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Mark Steyn posts on the Mass. race.

… However things turn out, the Dems have got a fright. I would be surprised if many candidates in November are quite the same spectacular combination of gaffe-prone stupidity and arrogance as Martha Coakley. But, granted that, I was surprised at how incompetent the Democrat machine was. On Sunday, the President veered between dull and really, really lousy. He did what he did with his Olympics pitch in Copenhagen – he took the extraordinary step of flying in to save the day, and then when he got there thought he could wing it. He, or at any rate his minders, should know by now that his rhetoric is seriously underperforming – “incoherent without his teleprompter and a bore with it“. Yet his staff allow him to stagger around as the last believer in his own magic. What sort of functioning pol would be so careless as to say “Everybody can own a truck”? He should talk to any New England dealership about that. As it happens, I bought a new truck last month and I’ve never seen the place so empty. …

Jennifer Rubin reports that in national security issues, the Obami may be waking up to reality.

Michael Isikoff reports:

“Top administration officials are getting nervous that they may not be able to proceed with one of their most controversial national-security moves: trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 conspirators in federal court in New York City. Last November Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. portrayed the trial as a way to showcase the American justice system to the world — and to accelerate President Obama’s stalled plans to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. But because of shifting political winds in Congress, the trial is now “potentially in jeopardy,” a senior official, who did not want to be named talking about a sensitive situation, tells Newsweek. The chief concern: that Republicans will renew attempts to strip funding for the trial and, in the aftermath of the bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253, pick up enough support from moderate Democrats to prevail.”

It seems that Sen. Lindsay Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf will try to force votes in Congress to cut off funding for the trial. And one additional issue: the more than $200 million price tag for each year of the trial. The kicker: “If Holder’s plans are thwarted, though, one top administration official, who also didn’t want to be named talking about delicate issues, notes there is a Plan B — reviving the case against the alleged 9/11 conspirators before a military tribunal, just as the Bush administration tried to do.” …

…But alas, that proved to be politically untenable and logistically difficult. We had three domestic terror attacks. The president was hammered for his clueless reserve and the Keystone Kops response to the Christmas Day bombing. So now being “not Bush” doesn’t seem like such a good idea. It was born of arrogance and from a distorted view of the nature of our enemy. If Obama retreats on both this and Guantanamo, it will be a bitter pill for the Left and sweet vindication for those who kept us safe for seven and a half years after 9/11. But more important, it will be a step toward sanity in the administration’s national security policies. And should Obama and Holder feel the sting of humiliation if forced to abandon their plans to shutter Guantanamo and give KSM a propagandistic platform, the White House may find that a small price to pay to sync up its anti-terror policies with both reality and public opinion.

Peter Wehner on Obama’s fall from grace.

…But there is another, and I think quite important, explanation that was reinforced to me while reading John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book, Game Change, which is a fascinating (and very well-written) account of the 2008 presidential campaign.

One is reminded once again of how the core of Obama’s popularity was an appeal not to policy or to a governing agenda; instead it was an appeal to thematics and narrative.  …Obama’s appeal was romantic and aesthetic, built on the rhetoric of hope and change, on his “freshness and sense of promise.” A cult of personality built up around Obama — not because of what he had achieved but because of what he seemed to embody. (”Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention,” Michelle Obama dryly told a reporter.)…

…That was what we were promised. What we got instead is a president who increased the divisions in our nation, the most partisan and polarizing figure in the history of polling, one who is dogmatic and has been as generous to special interests as any we have seen. The efforts to buy votes in pursuit of the Obama agenda has added sewage to the cesspool.

This would hurt any president under any circumstances; for Barack Obama, whose allure was based almost entirely on his ability to convince the public that he embodied a “new politics,” it has been doubly damaging. It was Hillary Clinton of all people who understood Obama best when she said during the campaign, “We have to make people understand that he’s not real.” …

Jennifer Rubin brings up some excellent points about Obama campaigning in Massachusetts.

Charles Hurt, writing of Obama’s lackluster and belated appearance in Massachusetts on behalf of the listing campaign of Martha Coakley, observes:

“Obama told the crowd here yesterday that he needed Coakley in Washington because she is “independent.” Really? Does anybody actually think that the reason Obama wants her in the Senate is that she would even dream of casting the deciding vote to kill the Democratic health-care bill? Absolutely not. The only reason Obama came here is because he needs somebody bought and paid for. By him.”

This concisely sums up the problem that threatens to engulf Obama and whatever is left of the remnants of his campaign organization. He is a candidate deprived of a campaign. He is a community organizer with no one to organize against those who hold the levers of power. He holds the levers of power but without the executive acumen to bring the country along and to craft a successful, broad-based agenda. If not out of his depth, he is out of his milieu. …

Roger Simon posts more on the Copenhagen summit of thieves.

I thought I was done writing about my trip to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December, but just when you think you’re out, as Mario Puzo once put it, they pull you back in. And what did my pulling in in this instance was the CBS report on the amazingly lavish junket (well, not so amazingly really) of Nancy Pelosi & Co. to the Scandinavian capital. I learned therein that seventeen, count ‘em seventeen, Members (many with spouses and even children) went to the conference with their staffs, utilizing three military jets and booking 321 hotel nights at the posh Copenhagen Marriott. The carbon footprint of all that – assuming you believe in AGW, and most of them claim to – was immense. The amount of serious discussion that went on was practically nil.

And, yes, needless to say, there’s more, lots more, although LaPelosa has, also needless to say, resisted press inquiries about the details. She is now being bombarded, as she should be, by FOIA requests, so we will probably learn more anon. But the idea of all that absurd excess in the light of what is now going on in Haiti is particularly stomach-turning. …

…In a way, that’s what Copenhagen was about and why it was such a signal event. Everyone was playing a role. I doubt if a single person in the city changed their mind about anything, certainly not anything remotely to do with climate. It was just a game with no purposes other than spending money or trying to extort some – or posturing. …

There is housecleaning to be done at the Pentagon. Bill Bennett writes about the politically correct report from the Pentagon on the Fort Hood massacre.

…Here’s the report I’d write and I can do it on less than one page:  An Islamic terrorist was raised in the United States and given a pass throughout his professional career in the United States military.  His allegiance was not to his country but to his radical religion.  He told his colleagues of this again and again.  He didn’t set off signals, he set off sirens.  And nothing was done. The military leadership didn’t take his words seriously, even as we were at war with people saying the exact same things he was saying. And the culture of the Army that coddled him was too well-represented by the Army chief of staff who, after the rampage, said “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

It was this thinking that led to us keeping Major Hasan in the Army and that diminished force protection. It was this culture that allowed a terrorist into the Army. It was this political correctness that led to the deaths of 14 innocents. And if you want to prevent another tragedy like this, you must end this infection of the mindset. I call it a tragedy because it was preventable. That it was not prevented is a shame on our institutions and indicative of a preemptive cultural surrender that I never thought would affect the U.S. military but, sadly, dangerously, has.

But the solution to these problems remains elusive because the military will not even mention the problem. And that, as Winston Churchill once put it, is why we still have a “Gathering Storm” coming, and not a near-victory in this, the Global War Against Islamic Terrorism.

Tunku Varadarajan thinks that bankers should not receive huge bonuses this year.

…Banks are making money because they’re borrowing at ridiculously low rates from the public and central banks and then investing in higher-yielding government securities.

The banks receive deposits from savers (on which they pay negligible interest) and then leverage it several times by borrowing from other banks, or the central bank. LIBOR (the rate at which banks borrow from each other) as well as the Fed’s discount window are below 0.5 percent. This is the cost of money to banks. The loot is then invested in government bonds, which are yielding anywhere from 3.75 percent to 4.75 percent in the U.S. and Europe.

This interest margin may not sound like much, but when applied to the trillions of dollars that make up various banks’ balance sheets, it produces profits in tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. For a well-leveraged bank, this is a safe “carry” trade as long as the value of government securities does not collapse. In fact, a bank would have to be incredibly inept not to make money in these circumstances. Awarding bankers bonuses is tantamount to paying them for not being certified cretins. …

…Such action would also have shown up as specious the argument that “if we do not pay, the talent will go away.” If tax measures were implemented globally, where would the talent go? Some of it, perhaps, to hedge funds. That would be an appropriate, even elegant, solution, because the kinds of risks some of the bankers were taking are best suited for hedge funds. As for the rest of the bankers… they should just stay put and expect to get paid when they start adding value, not merely leeching from public policy.

Robert Samuelson gives an explanation for why investment bankers earn so well.

…The explanation for Wall Street’s high pay lies elsewhere. Most of us are paid based on what we produce or, more realistically, what our employers produce. By contrast, Wall Street compensation levels are tied to the nation’s overall wealth. Investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and many other financial institutions trade stocks, bonds and other securities for their own profit. They also advise mutual funds, pension funds, endowments and wealthy individuals on how to invest and trade.

There’s a big difference between annual production and national wealth. In 2007, the last year before the crisis, annual production (gross domestic product) equaled almost $14 trillion. In the same year, household wealth was $77 trillion (5.5 times production); that covered the value of homes, vehicles, stocks, bonds and the like. Eliminating nonfinancial assets (mainly homes) cut wealth to about $50 trillion (3.5 times). Deducting household debts from financial wealth pushed net worth to $35 trillion (2.5 times income).

People who are trying to protect or expand existing wealth are playing for much higher money stakes than even hard-working and highly skilled producers. That’s the main reason they’re paid more. Similar percentage changes in production and wealth translate into much larger gains or losses in wealth — up to five times as much based on the crude math above. Many lawyers enjoy the same envious position of being paid on the basis of wealth enhancement or protection. They’re involved in high-stakes mergers and acquisitions, estate planning, divorces and tax planning. On average, partners in the top 25 law firms earned from $1.3 million to $4 million in 2008, reports The American Lawyer magazine. …

If what you’ve heard about Obamacare makes you sick, get ready. WSJ editors tell us how Dems are buying off their union friends.

Democrats seem impervious to embarrassment as they buy votes for ObamaCare, but their latest move makes even Nebraska’s Ben Nelson look cheap: The 87% of Americans who don’t belong to a union will now foot the bill for a $60 billion giveaway to those who do.

The Senate bill was financed in part by a 40% excise tax on high-cost insurance coverage. The White House backs this “Cadillac tax” as one of the few remaining cost-control tokens. But Big Labor abhors the tax because union benefits tend to be far more generous than average, and labor leaders and House Democrats have been throwing a political tantrum for weeks.

So emerging from their backrooms, Democrats have agreed to extend a special exemption from the Cadillac tax to any health plan that is part of a collective-bargaining agreement, plus state and local workers, many of whom are unionized. Everyone else with a higher-end plan will start to be taxed in 2013, but union members will get a free pass until 2018.

Ponder that one for a moment. Two workers who are identical in every respect—wages, job, health plan—will be treated differently by the tax system, based solely on union membership. …

Ed Morrissey blogs about a headline that makes a farce of claims by Obamacare fans and green fascists.

Like my friend Bruce McQuain at QandO, I’m wondering whether Michael Moore will add this to a later edition of the Sicko DVD.  Twenty-six patients in a Cuban mental hospital died from hypothermia during an unusually cold winter in Havana…

…My goodness, it’s a good thing that Michael Moore decided to lecture Americans on the superiority of the Cuban health-care system in his feature-length diatribe, isn’t it?  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be demanding a government takeover of our own health-care system to achieve parity with Fidel’s paradise.

I live in Minnesota, where it gets considerably colder than Havana for about six months out of the year.  Our hospitals manage to keep patients warm, clean, and safe.  When was the last time anyone heard of patients dying in an American hospital of hypothermia caused by their stay in the facility?  According to my recollection, that would be, uh … never. Where were the staff at this Cuban paragon of medical care?  When it got cold, no one apparently thought to close windows, or give out more sheets and blankets, or bring in more heaters … for hours. …

…Addendum: It’s also worth pointing out that a mass of people dying of hypothermia in the tropics doesn’t exactly bolster the claims of global-warming activists. …

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Power Line posts on dueling rallies in Mass.

