miercuri, 29 februarie 2012

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 01:00 PM PST

One of my guilty pleasures is looking through the search query reports (SQR) of an AdWords campaign for the cringe-worthy search queries that led to someone clicking on a PPC ad. Really Google? You felt that goat transportation cost was related to my keyword of freight costs? Or that a babe cam search should show my ad for digital camera? Sadly, these matches and worse can happen if you lack proper negative keywords.

This screenshot shows what happens when your campaign does not have enough negative keywords. It is just as important to have negative keywords as it is to have regular keywords.

People really DO click on anything and everything, including these off-target ads, and the advertiser gets charged for that click.
Most people are smart enough to not click, so the advertiser isn't directly charged. They just get hit when it comes to their quality score (affecting your cost per click and ad ranking) , which is based in part on your clickthrough rate (CTR). If nobody is clicking on your ads, Google is apt to lower your quality score and increase your cost per click.

I'm going to help you brainstorm and greatly expand your negative keyword list. Evan Steed, co-founder of Meathead Movers, has been brave enough to let me look at his AdWords account and share some real-life examples with you here (and in my February 29th SMX presentation) from an account with no negative keywords. Meathead Movers is based near my hometown on the central coast of California, and they do some awesome things in the community, including moving women out of domestic violence situations for free. That's always impressed me, and I'm glad to be able to give something back to a local business.

Start with the Search Query Report

Download your search query report, and review what people actually entered to trigger your ad. You'll find some good candidates for negative keywords here, and you can start developing organized negative keyword lists.

Go Beyond the Search Query Report to Find Negative Keywords

I use the search query report for gathering negatives I had missed, and to find ideas for entire classes of negative keywords. This all started when I found "honeymoon with a stranger" in a search query report, found out it was a movie title, and got the idea to search IMDB for other titles containing honeymoon. Suddenly I had "zombie honeymoon", "honeymoon for three", and a large variety of other keywords in my negative keyword list. I saw lots of honeymoon resort ads showing for these queries, and realized not too many people were using this method, and started thinking of other ways to find negative keywords.

I prefer to have a good negative keyword strategy in place before I even launch a campaign, to prevent some of these stupid clicks from ever happening. Here are some of the resources I use.

The first resource is an engaged brain. Words often have many meanings, and this can cause you trouble. If you are marketing only to the United States, it's tempting to dump a list of all countries except the US into a list, but remember that Georgia is both a US State and a country. Also, make sure that you don't use the same word in your campaign as in your negative keyword list. Microsoft AdCenter has a nice feature that will alert you to these keyword conflicts.

Existing Negative Keyword Lists

Review existing negative keyword lists that other people have generated. If you do nothing else, review these lists. You'll find near-universal keywords (like ebay, craigslist, sex, porn), keywords to exclude job seekers (resume, position, salary, job), keywords to exclude information seekers (how to, about, what is, how do I), and many more.

Engine Ready Negative Keyword List
200+ Negative Keywords to Consider for B2B PPC
Plastic Surgery negative keyword list. This list has a lot of celebrity names, which can be useful in all types of campaigns. Meathead gets queries about when did a certain actor move to Los Angeles, for example.
150+ Negative Keywords for Software Selling AdWords Campaigns
Not explicitly a negative keyword list, but a collection of banned word lists for forums. You probably don't want your ads showing for these types of NSFW words.

Geography Lists

This is helpful for excluding people searching outside of your area of service. Even though Meathead geo-targeted their ads to appear only where they offered service (they only offer moving services in the state of California), people are looking to move from California to another state. Lists like this are also helpful in building your regular keyword list, as you can easily find all of the counties in a state, and all of the cities in each county, and develop targeted ad groups for your product or service.

Movie Lists

I use IMDB's title search and check Feature Film, TV Movie, and TV series to get the most common titles without being bogged down in every single TV episode title ever made.

