It's not too late to save Christmas

Buy these 10 gifts now and keep the American economy humming

Consumers account for some two-thirds of the growth in the U.S. gross domestic product by buying goods and services and have largely been credited with holding up the U.S. economy for most of the decade. With spending predicted to slow to a crawl, many analysts believe the economy is on the verge of a menacing contraction.

It doesn't have to be that way. With your last-minute holiday purchases, you still have time to get your loved ones the gifts they crave and save the U.S. economy from potential disaster.
To help you choose the right gifts with the proper amount of economic heft, MarketWatch has gathered 10 suggestions, culled from the brightest minds in everything from economics to bar tending.

There's nothing scientific or methodical about these items. They're just old-fashioned, homegrown ideas, which not surprisingly tend to focus first on U.S.-made goods and local services.

"It's back to the old days -- buy American; buy things that are produced here," said David Wyss, Standard & Poor's chief economist.

Apparel, for example, is mostly woven, sewn and stitched overseas, primarily in China. But golf balls are chiefly American-made. So is food, both in grocery stores and at restaurants.

Buy any one of these 10 now, then sit back and watch the economy roll:

A used house
No industry produces the ripple effects of housing, which by some estimates accounts for 15% of all domestic economic activity. Besides the real estate agents' commission there are mortgage fees and title charges and attorneys' costs -- not to mention money generated for everyone from the moving van driver to the carpet cleaner. At a median price of just about $206,000, houses are even on discount (about 6%) from a year ago. Worried about more price declines? Once folks start buying and supply equals demand, MarketWatch's chief economist Irwin Kellner said, housing prices will stabilize.

A newly constructed house
Better yet, convince 99 friends and family to get one too. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the estimated one-year impact of building 100 single-family homes in a typical U.S. metropolitan area is $16 million in local income and 284 jobs. They then drum up $3.2 million annually in local income and 63 jobs -- and there's no question the construction and building industries are hurting for jobs. An average new home will set you back about $218,000, about 13% less than a year ago.

A pickup truck
It's true you'll be using a good percentage of foreign substances to fuel it, but the domino-effect of building trucks and cars in the U.S. trails long and wide. Consider the Ford F-series trucks and in particular the F-150, the most ubiquitous on the road. Ranging in price from $15,000 to $30,000, about 90% of the truck's parts are manufactured in the U.S. and there are plenty of people employed to build engines, doors, fenders and rear-view mirrors. But more important, the entire machine is assembled in the U.S. The F-Series Super Duty, for example, has spawned an entire community around the 5,000 workers Ford employs at the assembly plant outside of Louisville, Ky., in the last 10 years alone, according to the company.

An airplane
Need a faster and more-high-flying means of transportation? Boeing's best-selling plane is the 737, which ranges in price from $57 million to $79 million. Ninety percent of its parts are U.S. made and the entire plane is assembled in the homeland, mostly in the Washington state cities of Renton and Everett. In fact, all Boeing planes are put together in the U.S., the company said, while the percentage of parts made here varies according to style and size. Don't forget, too, that planes need pilots to fly them, mechanics to service them and airport personnel to direct and harbor them, among other jobs tied to putting a plane in the sky.

A couch
And while you're at it, throw in matching chairs, tables, lighting and rugs. Hit hard and hardly noted during the housing slowdown has been the furniture industry, in which sluggish sales have led to bankruptcies ranging from Levitz Furniture -- its third in 10 years -- and Bombay Co. to Mattress Gallery and Sofa Express.

An entertainment package
Bring down the price points and buy a subscription series to the local opera, orchestra, play group or museum. Artists really don't like to starve and a gift certificate to a local arts group helps keep them employed, as well as their directors, lighting crew, makeup artists and costume designers. Don't forget ushers and ticket-booth sales people, too, who will benefit from your up-front purchase and continued support.

Food
Buy restaurant gift certificates to a favorite dining spot or a one that should be someone else's favorite. That keeps the chefs, waiters and waitresses, bartenders, bus boys and kitchen crews in living wages. Even fast-food and grocery-store gift cards generate income for your neighbors.

A local service
Any kind of service will do, be it a massage, a hair cut or even a trip to the dentist. Services are nearly always performed down the block or around the corner and help employ any number of people to book, manage and carry them out.

