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Obama fan, Camille Paglia blames it all on his staff.

Free Barack!

Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.

Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama’s first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)

First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration’s weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don’t they read the “Iliad” anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years. …

Imagine what the Brits are thinking about Obama now; what with the gift snit and then more omniously, the inability of this administration to concentrate on Job 1 which is the economy. London Times has the story of the empty jobs at Treasury.

Alarm is growing that President Obama’s Administration, as it seeks to navigate a course away from the jagged rocks of the worst recession in a generation, lacks hands on deck. Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is being forced to operate virtually on his own without any of the 17 deputies his department is supposed to have representing him in important negotiations or helping make crucial decisions.

British officials and other diplomatic sources are already privately expressing concern that the crucial G20 summit in London, now less than a month away, could be disrupted by the US failing to prepare properly for the talks. …

In their efforts to be different from Bush, the new administration has started silly season with the idea of “moderate Talibans.” Tunku Varadarajan has the story for Forbes.

In an interview with The New York Times, published on March 8, President Obama appeared to suggest that his administration might be willing to talk to people in Afghanistan whom the newspaper characterized as the “more moderate elements of the Taliban.”

One wonders, here, what makes for “moderate” Taliban. While it is tempting to explore the darker recesses of humor–and define as moderates those who’d draw the line at filming beheadings, stoning and public bastinadoes–what we mean, surely, are those who’d contemplate an abandonment of their jihad against Western forces in Afghanistan in exchange for some sort of power-sharing arrangement with the government of Hamid Karzai. It is their willingness to do deals, in other words, that makes them moderate, not the essential make-up of their beliefs and culture. That said, if they are willing to set aside their adamantine opposition to the infidel West and its puppet, Karzai, they are clearly less purist in their pursuit of an Islamist society than those who would fight to the finish. That makes them relatively moderate, if you like. Or just plain cynical.

I prefer to regard them as cynical. Why? Because I’ve met two senior Taliban “moderates,” both masterful–and disconcerting–practitioners of the cynical arts. …

Which brings us to Christopher Hitchens’ thoughts about the deal struck in Pakistan with elements of the Taliban.

… one should be careful of the seductions of this compromise. In a wishful attempt to bring peace with the Taliban in Pakistan itself, the government has recently ceded a fertile and prosperous and modernized valley province—the former princedom of Swat—to the ultraviolent votaries of the one party and the one God. This is not some desolate tribal area where government and frontier have been poorly delineated for decades, as in Waziristan. It is a short commute from the capital city of Islamabad. The Taliban have never won an election in the area; indeed, the last vote went exactly the other way. And refugees are pouring out of Swat as the fundamentalists take hold and begin their campaign of cultural and economic obliteration: no music, no schooling for females, no recognition of the writ of the central government. (See the excellent report by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the March 5 New York Times.)

According to this and other reports, the surrender of authority by the already crumbling Pakistani authorities has had an emboldening effect on the extremists rather than an appeasing one. The nominal interlocutor, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, with whom the deal was signed, is related by clan and ideology to much fiercer and younger figures, including those suspected in the murder of Benazir Bhutto, in the burning of hundreds of girls’ schools, in the killing of Pakistani soldiers, and in the slaughter of local tribal leaders who have resisted Taliban rule. Numberless witnesses attest that the militants show not the smallest intention of abiding by the terms of the so-called “truce.” Instead of purchasing peace, the Pakistani government has surrendered part of its heartland without a fight to those who can and will convert it into a base for further and more exorbitant demands. This is not even a postponement of the coming nightmare, which is the utter disintegration of Pakistan as a state. It is a stage in that disintegration. …

Rich Lowry says, “At least he’s calm.”

… As the financial crisis hit, he never took a position on the first AIG bailout. Perhaps this was the truest indication of his instincts on the financial crisis — namely, avoidance. To sidestep the politically risky imperative of asking Congress for even more funds to address the crisis, Geithner has resorted to complex schemes that haven’t yet been thoroughly formulated.

Perhaps Obama’s muddle-through approach to the banks will suffice until the natural resilience of the economy brings a recovery. Or perhaps, as Obama temporizes, the problem gets bigger and worse, discrediting his leadership and exposing the vision of his budget as, in the words of a headline in The Economist, “wishful, and dangerous, thinking.” Either way, Obama will be calm.

Bill Sammon broke an important story today. Turns out James Carville claimed he wanted Bush to fail and worked towards that end.

The press never reported that Democratic strategist James Carville said he wanted President Bush to fail before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But a feeding frenzy ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president. …

Ed Morrissey reports the NY Times has confirmed it was David Axelrod who turned the administration to the Rush Limbaugh attack mode.

… And for that matter, why didn’t the New York Times report this separately?  The White House has ginned up an attack machine to pillory Rush Limbaugh, but meanwhile dozens of high-level appointments have yet to be made at Treasury.  They’re too overwhelmed to figure out correct protocol for Gordon Brown’s visit (and too busy to offer decent gifts), but they have the time to coordinate attacks on a radio-show host.

That’s an interesting set of priorities — for both Obama and the New York Times.

Cafe Hayek tells Paul Krugman, “Or course the Obama is screwing up. He’s the government now.”

… It takes a long time for government to spring into action. It takes a long time for government to do stuff. It even takes a long time for government to spend money. On top of all that, it is very hard for politicians, Republicans or Democrats, to say the words, “I made a mistake.” So even though I sympathize with Krugman’s view that Obama doesn’t seem to realize that we’re in a bigger mess than he may have thought and the solutions so far aren’t working, I don’t really expect a change of course until, oh, sometime close to the next Congressional election. Close means a year or so in advance.

The title of the Krugman’s piece is “Behind the Curve.” That’s the essence of government. Behind the curve. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

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Vaclav Klaus, Czech president, has some advice for the U. S..

Massive government spending and tighter regulation would prolong recession, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Monday, as he urged U.S. President Barack Obama not to endanger the free market economy in his response to the financial crisis. …

Mark Steyn thinks America should be wary of Canadian imports.

