Already Back on the Trail, Now to Sell a Stimulus Plan

WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign trail often loved Barack Obama more than he loved it back. When he was sworn in last month, he told friends he was eager to tackle the rigors of the Oval Office without the drudgery of shuttling to a different part of the country every other day.

But a road trip is suddenly looking far more appealing.

In an effort to build support for his signature economic stimulus plan, Mr. Obama is setting off for Indiana on Monday, holding his first prime-time news conference on Monday night and heading to Florida on Tuesday. In both states, he will be working to counter Republican criticism of his $800 billion recovery package and take greater control of the debate.

He also is hoping to refill his reservoir of political capital and escape Washington after a bruising week in the White House.

“Washington can be a little suffocating that way,” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said in an interview on Sunday. “It’s good to go out where the American people are, where they have a very strong view about what we should be doing.”

When Mr. Obama arrived in Washington on Jan. 4, more than two weeks before he was sworn into office, he said he was glad he would soon be settled after hopscotching from city to city for the last two years. Initially, the president was reluctant to be too far away from Washington, aides said, because he was juggling the economic proposals, meeting with military commanders and still trying to fill his cabinet.

But last week, as Republicans in Congress stood nearly solidly against Mr. Obama’s stimulus plan, some Democrats voiced concern that the president was not following in the path of his predecessors in both political parties by taking his campaign for the plan on the road to help aggressively sell it and guide it through a rough patch.

This “tug and pull,” as Mr. Axelrod called it, has presented a challenge because the president is intent on getting his arms around the enormous problems facing the nation. The political instincts that served Mr. Obama well in his campaign faced new tests after he conceded last week that he had made a mistake by pushing the nomination of Tom Daschle to champion health care.

Going out into the country offers a chance for Mr. Obama to reboot. And the image of him stepping off Air Force One, with adoring crowds waiting, is a uniquely presidential way to do it.

For the first 20 days of his presidency, Mr. Obama has been captive to the fixtures of government, dashing from the White House to Capitol Hill to a series of agencies for an early look at his administration. The images, while presidential, bore only a faint resemblance to the man who charmed voters with an outside-of-Washington persona.

He is taking to the formality of his new duties. Several people who met with him in the Oval Office or in other rooms throughout the White House said they were struck by how at ease Mr. Obama seemed in his new surroundings.

Since moving into the White House on Jan. 20, he has enjoyed a series of firsts, including sitting in the presidential box at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Friday night and flying aboard Marine One to the presidential retreat at Camp David on Saturday.

But the urgency outside Washington was growing.

A collection of private and public polls, as well as focus groups convened by Democratic strategists, showed that the public’s support for the economic recovery package was eroding as Republicans intensified their criticism of the plan. So advisers to the president told him he had no choice but to fire up Air Force One and return to a mode of campaigning that helped him win the presidency.

On Monday night, Mr. Obama will address the nation for the first time in a prime-time appearance from the East Room of the White House and make his argument for why the economic bill is necessary. When he does, aides said, he will recount his visit earlier in the day to Elkhart, Ind., a city he visited twice during the presidential race that has seen its unemployment rate rise to 15.3 percent, largely because of layoffs in the recreational vehicle industry.

“They’ve watched their unemployment triple,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary. “This isn’t just something that people debate. It’s something that they live every day.”

Mr. Obama is set to meet with the mayor, Dick Moore, who has assembled a list of 18 construction projects, from rebuilding runways at the local airport to upgrading sewer systems, that he said could help create 2,300 jobs. In Washington, those are the types of projects deemed recipients of pork-barrel spending, but the administration hopes they will be seen differently at closer range.

To members of Congress who have yet to say how they intend to vote on the economic stimulus plan — including Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana — a bit of high-profile arm-twisting by the president will not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill. The White House is taking six members of Congress along for the ride on Monday, including one Republican, Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, whose vote the president is trying to win.

In Washington, the White House prepared Sunday for its first major presidential trip and a week that could help define Mr. Obama’s presidency with the votes on the economic bills. Elkhart, a city of 52,000 just south of the Michigan line, was alive with anticipation of the visit.

A headline in The Elkhart Truth declared, “Don’t bother asking — there aren’t any more tickets for Obama visit.”

The newspaper reported Sunday that a real estate developer had placed a classified advertisement to sell two tickets to see Mr. Obama for $1,000. The developer, Nawab Manjee, said he intended to use the money to help him meet a week’s worth of payroll — if anyone took him up on the offer.

 
on one of the most devastating financial years on record, business bankruptcies -- both large and small -- continue to soar.

