When Putin announced that Russia would no longer sell its oil and natural gas in dollars, there were the normal — its OK type statements from the financial world, and it was viewed by the Western financial cognoscenti as an anomaly.

However, since the Federal Reserve is printing an estimated $600 billion a year to give to bankers and brokers, who then buy U.S. Treasury bills to finance for our over-spending Federal Government with printed dollars — the value of the dollar drops due to the massive over supply.

Then, those countries holding the U.S. dollar as reserve currency start to speak up. They plead with the President and Congress to start balancing the budget and lowering the deficit.

Instead, President Obama and Congress has not decreased the deficit, it has grown four times it was under Bush, to record numbers — $9 Trillion — under President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

And President Obama, by pushing his trillion dollar health care plan is rubbing the world’s face in their concerns about U.S. spending. He simply does not care that the dollar is dropping and that the value of these country’s dollar holdings is also dropping.

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From the diaries, by Erick.

As the health care industry collectively does a damage assessment of the Pelosi-Kennedy-Obama health care plans to their individual interests, one thing is clear: things have changed radically in the last week:

1. hospitals will be facing cuts of billions from Medicare and Medicaid;
2. big Pharma is facing a certain drug re-importation fight sooner than later, likely during the health care scrum;
3. the doctors are posting with a No to the public plan and irritation on medical malpractice;
4. the teabag teams have planned a national no-new-taxes-for-health-care reform day — in every state of the Union;
5. the slumber of the anti-tax, pro-business groups was jolted by the U.S. Chamber’s war-cry of No More Mr. Nice Guy, and now the Chamber is ripping the Senate Health Care bill;
6. the unions and some employers are spooling to fight the tax on health insurance planned by one Democratic faction, and the White House has announced its opposition;
7. the pro-lifers are now scrambling to catch up and be relevant on the most important government program to their interests;
8. the Move-On.org crowd keeps sending alerts to its base to hold the liberal’s feet to the fire on the question of a public plan;
9. the Heritage Foundation is coming under fire from its friends about their footsie with various aspects of the Democrats plans, especially mandates and the connector idea, which really began when President Obama ran an health care ad quoting the Heritage Foundation in support of one of then-candidate Obama’s Health Care Reform Plans;
10. Gun Owners of America is leading the charge against physicians who now feel empowered to ask if their are handguns in the house, and that information making its way into the great medical record computers in the vast U.S. government. GOA is asking its members if it wants their gun ownership showing up in their medical records;
11. Speaker Pelosi and President Obama’s commitment to a Public Plan option is being questioned by political moderates in the normally-fawning media; and,
12. there is growing consensus among those who are finding problems with the various and wide-ranging proposals that the 180 million Americans who have health insurance should be the real target of the attacks on the Obama plan: specifically, the idea that your health care plan will not change is going to be the focus of some serious and politically relevant attacks (I’ve heard it be told, anyway).

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As anyone who followed the Kyoto Protocols back in the 1990s can tell you, even if you believe that government action to stem carbon emissions would be desirable, Kyoto wasn’t a genuine effort to get a worldwide agreement on limiting emissions: it exempted seven of the world’s eight most populous nations (the U.S. being the lone exception) from its provisions, including rapidly growing economies like China (now the world’s number one carbon emitter) and India. And neither of those countries, with more than a billion inhabitants each, has any intention of being subject to the kinds of restrictions that President Obama’s carbon emissions “cap-and-trade” plan would impose on U.S. industries, much less during a global recession. Including industries that employ lots of the blue-collar union workers the Democrats purport to represent.

Those industries’ and unions’ solution, naturally, is even more government taxes and regulations: use trade barriers to try to inflict the same harm on foreign manufacturers as on American ones. Hey, why not start a trade war? Just remember, one thing, though: Senator Smoot and Congressman Hawley both lost their bids for re-election in 1932.

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