In the display options at the bottom, I choose to display compact and sort by number of votes descending. This gets you a list of the most popular movies at the top of the list, and you can easily copy the titles that make sense for your list.

Music Lists

Leo's Lyrics does a good job of listing song names in a compact format. In this example, with so many titles being just "move", I'd consider adding some artist names to a keyword list, along with the words lyrics, artist, and album.

Book Lists

For books, I haven't found a great way to get just the most popular titles in an easy manner. I'd just scan Amazon and Barnes and Nobel online and sort by popular items.

Wikipedia Lists

Wikipedia is a great source of lists on nearly any topic. Search "list of [keyword] wikipedia" and you'll often get a great list, along with references for other sites that have similar lists. If you are an animal shelter that only has cats and dogs, you might go for the list of domesticated animals in Wikipedia so your ad doesn't show for people wanting to adopt a pig (and you might want to head to their list of cat and dog breeds as well when you develop your regular keywords).

Government Lists

Governments are great for more than just good backlinks. For regulated industries, they often have lists of approved companies in that industry. You can use that for a negative list in your branding campaign, and as a keyword list in a campaign targeting people searching for your competitors. Another handy feature is that there is often an export option in these lists to download in a text or CSV format.

Top Lists

Forbes and other sites have endless top 10 and top 100 lists of all kinds of subjects. In Evan's case, I'd use some of the celebrity names as negatives to block his ads from being shown when someone searches for information on a celebrity moving to Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or another of his target cities.

Affiliate Lists

Some affiliate programs have detailed lists of negative keywords that can provide inspiration. If I were advertising for something related to Whitney Houston, I'd add the list of JC Whitney (an auto parts retailer) variations to my negatives list.

Paulson Management Group and Link Connector have several lists of negative keywords for specific campaigns.

Finding alternate meanings

You don't want your financial institution showing up for queries for blood banks and food banks. How to think of some of those other meanings for words ahead of time?

Wikipedia Disambiguation pages

Google Queries

Meathead has a new service for packing in addition to just moving. They knows they need to exclude Green Bay Packers, but wants ideas of what other meanings packing can have beyond the moving industry. Searching for [packers -"green bay" -moving -movers] yields a company in their service area called Island Packers, agriculture packing, and a restaurant called Packers.

Vocabulary lists

Meathead had a query for moving furniture. They don't focus on rearranging furniture, so needs to have an exclusion list for their campaigns that focuses on furniture. An ESL vocabulary list provides a nice text-based list for easy copying and brainstorming.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers provides some natural-language ideas for negative keywords that you might have otherwise missed.

Keyword Research Tools

Soovle shows suggestions from any number of engines (you can choose) for your keyword. It's another way of quickly spotting off-topic trends.

Übersuggest scrapes Google Suggest and other suggestion services to come up with lists.

Short Words

If you have a short keyword or an acronym, check to see if it's also an acronym for something else, a stock symbol, or an airline code.

Link Builder and SEOs

You also don't want to show your ad to people looking to build links related to your keywords. Rand's post has a number of phrases you'd want to exclude, like "submit url" "add site" "suggest a url".

Bonus Round! Tools to Harvest Data

Not every site is going to have a nice plain text list ready for you to copy and paste. I've found a couple of tools that are helpful for harvesting data and making it easily usable.

Dafizilla Table2Clipboard lets you easily paste data with its formatting to Excel, where you can then manipulate the data for just the information you need.

Outwit Hub offers a variety of ways for you to extract data from web pages. This tool deserves several blog posts of its own on its overall uses for SEO, not just in collecting keywords.

Wrapping Up

Whew! There's a lot to think about when finding negative keywords. Is it all worth it? Check out an interview with Ken Jurina with case studies where using tens of thousands of negative keywords has helped businesses save 5% to 40% on their PPC.

