Son of Africa, Obama scolds forces of tyranny

ACCRA, Ghana – An American president who has "the blood of Africa within me" praised and scolded the continent of his ancestors Saturday, asserting forces of tyranny and corruption must yield if Africa is to achieve its promise.
"Yes you can," Barack Obama declared, brushing off his campaign slogan and adapting it for his foreign audience. Speaking to the Ghanaian Parliament, he called upon African societies to seize opportunities for peace, democracy and prosperity.
"This is a new moment of promise," he said. "To realize that promise, we must first recognize a fundamental truth that you have given life to in Ghana: Development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa's potential."
The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black goat herder-turned-academic from Kenya, Obama delivered an unsentimental account of squandered opportunities in postcolonial Africa. America's first black president spoke with a bluntness that perhaps could only come from a member of Africa's extended family.
"No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers," he said.
"No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end."
He added: "Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions."
Obama was on a 21-hour visit to the West African nation to highlight that country's democratic tradition and engagement with the West. His visit, his first to sub-Saharan Africa as president, was greeted as a "spiritual reunion" Saturday by Ghanian legislators.

Obama visits Saudi king before high-stakes speech

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Opening a mission to write a new chapter on Islam and the West, President Barack Obama consulted Wednesday with the Saudi king "in the place where Islam began," prelude to a high-stakes speech in Egypt meant to ease long-held Muslim grievances against the United States.
The son of a Kenyan Muslim who lived part of his childhood in Muslim-majority Indonesia, Obama planned what aides called a "truth-telling" address on Thursday, aimed directly at the world's 1.5 billion Muslims. Many harbor animosity toward the U.S. over its staunch support for Israel, its terrorist-fighting policies and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Americans, likewise, formed negative perceptions of the Muslim world after the 9/11 attacks.
In advance, Saudi King Abdullah staged a lavish welcome after Obama's all-night flight to Riyadh.
"I thought it was very important to come to the place where Islam began and to seek his majesty's counsel," Obama said. The president and the king talked in the splendor of Abdullah's sprawling retreat, a lush patch of searing desert.
The king, who was hosting Obama for an overnight stay, called his guest "a distinguished man who deserves to be in this position."
Birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia is still considered guardian of the faith as home to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. The Sunni Arab powerhouse also sits on the world's largest oil reserves, buys billions in U.S. military equipment and has cooperated extensively with the U.S. on anti-terrorist operations.
As such, Obama's goals of opening what speechwriter Ben Rhodes called "a new chapter between the United States and the Muslim world" could hardly proceed without Saudi support. Obama also came asking for specific requests of help from Abdullah on a range of related issues, such as peace between the long-feuding Israelis and Palestinians, Iran's suspected efforts to build a nuclear bomb, rising Taliban extremism in Pakistan and a destination for some 100 Yemeni detainees now in the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp.
Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser to Obama, could not immediately say whether the president's requests were successful after meetings between the two leaders and their delegations that stretched over nearly four hours.
Abdullah showered Obama with compliments in the welcoming ceremonies and presented him with the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, a large medallion with a thick gold chain that is the kingdom's highest honor. "Those are only given to the very few friends of the king, and you are certainly one of those," Abdullah said.
"Goodness gracious," Obama said as an aide approached with the striking necklace. "That's something there." He said: "I consider the king's friendship a great blessing, and I am very appreciative that he would bestow this honor on me during this visit."
Obama had pledged during his presidential campaign to deliver a major address from an Islamic capital within 100 days of becoming president. He did so with a speech to the parliament in Turkey, a secular but overwhelmingly Muslim nation. The White House says his speech in Cairo, a center of Islamic thought and culture, is the one he had in mind in making that promise, and set high expectations for it.
Al-Qaida countered Obama's outreach. Osama bin Laden released an audio tape accusing Obama of inflaming hatred toward the U.S. by ordering Pakistan to crack down on militants in Swat Valley and block Islamic law there. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, said "farcical visits or elegant words" in Cairo can't disguise "bloody messages" the U.S. sends to Muslims with its prosecution of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The message from bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind-in-hiding who was born in Saudi Arabia and directed the 2001 attacks that involved 15 hijackers from the desert monarchy, was broadcast by Al-Jazeera Television almost exactly as Obama's plane touched down in Riyadh.
"Americans have seen these types of threats before," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in response. "This is much more an effort to try to upstage."
Aides spared no effort to ensure Obama's speech Thursday reaches a vast Muslim audience.
A special State Department Web site lets people everywhere register to receive and reply to speech highlights; Obama's remarks were to be played live on the White House Web site and translated into 13 languages; and excerpts were being distributed not only on the White House's dedicated YouTube page but also on special-event links on social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, complete with live chatting opportunities.
In his speech, Obama does not intend to make new policy — but to frame it differently. By stressing both U.S. respect for Muslims and the need for all sides, including Washington, to make changes, the president hopes to start setting relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world down a more constructive path even while some disagreements persist.
"There's been a breach, an undeniable breach, between America and the Islamic world," senior adviser David Axelrod said.
"That breach has been years in the making. It's not going to be reversed with one speech — it's not going to be reversed, perhaps, in one administration. But the president is a strong believer in open, honest dialogue."
The centerpiece of the speech is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a driving force behind Muslim anger worldwide. Obama was prepared to discuss in some detail what needs to be done to resolve it," though by urging all sides to meet obligations already agreed upon, Rhodes said.
That includes calling for a full halt to all growth in Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, the subject of a striking rift between the U.S. and Israel in recent days. It also includes telling Palestinians that anti-Israel rhetoric, and the violence it spawns, does not benefit their daily lives. Obama also was to call on his hosts, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as other Arab nations, to put actual money behind their rhetorical support for the struggling Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas. Obama also wants to persuade Arab allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, to make conciliatory diplomatic moves toward Israel.
The president also was to explain the U.S. goals in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.
And he wasn't going to shy away from a hot topic — the fact that he was to speak from Egypt, which has been under the iron rule of President Hosni Mubarak for nearly 30 years.
Obama planned to salute Egypt's historically positive role in Mideast peacemaking, while also talking about the need for a better democratic and human rights model. In one gesture, organizers made sure that members of Egypt's main opposition movement, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, would be in the audience at Cairo University.
The president also planned to talk "with a sense of candor" about U.S. policy that has largely shunned armed militias that have won elections in the Arab world, such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Rhodes said.