Writing about Europe a couple of pages back, I didn’t mention Canada — mainly because Canada isn’t in Europe, although it has a European mien. But, when I do raise the subject of Her Majesty’s northern dominion in this space, American conservatives sometimes query the relevance: “What’s Canada to do with me?”

Hey, wake up and smell the syrup! The road to hell is paved with Trudeaupian public policy. Every malign Canadian idea (from multiculturalism to socialized health care) heads south a generation later, while every American idea (from the First Amendment to non-confiscatory taxation) foolish enough to attempt the journey north gets gunned down on the 49th parallel. …

WSJ Editors think it is time to stand up to teachers’ unions.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that poor children receiving federally financed vouchers to attend private schools in Washington, D.C., shouldn’t be forced out of those schools. Bully for Mr. Duncan. But the voice that matters most is President Obama’s, and so far he’s been shouting at zero decibels. …

… It’s no surprise that the Obamas opted out of D.C. public schools for their own daughters and instead chose an exclusive private institution. Come on, Mr. President, find your voice for families of lesser means.

Peter Robinson celebrates the partial return of some prodigal sons.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously asserted, “needs a constant struggle.”

Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken. …

In Contentions, Peter Wehner introduces us to a new column by Robert Samuelson.

Robert Samuelson is one of the most influential economic columnists in America, and for good reason: he’s informed, intelligent, and measured. That’s why his column today is significant. …

Here is Samuelson’s column.

To those who believe that Barack Obama is a different kind of politician — more honest, more courageous — please don’t examine his administration’s budget. If you do, you may sadly conclude that he resembles presidents stretching back to John Kennedy in one crucial respect. He won’t tax voters for all the government services they want. That’s the main reason we’ve run budget deficits in 43 of the past 48 years.

Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he is doing things that he isn’t, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made “responsibility” a personal theme; the budget’s cover line is “A New Era of Responsibility.” He says the budget begins “making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline.” It doesn’t. …

Yuval Levin says Obama’s budget ignores and will probably exacerbate the economic crisis.

Last September, during the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, moderator Jim Lehrer asked Obama what the growing economic crisis would mean for his policy ambitions: “What are you going to have to give up, in terms of the priorities that you would bring as president of the United States, as a result of having to pay for the financial rescue plan?” Obama’s answer was so evasive that Lehrer asked him if he really meant to say that essentially nothing would change.

Over the past two weeks, we have seen something of a reiteration of that answer in practice. Obama indeed meant that no part of his agenda would be given up to pay for the economic recovery. On the contrary, recovery efforts will be undercut in favor of the new administration’s sweeping liberal ambitions. …

Thomas Sowell asks if we want government to subsidize bad decisions.

Now that the federal government has decided to bail out homeowners in trouble, with mortgage loans up to $729,000, that raises some questions that ought to be asked, but are seldom being asked.

Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand— for the very good reason that he could not afford it— why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?

Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?  …

Yesterday Chris Dodd, Dem of CT figured prominently in the Director Blue recap of the mortgage meltdown. According to the Hartford Courant, Sen. Dodd has strange real estate dealings all over the place. Some of them up close and personal – and corrupt.

It takes considerable political skill for a U.S. senator to win a presidential pardon for a friend without the traditional review by the Justice Department. Sen. Christopher Dodd moved the furtive levers of power in 2001 for Edward R. Downe, convicted of tax and securities fraud eight years before. A man will do a lot for a former real estate partner.

It was reported here two weeks ago that Downe’s real estate development partner, William “Bucky” Kessinger of Kansas City, Mo., purchased a 1,700-square-foot home in Ireland with Dodd in 1994 for $160,000. Downe’s name appeared on the transfer document filed in the Irish Land Registry as the witness to Kessinger’s signature. Kessinger owned two-thirds of the property, Dodd one-third.

Dodd’s spokesman told The Courant in 2001 that the senator and Downe, who pleaded guilty to insider trading in 1993, had been friends for many years. No one mentioned that Dodd and Downe together purchased a condominium in Washington, D.C., in 1986. Dodd bought Downe’s share 3 1/2 years later. …

Borowitz reports March Madness has been changed to March Bipolar Disorder.

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Mark Steyn thinks Obama is trying to turn us into Europe.

Back during the election campaign, I was on the radio and a caller demanded to know what I made of the persistent rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “I doubt it,” I said. “It’s perfectly obvious he was born in Stockholm. Okay, maybe Brussels or Strasbourg.” And the host gave an appreciative titter, and I made a mental note to start working up a little “Barack Obama, the first European prime minister to be elected president of the United States” shtick for maybe a year into the first term.

But here we are 20 minutes in, and full-scale Europeanization is already under way: Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized college education, Europeanized climate-change policy . . . Obama’s pseudo-SOTU speech was America’s first State of the European Union address, in which the president deftly yoked the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance, entrepreneurial energy, and the can-do spirit like joining the vast army of robotic extras droning in unison: “The government needs to do more for me.” For the moment, Washington is offering Euro-sized government with Euro-sized economic intervention, Euro-sized social programs, and Euro-sized regulation. But apparently not Euro-sized taxation.

Hmm. Even the Europeans haven’t attempted that trick. But don’t worry, if that pledge not to increase taxes on families earning under $250,000 doesn’t have quite the Continental sophistication you’re looking for in your federal government, I doubt it will be operative very long.

Most Americans don’t yet grasp the scale of the Obama project. The naysayers complain, Oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or It’s the new New Deal, or It’s LBJ’s Great Society applied to health care. You should be so lucky. …

If that the case, asks Claudia Rosett, who is going to defend Europe, or invent stuff, or . . .

