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Peter Wehner comments on James Ceaser’s appellation for the political change that produced the 2010 election results.

In his excellent essay in the Claremont Review of Books, titled “The Great Repudiation,” Professor James Ceaser wrote

“The results of the 2010 election changed the landscape of American politics. … In fact, 2010 is the closest the nation has ever come to a national referendum on overall policy direction or “ideology.” … There is only one label that can describe the result: the Great Repudiation.”

To understand just how much the landscape of American politics changed, consider (as John does) yesterday’s events — a day in which the Democratic majority in Congress averted across-the-board tax increases and enacted new tax breaks for individuals and businesses and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to pull an almost $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, replacing it (presumably) with a Continuing Resolution.

These were major substantive achievements by Republicans — and enormous substantive concessions by President Obama and his party. We have the Great Repudiation to thank for them.

And here’s James Ceaser’s article, from the Claremont Institute.

…The midterm election is one of the distinctive features of America’s constitutional system. By allowing an expression of voter sentiment separate from the presidential selection, midterms help supply the Congress with concrete political support for checking the president’s power. A check of this kind seems to be exactly what the public had in mind in 2010, ending liberal hopes that Obama’s presidency would inaugurate a “new” New Deal. …

…Elections in America serve two functions: a “formal” function of appointing the personnel for constitutional offices, which takes place in every election; and an “informal” function of signaling what the people want, which takes place only in certain elections, when national public sentiment has congealed into a common message or theme. The situation in Washington reflects a conflict stemming from the results of these two functions. On the formal side, the array of forces puts neither party in full control. Democrats hold the presidency, Republicans now firmly control the House, and the Senate will likely swing in ways no one can foresee. The Democrats, who now derive their power from this formal situation and rely on officials chosen in elections conducted two and four years ago, will emphasize their offices’ constitutional authority. They represent for the moment the conservative position. On the informal side, Republicans boast not just of their seats and numbers in Congress, but of the majority’s weight and power as expressed in the clear message delivered on Election Day. This claim cannot, of course, cancel the formal array of power-we are a nation governed by laws and institutions-but there is nothing amiss in reminding those in office that they cannot stray too far, too long from the majority’s wishes without straining a democratic system’s authority. Although the informal function should not be overvalued, it should not be undervalued either.

The Republicans’ case, resting on this informal claim that can always be disputed, is already under assault. Along with the Democrats’ open campaign to persuade the public that the election did not mean what Republicans thought it did, there is an allied effort underway, far more subtle, to undermine and weaken the GOP position. It comes from a group of self-proclaimed wise men who present themselves as being above the fray. These voices, acting from a putative concern for the nation and even for the Republican Party, urge Republicans to avoid the mistake of Obama and the Democrats of displaying hubris and overinterpreting their mandate. With this criticism of the Democrats offered as a testimony of their even-handedness and sincerity, they piously go on to tell Republicans that now is the time to engage in bipartisanship and follow a course of compromise. The problem with this sage advice is that it calls for Republicans to practice moderation and bipartisanship after the Democrats did not. It is therefore not a counsel of moderation, but a ploy designed to force Republicans to accept the overreaching policies of the past year-and-a-half. It is another way to defend Obama’s “change.” If Republicans are to remain true to the verdict of 2010, the message of this election cannot be merely containment; it must be roll back.

Peter Schiff says that the Fed has no other tricks left to artificially stimulate the economy. Worse yet, the quantitative easing will be bringing us inflation.

…For years, the Fed has been able to prevent market forces from correcting our growing economic imbalances by inexorably pushing rates lower. This happened in 1991, 2001, and most notably in 2008. These easing campaigns succeeded in boosting the economy in the short term by greatly increasing the amount of debt held by both the private and public sectors. As such, these episodes have allowed our economy to delay and magnify the ultimate reckoning.  

Just like a junkie who requires ever-increasing doses of heroine to achieve the same high, the Fed has needed to take rates ever lower to boost the economy after its previous stimulants had faded.

To stimulate after the bursting of the housing bubble (which itself resulted from the low interest rates used to juice the economy following the bursting of the dot-com bubble), the Fed lowered interest rates to practically zero. At that point, rates could go no lower. However, when that stimulus failed, the Fed decided to bring on the heavy artillery in the form of “quantitative easing,” or as it is known in the vernacular, “printing money to buy government debt.”

…However, the Fed’s plan backfired. The selling pressure on long-term bonds is overwhelming the Fed’s buying pressure. Spiking rates (which move inversely to price) are powerful evidence that the bond bubble has finally burst. The Fed threw everything but the kitchen sink at the bond market to force yields lower, yet they rose anyway. If bond prices failed to rise given such a Herculean effort to lift them up, there can be only one direction for them to go: down.

…What lies ahead is a new era of rising interest rates, soaring consumer prices, increasing unemployment, economic stagnation, and lower living standards. Instead of stimulating the economy, quantitative easing and deficit spending will prove to be a lethal combination. …

In Contentions, Michael Totten points out Gideon Rachman’s comment: WikiLeaks dispels many conspiracy theories about US intentions.

Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange deserves a medal rather than prison. “He and WikiLeaks have done America a massive favour,” he writes, “by inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its foreign policy.”

…Rachman points out that many rightists in China and Russia, and leftists in Europe and Latin America, assume that whatever American foreign-policy officials say in public is a lie. I’d add that Arabs on both the “left” and the “right” do, too. Not all of them, surely, but perhaps a majority. I’ve met people in the Middle East who actually like parts of the American rationale for the war in Iraq — that the promotion of democracy in the Arab world might leech out its toxins — they just don’t believe the U.S. was actually serious.

And let’s not forget the most ridiculous theories of all. Surely somewhere in all these leaked files there’d be references to a war for oil in Iraq if the war was, in fact, about oil. Likewise, if 9/11 was an inside job — or a joint Mossad–al-Qaeda job — there should be at least some suggestive evidence in all those classified documents. If the U.S. government lied, rather than guessed wrong, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or if NATO invaded Afghanistan to install a pipeline, this information would have to be written down somewhere. The State and Defense department bureaucracies are far too vast to have no records of what they’re up to. …

In Hot Air, Allahpundit blogs about more beneficial information from WikiLeaks.

No foolin’. So fulsomely slavish to the cause have our progressive icons become that their propaganda now makes even the Castros blush. Keep on rocking, “reality-based community.”

Incidentally, this story comes from a Wikileaks document. Second look at Assange?

[T]he memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.

Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”…

The cable describes a visit made by the FSHP to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital in October 2007. Built in 1982, the newly renovated hospital was used in Michael Moore’s film as evidence of the high-quality of healthcare available to all Cubans. …

Ed Morrissey has a post on an ironic turn of events.

The man who heralds himself as the vanguard of radical transparency has finally found an opacity he can support — himself.  Julian Assange’s legal team has demanded an investigation into the leak of documents from Sweden’s investigation of rape allegations after the Guardian reported on them over the weekend.  This is, of course, a Schadenfreude-tastic moment — but shouldn’t take away from the seriousness of the issue …

…Defendants facing criminal charges have the right to a presumption of innocence.  Nations have the right to expect that their internal systems for communication will remain secure, whether that be for diplomatic or military purposes.  Not all transparency is beneficial, a lesson Assange appears to be learning the hard way.

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Alain de Botton writes in the WSJ about how liberal arts education can help us live our lives.

…My own answer to what the humanities are for is simple: They should help us to live. We should look to culture as a storehouse of useful ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. Novels and historical narratives can impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings can suggest the requirements for happiness. Philosophy can probe our anxieties and offer consolation. It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish and blinkered human beings. Such a transformation benefits not only the economy but also our friends, children and spouses.

…The claim that culture can stand in for scripture—that “Middlemarch” or the essays of Schopenhauer can take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms—still has a way of sounding eccentric or insane. But the ambition is not misplaced: Culture can and should change and save our lives. The problem is the way that culture is taught at our universities, which have a knack for killing its higher possibilities.

The modern university has achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, but it remains wholly uninterested in training students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom—that is, a kind of knowledge concerned with things that are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, providing comfort in the face of life’s infinite challenges, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal diagnosis. Our universities have never offered what churches invariably focus on: guidance.

…Because this situation cries out for a remedy, a few years ago I joined with a group of similarly disaffected academics, artists and writers and helped to start a new kind of university. We call it, plainly, the School of Life, and it operates from a modest space in central London. On the menu of our school, you won’t find subjects like philosophy, French and history. You’ll find courses in marriage, child-rearing, choosing a career, changing the world and death. Along the way, our students encounter many of the books and ideas that traditional universities serve up, but they seldom get bored—and often come away with a different take on the world. …

David Harsanyi comments on where the individual mandate leads.

…At some point in the next few years, the Supreme Court will decide whether coercing individuals to purchase a product is constitutional. That’s when we’ll find out if the document is worth anything at all anymore.

…Yet, if this mandate stands, any political group need only cobble together a majority of elected officials, find some open-minded judges dedicated to “doing the right thing” rather than upholding their oath, and government can be handed unlimited power to control not only what we can buy but what we must buy.

…As Federal District Court Judge Henry Hudson, who found the mandate unconstitutional recently, points out, “The same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation.”

Maybe that’s the point. Force someone to buy a gun? Awful. Force someone to buy insurance? A victory for fairness. The limits of this philosophy depend solely on the subjective ideals and imagination of powerful advocates. …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett highlights commentary from Glenn Reynolds on two more “eminent domain” thefts. Kelo v. New London continues to allow government and the well-connected to steal land from others. This time it is Columbia University stealing from small businesses near the school.

The takings clause reads “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” When Kelo v. City of New London upheld the power of takings for economic development, many used the political backlash to that decision as a vindication of “judicial restraint.” See, we were told, this sort of dispute should be left to the political sphere. Now, as Glenn Reynolds notes in his New York Post column, Columbia University has succeeded in its quest to take two businesses to incorporate their land into the university’s footprint:

[T]his week, . . . the last legal barrier (a possible US Supreme Court review) to Columbia University’s efforts to condemn and seize two businesses — Tuck-it-Away Self-Storage and a gas station owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur in West Harlem — vanished.

Columbia said the condemnation was necessary to support the university’s “vision” for a new campus; school President Lee Bollinger called the victory “a very important moment in the history of the university.”

It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia — but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the “vision” of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the wealthy, the powerful and the connected.

Traditionally, the “public-domain” power was used to acquire property needed for things like roads and bridges. It’s still often defended in those terms, but the “public use” required for such takings has now been interpreted by courts to include pretty much anything the government wants to do with the property — including handing it over to someone else who just happens to be wealthier or better-connected than the original property holder…

Jennifer Rubin looks at the DC drama last week.