President Obama came to Massachusetts yesterday in a last-minute effort to preserve his party’s filibuster proof majority in the Senate. He did so at a rally at the campus of Northeastern University in Boston which featured the Massachusetts political establishment. Scott Brown countered with a rally in Worcester which featured Massachusetts sports legends Curt Schillling and Doug Flutie.

I didn’t watch the dueling rallies, but this report by Politico leaves the impression that Brown may well have won the duel, or at least that if Martha Coakley needed a big day, she probably came up short. …

Jake Tapper has another report on the Mass. race.

Political operatives say the Senate race in Massachusetts between Democratic state attorney general Martha Coakley and Republican state senator Scott Brown is too close to call. But the fact that President Obama felt the need to fly to the Bay State to campaign for a Democrat in one of the most Democratic states in the nation speaks volumes about the ugly climate for Democratic candidates.

Coakley has run an imperfect campaign and has had a rough couple weeks. But, as one senior White House official acknowledged to me, “in Massachusetts, even after a rough couple weeks the Democrat should be ahead.” Polls have Coakley and Brown neck and neck.

At the rally in Boston for Coakley yesterday, President Obama said a few things worth paying attention to: …

David Brooks has interesting comments on Haiti and the methods for fighting poverty.

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not. …

David Warren offers his thoughts on Haiti.

…A knowledge of Haiti itself already provides intending rescuers with some idea of the difficulties they face in delivering food, water, medicine, and shelter. Looting, gang violence (with machetes, when guns are unavailable), and such spontaneous acts of public despair as piling corpses across a street to protest the lack of aid (thus creating a roadblock against its delivery), must all have been predictable, from past experience of delivering aid after hurricane disasters. The collapse even of surviving infrastructure, and of all government services, went without saying. …

…For such reasons as I’ve sketched above, they are already tripping over each other. According to reports, the airport at Port-au-Prince is blocked with the accumulation of planes that cannot be refueled; the city’s hospitals collapsed; inmates of the main prison escaped. Rescuers are not to be blamed when making their best efforts. …

…But the same informants who described to me the worst of Haiti, often also described the best: exhilarating encounters with warm, kindly, often very creative and thoughtful people, who were no less “typically Haitian” than members of machete gangs. An earthquake makes no distinctions between them. …

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Steyn on a number of current topics, including Game Change, the new book about the election.

HH: Yeah, what’s remarkable, the people who come off the worst, though, is the media, because you’ve got Hillary and Bill wandering around obsessing about President Obama’s past drug use and not being reported…

MS: Right.

HH: …Hillary muttering about Obama’s mother being a communist. I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff in this book.

MS: Right, right, right.

HH: None of it made it into the media.

…HH: Hillary at one point says, “Am I the only one who sees the arrogance? Does it not bother other people? Bill says he’s an, “off the rack Chicago politician.” Over and over again, they’re amazed he’s an empty suit, and they can’t touch him.

MS: Well, and the arrogance thing, and I think Hillary is right. I think there is, that you can certainly make the case, I mean, I’m not someone who cares about sexism and mean-spiritedness, and all the other obsessions of the Democratic Party. But I think if you do, then I think that you can certainly make the case that Hillary was the victim of that, that in fact, he’s in many ways a quite unpleasant man, this sort of curious habit he has of composing himself so that his hand on his face appears to be flipping the finger at you, which he has done a significant number of times, toward political opponents, that it doesn’t seem like an accidental gesture. And I think this is the question….somebody said to me before the election, Obama isn’t cool, he’s cold, he’s cold. And I think that’s what America saw in the performances after Fort Hood and the Pantybomber. …

In the National Journal, Charlie Cook discusses the disconnect between the political struggle over Obamacare, and the economic struggle facing so many Americans.

…Last week’s disappointing December unemployment report was the final blow in what was already a bad week for Democrats. One of the most sobering findings in the report was that if 661,000 Americans had not given up even looking for work that month, the unemployment rate would have moved up rather than holding steady at a horrific 10 percent.

Most economists had been expecting an increase of about 50,000 jobs in December; instead, the total declined by 85,000. Some 6.1 million Americans, the highest number in the post-World War II era, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The “U-6″ rate of unemployment, which adds in people who are working part-time while seeking full-time work and those who have stopped looking, stands at 17.3 percent, the highest level in the 15 years that the Labor Department has calculated it.

…Another piece of bad news was the distressing late-December report that the housing sector’s slow improvement had stalled, raising the specter of a second dip. As Wellesley College economist Karl Case, one of the developers of the definitive Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, told The New York Times recently, “I’m worried. Everyone’s worried.” He added, “If prices sink 15 percent from here, which is a possibility, and the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we’re back where we were before — in a nightmare.” Faster action in Congress to renew (or even increase) the tax credit for first-time homebuyers might have boosted housing prices, which in turn would have improved mortgage lenders’ balance sheets. …

Good news! Bret Schundler, once mayor of Jersey City, is back. In the NYTimes, David Halbfinger discusses New Jersey Governor-elect Chris Christie’s appointments.

…The nomination of Bret D. Schundler to the post underscored the governor’s determination to press ahead with his push for school vouchers, more charter schools and merit pay for teachers.

It was the first selection by Mr. Christie to suggest even the possibility of a confirmation battle with Democrats, who control both houses of the Legislature. Thus far, the governor-elect has chosen nominees heavy on managerial experience, if lacking in drama or outsized personalities, and drawn bipartisan praise for his selections. …

…“We agree on the type of significant reform that needs to happen in our educational system here in New Jersey,” Mr. Christie said in making the announcement at the State House. “I want a strong, reasonable, bold leader who’s going to help me implement those policies.” …

Richard McKenzie, in the WSJ, writes an interesting article about the successes of orphanages.

…I watched the Gingrich-Clinton debate with a personal interest, having grown up in an orphanage in North Carolina in the 1950s. I wrote a column for this newspaper defending my own orphanage and others like it: “Most critics would like the public to believe that those of us who went through orphanages were throttled by the experience. No doubt, some were. However, most have charged on.” The children at Barium Springs Home for Children worked a lot and didn’t get the hugs many children take for granted, but we did get advantages that many children today don’t get—a sense of security, permanence and home.

I was shocked by the number of orphanage alumni who called, faxed or emailed in agreement. What’s more, many added, “My orphanage was better than yours,” which made me wonder if the experts knew what they were talking about.

During the past decade I have surveyed more than 2,500 alumni from 15 American orphanages. In two journal articles, I reported the same general conclusion: The orphanage alumni have outpaced their counterparts in the general population often by wide margins in almost all social and economic measures, including educational attainment, income and positive attitude toward life. White orphanage alumni had a 39% higher rate of college graduation than white Americans of the same age in the general population, and less than 3% had hostile memories of their orphanage experiences. University of Alabama historian David Beito replicated the study with several hundred alumni from another orphanage, reaching much the same conclusions. …

Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings report in the Times, UK, that climate scientists are having more problems with facts.

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. …

…Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

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Jennifer Rubin blogs about Martha Coakley and Tuesday’s vote in Mass.

Just as I suggested this week, Democrats are now attempting, according to Byron York, to Creigh Deeds-ize Martha Coakley. If she is in fact tanking, now is the time to write her off as a damaged and enfeebled candidate, lest anyone suspect that this is a reflection on Democrats’ political liabilities. York suggests that Coakley’s own polls show her trailing by 5 points. So the buzzards are circling:

“This is a Creigh Deeds situation,” the Democrat says. “I don’t think it says that the Obama agenda is a problem. I think it says, 1) that she’s a terrible candidate, 2) that she ran a terrible campaign, 3) that the climate is difficult but she should have been able to overcome it, and 4) that Democrats beware — you better run good campaigns, or you’re going to lose.”

… Coakley may simply be in over her head, a woman of flawed judgment and limited political skills. In any other year, that might not be a barrier to election for a Democrat in a deep Blue State. But this is no ordinary year.

David Goldman, (AKA – Spengler) shows how small business economic indicators are still down in the recovery that isn’t. There is an excellent three dimensional graph here that shows the net job creation by firms in terms of age and size. The engine of job growth is the small start-up. Precisely the type of effort least likely to be encouraged by Obama’s hyper-government.

A month ago, when I debated Deutsche Bank’s chief economist on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show, the consensus held that a rapid recovery in employment would ensue during 2010. This expectation crashed and burned with last Friday’s employment report for December, showing that more than 600,000 “discouraged workers” had left the labor force. Today we have an unexpected rise in initial claims for December on top of an unexpected drop in December retail sales. …

…A website called Shadow Government Statistics does a public service by un-adjusting the government’s data, for example, to include “discouraged” as well as “long-term discouraged” workers in the unemployment rolls. By that measure US unemployment is at 22 percent, an astonishing number. …

…What’s happening to small business today?

As I noted, the Discover Small Business Watch collapsed in November to an index level of 76 from 88, with 52% of respondents reporting cash flow constraints. Every other available measure of small business performance looks utterly miserable. …

In Forbes, Amity Schlaes describes government actions that prolonged the Great Depression.

…In researching the 1930s I found another picture. To be sure, the monetary problem, deflation, was a big hurdle, but there were three other factors postponing recovery.

–Taxation. President Hoover raised the top income tax rate from 25% to more than 60%. FDR increased taxes on the poor with levies on liquor and slammed the highest earners by moving the top income tax rate above 70% and eventually above 90%.

–Labor costs. Proto-Keynesians, the New Dealers told themselves that there was only an upside to higher wages: more purchasing power for the worker. The New Deal’s National Recovery Administration in 1933 and the Wagner Act of 1935 pushed wages up above the trend–for the century. The high price of labor meant that those who had jobs did well, which is what we’ve always heard about the period. But many people couldn’t get a job at all. As the 1937 Gershwin song put it: “Nice work if you can get it.”

–Executive discretion. FDR’s rule of “bold, persistent experimentation” gave him license to change the rules all the time, which he sometimes did on a daily basis. Since Roosevelt always thought in terms of politics–he was a political master–instead of economics, his discretionary moves did not always make economic sense.

The result was what came to be known as a “capital strike.” In 1937 William O’Neil, founder of General Tire & Rubber Co., described the supply side’s stoppage: “[The large capitalist] will not risk financing new ventures if the government’s take is greater than that of the average gambling house, and he knows he will never get it back. The small-time capitalist, who has stayed away from Wall Street and corporation finance, is on strike, too. He will not build the house that he needs.” …

We have Charles Krauthammer’s commentary on the effect of the Obami overreach.

…The health-care drive is the most important reason Obama has sunk to 46 percent. But this reflects something larger. In the end, what matters is not the persona but the agenda. In a country where politics is fought between the 40-yard lines, Obama has insisted on pushing hard for the 30. And the American people — disorganized and unled but nonetheless agitated and mobilized — have put up a stout defense somewhere just left of midfield. …

…Perhaps Obama thought he’d been sent to the White House to do just that. If so, he vastly over-read his mandate. His own electoral success — twinned with handy victories and large majorities in both houses of Congress — was a referendum on his predecessor’s governance and the post-Lehman financial collapse. It was not an endorsement of European-style social democracy.

Hence the resistance. Hence the fall. The system may not always work, but it does take its revenge.

In the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone contrasts the Tea partiers with the “educated” class.

…The educated class thinks that gun control can reduce crime. But over the last 15 years, crime rates have plummeted thanks to Giuliani-type police tactics and while 40 states have laws permitting law-abiding citizens to get licenses to carry concealed weapons.

“The educated class believes in global warming,” Brooks notes. But ordinary Americans have been noticing that temperatures have not been rising in the last decade as climate scientists’ models predicted, and they may have noticed those Climategate e-mails that show how climate scientists have been jiggering the statistics and suppressing opposing views.