Europe — sclerotic, bureaucratized and social-democratized – has for decades enjoyed the protection, inventions and security afforded by its more laissez-fair, strapping, and exuberant cousin across the Pond, the United States. America, with its free markets, its market incentives, and its relatively large private sector, has been the engine of global growth. America’s system, based fundamentally on individual risk and responsibility, has been the great incubator of innovations that have become the staples of the modern age — from medical advances, to computers, to the internet and beyond. Around the world, people have benefited in ways beyond measure. …

Director Blue, a new blog for us, has an interesting picture postcard way of explaining the sub-prime mess.

Steve Forbes faults a couple of Treasury regs for a lot of the banking troubles.

… The most disastrous Bush policy that Mr. Obama is perpetuating is mark-to-market or “fair value” accounting for banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. The idea seems harmless: Financial institutions should adjust their balance sheets and their capital accounts when the market value of the financial assets they hold goes up or down.

That works when you have very liquid securities, such as Treasurys, or the common stock of IBM or GE. But when the credit crisis hit in 2007, there was no market for subprime securities and other suspect assets. Yet regulators and auditors kept pressing banks and other financial firms to knock down the book value of this paper, even in cases where these obligations were being fully serviced in the payment of principal and interest. Thus, under mark-to-market, even non-suspect assets are being artificially knocked down in value for regulatory capital (the amount of capital required by regulators for industries like banks and life insurance).

Banks and life insurance companies that have positive cash flows now find themselves in a death spiral. …

Politico reports on the president’s training wheels – the telepromptors.

The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.

Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.

Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.

After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck. …

Jeff Jacoby suggests, since it’s been so cold lately, maybe some of the global warming folks could climb down from some of their extreme rhetoric.

… But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.

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Stuart Taylor has always been a fair minded liberal which is why his work has graced these pages many times. He starts us off today with his concerns about the “left turn” of the new administration.

Having praised President Obama’s job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

But with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama’s proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both. …

Pickerhead was delighted with Stuart Taylor’s column. Mark Steyn not so much. Seems he might have confused David Brooks’ thoughts for Taylor’s

… As for Stuart Taylor, he still doesn’t quite get it:

The house is burning down. It’s no time to be watering the grass.

If only. The house is burning down. And Obama’s soaking the neighboring buildings in Exxon-Mobil’s finest. Fortunately for Mr Taylor’s fit of the wobbles, the alternative to the Obama Fire Department is a GOP “dominated by such hard-right conservatives as Rush Limbaugh”. Twenty-five million people listened to Rush last week. Millions of them have listened to him for 20 years. That makes them “hard-right” extremists.

Whereas being one of a few thousand who listened to Jeremiah Wright every week for 20 years makes you a mainstream moderate.

Which leads us to Mark’s weekly column in the Orange County Register. Since Mark is a Brit educated Canadian immigrant to the U. S., he is particularly well situated to comment on last week’s gift gaffe.

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.

The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.

And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.”

Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of “MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT” T-shirts. Still, the “classic American movies” set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I’m sure – “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Sound Of Music” – though this sort of collection always slip in a couple of “Dude, Where’s My Car? 3″ and “Police Academy 12″ just to make up the numbers. I’ll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don’t work in United Kingdom DVD players. …

Ed Morrissey deconstructs the proposed excuse for the gag gift for Gordon Brown.

After insulting Gordon Brown during the British prime minister’s visit this week by ignoring protocol and cheaping out on the traditional gift exchange, the UK media has erupted in outrage.  The Obama White House has now started to recognize the firestorm the new President created with our closest ally, and wants to assure the Brits that he meant no disrespect.  Instead, Obama apparently wants to assure them that he’s simply in over his head and floundering …

Continuing on the gift gaffe riff, Morrissey covers Hillary’s hilarious gift to the Russian foreign minister.

… Some will say, Come on, it’s just a light moment, but let’s think about what Hillary was doing here.  She was making fun of the previous administration’s diplomacy with her “reset” button, a rather nasty piece of work.  I’ll bet the Bush administration and Condi Rice would have gotten the translation correct before making that joke — and I’d bet even more money they wouldn’t have thought to make fun of Hillary’s husband in that fashion in the first place.

Can we get a reset button?

And the London Times is looking askance at all this.

… What has begun to trouble some even within his own party is that Mr Obama’s pledge to spend the US out of recession, while slashing the budget deficit to $533 billion within four years, already looks recklessly optimistic. Few dispute, even among Republicans, the need for healthcare reform or to wean America off foreign oil. It is the scale of debt that Mr Obama is willing to incur to achieve these goals that is causing such heartburn.

And it is not just Americans who desperately need him to prevail. As Gordon Brown said in Washington this week, while pledging faith in the President’s plans, everyone is watching the US economy. The entire developed world is banking on Mr Obama to succeed.

But much of his promise to rein in the deficit rested on a projection that the recession will cease and the US economy grow next year, but nobody can clearly see an end to this slump. The central question – how to stop the banking sector from collapse – is still a work in progress. They prefer huge injections of cash to stop the banks dying – but stop short of nationalisation – while they try to work out how to rid them of at least $2 trillion of toxic assets. There is still a significant chance that the scale of debt involved could devour Mr Obama’s presidency.

The markets are so unnerved about Mr Obama’s ability to rescue the financial sector, and by the numerous bailouts that have had little effect, that wealth is being destroyed on Wall Street at a rate not seen since the 1930s. The President said on Tuesday that he does not worry about “the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market”, but investors have made it clear that his economic prescriptions have so far failed to reassure them.

Mr Obama also says that much of his programme will be paid for by reducing the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet he has just ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan for a war that his Defence Secretary says will be a long and difficult slog, and he is still groping for a strategy in Pakistan.

“We are always better off on the high wire,” David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s campaign manager, said last year. Now Mr Obama is President, watching from below has become both enthralling and terrifying.

James Taranto discovers that even Paul Krugman has Obama reservations.

We never thought we’d say this, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has a pretty good column in today’s New York Times. It’s a tough criticism of the Obama administration but, unlike Krugman’s hundreds of anti-Bush columns, it is not a rant. Krugman is concerned that President Obama is not treating the crisis in America’s financial institutions with sufficient urgency:

Among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern. . . ….

