During the Carter years, Cyrus Vance pushed for negotiations and economic ties with the Soviet Union.  He was heavily involved in the Camp David accords, which brought about longstanding agreements between Israel and Egypt.

Under Ronald Reagan, George Schultz negotiated deals that ensured the safety of Taiwan yet kept improving relations with China.  When  Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Shultz advocated that Reagan pursue a personal dialogue with him, which led to Intermediate Range Nuclear Froces treaty being signed in 1987.  That treaty eliminated an entire class of missiles in Europe and was a turning point in the cold war.

Jim Baker was Secretary of State for George H. W. Bush.  Baker helped to construct the thirty four nation alliance that fought alongside the United States in the Gulf War.

Warren Christopher was probably the best Secretary of State during the Clinton years.  He worked to establish peace between Israel and its neighbors, worked to expand NATO in Eastern Europe, and pushed to use economic pressures to force improved human rights in China.

Under George W. Bush, Condi Rice pushed for the expansion of Democratic governments and she traveled all over the world representing the USA and the George W. Bush administration in diplomatic efforts.

It is admittedly early for Hillary Clinton, but her first official task as Secretary of State was to travel to communist China to sell bonds to play for the “stimulus.”  Secretaries of State for previous administrations have stood up to communists and pushed for human rights.  It appears that Obama sees his Secretary of State as a bond seller so he can go about his record spending on pork projects.  It would be interesting to know whether he made that clear to Hillary when he offered her the job.

So Obama was about change, right? Three nominees for Obama staff positions had issues with proper tax reporting, and one person has the most responsibility for executive spending, Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary.

We also heard of Norman Hsu, the pyramid schemer who gave bundles of money to the Democrats, money that was mostly unaccounted for, and likely came from overseas sources. But of course, this was an isolated incident, right.

Wrong.

The SEC’s fraud charges may be the least of accused financial scammer R. Allen Stanford’s worries. Federal authorities tell ABC News that the FBI and others have been investigating whether Stanford was involved in laundering drug money for Mexico’s notorious Gulf Cartel.

Authorities tell ABC News that as part of the investigation, which has been ongoing since last year, Mexican authorities detained one of Stanford’s private planes. According to officials, checks found inside the plane were believed to be connected to the Gulf cartel, reputed to be Mexico’s most violent gang. Authorities say Stanford could potentially face criminal charges of money laundering and bribery of foreign officials.

I won’t post the entire article, but seeing that it’s ABC News, make sure that you scroll to the bottom to see his connections; if it were a Repubican financier, it would have been in the headline and twice in the first paragraph. He supported the Democrats, “Oh, by the way, he gave some money to Dem…nevermind.” Fair and balanced reporting, always.

We have a party claiming “We won” just about everyday. The problem for me is that it appears a LOT of international money was used in order to bring about this victory. Of course, the real irony comes at John McCain’s expense, because if not for his very liberal campaign spending bill, I doubt this money would have made much of an impact, and he might have overcome this sustained media attack. Instead, it shot him right in the foot.

During the New Deal, FDR purposely authorized spending billions for relief.  A disproportionate amount of the money went not to southern states where people were more poor and had the greatest need but instead went to western states where people were more affluent.  The idea behind this was that FDR sent the money to swing states where he would then get more votes in the next election.  The south was heavily Democratic, so there wasn’t as much to be gained by buying votes there.  Relief and public works spending increased during election years as well.  Such activites contributed to the passage of the Hatch Act in 1939.

The “stimulus” bill that Obama signed today will create 600,000 jobs in the public sector most of whom will be members of a union.  These employees tend to be reliable Democratic voters.  Many of those federal workers will be from Virginia due to the close proximity to Washington DC.  Virginia is a swing state and the additional public union employees may be enough to ensure that Virginia votes for Obama in 2012.  There will be further dollars sent to the automakers subsidizing the paychecks of the unionized workers who represent another reliable Democratic voting block.  Close to half of the total “stimulus” money will go to entities that sponsor or employ (or both) members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions or other Democrat-controlled unions.

