Bloomberg has the story Netanyahu Attack on Iran Deal Threatens Rift With U.S.

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, who has helped write sanctions legislation, said pressure will build in Congress to move ahead with added strictures against Iran because some allies consider a potential interim nuclear deal to be too weak.

‘Tough Sell’

“My sense is it’s going to be a very, very tough sell to hold off” congressional action on additional sanctions, “especially with the Israelis and the Saudis just completely freaking out,” said Dubowitz, who consults with the Obama administration and Congress on sanctions policy.

The Senate Banking Committee is preparing to discuss legislation imposing new curbs on Iran. Chairman Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat, said in a statement that he hasn’t decided on timing for committee action.

“I don’t know the outcome of negotiations now under way in Geneva, and I plan to wait to hear any results of those talks from our negotiators before making a final decision on any additional sanctions,” Johnson said.

Now is the time to contact your Senators to let them know that we should not blow a chance for a peaceful settlement with Iran to appease the war mongers in Israel and our own Congress.  We got rid of the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney and did not replace them with like minded people partly on account of being sick and tired of constant war.  Why should we let Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu push us into policies that we do not want from our own elected leaders?  (If you don’t recognize the Cheney/Bush “reasoning” in Netanyahu, then you have not been paying attention.)

I sent the following message to Senator Elizabeth Warren and to Senator Ed Markey.

There is a very disturbing report in Bloomberg News, “Netanyahu Attack on Iran Deal Threatens Rift With U.S.”

It indicates that the Israeli Prime Minister is going to try to get the U.S. Congress to scuttle the diplomatic effort between our Secretary of State and Iran.  This effort will be made in the Senate Banking Committee.

Please, do not allow this to succeed.

We were happy to see the Cheney/Bush war mongers leave the scene.  We don’t need an Israeli Prime Minister to talk us into the same disastrous policies that Cheney/Bush managed to foist upon us.

CBS News has two articles, 60 Minutes apologizes for Benghazi report has the transcript of an interview.

LARA LOGAN: The most important thing to every person at 60 Minutes is the truth, and today the truth is that we made a mistake. That’s very disappointing for any journalist. It’s very disappointing for me. Nobody likes to admit that they made a mistake, but if you do, you have to stand up and take responsibility and you have to say that you were wrong. And in this case, we were wrong.

“60 Minutes” issues apology about Benghazi report has the video below.

Time will tell if the Democrats will call for Lara Logan’s head as the Republicans did with Dan Rather.

Yesterday, Foreign Policy had the story Graham Gets What He Wants on Benghazi… And Still Holds Up Government.

Another inspiration for Graham’s hold is a 60 Minutes report on Benghazi that aired last month. “The 60 Minutes piece detailed the people on the ground saw this attack coming. Has anybody been fired for letting the consulate become a death trap?” said Graham. However, the credibility of 60 Minutes’ key source, a private security contractor named Dylan Davies, has been called into question after he admitted lying to his bosses about his whereabouts the night of the Benghazi attack. (Davies maintains that the account he gave to 60 Minutes is true.)

Last Friday, Mother Jones had the story Yet Another Benghazi Story Falls Apart in which they quote Lara Logan:

….The State Department and GOP congressional aides confirmed that Davies’s Sept. 14, 2012, report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, was included among tens of thousands of documents turned over to lawmakers by the State Department this year.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Lindsey Graham’s apology.

The National memo has the story Wendy Davis Redefines ‘Pro-Life,’ Enrages Anti-Choicers.

“I am pro-life,” she told a University of Texas at Brownsville crowd on Tuesday. “I care about the life of every child: every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry about their children’s future and their ability to provide for that future. I care about life and I have a record of fighting for people above all else.”

This matches what I think the definition of Pro-Life is. If you want to put a fetus, a zygote, or even an ovum on a par with a child or an adult, you have some ‘splaining to do.

Fetus: a human being or animal in the later stages of development before it is born

Zygote: a cell that is formed when an egg and a sperm combine

Ovum: a female gamete : macrogamete; especially : a mature egg that has undergone reduction, is ready for fertilization, and takes the form of a relatively large inactive gamete providing a comparatively great amount of reserve material and contributing most of the cytoplasm of the zygote

If you want to let Texans know what you think, you can go right to the article in The Valley Morning Star and make a comment. It’s about time we tried to rescue “those people” from the bubble in which they live.