This past week was an extraordinary one for politics watchers. It had the feel of a national political convention week — all the pols, the pundits, the excitement of non-stop news. (START is dead! No it lives! The omnibus spending bill is monstrous! Oh my, that’s dead, too.) But unlike a political convention that simply chooses leaders and quickly fades into the atmosphere (Quick: who were the keynote speakers for the two parties in 2008?), the week had meat — constitutional law (wow, the Commerce Clause might have some bite left in it), ideological watersheds (we are all Bush tax cutters now), social breakthroughs (in a few years, will anyone care about any issue regarding gays?), and foreign policy intrigue (just how desperate is the administration to prostrate itself before the Russians?).

Big things happened. President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (I typed “majority leader” and had to correct, but he surely seems like the one running the place) may be the next Ronald Reagan-Tip O’Neill political odd couple. ObamaCare, by a combination of judicial surgery (a mandate-ectomy) and a starvation diet (not the Zone Diet, but the DeMint-McConnell-Boehner-Ryan Squeeze), suddenly seemed in peril.

The week’s events also confirmed that Congress, not the preliminary 2012 Republican primary scramble, will be where the action is for conservatives over the next few months. None of the often-mentioned contenders are anxious to get into the race, although preening for the base is very much underway (Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Rep. Mike Pence, unlike Rep. Dennis Kucinich, opposed the tax agreement because you can never say “yes” and impress the hardest of the hardliners.) …

Bill Kristol entertains us with the Beltway version of the Night Before Christmas.

’Twas the week before Christmas, and all through
the House

The liberals were stirring, and boy did they grouse!

While earmarks were hung on the Reid bill with care

In hopes that the public would not see them there,

The “rich folks” were nestled all snug in their bed—

In hopes they’d be spared, like the president said—

While Nancy in kerchief and Bernie in cap

Were hunting for corpses that Congress could tap. …

Michael Goodwin, in the NYPost, looks at all the Christmas presents the country has been receiving.

…From the federal courts to the halls of Congress, the counterattack against Big Government claimed its first victories just in time for Christmas. Casualties were suffered only by those who forgot that majorities still count in a democracy.

Themes don’t get any more American than that.

The bipartisan support for extending the Bush tax cuts was the first big shock wave of the November election, but not the only one.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to withdraw his earmark-larded $1.2 trillion spending bill because he didn’t have the votes.

That will give the new Congress, under public marching orders to trim spending and ban earmarks, its chance to whack away. …

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel says that we have Mitch McConnell to thank for the defeat of the omnibus monstrosity, and for keeping nine Republican senators from succumbing to temptation.

…This week Democrats unveiled a $1.2 trillion omnibus, legislation as pure an insult to the electorate as it gets. It was a 1,924-page monstrosity that nobody had time to read. It took 11 spending bills that Democrats couldn’t be bothered to pass individually and crammed them into one oozing ball of pork and bad policy, going beyond even the obscene budget of 2010.

Yet to this legislative Frankenstein Democrats carefully attached the spenders’ equivalent of crack cocaine. To wit, omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill. He lavished special, generous attention—$1 billion worth of it—on some reliable GOP earmark junkies: Mississippi’s Thad Cochran got $512 million; Utah’s Bob Bennett, $226 million; Maine’s Susan Collins, $114 million; Missouri’s Kit Bond, $102 million; Ohio’s George Voinovich, $98 million; and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, $80 million.

The effect of this dope—just sitting there, begging for a quick inhale—on earmarkers was immediate. Two seconds into the sweats and shaking hands, nine Republicans let Mr. Reid know they’d be open to this bill.

…Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell accomplished a mini Christmas miracle. The Kentuckian devoted yesterday to making the arguments—both principled and political—to the Spending Nine. He was ultimately persuasive enough, and the earmarkers wise enough, to pull back their support. A very unhappy Mr. Reid was forced to yank the omnibus last night. He will now work with Republicans on a short-term funding bill, a process that should give the incoming GOP House far more influence over upcoming spending decisions. …

Michael Barone also comments on the good news from Washington.

…At the south end of the Capitol Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to watch gloomily as her Democrats failed to rally majorities to alter — and probably sidetrack — the deal reached between Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders extending the Bush tax cuts for two years.

Instead, the House voted 277-148 for a measure that the Senate had passed 81-19 earlier in the week. “If someone had told me, the day after election day 2008, that the tax rates on income and capital would not increase for the next four years,” wrote Bush White House staffer Keith Hennessey in his blog, “I would have laughed.”

…Republicans, having succeeded in holding down tax rates, clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending and to defund and derail Obamacare, which is at or near new lows in the ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen polls. And there does seem an opening, as Clinton White House staffer William Galston argues, for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates. …

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David Harsanyi says that there are no brains at “No Labels”.

“We are not labels — we are people.”

So begins the absurd, anti-democratic “declaration” of the soon-to-fail “No Labels” organization. This movement of rejected liberal Republicans and triangulating Democrats (oops, there I go again with the labels) are, unlike partisans and ideologues with bad manners, really interested in solving America’s problems.

“Not Left. Not Right. Forward!” is its motto.

The answer, my friends, is always in the muddled but inspirational middle. And partisanship “is paralyzing our ability to govern” — because, as you well know, Washington didn’t spend trillions and reform a significant sector of the economy in just these past two years. …

George Will also discusses the No Labels outfit.

…No Labels purports to represent a supposedly disaffected middle of the ideological spectrum. Some No Labels enthusiasts speak of eliminating “political retribution,” presumably meaning voters defeating candidates with whose positions they disagree. No Labels promises to police the political speech of the intemperate.

…The perpetrators of this mush purport to speak for people who want to instruct everyone else about how to speak about politics. Granted, there always are people who speak extravagantly, and modern technologies – television, the Internet – have multiplied their megaphones. But blowhards, although unattractive, are easy to avoid. …

…No Labels, its earnestness subverting its grammar, says: “We do not ask any political leader to ever give up their label – merely put it aside.” But adopting a political label should be an act of civic candor. When people label themselves conservatives or liberals we can reasonably surmise where they stand concerning important matters, such as Hudson’s ruling. The label “conservative” conveys much useful information about people who adopt it. So does the label “liberal,” which is why most liberals have abandoned it, preferring “progressive,” until they discredit it, too.

Tony Blankley thinks its time that politicians face fiscal reality before investors force the issue.

…Starting immediately, it is beyond the doubt of rational minds of the right, center or left – (yes, I concede to my fellow conservatives that I am stretching a point combining the words “rational” and “the left”) – that our national destiny requires us to re-establish fiscal balance or let our great history and remaining great destiny rot and fail.

As Alan Greenspan observed recently, we will surely reduce our debt and deficit – “the only question is whether we do it before or after a bond crisis.” And, as we have seen in Greece, Ireland and other parts of the world, a bond crisis doesn’t come slowly. It strikes within hours when the collective judgment of cold and calculating investor minds around the world reach a harsh judgment.

How ludicrous our petty haggling will look to us the morning after. And what a painful and long-lasting economic agony we and the world economy will have if that dreadful day comes.

But as Thomas Paine said and Reagan often repeated, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And we do. Congress and the president could start now – before Christmas – to begin signaling to the world that Washington is committed to laying the legislative foundations in the next six months for fixing our fiscal crisis. It’s not even a world we have to begin again – just a vaunted American skill we have to reapply.

In Reason, Veronique de Rugy gives an overview of the muni bond bubble the administration increased, and explains how investors have recently signaled a lack of confidence in this market.

…Since 2000 the total outstanding state and municipal bond debt, adjusted for inflation, has soared from $1.5 trillion to $2.8 trillion … The recession didn’t slow the spending.

…Municipal bonds are perceived as safe investments because, like U.S. Treasury bonds, they are backed by the full faith, credit, and taxing powers of the issuing governments. Investors know that states and localities can always raid taxpayer wallets to pay off their debts. 

But in the last two years tax and fee hikes have faced greater public opposition. Last year, for example, Jefferson County, Alabama, was unable to raise sewer fees to meet its sewer bond obligation. Since governments are generally unwilling to cut spending either, the result of resistance to new revenue raising has been substantial increases in states’ and cities’ debt levels. Detroit and Los Angeles have announced that they may have to declare bankruptcy, as have a number of smaller cities. …

…But municipal bonds have not yet lost their low-risk reputation. According to the Investment Company Institute, $84 billion went into long-term municipal bond mutual funds in 2010, up from $69 billion in 2009. And the 2009 level represents a 785 percent increase from the 2008 level of $7.8 billion. Artificial incentives have lured investors into thinking that lending cash to bankrupted cities will be profitable. …

Fred Barnes discusses round one of Delta against the unions, and how the Obami are helping the unions in round two. Makes us want to hop on a Delta flight to show support.

…With the Obama administration on their side, the unions expected to win the elections and end Delta’s status as the only major airline with a largely nonunion workforce. (Delta pilots have been union members for years.) But the AFA and IAM lost in what was not only a shattering defeat for labor, but also a reflection of the sharply diminished appeal of unions for most workers today.

The final election, conducted last week, delivered the most stunning verdict. Delta workers at airports and reservation centers rejected the IAM, 70-30 percent. In November, flight attendants voted against unionization, 52-48 percent. Ramp (or “under the wing”) employees voted not to join the IAM, 53-47 percent. And maintenance workers turned down the IAM more decisively, 72-28 percent. Sensing defeat, labor unions had earlier decided not to attempt to unionize four other groups of employees: mechanics, technical writers, meteorologists, and “simulated technicians.”

It was a clean sweep for Delta and shocking to labor organizers. As a result, 17,000 former Northwest employees who had been union members will become nonunion once the election results have been certified. That may take a while because the unions have filed formal complaints that Delta interfered with the election. They are seeking a new election. Unions do this routinely when they lose an election. They are poor losers.

How did Delta thwart the unions? The company pointed out its pay and benefits are 10 percent to 15 percent above those of unionized employees who had worked for Northwest and have been for years. Higher pay, better benefits, no union dues—that was the argument. And it proved to be compelling. …

In the National Review, Rich Lowry succinctly explains everything wrong with ethanol and ethanol subsidies.

…Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley, the Democratic and Republican senators from Iowa respectively, stand at the doors of Congress declaring: Ethanol now, ethanol forever. They have graced the Obama-McConnell tax bargain with an extension of a tax credit for ethanol that costs about $6 billion a year, and with an extension of a tariff on ethanol imports. Ethanol is so uneconomical that Congress supports it three different ways — with a mandate for its use, a tax credit to subsidize it, and a tariff to keep out competitors. Rarely are so many levers of government used to prop up one woeful product.