What are some of your favorite ways to find negative keywords, and what are some of the worst search queries you have seen?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

February Linkscape Update: 66 Billion URLs

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 07:54 AM PST

Posted by randfish

After some wrestling with Amazon's EC2 and the tragic loss of many hard disks therein, we've finally finished processing and have released the latest Linkscape update (previously scheduled for Feb. 14). This new index is, once again, quite large in comparison to our prior indices, and contains a mix of crawl data going back to the end of last year. In fact, this is technically our largest index ever!

Here are the latest stats:

65,997,728,692 (66 billion) URLs
601,062,802 (601 million) Subdomains
140,281,592 (140 million) Root Domains
739,867,470,316 (740 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
- 2.21% of all links found were nofollowed
- 57.91% of nofollowed links are internal
- 42.09% are external
Rel Canonical - 11.11% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page in this index has 71.88 links on it
- 60.98 internal links on average
- 10.90 external links on average

We also ran our correlation metrics against a large set of Google search results and saw very similar data to last round. Here are the latest numbers using mean Spearman correlation coefficients (on a scale of 0 to 1, higher is better):

Domain Authority: 0.26
Page Authority: 0.37
MozRank of a URL: 0.19
# of Linking Root Domains to a URL: 0.26

Our evaluation process also check the comprehensiveness of our crawl data against a large set of Google results, and in this index, we've got link data on 82.09% of SERPs. This is slightly down from last month's 82.37%, which we suspect is a result of the late release. Crawl data ages with the web, and new URLs make their way into the SERPs, too. To help visualize our crawl, here's a histogram of when the URLs in this index were seen by Linkscape:

Crawl Historgram for Feb. 28th Index

We always "replace" any older URLs with newer content if we recrawl or see new links to a page, so while there may be some "old, crusty" stuff from December, the vast majority of this index was crawled in mid-to-late January.

In the next few weeks, we're working on a new, experimental index that may be massively larger (2-3X) this one, and closer to what's in Google's main index at scale. This is very exciting for us and we hope, for all of you who use Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, the Linkscape API and tools from our partners like Hubspot, Conductor, Brightedge and our newest API partner, Ginza Metrics (check out some cool stuff they're doing with Moz data here and in the screenshot below).

Ginza Metrics Backlink Tool
Ginza Metrics' New Backlink Analysis Tool

If you're interested in chatting about using Moz data in products, drop Andrew Dumont a line and he'll be happy to help. And, as always, feedback on this latest index, our tools or metrics are greatly appreciated.

How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 05:31 AM PST

Posted by wilreynolds

This past week I gave the keynote presentation at Searchfest in Portland and I hit on a few themes that seemed to resonate with the audience, and with Rand. So I wanted to share them here. It’s what I have been passionate about trumpeting for some time now. And it’s that the "Good Guys" of SEO, the people who do the things like building great content and community are being made into two faced liars every day by Google. Every day we tell our clients to build good content and Google will reward them we know that it’s a white lie most times, because the other side of that coin is and ALSO build anchor text links so you can actually rank well, because community building is not enough of a factor yet.

Just examine for a second this backlink profile to a sub page for a competitor to one of our clients:

What does a backlink profile like that say to you?

I think the above image from one of my slides illustrates this best...I showed how a client of mine who is getting killed by a website who is just targeting tons of anchor text only links on GARBAGE sites and is KILLING my client in the rankings. This is a truth we are all used to by this point that is nothing new. But let’s take a look at Google's rules. Go to that URL and do a Control F for the word "link" - you will find three instances. None of them talk about link building as a tactic to help you rank better, just to be leery of having to link to an SEO company. While that is a good tip, there is not one tip that talks about building links as important, HUH?

A little more searching and I found this resource.

Notice here Google says: The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating.

GREAT! They've admitted that the number of links, the quality of links, and relevance count - sweet!

But if you look at that screen grab above, do you see relevance, do you see quality? I don't, I see quantity and anchor text.

Later on Google says:

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

Hmmm, let's see how this plays out. But before we do, do me a favor:

Take five seconds to think of the SEO companies that you respect most, whom you consider to be constantly creating unique relevant content in this industry and whom you think of as thought leaders, and participants in the community.