It’s bad enough that congress is spending roughly $100 billion for each hour of debate for the “stimulus” bill, but for Obama and the congressional Democrats to be buying future votes with taxpayer money is unconscionable.  One of the saddest aspects of this is that it worked effectively for FDR who was re-elected three times and had large congressional majorities in both houses of congress during his presidency.

Without the “stimulus” spending, we were already going to have to sell $1.2 trillion worth of bonds to pay for the debt already budgeted.  Every dollar spent on those bonds is not available to purchase equity in startup companies or to purchase corporate bonds from companies looking to expand.  The pork spending in the “stimulus” bill will not address the unemployment problem. Throwing money at Democrat pet projects doesn’t create jobs.

So who pays for Obama’s “stimulus?”  The initial money will come from continued government borrowing.  Those dollars come increasingly from China, Japan, England, Saudi Arabia and other foreign creditors.  We get the dollars immediately to throw at the “stimulus” programs and the creditors get bonds.

The bonds issued to pay for the “stimulus” will need to be repaid eventually.  The “stimulus” spending will add to the national debt, which already stands at $10.7 trillion.  Interest payments alone on the national debt are already near $500 billion this year. It is the fourth-largest federal expenditure, after Medicare-Medicaid, Social Security, and defense.  Obama promised to cut taxes for 95% of Americans.  Considering that 40% of Americans already pay no income taxes, there will be fewer and fewer people paying taxes while the federal government spends more and more dollars.  It’s bad enough that our politicians refuse to address the acturarial time bomb of Social Security.  Now they are piling debt upon debt so as not to waste a crisis and pushing the problem onto future taxpayers.  That’s who will pay for the “stimulus.”

A short time into Obama’s term he has shown what he really thinks about working people.  Several companies had business meetings scheduled in Las Vegas and Obama spoke out against them.  Speaking of the companies who received federal bailout funds, Obama said, “You can’t get corporate jets. You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime.”

Businesses have legitimage reasons for holding conventions and business meetings.  Las Vegas provides great value for such meetings.  Casinos give discounted rates for rooms, meals, and entertainment to companies and most of the attendees of the meetings enjoy going to Las Vegas.  After Obama made his comments, several companies canceled plans to have meetings in Las Vegas and moved their meetings to other cities.  In some such cases, the companies end up paying twice as they had cancellation fees for booked events in Las Vegas.  The casinos get the cancellation fees, but the casino workers are still affected as their services are no longer necessary for cancelled events.  These are the ones that Obama pretended to care about when he asked for their votes before the election.

Obama also negatively affected the business at companies that make private jets.  Many companies are cancelling orders for jets and others are holding off on purchases as they don’t want the bad publicity of having the president of the United States pointing the finger at them.  When orders for planes are down, jobs for the workers at the manufactures are affected.  Cessna is laying off more than 4,600 people as a result of the sudden drop in demand for private airplanes of all sizes.

Obama is jetting around the country in Air Force One at taxpayer expense with the main purpose of building support for his “stimulus” plan.  Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable for him to travel in a private jet, but private businesses aren’t worthy to do so.  It would be interesting to know whether it even occurs to Obama that it took a lot of workers to build the aircraft he now travels in.  Obama has the option to be an example of saving money by not traveling around in his “private jet” and showing his leadership instead of just pointing the finger at business leaders.

Obama is pushing for his “stimulus” plan, which is similar to the New Deal policies of FDR.  Anyone who has spent any time looking at the Obama “stimulus” bill has seen hundreds of examples of wasteful spending in the nearly trillion dollar package.  One issue that has had little attention is that the wasteful items are directed spending items.  There are plenty of billions in discretionary spending that are not so obvious.  The biggest spending bill in the history of the United States of America has not had nearly enough scrutiny.  The wasteful spending will surely be exposed more as time goes on.

Throughout previous economic recoveries, job growth came from small business.  Businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 90 percent of all U.S. firms and are responsible for more than 97 percent of all new jobs, according to a new report by the Small Business Administration.  Obama is making no mention of that and instead wants to focus on his big government solutions.  Tax cuts for people who don’t pay taxes, targeted tax breaks for special interests, and wasteful spending will do nothing to help small businesses that we are counting on for an economic recovery.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is proposing a “truth commission” to investigate abuses of detainees, politically inspired moves at the Justice Department, and whole range of decisions made during the Bush administration.

