Just today it is hot off the press that GM is making a turnaround. I clearly remember when Obama took office and was going to force GM in a very well planned bankruptcy, all the republicans where crying fowl. Everyone was warning about the big job loss and disarray in the economy. I remember people throwing number as high as 3 million jobs will be lost if GM files for bankruptcy.

Now after a careful surgery of that sector there are good benefits and it will be in much better shape for rest of the economy. Lets see if people remember that Obama did something courageous with GM.

Just today at 2:00PM it was reported the Russian President is leaning on agreeing with the sanctions on the Iran. This comes after a long hard diplomatic push and a nice chess game the Obama team put to corner the Iranians on their nuclear issue.

As soon as Obama came in the office they announced the scrapping of the deal to put the missile defense shield over eastern Europe (i.e. Poland) suggested by the Bush administration. It was seen as very novice and some Fox TV commentators compared that to giving up to the Russian anger over the missile defense shield. But now the whole game is unfolding and it seems that Obama team has some support over the sanctions from all 5 permanent UN security council. This opens up a very big lead on host of many things but to start with on sanctions on Iranian Regime who thought that they had Russia and/or China in their pocket.

This shows the some smart world politics and i hope that the Obama team  gets the rest of pieces in place. This will put the Iranian in the box and if that happens I can see that will help persuade Israelis on some concessions to have the mid-east peace process started. I believe that the reason Israel is “acting up” or you can say throwing some temper tantrums lately. Israelis are doing this due to the fear that Iran may develop a nuclear bomb and they feel that Obama is not doing enough to stop that. But sometimes friends do not tell other friend what they are doing is for the ultimate good for them.

So lets see this game and think on how this can help America get some real diplomatic power on their side.

It is getting really scary out there in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the largest Oil Company and the best equipped government in the world is not able to stop the oil leak. We really need to start looking at these kinds of other disasters that are waiting to happen. It seems that we developed the technology to drill faster and get the oil out but never bothered to find ways to stop them if something should go wrong.

Its like designing a car that can go 1000 miles/hr and never bother to think about something called “Brakes” !! I am amazed to see how the BP and their engineers are coming up with ways to solve this and every time it is “this has never been tried before”. Why did not they try to have few methods on hand for something like this ? What was their budget they spent on stopping oil spills ?

All of this is now water under the bridge (or should i say oil under the sea !). Now the government should mandate these kind of steps and regulate in this area as well. To all those who say let the free market handle this, i say to look at all the latest disasters (Sub Prime Mortgage, Financial Industry Disaster and now BP Oil leak) and decide for yourself if these corporations are keeping the risk/reward ratio in the balance.

NATO announces that they have confirmed that 20 of their member countries will send more troops to Afghanistan. So this is the answer to all those critics who questioned that why Obama’s popularity is not translating in anything tangible. I am not saying this as a support for the Obama but just that a smart move can give some benefits at the end of the day.

He removed the cage rattling Missile Defense Shield with Eastern Europe and got some edge off of Russia. That gave some leverage in other negotiations like Iran and troop levels in Afghanistan. I think his moves are good comparison to a chess player. If he gets his way in few of the moves then i think US will be much better off and we can shrug off the losses we made under Bush.

NATO is also understanding that this war in Afghanistan is a shared global responsibility. Obama did a good job of make this war a true global responsibility then what we had under “Coalition of willing”.

Let’s see what comes out of this whole effort.

CNN is making a right decision to give Lou Dobbs a much needed break from all his crazy talk.  I was a big fan of CNN but since the Immigration debate under the Bush Administration got heated up. I also liked Lou Dobbs when he was doing good commentary on economy. Both CNN and Dobbs fell off my radar when Dobbs started getting “Foxinated” ( I know it is a good term that i just coined !).

Dobbs increasingly got narrower in his opposition and before he knew it was too late. I am sure that the general public may not know about this but there are some deep scares he left within the Immigrant Communities. I have seen posts on the internet about how Dobbs’ efforts have ruined lives etc. I know it is not true but in a quest to get good ratings he took CNN to the journey where the network was on a slippery slope.