5.....4...3....2...1..

Ok, now go type in SEO company, SEO consultant, or SEO agency on Google (unpersonalized) and report back on whether or not you saw one of those companies / consultants / agencies you hold in high regard anywhere in the top 10.

Let's take three companies with active blogs, lots of social engagement, and tons of high quality links and compare them to sites in the top 15. The companies I picked were SEOGadget, Distilled, and SEER Interactive (us) all come to mind VERY quickly. I am not mentioning by names of the companies I picked who where ranking top 15, but let's examine some differences

Looking at our site stats according to SEOmoz

SEOGadget has over 50 pages with 10 or more linking root domains
Distilled has over 100 pages with 10 or more linking root domains
SEER has over 30 pages with 10 or more linking root domains (we got some work to do!)

The "other guys" never had more than two, yet they are killing us on the rankings.

I knew putting this data in a chart form would illustrate this best:

First I looked at RSS subscribers, by going to Google Reader and searching for their blogs like this:

Wow that description sucks, I gotta work on that...anyway...

Half-Truth #1 - If people subscribe to my blog, that will show Google that I am writing good content and people want it, and that should help me rank, right?

Reality: Not even close pal. The four mystery SEO companies have seven subscribers to their blog combined.

Half-Truth #2 - If I engage with people on Twitter and social channels - that will show Google that I am engaging my audience, and I'll be rewarded with rankings, right?

Reality: Nope. Connecting with people on social can get you links in many ways but if you did that well and didn't get anchor text, you'd probably fail.

Half-Truth #3 - If I engage with people on Google+ and get added to circles, Google can DEFINITELY see that - that will show Google that I am engaging my audience, and I'll be rewarded with rankings, right?

Lastly, I looked at Google Circles (obviously you can buy Google accounts to add you to circles, but I am hoping Google can see more engagement not just counts), here is what I got:

Reality: Not yet. But I sure hope it comes.

What message does this send to SEO providers?

OK Big G - We are all playing by your rules, building community, working our tails off on social, and getting our butts kicked, why are you recommending I tell clients to do those things if they aren't helping us?

It's sad to think that if I wanted to rank well for keywords in my industry, writing this post, getting comments on it, and engaging in the community by answering questions counts LESS to help us rank well for targeted competitive keywords than me getting 20 anchor text links on a tag page? A freakin tag page! So when I spend time doing the HARD work, I get fewer rankings than those who take the lazy way out?

Is that really the message Google wants to send?

Think about the daily high wire act every one of us undertakes, too much anchor text – you win temporarily and risk getting banned too little you risk your reputation as an SEO company and are likely to be branded a snake oil salesman.

But let's also think in the same way we consult with clients, we tell our clients every day that people "Google things" and when they perform searches, they make sometimes make purchasing decisions, based on those searches, right?

So when people search Google for "SEO company" and they find this smut outranking the goog guys of SEO...Google is perpetuating the cycle they want to end.

They are "letting" the bad guys rank, which only gets them more clients, and pollutes more of the web with crappy sites that have over aggressively linked. Let's also act like noobs for a second - if a client is picking between SEO Gadget or Outspoken Media and one of the companies who ranks on page 1, then guess what they might say to Richard or Rhea? The prospective clients may say that they don't have the social proof, which would be true. It's logical to say, well Google MUST like what company X is doing because why else would they reward them with such high rankings?

People don't think about "algorithmic weights" and "over optimization" they believe in what they can see, and what they SEE is that the company ranking #1 or #2 has the social proof that maybe SEER or Distilled does not when it comes to the rankings.

C'mon Google! You are perpetuating the problem.

REAL SEOs wish that we NEVER had to worry about anchor text, we are the people who care about this industry and want to do the GOOD work. The real question is why does Google make us into liars everyday in the eyes of our potential clients? If we follow Google's rules to a T, we will likely never get the rankings, and if we don't get the rankings, we are branded as snake oil salesman.