On these issues the educated class is faith-based and the ordinary Americans who increasingly reject their views are fact-based, just as the Obama enthusiasts are motivated by style and the tea partiers by substance. …

Mark Steyn comments on the anti-Left political climate and Tuesday’s election in Massachusetts.

…”People once thought Obama could sound eloquent reading the phone book,” wrote Michael Gerson in The Washington Post last week. “Now, whatever the topic, it often sounds as though he is.” …

…For the most part, that’s just the ratchet effect of Big Government, growing, expanding, remorselessly, under cover of darkness. What happened this past year is that Obama and the Democratic Congress made it explicit, and did it in daylight. And, while Barack may be cool and stellar if you’re as gullible as “the educated class,” Nancy Pelosi and Ben Nelson most certainly aren’t: There’s no klieg light of celebrity to dazzle you from the very obvious reality that they’re spending your money way faster than you can afford and with no inclination to stop. …

…As Michael Barone observed, “the educated class” was dazzled by style, the knuckledragging morons are talking about substance. Just before the Senate’s health care vote, Obama, the silver-tongued orator, declared that we were “on the precipice” of historic reform. Indeed. On Tuesday, we’ll find out whether even Massachusetts is willing to follow him off the cliff.

In the WSJ, Patrick Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen are pollsters who have worked for Democrat presidents. They note Scott Rasmussen’s excellent record, and criticize the Obami attacks.

…The attacks on Rasmussen and Gallup follow an effort by the White House to wage war on Fox News and to brand it, as former White House Director of Communications Anita Dunn did, as “not a real news organization.” The move backfired; in time, other news organizations rallied around Fox News. But the message was clear: criticize the White House at your peril.

As pollsters for two Democratic presidents who served before Barack Obama, we view this unprecedented attempt to silence the media and to attack the credibility of unpopular polling as chilling to the free exercise of democracy.

This is more than just inside baseball. As practicing political consultants, both of us have seen that the established parties try to stifle dissent among their political advisers and consultants. The parties go out of their way to try to determine in advance what questions will be asked and what answers will be obtained to reinforce existing party messages. The thing most feared is independence, which is what Mr. Rasmussen brings. …

In Contentions, Abe Greenwald blogs about China’s response to Google’s decision to no longer participate in the Great Firewall of China. Greenwald has fun pointing to Tom Freidman’s obsequious odes to China.

Beijing is ready to say good-bye to Google. Wang Chen, China’s State Council Information Office minister, has responded to Google’s principled threat to pull out of China:

“Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development, and this is a period of marked social conflicts … Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security. Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty. Currently, the Internet gives space for spreading rumours and issuing false information and other actions that diminish confidence, and this is causing serious damage to society and the public interest.”

…The truth is that Wang Chen’s statement tells you everything you need to know about China’s supposedly inevitable rise. Beijing doesn’t enjoy enough legitimacy to allow its citizens to hear dissenting opinions. Without the free flow of ideas, China’s citizens will, in turn, remain insufficient to the task of true innovation. Instead, government-backed quasi-corporations will continue to tinker with gadgets from the disco era — bullet trains and solar power. The world’s Tom Friedmans will continue to swoon. Important technological innovation will come, inevitably, in a form few if any have predicted — let alone ranted about for years in the New York Times. And when it comes, it will come from a part of the world where disagreement and tension give birth to genius, not information blockades.

The Streetwise Professor discusses the unsustainable growth in the Chinese economy.

Infamous short-seller and sometime SWP follower Jim Chanos is very bearish on China (H/T MJ).  Sayeth Chanos:

Now Mr. Chanos, a wealthy hedge fund investor, is working to bust the myth of the biggest conglomerate of all: China Inc.

As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.

“Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. “And there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” He is planning a speech later this month at the University of Oxford to drive home his point.

…What I find hard to understand is why so many investors and commentators seem to have bought into the China growth story hook, line, and sinker.  I don’t expect everybody to be as skeptical as I am, or as Chanos is.  But one would think that in the aftermath of a major economic contraction which plausibly resulted from an overly expansive monetary policy and various institutional factors that directed most of the ballooning credit to the real estate sector, the China boosters would at least pause to ask whether the same might be occurring in China.  Or to question the reported growth, that always miraculously hits official targets, much in the same way as Enron’s earnings always miraculously came in as expected, with metronomic regularity. …

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WSJ Editors on the Google/China clash.

The uneasy truce between Google and China broke down yesterday when the company announced it would no longer censor search results on its domestic search engine, Google.cn. So far everyone seems fixated on the decision-making in the Googleplex headquarters, but ultimately this episode tells us more about Beijing than it does about Google.

Within minutes of the announcement, mainland users were calling up page listings on Tibet, Falun Gong and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre that had been hidden for the last three years. The company said it was pushed into this decision by a sophisticated hacking attack that threatened the privacy of its email users, but there’s more to this story.

Google deserves praise for having a bottom line, but it’s worth remembering that this is a lose-lose-lose scenario. The most likely outcome is that Google loses access to an important market, Chinese customers lose access to its services, and the government loses face. Google’s decision in 2006 that entering the mainland market was a net positive for information flows was well reasoned. The tragedy is that the Chinese government became so aggressive in its repression that this is no longer the case. …

Politico gives us another view of the Mass. senate race by looking at the Dem candidate, Martha Coakley.

Though polls show the race tightening, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley still seems the likely heir to the seat of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Coakley is commonly described as a traditional liberal, but in one policy area she’s far to the right of her predecessor. It also happens to be the policy area in which Coakley has built her career: criminal justice.

Last year, Coakley chose to personally argue her state’s case before the Supreme Court in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts. Despite the recent headlines detailing forensic mishaps, fraudulent testimony and crime lab incompetence, Coakley argued that requiring crime lab technicians to be present at trial for questioning by defense attorneys would place too large a burden on prosecutors. The Supreme Court found otherwise, in a decision that had Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia coming down on Coakley’s left.

The Melendez-Diaz case wasn’t an anomaly. Coakley has made her reputation as a law-and-order prosecutor. More troubling, she’s shown a tendency to aggressively push the limits of the law in high-profile cases and an unwillingness to cop to mistakes — be they her own or those of other prosecutors. Coakley’s most recent high-profile case was the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” hoax, in which she defended Boston authorities’ massive overreaction to harmless light-emitting-diode devices left around the city as a promotional gimmick. …

Jan Crawford reminds us of the time when Harry Reid said some really ugly things about Justice Thomas.

… Reid has waded into the minefield of prejudice and stereotyping before. I can’t help but think of his outrageous statements about Clarence Thomas back in 2005, when some were urging President Bush to make Thomas the first African American chief justice.

We all know Thomas’s compelling life story: growing in the harrowing days of Jim Crow in the segregated South, struggling to break free from poverty and racism, becoming the first black child to integrate all-white schools, graduating with honors from the seminary and Holy Cross before Yale Law School. Thomas succeeded on his unquestioned intellect and his determination and hard work.

Thomas is one of the Court’s most original and compelling thinkers, and his opinions are praised by scholars on the Left and the Right as important contributions. You may not agree with a single word Clarence Thomas says, and it may drive you crazy that he took Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court, but you can’t call him stupid or deny he’s an important intellectual force.

Unless you’re Harry Reid. …

The Streetwise Professor writes that Afghanistan is causing conflict between the Obami and the Pentagon.

The NYT reports that “senior administration officials” are angry at the military for its alleged slowness in deploying for the Afghanistan “surge”:

…One administration official said that the White House believed that top Pentagon and military officials misled them by promising to deploy the 30,000 additional troops by the summer. General McChrystal and some of his top aides have privately expressed anger at that accusation, saying that they are being held responsible for a pace of deployments they never thought was realistic, the official said. …

…The military seems to be playing it cynically.  McChyrstal and Petraeus are aggressive commanders, and there is no reason to believe that they were taking an unnecessarily leisurely course when they planned for an 18 month deployment period.  Instead, it is highly likely that they chose that schedule based on a professional, realistic understanding of the logistical constraints.  Faced with the stark choice of Obama pulling the plug on Afghanistan altogether if they stuck to their timeline, or getting his (grudging) acquiescence to an accelerated deployment, they chose the latter.  They probably figured that the iron laws of logistics would eventually rule, and that the “bell curve” would be pushed back beyond what Obama desired, but that since the president had committed, he could not bail.

This cannot end well.  There was never much chance that the Pentagon and Obama and his minions would ever be comfortable with one another.  They inhabit different mental universes.  But a military convinced that the president is a military neophyte who lets domestic political needs override fundamental military considerations, and a president and administration who are convinced that the military is defying the president’s will is an extremely poisonous combination.

In Contentions, David Hazony blogs about George Mitchell’s reported suggestion to use US aid as leverage with the Israelis to get concessions in the peace process. Without discussing the diplomatic implications of such a suggestion, Hazony explains that the amount of money is small.

While everyone over here in Israel is tittering over the question of whether George Mitchell did or did not threaten to cut back on American aid to Israel if there is no progress in peace talks, it might be worth getting a little perspective on what those numbers actually look like, both for Israelis and for Americans.

…In 2008, U.S. aid was down to about $2.4 billion, while Israel’s GDP was up to $199 billion. We’re talking about 1.2 percent of Israel’s GDP.

So whereas nobody would consider $2.4 billion a trivial amount of money, the economic significance of that aid has dropped dramatically, as far as Israelis are concerned. Israel’s “dependence” on American aid is not zero, but it’s heading there. …

Charles Levinson, in the WSJ, reports on increasing use of robots in warfare.

…Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.

Sixty years of near-constant war, a low tolerance for enduring casualties in conflict, and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world’s leading innovators of military robotics. …

…In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel’s military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel’s leading weapons manufacturers.

“We are moving into the robotic era,” says Mr. Katz.

Over 40 countries have military-robotics programs today. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world is betting big on the role of aerial drones: Even Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla force in Lebanon, flew four Iranian-made drones against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War. …

Newsbusters has an amazing story. A bunch of Congressmen and their spouses went on an all-expenses-paid-by-the-taxpayers trip to the Copenhagen Summit. That congresspeople steal our money isn’t the amazing part. Would you believe that CBS reported the story?

It must really be cold outside, for the CBS “Evening News” Monday actually did a segment exposing how members of Congress wasted a huge amount of money at the United Nations’ climate summit in Copenhagen last month.

Even more surprising, CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson pointed fingers at prominent Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.), and Charles Rangel (N.Y.).

Readers are encouraged to strap themselves in tightly, for this report coming from the global warming-obsessed media seems as likely as freezing temperatures in Miami (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript): Click on the link to see the video.

David Harsanyi comments on the Obami plans to throw stimulus money at green jobs.

…The uncalculated part of the above equation is this: Bogus jobs kill real jobs. At Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University, for instance, a study found that in Spain — the very country Obama has held out as the exemplar of greening (and with only a 19-plus percent unemployment rate!) — every green job created had destroyed 2.2 jobs in other sectors of the economy. …

…In the meantime, utilizing unemployment fears, this administration continues to pursue social policy through faux stimulus plans, funneling money into acceptable sectors, no matter how inefficient, no matter how unviable, no matter how unsustainable.

What we’ve learned is that the Obama administration will do anything humanly possible to rescue the economy, as long as it doesn’t relieve the pressure on the private sector. After all, this president explained last year that he believes “only government” can get us out of our troubles.

And that’s our biggest problem now.

John Stossel explains that we do not have true capitalism in the US.

…The truth is that we don’t have a free market — government regulation and management are pervasive — so it’s misleading to say that “capitalism” caused today’s problems. The free market is innocent.

But it’s fair to say that crony capitalism created the economic mess.

Crony capitalism, by the way, will be the subject of my TV show this week on the Fox Business Network (Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern; Friday at 10).

What is crony capitalism? It’s the economic system in which the marketplace is substantially shaped by a cozy relationship among government, big business and big labor. Under crony capitalism, government bestows a variety of privileges that are simply unattainable in the free market, including import restrictions, bailouts, subsidies and loan guarantees.