How to Spend Like a Frugal Millionaire

Saving thousands while still spending.

Millionaires make up just 2 percent of the population. They get a bad rap during recessions for being wasteful with their money and are frequently used as examples of excess. It's the millionaires that you don't see that you can learn from in times like these. I call them the frugal millionaires and interviewed 70 of them to uncover ways we can all be smarter with money.
Nearly 70 percent of the economy is based on consumer spending. To keep the economy going we need to keep spending but not waste money in the process. This is where the frugal millionaires come in. They've been smart with their money all along and haven't lost it all and had to remake it. These are the kind of people you want to learn from when it comes to spending your money.

Spending philosophy.
Frugal millionaires are unique thinkers when it comes to spending money:

1) they can easily delay their need for gratification when purchasing;

2) they are resourceful in getting what they want by carefully timing their consumer purchases;

3) they make living below their means painless;

4) they don't like wasting anything (especially money);

5) their sense of "self-entitlement" is highly minimized: and

6) spending is OK with them...depending on what they are buying (think: appreciating vs. depreciating assets).

Buying tips.
These millionaires keep more money than they spend, that's why they are rich. Their tactics work for them so they'll work even better for you. Key Point: They don't view shopping as a sport. They shop efficiently and spend their time doing more important things with their lives. Here are their tips that will help you save while spending:

Cars:

Buy used (or off lease) fuel-efficient cars, often with "certified pre-owned" warranties. This warranty can be better than a new car, plus the initial depreciation hit is avoided. Drive the car for a long time and never lease it.

