Morning Briefing for June 4, 2009
Erick takes to the airwaves all this week as RedState Radio fires up on 940 AM WMAC in Macon, GA, from 6:00 – 9:00 am (ET) where he’ll be guest hosting all week.
You can listen live here. The call in number is 478-742-0940.
JUNE 4, 2009
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1. Obama rebrands America as Muslim
Obamau Akbar
2. Obama Met Secretly with Jeremiah Wright During the Camapign
Did Obama and Wright conspire to get Wright out of the news right under the media’s nose?
3. Barry Obama: Worse Than Bernie Madoff?
Yes.
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1. Obama rebrands America as Muslim
Obamau Akbar
Rebranding America as “one of the largest Muslim countries” is not at all what I had in mind when I called for then candidate Obama to confront his Muslim issue head on.
In an interview with Laura Haim on Canal Plus, President Obama said the United States could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world“:
And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.
You can watch the interview here (thanks to Richard Fernandez for the link). There is French dubbing on the video, but you can hear Obama brand America as “one of the largest Muslim countries” at the 2:25 mark of the video.
Obama may be technically correct. If you compare the “number of Muslim Americans” — 1.8 to 3.0 million — to the Muslim population of other countries, 55 of 175 countries have more Muslims than does the United States. Nevertheless, his convoluted argument reminds me of that old adage you can prove anything with statistics.
If you consider the same population numbers and look at them as percentages, the usual and more meaningful way to deal with demographic data, you find that only 53 of 175 countries have a smaller Muslim population than does the United States. Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
Now that he is President, Obama is no longer hiding from his Muslim heritage.
2. Obama Met Secretly with Jeremiah Wright During the Camapign
Did Obama and Wright conspire to get Wright out of the news right under the media’s nose?
Last May, in the heat of the Democratic primary and coming off of a disastrous showing in the Pennsylvania primary, Barry Obama reversed course and publicly denounced his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, after refusing to do so the month before. In his now famous Philadelphia speech on race relations, Obama said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community. Wright then made an appearance at the National Press Club on April 28th, one week after the Pennsylvania primary, in which he refused to recant his controversial sermons, the revelation of which had brought pressure on the Obama campaign. Soon after, Obama would disown him, using the pretext of Wright’s affirmation of his sermons as the reason for his change of mind.
Wright disappeared from the campaign after that, disproving speculation that he was out to destroy Obama’s campaign out of anger at his former charge’s repudiation. At the time, I questioned whether it was all a set up. Did Obama and Wright conspire together to get Wright and the controversy surrounding Obama’s 20-year attendance at his Trinity United Church out of the news in advance of the crucial North Carolina and Indiana primaries? Now, there may be proof.
In his forthcoming book on the 2008 campaign, Richard Wolfe reports that Obama and Wright met between the Pennsylvania and North Carolina primaries at Wright’s home in suburban Chicago. The Obama campaign set up the meeting with the express goal of getting Wright to end his public appearances. The meeting was not reported in the press.
Wolfe’s account of the discussion between the besieged pastor and the beleaguered candidate leaves plenty of questions. Wolfe says Obama, “adopt[ed] the tone of a concerned friend giving advice,” and tried to, “nudge [Wright] in the right direction by making him aware of what was about to happen.” The account is silent about whether the two men discussed the campaign. But coming off a loss in a heavily rural state, and heading into two more contests in heavily rural battleground states, is it really much of a stretch to surmise that Obama asked Wright to get out of the way?
3. Barry Obama: Worse Than Bernie Madoff?
Yes.
How much would you pay for “New GM”?
About a year ago, all of GM’s common stock put together was worth maybe $2 billion, give or take, depending on the day. Go back three years, when things were merely bad instead of catastrophic for them, and people laughed at me whenever I said that GM was going to die. Back then, the stock was worth about $20 billion. For contrast, Toyota Motor at that time was worth more than $200 billion. That’s not a typo.
What would it have taken to buy GM out of bankruptcy, right now? Three years ago, when I first floated the idea to private-equity guys of my acquaintance, the answer would have been in the range of $75 billion. A few months ago, you could have done it for considerably less, depending on how far you could cram down the debt.
But now, We The Taxpayers have gotten suckered into buying the thing as a turnaround play. Barry Obama solved the debt problem by simply killing the bondholders, so he could have gotten the company for next to nothing, as opposed to the 20 to 40 billion dollars it might have cost a private syndicate. (That’s not to say, of course, that you’d ever find private investors stupid enough to do that.)
Instead, we’ve now put $50 billion in cold hard cash into this pig, with a lot more to come. And that’s to buy an asset the market has recently valued at a tiny fraction of that.
So when Obama says he’s going to sell GM back out to the public “very shortly,” what will the price be? Just to break even on his (actually, YOUR and MY) investment in 60% of the company, it’ll have to be almost $100 billion, and that’s ignoring the time value and opportunity cost. To get any kind of a decent return, it’ll have to be way more than $100 billion.
But who would pay even a little fraction of that much for “New GM,” even cleansed of its pension liabilities and long-term debt? New GM, in all candor, is an electric-car startup. I’d pay no more for New GM than I’d pay for Tesla. (And Tesla, according to the speculation which surrounded a capitalization they recently closed, is worth an absolute upper bound of $10 billion, and probably far, far less.)
Barry Obama is in the process of pulling off the biggest ream-job in financial history. Even worse than Bernie Madoff.
