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Spengler says the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers are incorrect. He gives 10 reasons that the jobless numbers are higher than the BLS is reporting.

10. As noted, nearly 300,000 people disappeared from the labor force, yet the BLS reports no increase in “discouraged workers” or workers forced to take part-time jobs for economic reasons.

9. Private sector service jobs supposedly increased by 51,000, yet the National Institute of Purchasing Managers’ (NIPM) survey shows that services employment fell during November. The unexpected drop in the NIPM report, which is a reasonably good advanced indicator of economic activity, doesn’t square with the BLS report. …

7. Goods-producing industries lost 69,000 jobs by the BLS count, about equally divided between manufacturing and construction – yet the “recovery” supposedly is led by manufacturing.

6. ADP, America’s largest processor of payroll information, publishes an independent survey of employment based on its own data. This is somewhat less comprehensive than the BLS data, but far more reliable. ADP reported a loss of 169,000 jobs, compared to only 11,000 for the BLS survey. …

From the Cato Institute, in an excellent article via Real Clear Politics, Nat Hentoff details how the “cold heart of Obamacare” means that the government decides what medical care we will receive. Mr. Hentoff, long the scourge of GOP administrations, has gone rogue.

…”If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly, federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions,” Groopman and Hartzband wrote.

If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health care “reform” measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.

Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your lifespan, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor, and, of course, haven’t the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America? …

…Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by “Change we can believe in?” Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you? …

To mark the start of the Copenhagen Summit, we have Mark Steyn on Climategate.

“The climate crisis threatens our very survival”—Herman Van Rompuy, “president” of “Europe” …

…“Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children?.?.?.?this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”—Barack Obama, president of the United States.

The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. …

…The other day, a whole bunch of electronic documents most probably leaked by a disaffected insider from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were posted online. … They confirm what the soi-disant “skeptics” have long known …

3) The Settled Scientists have attempted to (in the words of one email) “hide the decline”—that’s to say, obscure the awkward fact that “global warming” stopped over a decade ago.
Phil Jones, July 5, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

Back in the summer, I wrote in a column south of the border:

“If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. …

In the Corner, Dana Perino and Bill Burck tell of a surprising turn of events. The Obama administration will not allow White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers to testify before Congress, claiming Constitutional separation of powers–an even broader interpretation than the Bush administration claimed.

… Lest there be any doubt on this front, the White House made it clear that “staff here don’t go to testify in front of Congress.” There is no qualifier of any sort in that statement. At face value, this is a breathtaking assertion that all White House staff — everyone from the chief of staff to the 22-year-old assistant just out of college — are absolutely immune from appearing before Congress to give testimony. This jaw-dropper makes the prior administration, vilified by so many Democrats in Congress as imperious and dismissive of congressional prerogatives, look positively weak-kneed and lap-doggish. Incidentally, one has to wonder whether Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice agree with the Obama White House’s expansive view of immunity. As former Bush White House officials, we are well aware of the Department of Justice’s view of the scope of immunity during Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s tenure. Perhaps this is another example of President Obama bringing change to Washington. The audacity of hope indeed!

Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Conyers must feel particularly double-crossed because they were the principal sponsors of a lawsuit filed in an effort to compel testimony and documents from Ms. Miers, Mr. Rove, and others concerning the U.S. attorney controversy. The speaker and Chairman Conyers prevailed before the federal district court in the last months of the Bush administration, and the new administration took office before there could be an appeal. The district court rejected the Bush administration’s argument that the president’s closest advisers are entitled to absolute immunity from compelled congressional testimony. As was widely reported in the spring, the Obama White House brokered a settlement that effectively ended the litigation; however, the White House agreed to Speaker Pelosi’s and Chairman Conyers’ demand that the district court’s opinion remain in effect, even though they could have sought to vacate the opinion because the case had settled and there was no appeal.

How frustrating it must be, then, for the speaker and Chairman Conyers to see the new occupants of the White House taking a position so much more aggressive than that of the prior administration, and one that is completely irreconcilable with a federal court opinion that the Obama White House itself has consented to keep on the books. …

Dana Perino and Bill Burck have a follow up on their article.

Faced with widespread skepticism about its assertion that the “separation of powers” bars Congress from requiring testimony from White House social secretary Desiree Rogers, the White House has sent out the message, through Valerie Jarrett and others, that Rogers is actually a “close adviser” to President Obama, and therefore immune from compelled testimony. There is no doubt that the social secretary performs an important role at the White House. But it strains credulity to believe that Ms. Rogers plays a role on policy matters akin to those performed by the chief of staff, the national security adviser, the vice president, the White House counsel, and senior political advisers such as David Axelrod and Ms. Jarrett herself. Does Ms. Rogers counsel the president on health-care reform, the budget deficit, job creation, the Afghanistan surge, financial regulatory reform, or the myriad other major policy issues that have consumed his first year in office? Perhaps she does, and if so, the White House may not be playing fast and loose with the term “close adviser.” However, if her job is that of a traditional social secretary, then it is quite unlikely that she provides advice to the president on these types of issues. …

Hillsdale College professor, Paul Rahe believes we are at a historic point, where citizens will resist the encroachment of government on the liberties of the people. In Forbes, Peter Robinson writes that he has doubts.