Movie tickets and DVDs
The vast majority of movies are created, produced, directed and acted out in Hollywood, employing hundreds of people per flick. California needs the help. The state, whose residents number some 36.5 million, is on the brink of a recession that most economy watchers believe would ripple quickly throughout the rest of the country.

A person's time
Hire someone, anyone: a nanny, a painter, a gardener, a tutor, a piano teacher or even a teen to shovel snow. For every job that's created there is a new consumer created too.

Jennifer Waters, MarketWatch

Putin, the Kremlin power struggle and the $40bn fortune

An unprecedented battle is taking place inside the Kremlin in advance of Vladimir Putin's departure from office, the Guardian has learned, with claims that the president presides over a secret multibillion-dollar fortune.

Rival clans inside the Kremlin are embroiled in a struggle for the control of assets as Putin prepares to transfer power to his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, in May, well-placed political observers and other sources have revealed.

At stake are billions of dollars in assets belonging to Russian state-run corporations. Additionally, details of Putin's own personal fortune, reportedly hidden in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, are being discussed for the first time.

The claims over the president's assets surfaced last month when the Russian political expert Stanislav Belkovsky gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Welt. They have since been repeated in the Washington Post and the Moscow Times, with speculation over the fortune appearing on the internet.

Citing sources inside the president's administration, Belkovsky claims that after eight years in power Putin has secretly accumulated more than $40bn (£20bn). The sum would make him Russia's - and Europe's - richest man.

In an interview with the Guardian, Belkovsky repeated his claims that Putin owns vast holdings in three Russian oil and gas companies, concealed behind a "non-transparent network of offshore trusts".
Cont ........

Luke Harding The Guardian

Success Against the Axis

WASHINGTON -- Just four months after 9/11, George Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil" and declared that defanging these rogue regimes was America's most urgent national security task. Bush will be judged on whether he succeeded.
Six years later and with time running out on this administration, the Bush legacy is clear: one for three. Contrary to current public opinion, Bush will have succeeded on Iraq, failed on Iran and fought North Korea to a draw.

Iran. Bush has thrown in the towel on Iran's nuclear program because the intelligence bureaucracy, in a spectacularly successful coup, seized control of the policy with a National Intelligence Estimate that very misleadingly trumpeted the claim that Iran had halted its nuclear program. In fact, Iran only halted the least important component of its nuclear program, namely weaponization.

The hard part is the production of the fissile material. Iran continues enriching uranium with 3,000 centrifuges at work in open defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Once you have the necessary fuel, you can make the bomb in only a few months.

Thus to even speak of the Iranian program as having been stopped while enrichment continues is absurd. And that is true even if you discount recent dissidents' reports that the weaponization program, suspended in 2003, in fact resumed the following year -- contrary to the current NIE estimate, offered with only "moderate confidence," that it has never been restarted.

The administration had to immediately release and accept the NIE's sensational conclusions because the report would have been leaked and the administration then accused of covering up good news to justify going to war, the assumption being that George Bush and Dick Cheney have a Patton-like lust for the smell of battle.

The administration understands that the NIE's distorted message that Iran has given up pursuing nukes has not only taken any military option off the table but jeopardized any further sanctions against Iran. Making the best of the lost cause, Bush will now go through the motions until the end of his term, leaving the Iranian bomb to his successor.

North Korea. We did get Kim Jong Il to disable his plutonium-producing program. The next step is for Pyongyang to disclose all nuclear activities. This means coming clean on past proliferation and on the clandestine uranium enrichment program that North Korea had once admitted but now denies.

Knowing we have no credible threats against North Korea, we now come bearing carrots. President Bush writes a personal letter to Kim Jong Il, in essence entreating him to come clean on his nuclear program so we can proceed to full normalization.

Disabling the plutonium reactor is an achievement and we do gain badly needed intelligence by simply being there on the ground to inspect. There is, however, no hope of North Korea giving up its existing nuclear weapons stockpile, and little assurance that we will find, let alone disable, any clandestine programs. But lacking sticks, we take what we can.

Iraq is a different story. Whatever our subsequent difficulties, our initial success definitively rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his monstrous sons. The Hussein dynasty will not -- as it would have, absent the U.S. invasion -- rebuild, rearm and threaten the world.

The taking down of Saddam led directly to Libya's full nuclear disarmament and, undoubtedly, to Iran's 2003 suspension of weaponization. As for Iraq itself, after three years of disorientation, the U.S. has finally found a winning counterinsurgency strategy.