Eating Out:

Bring half of a meal home to eat later (this also saves the waistline). Eat at happy hours. Bring wine from home and skip dessert. Value food quality over expensive ambience.

Eating In:

Eat better and less expensively by cooking at home. Make it a friends and family event. Get your kids involved. Bonus: You can have that extra drink without worrying about getting busted for driving under the influence. Also: buy day-old bread at the best bakery in town and freeze it. Eat oatmeal, because it's the most cost-effective breakfast food. Get a supermarket "club card" and buy food on special. Play the game of trying to see how much of a discount can be saved off the total food bill.

Clothes:

When you buy something new donate something used to charity. Buy traditional clothes, but wait for the off-season to acquire them. Go for high quality - not high price. Buy vintage clothing and avoid logo clothing and keep people guessing who the designer might be. Hint: There shouldn't be one!

Consumer Electronics:

Buy low-end gear that has the basic functionality of the more expensive stuff. Don't be the first to buy new technology. Wait at least one lifecycle so the bugs are worked out. Buy refurbished electronics whenever possible.

Computers:

Buy more mainstream computers with proven technology. Select higher capacity hard drives, a decent amount of RAM (the memory that the program runs in) and a cost effective processor. Super fast doesn't always equal super good...unless you are building airplanes or bridges. Laptops are a good compromise between desktops and netbooks. Don't go through the pain of upgrading operating systems on existing computers, it's not time efficient and you will probably go insane trying.

Going green:

Being green and frugal go hand-in-hand. Yet frugal millionaires don't readily fall for the trendy green hype machine. They typically buy green if it helps the environment and lowers their costs. They look at the timeframe when a product can pay for itself. They do use compact fluorescent lighting, turn off lights and equipment that isn't being used, monitor AC and heat usage (with programmable thermostats), drive efficiently, live in "right-sized" homes and turn off the water when they aren't brushing their teeth or washing dishes. Because they have trained themselves to not waste money they won't waste anything else either. They get into good habits and keep them going. You can, too.

Storm Katrina

The Obama administration will announce plans today to virtually give away roughly 1,800 mobile homes to 3,400 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who are living in government-provided housing along the Gulf Coast, officials said.
The administration also will make available $50 million in rental vouchers to income-eligible trailer occupants who move to targeted housing projects, and take over from Louisiana the job of helping residents find permanent homes, said a senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the formal announcement.

"We knew we needed to bring this program to a close," the official said. "We also want to ensure a humane and secure transition for all of them."
The sale option comes weeks after the trailer program formally ended May 1, and after Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said they could begin officially referring cases for eviction June 1.

FEMA typically provides disaster aid for 18 months. It extended assistance for 45 months since Katrina hit in August 2005.
About 1,150 families in FEMA housing live in units the agency classifies as mobile homes and park models, which will be offered for sale at $5 and $1, respectively. FEMA expects to free up an additional 600 to 700 units from its inventory to donate through state and local governments and nonprofit groups, the administration official said. Individuals who previously bought units will be offered refunds.

Its unclear what impact the changes will have. Many local jurisdictions refuse to alter zoning ordinances to allow small manufactured homes.
Thousands of existing vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that are becoming available in Louisiana are going unused. Some trailer occupants await promised grants to rebuild their homes or do not want to leave their home sites. Others do not want to move to HUD-subsidized housing or to pay more rent. Some occupants are so sick, elderly or dysfunctional that they require more help to find housing, officials said.
Spokesman Clark Stevens said FEMA is committed to working with families case by case, adding that 139,000 other households have cycled out of the trailer program. "No one will face evictions from a temporary unit while these new measures are implemented," he said in a written statement.

Brian Deese

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.
But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended.

“There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”
But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention.
While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit, it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options.

