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McCain Wants Ballmer For His Cabinet
While many people jumped all over presidential hopeful John McCain's wrong-headed view on network neutrality, few noticed his infuriating love for Microsoft. "[T]he 70 year old presidential hopeful also said that he would ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to serve on his cabinet to deal with technology issues if elected. He did not however say what position Ballmer might be hired in, but did joke that he might consider him for a diplomatic position, such as ambassador to China."
McCain was once a Republican I could vote for: His own man. But a few years ago he became little more than a lapdog for the RNC. Makes you wonder what kind of dirt they have on him. He's not White House material. Once maybe, but not anymore. Not because I think he's become crooked, but because I think he's become weak.
I'd rather an idiot who might do the right thing by accident than someone who will maliciously undermine their competition (McCain said that he would bring the successful people into Washington, who we all know would make themselves more successful with their newfound influence).
BTW, Mod the article down, McCain didn't say anything like that. He laughed at the suggestion of Secretary of State!
He is old, and he would be the oldest President if he won and he also supports the unpopular Iraq War. If Fred Thompson enters the race which is just a formality now, there will be no chance McCain will grab the Republican nomination.
I'm not making much headway against Rudy, Romney. (and Thompson), so I need some REALLY big campaign donations.
[Insert pithy quote here]
People say I am a bad American because I don't vote for president.
But...
There are NO candidates that I like. I also see no value in voting for the lesser of two evils since I hate them both equally (there is no lesser) and such a vote is pointless anyway (who you vote for is still evil).
With options like these, voting is not an effective means of bringing about positive change.
Once we get rid of this completely wrong-headed "one-person-one-vote" nonsense and also start allowing a wider range of options (two parties are a horrible oversimplification of the range of political agendas at work in a nation of our size), maybe then I will see some value in voting. Until then, nothing good can come of it, so I won't participate.
Seriously, how is this a surprise? McCain, Clinton, Guliani, any number of other bodies up on those debate stages - none of them have their own views, none of them are competent to lead a country, all obey special interests without understanding the repercussions, all are thoroughly opportunist, and all have little if any understanding of the real intricacies and problems to be addressed in foreign and domestic policy of the US. Obama might be the only one who shows any amount of promise, but I'm not sure at all.
And if any of them gets elected, it will just be replacing one criminally negligent and malicious president with another.
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You act like John McCain made it up. It's actually an old parody cover that came out of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979.
By the way, I thought it was kinda funny.
Err... Balmer is the CEO of a convicted criminal corporation.
In a country where convicted criminals can lose the right to vote, you can also go to the White House for being one? That's not really something that can be explained in english without getting into some kind of semantic Moebius loop, can it?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If Balmer wanted to be a politician he could run for President himself, he is a vastly more credible candidate than the rest of the Republican field to date.
Romney is running against the state he was governor of, openly attacking liberals for holding the views he claimed to hold five years ago, another flip flopper.
Worst flip flopper of all is Giuliani, he was for terrorism before he was against it. Back when he was running for Major of NYC it was convenient to pander to the expat Irish vote by supporting the IRA. So Giuliani was a regular fixture at Sinn Fein and Noraid fund raisers. In 1994 he gave a 'humanitarian award', the Crystal Apple to Gerry Adams, who blew up a shopping mall 18 months later.
Thompson is busy hiring staff embroilled in the worst Bush administration scandals. And Ron Paul will have been drowned in the slime generated by the administration noise machine long before the primaries.
What is particularly disgusting about this crew is the snearing contempt they have for anyone who does not share their exact views. There were plenty of people who understood what the Iraq war was almost certain to become, it was not even a close call if you knew the history of the British occupation. Put one of those people in charge, not the blind sheep.
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Name one colony that is now prosperous that was liberated during the twentieth century without going through socialism. Name one instance where shock treatment has not lead to massive inequity, corruption, and unemployment. And anyone who believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003 would be ignoring the reports of the UN inspectors. As for relinquishing control to colonial leaders, look at how well that worked in Africa.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
...John McCain is not going to be choosing cabinet officials anytime soon. The right-wing extremists who dominate the GOP primaries still mistrust him for publicly calling them out in 2000, and the centrists who loved McCain back then have since been alienated by his blatant pandering to the right-wing extremists. All McCain has left to attract voters is a lingering nostalgia for the pre-Dubya, pre-9/11 days when political moderates roamed the earth and had not yet been pulverized into extinction.
I think it makes even more sense than that. Ballmer is a PERFECT canditate for the current administration / Republican philosophy - that is "If we stick our fingers in our ears and talk really loud, the problem goes away"
Ballmer has repeatedly discussed how he bans his kids from using Google (instead of using it as a fantastic opportunity for first hand research into what makes a competitor's product better than his to the degree that his OWN KIDS would rather use it), and runs a company that sneers at employees that use ipods instead of zunes (instead of asking them WHY, so as to maybe make their own products more competitive).
And deflation is bad because?
Deflation increases the value of money. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you are. For wages, deflation increases unemployment, because the real price of labor goes up. The same is true in reverse, inflation increases employment because real wages go down. However, from an economic point of view, nothing has changed. Increased employment through inflation is essentially reducing the wages of those who are employed and giving it in form of new jobs to the unemployed.