It took Bush three years to find his general (as it did Lincoln) and turn a losing war into a winnable one. Baghdad and Washington are currently discussing a long-term basing agreement that could give the United States permanent military presence in the region and a close cooperative relationship with the most important country in the Middle East heartland -- a major strategic achievement.

Nonetheless, the pressure on this administration and the next to get out prematurely will remain. There are those for whom our only objective in Iraq is reducing troop levels rather than securing a potentially critical Arab ally in a region of supreme strategic significance.

On North Korea and Iran, with no real options at hand, the Bush administration heads to the finish line doing what Sen. George Aiken once suggested for Vietnam: Declare victory and go home. With no good options available, those decisions are entirely understandable. But if Bush or his successor does an Aiken on Iraq, where success is a real option, history will judge him severely.

By Charles Krauthammer

Townhall.com

Bush Bans Light Bulbs, Gas Guzzling Cars

President Bush signed an energy bill on Wednesday that bans traditional incandescent light bulbs and requires automakers to produce more energy-efficient vehicles.

The bill, titled the Energy Independence and Security Act, calls for higher fuel standards for cars and light trucks, mandates higher ethanol production and begins a phase out of incandescent light bulbs by 2012 because they burn too much energy.

Instead, Americans will have to purchase more expensive, longer burning compact fluorescent bulbs. Although they last longer than incandescent bulbs, CFL bulbs contain small amounts of mercury and, if broken, must be handled with caution.

At his signing ceremony Bush said the bill was a “major step” toward making the United States “a nation that is stronger, cleaner and more secure.”

The legislation will dramatically change production for automakers and domestic energy producers.

Corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ) standards are currently 27.5 miles per gallon for cars and 22.2 miles per gallon for light trucks. This bill increases that to new standard of 35 miles a gallon for all cars and light trucks by 2020.

It also increases domestic ethanol production by five times in order to meet an annual 36 billion-gallon requirement.

By Amanda Carpenter

Townhall.com

Paul keeps white supremacist donation

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist, and the Texas congressman doesn't plan to return it, an aide said Wednesday.

Don Black, of West Palm Beach, recently made the donation, according to campaign filings. He runs a Web site called Stormfront with the motto, "White Pride World Wide." The site welcomes postings to the "Stormfront White Nationalist Community."

"Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he's wasted his money," Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. "Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom."

"And that's $500 less that this guy has to do whatever it is that he does," Benton added.

Black said he supports Paul's stance on ending the war in Iraq, securing U.S. borders and his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants.

"We know that he's not a white nationalist. He says he isn't and we believe him, but on the issues, there's only one choice," Black said Wednesday.

"We like his stand on tight borders and opposition to a police state," Black told The Palm Beach Post earlier.

On his Web site, Black says he has been involved in "the White patriot movement for 30 years."

By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press Writer

Why are the wheels coming off the Clinton bandwagon?

In Iowa and New Hampshire — the first two tests for the presidential nominating process — Hillary Clinton is faltering badly.

When you average all the polls in Iowa, her lead has dwindled and is now eradicated:

Hillary vs. Obama in Iowa
	Hillary	Obama	Hillary Margin
October	30	23	+7
First half Nov.	28	22	+6
Sec half Nov.	26	28	-2
December	28	30	-2

And, Hillary has suffered an even greater slippage in New Hampshire, where the last poll, by Rasmussen, has Obama ahead by three points. Here are the averages of all the polls for these time periods:

Hillary vs. Obama in New Hampshire
	Hillary	Obama	Hillary Margin
October	41	22	+19
First half Nov.	36	23	+13
Sec half Nov.	34	23	+11
December	31	29	+2

But curiously, Hillary remains in the national lead and her margin has not dwindled appreciably:

Hillary vs. Obama National
	Hillary	Obama	Hillary Margin
October	47	21	+26
First half Nov.	45	23	+22
Sec half Nov.	45	23	+22
December	45	24	+21

Hillary Clinton is tanking and Obama is surging in New Hampshire, gaining a net of 17 points. In Iowa, Hillary is dropping and Obama is also moving up, gaining a net of nine points. But nationally, there is almost no change since November 1. Throughout the country, Obama has gained only five points in three months.

Why the difference?