I have just read two small but interesting books by Frank N. Newman, Six Myths that Hold Back America: And What America Can Learn from the Growth of China’s Economy (Dec 6, 2011) and Freedom from National Debt (May 2, 2013).

I am not saying this as a guarantee of anything, but if you look up Newman’s biography by following the links above, you might conclude that he has some very practical reasons to know what he is talking about.

The content of the two books is similar.  There was one epiphany I had in reading the second book, that I did not get in the first book, though.

First, I’ll just tell you the titles of the 6 myths.

1. Asian nations are bankrolling the U.S.
2. Treasuries “crowd out” financing for the private sector.
3. If everyone tries to save more, the nation will save more, and Investment, GDP, and employment will increase.
4. If the deficit is reduced, then national Saving and Investment will increase.
5. Deficits create great burdens of repayment and taxes for our children.
6. If the U.S. does not get its fiscal deficit reduced, U.S. Treasuries will face the same problem as bonds of Greece and Ireland.

If you believe any of these myths, you need to read the book(s).  I am not going to try  to repeat everything in these books.  You really  need to read them yourself.

I will explain, mostly in my own words, I think, one great insight that I got that goes a long way to explaining why all the myths are truly myths.

The first sentence in the next paragraph is my interpretation of what I read.  I do not think either book explicitly said this in exactly these words.

U.S. Treasuries that are sold to the public to finance  government operations should really be considered like bank deposits rather than debts.  We don’t get worried (sort of) when banks receive larger and larger deposits. We usually think this is what makes banks profitable.

Treasuries are like deposits in that people buy Treasuries as a safe place to put their money.  In fact Treasuries are safer than bank deposits, which is the reason people do not get (do not demand) as high an interest rate from Treasuries as they do from banks.  Treasuries are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government.  Deposits in banks are only FDIC insured up to $250,000.   The primary way that the FDIC insurance “policies” are funded is by money raised from the banks.  However, if a real disaster struck, the ultimate backing for the FDIC is the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government – the same as for Treasuries.

The interest that the Treasuries pay out is then quite similar to the interest that banks pay for the use of your deposits.

The banks earn the money to pay you interest by lending out your money to borrowers who pay higher interest than you get from the bank.

The Treasury uses the money it gets to pay what the Federal Government spends.  This puts your money right back into circulation.  It just occurred to me that instead of the Treasury earning interest from borrowers, the people who receive the money in payment from the government pay some of it back to the Federal Government in the form of taxes. The taxes the government receives is more than enough to pay the interest on all the outstanding Treasuries.

From the book, I learned that there is about a $500billion a day market for Treasuries, so Treasuries are very liquid.  The holders of the Treasuries can get their money back if they need it before the maturation of the financial instruments by selling them on the open market.  When the Treasuries come due, then the Government holds an auction to sell more Treasuries to replace the money from the ones that come due.  A very large fraction of the Treasuries held by the public are just rolled over to the new Treasuries.

Historically, for the last few hundred years ever since the Treasuries were first sold, there are more than enough buyers to buy all the Treasuries that the Government wants to auction off.  So the government never has to come up with USD money to pay off the Treasuries coming due.  It only pays out USD money if it wants to lower the amount of Treasuries outstanding by auctioning off fewer Treasuries than have just come due.

Think Progress has the article The Stunning Collapse Of Infrastructure Spending In One Chart.

“It’s also likely that much of the investment that has been forgone in the name of fiscal consolidation will have to be made eventually anyways — only it will be made when rates are higher, exacerbating the long-term fiscal outlook rather than improving it,”

Here is the chart:

This echoes a point I have been making for a long time.

If there is infrastructure spending that must be done at some time or another, why would we choose not to do it when the costs are at rock bottom? Why would we choose to do them later when the costs will be elevated?

If Republicans are really worried about government project crowding out private corporate spending, why wouldn’t we do the projects now when corporations are sitting on trillions of uninvested dollars? Why would we wait until the corporations have all of their cash fully invested?