…We don’t have to look far to see how crony-dominated American capitalism is today. The politically connected tire and steel industries get government relief from a “surge” of imports from China. (Who cares if American consumers want to pay less for Chinese steel and tires?) … Banks and insurance companies (like AIG) are bailed out because they are deemed too big to fail. Favored farmers get crop subsidies. …

Richard Epstein discusses the referendums initiated in California, and the issues underlying these impulses.

…The theoretical mistake in these reforms needs emphasis. Structural remedies have one vital function: The diffusion of power in different branches of government is a key bulwark against tyranny, even at the cost of gridlock and paralysis. On balance that trade-off is worth making.

Yet tinkering with this balance will do little to cure today’s entitlement malaise. Whatever the importance of some division of power among political actors, no theory tells which division of power is likely to work better than the others. Look around the world and ask whether presidential systems of government, like that in the United States, work better than parliamentary systems of government, like that in Great Britain. We can’t be sure. Nations under stress often oscillate between the two, without any clear direction.

On the other hand, getting the basic set of substantive entitlements right does make a huge difference in the success or failure of government. It is only by taking on that unfashionable issue that real progress can be made in places like California. The first order of business should be to rationalize the tax structure. Low, flat taxes on income will draw in capital, not drive it away.

More to the point, none of these proposals take dead aim at entitlements. The impulse is to find out ways to add back dental benefits to Medicaid, often by asking the federal government (i.e., citizens in other states) to foot the bill. It’s a mug’s game that forces sensible states to subsidize the follies of profligate ones. We need to find a way to shrink the program nationwide. …

A Japanese man had the bad luck to be on a business trip in Hiroshima when we dropped a bomb. Two days later he finally got home to Nagasaki. Christopher Hitchens does an obit of sorts for Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who we chased around Japan with atomic bombs. He just died at 93.

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Scott Brown, running for the senate in MA is fast on his feet. The Corner has the story.

David Warren says that left-leaning lawyers make for dangerous politicians.

…And this is the wisdom of all the policy czars that President Obama has appointed — his commando team of lawyers, many with highly controversial, radical left pasts. Superficially, they could be removed from office tomorrow. But if they can rewrite enough laws and regulations, in the smoke and confusion of brief moments in power, they will, in a deeper sense, remain in office for generations to come.

I was writing last Sunday in general opposition to the concept of “reform.” It is a lawyerly concept, which has narrowed in our time to the tactics of “legislation by litigation,” and should be profoundly anathematic to a free society. By increments, the need for lawyers has been extended to every aspect of human life, and the law schools themselves have metastatically expanded.

In a sense, our entire society has been criminalized, by lawyers adding to myriad laws that impinge not only on criminals, but on everybody. And by increments, we must find some way to reverse that parasitical growth, which threatens to choke even our humanity.

John Bolton has an article in the WSJ on how to increase the effectiveness of the intelligence community.

…The problem is often not the intelligence we collect, but assessing its implications. Solving that problem requires not the mind-deadening exercise of achieving bureaucratic consensus, but creating a culture that rewards insight and decisiveness. To create that culture we should abolish the DNI office and NIEs.

Eliminating the DNI should be accompanied by reversing decades of inadequate National Security Council supervision of the intelligence function. The council is an awesome instrument for presidential control over the IC, but only if the national security adviser and others exercise direction and control. Sloughing off responsibility to the bureaucracy embodying the problem is a failure of presidential leadership, and unfortunately gives us exactly the IC we deserve.

Contemporary NIEs (and other IC products) reflect the bureaucracy’s lowest-common-denominator tendencies and should be abolished. Each intelligence agency should be able to place its analysis of data into a competitive marketplace of classified ideas—this will help determine which is the superior product. …

Mark Steyn suggests that Great Britain should be on the list of countries requiring extra airport screening.

…On the other hand, the threat posed by Yemen and Pakistan is not confined to those who travel on Yemeni and Pakistani passports. There are many Muslims with Western passports who shuttle back and forth between their countries and ours. Indeed, the flight routes between Britain and Pakistan are some of the busiest in the world — a lot of innocent stuff like picking up the child bride, but some trips whose purposes are not so clear.

Come to think of it, if we’re profiling, why not the Brits? Americans do the shoeless shuffle for every 40-minute puddlejump because of one British subject — Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. Americans dutifully put their restricted quantities of shampoo and cough medicine in approved plastic sacks because of more British subjects — the Heathrow plotters. And now Americans will be forbidden to go to the bathroom or read a paperback book or whatever halfwit stricture the TSA has settled on this week because of a British university student, Mr. Abdulmutallab.

Obviously — although less obviously than a decade ago — not every Briton is a terrorist risk: One would probably not need to screen David Beckham, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Rod Stewart . . . Nevertheless, according to the New York Times, of Britain’s half million university students, one-fifth are Muslim. And, according to a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion, one-third of British Muslim students favor a global caliphate and believe killing in the name of religion is justified. Presumably only a small percentage are so gung-ho that they’d be willing to stuff the explosives in their briefs. But they provide a large comfort zone for the jihad to operate in.  …

In the Daily Beast, Tunku Varadarajan comments on the superficial criticisms of the Tea Party.

…Put to one side, for the moment, David’s (David Brooks) exaggeratedly Hamiltonian belief in the natural leadership abilities of people like him, and ask this: What exactly is this “educated class,” and what leads him to think that those who oppose it are not, somehow, sophisticated? Forgive me, here, for bringing to the discussion a personal note. I have a cousin who is a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan. She is a Tea Party supporter, and she wrote me these words in an email:

“I laugh, but also feel indignant, when I read that the tea parties are filled with angry white men, because it’s obvious that reporters are not attending the same tea parties I attended. The events were a mix of young and old, VERY mixed ethnicities (but yes, a majority white). Everyone to a person was courteous and polite, and the best part was the signs, which were funny and clever. It did feel very grassroots and very much a movement fueled by the people rather than by shadowy party apparatchiks. It felt cool to think that we were not going to be taken in by government and be told what was good for us. (Does that sound really hokey?) It felt good to be a part of a group of people who were saying “enough!” I’m a huge supporter of the tea party movement because I think it exists outside of the traditional parties and is a true manifestation of the voice of the citizen.

Not everyone in the movement is a Wellesley graduate, and I bring my cousin into the story only as a forensic counterpoint to David’s fixation with the “educated class.” America doesn’t really have a class system, but that fact makes it tough for people like David, who sometimes seem to wish it did. The traditional solution has been to attend an Ivy League school if possible—or just cop an “intellectual” attitude if not—and then look down on the rest of America. When America was less of a meritocracy (and that was not so long ago), this solution was less damaging. Now that the country is run mostly by graduates of Ivy League schools, however, that they look down on the electorate is becoming not only vastly irritating to the electorate but also rather dangerous. Elitism, now, might have adverse political consequences—and a backlash. …

Would you believe that the AP is reporting that the stimulus has not helped the economy? Jennifer Rubin fills us in.

The stimulus money to be spent on infrastructure really did nothing to save or create jobs. That’s not a conservative talking point; that’s the AP:

Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found. …

Obama wants a second stimulus, but what would be the point? (”AP’s analysis, which was reviewed by independent economists at five universities, showed that strategy hasn’t affected unemployment rates so far. And there’s concern it won’t work the second time.”) The reaction of economists is instructive …

…Even within the construction industry, which stood to benefit most from transportation money, the AP’s analysis found there was nearly no connection between stimulus money and the number of construction workers hired or fired since Congress passed the recovery program. The effect was so small, one economist compared it to trying to move the Empire State Building by pushing against it. …

Jennifer Rubin also blogs about how lying is part of the Washington, DC job description.

You wonder how government officials do it. Self-respecting professionals who enjoyed a good reputation and seem like decent types come to Washington, go to work for an administration, and are required, as part of their job, to propound nonsense. More than nonsense, really — lies. A case in point is Christina Romer’s appearance on State of the Union. John King played for her a tape of then candidate Barack Obama, declaring: “I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” King and Romer then had this exchange:

KING: Does that stand as we head into year two of the Obama administration and you try to make the difficult choices to start to bring the deficit under control? Does that promise still stand, not any of your taxes if you’re under $250,000?

ROMER: I mean, yes. And let me talk, though, about the — the bigger issue, which is, you know, even — to the degree that we, of course, care deeply about the deficit, and you’re right. In 2010, that is going to be something very much that the president is focusing on and talking about. …

Gerald Warner posts on more green insanity in Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…The whole “climate change” scenario has now assumed such Disneyland characteristics, it is impossible to keep pace with the escalating extravagance of the global warmists’ fantasies. We truly are in the territory where the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

For those who missed it, I feel obliged to share the following gem from Dominic Lawson’s excellent piece on the Sunday Times Online yesterday. It provides a unique insight into the extent to which the Met Office, in its crusade to support the global warming scam, has lost touch with any sense of reality. Lawson quotes from a Met Office staffer’s internet posting to a newspaper last week:

“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

Beam me up, Scottie! …

The NYTimes had an interesting piece on the life of a person with autism. Saki Knafo writes about George Kramer, 73.

George Kramer sat hunched on his stool behind the counter of the small hardware store on Coney Island Avenue, gazing out the window at the passing traffic. He was bundled up in a heavy sweater, a maroon wool cap folded above his ears. Toward the back of the store, beyond Mr. Kramer’s field of vision, Isaac Abraham was rifling through a cabinet. Mr. Abraham, the store’s owner for many years, knows Mr. Kramer about as well as anybody, and he was about to give a demonstration.

Quietly, he removed a faucet knob from the cabinet and hid it behind his back. Then he approached the counter and clapped it down with a flourish.

Mr. Kramer gave it a perfunctory glance. “Gerber,” he said.

“Gerber what?” asked Mr. Abraham.

“Ninety-nine, eleven fifty-one.”

Mr. Abraham turned over the package to show the catalog number: 99-1151. Mr. Kramer — George to me — is my second cousin, and he has worked at Kramer’s Hardware, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for 58 years. He has a developmental disability, which is obvious to people who meet him, but he also has a rare and less apparent ability: Like the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for the film “Rain Man,” George, 71, has a powerful memory for dates and numbers and facts. If you tell him your birthday, he can tell you what day it will fall on two years in the future. He studies phone directories and atlases in his spare time. …

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Michael Barone looks at the polls in Massachusetts.

John Fund posts on that race.

Corner post too.

What a day for Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican vying for Teddy Kennedy’s former U.S. Senate seat. In recent days, polls have shown Brown steadily closing the gap in what’s become a surprisingly close race against Democrat Martha Coakley. To build on his momentum, Brown went to the web today to raise more cash for his surging campaign. Brown hoped to raise half-a-million dollars in a day, and boy, did his supporters come out in droves. As of 11:40 p.m., Brown has raised over $1,117,000 dollars via his “Red Invades Blue” campaign. Many Republicans have pitched in: To help Brown out, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty both sent out fundraising appeals on his behalf. …

After that we open with more commentary from Mark Steyn on the fallout from the pantybomber.

…According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world’s superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can’t blame the world’s mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.

…What did the Pantybomber have a membership card in? Well, he was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning jeep into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, had been president of the Islamic Society of Queen’s University, Belfast. Yassin Nassari, serving three years in jail for terrorism, was president of the Islamic Society of the University of Westminster. Waheed Arafat Khan, arrested in the 2006 Heathrow terror plots that led to Americans having to put their liquids and gels in those little plastic bags, was president of the Islamic Society of London Metropolitan University.

Doesn’t this sound like a bigger problem than “al-Qaida,” whatever that is? The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist’s home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious – that this “war” is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London. …

In the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes says that the Obami need to get smart about counterterrorism.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was created in 2004 for the purpose of coordinating intelligence among the many agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The NCTC essentially exists to make sure the strands of intelligence like those the U.S. government had on Abdulmutallab are brought together to prevent an attack.

