site parking business, the Parking Spot, a company that stands to make millions from the Olympics bid. The Pritzker family, which holds a number of real estate properties in Chicago, also

I guess these people are not close enough to the Obamas to make money from the Olympics

stands to reap tens of millions from a successful Olympics bid. Nesbitt is also the chairman of the board of commissioners of the Chicago Housing Authority.

Nesbitt did not join the board of Chicago 2016 until March 2009, when he replaced … Valerie Jarrett, who resigned from the board to accept her post in the White House.

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/29/obamas-olympic-spirit

Face Fwd Comments:

You didn’t really think it was because Obama had the Olympic spirit did you?  Of course not.  It is more dirty Chicago style politics. And now you know why he flew to Denmark.

A song about President Obama that was performed by a group of young New Jersey students and has led to charges of indoctrination was videotaped and posted on the Internet without authorization, a district official told parents.

The performance and the videotaping at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, N.J., have sparked a review by school officials, according to a letter to parents from Christopher Manno, Burlington Township’s superintendent of schools.

“We are carefully evaluating what occurred and will implement any additional needed procedures to prevent children’s images in school from being publicly posted without permission,” Manno wrote on Friday. “We will also provide reasonable direction and guidelines so that classroom activities will not give the appearance of promoting a particular political perspective.”

Manno said the Obama song was originally part of an eight-skit assembly program performed on Feb. 27 that marked Black History Month, as well as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays, Groundhog Day, the Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras and Dental Health Month.

“We have been informed that the lyrics of the song were sent home with the children in advance of the assembly, which was the teacher’s normal procedure,” Manno wrote in his letter. “There were no concerns or complaints to, during, or after the program.”

For the rest of the article:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/28/obama-song-larger-performance-school-official-says/

Face Fwd Comments:

Thank God someone made it public. The National Education Department, teacher unions, and many (not all) teachers and college professors are extremely liberal. If this just happened to be caught on tape, just imagine what else is being done by some of the zealots.

I am a little tired of being called a right wing, republican conspirator. While my political views are certainly right of those leading the Obama pledge and singing about him in school, there is nothing “right wing” about me. Nor is there anything right wing about parents being up in arms that teachers in some of our schools (encouraged by the NEA) are promoting a man like he is a god (small g). If the term separation of church and state was ever applicable, it is now.

Okay, I do admit to singing political songs while I was in school but I don’t think that “Yankee doodle came to town riding on a pony”, equates to the genuflecting many in government and education employees are giving to Obama. Manno, said that the the song was part of a skit that covered dates during the month of February. I’d love to see the song they had or the tooth fairy.

I have 2 words for all of you liberals that can’t seem to help your self. STOP IT. Take a class, get a patch, or go to a 12 step program because while you are killing yourself with this habitual worship of Obama, you are hurting the rest of us as well.

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.

It is not that the left is irrelevant — it often represents the only viable opposition to established governments, and so benefits, as in the United States, from the normal cycle of electoral politics.

In Portugal, the governing Socialists won re-election on Sunday, but lost an absolute parliamentary majority. In Spain, the Socialists still get credit for opposing both Franco and the Iraq war. In Germany, the broad left, including the Greens, has a structural majority in Parliament, but the Social Democrats, in postelection crisis, must contemplate allying with the hard left, Die Linke, which has roots in the old East German Communist Party.

Part of the problem is the “wall in the head” between East and West Germans. While the Christian Democrats moved smoothly eastward, the Social Democrats of the West never joined with the Communists. “The two Germanys, one Socialist, one Communist — two souls — never really merged,” said Giovanni Sartori, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. “It explains why the S.P.D., which was always the major Socialist party in Europe, cannot really coalesce.”

The situation in France is even worse for the left. Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.” While he was accused of exaggerating, given that the party is the largest in opposition and remains popular in local government, his words struck home.

For the rest of this tremendous article please go here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/europe/29socialism.html

Face Fwd Comments:

I can’t believe that it came out of the NY Times.  Socialism cannot survive without a strong capitalistic counterbalance to fund it. 

One of my favorite quotes from  Margaret Thatcher, in a TV interview for Thames TV This Week on Feb. 5, 1976, said, “…and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”

What if the socialist start spending money even if they don’t have it.   Obama’s answer, print more, we have plenty of paper.  Inflation is coming.  It is the only way this administration can wipe out the debt and put their socialist agenda into place.  Which, according to the story above, is doomed.