The administrative decision to shut down ALL oil drilling and exploration is indicative of our Novelty President.

Editor's notes: Obama has decided to cancel oil drilling in the Gulf for AT LEAST six months (his words). What does this academic think will happen during this moratorium, that the jobs will be there when he decides to lift the moratorium, that the various oil giants in the region will sit on their profit margins and patiently wait for his next decision? The fact is this --- during the coming six month moratorium, businesses will fail and oil companies will go elsewhere, not to return to the Gulf anytime soon. Restrictions on deep water drilling? Absolutely. Shut down the Gulf to oil exploration and lose thousands of jobs? Sheer idiocy -- jds.

An opinion from Investor's Business Daily: As if the latest measly numbers on our jobless recovery weren't bad enough, along comes the administration to pile disaster upon disaster by slapping a six-month ban on deep-water drilling.

When President Obama visited Louisiana on May 1, he talked about the possibility that the oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon well could "jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home." Now the administration's response could jeopardize the livelihoods of tens of thousands more.

In a letter sent to Obama on Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal challenged the president's decision to suspend deepwater drilling for six months while a presidential commission to which the buck has been passed tries to sort things out.

It's another chapter in the administration's inept response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which has included seeking the advice of "Avatar" and "Titanic" director James Cameron, presumably because he knows how to operate cameras underwater. Perhaps Cameron, as one wag put it, told the White House how to rearrange the deck chairs.

The last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs while preventing the creation of thousands more," Jindal wrote. The moratorium, he said, will shut down 33 deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, including 22 near Louisiana, costing as many as 6,000 jobs in the next three weeks and 20,000 by the end of next year.

We expect his plea to fall on deaf ears. Jindal was last seen begging the federal government to provide millions of feet in containment booms and to approve an emergency permit for a state plan to dredge and build new barrier islands to keep the oil from reaching the marshes and wetlands. Both could have been done in a single White House phone call.

The ban requires all Gulf wells in more than 500 feet of water to shut down, and also prevents permits from being issued for any new deepwater drilling. According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association (LMOGA), as many as 1,400 jobs are at risk for each of the 33 idled rigs. The jobs average $1,804 a week, meaning lost wages could be as high as $330 million each month.

Here is another reason why intelligent folks know we cannot leave Afghanistan beginning in July of 2011.

Editor's notes: before you read this and start with the Bush Blame Game, stop and think. The report, indeed, deserves criticism but the criticism should be directed at the NATO originators, not Bush or Obama, for that matter. The end report in this article is this: we will not be ready to draw down troop strength in Afghanistan 12 months from now. It remains a mystery that the smartest president in American history thinks a frequently announced and intentional retreat is a satisfactory war strategy. The heart break in all this is the realization that so many solders in that theater of action will have died IN VAIN because of this decision and Obama's incompetence as the Commander in Chief. If the lives of thousands of solders make any difference to the American electorate, Obama will be escorted out of office in November of 2012 -- jds.

By Kevin Sieff in Washington Published: June 6 2010 Financial Times:

A US government audit to be released at the end of this month will cast doubt on the $25bn effort to build Afghan military and police forces, a blow to the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s exit strategy. According to the audit, the standards used to appraise the Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities. The Nato-led coalition’s rating system measured forces based on such factors as training and equipment, rather than a metric that would more accurately assess their fighting abilities, the report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concludes.

Military officials acknowledge the rating system’s inadequacies. “It became clear to us that the assessment wasn’t giving a clear picture of the actual operational readiness of Afghan National Security Forces,” said Colonel Dennis Devery, deputy director of the ANSF development assistance bureau. For nearly five years, the Capability Milestone measure was used to advertise the growing number of competent Afghan soldiers. It said 22 Afghan National Army units were considered “fully capable” by May 2009 – a rapid improvement, as not a single unit met that standard until 2008. PERMALINK

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How bad is our debt? One Bloomberg advisor is selling all his treasury notes - that's how bad it is.

By Garfield Reynolds and Wes Goodman

June 4 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”

The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.

“Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimazu, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.”

Gross, who runs the world’s largest mutual fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in his June outlook report that “the debt super cycle trend” suggests U.S. economic growth won’t be enough to support the borrowings “if real interest rates were ever to go up instead of down.”

Dan Fuss, who manages the Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, which beat 94 percent of competitors the past year, said last week that he sold all of his Treasury bonds because of prospects interest rates will rise as the U.S. borrows unprecedented amounts. Obama is borrowing record amounts to fund spending programs to help the economy recover from its longest recession since the 1930s.

“The incremental borrower of funds in the U.S. capital markets is rapidly becoming the U.S. Treasury,” Boston-based Fuss said. “Do you really want to buy the debt of the biggest issuer?”

From Bloomberg:

Once a week we will include a summary of certain aspects of the past financial week. May was the worst May in 60 years for the stock market and its opening week for June did not set any records. Note the 10-year treasury bond interest rate of 3.17%. The weeks closing percentage was down from 3.37% which means that the money we borrow cost us less last week than the week before. Understand that we borrow nearly 48% of all the money we spend. Our debt management costs total 11% of GDP --- it was less than 6% of GDP under Bush. If that percentage gets to 14%, the interest we will have to offer in order to sell our treasury bonds will rise from the current rate of 3.17% to somewhere near 8% --- a disaster. We must not allow that to happen. Currently, we are on track to reach the 14% barrier by 2015. The 2012 elections are critical in view of the current debt crisis and the 2015 "deadline."

Canadian 10-Year Bond	3.29	-0.10
U.S. 10-Year Treasury	3.17	-0.20

U.S. GDP*	05/27	3.0%
U.S. Unemployment	06/04	9.7%
Canadian Unemployment	06/04	8.1%
Brazilian Unemployment	05/27	7.3%

Compare unemployment benefit rates with Canada and Brazil. Understand that the census was run two months ago. The total job count for the month of May was 431,000 of which 411,000 were census jobs. Obama held up the reporting of these jobs until May in order to give the impression of sustained and increasing job growth. They could have been reported in April. The stock market did not buy the deception and dropped more than 330 points for the day.