Michael Leiter, the head of the NCTC, spent Christmas Day on the job. He left the day after, having gotten permission of the White House and the director of national intelligence. …

…Under any circumstances, Leiter should have remained at the NCTC to help determine how such an intelligence failure could have happened. But there was a truly pressing reason for him to stick around and do his job. Abdulmutallab had told interrogators that there were others to follow. The concerns were serious enough that Obama surged the number of federal air marshals on airplanes. …

…So at precisely the same time the staff of the NCTC was working furiously to piece together bits of intelligence to prevent another attack, the director was on a White House-approved vacation? …

Claudia Rosett criticizes Obama’s lack of understanding of the important issues, by way of discussing his December schedule, and then reviews the serious foreign situations that the Obami need to be paying attention to. Here are a few:

Iran: Last week the Tehran regime missed another U.N.-drafted deadline for halting its uranium enrichment, aka its nuclear bomb program. Instead, in its umpteenth round of nose-thumbing at the multilateral monitoring and dialogue on which Obama has placed his bets, the Iranian regime set its own Jan. 31 deadline for the West to accept Tehran’s terms for its bomb-fuel projects. Meanwhile, Manhattan’s longtime, legendary district attorney (a Democrat), Robert Morgenthau, just before going into retirement, told The Wall Street Journal, that “the president is smoking pot or something if he thinks that being nice to these guys is going to get him anywhere.” …

North Korea: As detailed in the Washington Post, a report surfaced from Pakistan’s nuclear mass-marketing wizard, A.Q. Khan, that, based on his multiple past close encounters with North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s regime may have a more advanced uranium enrichment program and missile-ready nuclear arsenal than suspected. Meanwhile, North Korea keeps dispatching munitions to Iran, by ship and by plane.

Russia: Obama’s “reset” and reneging on missile defense for Eastern Europe has now translated into Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s threat that Russia, to balance any American missile defense, will develop new “offensive” weapons. …

…America’s foes have their differences. But they all have this in common: They see America as an antagonist, not because they are appalled by Guantanamo Bay, as Obama keeps arguing (every patch of turf listed above features far worse treatment of “detainees”), but for the opposite reason–that America has stood for generations as the leader of the free world, what Ronald Reagan called “the shining city on a hill.” That’s what this war is about, and that’s the crisis that needs the full attention and a genuinely viable strategy right now from America’s commander-in-chief. When does President Obama look at this scene and finally connect the dots?

Mark Steyn blogs about the security breach at Newark Airport and the Keystone Cop performance of the TSA.

After six days, the authorities have finally caught the man who strolled through into the “secure” area at Newark Airport. …

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg expressed anger that he could only face a fine.

“It wasn’t some prank that didn’t do any harm – it did a lot of harm because it sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this,” he said.

Yes, and, if you thought before opening your ridiculous Senatorial mouth, you’d realize that that’s what you should be mad about – that at your airport anybody “can get away with something like this”, not that Mr Jiang exposed that fact. He didn’t have to try anything clever. He just waited until crack TSA national security operative Ruben Hernandez turned his back…

…A bystander waiting for an arriving passenger noticed the breach and told the guard. TSA officials then discovered that surveillance cameras at the security checkpoint had not recorded the breach. …

…That’s right – they weren’t even recording, sources said, and needed a reboot, which the agency apparently didn’t ask for. …

…With the cameras inoperable, the TSA tried to get a second set of surveillance video from Continental Airlines. But the TSA apparently didn’t know the correct telephone number and the specific procedures to get the footage.

Shutting down the airport, wasting thousands of people’s time by pointlessly rescreening them, treating them as animals in pens without food or drink or bathroom breaks for hours on end, causing them to miss their flights and screwing up their lives… none of that is Mr Jiang’s fault but that of the money-no-object TSA that imposes stupid petty rules on everybody else but doesn’t even follow its own. …

Melanie Phillips on the self-destructive culture of guilt and appeasement in Britain.

…The left are consumed by hatred of America and the west in general. The paleo-cons believe that ‘abroad’ – about which they know no more than the BBC tells them, God help us – is a dangerous and frightening place full of lunatics who will leave us alone as long as we don’t do anything unpleasant to them; and the fact that they want in fact to kill us must therefore mean that we have indeed done something unpleasant to them. So they end up agreeing with the Islamic world that the west is actually the cause of the war being waged against it. …

…There is no question in my mind but that this mass public derangement is the single most important weapon in the Islamists’ arsenal. The unremitting barrage of these ignorant, bigoted and unfounded claims week in, week out provides a lethal echo chamber for the already epidemic conspiracy theories, victim complex and inversion of cause and effect that are coursing through the Islamic world, thus helping to incite untold numbers of British Muslims to an ever greater pitch of hysteria.

It also demoralises (in every sense), demotivates and discombobulates non-Muslim Brits so that they are quite unable to grasp that they are under attack from religious fanaticism; instead they turn on their own side (America, Israel) and create a climate of anti-war defeatism and appeasement. This undermines British troops abroad and ensures that no politician will commit properly to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq (not to mention Iran) thus ensuring that the west will lose the fight to defend the free world. …

What happens when the government provides low-interest loans to law students? More law schools open and charge higher tuition, and more students get degrees and large student debt, but can’t get jobs. Government incentives distort the market, and calls for regulation begin. Mark Greenbaum in the LATimes does just that, but he also gives us a picture of the untenable market situation. His solution though just packs more bad laws on top of other bad laws. We’d have been better off if market distorting policies didn’t get launched in the first place.

…From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.

This jobs gap is even more problematic given the rising cost of tuition. In 2008, the median tuition at state schools for nonresidents was $26,000 a year, and $34,000 for private schools — and much higher in some states, such as California. Students racked up an average loan debt in 2007-08 of $59,000 for students from public law schools and $92,000 for those from private schools, according to the ABA, and a recent Law School Survey of Student Engagement found that nearly one-third of respondents said they would owe about $120,000.

Such debt would be manageable if a world of lucrative jobs awaited the newly minted attorneys, but this is not the case. A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt. This problem is exacerbated by the existing law school system. …

In WSJ, Eric Felten discusses his discomfort with charitable solicitations at store checkouts.

…If you shopped at any number of stores participating in the hospital’s campaign—including Williams-Sonoma, Kmart, CVS drug stores, and others—you also were asked to contribute. Chances are, like me, you dutifully added to the kitty. But I wonder how many, like me, came away with a bad taste from the experience, an unpleasant sense of having been imposed upon.

I asked Leslie Lenkowsky, who is director of graduate programs at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy. He acknowledges that the practice involves some arm-twisting—”You get to feel badly if you refuse to donate”—but he thinks that the register pitch is not only effective but morally superior to indirect methods (such as when a store contributes on customers’ behalf a small percentage of its revenues). “From the charity’s point of view, this will be viewed as more ethical,” he says, “since the donor has to make an affirmative decision to give.” And if you are a customer/donor, he adds, “you get the product and the warm fuzzy glow.”

Well, I’m not glowing. It’s more like a slow burn. If I answer yes to the pitch, I don’t feel the least bit generous; I’m left with the nagging sensation of having been made to cry “uncle.” I never feel as though the offhand donation amounts to much—what, only a $5 donation when spending $100 on yourself?!—which leaves me feeling rather like a skinflint. And yet, if I don’t pony up at all, there’s the reflexive twinge of shame. Are these the emotions businesses want to produce in their customers? …

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Scott Rasmussen analyzes the Massachusetts race.

On the surface, three recent polls on the upcoming Massachusetts special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy seem to tell three different stories. …

… As always, it’s important to look at what the polls have in common to learn the real lessons from the data. A closer look at all three shows a lot of common ground. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff responds to the Fed chairman’s recent speech claiming the Fed had no hand in the mortgage crisis. Schiff asserts that the Fed can claim a hefty share of the blame.

…The biggest issuers and insurers of ARMs were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these Government Sponsored Entities (GSE’s) had policies that allowed for borrowers to qualify based solely on their ability to meet the initial loan payments, not the higher payments that would eventually kick in. Why didn’t the Fed advise Congress to force the GSE’s to adopt more prudent standards? Either they did not recognize these mortgages as problematic, in which case they are incompetent, or they did and remained silent, which is worse. In either case, if they lacked the foresight or political will to prevent this crisis, how can we expect them to protect us from the next?

Furthermore, is it really possible that Bernanke is so clueless that he does not see the relationship between the proliferation of ARMs and interest-only mortgages and the low short-term interest rates that made them so popular? Without the ultra-low interest rates provided by the Fed, the vast majority of these problem mortgages never would have been originated. ARMs and interest-only mortgages existed well before the housing bubble began; however, it wasn’t until the Fed cut rates to historically low levels in 2002, and held them there through 2005, that they became so popular.

The only reason so many people were able to overpay for houses was because of the temporarily low “introductory” rates. Had the Fed not set interest rates so low, these options would not have been available, and house prices would have been held in check. In short, by keeping interest rates too low, the Fed inflated the housing bubble by enabling banks to issue mortgages that made overpriced houses seem affordable. …

In the Atlantic, Megan McArdle explains the unfolding commercial real estate crisis.

…In some ways, price declines are a bigger problem for landlords than for homeowners. Unless forced to move, homeowners with long-term mortgages who make enough to cover their payments can sit tight and hope the market recovers. Landlords, however, typically take out commercial loans for shorter terms of three to 10 years. In normal times, landlords coming to the end of a mortgage simply roll the debt over into a new loan. But collapsing asset values have wreaked havoc on this process.

Now, as loans come up for renewal, lenders have to reassess how much credit they’re willing to extend. Take a property that was worth $100 million in 2007, when it was financed with a four-year, $70 million mortgage. That’s a reasonably conservative 70 percent loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. But if the building is worth only $70 million when it’s time to roll the loan over, keeping the LTV at 70 percent means that the owners can now borrow only $49 million, and have to come up with tens of millions to pay off the original loan. Worse, as the markets tighten, lenders tend to want to see a lower LTV in the deals they finance.

That suggests that a lot of commercial loans are going to go bad. According to Joseph Gyourko, a Wharton real-estate professor, at least $250 billion worth of commercial loans are going to roll over in each of the next few years. When they do, many landlords will probably be caught short—and so will their bankers. Although most U.S. residential mortgages were bundled into mortgage-backed securities, only a fraction of commercial mortgages were securitized. Some bank or finance company still carries the rest on its books and will have to write them down if they can’t be rolled over; some of those banks will ultimately have to be taken over by the FDIC. As the banks’ loan portfolios are sold off, the write-downs of the underlying collateral will give bank examiners a new, lower reference price for the collateral held by other banks, possibly tipping those banks into insolvency as well. You get the picture. …

Ed Morrissey comments on an AP unemployment article that pulls no punches.

For a while, the Associated Press seemed determined to make “unexpected” and its variants the most overused term in economic reporting.  Today, they give their readers an unexpected shock by dropping the forced sense of optimism normally used in giving bad economic news in their analysis of today’s jobless report.  Instead, Christopher Rugaber reports the obvious — that the loss of 85,000 more jobs is nothing but bad news, and that the 10.0% figure hides the rot underneath:

“Lack of confidence in the economic recovery led employers to shed a more-than-expected 85,000 net jobs in December even as the unemployment rate held at 10 percent. The rate would have been higher if more people had been looking for work instead of leaving the labor force because they can’t find jobs. …

…When discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs are included, the so-called “underemployment” rate in December rose to 17.3 percent, from 17.2 percent in November. That’s just below a revised figure of 17.4 percent in October, the highest on records dating from 1994. …”

…Unemployment has not gotten better; it has gotten worse, and the statistics have hidden the real decline in 2009.  Until now, only a few media outlets bothered to highlight the problem.  The AP has finally made it clear — and that will mean a lot more attention in 2010 to the failed Porkulus legislation and the fumbled economic strategies of the Obama administration.  (via Geoff A) …

In the Corner, Stephen Spruiel gives his forecast on the economy, and what Republicans should do.

