"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans
began to slow and our planet began to heal"
Barack Hussein Obama
event
description
The Death Of Welfare Reform
Obama's Plan All Along Was to Repealed Clinton's 96
Welfare Reform (06:00)
Posse Comitatus Be Damned
Following publicized reports that the Army National Guard was
planning a military training exercise on the streets of a rural Iowa
town, the commanding officers have called off the mock "invasion."
The Guard had planned a four-day urban military operation in tiny
Arcadia, Iowa, population 443, sending troops to take over the town and
search door-to-door for a suspected weapons dealer.
The exercise
was designed as a mock scenario to give soldiers the skills needed for
deployment in an urban environment.
Military spokesman Lt. Col.
Greg Hapgood,
confirmed the Guard had been inundated with objections from citizens
concerned about soldiers patrolling the streets of an American town, and
higher headquarters leadership made a decision to scale back the
exercise.
Sgt. Mike Kots, readiness NCO for Alpha Company,
described the original operation to the Herald as set to begin on
Thursday, April 2, with reconnaissance and exploratory patrols. On
April 4 convoys were to be deployed from the armory in Carroll to nearby
Arcadia, where soldiers would knock on doors, showing a picture of the
invented "arms dealer."
"Once credible intelligence has been
gathered," said Kots, "portions of the town will be road-blocked and
more in-depth searches of homes and vehicles will be conducted.
The planned drill had also included overhead supervision from a
Blackhawk helicopter, crowd-control measures and simulated extraction of
"injured" people, culminating in capture of the "arms dealer."
Plans for the urban operation training, Hopgood explained, are still set
to continue, but will be conducted in a smaller, platoon-by-platoon
basis in the near vicinity of the Carroll armory.
Obama Plans Eclipse New Deal Spending
In sheer size, the economic measures
announced by Obama to address "a crisis unlike we've ever known" are
remarkable, rivaling and dwarf the New Deal programs that Franklin D.
Roosevelt famously created to battle the Great Depression.
Winning approval was a political tour-de-force for the new
administration. Yet gloom and uncertainty persist about the plan's
ability to deliver a cure for the economy's severe ailments.
Stocks plunged to six-year lows after the burst of bill signings,
bailout announcements and presidential pledges, and polls show Americans
are increasingly worried about losing jobs and not having enough money
to pay their bills.
Tomorrow's taxpayers will still be paying
for them long after Obama is out of office.
So far in his
month-old presidency:
•
Congress passed and Obama signed into law a record $787 billion mix of
tax cuts, job-creating projects and aid to struggling states.
• Obama pledged up to $275 billion in
federal aid to help stem a tidal wave of home foreclosures.
• The Treasury Department and the
Federal Reserve announced financial-rescue steps that could send up to
$2 trillion coursing through the economy.
"The New Deal by
today's standards involved a minuscule amount of spending," said Allan
J. Lichtman, a professor of political history at American University.
He said Obama is more of a "big spender" than was Roosevelt, and
Roosevelt had a bigger crisis on his hands. Unemployment was 25
percent when he took office.
Last month's jobless rate was 7.6
percent, up from 4.9 percent a year before but still shy of the postwar
high of 10.8 percent reached in 1982 -- and far from Great Depression
levels.
Reaction to Obama's programs has been decidedly negative.
Investors, among others, have panned the plans; the stock market is off
nearly 10% from the day before the inauguration, or more than 800 points
on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Yesterday, in fact, we
crossed a truly alarming divide. The Dow Jones average closed
at its lowest point since October 2002, the bottom of the last bear
market. The S&P 500 fell to 779, barely above the intra-day low of
741 of last November. For many market analysts, if the market
crashes through that recent benchmark, it will next move significantly
lower.