During the past decade, ethanol enjoyed a good run as a notional part of the solution to global warming. Then, environmentalists began to realize it may actually increase greenhouse emissions. Ethanol releases less carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline. Once the emissions necessary to convert land to corn production and then grow and process it are taken into account, though, ethanol doesn’t look so green anymore.

So much corn — about 40 percent of the U.S. crop — is feeding into the maw of government-created demand for the fuel, that it could be increasing worldwide food prices. In short, in exchange for not reducing greenhouse emissions, ethanol reduces the availability of food to the poor.

The multiple layers of subsidization have their own perversity. Since there’s already a mandate to blend ethanol into gasoline, the tax credit is giving away money for something that would happen anyway. Environmental groups say this pads the bottom line of Big Oil. Harry de Gorter of the free-market Cato Institute has a more complicated take — the subsidy decreases the cost and therefore the price of gasoline, effectively subsidizing its consumption. Your Congress at work. …

In the Top of the Ticket Blog at LA Times, Andrew Malcolm has a post on Virginia’s AG and the win against the individual mandate.

Ken Cuccinelli has not been a well-known public figure — until now.

He’s the attorney general of Virginia, who wasn’t given much chance of succeeding in his lonely legal challenge to President Obama’s beloved healthcare legislation designed to change whatever you believe in on that subject.

But then, oops, Federal District Judge Henry Hudson on Monday agreed with the Virginia AG, declaring a crucial part of the law unconstitutional. Full details here, including the opinion’s complete text.

…Here’s how the judge put it in a powerful historical footnote: “Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause power to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.” …

CBS – Baltimore reports on a natural resources police officer that needs to get a clue.

BALTIMORE COUNTY, Md. (WJZ) – They fought to save a life, and now they say they’ll fight the fine. It all revolves around the rescue of a deer trapped in icy water Thursday night.

Alex DeMetrick reports that good deed was rewarded with tickets.

Strangers banded together to pull a deer out of the freezing water of the Patapsco River on Thursday night. “We seen the deer going under,” said Khalil Abusakran. “It couldn’t maintain.  It was starting to freeze, and it was really getting bad.” Abusakran brought a raft, and Jim Hart joined him. “We had oars and shovels to break the ice, for the deer to get out,” Abusakran said. But in the excited aftermath of the rescue, a natural resources police officer on the scene wrote both men a ticket.

“And he didn’t say anything,” Jim Hart said. “We went in and out of the water numerous times.  He didn’t stop us at all.” They say they were ticketed for not wearing life vests, although both are over the age for mandatory use of flotation devices. “No, we didn’t have vests on, but we’re not 16 years old,” Abusakran said. “There were personal floating devices on the boat.” The ticket itself doesn’t check off any specific violation, just a $90 fine. They’ll fight it in court, as they fought for the deer. The two men ticketed say they will fight the citations at the court hearing in Annapolis set for Feb. 18

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We open with a touching Christmas story shared by Andrew Malcolm in the LA Times. Ronald Reagan is in it.

…One day in the middle of his eight years as governor (1967-75), Reagan received a letter from two sisters — Bertha and Samueline Sisco. According to their story, they had promised their dying mother they would always care for their brother, Buzzy who was, as they phrased it in those days, retarded.

The sisters were seeking guidance to some kind of state help in caring for their 43-year-old sibling and the governor’s office steered them toward it.

But Gov. Reagan heard a about the family’s situation and made some inquiries. He discovered that Buzzy had always wanted a rocking chair to sit in with his teddy bear.

…Shortly before Christmas that year California Highway Patrolman Dale Role delivered a rocking chair to the Sisco home, along with a note explaining that it came from the governor’s personal family furnishings and he wanted Buzzy and his teddy bear to be rocking in time for Christmas. …

In American.com, Arthur Brooks and Peter Wehner discuss how society benefits from capitalism.

…The American founders believed, and capitalism rests on the belief, that people are driven by “self-interest” and the desire to better our condition. Self-interest is not necessarily bad; in fact, Smith believed, and capitalism presupposes, that the general welfare depends on allowing an individual to pursue his self-interest “as long as he does not violate the laws of justice.” When a person acts in his own interest, “he frequently promotes [the interest] of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. ”7

…Smith took for granted that people are driven by self-interest, by the desire to better their condition. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” is how he put it, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”9

…Advocates of free enterprise believe that creativity, enterprise, and ingenuity are essential parts of human nature. Capitalism aims to take advantage of the self-interest of human nature, knowing that the collateral effects will be a more decent and benevolent society. Capitalists believe that liberty is an inherent good and should form the cornerstone not only of our political institutions but our economic ones as well.  …

The Christian Science Monitor editors comment on the individual mandate and the Supreme Court.

…Never before has the federal government tried to punish citizens for not engaging in a private activity. This “individual mandate” is a legal innovation, one now being challenged in several courts. On Monday, US District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled that the mandate “exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution].” Two other federal judges, however, recently ruled in favor of the mandate’s constitutionality.

At least one of these cases will probably reach the Supreme Court by 2012. As in many of its decisions, the high court may be split in a 5-to-4 vote. And Justice Anthony Kennedy, as often happens, could be the swing vote and write the majority opinion.

Here is what he may well say – in a layman’s version of arguments – against the mandate…

Thomas Sowell supplies some gift-giving ideas. We highlight a few:

…Among the books I read this year, the one that made the biggest impact on me was “New Deal or Raw Deal” ($10.20; 32% OFF) by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor at Hillsdale College. It was that rare kind of book, one thoroughly researched by a scholar and yet written in plain language, readily understood by anyone.

So many myths and legends glorifying Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal administration have become part of folklore that a dose of cold facts is very much needed.

…I don’t usually read autobiographical books but two very good ones came out this year. My favorite is titled “Up from the Projects” (34% off) by economist, columnist and personal friend Walter Williams. It is a small book with a big punch. Once you start reading it, it is hard to put down.

“Up from the Projects” is not only a remarkable story of a remarkable man’s life, it is the story of both progress and retrogression in the black community. Everyone wants to take credit for the progress but nobody wants to take the blame for the retrogression.

…My own new books this year are “Intellectuals and Society,” (34% off) an account of another strange and dangerous group of people, and the 4th edition of “Basic Economics,” which is more than twice as large as the first edition. It has been putting on weight over the years, like its author, but the weight is muscle in the case of the book.

“Basic Economics” (38% off) has sold more copies than any other book of mine and has been translated into more foreign languages. Apparently there are a lot of people who want to understand economics without having to wade through graphs and equations.

 David Harsanyi shifts gears and comments on movies versus tv.

…Recently in a Wall Street Journal piece, humorist Joe Queenan made a stinging case that 2010 was the absolute worst year in movies — ever. Queenan contends that Hollywood’s historical mission is to provide “a steady stream of engaging movies to generate a continuous sense of excitement” but also to make us “anticipate” and “talk them up long before their release.” But movies for adults rarely generate any excitement. The medium that produces the most conversation and enthusiasm these days is television.

Take “Mad Men.” The highly rated series set in the 1960s focuses on the escapades of Don Draper, creative director for a fledgling Madison Avenue ad firm. Jon Hamm’s acting is as good anything we’re seeing in movies, and the show is crammed with rich characters and provocative story lines. In the real world, “Mad Men” unleashes a massive post-episode conversation that takes place in thousands of discussion boards, blogs, talk shows, offices and newspapers. What movie can claim anything close to that kind of relevance?

…This kind of care often makes television more akin to reading a novel than watching a movie. It does not shy away from the cerebral. Ask David Simon, the Baltimore Sun crime reporter and co-creator of HBO’s “The Wire,” who explained to Newsweek a few years ago that his standard for Baltimore “was Balzac’s Paris, or Dickens’s London, or Tolstoy’s Moscow.” The realism of that show — which spent each of its five seasons dissecting another area of urban life — had the feel of a documentary.

I remember an FBI agent telling me that “The Wire” was the closest thing to police reality he had ever watched. Certainly, the show’s 21st century newsroom — the focus of the last season — was as authentic as any portrayed in film. …

In the WSJ, Lauren Etter writes about how Chicago is making life difficult for their culinary entrepreneurs who operate food trucks rather than restaurants. 

…Food trucks—essentially restaurants on wheels—have taken off in cities such as Los Angeles and New York, spurred by the weak economy, trendy fare and the proliferation of social media, like Twitter. Food & Wine magazine voted an L.A. food-truck chef one of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 and the Food Network has a show devoted to such vendors. But in Chicago, one of the nation’s most progressive culinary cities, the trucks are held back by restrictive rules and operate in a legal twilight zone.

…Unlike other cities, where chefs are free to actually cook inside their trucks, Chicago chefs can’t unwrap or alter the food in any way once it’s on a truck. And food trucks aren’t allowed to park within 200 feet of a restaurant. Such roadblocks have kept all but a few chefs from taking to the streets—even as the food trucks fight to change the rules.

…A food-truck operation can get off the ground for under $150,000, while many restaurants spend more than $1 million on real estate and equipment to open their doors. .. 

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Richard Epstein explains Virginia’s win against Obamacare.

…The key successful move for Virginia was that it found a way to sidestep the well known 1942 decision of the Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn, which held in effect that the power to regulate commerce among the several states extended to decisions of farmers to feed their own grain to their own cows.  Wickard does not pass the laugh test if the issue is whether it bears any fidelity to the original constitutional design.  It was put into place for the rather ignoble purpose to make sure that the federally sponsored cartel arrangements for agriculture could be properly administered.

At this point, no District Court judge dare turn his back on the ignoble and unprincipled decision in Wickard. But Virginia did not ask for radical therapy.  It rather insisted that “all” Wickard stands for is the proposition that if a farmer decides to grow wheat, he cannot feed it to his own cows if a law of Congress says otherwise.  It does not say that the farmer must grow wheat in order that the federal government will have something to regulate.

It is just that line that controls this case.  The opponents of the individual mandate say that they do not have to purchase insurance against their will.  The federal government may regulate how people participate in the market, but it cannot make them participate in the market.  For if it could be done in this case it could be done in all others. …

The WSJ editors crafted an excellent editorial on individual mandate that is well worth reading.

…Moreover, Judge Hudson says that no court has ever “extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.”