Charles Krauthammer continues commentary on the money spent in DC.

… The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people. …

Jennifer Rubin says he’s just not into governing.

… What does he like to do? Summits. These are in essence campaign events — faux town-halls where nary a discouraging word is heard and no real work is done. And he loves those campaign rallies around the country.

So if the report is accurate that others are crafting his political strategy (just like the Pelosi-Reid machine is drafting his legislation), it should should come as no surprise. George W. Bush was lambasted for poor management skills and excessive delegation. But that was nothing — Obama has delegated the entire task of governing. He will keep the campaigning for himself.

Scrappleface says Obama’s gift to the Queen next month will not be a queen sized bed.

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Tony Blankley comments on the administration so far.

I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died. Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: “Bush lied, people died.” There are, of course, two differences between the slogans.

Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction. In the age of Obama, there is little more important than maintaining the integrity of our language against the onslaught of Orwellian language abuse that is already a babbling brook and soon will be a cataract of verbal deception.

The other difference is that Bush didn’t lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He merely was mistaken. Whereas Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t.”

This he asserted despite the fact that the budget he proposed the next day asks for federal spending as 28 percent of gross domestic product, higher by at least 6 percent than any time since World War II. …

Would you believe Bush was more popular than Obama at this point in their terms? Of course you wouldn’t, because the media wants you to think the Kid walks on water. Peter Wehner Corner post with details.

VDH says he knew he’d be the Great Divider.

I confess I did not believe Barack Obama entirely during the campaign when he bragged on working across the aisle and championing bipartisanship.

You see, as in the case of any other politician, one must look to what he does—and has done—not what he says for election advantage.

And in the case of Sen. Obama, in his nascent career in the Senate, he had already compiled the most partisan record of any Democratic Senator. He had attended religiously one of the most racially divisive and extremist churches in the country. His Chicago friends were not moderates. His campaigns for state legislature, the House and the Senate were hard-ball, no-prisoner affairs of personal destruction, even by Chicago standards. Campaign references to reparations, gun- and bible-clingers, and Rev. Wright’s wisdom were not words of healing. …

Power Line posts on the voice of the market.

… Yesterday Obama was asked about the stock market. He advised his audience not to “spend all your time worrying about that.” Bill Kristol sums up Obama’s response under the heading “Don’t worry, be happy.” Obama explained:

What I’m looking at is not the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world economy to regain its footing. And, you know, the stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. You know, it bobs up and down day to day. And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.

With its likening of the stock market to daily tracking polls, this is certainly a rich text. Most notably, as Bill Kristol observes, “the stock market isn’t gyrating, or bobbing up and down. It’s dropping.”

The sobering voice of Mr. Market is saying that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress have done nothing to brighten the prospects of companies struggling to make a go of it in the private sector. On the contrary, they have dimmed the prospects of these companies. The dimming can be measured in the vast destruction of wealth in the stock market. …

And on whether he will sell out the African-American children who get DC vouchers.

David Warren writes on what he has learned.

… “The people” have discovered that they can vote themselves money, by the simple device of putting into office politicians like Barack Obama, who promise them cash, services, tax breaks, bailouts, and to “make the rich pay.” Democracy has been degenerating into a vicious system in which wealth is transferred by the power of law from “them” to “us.” That this must have a crippling effect on the creation of wealth should be perfectly obvious.

The Nanny State is hardly something new, but it seems that in this year of 2009 we have entered a new phase of it, which might be characterized as the “death spiral.” The U.S. government is suddenly vomiting out trillions — literally, trillions — to the people who voted for it. Partly at the expense of the people who didn’t; but mostly conjured from thin air.

The laws of supply and demand are laws of nature. They do not apply only to free markets, but with a special vengeance to those who try to subvert market disciplines. The effect of summoning huge quantities of dollars out of nothing is extremely well known. It leads to inflation, and when not then very painfully corrected, to hyperinflation.

Inflation, too, has been with us for some time, but seldom on the scale the U.S. is now risking. …

David Harsanyi likes Limbaugh’s ideas of failure.

… Republicans, conversely, are fighting over their future, a future that grassroots figures like Limbaugh will certainly be a part of. In the meantime, Democrats are hoping Republicans fail to come to a consensus and regroup — even though two vibrant parties are always healthier for the nation than one.

And many of us are hoping that all those in power fail. Because those in power have a grating habit of being annoyingly self-righteous, hopelessly corrupt, resolutely incompetent and completely apathetic about the freedoms that they have sworn to protect.

Embrace the failure. It’s patriotic.

Pseudonymous film writer explains why Hollywood hates America.

… Many explanations have been offered to account for our ludicrously parodistic version of liberalism. There is no cause too ridiculous for us to support, as long as it is described as a civil-rights issue and is couched in the language of “fairness,” preferably tinged with self-loathing and anti-Americanism. Among the clichés cited for our conformism are (a) the arts are a natural home for sensitive and suffering souls, (b) like journalism, the movie business has long attracted crusaders for “social justice,” and (c) the immense wealth generated for its creators by a hit movie — or, even better, a long-running television series — provokes an internal backlash of guilt over undeserved good fortune, which is then partially expiated by “good works,” especially when those works involve spending taxpayers’ money. (Taxes? Us? We have accountants for that.)

Forget about it. The origin of our reflexive liberalism lies not in the kinds of people who go into movie-making but in something far deeper: the nature of the movie business itself, which drives us insane. …

Here’s some good news. Remember the bees that were disappearing? They might be coming back. The Economist has the story.

AT THE end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery.

Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut. …

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Finally, a Dem senator with courage. Evan Bayh comes out against the budget. Virginians must be wondering why it wasn’t Webb or Warner leading this charge.

This week, the United States Senate will vote on a spending package to fund the federal government for the remainder of this fiscal year. The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 is a sprawling, $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess.

The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it.