Thank god  there is a media president who wants to stick to pure news. It was a good decision for Jon Klein and may be CNN will get back viewers like me who care about straight news but the perceived anti-immigrant tone turned them away.

Best Luck CNN !

It seems clear that not listening to Obama on the Healthcare timetable is going to be a big miss that Dems will pay a big price. It started from yesterday in the off year election and I hope that they realize it the hard way. Obama made a very good calculation (it had all the good political calculations backed in) when he wanted to have the August deadline for the health care bills. It would have been perfect for the party to show some proof. But guess what happens when Dems are in charge. They do not know how to get their priorities through. Max Baucus wasted a lot of time in getting some support from Republicans and they played a nice hand. They gave him some mirage to chase for few months and at the end they walked away.

If the HealthCare bill would have passed the mood will be totally different for the voters. They would have something to jump on. The core alliance that supported Obama would have seen “the change they can believe in”. But the congress failed Obama and it only takes one slip in this kind of political environment to derail the whole Agenda. Now they are talking about the Healthcare will be done in January 2010. Do you really believe that any conservative Dems will have balls to vote for it after what they have seen in this election ? Does anyone believe that now Republicans will even think of showing any “support” for any legislation ?

It is going to be harder for Dems going forward and i hope that they get defeated in the 2010. If they cannot govern with super tight majority, they are better off without one.

Google is at it again. The same way they did with the internet search technology they are doing with the mobile OS (and i was waiting for that). I always thought that the GPS Navigation was overrated in this era where Google Maps is everywhere. It is so easy to develop upon and share with your custom maps. Long behold and Google does it. That’s what i like about Google is that they TAKE BOLD STEPS. Microsoft always try to play it safe and that is their main issue. Google has baked its Android 2.0 with so many features inside it, we will be getting surprised for next few months with what it can do.

With its voice activated search capabilities it is taking the whole GPS market down and coming up with brand new technology that will spawn the virtualization of the Billboards that we see on the roads. Guess what Google can do with its voice activated search capability ? It can get advertising revenues from all those restaurants, hotels and everything that you would advertise on billboards.

That is not it. The Droid has the high-end features expected from a top-tier smartphone including Wi-Fi, 3G on Verizon’s EV-DO Rev. A network, assisted-GPS, Bluetooth, and a 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus and video-recording capabilities. The Droid will come with a 16GB memory card, and users will be able to download new programs from the Android Market, as well as download music tracks over the air from Amazon’s MP3 store.

It is just a start. Buckle up your seat, Google is driving !!

It seems that there is a political timing at work here when it comes to job creation. I clearly see that the Obama Administration is gearing up to make sure that the jobs activity gets picked up at the right time. If history is any guide the Obama team did the same with their main rival campaign. It may be too late or the size of the US economy will give some challenges to them.

I am bit concerned with them on this front as they may have hard time with the jobs creation.

I jus saw www.Recovery.Gov with some new data. It is really slick website especially coming from our government. I have seen some pale websites from govt. before, but this time around i see a totally new twist where the government is really showing that they can also do some cool stuff.

I feel that it will take some time for the people to get used to the government that actually works. Lots of [old] people in congress are talking about the government cannot do this and that, but if they keep the bar this up very soon it will apparent.

What all the people including Democrats are missing is that this guy is truly transformative and he means the business. Unfortunately, it will take some time to change the reputation of the government. Till then, we shall wait…

So slowly the numbers starts to add up. Last week it was 30,000 construction jobs and this week it is 250,000 education jobs. It will be very hard for Republicans next year because they are still hoping to have the unempoyment around 10%. If the numbers keep getting better by week what it will look like in few months ?

Still the Republicans will try to spin this as failure for the Obama Team when i really think they should get behind the efforts to get some credits. They keep saying NO to everything and the results are improving everyday. It will be hard before we get full recovery but if you see the way this whole stimulus is crafted, by the early next year it will be in full swing and it will outshine all the arguments Republicans are planning right now to take back the congress.

Best Luck to them !!