Personally I can't wait for Google+ to start impacting results more. I want to see our TRUE industry leaders rankings to FINALLY be rewarded by our hard work in the community and I bet a LOT of others are with me!

If you are saying Wil help me get anchor text in a better way, then I want to give you a few ideas on how to get your targeted anchor text:

Include the keyword in your domain name, so consider that when registering domains or microsites
Include the keywords in your digital assets, so whether it is a scholarship or a whitepaper, just the "suggestion" of titling a scholarship or whitepaper with your target keywords will help
Link internally with targeted anchor text in blog posts, when people copy your posts or scrape them, they will pull in your anchor text and you'll have a chance to get links

Hoping the good guys get rewarded soon!! Or we'll all be selling snake oil!

"The American Auto Industry is Back"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012

"The American Auto Industry is Back"

Yesterday, President Obama spoke at the United Auto Workers Annual Conference to discuss the success of the American auto industry.

After nearly collapsing three years ago, our nation's big three automakers are turning profits and opening new factories. The industry has added more than 200,000 jobs. And those workers aren't just building cars again -- they are building better, more fuel efficient automobiles that help Americans save money at the pump every time they fill up:

Three years later, the American auto industry is back. GM is back on top as the number-one automaker in the world -- with the highest profits in its 100-year history. Chrysler is growing faster in America than any other car company. Ford is investing billions in American plants, American factories, and plans to bring thousands of jobs back to America.

See the President’s full remarks, and find out more about the cars Detroit is building.

Seth's Blog : Leap year meditation

Leap year meditation

Once in four years, just once, perhaps we could:

Forgive, forget, relax, care, stand out, speak up, contribute, embrace, create, make a ruckus, give credit, skip, smile, speak truth and refuse to compromise--more than we usually do. Pick just one or two and start there.

Hey, it's just one day.

Careful, though, it might become a habit.

• Email to a friend •

Seth's Blog : Fade or gain?

Fade or gain?

An idea introduced to a population almost always fades away.

Send 1,000 people a coupon, and perhaps 20 use it. To get more usage, you either need to ping the audience again or find a new group of people.

This explains why marketers are always in search of new people to reach, and also insist on frequency of messaging--it maximizes the percentage of the group that is reached and minimizes the fade of the idea.

There's an important exception to the rule of fading ideas, though. Every once in a while, an idea starts with a small population and actually reaches new users, people outside the population. Instead of the idea fading, it gains traction as it spreads. Imagine a cold getting started at an elementary school but soon the cold infects parents, teachers and the co-workers of those parents...

Eventually, even these viral ideas fade away (if they didn't, then every single person on Earth would know about LOLcats and be into slacklining.) But before that happens, an idea spread by an excited tribe can have huge reach, particularly if it's digital.

One mathematical cause of this viral spread is the outlier who becomes quite active in sharing the idea. This superuser might tell a hundred or a thousand or more other people about it. Using his own pulpit, reaching his own tribe, the superuser raises the average (the R0 value) to over one, causing the idea to continue spreading.

Monday's publication of Stop Stealing Dreams has exceeded my expecations for feedback and impact. While a typical bestseller might sell 2,000 copies a day, this free manifesto was downloaded and shared more than 60,000 times since yesterday. I've gotten comments from around the world, and it's clear that the manifesto has struck a chord--and that's exactly why I wrote it. (Translations in two countries are already underway... I'll post them on the download page as they become available).

And now the moment of truth--will the people who read it, share it? Will they take the file and email it to 5 or 50 of their peers? Will they use it to start a conversation among parents or teachers or, best of all, students?

Thanks.

• Email to a friend •

marți, 28 februarie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Sharpen the Mower: Spain Needs Triple the Budget Cuts and Tax Hikes to Meet EMU Imposed Budget Targets
Damn the Voters, Full Bailouts (and Existing Policies) Ahead
Referendum on a Person or on a Treaty?