Obviously, New Hampshire and Iowa are markedly different states with little in common demographically. But, what they do have in common is prolonged exposure to the candidates and to their paid media advertising. These two states have been through what we will all go through before Election Day. They have seen Hillary and Obama campaign day after day. They have watched the candidates — with the advertisements on television, heard them on radio and have focused on the more intensive news coverage they are receiving in the local media. The conclusion is inescapable: the more voters come to know Hillary Clinton the less they like her and the more they get to know Barack Obama the more they like him.

In the abstract, Hillary is a captivating idea. The first woman to run for president, she is the living reminder of the better economic times and international peace of the Clinton administration. But, up close and personal, she is far less attractive. As the rest of the country is exposed to the former first lady, if they emulate the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and revise their opinion of her, the results will not please the Clinton camp.

What is Hillary doing wrong and what is Obama doing right?

A trip to youtube.com or to the Web site of each of the candidates shows in an instant the difference in the ads the two campaigns are running. Obama's send goose bumps up your skin while Hillary's leave one flat. Obama speaks and demonstrates his charisma. Hillary’s platform style is no match for the Illinois senator and most of her ads feature a voice over doing the speaking for her.

In their campaign themes, Hillary stresses her experience while Obama focuses on the need for change. Hillary seems determined to appropriate her husband’s record, while Obama mocks the idea of going back to an alternation of the Bushes and the Clintons, a latter day American Hatfields and McCoys.

Now, in desperation, Hillary and her minions are attacking Obama with shots that will only arouse voter sympathy for him and backlash against her. Hillary asks, “When did running for president become a qualification to be president?” and her aides distribute evidence that Obama wanted to run for president in kindergarten to defuse the attack that Hillary and Bill have always planned on a regal, dynastic succession. More recently, a top Hillary campaign aide spoke of the need to investigate Obama’s drug use in high school where he has admitted to using cocaine.

None of these shots are going to knock anybody out or even down, but Hillary keeps up the pattern of personal, irrelevant negative attacks.

The conclusion is obvious: neither Hillary nor her staff know how to campaign. After the Clinton re-election in 1996, they have never been tested in a competitive race. When Giuliani dropped out of the New York State Senate race and the young Congressman Rick Lazio had to enter at the last minute to try to stop Hillary’s bid, the conclusion was pre-ordained. Hillary’s re-election was a cakewalk against a totally under funded opponent. She doesn’t know how to win.

Hillary’s experience has been limited to the insider back biting of Washington where she is an expert at using her secret police — a small army of private detectives — to unearth negatives about her or Bill’s opponents. (Even former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young recently admitted that Hillary ran the effort to discredit women who might come forward and accuse Clinton of misconduct.) But, when it comes to campaigning, advertising and winning an election, these folks and this candidate don’t have a clue.

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Townhall.com

Small group of US experts insist global warming not man-made

A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth.

These experts believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and they point to reams of data they say supports their assertions.

These conclusions are in sharp contradiction to those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reached its conclusions using largely similar data.

The UN body of about 3,000 experts, including several renown US scientists, jointly won the award with former US vice president Al Gore for their work to raise awareness about the disastrous consequences of global warming.

In mid-November the IPCC adopted a landmark report stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal."

Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning Arctic summer sea ice and thawing permafrost shows that climate change is already on the march, the report said.

Carbon pollution, emitted especially by the burning of oil, gas and coal, traps heat from the Sun, thus warming the Earth's surface and inflicting changes to weather systems.

A group of US scientists however disagree, and have written an article on their views that is published in The International Journal of Climatology, a publication of Britain's Royal Meteorological Society.

"The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends, doesn't show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming," wrote lead author David Douglas, a climate expert from the University of Rochester, in New York state.

"The inescapable conclusion is that human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming," Douglas wrote.

According to co-author John Christi from the University of Alabama, satellite data "and independent balloon data agree that the atmospheric warming trends do not exceed those of the surface," while greenhouse models "demand that atmospheric trend values be two to three times greater."

Data from satellite observations "suggest that greenhouse models ignore negative feedback produced by clouds and by water vapor, that diminish the warming effects" of human carbon dioxide emissions.

The journal authors "have good reason, therefore, to believe that current climate models greatly overestimate the effects of greenhouse gases."

For Fred Singer, a climatologist at the University of Virginia and another co-author, the current warming "trend is simply part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that has been seen in ice cores, deep sea sediments and stalagmites . . . and published in hundreds of papers in peer reviewed journals."