…While Judge Hudson’s ruling is the first to declare part of the law unconstitutional, more than 20 state attorneys general and the National Federation of Independent Business are also suing in Florida. Oral arguments will be heard on Thursday in that case, which we think is the strongest constitutional challenge to the law.

As the Virginia case shows, ObamaCare really does stretch the Commerce Clause to the breaking point. The core issue is whether the federal government can order individuals to do anything the political class decides it wants them to do. The stakes couldn’t be higher for our constitutional order.

David Goldman says get out of municipal bonds and bank equities while you still can.

I’ve been warning for months that a few state and municipal bankruptcies (actually, a few states and a great many city bankruptcies) will be required to slay the beast of government-union pension liabilities. The total size of the muni bond market is about $2.4 trillion. Unfunded pension liabilities (calculated with a realistic discount rate) are almost as high, according to one study. Now comes James Pethokoukis of Reuters to tell us of a “secret GOP plan” to bankrupt local governments and crush the government unions.

…That’s why the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program.  BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31.  And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.”…

I’m not going to trade in Capitol Hill rumors, but whether there is a secret plan or not, the US federal government is in the same position that Germany is with respect to Greece — the creditors (in this case public employee pensions) have to take a massive haircut for the numbers to add up. The delayed effect of the real estate collapse (which is still getting worse) is going to hit local revenues next year due to massive downward adjustment in tax assessments. …

…It’s cities, not states, that live off real estate taxes. Local government was riding the real estate boom along with everyone else but it takes a couple of years for the price collapse to work its way through tax assessments. What’s going to happen is two, three, many Harrisburg bankruptcies. The cities will collapse and the states will push them over the edge (like NY State with NYC in 1974). They’ll make a horrible example of a couple of states — California and Illinois — others will hold the line as the cities go down like ninepins

…There’s a limit to how far they can take this: Banks and insurance companies together have about $700 billion of munis. You can wipe out mom and pop (did so already with the auction securities market) but a 40% haircut would take out about $300 billion of financial institutions’ capital — not pretty.  And that’s not to mention the spillover effect on other markets. That’s yet another reason not to own the banks’ common equity. …

In the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell thinks that the tax deal does not bode well for the US.

…This week’s debate is the latest, and maybe the last, chapter in a woeful deterioration of US budgetary politics. Democrats and Republicans used to understand that tax receipts must equal outlays, and they argued over priorities. For a while after Ronald Reagan, the argument shifted to the size of government, with Republicans arguing for smaller budgets and Democrats for larger ones. But in the decade of George W. Bush, it all changed. Republicans argued for ever-lower taxes, and often had the power to push them through. Both parties agreed on ever-higher spending. This week Mr Obama took a slightly different tack, larding more tax cuts on to the ones he professed to dislike, but the fiscal effect is the same: a social-democratic government on an anarchist budget, with deficits of more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product and a government that pays for 40 per cent of operating expenses by borrowing.

This is evidence of some failure of national character. Perhaps the American moral imagination has been poisoned by those old Hollywood movies about virtuous underdogs, in which the hero’s interests and his principles always point uncomplicatedly in the same direction, and making things easier for oneself is always the right thing to do. Perhaps the failing is an inability to draw boundaries and give straight answers. Everything is provisional in American politics. Republicans, who warned two months ago that “uncertainty” about taxes made it hard for businesses to hire, have happily signed on to a plan that extends that uncertainty for another two years. The two parties have connived to kick every single difficult budget decision down the road. They have collaborated only to give away money. If this were part one of a larger plan to get the country’s fiscal house in order, it might be welcomed. But it is an exercise in wishful thinking. It damps hopes that America can reform before the markets bring it to heel.

The trap that Mr Obama’s angry partisans espy is that events will impose some serious gesture of deficit reduction on the new Congress. There are two ways to balance budgets: Democrats would prefer to assess government’s responsibilities, and then raise taxes to fund them. Republicans would rather measure government revenues, and then slash programmes those revenues do not cover. Mr Obama’s short-term deal makes it more likely that the long-term equilibration of income and outgoings will be done on Republican terms. …

Here’s an ugly collusion: big government, big business, and big unions. Gary Jason, in the American Thinker, explains how the taxpayers and GM’s creditors got screwed in the GM deal.

…First is the news that the “new” GM walked away from the crony bankruptcy proceedings with a huge tax break — one worth up to $45 billion.  It was revealed in the paperwork filed for its IPO that the Obama administration gave the new GM a sweetheart deal: it will be allowed to carry forward huge losses incurred by the “old” GM prior to its bankruptcy.  Of course, the IRS doesn’t allow the new companies that emerge from bankruptcy to write off their old losses.  But the feds decided to waive that rule for companies bailed out by TARP.

Thus, the new GM will save about $45.4 billion in taxes on future earnings, which may allow it to escape taxes for the next twenty years. …

…The UAW was given a big chunk of new GM in the crooked bankruptcy settlement.  To be precise, the very monster that drove GM off the cliff — the UAW — received 35% of the stock in the new company.  With the sale of the stock in the new GM, the UAW earned an immediate $3.4 billion in selling about one third of its shares.

…In fact, the Obama administration screwed the taxpayer just as thoroughly as it pampered the UAW.  The taxpayer put $49.5 billion into GM in the bankruptcy, not to mention all the funds shoveled at the company prior to that.  The Treasury recouped only a wretched $13.7 billion in the IPO, mainly because the Obama administration — in yet another unprecedented gift to the union — announced publicly that it would not sell any more stock for the next six months.  This enables the UAW to dump its shares whenever it wants at a much higher price than it could get if the Treasury were also selling.  The taxpayers will almost certainly get a lower payout, and they will never recoup their forced investment in these dinosaurs — all to enable the UAW to walk away made whole.

…The Obama administration car czar, who engineered the crony bankruptcy — the aptly named Steve Rattner — claims that the secured creditors would have received nothing in a standard bankruptcy anyway.  But his claim is ludicrous on its face: in a regular bankruptcy, the union contracts that caused GM’s and Chrysler’s failure would have been nullified, and the substantial assets of the companies (plants, inventory, receivables, land, patents, etc.) would have been worth a substantial amount to other automakers and investment companies.  The proceeds would have gone to satisfy the bondholders at least to a fair degree. …

We have more from the WSJ editors, this time on the ethanol subsidy boondoggle.

…The public choice school of economics describes how the government and special interests collude against the public good, and it’s hard to think of a better model than the ethanol industry. Despite opposition from an emerging left-right anti-boondoggle coalition, the Senate version of the White House-GOP tax deal preserves the corn fuel’s multiple subsidies. …

…Direct subsidies and trade protectionism, plus mandates that force consumers to buy ethanol: This is the trifecta of government support, and all for an industry that is 30 years old and that even Al Gore now admits serves none of its advertised environmental purposes.

The ethanol extension is the bipartisan handiwork of Iowa Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin, who both regularly abandon their professed principles (fiscal conservatism for the Republican and equity for the Democrat) in the service of agribusiness. …

Peter Suderman comments on how the politicians and the people they’ve been paying off are still controlling the ethanol money.

As CEI’s Brian McGraw points out, ethanol subsidies are opposed by just about everyone: researchers, environmental activists, free market wonks, and newspaper editorial writers across the ideological spectrum. Even Al Gore has come out against them.

I say “just about” everyone because of course the ethanol lobby and the farmers it serves still favor keeping the subsidies in place. 

Naturally, the current plan is to extend them for another year. …

In the National Review, Robert Bryce has more on unsustainable fuels. Or fuels that can only be sustained with your tax dollars.

…But the ethanol producers, as usual, can’t get enough of your money, and they are working hard to assure that the fat subsidies (which now total about $7 billion per year) keep flowing. Last month, their main lobby groups — the Renewable Fuels Association, Growth Energy, and the American Coalition for Ethanol — sent a letter to congressional leaders telling them that ethanol has been “uniquely successful in reducing our dependence on foreign, imported oil.” They urged Congress to pass legislation extending the tax credit before the end of the year.

..While oil imports are increasing and the ethanol industry is producing too much ethanol, the wind-energy sector is being garroted by that dastardly opponent of renewable energy:  competitive markets. In late October, the American Wind Energy Association announced that through the first three quarters, just 1,600 megawatts of new wind capacity was installed in the U.S., “down 72 percent versus 2009, and the lowest level since 2006.”

In a press release, the lobby group said the solution for its woes were — wait for it — more subsidies and mandates. The group’s CEO, Denise Bode, said that “the best way to galvanize the industry now will be continued tax credits and a federal benchmark of 15 percent renewables in the national electricity mix by 2020.” Bode continued, saying that those subsidies and a 15 percent renewable mandate “will send a clear signal to investors that the U.S. is open for business.”

…Unable to compete in the free market, the wind industry’s only near-term hope is an ethanol-style mandate. And if given that mandate, perpetual ethanol-style subsidies will surely ensue. Congress, please, just say no.

Jennifer Rubin comments on a Sarah Palin op-ed.

Last week, I criticized Sarah Palin for using Twitter to render an ambiguous, off-the-cuff response to the bipartisan tax agreement. I understand that some of her supporters weren’t too pleased with the suggestion that one of her favorite modes of communication made her seem like a lightweight. But she then followed up in the Wall Street Journal with a robust and detailed endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R.-Wisc.) Roadmap for America’s Future. After detailing her criticisms of the debt commission proposal, she argued:

“…The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission’s proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.

On Social Security, as with Medicare, the Roadmap honors our commitments to those who are already receiving benefits by guaranteeing all existing rights to people over the age of 55. Those below that age are offered a choice: They can remain in the traditional government-run system or direct a portion of their payroll taxes to personal accounts, owned by them, managed by the Social Security Administration and guaranteed by the federal government.”

… she’s made a valuable contribution by highlighting and explaining Ryan’s plan. It is a step in the right direction for someone who in some capacity wants to be a player in the GOP.

The Economist reports on a possible new medical use for an old pain reliever.

FOR thousands of years aspirin has been humanity’s wonder drug. Extracts from the willow tree have been used for pain relief in folk medicine since the time of the ancient Greeks. By 1897 a synthetic derivative (acetyl salicylic acid) of the plant’s active ingredient (salicin) was created. This allowed aspirin to become the most widely used medicine in the world.

In recent years its benefits as a blood-thinning drug have led to it being prescribed in low doses of around 50mg to reduce deaths from stroke and heart attack. There were also hints that aspirin may help prevent some cancers. But these were mostly based on observational studies, which can be misleading. …

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Jonah Goldberg writes that we need to be doing more for the people of North Korea. He has quite an opening: 

If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so? 

In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question: 

“If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire? 