Sharpen the Mower: Spain Needs Triple the Budget Cuts and Tax Hikes to Meet EMU Imposed Budget Targets

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 03:35 PM PST

Conditions in Spain have deteriorated at a rapid pace. As little as a few months ago the Spanish economy was foolishly projected to grow at .7%. Now it expected to contract 1%.

Likewise, Spain's budget deficit was supposed to shrink to 6% in 2011 and 4.4% in 2012. Instead it rose to 8.51 percent in 2011, up from a revised estimate of 8.2% which was up from a revised estimate of 6.5%.

I think you can see a clear pattern here and as a result, the EU Commission Pressures Spain for Explanations.

Spain must explain soon to the European Commission why its 2011 budget deficit was substantially higher than expected and deliver clear future budget plans, the Commission said on Tuesday.

Spain's 2011 budget deficit came to 8.51 percent of GDP, the finance minister said on Monday, up from early estimates of 8.2 percent and far above forecasts from the Commission for something nearer 6.5 percent.

"We need to understand the causes of this significant slippage," Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly told a regular briefing in Brussels.

Spain will have to come up with more than 40 billion euros in savings to meet that target, implying spending cuts that most economists see as impossible given that the economy is already slipping into recession and the jobless rate is the highest in the European Union at 23 percent.

Bailly said Spain also needed to deliver its 2012 budget estimates in the coming weeks, not at the end of March, saying the task in hand was so great it could not be delayed.

Sharpen the Mower

My friend Bran notes that Spain now needs to come up with another 30 billion Euros in budget cuts on top of the 15 billion promised. Moreover, those cuts need to be spread out over 9 months, not 12.

This set of facts prompted the Spanish Gurus Blog to write Sharpen the mower. Spain's deficit exceeds 90 billion euros.

Specifically, Spain's budget deficit is 91.3 billion euros, 8.51% of GDP. So it should not take a wizard to realize the simple mathematical fact that team Rajoy has not yet begun with budget cuts and tax increases, if by 2012 Spain is to meet the 4.4% of GDP deficit target set by creditors.

The measures announced in December were only an appetizer. Instead of sharpening the blades, I think a good lawn mower would be more practical.

The announced cuts and tax increases of last December (income tax, capital gains), are expected to generate about 14,900 million.

To meet the objective of a 4.4% deficit, in 2012 the government deficit should not exceed 46,500 million euros.

To do so requires a nearly 30 billion euros hole to be filled, with the aggravating circumstance that it's now March and those 30 billion euros need to come in the next 9 months.

This figure is double the cuts and tax increases approved last December. So Rajoy has quite imagination if he expects this to happen.

I modified that translation substantially, but I am pretty sure I have it accurate. Spain's unemployment is already 22.9%. What pray tell would another 30 billion in cuts or tax hikes do to that number?

By the way, to go from 15 to 45 is tripling (not doubling) the tax hikes and cuts.

Many structural reforms pertaining to jobs and work rules are quite necessary. The accompanying tax hikes are not and the Spanish economy is poised to implode as a result.

Not to worry, EU commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker promises to "examine the situation with calm and serenity".

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn the Voters, Full Bailouts (and Existing Policies) Ahead

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 10:48 AM PST

What's "too complicated" for France is not "too complicated" for Ireland. The Financial Times reports Ireland calls vote on European treaty

Dublin will hold a referendum on the eurozone fiscal treaty, plunging Europe into months of uncertainty and potentially placing a question mark over Ireland's future membership of the euro.

Enda Kenny, Ireland's prime minister, said on Tuesday that the government had decided to hold a referendum following advice supplied by the attorney-general that "on balance" the Irish constitution required the treaty to be put to a vote.

He said he would sign the treaty at a European Union summit on Friday and within a matter of weeks the government would organise a referendum commission – an independent body appointed to explain the subject matter of a referendum to the public.