The omnibus increases discretionary spending by 8% over last fiscal year’s levels, dwarfing the rate of inflation across a broad swath of issues including agriculture, financial services, foreign relations, energy and water programs, and legislative branch operations. Such increases might be appropriate for a nation flush with cash or unconcerned with fiscal prudence, but America is neither. …

Maureen Dowd is figuring it out.

… In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork. …

David Brooks continues to learn to understand his mistaken admiration.

… The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.

The U.S. has always been a decentralized nation, skeptical of top-down planning. Yet, the current administration concentrates enormous power in Washington, while plan after plan emanates from a small group of understaffed experts.

The U.S. has always had vibrant neighborhood associations. But in its very first budget, the Obama administration raises the cost of charitable giving. It punishes civic activism and expands state intervention.

The U.S. has traditionally had a relatively limited central government. But federal spending as a share of G.D.P. is zooming from its modern norm of 20 percent to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond.

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.” …

And perhaps David Gergen is tired of being a Dem fool.

… So, the argument comes from the White House, damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead!

Yet… yet… yet: It isn’t popular to say right now but there is growing reason to question whether this is the wisest course in terms of our most urgent and pressing challenge: a collapsing world economy. News on the economic front has to be sobering to even the most optimistic among us. Last Friday, we learned that the economy contracted in the 4th quarter by over 6 percent. Over the weekend, Warren Buffett warned that the economy would be in a “shambles” through 2009 and possibly beyond. On Monday, the government issued its fourth bailout for AIG, European ministers rejected a general bailout for Eastern Europe, and the Dow sank below 7,000 – down some 25% since its run-up in January. This Friday economists expect the latest U.S. unemployment numbers to be dismal. Already, the administration’s optimistic economic forecasts for next year look way too rosy. …

The apostate Chris Buckley.

… “$3.6 trillion budget” can’t be right.The entire national debt is—what—about $11 trillion? He can’t actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, “Well.” …

Happily, the New Republic has made available Andrew Ferguson’s 1991 expose of Bill Moyers.

… He has, for example, used Republican scandals as occasions for sermons about betrayals of trust, government run amok, even as his own involvement in one of the seamier episodes of government malfeasance slips quietly down the memory hole, Johnson once called Movers “my vice president in charge of everything.” By all accounts the tag was accurate. According to classified documents unearthed by the Church Committee on intelligence abuses in 1976, and others obtained by David Garrow for his The FBI and Martin Luther King (1981), while at the White House Moyers tracked the bureau’s infamous campaign against King. The surveillance, begun under Kennedy, was broadened under Johnson. The rationale at the time, and the one Movers clings to on the few occasions he has discussed his involvement, was that King’s association with supposed Communists endangered the civil rights movement.

As the campaign against King progressed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely forwarded to the White House summaries of the King wiretaps, which were placed not only in King’s home and office but also in his hotel rooms around the country. The summaries covered not only King’s dealings with associates but also his sexual activities. After receiving one such summary, Moyers instructed the FBI to disseminate it widely throughout the executive branch, to Dean Rusk. Robert McNamara, Carl Rowan, and many others. Moyers was also aware at the time of Hoover’s efforts to leak the King material to the press.

Moyers’s interest in King was not limited to the “Communist” scare. King was allied with a group even more worrisome to the Johnson White House: dissident Democrats. At the Democratic convention in Atlantic City in 1964, King assisted civil rights associates in a credential challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation. The White House, fearing trouble for the fall campaign, instructed the FBI to intensify surveillance of the dissenters during the convention. As a result a wiretap was installed in King’s Atlantic City hotel room. One bureau memo reported happily that “we have been able to keep the White House and others very currently informed concerning King and these important matters.” The agent in charge of the bugging, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, kept in telephone contact with Moyers and his fellow Johnson aide, Walter Jenkins, throughout the convention, and the two aides successfully countered the King group’s maneuvers, allowing the good old boys to take their seats on the convention floor.

Moyers later wrote a note thanking DeLoach for his help, DeLoach replied: “Thank you for your very thoughtful and generous note concerning our operation in Atlantic City… . I’m certainly glad that we were able to come through with vital tidbits from time to time which were of assistance to you and Walter. You know you have only to call on us when a similar situation arises.”

It soon did. Not long before the election. Jenkins was arrested in a bathroom stall at the YMCA on a charge of “disorderly conduct.” Johnson, convinced that Jenkins was somehow set up by Goldwater’s campaign operatives, ordered Movers to gather information on the sexual histories of Goldwater’s staff. Movers called DeLoach, who reported back that he had been unable to find anything of political use. Ten years later Moyers won an Emmy for two PBS shows on Watergate, both noteworthy for his fiery indignation over Richard Nixon’s abuse of government power for political ends. The outrage was displayed again in the two ninety-minute PBS shows he has produced on the Iran-contra affair. …

Dilbert knows what will improve the economy.

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David Warren says Islamofacists are on the march because the West is beginning to look the part of bin Laden’s weak horse.

… The reasons for this resurgence are ready to hand. To the Islamist mind, the United States and her allies appear mortally wounded by a financial crisis that is metastasizing into an international depression. While they, too, suffer from the collapse of the oil price, and such funding as depends upon it, their war against the “Great Satan” remains asymmetrical, and material setbacks count harder against their enemy.

But there is a larger, though less tangible reason for their renewed confidence. “Bush and Blair” — the enemies Islamists most feared and detested — are now gone from the world stage, and the vision and determination with which they resisted Islamism has become suddenly a thing of the past.

The new American president, Barack Obama, has come to power with a promise to negotiate with America’s most deadly enemies; he signalled weakness unambiguously in a television interview to the Muslim world; he wants out of Iraq, and does not know what he is doing in Afghanistan. The very gloom and doom he is preaching on the home front, in order to get huge “progressive” spending measures through Congress, is the final confirmation that the United States is down and ready for the kicking. …

Looking at the collapsing markets, Roger Simon can follow the clues.

