Lawmaker wants to keep children born in the U.S. to illegals from becoming citizens.Read Article 


 

  Obama is cool, calm -- and lucky
May 2, 2009
BY ROGER SIMON- Chicago Sun-Times

 With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday Read Article    

 Sex and the City 2 accused of being 'anti-Muslim' and 'condescending' to Arab women   Sex and the City 2 is "blatantly anti-Muslim", according to early reviews of the movie. Read Article      

 Obama can't trust to luck to fix the economy The President has dithered over the banks and the economy in his first 100 days in power, says Edmund Conway.   By Edmund Conway

 
  Barack Obama is a pretty superstitious guy. During the marathon presidential campaign, he made a routine of playing basketball on each of the various polling days, and carried with him a pocketful of lucky trinkets, including a poker chip and a small golden statue of the Monkey King. So one rather fears for his reaction to the inauspicious omens yesterday, on his 100th day in office. As if the first US death from swine flu weren’t bad enough, the President had to contend with news that the economy slumped by an annual rate of 6.1 per cent in the first three months of the year – far more than most experts were expecting. Jeff Frankel, a leading institutional economist, declared that this is now the longest and sharpest slump since the Great Depression.   The banking system is still in crisis, house prices are in freefall and unemployment is climbing rapidly; those seeking out green shoots are likely to be disappointed, since the economy is hardly through the danger zone. The only consolation comes from the stock market, which is more or less flat since Obama took over, and the fact that most other economies are in a worse state. More worryingly, the new president has yet to convince us that he is more Franklin D Roosevelt than Herbert Hoover. Those of us who hoped that the new president would infuse genuine urgency into the rescue plan, for either the economy or the financial system, have been sorely disappointed. The language may be more sincere, the speeches more glamorous, but the response is still nowhere near bold enough. All the criticisms of the initial Bush “rescue” – that it nationalised the financial system’s losses while allowing the bankers to make off with the profits; that it failed to draw a line under the institutions’ previous failures – remain applicable to Obama’s scheme. There are various arguments both for nationalising the struggling banks or for allowing them to collapse, but there are few convincing ones in favour of playing for time. And yet that is precisely what the Obama’s administration’s opening economic forays have amounted to. We remain stuck in financial no man’s land: the taxpayer has poured nearly $600 billion into the banks but they remain undercapitalised, on the basis of the losses they will soon incur. Next week brings the results of the much-vaunted “stress tests” for US banks, whereby the big institutions will be told whether they need more cash to shore themselves against future losses. This would be well and good if there was really anyone out there who wanted to buy big dollops of banking stock – but given the state of the US economy, this seems fairly optimistic. The problem-in-chief is the insidious interaction between the…