An opinion poll last month found 73 per cent of the public felt a vote should be held on the treaty, which would tighten budget rules for the 17 countries sharing the euro. Some 40 per cent of the 1,000 people questioned in the Sunday Business Post/Red C poll said they would support the treaty, 36 per cent were opposed and 24 per cent were undecided.

The government's decision to hold a referendum follows a threat by the Sinn Féin party to challenge in the Supreme Court any decision not to give the public a say. Irish officials have privately acknowledged it would be more difficult to win a referendum if the government was seen to have been forced to hold a vote by the Irish courts.

The Irish public have twice rejected EU treaties, only to approve them in second referendums. In 2008 the Lisbon treaty was rejected only to be approved in a second referendum held 18 months later.

Logic of Signing a Treaty then Voting on It

In the real world it makes no sense to sign a treaty then vote on it. In the political world it is a way of telling voters their wishes do not matter, that politicians will hold a referendum as many times as it takes to get a treaty signed.

In a massive landslide, Irish voters swept out Ireland's previous prime minister, only to have Enda Kenny come along and do the exact same things as the politician he replaced.

US Budgets and Bailouts

That is exactly what happened in the US 2008 presidential elections as well. Obama carried out the same bailout policies and the same war mongering policies as Bush.

There is plenty of rhetoric for change, just no real change that anyone can see. Both sides want to do something about the budget, neither side does.

Obama wants to close corporate tax loopholes, then just a few days ago proposed a new set of loopholes for manufacturing, just as Santorum and Romney have proposed. The net result would be an increase in the budget deficit.

There are differences between the parties on social issues, but nothing happens there but hot air.

Romney vs. Obama What's the Difference?

Not your grandfather's Republican Party; President Obama and Mitt Romney are Nearly One and the Same!

Obama Seeks to Prove He is More Like Romney; Obama vs. Romney - What's the Difference?

Germany Bailouts

Voter sentiment in Germany is overwhelmingly against giving more money to Greece. So why did Chancellor Angela Merkel ram through more aid for Greece?

The answer as explained many times is all Merkel cares about is her legacy, and that legacy says no country can leave the eurozone. Merkel does not give a damn about what is good for Greece, or what her own constituents want either.

French Promises

French President Nicolas Sarkozy will not hold a referendum claiming it's "too complicated". In reality, Sarkozy knows the referendum would be about him (See Referendum on a Person or on a Treaty?).

Everywhere you look, it's a case of "Damn the Voters, Full Bailouts (and Existing Policies) Ahead". Politicians have decided, things are "too complicated to change". Expect a cornucopia of promises from politicians, just don't expect any real change.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Referendum on a Person or on a Treaty?

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 09:49 AM PST

Reader Andrea from Italy, but who now lives in France adds some insight into Sarkozy's "Treaty Too Complicated For A Vote" excuse.

Andrea writes ...

Hi Mish,

I can add some more info.

Sarkozy started his presidential campaign pledging to be the "president of the people" and saying he wants to give to the people the power to decide about some issues: particularly he said he is going to propose a referendum about a couple of issues, immigration laws and unemployement benefits. As you can easily imagine, these are "minor" subjects for a referendum, normally dealt by executive power.

So, it is very contradictory that he does not want a referendum about the European Treaty, even more in the light of the fact that in recent years France held two referendums about Europe: one about Euro introduction and another about approval of the European treaty signed in 2006 (possibly as complicated as this one). Clearly he knows the topic is a referendum on his own policies and he wants to avoid this.

Regards,

Andrea

On second thought, the treaty is too complicated (for his own personal good), not too complicated for the good of France.

President of the people? Is there a president (leader) of the people anywhere? Certainly not Germany, Ireland, Greece, Italy, the United States, Australia, Canada, or anywhere else.

I am tired of the endless brutal lies from politicians everywhere. Unfortunately, such lies on both sides of the Atlantic are going to get much worse.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List