A month ago, when the administration was divided over whether to support Fiat’s bid to take over much of Chrysler, it was Mr. Deese who spoke out strongly against simply letting the company go into liquidation, according to several people who were present for the debate.
“Brian grasps both the economics and the politics about as quickly as I’ve seen anyone do this,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the head of the National Economic Council who is not known for being patient whenever he believes an analysis is sub-par — or disagrees with his own. “And there he was in the Roosevelt Room, speaking up vigorously to make the point that the costs we were going to incur giving Fiat a chance were no greater than some of the hidden costs of liquidation.”

Mr. Deese was not the only one favoring the Fiat deal, but his lengthy memorandum on how liquidation would increase Medicaid costs, unemployment insurance and municipal bankruptcies ended the debate. The administration supported the deal, and it seems likely to become a reality on Monday, if a federal judge handling the high-speed bankruptcy proceeding approves the sale of Chrysler’s best assets to the Italian carmaker.
Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.
He lives a dual life these days. He starts the day at a desk wedged just outside of Mr. Summers’s office, where he can hear what young members of the economic team have come to know as “the Summers bellow.” From there, he can make it quickly to the press office to help devise explanations for why taxpayers are spending more than $50 billion on what polls show is a very unpopular bailout of the auto industry.

Several times a day he speed-walks to Treasury, taking a shortcut through the tunnel under the colonnade, near the kitchens. The other day he talked about how sharply perceptions of the industry’s future changed after Mr. Obama’s election.
“At the first meeting with Rick Wagoner,” he said, referring to G.M.’s recently deposed chief executive, “they were in a very different place. He said publicly that bankruptcy was not a viable option. It’s been a long process getting everyone to look at the options differently.”
In fact, from before Inauguration Day, few in Mr. Obama’s circle saw any other choice. Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues. But it took the support of Mr. Rattner and Ron Bloom, senior advisers to the task force charged with restructuring the automobile industry, to help turn Mr. Deese’s positions into policy.

“The president’s instruction to us was that we had to come up with a solution that would work on a commercial basis, that didn’t involve indefinite federal financing,” Mr. Deese said. “But we didn’t want liquidation, which would have even worse effects. So the question was how do you design a very substantial restructuring, and do it fast.”

Mr. Deese’s route to the auto table at the White House was anything but a straight line. He is the son of a political science professor at Boston College (his father) and an engineer who works in renewable energy (his mother). He grew up in the Boston suburb of Belmont and attended Middlebury College in Vermont. He went to Washington to work on aid issues and was quickly hired by Nancy Birdsall, a widely respected authority on the effectiveness of international aid and the founder of the Center for Global Development.

But he wanted to learn domestic issues as well, and soon ended up working as an assistant for Gene Sperling, who 17 years ago in the Clinton White House played a similar role as economic policy prodigy. Eventually, Mr. Deese headed to Yale for his law degree. But his e-mail box was constantly filled with messages from friends in Washington who were signing up to work for the Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns. Mr. Deese chose Senator Clinton’s.

“He was pretty quickly functioning as the top economic policy staffer through her campaign,” Mr. Sperling said. “He could blend the policy needs and the political needs pretty seamlessly.” On the day that the Clinton campaign ended, Mr. Deese left her concession speech and received a message on his BlackBerry from a friend in the Obama campaign urging him to sign on immediately to Mr. Obama’s team.

He resumed his policy work there, and found himself stuck in Chicago — unable to fly to Washington with his dog — as the economic crisis deepened. Finally, one night, he decided to get into his car with his dog and just started driving back to Washington. Tired, he pulled over to catch some sleep in the car.

“I slept in the parking lot of the G. M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio,” he recalled. The giant plant, opened during G.M.’s heyday in the mid-1960s, is where the Pontiac G5 is produced. Under the plan Mr. Deese worked on when he arrived in Washington, Pontiac will disappear.
“I guess that was prophetic,” he said, shaking his head.