Jennifer Rubin learns from markets too.

… the president seems unconcerned with the private-sector slump. He’s out to expand government into new areas of regulation and control, inflict new taxes on investors, and remake the U.S. economy in the mold of its European counterparts so it will absorb more and more of the nation’s GDP than at any time since World War II.

Liberal pundits and other supporters of the president feign ignorance as to why the markets are crashing or they contend the downturn is unrelated to the Obama economic agenda. This is hogwash. CNBC analyst Charlie Gasparino, who spends his day with traders, investors, and other analysts, asks them why markets are in a downward spiral. Lo and behold, the administration’s policies and uncertainty have freaked them out. He describes their buyers’ remorse: …

Rubin says now Obama has lost David Brooks.

It’s not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War, but the president has lost David Brooks:

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Well, well. First Chris Buckley and now Brooks. Usually it takes more than a month for presidents to disappoint those they have bamboozled during the campaign. But, as Brooks points out, Obama threw caution to the winds when he unveiled his monstrous budget: …

Abe Greenwald on how the Russians said nyet.

… Barack Obama is turning into a bizarro Don Corleone: He makes offers you can’t not refuse. Here are the fruits of “smart power” so far: Iran responds to President Obama’s “extended hand” by demanding apologies for a litany of American crimes; China has been given an American green-light to ramp up undisguised human rights abuses; the Russian president brushed off Obama’s appeal for help like so much dandruff; and Eastern Europe, where George W. Bush had successfully built up a spate of American allies, has been cut loose.

Next stop on the Smart Power ‘09 Tour: Syria, where the Assad regime is undoubtedly astounded by its own good fortune.

Bill McGurn wants to know if Obama will stand up for his children’s classmates.

Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama’s new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position.

The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation’s capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program — and with it perhaps the Parker children’s hopes for a Sidwell diploma. …

Cato posts on the DC voucher program.

WaPo editors defend the vouchers in DC.

CONGRESSIONAL Democrats want to mandate that the District’s unique school voucher program be reauthorized before more federal money can be allocated for it. It is a seemingly innocuous requirement. In truth it is an ill-disguised bid to kill a program that gives some poor parents a choice regarding where their children go to school. Many of the Democrats have never liked vouchers, and it seems they won’t let fairness or the interests of low-income, minority children stand in the way of their politics. But it also seems they’re too ashamed — and with good reason — to admit to what they’re doing. …

Walter Williams has words for Eric Holder.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the United States is “a nation of cowards” when it comes to race relations. In one sense, he is absolutely right. Many whites, from university administrators and professors, schoolteachers to employers and public officials accept behavior from black people that they wouldn’t begin to accept from whites. For example, some of the nation’s most elite universities, such as Vanderbilt, Stanford University and the University of California, have yielded to black student demands for separate graduation ceremonies and separate “celebratory events.” Universities such as Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and Cal Berkeley have, or have had, segregated dorms. If white students demanded whites-only graduation ceremonies or whites-only dorms, administrators would have labeled their demands as intolerable racism. When black students demand the same thing, these administrators cowardly capitulate. Calling these university administrators cowards is the most flattering characterization of their behavior. They might actually be stupid enough to believe nonsense taught by their some of sociology and psychology professors that blacks can’t be racists because they don’t have power. …

Jonah Goldberg defends Rush Limbaugh.

Here we go again. Rush Limbaugh is public enemy No. 1.

Liberal bloggers and media chin-strokers are aghast at Limbaugh’s statement that he hopes Barack Obama fails.

Well, given what Obama wants to do, I hope he fails too. Of course I want the financial crisis to end — who doesn’t? But Obama’s agenda is much more audacious. Pretty much every major news outlet in the country has said as a matter of objective analysis that Obama wants to repeal the legacy of Ronald Reagan and remake the country as a European welfare state. And yet people are shocked that conservatives, Limbaugh included, want Obama to fail in this effort?

What movie have they been watching? Because I could swear that conservatives opposing the expansion of big government is what conservatives do. It’s Aesopian. The scorpion must sting the frog. The conservative must object to socialized medicine. …

Scott Ott of Scrappleface reports in the DC Examiner that soon AIG will not be too big to fail.

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It seems there are two components to the causes of our current economic distress. The first, was affirmative action in mortgages. It had the same toxic effects affirmative action has had in the field of education, but in education there is no objective market mechanism to say, “This is bullshit.” So it can run along forever. However, there’s no ‘pretend’ option in the economy, so eventually the bad loans were found out. The second component, one harder to understand, is how the affirmative action mortgage bacillus infected the whole economy of the whole world. An article from Wired is one of the best attempts Pickerhead has seen in providing that understanding.

… Yet during the ’90s, as global markets expanded, there were trillions of new dollars waiting to be put to use lending to borrowers around the world—not just mortgage seekers but also corporations and car buyers and anybody running a balance on their credit card—if only investors could put a number on the correlations between them. The problem is excruciatingly hard, especially when you’re talking about thousands of moving parts. Whoever solved it would earn the eternal gratitude of Wall Street and quite possibly the attention of the Nobel committee as well.

To understand the mathematics of correlation better, consider something simple, like a kid in an elementary school: Let’s call her Alice. The probability that her parents will get divorced this year is about 5 percent, the risk of her getting head lice is about 5 percent, the chance of her seeing a teacher slip on a banana peel is about 5 percent, and the likelihood of her winning the class spelling bee is about 5 percent. If investors were trading securities based on the chances of those things happening only to Alice, they would all trade at more or less the same price.

But something important happens when we start looking at two kids rather than one—not just Alice but also the girl she sits next to, Britney. If Britney’s parents get divorced, what are the chances that Alice’s parents will get divorced, too? Still about 5 percent: The correlation there is close to zero. But if Britney gets head lice, the chance that Alice will get head lice is much higher, about 50 percent—which means the correlation is probably up in the 0.5 range. If Britney sees a teacher slip on a banana peel, what is the chance that Alice will see it, too? Very high indeed, since they sit next to each other: It could be as much as 95 percent, which means the correlation is close to 1. And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1.