Of course it really isn’t about the money in the crowding out case, it is about competing for resources. When the productive resources of the country are being fully used by the private sector, we don’t need government to compete and cause inflation. When resources are not being fully used, then the government won’t cause inflation by putting them to work. Such a government effort will put unemployed people to work and thus raise tax revenues without raising tax rates.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Also note my previous posts The Weak Economy and Deficit Reduction: Deniers and Terrorists and What So Proudly We Hail.  These previous posts discuss President Obama’s bragging of the deficit reduction he has achieved, when he really ought to be ashamed of allowing a reduction during a recession and very slow growth.  The Republicans will just claim that they caused the deficit reduction, no matter what Obama says.  Moreover, he ought to let them take the credit for reducing the deficit and the blame for keeping the county’s economic performance way below what it should be.

After putting up my previous post What So Proudly We Hail, I found The Weak Economy and Deficit Reduction: Deniers and Terrorists.

The folks making economic policy in Washington are getting ever more resistant to evidence. As we approach the sixth anniversary of the downturn with no end in sight, the nation has been treated to the perverse spectacle of our Treasury Secretary celebrating the sharp drop in the deficit.

This is a bit like celebrating a sunny day in a region suffering from drought. In an economy that is suffering from lack of demand, as is the case in the United States today, smaller deficits are bad news. They mean less demand, slower growth, and fewer jobs.

Actually I thought that not voting for Mitt Romney would some how stop Mitt Romney policies from being touted by our President.  Even the fact that President Obama does not have to run for office anymore is not helping him do the right thing instead of doing the profitable thing.  Maybe he has big dreams for  his income after he leaves the Presidency.  We know that when the rich have many factors of 10 more wealth than even a President, that the amounts offered in bribery can be very powerful.

The White House is promoting the message about Cutting our deficit in half.

A new report has some big economic news you probably missed: Since 2009, we’ve cut our deficit in half — and it’s falling at its fastest rate since World War II.

Here is the graphic that they have come up with:

And now you know why the economy is in the crapper. What a misbegotten feat that Obama is hailing so proudly.

We should be keeping the deficit high until the economy recovers. What a missed opportunity to invest in building and maintaining infrastructure on the cheap while also boosting the economy and cutting the rolls of the unemployed and suffering.

The Daily Kos has the article Ooops, 60 Minute’s Benghazi Source Is A Liar. The Daily Kos bases its report mainly on a Washington Post article, but it also adds comments from another source, too.

The Washington post article is ‘60 Minutes’ broadcast helps propel new round of back-and-forth on Benghazi.

In an explosive report on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday, the British supervisor of local security guards protecting the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, provided a harrowing account of the extremist attack that killed four Americans.

The man whom CBS called Morgan Jones, a pseudonym, described racing to the Benghazi compound while the attack was underway, scaling a 12-foot wall and downing an extremist with the butt end of a rifle as he tried in vain to rescue the besieged Americans.
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But in a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

In Davies’s 2 ½-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, “we could not get anywhere near . . . as roadblocks had been set up.”

Apparently even Faux Noise had the good sense to disassociate itself from this guy.  Perhaps I should say that especially Faux Noise had good sense, because as Sharon said, “When it  comes to liars, it takes one to know one.”  Does that mean that CBS news is so honest they cannot tell when they are being lied to?  Being honest is not the only requirement for being a good news medium.  One also has to know how to separate fact from fiction.

Jason Thigpen has the article Hate has no home in Representation – Congressional candidate for NC3 parts company with the GOP to run on the Democratic ticket By Christopher Dean on his campaign web site.

“Enough is enough,” says Jason R. Thigpen – formerly a Republican candidate seeking election to the U.S. House in North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. “After discussing it with my wife and family, I’ve decided to run as a Democrat rather than a Republican. I simply cannot stand with a Party where its most extreme element promote hate and division amongst people. Nothing about my platform has, nor will it change. The government shutdown was simply the straw that broke the camels back. I guess being an American just isn’t good enough anymore and I refuse to be part of an extremist movement in the GOP that only appears to thrive on fear and hate mongering of anyone and everyone who doesn’t walk their line.

There seems to be little choice for a moderate who is in the Republican Party, but to switch to a Party that has room for all.