…There are other reasons to think that, even with moderate GDP growth, unemployment could remain at 8 or 9 percent for the rest of the year. Home prices are likely to stay flat, i.e. the asset inflation that drove consumer spending during the credit bubble isn’t there to drive it now. The stock market has rallied, but an analysis of economy-wide stock prices to corporate earnings indicates that stocks might be overvalued. I tend to think that’s the case. Additionally, the number of people dropping out of the workforce is still quite high. As James Pethokoukis noted today, a growing economy will draw these discouraged job-seekers back into the labor force, offsetting jobs created and keeping the unemployment rate elevated.

Second, I think it’s fair to blame Obama and the Democrats for creating a climate that is not conducive to job creation. (I think Ramesh probably agrees with that.) I have a piece up today arguing that the administration’s agenda has created a deleterious level of regulatory uncertainty, particularly with regard to health-care costs, which has suppressed job growth. I actually think this point ties in well with the larger point of Ramesh’s piece, which is that it’s time for Republicans to pivot from opposition to Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Care to a positive message on health care. …

…Republicans should run on the following message: The cost controls in the Democrats’ bill are a joke: Obamacare will drive premiums up and expose small businesses to new taxes and regulations. Republicans will repeal Obamacare as their first order of business and replace it with the right reforms, such as the refundable health-care tax credit that John McCain touted during his presidential campaign. Such a strategy would tie unease over the Democrats’ health-care bill to anger over high unemployment.

Robert Samuelson introduces us to the Statistical Abstract.

You may think that the last place to find a portrait of a nation is a book full of numbers. But turn to Page 673 of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, and you find these intriguing figures. About three-quarters of Americans (76.1 percent in 2007, to be exact) get to work by driving alone. Only 10.4 percent carpool, while 4.9 percent use public transportation and 2.8 percent walk. On average, Americans spend 25.3 minutes commuting each way. The state with the longest commuting time is New York, at 31.5 minutes; the states with the shortest are North and South Dakota, at about 16 minutes, followed closely by Montana and Nebraska, at 17.6.

I’m an avid fan of the Stat Abstract, published annually by the Census Bureau, because it tells so much so quickly. The just-out 2010 edition bulges with information. For me, the Stat Abstract is often the place to start a story, because it substitutes evidence for speculation. How do we compare with other countries? Sometimes favorably; sometimes not. …

Jennifer Rubin notices Maureen Dowd falling out of ObamaLove.

… Not even the grande dame of the Gray Lady can avoid the conclusion that Obama hasn’t panned out. The fellow whom she and the entire liberal media swooned over during the campaign and those very qualities the Left punditocracy touted as praiseworthy (e.g., intellectualism, emotional reserve) have proven ill-suited to the job. Obama is neither leading nor seeming to understand state craft.

How could they have gotten it so wrong? Well, they were plainly in love with the “historic” opportunity to elect an African American. And they saw in Obama one of them — elite educated, scornful of gun clinging and Bible thumping Americans, contemptuous of American exceptionalism, skeptical of “hard power,” and infatuated with the public sector. It turns out that this was a recipe for disaster when it comes the the presidency. …

Dale McFeatters, in Central Florida’s NewChief, tells us about a new trend in medicine; walk-in labs.

…As Lee Bowman of Scripps Howard News Service reports, a growing number of Americans are bypassing doctors and going directly to online and storefront labs for diagnostic testing. Most often they pay for these tests out of their own pocket. The results may persuade the consumer to pursue the matter further with a personal physician but, in any case, the consumer is in charge of who sees the results.

…The name of one fast-growing chain of walk-in labs encapsulates the field’s business model, Any Lab Test Now. The company says it can generally have testing results within 24 hours and at a cost that is as much as 80 percent less than going through a doctor. The lab franchises offer up to 1,500 tests, from a simple cholesterol check to more sophisticated packages of tests that address complex medical issues. …

…There is no federal oversight over medical testing, other than requiring that the labs that do the actual testing for the storefronts be properly certified. State regulations vary widely. As so often happens, the consumers seem to be far out in front of the lawmakers and regulators.

In the Corner, Robert Costa posts that Sarah Palin got it right again.

So this is why Sarah Palin isn’t going to CPAC (via Politico):

Palin is declining an invitation to address the Conservative Political Action Conference next month because, a source said, she does not want to be affiliated with the longtime organizer of the traditional movement confab.

At issue is the role of David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union which organizes CPAC. In September, POLITICO reported that Keene asked FedEx for between $2 million and $3 million to get the group’s support in a bitter legislative battle with rival UPS.

A source close to the Palin camp says that request led to a decision to stay away from the upcoming CPAC conference, calling it a forum that will place “special interests over core beliefs” and “pocketbook over policy.”

“That’s not what CPAC should be about and people are tiring,” the source said. “Palin is taking a stance against this just as she did in Alaska.”

Gerald Warner has more to say about the green fraud and those who are still drinking the cool-aid, in Telegraph Blogs, UK.

Fasten your seat-belt before you read this one. It’s a corker. It is a quote from Susan Watts, BBC Science Editor, on Newsnight, as she attempted to explain why the abysmal failure of climate “scientists” to predict current weather conditions does not in any way reduce their credibility in predicting global warming. Watts said: “In fact that seasonal forecast predicting a mild winter wasn’t actually wrong, but it left people with the wrong impression.”

If you think I am making this up, I cannot honestly blame you. I can only invite you to go to BBC iPlayer and view Newsnight for 7 January, in order to hear this garbage for yourself. So, the prediction of a mild winter “wasn’t actually wrong”. Does the term “in denial” have any more graphic illustration than that? If you look out the window you might get the impression of Arctic conditions. But please remember, that is only an impression – a wrong impression. In scientific terms, it is baking hot. …

… Global warming is all around us, only we are too sinful/sceptical/denying to see it. The total, insupportable falsity of the whole AGW scam is so blatant that its apologists’ excuses are now not so much infantile as cretinous. …

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America in decline? Could happen, says Mark Steyn.

…Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” …

…Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies,” from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the Free World” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few NATO members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. …

Maybe the country will decline the decline. New poll shows the Mass. US senate race a toss up. We shall see if voters in Massachusetts are going to send a thunderbolt to the White House. Corner post with the details.

The Senate race in Massachusetts is a dead heat according to an extensive new poll, with Republican Scott Brown leading Democrat Martha Coakley 48-47 among likely voters.

Brown enjoys a staggering 70/16 favorability ratio among independents, and 66-31 advantage over Coakley (thanks in part to a total lack of advertising from the latter). He also benefits from an “enthusiasm gap”: 68 percent of Republicans polled said they were “very excited” about casting their vote, compared to just 48 percent of Democrats. …

Ready to get covered with slime? The Dems have a plan to delay the swearing in of Scott Brown if he’s elected to the senate.

Tony Blankley looks to the past to instruct us on how to handle the tumultuous times that we face.

Over the Christmas holiday, I read a couple of books that, at least for me, may provide some guidance in the upcoming tumultuous and probably consequential year. The first book was “Munich,” 1938 by David Farber, (grandson of former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) by far the most authoritative book on that world changing event. …

…The other half of the story of Munich 1938 was events in Germany, where, unlike in Britain, the problem was a war policy advocated by Adolf Hitler that was opposed by most of the institutional leadership (including many of the very top generals) and by the general public which feared another war. (As Hitler paraded his armored columns through Berlin in preparation for entering Czechoslovakia, according to a witness, “the people of Berlin ducked into subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence. It was the most striking demonstration against the war I’ve ever seen.” Hitler watched it from a window and in furious contempt of the German people complained “With such people I cannot wage war.” Of course he did, in part because of what, the author points out, was Hitler’s “exceptional insight into the tendency of men torn between conscience and self-interest to welcome what made it easier to opt for the latter.”)

The second book is a new short biography of Winston Churchill by the prolific English writer Paul Johnson. It has the advantage of being probably the last Churchill biography which will be written by an author who personally knew the great man – and is filled with personal tidbits that bring further color to the well known story of Churchill’s life. …

…The author identifies five Churchillian attributes that guided his eventual success: 1) He aimed high, but never cadged or demeaned himself to gain office or objectives; 2) there was no substitute for hard work – even though he was brilliant; 3) Churchill “never allowed mistakes, disasters – personal or national – accidents, illnesses, unpopularity and criticism to get him down. His powers of recuperation, both in physical illness an in psychological responses to abject failure, were astounding”; 4) Churchill wasted extraordinarily small amounts of energy on hatred, recrimination, malice, revenge grudges, rumor mongering or vendettas. Energy expended on hate was energy lost to productive activity; and 5) he always had something other than politics to give joy to his life. …

Charles Krauthammer reviews the Obami’s irrational counterterrorism policies, and the irrationality of radical Islam.

On Wednesday, Nigerian would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indicted by a Michigan grand jury for attempted murder and sundry other criminal charges. The previous day, the State Department announced that his visa had been revoked. The system worked.

Well, it did for Abdulmutallab. What he lost in flying privileges he gained in Miranda rights. He was singing quite freely when seized after trying to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. But the Obama administration decided to give him a lawyer and the right to remain silent. We are now forced to purchase information from this attempted terrorist in the coin of leniency. Absurdly, Abdulmutallab is now in control. …

…This is nuts. Even if you wanted ultimately to try him as an ordinary criminal, he could have been detained in military custody — and thus subject to military interrogation — without prejudicing his ultimate disposition. After all, every Guantanamo detainee was first treated as an enemy combatant and presumably interrogated. But some (most notoriously Khalid Sheik Mohammed) are going to civilian trial. That determination can be made later. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa posts an interview with Liz Cheney at Keep America Safe about national security concerns. Here’s Pickings dream ticket – Palin and Cheney.

Liz Cheney, the founder of Keep America Safe, tells National Review Online that President Obama’s national-security remarks this afternoon, plus the press conference with John Brennan and Janet Napolitano, were “extremely troubling.”

“Over the course of the last year, President Obama has taken his eye off the ball and allowed America’s counterterrorism systems to erode,” says Cheney. “Brennan and Napolitano both said they were surprised to learn from the review released today that al-Qaeda in Yemen was operational.  Napolitano went on to say she hadn’t realized previously that al-Qaeda might use an individual to attack us.  Yet, in the past year, we’ve had three attacks on America from individuals with Yemeni connections — from the terrorist at the recruiting station in Little Rock to the terrorist at Ford Hood and now the Christmas Day bomber.” Thus, she says, “it is inexplicable that our nation’s top counterterrorism officials would be surprised by a method of attack we’ve repeatedly seen before.”

“At the end of the day, we cannot win this war without daily, unwavering, resolute presidential stewardship,” says Cheney. “By tasking his counterterrorism officials to spend their time focused on trying to close Guantanamo and investigating their predecessors, by treating terrorists as criminals, by treating terrorist attacks on the U.S. as the acts of ‘isolated extremists,’ President Obama has failed to make fighting terror and keeping the nation safe his top priority.”

“The president says he’s using every tool at his disposal but he’s not,” says Cheney. “We can’t prevail against terrorists without intelligence.  When President Obama treats terrorists like criminals, reads them their Miranda rights and allows them to lawyer up, he ensures we won’t get the intelligence we need.”  In addition, Cheney says, “When the president stopped the enhanced-interrogation programs and revealed our tactics to our enemies, he significantly reduced our ability to successfully interrogate any senior al-Qaeda leaders. Intelligence is key. Let’s be clear: We’re not going to win this war through more intense airport screenings.”

Roger Simon blogs about global warming wealth-seeking.

Hardly more than two weeks after the United Nations Climate Conference known as COP15 global warming has virtually disappeared from the world’s front pages. First was Climategate, then the inconvenient truth of Siberian winds bringing record breaking cold to Beijing (not to mention Miami, of all places) and virtually everywhere else and poof (!) AGW is gone, more than likely for a long time to come. It’s almost as if it never happened, all those drowning polar bears and glaciers receding forever and a day. Now, only crickets. …

…I don’t know whether Mr. Rachman was in Copenhagen, but I was. I didn’t speak to Singh or Wen or anybody quite that august, but I did speak to a number of third world delegates and it was commonplace among them to admit the AGW was hooey, therefore acknowledging the obvious – that they were there for the money. In fact, I was stunned at how easily they admitted it.