Obama, Can he Win Muslim Hearts and Minds?

The scene: a packed auditorium at a major Cairo university. The speaker: a leader in the U.S. government, with a compelling personal story. The message: American foreign policy is "idealistic." The world should embrace the "challenge of listening," while seeking "a new standard of justice for our time." The impact: not much.
On June 20, 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered an ode to liberty, democracy and a bright future in U.S.-Arab cooperation to a group of students in Cairo. As an effort to sell Arabs on American foreign policy, it was a measurable failure: three years later, a piddling 6% of Egyptians told Gallup pollsters that they approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders.
Now, President Barack Obama is set to attempt a makeover. He will appear at a different Cairo university on Thursday to deliver a speech to the entire Muslim world. Not unlike Condi Rice, Obama is expected to offer an idealistic vision of the future, proclaiming a common purpose as allies who can celebrate their differences and embrace their similarities. But Obama's team hopes to succeed where Rice failed, in changing the deteriorating dynamic between the U.S. and the Muslim world. (See pictures of Islam's soft revolution.)
In appealing to the Muslim world, Obama starts with an advantage over Rice: his biography, which ranges from his international family, which included Muslim members, to his opposition to the Iraq War. As early as April 2007, candidate Obama had ventured that his unique story "allows me to say things to them that other Presidents might not be able to say."
Even before he speaks, Obama has registered considerably higher approval ratings in Muslim countries than his predecessors. A recent Gallup poll found 1 in 4 Egyptians now approves of the U.S. leadership. Governments in the Arab world have welcomed the new tone adopted by Obama in his early outreach efforts. "They are discussing issues, showing their concerns, but they also listen," Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit said of Obama's team during a recent visit to Washington. "I think they are very much different from the Bush Administration." Last month, Jordan's King Abdullah II enthused on Meet the Press, "In the Middle East, this President provides hope ... There's a collective hope that there is a new America."
When it comes to policy, however, Obama's message becomes a tougher sell. He may have sought to distinguish his Administration from its predecessor on issues ranging from treatment of detainees to an exit date in Iraq and a renewed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace, including a tougher line against Israel's expansion of West Bank settlements. But many of the policies that most aggrieve the Muslim world remain intact, and any changes will be slow in coming. Obama arrives in Cairo as the commander of a military whose deployment in Iraq continues, while its engagement in Afghanistan is steadily growing. Civilian death from U.S. air strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to be a problem, while the situation in the Palestinian territories has deteriorated over the past year.
No matter how well liked Obama is personally, substantial differences over a raft of U.S. policies will not be easily papered over. "Our policies are a reflection of our interests and our alliances and while they may change moderately from administration to administration, the underlying interests are simply not allied with the policies that many Muslims around the world would like to see the United States pursue," explained Jon Alterman, a former State Department adviser, at a recent forum in Washington. "We're going to have to agree to disagree, and that's the first task for the President - to frame U.S. policy in a way that takes some of the passion out of the widespread hostility for the United States."
Alterman's advice dovetails with Obama's diplomatic approach on previous trips to Latin America and Europe, where rather than try to paper over differences, he focused on changing the tone of the discussion. "Where there is resistance to a certain set of policies that we are pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they're cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem," Obama said in Trinidad.
Obama appears to believe that many of the world's most intractable problems can be alleviated by better communication and understanding. Similar themes are likely to be echoed in his Cairo speech: a call for dialogue and understanding that flows both ways, and which the Bush Administration, with its tin-eared visions of global transformation, sorely lacked. When Rice spoke in Egypt in 2005, she cast the democratic project as an American success story that would soon spread through the Arab world. "The day is coming when the promise of a fully free and democratic world, once thought impossible, will also seem inevitable," Rice promised the students.
Rice's historical prescription fell mostly on deaf ears. When Obama stands before his own crowd of Egyptian students, he is likely to avoid her mistakes, and instead emphasize the need for a respectful conversation.