If investors were trading securities based on the chances of these things happening to both Alice and Britney, the prices would be all over the place, because the correlations vary so much.

But it’s a very inexact science. Just measuring those initial 5 percent probabilities involves collecting lots of disparate data points and subjecting them to all manner of statistical and error analysis. Trying to assess the conditional probabilities—the chance that Alice will get head lice if Britney gets head lice—is an order of magnitude harder, since those data points are much rarer. As a result of the scarcity of historical data, the errors there are likely to be much greater.

In the world of mortgages, it’s harder still. What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation’s macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well? …

London Times editors appraise the president’s first month.

… It is a political commonplace that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But the sound of Mr Obama’s prose has begun to jangle. “Now is the time,” he said lulling his congressional audience, “to act boldly and wisely – to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.” The trouble is that this wasn’t the first time that Mr Obama told Americans that “it’s time to act”. Nobody doubts that now, in the teeth of the cruelest economic crisis in decades, it is time to act. But the world is still not clear what actions Mr Obama plans to take. What unnerves it even more is that when he has acted, his judgment has not always matched the sturdiness of his campaign rhetoric, let alone its slick, skilful execution. He has been ambushed in traps too often of his own making. …

Union-Leader editors too.

In nine words of his Wednesday night address to Congress, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he was not for big government. In the remaining 5,893 words, he proved those nine untrue.

The agenda the President put forward is the largest expansion of the federal government at least since the Great Society and probably since the New Deal. It would not simply pump short-term cash into the economy and the credit markets. It would fundamentally reorder America’s relationship with Washington.

Worse, it would do so in ways that are economically destructive. …

NewsBusters has more on Bill Moyers.

… Moyers has a reason to hope that everyone under 60 forgets, after all his PBS moralizing on shows with titles like The Secret Government, and after suggesting Reagan should be impeached for Iran-Contra dishonesty in a documentary suggestively titled High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The more that uncooperative writers peek under the rocks of Bill Moyers in government service, the phonier he looks. He looks, unsurprisingly, like a Democratic hack who became a Democratic hack media star on PBS, a network launched by LBJ’s Democratic hacks.

The Economist reports Atlas Shrugged is selling especially well during triple T. (These Troubled Times)

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We are going to have another shot looking at Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” remarks. Marty Peretz starts it off calling attention to a piece by one our favorites, Abigail Thernstrom. Another of our faves, Stuart Taylor, quotes Abby in his commentary.

Here’s Abby Thernstrom’s piece.

I don’t know what nation the attorney general is living in, but it’s not the one I know. Eric Holder’s speech to Justice Department staff on February 18 was scandalously uninformed, as well as arrogant and incoherent. It should be an embarrassment to the president.

Given the already splendid commentary on this speech by Jonah Goldberg and others, I had intended to hold my tongue. But after reading the attorney general’s remarks in full, I changed my mind. “A nation of cowards” — those attention-grabbing words have been much remarked upon. In fact, the rest of the speech is even more disturbing than that mud-slinging phrase.

Take the charge that “outside the workplace” the racial scene is “bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.”

A little fact-checking is in order. …

And Stuart Taylor was in the National Journal.

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Your speech commemorating Black History Month by calling America “a nation of cowards” because we “do not talk enough with each other about race” — a topic about which we talk incessantly — was unworthy of the admirable public servant I believe you to be.

The speech was, as others have pointed out, embarrassingly misinformed, hackneyed, and devoid of thoughtful contributions to racial dialogue.

You can do much better. Please use your bully pulpit in the future to cut through the usual cant and state some politically incorrect truths about race in America that would carry special weight if they came from you. That would require mustering the courage to take on the Democratic Party’s powerful racial-grievance lobby. But it would do the country a lot of good.

The one point that you developed in a bit of detail in the February 18 speech was especially silly: “Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment…. Until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so-called ‘real’ American history.”

Bosh. The reality is that our high schools and universities are quite clearly focusing disproportionate attention on black history. …

Mark Steyn has a look at the budget.

… The Wall Street Journal calculated that if you took every single dime – that’s 100 percent – of the over-250K crowd, it barely begins to pay for this program, even before half of them flee the country. The $4 trillion Congress is planning on spending next year (2010) could just about be covered if you took every single dime of the taxable income of every American earning over $75,000.

But it doesn’t matter. Because Big Government is the ultimate hero, and the private sector is merely a supporting role. Last week, the president redefined the relationship between the citizen and the state, in ways that make America closer to Europe. If you’ve still got the Webster’s to hand, “closer to Europe” is a sociopolitical colloquialism meaning “much worse.”

Is the new all-powerful Statezilla vulnerable to anything? Unfortunately, yes. He loses all his superpowers when he comes into contact with something called Reality. But happily Reality is nowhere in sight. There are believed to be some small surviving shards somewhere on the planet – maybe on an uninhabited atoll somewhere in the Pacific – but that’s just a rumor, and Barack Obama isn’t planning on running into Reality any time soon.

Thomas Sowell thinks Sarah Palin is a modern day Whittaker Chambers.

… Governor Palin’s candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, “He’s not one of us.”

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was “one of us.” As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today. …

LA Times Op-Ed on the havoc in Mexico wrought by our drug war.

Early in the last century, near the end of his 34 bloody years in power, the aging Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz mused that his country’s great misfortune was to be located “so far from God and so near the United States.”

The shrewd old thief’s observation came to mind this week when U.S. officials announced they’d joined with Mexican authorities in arresting more than 730 people allegedly linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel. That gang is the most powerful of the numerous criminal organizations smuggling drugs into the United States. Their intramural quarrels and resistance to a government crackdown have plunged Mexico into a round of violence unseen since the Cristero Wars in the 1920s. Over the last year, about 6,000 Mexicans have been killed.