Another claimed "negative" side of deflation is that if you have borrowed money, the real amount you end up paying grows as the value of money increases. With inflation your debt decreases the more inflation eats the value of money. Obviously this causes problems in a central bank-run monetary system. Which however isn't an argument for paper money, but is an argument for letting the market decide what the rate is. In periods of great inflation, this would cause high interest rates, and in periods of deflation, the interest rate would be zero, and in some cases negative.
Oh my. The awful price revolution, where prices increased sixfold in a period of 150 years. This is obviously why paper money is superior to a gold standard!
Do you know how much a 1966 dollar is worth today? 6 dollars. That is the same sixfold increase in prices, in a period of 40 years, and that's for a relatively strong fiat currency . To make an apples to apples comparison, we need to compare the price revolution to a similar case of extreme growth of money supply. A good example would be Germany, from the year 1914-1924. During this time period, the prices in German papiermark grew an incredible one trillion times!
Compared to the horrors of paper money, a gold standard is rock solid. Such stability would increase the predictability of the economy, and would benefit almost everyone. There is one huge problem with moving to a gold standard however. Losing the power to inflate, means that the US government would have to pay for military expenses through taxation, instead of just borrowing money from the Chinese and inflating the debt away. If the people actually saw in their taxation how much it all costs, the empire would dissolve overnight.
He should hire Steve Jobs, that way when things aren't going our way in China he can just sit there and bitch at them personally until they are.
He could also get all of the other Cabinet members to dress in a classy manner, and use Macs.
Make America grate again!
An excerpt:
And something more current regarding Halliburton's current relationship with Iran."The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
1) Well, during economic growth, the demand for money goes up, with a Gold standard the government can't increase the monetary mass without getting more gold... THis would mean the government should never immediately face money demand.
2) During a recession, you cannot use a monetary tool to reboost the economy. This eans that when reession hits, it hits (much) harder.
3) It is supposed to bring stable prices, but gold (or silver) is far from being a stable commodity, prices fluctuate, hence a completely exterior event like a war in an important gold/silver producer can completely disrupt the system.
4) You give an enormous power to gold/silver producing nations, which exert great pressions on the USA.
5) Trust, a Gold standard is supposed to make Federal Banks more trustfull, in reality the Fed can withhold gold and still play with the monetary mass.
6) Gold is a commodity, there is no interest rates on Gold. This will mean that foreign central banks will get American bonds, which bring some interest, while being backed by gold. This will lead to an ever increasing amount of money in the circuit, which will cost the USA a whole lot of money, if they can even back it up (which is doubtfull seeing the amounts that they would need).
7) Internet and Distrust. Imagine a recession, another terrorist attack or a bank that fails, there would be an immidiate rush to convert dollars in gold, in this case there are two possibilities: 1) You give them their gold and create a situation worse then the great depression or 2) block the transactions, in which case there is no point whatsoever to have a gold standard.
8) Exchange rates. Tying the price of a dollar to gold also fixes the exchange rates, since the value of the USD is fixed by the value of the commodities. Now the US have a huge deficit on the current account, which is the main reason why the dollar devaluates so much, this devaluation reinforces the American position on the international market since their products become cheaper for foreign nations. Floating rates act like a cushion when things go bad, it smoothes the ups and downs of the economy, which is very beneficial for the economy because it brings stability to the system.
9) Money is an asset, not a commodity. And every asset should fluctuate. In the case of currency, it should fluctuate around rates of return, expected exchange rate values and risk on the exchange market, and should fluctuate around Rate of return and supply/demand on the money market.
10) You cannot put a gold standard back without reverting to fixed exchange rates in the whole world. Now, look at china which pegs its yuan on the dollar. The US don't want the chinese yuan this weak. Under fixed exchange rates the US will probably devaluate, this will make the chinese devaluate their yuan since they want to keep the peg. Now every other currency will want to devaluate as well since everyone lost competitiveness in International trade... This rings any bells? This is what caused the great depression in the late 20's, just put the UK in the place of the USA and Germany in the place of China. And this, in the end, lead to world war 2 and the Nazis.
So yeah, for all those reasons, reverting to a gold standard would not be such a bright idea.
Your ignorance of history is utterly amazing. You can't put Iraq in the same class of destruction that was Germany or Japan post world war II.
You claim Iraq was firebombed? Really? Firebombing involves thousands of bombs and hundreds of aircraft and kills 100,000 people at a pop. Show me the city in Iraq that was bombed like Dresden, or Berlin.
And, once again. Iraqis are killing each other! That's not America's fault. Nobody is making them do it. They do it on their own. The civil war is not the fault of the United States. If the Iraqi people truly wanted peace, they would have had it already.
Where was the civil war in Germany after World War II? Where was the civil war in Japan after World War II? It didn't happen.
This is my sig.
Oh so its not a coincidence that his views on this issue just happened to change after ceasing to run for office in a liberal state and instead running for national office?
If Romney had told voters of Massachusetts what he is currently saying about Massachusetts he would never have been elected Governor. Strange place for someone who says he hates liberals to want to govern.
Of course not being an actual supporter of terrorism makes him better than Giuliani and not being an appologist for torture makes him better than McCain. So as flip flops go less serious than the rest of the GOP frontrunners.
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