The answers are too obvious, the questions merely rhetorical. And therein lies a very great irony. At long last a genuine spirit of transnational benevolence has arisen, fulfilling the highest hopes of the rare pioneering globalists of the 19th century and before. No longer does this disinterested benevolence abruptly stop at the boundaries of state, nation or culture. Instead it now encompasses all of life both animal and vegetal across the entire globe, with only one exception: Homo sapiens.” 

Luttwak overstated how good animals have it, alas. But his point was well taken. And to America’s credit, it wasn’t long after Luttwak’s essay that the United States and NATO (but not the United Nations) finally did something to curb the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia. 

But that’s probably little solace to the people of North Korea. … 

A National Review post comments on the Virginia Court’s health-care decision. 

In its first serious court test, the most unpopular provision in Obamacare — the individual mandate — has been declared unconstitutional on two crucial grounds. 

First, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce by compelling people “to involuntarily engage in a private commercial transaction.” 

Second, he said the Obama administration can’t argue after the fact that the mandate is a tax and therefore within Congress’s constitutional taxing authority. “The Court is unpersuaded” that the penalty for not purchasing insurance is a “bona fide revenue raising measure enacted under the taxing power of Congress,” he wrote from his bench in the Eastern District of Virginia. 

Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli led the commonwealth’s case against the law. It was a victory for him when Judge Hudson declared that the mandate to purchase health insurance represents an “unchecked expansion of congressional power” that “would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers.” 

Cuccinelli had argued that the Commerce Clause of the constitution does not grant Congress the authority to force people into economic activity. Judge Hudson declared that the mandate is “neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution.” …  

John Podhoretz comments on Clinton taking center stage, and other tax compromise oddities. 

…What was Clinton doing there, exactly? Could it be news to anyone that Clinton would support the deal, especially since it seems to come straight from the his political playbook? Not to mention that, let’s face it, Obama is his wife’s boss. 

The event gobsmacked the political class. On Twitter, ABC News political director Amy E. Walter wrote, “Obama just ceded the podium to Clinton. This. Is. Awesome.” Christina Bellantoni of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call used the same punctuation trope: “This is Un. Real.” 

Washington froze in wonder at this momentary trip into the past. The sheer strangeness of the sight of Clinton alone at that podium crystallized the sense that the American political system (or more specifically, the Democratic party) had spun out of control over the course of the week. 

The week began with the announcement of the grand budget deal on Monday, triggering rage from Obama’s base that he had somehow “caved” to Republicans — conveniently forgetting that the Democratic party in DC had been decimated only a month earlier in the midterm election. … 

George Will reminds us of the issues in Bush v. Gore ten years ago.

…The post-election lunacy could have been substantially mitigated by adhering to a principle of personal responsibility: Voters who cast ballots incompetently are not entitled to have election officials toil to divine these voters’ intentions. Al Gore got certain Democratic-dominated canvassing boards to turn their recounts into unfettered speculations and hunches about the intentions of voters who submitted inscrutable ballots. Before this, Palm Beach County had forbidden counting dimpled chads….But three of the four (of Florida’s 67) counties – each heavily Democratic – where Gore was contesting the count were not finished deciphering voters’ intentions. So Gore’s lawyers persuaded the easily persuadable state Supreme Court – with a majority of Democratic appointees – to rewrite the law. It turned the seven-day period into 19 days.Many liberals underwent instant conversions of convenience: They became champions of states’ rights when the U.S. Supreme Court (seven of nine were Republican appointees) unanimously overturned that extension. But the U.S. high court reminded Florida’s court to respect the real “states’ rights” at issue – the rights of state legislatures: The Constitution gives them plenary power to establish procedures for presidential elections.

…The U.S. Supreme Court was duty-bound not to defer to a state court that was patently misinterpreting – disregarding, actually – state law pertaining to a matter assigned by the U.S. Constitution to state legislatures. … 

 Chris Hitchens reads the riot act to some on the right. Main target – Glenn Beck. Hitch is a little overboard here and overlooks some of the good things Beck has done; like reminding us of Frederick Hayek.

…Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. … …The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.

Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault. …

 In the WaPo, Phillip Howard is back. He has a great idea to have expiration dates on legislation. We might ask lawmakers to try this out on the law they passed to give themselves automatic pay raises every year.

…A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjustment of laws. Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities….the political scuffle over ethanol subsidies – with Republican fiscal hard-liners facing off against Republicans from farm states – shows how sunset laws can reinvigorate democratic debate. Critics have long questioned billions of dollars in subsidies (last year, $7.7 billion) for a product known to have serious environmental drawbacks. The issue has come to a head, however, only because ethanol subsidies, like the Bush tax cuts, are set to automatically expire at the end of this year.  …To an amazing degree, our government’s choices are dictated by political leaders who are long dead. Health-care programs and Social Security – eating up about 70 percent of each year’s federal revenue – don’t even come up for annual authorization and are not limited by a budget. Many programs outlived their usefulness decades ago: New Deal subsidies intended for starving farmers now go mostly to corporate farms ($15 billion annually), and inflated union wages on government contracts (more than $11 billion per year), another relic of the 1930s, have the effect of limiting public works and employment.

…An omnibus sunset law would dislodge the status quo by requiring that every statute expire at some point, unless it is reenacted. Laws with budgetary mandates, such as subsidies, should probably have shorter fuses than broader regulatory laws, such as antitrust statutes. It would be much harder for Congress to overtly support a wasteful subsidy than to passively let it continue. Our democracy would be revitalized if there were an opportunity to debate how laws actually function. However unsatisfactory the current debate over tax cuts, at least there is a debate. … 

Gas prices are rising. The US has an answer that will put people to work and bring gas prices down. Stephen Dinan and Kara Rowland discuss this in the Washington Times. 

Gas prices have risen $1 since just after President Obama took office in January 2009 and are now closing in on the $3 mark, prompting an evaluation of the administration’s energy record and calls for the White House to open more U.S. land for oil exploration….Gas prices have been on a roller-coaster ride over the past decade, dropping to near $1 after President George W. Bush’s first year in office, crossing the $2 mark in 2005 and reaching $4 in June 2008 before Congress and Mr. Bush took action, lifting presidential and congressionally imposed moratoriums on expanding offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.Mr. Bush lifted the presidential moratorium in July that year. The congressional moratorium expired Sept. 30, and prices fell precipitously, dropping more than $1 in October. 

He said the solution is the same for both the short-term and long-term prices: Assure the markets that the U.S. will pursue domestic exploration. ..

“The reason that it dropped is because the U.S. sent a signal to the markets, by dropping the moratoria, that we’re going to drill on our lands. Obviously, we never followed up, and thus you see the crisis gradually rising,” said Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, the ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee.

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David Warren comments on recent events in England.

Prince Charles, and Camilla, were not the only things under attack in England this week, on the streets of London, as the British government took its latest steps to avoid the fate of Ireland and Greece. Not only publicly, but privately, the British are now a people who have borrowed and spent themselves into perdition; and at both the public and the private level, the legacy of consumer gratification is at hand. …

…At the root of criminal behaviour, after we have lopped off all its branches and dug to its source, is indifference to the pain of others, contrasted with wilful indulgence of one’s own pleasures. We think of criminals as brutish and cruel and, fair enough, they are. But only towards those who are in their way. In my experience, they are extremely sensitive about their own rights and perquisites. The person who doubts this should spend more time visiting prisoners in jail.

…Reason comes into this, too. At the root of reason is a certain patience in observing the connections between things. One does not, for instance, take out one’s wrath on Prince Charles because the education secretary in a government he never elected has raised one’s tuition fees. One does not even take it out on the education secretary, who is only doing his job in the face of massive public debt. Instead, one patiently reviews his arguments, to see if they can be confuted. …

David Harsanyi has an interesting take on manufacturing in the US.

…William Strauss at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago recently explained that the same number of Americans are working in the manufacturing sector now — around 14 million — as were in 1950. Yet, there has been a 600 percent increase in output. That’s good news.

It makes no sense for government to prop up non-productive manufacturing jobs any more than it makes economic sense to artificially prop up farmers (oh, I know, we try). We need far fewer people to work those jobs, but it doesn’t mean we don’t make anything. But as Williams succinctly points out, “If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany for the world’s fourth-richest economy in the entire world.”

Eighty percent of Americans told the National Journal that manufacturing was “extremely or very important to U.S. economic growth over the next five to 10 years.” (Manufacturing what?) Sixty-two percent believe it was important for government to help advanced manufacturing industries with “tax incentives and funding.”

How many price-fixing fiascoes does government have to engage in for us to understand that Washington shouldn’t be picking winners in the marketplace? How many wasted dollars will we need to pump into subsidies to understand that the market doesn’t care what we think, that it cares what we buy? …

Last week’s Obama meltdown is the subject of many posts by our favorites who explore presidential leadership past and present. Roger Simon kicks it off.

…We need a leader and don’t have one. This is extremely bad news for our country, especially now.

What is to be done? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t close to simple even with a real leader. Merely cutting taxes — assuming we do that — may not be nearly enough. And pseudo-stimulus spending, such as has been shamefully added on to this “compromise bill,” will most likely make matters worse. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on our economy, our way of life really. Interest to China alone will soon be enough to bankrupt us.

So what indeed is to be done? Paul Ryan has a prescription that’s a starting point, but even his ideas may not reduce spending fast enough. There is little reason to be optimistic, even with the Tea Party victories. I have just returned from New York and found the situation there similar to California, strongly resistant to change. (A good analysis can be found in the WSJ’s interview with Richard Ravitch — “Gotham’s Savior, Beaten By Albany.”) It’s tempting for some on the right to dismiss this as just New York and California, but these are our two most populous states and comprise a huge percentage of the U.S. economy. Things will not be easily improved without them. In fact, they probably can’t be improved without them. And Illinois too seems out of control.

And we have Barack Obama to lead us. Wow. The Republican leadership had better be strong. Their recent “compromise,” as Charles Krauthammer has shown us, was not inspiring. Color me nervous.

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner has depressing poll numbers for the White House. And they are not Obama’s numbers.

You’ve got to hand it to President Bush – his political comeback has been simply stunning. The latest Gallup poll shows him at 47 percent approval, a 13 point increase since he left office, and his highest rating since 2005. He now leads Barack Obama by a percentage point. His book Decision Points is still top of The New York Times bestseller list, and Americans can’t seem to get enough of him at the moment, much to the shock and horror of his increasingly “shellacked” political opponents.

