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Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) announced he will seek another term in the Senate, Tulsa World reports.

Geithner told China yesterday that the Obama Administration was committed to bringing down the US deficit.
Really?

Barack Obama will quadruple the deficit this year.

Geithner also told China that Team Obama wants to bring down the deficit next year from 12.9% of GDP this year to 3% of GDP next year (a near impossibility)...
Or, in other words, back into Bush territory.

In response, China told Geithner to show them some numbers!
Bloomberg reported, via Bizblogger:

In an interview with Bloomberg Television May 21, Geithner said the administration?"s goal is to cut the budget shortfall to 3 percent of gross domestic product or smaller. That would be down from a projected 12.9 percent this year.

Seventeen of 23 Chinese economists polled in connection with Geithner?"s visit said holdings of Treasuries are a ?Sgreat risk? for the nation?"s economy, according to a Chinese state media report yesterday. Still, the majority argued against quickly cutting them, the Beijing-based Global Times reported.

Geithner, 47, needs to show how the U.S. can prevent the value of China?"s investment from being eroded by a weaker dollar or by the inflation that might be stoked by the stimulus money being pumped into the U.S. economy, according to Yu.

?SIt will be helpful if Geithner can show us some arithmetic,? he said.

...The Treasury released a transcript May 30 of a briefing Geithner gave last week at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. In it, he said he will stress with Chinese officials that he?"s intent on maintaining the dollar?"s strength.

?SI will, of course, make it clear that we are committed to a strong dollar, that we are committed to bringing our fiscal deficits down over the medium term to a sustainable place, to a sustainable level,? Geithner said in the briefing May 27. ?SWe believe in a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in the U.S. interest.?

This doesn't sound good at all.
No wonder China is concerned.

The US has lost 16,000 jobs each day since Obama signed the Spendulus Bill and sunk the US economy further into debt.

by Mark Silva

As President Barack Obama prepares to depart Tuesday for a trip that will carry him from Saudi Arabia to France -- with an address to the Muslim world from Cairo in the middle of the journey -- he is starting to aim his megaphone at a global audience.

In an interview with the BBC on the eve of the trip, the president was asked about delivering his appeal for peace to the Muslim world from a city, Cairo, where many political prisoners are being held, and how he can reconcile the two.

"The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion those are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries, but rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity,'' Obama said in an interview airing this evening.

"Now, the danger, I think, is when the United States or any country thinks that we can simply can impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture .. our job,'' Obama tells BBC interviewer Justin Webb.

"Absolutely we'll be encouraging ......and I think the thing that we can do most importantly is to serve as a role model, and that's why, for example, closing Guantanamo from my perspective -- as difficult as it is -- is important, because part of what we want to affirm to the world is that these are values that are important even when it's hard, maybe especially when it's hard -- and not just when it's easy."

Part of the interivew will be broadcast on BBC World News and BBC World Service radio at 9 pm United Kingdom time, and the full interview will air on Tuesday a 04:30 am UK time. The BBC Obama interview also will be shown online.

The president leaves Tuesday evening for Saudi Arabia, where he will hold private meetings with the king before traveling to Cairo for his public address on Thursday, and then on to Dresden, Germany, for a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Paris for commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landing.

I arrived in Aarhus, Denmark, two weeks ago with the strange feeling that I had really not left Toronto. Tamil demonstrators, waving Tiger flags, banging drums and chanting incomprehensibly, blocked traffic in front of the railway station. A few days later in Copenhagen, their leader dead, their resistance in Sri Lanka at an end, Tamils were chanting "U. S. A., U. S. A." in front of the American embassy. Polyglot Denmark is not, but multiculturalism is present everywhere in the cities.

Most of it is benign and hopeful. There are mixed race children playing happily together in both Aarhus and Copenhagen, teenagers moving in packs and black and white couples walking with small children. There are women in chadors and Muslim men with beards, halal meat shops and kebabs for sale everywhere. But after the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons, there is substantial unease among many Danes. When the cartoons were published in 2006, they were frightened by the rage directed against them in the Muslim world--and the hints of violence they detected from the 4% of the Danish population who are Muslim.

And they worried about the threat to freedom of speech posed by the controversy. More recently, they bitterly resented Muslim Turkey's attempt, in response to the cartoon controversy, to block the Danish Prime Minister from becoming secretary-general of NATO. Only in the face of Danish resistance will Turkey now make it into membership in the European community.

Many Danes look to Canada as a model of multiculturalism -- a country that they believe got it right. But even if almost everyone speaks English, few know much about Canada, and certainly they know nothing about this nation's problems in integrating immigrants or the difficulties with our refugee system. Still, when compared to racial and religious tensions in Britain, France, the Netherlands and Denmark, Canada's multiculturalism looks like a great success.

What does seem clear is that the European community has been good to Denmark, even if the Danes have thus far refused to adopt the Euro as their currency. The tiny nation's GDP per capita in 2008 was $66,760 (well above Canada's at $48,427), and welfare benefits are generous, so much so that most Danes label their welfare state as their country's defining characteristic. Many cynics might declare that Denmark's taxes --"the highest anywhere," I was repeatedly told -- are the true defining fact (and this tax burden is largely responsible for complaints about the costs of trying to integrate immigrants). But the Danish medical care system is good, the emergency room lineups relatively short and cancer operations in first-class hospitals, for example, can be scheduled and performed quickly and well. (Nonetheless, private hospitals advertise their up-to-date facilities at pleasant locations on the coast.) Even more extraordinarily, university students who make it to higher education after tough competition for places get free tuition and a stipend.

Graduate students get the same, and their stipend is enough to live on, no matter their subject of study.

The only drawback in this halcyon paradise? Everything is ridiculously expensive -- notably clothing (though women are nonetheless stylishly dressed), restaurant meals and alcohol. Copenhagen has a number of two-star Michelin restaurants, but there seems a large gulf between the hot young chefs and most of the rest. The food here is good but simple, though fresh fish seems available everywhere and Danish pork, proudly labelled as such, appears on almost every menu. The pastries are good, the breads wonderful.

Unfortunately, a half-pint of Carlsberg costs around 30 kroner ($6.50) and a glass of Italian plonk will run about $12. With gasoline selling for almost 10 kroner a litre, taxi meters in Aarhus start at 30 kronor and even a short trip will hit $25.

On the other hand, the public transit system is first rate, with bus networks and subways operating in Copenhagen and an efficient rail network reaching into the country. If they're not riding their bicycles around town, people will commute a hundred kilometres to get to work and do so without a qualm. Likewise, Swedes take the train from Malmo, just a bridge away from Copenhagen, to work. Danes, in return, go to Malmo to buy houses and apartments, which are much cheaper there than in Copenhagen.

Occupied without a fight by the Nazis in 1940, Denmark drew the appropriate lessons and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a founding member. It despatched troops to Iraq, and has some 700 soldiers in Afghanistan's difficult Helmand Province. The Danish casualty rate is comparable to Canada's, and people I spoke too worried that the Afghan mission's aims were hopelessly muddled. Others noted that Denmark, proud of its peacekeeping record, had trouble dealing with combat and its costs.

In other words, Denmark is much like Canada on the important issues. Politicians brag about Denmark punching above its weight, but ordinary Danes worry about the economy and the strains posed to the polity by immigration and wonder if their taxes can possibly go any higher.

But it's a sweet life for now, everyone sitting outside at cafes in the sun or lying stretched out in Copenhagen's superb parks. There really is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark.

Historian J. L. Granatstein writes for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.

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