But speaking of the money and the strange saga that allowed it to become conventional wisdom that the CO2 we all know and love from photosynthesis was a treacherous greenhouse gas about to turn us all into baked potatoes, PJM and PJTV promise not to let this subject go. In the coming weeks and days, we’re going to be following that money – and there’s a lot of it to follow indeed. We’re going to name names too. That should be fun – even if we don’t get our money back (less likely, alas).

Gerald Warner posts in the Telegraph Blogs, UK. He advocates that the British public vote out all politicians advancing green fraud.

“Climate science” is the oxymoron of the century. There is not a city, town or hamlet in the country that has had its weather conditions correctly forecast, over periods as short as 12 hours, during the past week. This is the “exceptionally mild winter” that the climate change buffoons warned us would occur as a consequence of global warming. Their credibility is 20 degrees below zero.

Yet nothing shames them, nothing persuades them to come out of the bunker with their hands high and “fess up”. …

…The entire Northern Hemisphere is frozen. …That is completely normal, part of the random climate fluctuations with which our ancestors were familiar. Yet fraudulent scientists have gained millions of pounds by taking selective samples of natural climate change, whipping up a Grande Peur and using it to advance the cause of world government, state control and fiscal despoliation of citizens.

2010 should be the year when all that ends. It is time for Zero Tolerance of AGW fraudsters and their political masters. It is time to say: Green taxes? We won’t pay them. Nor will we vote for or permit to remain in office any politician or party that supports the AGW fraud. This year is one of those rare occasions when we have an opportunity to punish and control our political masters – provided Britons have the will to break with the two-party system. …

Peter Robinson reports on the entitlement demonstrations at Berkeley in Forbes.

…Faculty and administrators have joined the protests. Advocating a march on Sacramento, Robert Birgeneau, the Berkeley chancellor, has compared the student movement with the civil rights movement. “I hope that this [march] will match the March on Washington,” Birgeneau said. Prof. Ananya Roy has become a particular champion of the protest movement. Addressing students one day, Friend writes, Roy “began to voice … [their] dismay in sharp, sloganeering phrases. … In her piping voice … she repeated, elegaically: ‘We have all become students of color now.’”

We have all become students of color? A march on Sacramento that possesses the same moral dimension as the March on Washington? Let us remind ourselves just what the Berkeley protesters are demanding–not racial equality but money. For the poor and dispossessed? Scarcely. For themselves. To place the protesters’ demand in perspective, a few figures…

–The salary of Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau: $445,716. The salary of a typical full-time professor at Berkeley: $127,300. The average starting salary for the holder of a Berkeley undergraduate degree–I repeat, the average starting salary: $59,900. The median household income in California: $61,154.

–The number of Berkeley professors who have been laid off as a result of budget cuts: zero. The proportion of California workers who are now unemployed: 1 in 10. …

In the NY Times, Tara Pope reports on 11 foods to boost your health.

Nutritionist and author Jonny Bowden has created several lists of healthful foods people should be eating but aren’t. But some of his favorites, like purslane, guava and goji berries, aren’t always available at regular grocery stores. I asked Dr. Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” to update his list with some favorite foods that are easy to find but don’t always find their way into our shopping carts. Here’s his advice.

Beets: Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.
How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.

Cinnamon: May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.
How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal.

Dried plums: Okay, so they are really prunes, but they are packed with antioxidants.
How to eat: Wrapped in prosciutto and baked. …

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Today’s Pickings examines in detail the case in favor of profiling. It started with Tunku Varadarajan and Bret Stephens who both wrote on the subject. Then David Warren showed up with a fascinating piece that wandered around some before making some very good points. (That’s kinda his style. Isn’t it?) Later David Harsanyi hopped on. To set the tone, we start with Roger Simon who wishes to call a spade a spade.

And, by the way, this coming weekend the NY Times Magazine has a nicely balanced look at the Florida race for U. S. Senate between Crist and Rubio. At 8,000 words it’s too long for us here, so if you want to read it you must follow this link. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10florida-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print

Roger Simon blogs about the effectiveness of the euphemisms currently circulating.

…Not that the “War on Terror” is an accurate appellation in the first place. “Man-caused disasters” is actually a euphemism of a euphemism, because the “War on Terror” itself has no real meaning. Terror is a method, not an end or a place. Fighting a “War on Terror” is like fighting a War on Cannons or Airplanes. Meaningless.

But we all know that the “War on Terror” is actually a euphemism for the “War on Radical Islam.” But nobody says it. Nobody official anyway. (Bush did say something like that once in a speech, as I recall, but was quickly shouted down by the nabobs of political correctness.) …

…I know there are those who thought that this soft-pedaling of this war would calm down the Islamic world and make things go away, but by now events have shown them to be wrong. From Sana’a to Somalia, from Detroit to Ft. Hood, and most importantly on the streets of Tehran, things have by now, if anything, heated up, morphing to new, and often more complicated, locations.

Yet still we dare not speak the name of the War on Radical Islam. Still we fear to offend. Perhaps we need a new euphemism. For now I would suggest the “War on Ourselves.” It looks to be becoming dangerously successful.

David Warren discusses political correctness related to smoking and stereotyping. This article may be hazardous for liberal sensibilities (or insensibilities, as it were).

…But there is hope. Conditions have now got so bad, from the 99 per cent of damage that is inflicted not by terrorists but by the cumbersome bureaucracies responding to them (100 per cent in this case), that we are now reading “mainstream” articles about how the Israelis handle airport security — with total success, against much greater threats, at lower cost, with no flight delays.

This is encouraging: people are actually discussing what works. I did notice several of the articles, though well-researched in other respects, carefully avoided mentioning the key element in the Israeli security strategy, which is: open ethnic, religious, demographic, and behavioural profiling.

It is not something anyone wants to do. It is just something that has to be done if we are going to avoid being slaughtered by terrorists.

And though we may not yet be talking about the issue directly, the cracks are appearing in the wall of political correctitude, which means it might eventually come down. …

Tunku Varadarajan’s article on security and politics is full of interesting points from beginning to end. Here are a few highlights:

…Next, make it more cumbersome for people in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to get a U.S. visa, and institute an immediate review of all visas issued to males under 40 from the 14 countries. Revoke all those that don’t pass a “smell test.” As Abdulmutallab demonstrated, a U.S. visa is a precious al Qaeda asset. …

…We have to create—increasingly—two classes of traveler, those that get normal checks and those that are subject to intensive checks. Inevitably, this will open up fissures, but these are fissures we must learn to live with. As Melik Kaylan wrote recently, ” the world will likely undergo a period of de-integration or rather a new kind of integration in which mutually sympathetic cultures grow actively closer while others get slowly excluded.” Eventually, if the pressure is applied long enough, the innocent majority in the watch-list countries will decide that it is in their own interest to root out the radical Islamists. … It is likely that certain countries will not get off the list for decades, which may mean that they don’t care enough, or are just too ramshackle and corrupt, to get their house in order.  …

…To conclude, there are three under-acknowledged factors involved here, all of them cultural in character (and our culture inclines us to overlook them). First, when the White House and Congress are in Democratic hands, a slight and silent sense goes out over all the bureaucracy that national security is not all that important or interesting. Second: Bureaucracies reward inertia and do not punish ignorance. They are also—no news here—deeply compartmentalized. Three: Every educated American under the age of about 40 has been indoctrinated into the view that the worst thing imaginable is to be judgmental, because to make a judgment is, per se, to be intolerant.

Put all these together and you have a society almost perfectly unable to discern deadly threats to its existence—a society in which, it would appear, profiling people is more odious than mass murder.

In the WSJ, Bret Stephens looks at the political correctness that is incapacitating the nation’s security.

When does a civilization become incompetent? I’ve been mulling the question in a number of contexts over the last year, including our inability to put a stop to Somali piracy, detain a terrorist who can neither be charged nor released, think rationally about climate change, or rebuild Ground Zero in an acceptable time frame. …

…a civilization becomes incompetent not only when it fails to learn the lessons of its past, but also when it becomes crippled by them. …

…we reject profiling on the commendable grounds that human beings ought not to be treated as statistical probabilities. But at some point, the failure to profile puts innocent lives recklessly at risk. We also abhor waterboarding for the eminently decent reason that it borders on torture. But there are worse things than waterboarding—like allowing another 9/11 to unfold because we recoil at the means necessary to prevent it. …

…Put simply, we do not acquit ourselves morally by trying to abstain from a choice of evils. We just allow the nearest evil to make the choice for us.

David Harsanyi once again shows how to make a joke and a point at the same time.

When comedian Joan Rivers was booted off a flight from Costa Rica to Newark this past weekend, it was not because she had perpetrated crimes against the human appearance. Rather, it was because she was a potential security risk. …

…Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, was, according to the president, an “isolated extremist” — which is true, if he means the extremism is isolated to a few million people.

Then, Obama went on to talk about the “crushing poverty” of Yemen, insinuating that neediness was a root of man-caused disasters — though the underwear bomber came from a wealthy and educated family and the “crushing poverty” of Haiti has yet to compel those nation’s young men to stuff explosives down their pants. …

Karl Rove gives the skinny on Obama’s fat budget.

After President Obama devoted much of 2009 to health care and global warming—two issues far down Americans’ list of concerns—the White House says he will pivot to jobs and deficit reduction in his State of the Union speech in a few weeks. The White House is considering dramatic gestures, perhaps announcing a spending freeze or even a 2% or 3% reduction in nondefense spending.

But Americans shouldn’t be misled by the election year ploy: Mr. Obama rigged the game by giving himself plenty of room to look tough on spending. He did that by increasing discretionary domestic spending for the last half of fiscal year 2009 by 8% and then increasing it another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush’s last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That’s a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama. The $102 billion spending increase doesn’t even count the $787 billion stimulus package, of which $534 billion remains unspent. …

Stephen Spruiel posts a depressing chart in the Corner. It’s about the number of people working for governments.

Jonah Goldberg, in USA Today, comments on liberal aspirations.

…”Leftward ho!” Alter proclaimed.

A little more than a year later, we surely have been hoing leftward. But it already seems as if the American people are sick of it. The 2009 off-year elections might not have been a repudiation of Obama, but they were definitely not an embrace of Obamaism. Meanwhile, by nearly 2 to 1, Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Obama’s approval ratings have slumped severely. Independent voters have abandoned the Democrats. The only populist fervor out there is fueling the anti-tax, pro-limited government, “Tea Party” movement, which is now more popular than either the GOP or the Democrats. Even last spring, when anti-Wall Street fervor was justifiably high, more Americans viewed “big government” as a bigger threat to the country than “big business.”

Obama’s signature domestic policy goal, health care reform, is decidedly unpopular with a majority of Americans. And a Rasmussen Reports poll last week finds that 70% of respondents either support waterboarding the Christmas bomber suspect or are unsure whether we should. Only 30% subscribe to Obama’s position. And that’s after an unsuccessful terrorist attack. …

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin discusses the economic and demographic woes of blue states.

…Other key sectors are also flailing. Political influence in Washington will not stem the flow of high-wage trading jobs away from the Mercantile Exchange to decentralized electronic exchanges. Nor can it reverse the deteriorating state fiscal crisis caused by weak economies and exacerbated by insanely high pensions and out of control spending policies. Late last month Moody’s and S&P downgraded the debt ranking for the State of Illinois. Of course, such fiscal malaise is not limited to Chicago or Illinois. True blue California has an even worse debt rating. New York, another blue bastion, is also just about out of cash. …

…Other blue bastions have been shedding jobs as well, both during the recession and over the whole decade. Beyond Chicago and Detroit, the biggest losses among the mega-regions have taken place in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles-Long Beach and Boston. Big money can still be made in Silicon Valley, Hollywood or around the academic economy of Boston, but in terms of overall jobs, the past decade has been dismal for these regions. Meanwhile, the consistent big gainers have been–besides Houston–Dallas and Washington, D.C., the one place money really does seem to grow on trees. Even Miami, Phoenix and San Bernardino-Riverside, in California, boast more jobs today than in 2000, despite significant setbacks in the recent recession.