…Bush’s rising popularity is in large part a backlash against Barack Obama’s left-wing and lacklustre leadership of the United States, and the perception that he is weakening America both at home and abroad. As the latest RealClear Politics average of polls shows, almost 60 percent of Americans believe the country is going down the wrong track. The Obama administration’s relentless bashing of the Bush presidency has clearly backfired, and has only served to enhance the former president’s popularity.

In addition, many Americans now look back with nostalgia on a president who had a clear-cut view of the United States as an exceptional nation and a great force for good on the world stage. In contrast to President Obama, there were never any apologies for America’s past from George W. Bush, and the US was feared by its enemies. President Bush liberated 50 million people from tyranny, a staggering achievement. …

John Fund thinks that the president will weather the liberal storm.

…White House officials are playing down the contretemps, emphasizing to reporters that it will use the liberal anger to its political advantage. Distancing Mr. Obama from the left wing of his party will be “a positive byproduct” of the tax extensions for all income groups, a White House aide close to Obama told Politico.com. “Compared to these guys, the president looks mature and pragmatic,” the official said.

But Mr. Obama may have underestimated the potential damage of his about-face on extending the tax cuts. The 2008 campaign featured three Democratic front-runners — Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards — and all solemnly pledged to end the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans. Mr. Obama repeated his pledge after he won the nomination. “We are going to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, those making more than $250,000 a year,” he told an audience in Lake Worth, Fla., just two weeks before the election.

…In the end, of course, liberals will line up to support Mr. Obama against any likely Republican challenger. But the enthusiasm and commitment liberals had in 2008 for Mr. Obama may well be muted. On the margins, that could hurt him as he seeks re-election at a time when many of his core supporters will still be economically stressed.

John Podhoretz comments that Obama’s press conference on the tax cut compromise did not earn him points with either party in Congress.

…Somehow, I don’t think the Democrats disenchanted by his policy choices over the past couple of days are going to be in a coronating mood after Obama furiously upbraided them in ad hominem language of a kind we may never before have heard from a president.

Had he followed their counsel and refused to deal with the GOP, he said, “We [would] be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.”

And the Republicans who just struck a deal with him will surely be less inclined to compromise in future negotiations if they are going to be insulted immediately afterward. …

Peter Wehner adds his thoughts.

President Obama, who during the heat of the 2010 midterm election referred to Republicans as “enemies,” has now decided to refine things a bit. The car-in-the-ditch analogy is out; the-GOP-as-hostage-takers is in.

As John mentioned, in Obama’s press conference earlier today the president, in discussing the tax cut deal he has negotiated with Republicans, said, “It’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed. … In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”

…On some deep level, Obama must understand that, at this moment at least, his presidency is coming apart. It’s not at all clear to me that he’s particularly well equipped to deal with the shifting fortunes, the hardships, and the battering that a president must endure. Difficult circumstances seem to be bringing out his worst qualities rather than his best. And that may be what was on display this afternoon.

Here’s a sentence from the twilight zone: Jennifer Rubin agrees with Maureen Dowd. The president is not looking very presidential.

I agree with Maureen Dowd on virtually nothing. But now and then she meanders close to the mark. Dowd writes of President Obama’s press conference yesterday:

“Obama used to play poker in the Illinois Legislature, but it’s hard to believe. First, he cried uncle to Republicans standing in the corner, holding their breath and turning blue. Then, in his White House press conference, he was defensive, a martyr for the middle class.”

…What is accurate in Dowd’s description, however, is the sense that this whole governing thing — the public salesmanship, the deal making, the explaining — is not Obama’s strong suit. It was disturbing at some level to see him, rendered so hapless, frustrated and angry. So much for the “superior temperament” we kept hearing about during the campaign. As Dowd uncharitably put it, “There’s an argument to be made for what the president did, but he doesn’t look good doing it.” In fact, many conservative pundits, think tankers, staffers and office holders think it’s a bit pricey, but a fine deal. So to put it differently, there is an argument for conservatives to accept the deal, but little reason other than resignation to reality for liberals to do so.

Let’s be honest here: a lot of being president is the aura of authority and the projection of strength and competence. Right now, does anyone on either end of the political spectrum think he’s demonstrating those traits? Well, Dowd and Rubin sure don’t, and that covers a pretty vast swatch of political territory.

In Contentions, J.E. Dyer was also surprised by the president’s performance.

…I don’t recall Obama ever coming off in a national forum quite so much like a leftist community organizer. In demonizing his political opponents, lecturing his base, and vowing to fight on in a long struggle, Obama appeared to be channeling his political roots in radical activism. He evoked an activist street fighter on the steps of city hall more than a president of the United States. The president is our head of government but also our head of state: a ceremonial symbol of national unity. One of his chief duties is to be happy about that.

As a partisan performance, Obama’s today didn’t stop with the relatively benign Democrat-versus-Republican divide. It recalled the European political sense in which partisanship is narrowly based on ethnicity or ideology, and opposes the putative complacency of all social compacts and central authorities. I suspect that one of the most difficult things for Obama himself, as well as for the more radical in his political base, is coming to grips with the truth that some homage must still be paid to the traditional compact of the U.S. government with its people. It was not, in fact, politically possible for Obama or the Democrats in Congress to imperil the finances of the middle class with a quixotic standoff over raising tax rates on the wealthy.

The people are, by and large, middle-class householders with no interest in suffering to make ideological points. The source of Obama’s peculiar dissonance in American politics is that he doesn’t feel, in his gut, that that is a good thing.

Ed Morrissey thinks that this is the beginning of the end for Obama’s presidency.

If Barack Obama hoped to launch his triangulation strategy with his tax-cut deal, so far it has failed to impress.  Charles Hurt, a frequent critic of Obama at the New York Post, spends most of today’s column praising Obama for finally cutting the Left loose and working with newly-energized Republicans on tax rates.  At the end, though, Hurt lays out the brutal political math that Obama faces, and declares that Obama has made himself a one-term President with this move…

That may be a little premature, but without doubt Obama is off to a bad start for his apparent triangulation strategy.  When Bill Clinton executed it in 1995-6, he put himself at the lead for what had been Republican agenda items on spending and welfare reform.  Obama didn’t get out in front on tax-rate extensions; instead, he obviously capitulated in return for a lot less than his base is willing to tolerate.

…Update: Greg Sargent reports the results of a Survey USA/WaPo poll among volunteers and contributors to Obama’s presidential campaign that underscores the problem:

The poll shows clearly that these contributors are deeply opposed (74%) to a deal with Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax breaks for those making over $250,000 a year. The depth of opposition to a deal is severe with former Obama contributors saying that they are less likely (57%) to support Democrats who support this deal in 2012. …

Nile Gardiner has more bad news for the Obami, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…The latest Bloomberg National Poll makes especially grim reading for the White House. More than half of all Americans (51 percent) believe they are worse off than they were two years ago when Barack Obama took office, with just 35 percent saying they are better off. A striking 66 percent of voters believe America is on the “wrong track”, with just 27 percent agreeing with the view that the United States is heading in the “right direction”.

Among Democrats, 48 percent think the country is on the wrong track, as opposed to 44 percent who disagree. And even more worryingly for the president, who is now trying harder to appeal to the centre ground, 67 percent of Independents believe Obama’s America is going down the wrong path, with just 24 percent disagreeing.

Fears over the economy are undoubtedly the biggest factor in the lack of confidence Americans have in their president. According to the Bloomberg survey, 50 percent of respondents listed unemployment and jobs as the most important issue facing the country, with 25 percent citing the federal deficit and government spending. Other issues, such as health care and immigration, are ranked as the most important by just 9 percent and 5 percent respectively. And consumer confidence remains stubbornly downbeat. When asked if they plan to spend more this Christmas season compared to 2009, just 12 percent said yes, with 46 percent declaring they plan to spend less. …

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In Forbes, Charles Kadlec comments on the looming debt crisis here and in the EU.

…In the U.S. at least, the looming debt crisis among states and municipalities also reflects a lack of diligence on the part of the citizenry. This can be attributed in part to a naïve assumption by the electorate that those in government, freed from the profit motive, could be trusted to do what was “right” for the community as a whole.

Instead, what we now can see is that elected officials, following a power motive, can be as greedy and irresponsible as anyone in the private sector. In many cases, officials from both parties have been captured by powerful interests, including public sector unions and recipients of transfer payments. As a consequence, they have willfully committed current and future taxpayer money to benefit those with political power at the expense of the community as a whole.

One lesson is that to live in liberty requires an elevated level of diligence, oversight and skepticism of our elected officials. Taxpayers and financial market regulators need to insist on more honest accounting and disclosure of the true costs of the government programs in general, and government employee pensions and benefits in particular.

The sovereign debt crisis now encircling Europe may well prove to be a preview of what lies ahead for the political class in the U.S. Like their European counterparts, they may be participants in an end-game in which capital markets force a reassessment of debt-financed government spending, especially on transfer payments, government pensions and wealth-destroying investments in bridges to nowhere, green energy and other government boondoggles with negative rates of return.

Walter Russell Mead looks over the edge.

The global financial crisis could be heading to a blue state near you: that is the latest grim news from the New York Times:  “Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis.“  Normally a cheerleader for the free spending (in bluespeak, compassionate) policies of the public sector union dominated, high tax, high cost states like California, Illinois and New York, the Times now warns that fiscal ruin could be at hand. 

…The Times story compares blue state debt to the subprime crisis and the Greek meltdown.  A deeply disturbing graph shows a true panic underway as investors pull money out of mutual funds that invest in municipal bonds even faster than at the height of the market collapse in October 2008.  With as much as $4 trillion in off-the-books pension and health care liabilities, the worst hit states may soon be unable to operate without massive federal support.

…Bond investors are much more skittish than stock buyers.  Any risk of default sends them running for the exits.  Without swift federal action, a crisis in the market for some cities and states would inevitably lead to sharp spikes in interest rates for other state and city governments whose positions suddenly looked risky.  Massive layoffs of government employees would be inevitable in a widening range of affected states, throwing the weak recovery off course and quite possibly bringing on the much-feared second dip of the recession. Many banks and other financial institutions like insurance companies hold significant portfolios of state debt; if those bonds tank in value, we could go back to the darkest days of the financial crisis of 2008 as big banks and insurance companies come running to Uncle Sam for more bailouts. …

…Some Democratic voters, heavily dependent on state spending because they are state employees or because they rely on state and local spending for vital services, will want the party to fight for them.  But very few non-affected Americans want to be taxed or for the federal government to take on large amounts of new doubt to bail out the cushy pensions of public employees. Nor will voters in the non-bankrupt states want to bail out the ne’er-do-wells without strict conditions and limits. …

Charles Krauthammer writes that Republicans just agreed to increase government spending to get the Bush tax cuts extended.