The nearly 58,000 commercial bankruptcies filed nationwide through November of this year exceed the year-end totals of every year since Congress overhauled the bankruptcy laws in 2005, according to Automated Access to Court Electronic Records, an Oklahoma City bankruptcy data company.

The 11-month figure is also 35 percent more than the nearly 43,000 business petitions filed in all of last year, the company's data show.

The combination of massive job losses, stagnant consumer spending, tighter credit and the sub-prime mortgage crisis have hammered businesses coast to coast.

Victims include Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, the two largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history.

Thousands of smaller companies also have been forced to liquidate or restructure through bankruptcy. They include car dealerships such as Ernie Haire Ford of Tampa, Fla., home remodeling firms such as Accurate Kitchens of Clifton, N.J., and natural gas marketers such as Catalyst Energy of Atlanta.

When the recession began last December, businesses nationwide were filing an average of 206 bankruptcy petitions a day. That average has increased steadily since June, reaching 318 per day in November.

Commercial bankruptcy filings are up 111 percent in Oregon, 91 percent in Utah and 83 percent in California, which leads the nation with nearly 12,000 business filings this year.

Things look even worse for next year, when business filings are likely to increase 40 to 50 percent, said Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes ACI, an Owings Mills, Md., firm that insures more than $150 billion in U.S. trade transactions each year.

North expects a wave of retail bankruptcies in the first quarter of 2009, as struggling businesses run out of gas after hanging on for the holiday shopping season.

Some retailers, such as KB Toys, have decided not to wait, hoping that the holiday season will help them liquidate their inventories. After filing for bankruptcy this week, KB Toys will begin going-out-of-business sales at all its stores. The company blamed a "sudden and sharp decline in consumer sales" for its downfall.

Earlier this month, the nation's largest poultry producer, Pilgrim's Pride, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

"Over the past year, Pilgrim's Pride has faced a number of significant challenges including high feed-ingredient costs, an oversupply of chicken, weak market pricing and softening demand," said a statement by Clint Rivers, the company's president and chief executive officer. "Chapter 11 filing was a necessary and prudent step and the best way to obtain the financing necessary to maintain regular operations and allow for a successful restructuring."

In Delaware, where many out-of-state companies file incorporation papers, bankruptcies have jumped 243 percent from last year. Many companies file in Delaware because the bankruptcy process tends to move faster there, said Gregory R. Stone, an assistant finance professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Last year, in the New York-Delaware region, there was one major business filing per quarter. "Two or three at the most," said Mark Indelicato, a bankruptcy lawyer and partner at Hahn & Hessen law firm in New York. "Now you're seeing multiple filings per week."

The situation wouldn't be so bad if access to credit weren't so tight. In previous years, companies with operational and cash problems had little trouble getting emergency loans.

"There was enough liquidity in the market — the availability of cheap dollars — to chase deals, so you could always correct a problem by refinancing it and getting a different level of debt in there," Indelicato said. "But ever since the sub-prime crisis hit, these parties have hit a wall and they can't get financing anymore,"

The Federal Reserve's most recent quarterly survey of senior bank-loan officers found that 81 percent have made it more expensive for large firms to borrow. Seventy-one percent did the same for small firms. The response rates were the highest ever recorded in the survey, said North of Euler Hermes ACI.

The uncertainty shows no sign of abating.

The Distressed Company Alert, a weekly newsletter about troubled public companies, typically adds five to 10 companies a week to its list.

These days, it's adding 18 to 24 a week.

We are definitely going into a major depression by 2010 or just into it.

 

 so pleasureable because of hormone surge says scientist

By Matthew Moore
Last Updated: 12:00AM GMT 09 Feb 2009

Couples who share a passionate kiss this Valentine's Day will enjoy sensations of relaxation. Photo: GETTY

Couples who share a passionate kiss this Valentine's Day will enjoy sensations of relaxation and excitement because of a complex series of chemical processes, as well as their love for their partners.

The study showed that women need more than just a kiss to experience the same chemical high as men - with additional features such as a romantic atmosphere of dimmed lights and mood music also required.

Wendy Hill, professor of psychology at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania began the research to find out why the mundane physical activity of rubbing lips can elicit such a gratifying emotional response.

Her team tested the levels of two hormones, cortisol and oxytocin, in 15 couples before and after holding hands and kissing.