Of course, nothing resembling “the truth” will end up being discussed in this Commission. “Witch-Hunt” is more like it.

So much for “Change.” I would have thought “change” would have meant focusing on this horrible economy they keep throwing in our faces. But as anyone would have figured, no change at all. It’s the same baloney they’ve flung around for the last 2 years.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the primary goal of the commission would be to learn the truth rather than prosecute former officials, but said the inquiry should reach far beyond misdeeds at the Justice Department under Bush to include matters of Iraq prewar intelligence and the Defense Department.

That is not a reasonable goal for a Commission, Senator. Commissions should be formed to investigate (and in the end bring charges against) crimes. No, this is not really to put Bush in jail, their goal is to continue to bash the Republican Party and make Iraq out to be a disaster.

Leahy outlined his suggestion for a “truth and reconciliation” commission during a speech at Georgetown University Monday.

If you’re not going to reconcile with some form of formal charges, then why even waste our time and money? Politics, politics, more politics. The “change” nobody with a brain believed in.

He must be taking lessons from Obama.

Obama said, “This is America.  We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we believe success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset — and rightfully so — are executives being rewarded for failure, especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.”

It is hardly unreasonable for anyone including Obama to get upset about rewarding bank executives that were largely responsible for the banking mess.  But what Obama fails to realize is that limiting executive pay will not help the problem going forward.

Top executives can command top salaries that exceed Obama’s arbritary $500,000 a year limit.  Some say that is a sign of greed, but that is not necessarily the case.  A person may be the greediest person in the world yet make nowhere near $500,000 a year.  The salaries of top executives depend on what others are willing to pay them, not on their own greed.  Many celebrities make salaries greater than top executives but somehow they aren’t accused of being greedy.

Executive pay is set by supply and demand.  Some may make the case that companies grossly overpay executives.  Some executives are certainly overpaid, but that is not always the case.  Warren Buffet was on the board of the company that pubishes the Washington Post.  Buffet made cost saving suggestions that were worth billions of dollars, which was a ridiculous multiple of his compensation.

If a bailed out bank wants to hire a new executive with a track record of cost savings, they will have to bid for that person’s services in the open market.  If a bank is constrained by Obama’s artificial $500,000 a year salary limit, they will likely miss out on the opportunity to hire that person.  The taxpayers that are hoping for a return on the bailout investment will miss out as well.

Employees at any company at any level are hired only for the benefit of the employer.  If an employer chooses to pay an executive $50 million a year, the employer expects to get at least $50 million of economic benefit for having hired that person.   Limiting executive pay will deprive companies of the talent they need to be as successful as they can be.

The other annoying part is the Invertebrate Branch of the Republican Party, that immediately slogs over to Harry Reid and Obama and looks for ways to pad their own pockets at the expense of the American people. We had one chance of keeping this horrible piece of legislation from becoming a stain on future generations, but unfortunately a few selfish weasels named Specter, Snowe, and Collins have to spoil the applecart.  This is going to be a quick 3 days in politics, followed by a long 40 years of rebuilding this economy from the serious trough this bill will create.

And finally, Obama, in his infinite wisdom (which we all know is infinite because Katie Couric and Chris Matthews have done the math), never has to speak in front of a serious Press room. He gets away with talking about how these tax-cut policies have created this economy. NO, I don’t think so buddy, and if they actually would let me in the room with you, I’d call you on it.

I can tell you in one sentence the reasons for this economy to have hit the skids: We expect to get everything for nothing. From a family that makes $30,000 buying a $200,000 home to a person who joins a union to make $60 an hour for a $20 an hour job, we’ve outpriced ourselves. This has little to do with Republican or Democrat, rich or poor. Each of us has a chance to purchase American made goods, but none of us want to take the chance that our purchase would have the same “American craftsmanship” we put into our own vocation. Until this country has a change in ideal, a return to morals, a shift in work ethic, ingenuity, and pride in one’s own output, we’re going to continue to spiral out of control.

And I’m willing to bet that this President’s words will not facilitate this renaissance. That’s what’s needed, not a bunch of government-funded jobs.