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies.

No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president’s deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.

Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way – mostly tax cuts – rather than the Democrats’ spending orgy of Stimulus I. That’s consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget. …

Michael Barone comments on tax cuts and Obama’s surprising admission.

…The strongest part of the press conference came when Obama told liberal Democrats that robust economic growth will make everything easier. That’s true: Robust growth produces a boom in revenues far beyond what government statistical models predict. In 1995 President Clinton refused to even promise to balance the budget, but the tech boom generated enough revenue to do so a few years later.

But that raises the question of why the economy has been growing at such a limp rate two years into the Obama administration. The specter of higher taxes on high earners — delayed now for two years, but still threatened by the president — surely has done something to choke off growth.

So has uncertainty about the extent and cost of the administration’s regulatory policies — which are not limited by the deal on taxes. Extension of unemployment benefits, arguably good policy at a time when jobs are genuinely scarce, tends to perpetuate unemployment as the economy grows, by inducing some workers to hold out for higher-paying jobs.

…But the Democratic base seems more interested in expanding government than in stimulating the economy. They are bellowing with rage not so much at Obama but at the reality that he is grudgingly acknowledging. They had their time and now it’s gone.

Two weeks ago Thomas Sowell explained how historically tax cuts have increased economic growth, and therefore increased government revenues. Surprisingly, Peter Schiff says not always. His complaint is lack of spending restraint.

…While Democrats wanted more government spending,they were unwilling to vote for broad-based middle class tax increases to pay for it.  Instead they want what Democrats have always wanted: higher taxes on the “rich.” Republicans want lower taxes, but as has become typical, they were unwilling to cut government spending to enable it.By running up the deficit both sides get what they want without any political sacrifice.Sure, they break their campaign promise to cut the deficit, but the political fallout that results will be far less costly than voting for the tax hikes or spending cuts.

In truth however, there are no real tax cuts in this proposal. The true burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes but how much it spends. Since this deal ensures that government will be more expensive next year than it was this year, American citizens will have to shoulder the added cost. Just because Congress has decided to deliver the bill with debt rather than current taxes does not mean that the spending will not be paid for. The only thing the plan accomplishes is to alter the means by which government spending is financed. 

…Unfortunately, nothing in the plan addresses the fundamental economic imbalances that underlie our economy and that brought us to the brink of ruin in the first place. What we really need are massive cuts in government spending so we can have true tax relief.  In addition, we need to remove the government-imposed barriers which make our economy uncompetitive, and which are preventing market forces from correcting the imbalances. By expanding government and increasing debt, the plan puts us farther than we have ever been from a real recovery. …

The WaPo editors say enough with the ethanol subsidies.

…In other words, the government pays the industry for the privilege of selling to a captive market, spending $6 billion in 2009 on the tax credits alone. Without the tax credits, the amount of corn ethanol produced would still increase over the next 10 years, the Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri calculates. Yet the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that taxpayers still pay $1.78 to replace a gallon of gasoline with its energy equivalent of corn ethanol. The numbers are far worse when put in terms of greenhouse gases. The CBO reports that it costs a staggering $750 to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions one ton by burning corn ethanol – and the CBO makes some generous assumptions to get even that figure.

Yet because the policy directs cash to farm states that are rich in political influence, lawmakers are rallying to save this payoff from expiration. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who insisted Sunday that President Obama’s fiscal commission didn’t go far enough in its deficit reduction plan, has paired with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to press for renewal of the gratuitous corn ethanol tax credit and the ethanol tariff through 2015. Typically, the farm lobby has won out on such issues. But this year it’s meeting stronger than usual opposition from a bloc of fiscal conservatives and environmentalists, backed by such strange bedfellows as Tea Party organizer FreedomWorks and ultra-liberal pressure group MoveOn.org – even Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Al Gore. …

Proof God has a sense of humor; The Week highlights Cancun’s record low temps during the globalony confab.

The irony: As negotiators from nearly 200 countries met in Cancun to strategize ways to keep the planet from getting hotter, the temperature in the seaside Mexican city plunged to a 100-year record low of 54° F. … 

The reaction: ClimateGate was “bad enough,” says Duncan Davidson in Wall Street Pit, but Cancun’s weather is particularly “inconvenient” for global-warming alarmists. It’s a reminder that global temperatures have “flatlined” despite rising carbon dioxide levels, “which is decidedly chilling against the concept of hampering economic growth to limit Co2 emissions.” …

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An unlikely Pickings today with just two items; from the New Yorker and National Journal of all places. We have not gone over to the dark side. The New Yorker piece is a very fair portrait of John Boehner and others in the GOP leadership. The National Journal article looks at the leadership of both parties. Pickerhead is still trying to understand what has happened at The New Yorker. That magazine has been so reliably obnoxious for years it seems strange to have a political subject treated impartially. You will learn a lot. 

In the New Yorker, Peter Boyer profiles the new House speaker John Boehner. Boyer also tackles the recent history of House Republicans, and how the reinvigorated conservatives and Tea Party members may effect needed changes.

John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”

The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.

For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”

Back in Washington, Boehner reported what he’d seen to his Republican colleagues. While many Democrats and the mainstream media mocked the Tea Party, Boehner pressed his members to get out in front of the movement or, at least, get out of its way. “I urge you to get in touch with these efforts and connect with them,” he told a closed-door meeting of the Republican Conference. “The people participating in these protests will be the soldiers for our cause a year from now.”

Boehner seemed an unlikely clarion for an anti-establishment revolt. He had been in Congress since 1991, during the Bush-Quayle Administration—long enough to have twice climbed from the back bench to a leadership position. He was a friend of Ted Kennedy’s, and a champion of George W. Bush’s expansive No Child Left Behind legislation. After the economic collapse of 2008, he had reluctantly advocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“a crap sandwich,” he called it), the Tea Partiers’ litmus test of political villainy.

But Boehner was among the first Beltway Republicans to recognize that the rise of the Tea Party represented, for Republicans, a near-miracle of good luck. …

…Boehner is a delegator, but he is given credit by some conservatives for taking on the Republican appropriators in the House last year on the issue of earmarks. He has shunned earmarks for his entire career in Congress, and he insisted upon the gesture of a Republican moratorium on the practice. “He stared the appropriators down, and he won,” Patrick McHenry says. “And I don’t know the last time that appropriators have been beaten.” …

… Boehner forbade a Republican victory party on November 2nd, and has since signaled that he means to play the “adult” card in his dealings with Obama and within his own House conference. It is the strongest play he has. Unlike Gingrich, Boehner is not a visionary; his politics were formed by his revulsion, as a small businessman in Ohio, at the size of his tax bill. Nor is he an extemporaneous rhetorician; in public appearances, he rarely strays from his script. Where Gingrich was at once the Party’s chief political theorist, strategist, and messenger, Boehner is happy to delegate those roles to the young comers around him: Eric Cantor, the next Majority Leader; Kevin McCarthy, who will be the Republican Whip; and Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s designated thinker on the big issues, like entitlement reform. “We have very different personalities and different styles,” Gingrich told me recently. “You have to measure Boehner against other Boehners—you can’t measure him against me. Boehner would tell you up front that he’s not attempting to be the defining figure of this moment. He’s trying to be the organizer of the team that may define the moment. Clinton was able to pivot with me because I was a large enough figure that Clinton could say to the left, ‘You really want Gingrich?’ And they’d go, ‘O.K., even though we’re really mad at you, we’re not that mad at you.’ This may be an argument for the Boehner model.”

Boehner is now the most important Republican in the country, but far from the best known, which carries some advantage. Washington is familiar with him as an amiable, somewhat prosaic conservative with an umbilical connection to business, an old-school pol who loves his golf, his wine, and his cigarettes. His physical aspect—the mahogany skin tone, the smoky baritone, the Ken-doll coif, and the impeccably dapper attire—lends itself to caricature with a throwback theme. (Dean Martin and Don Draper are two press favorites.) Lately, Boehner has taken to reciting his personal biography, perhaps partly to counter the caricature, but also as a device for framing his approach to the job as the uncomplicated application of ordinary American common sense. “Trust me—all the skills I learned growing up are the skills I need to do my job,” he says. …

…The test of Boehner as Speaker will be how the Republican majority decides to interpret that tentative mandate. One reading is that voters were alarmed by a government stuck in overdrive, and elected Republicans in order to slow it down. As a Boehner adviser put it, “The country is saying to all of us, ‘Stop. Just put the gun down and walk away.’ ” Boehner leans toward that interpretation, which dictates a particular approach: an effort to achieve things that might be broadly considered sensible, doable, and practical, like the earmark moratorium. If Boehner gets his way, there would be reforms of the institution itself that, if they worked, might tend toward greater caution on spending. There would be an effort to pass elements of the Pledge to America, such as a rollback of government spending to 2008 levels, and there would be extensive use of the congressional-oversight function.

Kevin McCarthy’s revolutionaries are unlikely to embrace that approach. “They didn’t come to Washington to tinker around the edges,” McHenry, one of the conservatives who have most eagerly welcomed the newcomers, says. “They came to cut the size of government, not to trim its growth.”

The next Congress will also be a test of the Young Guns, two of whom—McCarthy and Cantor—carry rank on Boehner’s leadership team. I asked the third, Paul Ryan, what he thought of the prospect of a go-slow approach. “I could not disagree with it more,” he said. “I am so sick of playing small ball. That’s why I stepped out there with the Roadmap in the first place. The country doesn’t deserve small ball. The country deserves real answers to the enormous problems facing us. And we owe it to our employers, the people who elected us, to give them a choice of two futures. Look, we know where the left wants to go, we know the path that we are on. We owe it to the country to show them an alternative path, based upon our principles. And if, after getting a second chance, we blow that opportunity, then shame on us.”

Ryan noticed that, during the campaign, the complimentary remarks about his reform ideas from President Obama and other Democrats were replaced by criticism of his entitlement plan as a risky scheme. Republicans, too, shied from Ryan’s politically toxic pet subject, even while positioning him to amplify his arguments (he’ll be chairman of the Budget Committee). Ryan believes that the incoming Republican freshmen will ally themselves with him. “We’ve got different people coming to Congress than we have had in the last number of cycles,” he says. “We’re not getting that many career politicians and wannabes. We’re getting a bunch of cause people. And these are cause people who will be fresh out of the experience of being hit by this’’—campaign attacks over proposed entitlement reforms—“and who will have survived those hits.”