They found that kissing reduced the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in both sexes. But levels of oxytocin, a hormone linked to social bonding that they expected to be boosted by kissing, only rose among the men.

The scientists have since replicated the tests in more intimate settings, to see if the less-than-alluring environment of the university health centres where the original research was carried out hampered women's hormonal surge.

The final results will be presented at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago this week.

"This study shows kissing is much more complex and causes hormonal changes and things we never thought occurred," said Prof Hill.

"We tend to think more about who we are kissing and how it feels, yet there are a lot of other things happening."

It is not clear how kissing provokes such hormonal reactions, but some scientists believe they are triggered by the exchange of pheromones – chemicals our bodies release to attract sexual partners – in the saliva.

This interaction may also have health benefits. Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, New Jersey, said: "If you share your germs with somebody, you're boosting your internal defence system."

This is not the first research to analyse the physical effects of kissing. In 2007 British scientists measured the brain and heart activity sparked by passionate kissing, but found it was less intense that the stimulation produced by eating chocolate.

Romantic love has also been shown to have a close link to neurological activity, with scans showing that it has similar effect to cocaine on our brains.

 

 Worried about Money? 9 Ways To Avoid Overspending

One source of unhappiness for people is feeling out of control of their spending - and this is a problem that's far more widespread now than it was a year ago. Feeling regret about having bought something is a very unpleasant sort of unhappiness.

Being an under-buyer, as opposed to an over-buyer, I don't generally have much trouble avoiding overspending. I have more trouble prodding myself to make the effort to buy things I actually need.

Nevertheless, even with my under-buying ways, I sometimes come home with something I didn't really need to buy. Stores use extremely clever strategies to winkle customers into making purchases. Here are some strategies to make sure you don't make purchases you regret:

1. Be wary of the check-out areas. There are lots of enticing little items here; ask yourself if you really need something before you add it to your pile. How many times have I picked up a jar of Balmex?

2. Get in and get out. The more time you spend in a store, the more you're likely to buy. Even better: don't even go in the store. Then you definitely won't buy.

3. Question the need for an upgrade. You might want that device with a slick new function, or to get the improved version of what you have now, but do you really need it?

4. Be polite to salespeople, but don't feel like they're your new best friends. Don't buy something because you're worried about hurting their feelings or having made them do a lot of work helping you or explaining products to you. (At the same time, be respectful of clerks' efforts. The other day, I was in Gap Kids, and I saw someone rifle through a pile of beautifully stacked shirts in a way that meant that they'd all have to be re-folded. Was he malicious or oblivious? I couldn't tell.)

5. Don't shop when you're in a hurry or when you're hungry.

6. Stick to a list. I've found that after I've decided to buy one thing, I'm far more likely to throw in other impulse items, because I know that I'm committed to going through the hassle of paying.

7 . Beware of sale items, which make you feel like you can't afford not to buy, or limited-time offers, which make you feel like you have to take advantage of a special deal. If you don't need or want something, it's not a good deal, not matter how cheap it is. A friend of mine told her husband, "I got this 50% off!" and he answered, "That means it was 50% ON." Along the same lines...

8. Don't buy anything that you don't know you need - this is especially important with clothes. If you're not careful, you can buy a pair of pants marked down 75%, then realize that you can't really wear them unless you buy the right shoes to go with them.

9. Choose cash or credit card. Some people find it far harder to spend actual physical cash; other people find that paying cash makes a purchase seem trivial, even when the dollar amount is high. Know whether you're more inclined to overspend with cash or credit cards - and leave that payment method at home.

 

"This is a seismic shift in the role of government in our society," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics. "Those who believe the government can be an effective, positive instrument for good will have another chance to try it," said Sinai, a political independent.

While economists remain divided on the role of government generally, an overwhelming number from both parties are saying that a government stimulus package -- even a flawed one -- is urgently needed to help prevent a steeper slide in the economy.

Many economists say the precise size and shape of the package developing in Congress matter less than the timing, and that any delay is damaging.

"Most of the things in the package, the big dollar amounts, are things that are pretty quick stimulus and need to be done," said Alice Rivlin, who was former president Bill Clinton's budget director and who criticized aspects of the proposed stimulus in congressional testimony two weeks ago. "Is it a perfect package? Of course not. But we're past that. Let's just do it."

 "We have now lost 3.6 million jobs, a stunning loss. But what's more horrifying is that half that loss has occurred in the last three months. This is a severe recession. There's no doubt about it."

 

 

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