How these cyclical climate take place is still unknown, but they "are most likely caused by variations in the solar wind and associated magnetic fields that affect the flux of cosmic rays incident on cloudiness, and thereby control the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface and thus the climate."

Singer said at a recent National Press Club meeting in Washington that there is still no definite proof that humans can produce climate change.

The available data is ambiguous, Singer said: global temperatures, for example, rose between 1900 and 1940, well before humans began to burn the enormous quantities of hydrocarbons they do today. Then they dropped between 1940 and 1975, when the use of oil and coal increased, he said.

Singer believes that other factors -- like variations of solar winds and terrestrial magnetic field that impact cloud formations and the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface, and thus determining the temperature -- are much more influential than human-generated greenhouse gas emissions.

by Jean-Louis Santini
Yahoo News

Taxing Time for Democrats?

It's been a while since taxes were a potent political issue. It was almost 20 years ago that George H.W. Bush invited voters to "read my lips" and a baker's dozen years since Republicans captured Congress by decrying the Clinton tax increases. George W. Bush did promise to cut taxes, but it didn't help him much in 2000, and the ensuing economic recovery didn't help him much in 2004.

But taxes could be an issue in 2008, as the federal tax structure is poised to change in the next few years.

First, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010, and the Democrats, who seem almost sure to hold or expand their majorities in the next Congress, seem determined not to extend some or all of them. So taxes at least on high earners are likely to rise. And secondly, the alternative minimum tax, passed in 1969 to prevent a handful of millionaires from avoiding income tax altogether, is now slated to hit more than 20 percent of taxpayers. And that percentage is due to rise every year because the AMT is not indexed for inflation.

The paradox is that the same Democrats who want to increase top-bracket income and capital-gains tax rates are desperately eager to spare relatively high earners from the AMT -- so desperate that Senate Democrats agreed to waive the "paygo" rule they reinstated when they took control.

Paygo requires that a tax cut be offset by a tax increase or a spending cut of corresponding dollar amounts. But when the Senate early this month passed its $50 billion AMT "patch" exempting 230 million taxpayers from the AMT for one year, it waived the paygo rule.

House Democrats are simmering, but they will probably have to go along. There's a process argument for waiving paygo, which is that future AMT revenues are fictitious because no Congress will allow the tax to go into effect. But it's nonetheless embarrassing for Democrats to renounce a rule they adopted as a guarantee of their fiscal responsibility.

The reason Democrats risked this embarrassment is that the AMT tends to fall on voters in places with high state and local government spending and taxes -- Democratic places like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and California.

Taxpayers hit by the AMT can't deduct state and local taxes from their federal income tax bill. Sooner or later, that puts downward political pressure on state and local spending. And that, in turn, threatens the vested interest of a key Democratic constituency, the public employee unions. Democratic voters in suburban New Jersey, for example, who feel far from rich, face a substantial tax increase if they're suddenly covered by the AMT. They may take their revenge on Democratic candidates and on New Jersey public employee union members.

The Democrats' need to get rid of the AMT suggests the possibility of broader tax reform. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel has put forth such a proposal, with a cut in the corporate tax rate and huge tax increases on very high earners. But it's a nonstarter as long as George W. Bush is in office.

Another approach with more bipartisan appeal would be to combine AMT repeal and extension of the Bush tax cuts with a mass repeal of tax exemptions, along the lines of the 1986 bipartisan tax law.

Meanwhile, in this election cycle, the AMT remains largely invisible to the voters who are threatened by it, and it will remain so unless Congress somehow fails to patch it this year. The more visible issue is whether or to what extent taxes will go up in 2010.

Democrats, conscious of the popularity of some recent governors who have raised taxes (like Mark Warner of Virginia), seem on the surface unfazed by the political risks of tax increases and are preparing to argue that they'll raise taxes only on the rich. But this may be awkward at a time when the budget deficit is rapidly declining and when we face the nontrivial possibility of a recession.

A tax increase in a recession is usually not a good idea. And Republicans will say that when Democrats promise to tax the rich, they end up raising taxes on the ordinary person, as Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress did in 1993. The Democrats' desperation to patch the AMT and their willingness to break their own paygo rule suggest that they fear the wrath of those New Jersey suburbanites more than they let on.

By Michael Barone
Townhall.com