These trends coincide with continuing shifts in demographics. The recession may have slowed the pace of net migration, but the essential pattern has remained in place. People continue to leave places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles for more affordable, economically viable regions like Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Overall, the big winners in net migration have been predominately conservative states like Texas–with over 800,000 net new migrants–notes demographer Wendell Cox. In what Cox calls “the decade of the South,” 90% of all net migration went to southern states. …

Yesterday we had much about intellectuals and the way they think. This from the Corner is a piece of that.

… I’ve seen a lot of “Worst Quote” features on other right-leaning sites, featuring howlers from the President, Pelosi, Evan Thomas, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, Whoopi Goldberg.

All of them leave out what was to me the most chilling quote, uttered by one Ruth Bader Ginsburg in response to a New York Times Magazine question about lack of Medicaid funding for abortions:”Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae—in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” …

For an idea of how cold it has been around the world, we have some of the weather related headlines from Drudge.

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Thomas Sowell writes about the corrosive effects of intellectuals. His latest book, Intellectuals and Society, has just been released.

…Some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the Western world in the 1930s gave ringing praise to the Soviet Union, while millions of people there were literally starved to death and vast numbers of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.

Many of those same distinguished intellectuals of the 1930s were urging their own countries to disarm while Hitler was rapidly arming Germany for wars of conquest that would have, among other things, put many of those intellectuals in concentration camps — slated for extermination — if he had succeeded.

The 1930s were by no means unique. In too many other eras — including our own today — intellectuals of unquestionable brilliance have advocated similarly childish and dangerous notions. How and why such patterns have existed among intellectuals is a challenging question, whose answer can determine the fate of millions of other people.

Sarah Palin’s ability to turn a phrase is still working. She says, “We need a commander in chief, not a law professor.”

President Obama’s meeting with his top national security advisers does nothing to change the fact that his fundamental approach to terrorism is fatally flawed. We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation’s security. That’s what happened in the 1990s and we saw the result on September 11, 2001. This is a war on terror not an “overseas contingency operation.” Acts of terrorism are just that, not “man caused disasters.” The system did not work. Abdulmutallab was a child of privilege radicalized and trained by organized jihadists, not an “isolated extremist” who traveled to a land of “crushing poverty.” He is an enemy of the United States, not just another criminal defendant. …

In Powerline, John Hinderaker comments on a Telegraph article that is sure to cause the Obami pain: the UK had warned the US about Abdulmutallab.

The Obama administration has gone out of its way to poison relationships with traditional allies such as Great Britain, and it seems that the favor is now being returned, as the Prime Minister’s office has disclosed publicly that British intelligence, MI5, warned the US about Umar Abdulmutallab. The Telegraph reports:

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was named in a file of people based in Britain who had made contact with radical Muslim preachers. The file was sent to the US authorities in 2008. …

… in an official briefing, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said that British intelligence was shared with the Americans. He said: “Clearly there was security information about this individual’s activities and that was information that was shared with the US authorities. That is the key point.” …

Christopher Hitchens discusses what we know about Iran’s progress towards developing nuclear weapons. Here is the opening:

Some distance into Sunday’s New York Times report on the Obama administration’s increasingly worried internal discussions about Iran, there came a couple of paragraphs that repaid closer scrutiny:

Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.

After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale. [Italics mine.]

Leaving to one side the alarming possibility that any of Obama’s people ever did believe the preposterous arguments of that National Intelligence Estimate (denounced by your humble servant in this space on Dec. 10, 2007), one must wonder what sort of scale is implied by “smaller.” That ostensibly reassuring usage might, in fact, be accurate. The new documents alluded to in the article were published in the Times of London in the second and third weeks of December and have been extensively reviewed by numerous authorities, none of whom have chosen to challenge their authenticity. And the documents do, in point of fact, throw light upon something “smaller scale.” To be precise, they show the internal memoranda of the dictatorship as they bear on the crucial question of a “neutron initiator.” Small as this device may be, it is the technical expression used for the “trigger” mechanism of a workable nuclear weapon. The critical element of the “trigger” is uranium deuteride or UD3. And uranium deuteride has no other purpose. To quote David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington: “Although Iran might claim that this work is for civil purposes, there is no civil application. This is a very strong indicator of weapons work.”

That would be to phrase it mildly. …

John Fund focuses our attention on the Senate race that could, if we are very lucky, be the undoing of Obamacare.

In the two months since voters gave Republican candidates impressive wins in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races, unemployment has increased to 10% under a Democratic White House, and Democrats have focused on jamming an increasingly unpopular health care bill through Congress. Now comes another statewide race this month that will likely be read as a follow-up referendum on the Obama administration. Massachusetts holds a special election on January 19 to fill the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Ted Kennedy, and even in this bluest of states it may not be a cakewalk for the Democrat.

At first glance, the chances of an anti-Democratic tide here appear remote. The Bay State gave Barack Obama 62% of its vote last year, the state hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972, and Democrats hold seven out of every eight seats in the state legislature. But one of the few Republicans in that legislature, State Senator Scott Brown, is making a serious play to upset the conventional wisdom, which holds that Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley is a shoo-in for the Kennedy seat. In the process, Mr. Brown is irritating Democrats to distraction.

His first TV ad begins in black and white with John F. Kennedy describing his 1962 tax cut bill: “The billions of dollars this bill will place in the hands of the consumer and our businessmen will have both immediate and permanent benefits to our economy.” The screen slowly morphs into an image of Mr. Brown as he calls for a new tax cut by finishing Kennedy’s remarks: “Every dollar released from taxation that is spent or invested will help create a new job and a new salary. And these new jobs and new salaries can create other jobs and other salaries, and more customers and more growth for an expanding American economy.” …

Comments on the same race from John Steele Gordon in Contentions.

…But Brown is certainly making a game try. This commercial is, I think, nothing short of brilliant. It invokes the magic Kennedy name and uses John F. Kennedy’s own words, calling for tax reductions as a way to boost the economy and create jobs.  Democrats, naturally, are screaming bloody murder, probably because the ad is so effective, especially since the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, recently said on record, “We need to get taxes up.”

The odds are still against Brown, but given the prospect of a low-turnout election, nervousness regarding Obama’s tax plans, ever-rising opposition to the health-care bill, knowledge that Brown would be in office for less than three years until the expiration of the late Ted Kennedy’s term, and a sense that there is too much power in the hands of one party in Washington, it’s by no means impossible. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

If a Republican were to win Ted Kennedy’s old seat in ultra liberal Massachusetts, the political fallout would be huge. Every Democrat in Washington up for election in November would be reaching for the Maalox — or perhaps the Scotch bottle — and those in marginal districts or states might well begin to peel off the official line to save their own hides. Equally important, the balance in the Senate would shift from 60-40 to 59-41, and the filibuster-proof majority would be gone. The people of Massachusetts thus have it in their power to derail the health-care bill.

Mr. Gordon also posts on some interesting items in the Obamacare bills, and recounts a government overreach during the Depression that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.

The Times this morning ran a story on yet another fiddle that has been uncovered from the depths of the health-reform bill that passed in the Senate on Christmas Eve. This one favors construction unions. While, under the act, most companies with fewer than 50 employees would not have to provide government-mandated health insurance or pay a tax, those in the construction business would be exempt only if they have fewer than five employees. At least the Times notes that:

The construction industry provision is receiving a second look as work begins in earnest this week to resolve differences in bills passed by the Senate and the House to remake the nation’s health care system. Other provisions sure to be scrutinized include a tax break for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan in Nebraska; Medicare coverage for residents of Libby, Mont., sickened by a mineral mine; extra Medicaid money for Massachusetts, Nebraska and Vermont; and a special dispensation for a handful of doctor-owned hospitals.

One would hope that the endless number of constitutionally dubious provisions, including such lulus as requiring a supermajority in the Senate to repeal certain portions of the act, will also get a second look. …

In the WSJ, Conor Dougherty reports on continued decreasing government revenues.

…Sales taxes declined 9% to $70 billion in the third quarter compared with the year-ago period, the Census Bureau said. Income taxes plunged 12% to about $58 billion. Together, sales and income taxes make up roughly half of state and local tax revenue.

…”At minimum, cities will be working through the catastrophic drops in revenue for the next 18 months to two years,” said Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. …

…State and local tax revenues tend to lag behind the downturns as well as the upturns in the economy because of the time it takes for collections to catch up with depressed store sales and diminished incomes. The third quarter was the fourth consecutive quarter in which tax collections were below year-ago levels. Through the first three quarters of 2009 state and local tax revenues totaled $875 billion, nearly 8% below the $951 billion collected in the first three quarters of 2008. In the same period, federal receipts were down nearly 19%.

While the recession appears to have ended during the summer, government revenues are expected to continue to be weak. State and local governments employ 15% of American workers outside of agriculture. …

Richard Epstein gives examples of ways that governments can help the economy and increase their tax base. And they don’t require stimulus pork.

…On taxation, don’t play the mug’s game of imposing ever higher marginal tax rates on ever lower amounts of income. Play it smart for the long haul. Low-income tax rates (and no estate taxes) will attract into states and communities energetic individuals who would otherwise choose to live and work elsewhere. Treasure their efforts to grow the overall pie. Don’t resent their great wealth, but remember the benefits their successes generate for their employees, customers and suppliers. Repudiate the politics of envy for the social destruction it creates. Don’t fret about the states and communities left behind. Let them adopt the same sound policies to keep people at home. The outcome won’t be a zero-sum game. Enterprise is infectious. Open markets are the rising tide that raises all ships. High taxation is the tsunami that sinks them.

On real estate, change the culture so that getting permits for yourself and blocking them for everyone else is no longer the preeminent developer’s skill. The government can still prevent buildings from falling down and fund infrastructure through general taxation. But don’t let entrenched landowners and businesses raise NIMBY politics to a fine art. Today our dysfunctional land-use processes too often build thousands of dollars and years of delay into the price of every square foot of new construction. The instructive requirements on aesthetics and handicap access should be junked, along with the crazy-quilt system of real estate exactions that asks new developments to fund improvements whose benefit largely belongs to incumbent landowners. And for heaven’s sake, learn the lesson of Kelo and stop using the state’s power of condemnation for the benefit or private developers.

On labor, state and local governments have to junk the progressive mindset in both the public and the private sector. State and local governments should never, repeat never, be forced to negotiate with local unions. The huge pensions garnered by prison guards in California or transportation workers in New York present the intolerable spectacle of requiring ordinary citizens to pay huge subsidies to union workers far richer than themselves. On the private side, don’t force developers to hire union workers on construction sites or to block the construction of new facilities that hire nonunion labor. If unions are really efficient–and they aren’t–let them compete like everyone else. …

Daron Acemoglu, in Esquire, reviews how capitalism benefits societies. Capitalism and ….. governments that are under control.

We are the rich, the haves, the developed. And most of the rest — in Africa, South Asia, and South America, the Somalias and Bolivias and Bangladeshes of the world — are the nots. It’s always been this way, a globe divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine, though the extent of inequality across nations today is unprecedented: The average citizen of the United States is ten times as prosperous as the average Guatemalan, more than twenty times as prosperous as the average North Korean, and more than forty times as prosperous as those living in Mali, Ethiopia, Congo, or Sierra Leone.

The question social scientists have unsuccessfully wrestled with for centuries is, Why? But the question they should have been asking is, How? Because inequality is not predetermined. Nations are not like children — they are not born rich or poor. Their governments make them that way.

…People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.

Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments. …