Many fear that Mexico could be sliding into civil instability because of the cartels’ increasing willingness to use violence and bribery to protect their business. It’s an old story in other parts of Latin America, and for that reason, three of the region’s former heads of state — including onetime Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo — recently issued a report urging the U.S. to consider legalizing at least marijuana. Fat chance. …

Marine Private First Class Chance Phelps was killed in Rumadi, Iraq Good Friday 2004. Nine days later he was buried in Dubois, Wyoming. His escort home was Lt Col. Michael Strobl whose recollections formed the basis for an original HBO film Taking Chance which first aired a week ago this past Saturday. Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the film for the WSJ.

It was impossible to imagine, beforehand, all the ways a film like “Taking Chance”  could work its power. There are no conflicts, no warring sides, no mysteries of character — the usual stuff of drama. The story’s outcome is clear from the beginning. Yet it’s no less clear that “Taking Chance” is not only high drama, but a kind that is, in the most literal way, breathtaking — watching parts of it can make breathing an effort, and those parts come at every turn. It’s no less obvious that this film, about a Marine killed in combat, could have gone wrong in all sorts of ways and did so in none of them. There is in this work, at once so crushing and exhilarating, not a false note.

The credit for that belongs to Lt. Col. Michael Stroble, U.S. Marine Corps, on whose journal the film is based; to producer, writer and director Ross Katz; and, not least, to Kevin Bacon, whose portrayal of the devoted Col. Stroble is a masterwork — flawless in its fierce economy, eloquent in its testimony, most of it wordless, to everything that is going on.

You can watch this film on HBO today, Sunday, at 2:30pm, Monday morning at midnight, Wednesday noon and 8:00pm, and Sat. 4:30pm. Barack Obama diminishes himself by ignoring our success in Iraq. He would do well to watch this film. Perhaps he would come to understand some things about this country that, so far, have escaped his notice.

The Onion reports blacks are tired of all the high fives after Obama’s election.

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Karl Rove discourses on Obama’s straw man techniques.

President Barack Obama reveres Abraham Lincoln. But among the glaring differences between the two men is that Lincoln offered careful, rigorous, sustained arguments to advance his aims and, when disagreeing with political opponents, rarely relied on the lazy rhetorical device of “straw men.” Mr. Obama, on the other hand, routinely ascribes to others views they don’t espouse and says opposition to his policies is grounded in views no one really advocates.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, “I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.” Who exactly has that view? Certainly not congressional Republicans, who believe that through reasonable tax cuts, fiscal restraint, and prudent monetary policies government contributes to prosperity.

Mr. Obama also said that America’s economic difficulties resulted when “regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.” Who gutted which regulations?

Perhaps it was President Bill Clinton who, along with then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, removed restrictions on banks owning insurance companies in 1999. If so, were Mr. Clinton and Mr. Summers (now an Obama adviser) motivated by quick profit, or by the belief that the reform was necessary to modernize our financial industry? …

Barack has Tony Blankley missing Clinton.

I hate to admit it, but I miss Bill Clinton. At least that lecherous old charmer was more amusing than his successor as a Democratic president, our new mortician in chief, Barack “End of the World” Obama.

Although, our new president’s spokesman did deliver the funniest line of this so-far-not-too-funny millennium. Last week, Robert Gibbs called the president — who, in the previous couple of weeks, had talked about our economy being a catastrophe from which we might never recover — “an eternal optimist.”

I appreciate that presidential spokesmen are not always known for their candor. And putting a positive gloss on his boss’s image is barely an infraction, given the howlers that often have come from that podium. But really, one prefers one’s perfidy to be at least plausible. If our economy in a death spiral is Obama’s upbeat version of events, one can only tremble at what he would sound like if he turned a little glum. …

Abe Greenwald and Jennifer Rubin have Contentions’ posts on the budget.

Ann Coulter is getting tired of all the “African-American president” milestones.

… But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the house?

Obama spent more than twice as much time in his historic speech genuflecting to the teachers’ unions than talking about terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan. So it was historic only in the sense that Obama is the first African-American president, but was the same old Democratic claptrap in every other respect.

After claiming that the disastrous stimulus bill would create or save 3.5 million jobs — “more than 90 percent” in the private sector — Obama then enumerated a long list of exclusively government jobs that would be “saved.”

He was suspiciously verbose about saving the jobs of public schoolteachers. Because nothing says “economic stimulus” better than saving the jobs of lethargic incompetents who kick off at 2 p.m. every day and get summers off. Actually, that’s not fair: Some teachers spend long hours after school having sex with their students.

As with the Clintons, Obama so earnestly believes in public school education that he sends his girls to … an expensive private school. He demands that taxpayers support the very public schoolteachers he won’t trust with his own children.

It is one thing to tell voters that school choice is wrong, because, you know, the public schools won’t get better unless Americans sacrifice their children to the teachers’ union’s maw. But it is quite another for Democrats to feed their own kids to the union incinerator.

Consequently, no Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send his own children to a public school.

And yet the stimulus bill expressly prohibits money earmarked for “education” to be spent on financial aid at private or parochial schools. Private schools might use it for some nefarious purpose like actually teaching their students, rather than indoctrinating them in anti-American propaganda.

The stimulus bill includes about $100 billion to education. By “education,” Democrats don’t mean anything a normal person would think of as education, such as learning how to talk good. “Education” means creating lots of useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with teaching. …

David Bernstein in Volokh Conspiracy has this quaint idea campaign promises were going to mean something.

Obama, in the third debate, within the first minute: “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut…. What I want to emphasize … is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.”

Also, I wonder how Obama’s high-income supporters in high-tax, high-cost areas like NYC, California, and DC are feeling right now? According to an article I read today, the top 7% of taxpaying families make over 250K a year, while the top 1% make over 380K. So the vast majority of those affected by Obama’s tax plans are in the 250-380K range. …

The Heritage Foundation has produced a video of DC voucher kids asking the president to save their scholarships.