Ryan credits Boehner for giving him rein on an issue that many of their colleagues would prefer him to be less insistent about. “He’s never asked me to stop it, he’s never asked me to tone it down,” Ryan says. “He’s never asked me to jettison these things. I think he realizes the kind of class we’ve got coming in, and the kind of times that we are in.” Ryan’s first important task in the 112th Congress will be writing the 2012 budget, which will define the Republican agenda. “I will have to write a budget that can pass,” he says. “I can’t tell you what that is going to look like. I can tell you that it is not going to raise taxes, and it’s going to cut spending. And we are going to have to begin to have this conversation on entitlements.” It is likely that the Rivlin-Ryan plan, rejected by the Obama deficit commission, will find its way into Ryan’s budget next year. …

Charlie Cook writing in National Journal, says the Dems can’t fix a problem they won’t admit to.

…The public certainly hasn’t forgiven Republicans for their mistakes over the last decade.  But the loss of confidence in Democrats has been more immediate and more relevant than Republican miscues when they had both the White House and majorities in Congress.  There were plenty of things that voters held against the GOP, including scandals, the decision to invade Iraq, the case of Terri Schiavo, and the doubling of the national debt.  None of these were forgiven but they were all less relevant.

Americans see Democrats as having failed in their stewardship of the economy. A recession grew worse, unemployment soared, and Democrats seem to have checked the box and moved on to issues nearer and dearer to their hearts.  

For some reason, climate change legislation and health care seemed to be more important than sticking to a focus on the economy through 2009 and into 2010. It might be a while before voters forgive the president and the remaining Democrats in Congress for that.

One of the more interesting things that seems to be happening behind the scenes among Republican leaders in both the House and Senate is their focus on the mistakes made by the Republican majorities after their takeover in 1994.  

The freshmen and some of the younger Republicans certainly have their hubris, but the leaders seem to know that they scored an unearned run in this election and that they have been given an opportunity that they probably didn’t deserve. Nonetheless, they are determined not to blow it.

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Nile Gardiner provides another reason for us to leave the UN.

If further evidence is needed that the United Nations is a complete basket case in the arena of human rights, look no further than the world body’s decision to stay away from this Friday’s Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo. The winner of this year’s peace prize is Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who will not be allowed to travel to Norway by the authorities in Beijing. His family is also barred from traveling. …

Spengler gives reasons why the Tea Party will have longevity.

…The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Government that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.

…Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits. The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.

…This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ”cross of gold” imposed by Eastern creditor interests. …

We’ll wait to Sunday’s post for a complete wrap-up of the tax-cut deal and the petulant president’s presser, but for now Jennifer Rubin gives us a flavor.

… Juan Williams once remarked that Obama wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d want with you in a foxhole. When the crowd is swooning and the votes are going his way, no one can take a victory lap like Obama can. But when crisis hits — for the country or for his and his party’s political fortunes — he too often resorts to grouching and a self-pitying tone. It’s not going to win him new admirers, and it’s quite likely to annoy his already disillusioned liberal base.

Jennifer has some more.

Vice President Biden has been dispatched to calm down the Democratic troops on the Hill. But that’s not likely to alleviate the apparent despair within the liberal base. A tweet from Chris Hayes of the Nation seemed to sum up the sentiment: “Just so we’re clear: Democrats, currently in charge of Cong and WH, are about to ratify single defining domestic policy of W.” …

Rubin again, calling it the worst press conference – ever.

I don’t mean just for Obama. I mean any president. Or head of state. When I wrote this morning that he doesn’t do well in defeat, you didn’t know how right I was, huh? Let’s count the ways.

Calling Republicans “hostage takers.” Not helpful. Saying Republicans opposed middle class tax cuts. Not true — they wanted no tax increases for anyone. Accusing Republicans of holding out tax cuts for the rich as the “Holy grail.” Also wrong. As Republican strategist Mike Goldfarb tweeted, and as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said, beating Obama in 2012 is the Holy Grail. Then Obama started ranting at the media and bashing the left, which, if we are to believe statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, seems poised to abandon him on this. Obama also dragged in the “public option” for no apparent reason other than to remind everyone of the last time he disappointed liberals. Admitting he’s had a whole bunch of lines in the sand. Umm. Thunk.

On Twitter, there is shock and awe among pundits and reporters. Is Obama melting down? Has he lost control of the conversation? Yikes. Whoever let him go out there and do this rant-a-thon should be fired. Oh, was it Obama’s idea? I think his own party is indeed going to go into “riot mode.” A House GOP leadership aide pronounced the performance “angry” and out-of-touch. That’s being generous.

In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino tells us, don’t worry about bankers. The Fed is taking good care of them.

…Obama’s policies, insiders tell me, may be bad for the middle class — but they’ve been pretty good for the banking class.

…they love the fact that the White House has gone out of its way to support (some people think prod) Ben Bernanke’s policies of 1) keeping interest rates at rock-bottom levels and 2) pumping the banking system with $600 billion in cash, known in economic circles as “quantitative easing” and in less formal circles as “printing money.”

Both measures are supposed to spur lending to small business as banks, flush with cash, start to lend again and businesses can expand. But the direct beneficiaries of the “easy money” are the banks — which continue to hoard the cash, and (according to Leopard) are ready to rake in billions of dollars in fees as that backlog of deals starts to emerge next year.

Big bankers also don’t mind the inflation that Bernanke’s policies risk: Inflation usually pushes (nominal) stock prices up — and when the stock market rises, financiers and traders make a killing, even if the rest of us need a wheelbarrow filled with cash to buy a loaf of bread. …

Robert Samuelson criticizes the Deficit Commission’s lack of guiding principles that led to some arbitrary plans.

…One task of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson – was to discredit this self-serving morality. Otherwise, changing the budget will be hard, maybe impossible. If everyone feels morally entitled to existing benefits and tax breaks, public opinion will remain hopelessly muddled: desirous in the abstract of curbing budget deficits but adamant about keeping all of Social Security, Medicare and everything else. Politicians will be scared to make tough decisions for fear of voter reprisals.

…Answers exist. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize farmers, because food would be produced at low cost without subsidies. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize Americans, through Social Security and Medicare, for the last 20 or 25 years of their lives because healthier people live longer and the huge costs make the budget unmanageable. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally: If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it.

…The biggest blunder of their approach involved huge proposed cuts in defense, about a fifth of federal spending. National security is government’s first job. Bowles and Simpson reduced it proportionately with all other discretionary spending as if there’s no difference between a dollar for defense and a dollar for art subsidies. Nor was there much effort to identify programs that should be eliminated because they fail the national need test. Good programs would have been cut along with the bad. Finally, spending on the elderly, now about two-fifths of the budget, was treated too gently. Social Security’s full eligibility age would have increased slowly to 69 years around 2075. These programs are essential, but eligibility ages should be raised faster and, for wealthier recipients, benefits cut more. …

In the NYTimes, Ross Douthat takes a more optimistic view of the Deficit Commission results.

…Most importantly, we have at least a rough sense of how and where a compromise might ultimately be negotiated. As Barro wrote last week:

Conservatives’ reactions to the Bowles-Simpson Chairmen’s Mark … have been heartening: while some hardcore anti-tax groups (such as Americans for Tax Reform) have attacked the plan for raising taxes, the bulk of conservative commentators and politicians have sounded cautiously optimistic notes about the plan ….  [Meanwhile], a lot of liberal analysts and think tankers have drawn distinctions between Bowles-Simpson, which they don’t like, and Rivlin-Domenici, another bipartisan plan which they like a lot better. There are good reasons for the Left to feel better about the Rivlin-Domenici plan: its tax components are more progressive, and raise more revenue overall; it doesn’t raise the eligibility age for Social Security. But the two plans are fundamentally similar in a lot of ways, so if conservative policy elites like Bowles-Simpson and liberal policy elites can live with Rivlin-Domenici, that bodes well for coming up with a compromise plan that works for both sides.

None of this makes a compromise inevitable, or even necessarily likely. (The fact that Paul Ryan didn’t join the “yes” votes represents a missed opportunity, I think, for the reasons that Allahpundit sketches here.) But if America does manage to pull back from the fiscal precipice, there’s a good chance that we’ll remember the Simpson-Bowles proposals as a significant and clarifying step toward figuring how to make that pullback work.

As pointed out by several commentators featured in Pickings, the nation would be better off if the government did less: less taxing, less regulating, less meddling. John Steele Gordon has the latest example. 

The American Congress — not itself unknown for doing nothing in particular on occasion — has an opportunity in the next couple of weeks to do nothing at all and render the country a considerable service thereby.

What it needs to do nothing about is ethanol, one of the truly epic boondoggles in American history. As the ball falls in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, both the 45-cent-a-gallon tax credit on ethanol (which goes to companies that blend ethanol and gasoline, i.e., Shell, Exxon, et al.) and the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on foreign ethanol will expire, unless Congress acts.

The 45-cent tax credit costs the government $5-6 billion a year and is opposed by such strange bedfellows as the Sierra Club and the National Taxpayers Union. Those in favor are, no surprise, ethanol producers and the farmers who grow the corn it is made from. The 54-cent tariff, which, of course, is paid by American consumers, keeps cheaper foreign (mostly Brazilian) ethanol out of the American market.

…Since federal law now mandates that motor fuel contain 10 percent ethanol, both the tax credit and the tariff favor only the few (corn farmers and ethanol producers) at the expense of the many (taxpayers and drivers). …

In the Denver Post, Vincent Carroll comments on the cowardly Colorado Senators’ opinions on ethanol subsidies. Carroll reminds us what Al Gore says, now that he is out from under the lobbyists’ thumbs.

…Gore may have broken a tie vote in the Senate over ethanol tax credits when he was vice president, but last month in Greece he admitted that “first-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake.”

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies,” he added, noting the diversion of 40 percent of our corn crop into ethanol also “has an impact on food prices.”

To be sure, Gore continues to have a soft spot for the even more outlandish subsidies for biofuels produced from grasses and other non-edible organic material — although there still isn’t a single large-scale commercial producer of such fuels. Fifteen years from now, if Gore sticks with his schedule for confronting inconvenient truths, he may well be admitting that cellulosic ethanol subsidies were a boondoggle, too.

Make no mistake: Ending corn ethanol subsidies could hike fuel prices, especially if the tariff survived, because the federal renewable fuels standard requires oil companies to blend an escalating amount of ethanol into gasoline. If senators were truly focused on consumers, they’d call for an end to the fuels standard, too.  …

And we have a cartoon that’s not to be missed.