Odds and Ends

First off, the liberal New York times ran a nice piece on the growth of the economy in the 4th quarter. Though it didn't match the 8% growth in the 3rd quarter, the 4% growth in the 4th quarter was evidence of a strong, growing economy.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy grew at a 4 percent annual rate in the final three months of 2003 -- a slowdown from the red-hot performance of the prior quarter but still compelling evidence of a recovery in full motion at year's end.

The reading on the gross domestic product for the October-to-December quarter, reported Friday by the Commerce Department, came after the economy grew at a sizzling 8.2 percent rate in the third quarter. That had been the strongest performance in nearly two decades.

Analysts were predicting a slowdown in economic growth in the fourth quarter as the stimulative impact of tax cuts and a refinance frenzy -- which propelled the economy during the summer -- faded with the onset of winter.

Which is true, the economy tends to slow down during the winter. People don't travel as much, don't buy cars, and tend to stay home. Who can blame then with the nast Northeast weather we are experiencing. 4% growth is still good, the only thing we are waiting on is a jobs boom, but that should follow. Just last week for eample we got this good news from Big Blue:

IBM will hire 15,000 new employees--50 percent more than originally planned--in areas such as software and services because of a rebound in the economy, a top executive said Saturday.

It's a start.

Meanwhile President Bush continues to spend like a drunken sailor. He just announced an increase in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts. A program much maligned for it's pork and for the types of art that sometimes comes out of it's grants.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Thursday proposed an $18 million increase in next year's budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.

The 15-percent boost would be the largest percentage increase in funding that the agency has received in 20 years. It was announced by first lady Laura Bush at the endowment's headquarters in Washington.

I see what he is doing. Between funding AIDS research, pushing for a drug benefit in Medicare, his new immigration plan, and this NEA thing, Bush is trying to take away the pet projects of liberal Democrats.

Trouble is, conservatives don't like him spending like a liberal, and liberals won't give him credit for what he's done.

Despite pledging nearly 20 billion for AIDS work in Africa and around the world, he is still lambasted for it, and even though he promised and delivered a perscription drug benefit for seniors, freeloaders in our society say it's not enough. (these people won't be happy untill all their cares are paid for by you and me, but that's a different post)

It appears like there were no weapons of mass destruction. Chief weapons inspector David Kay did mostly exhonerate the exhonerate the Bush administration saying, while blasting the intelligence community's inability to get good intel.

It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.

We're also in a period in which we've had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didn't discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location.

What is distrubing is indeed the fact that our intelligence community got it so wrong, but do you know who to blame? Well, look no further than John F. Kerry and Bill Clinton.

John Kerry had sponsored a bill to cut the CIA budget for intelligence gathering by $1.5 billion. Then after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, he asked why America's intelligence wasn't better.

Bill Clinton was indifferent toward the CIA, and despite CIA Director James Woolsey's request for increases in funding for islamic language translators and a shift to focus on that region, Clinton scoffed.

Scoffed indeed.

Posted by psugrad98 at January 30, 2004 09:37 AM