Paul Rahe, a professor at Hillsdale College, believes the country is going to hell in a hand basket. The prospect delights him. Soon enough, Prof. Rahe (pronounced “Ray”) says, the federal government will have become so gigantic, meddlesome, overweening and bankrupt that Americans will rise up, reassert their rights as freeborn citizens of this republic and put the government back in its place. “The political moment in which we live,” Rahe says, “is a moment of great, great hope.”

I wish I could be so sanguine.

Not that Prof. Rahe, author of the splendid new book Soft Despotism fails to make a case. Seven decades after Franklin Roosevelt established the welfare state, and four decades after Lyndon Johnson vastly expanded it, the federal leviathan has begun to stagger under its own bloat. …

…”Look at the tea party movement,” says Rahe. “I cannot think of [protests against government overreach] … on this scale since the eruption against [President John Quincy Adams's] ‘Tariff of Abominations’ in 1828.” The administration of Obama, Rahe insists, represents “a gift to the friends of liberty.”

..let me state my doubts as questions.

Item: In his principles, in his rhetoric and in his agenda, Ronald Reagan championed the ideals of limited government and individual responsibility as stoutly as any president in our history. Was he able to eliminate a single entitlement program of any size? He was not. Was he able to cut domestic spending? He was not, instead only reducing the growth of such spending. …

The Economist reports that the scientists in genome studies are finding their work to be more complex than they originally thought. Of course, the bias of the new Economist is on display.

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them. …

…In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled. They hold small, discreet conferences on the “missing heritability” problem: if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often? The DNA chips should already have identified some important genes behind physical and mental health. They simply have not been delivering the goods.

Certainly, GWAS papers have reported a couple of hundred genetic variants that show statistically significant associations with a few traits. But the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait. In fact, classical Mendelian genetics based on family studies has identified far more disease-risk genes with larger effects than GWAS research has so far. …

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We start with a few more reactions to the president’s recent speech. George Will comments on Obama’s Afghanistan plan. Will continues to disagree with being there, but makes some good points on related topics.

WASHINGTON — A traveler asks a farmer how to get to a particular village. The farmer replies, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” Barack Obama, who asked to be president, nevertheless deserves sympathy for having to start where America is in Afghanistan.

But after 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama’s second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor’s plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq’s security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down.

Having vowed to “finish the job,” Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy. …

…Many Democrats, who think the $787 billion stimulus was too small and want another one (but by another name), are flinching from the $30 billion one-year cost of the Afghan surge. Considering that the GM and GMAC bailouts ($63 billion) are five times bigger than Afghanistan’s GDP ($12 billion), Democrats seem to be selective worriers about deficits. Of course, their real worry is how to wriggle out of their endorsement of the “necessary” war in Afghanistan, which was a merely tactical endorsement intended to disparage the “war of choice” in Iraq.

The president’s party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans’ patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan’s limitless demands for it. This will not end well. …

In the Daily Beast, Tina Brown blogs that in recent speeches, she finds the Great Orator’s meaning is unclear. Thinks he’s losing it.

It’s a strange paradox for a great wordsmith, but whenever Obama makes an important policy speech these days he leaves everyone totally confused. His first health-care press conference back in July triggered a season of raucous political Rorschach and left his hopeful followers utterly baffled about what they were being asked to support. Now White House envoys are being dispatched all over the globe to explain what the president really meant about the date when troops will or won’t be pulled out of Afghanistan. …

…Does Obama create confusion on purpose? Is this his “process” based on his confession that he’s a screen onto which people project things? Is it a strategy so that whatever bill trickles out of Congress or however many soldiers linger in Afghanistan, he can claim that the outcome is what he meant it all along? (Clinton and Gates assured nervous senators on the Hill Thursday that the August 2011 deadline was both firm and flexible, and that this position was, in Gates’ words, “not contradictory” in the least.) Or is it that for all the administration’s vaunted mastery of multiplatform communication, Rahm and Gibbs and company are actually amateurs at crafting a clear political message and launching it on the dazed American public?

Or is it that there is so much subtext to every part of this message that the simple heads of the electorate are just not pointy enough to comprehend it?

I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying. He couldn’t convey that health-care reform would be somehow cost-free because he knows it won’t be. And he can’t adequately convey either the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn’t really believe in it either. He feels colonized by mistakes of the past. He feels trapped by the hand that has been dealt him. …

In Forbes, Claudia Rosett wonders where the soaring rhetoric was.

…There was no full-throated celebration of America’s heart and soul of freedom. The president invoked “the challenges of a new age” in terms by and large so dreary they made the “malaise” of Jimmy Carter’s America sound like high old times. Forget about Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” or even Bush 41′s “thousand points of light.” Instead, there was the hallmark Obama apology for America: “We have at times made mistakes.” There was the damped-down phrasing with which Obama described America as having “underwritten global security for more than six decades”–a compliment of sorts, but quite a demotion from leader of the free world to underwriter of global security. …

…In speaking of Iraq, Obama gave America (and former president George Bush) no credit for leading the overthrow of a mass-murdering, war-mongering tyrant. Nor did he take into account in any way the genuine dangers averted by the removal of Saddam Hussein’s corrupt, violent and predatory regime from the heart of the Middle East. Obama’s focus was on “the wrenching debate” the “substantial rifts,” and the “extraordinary costs” of the Iraq war. He did praise the troops for their “courage, grit and perseverance.” But in this speech, it all added up to nothing more than bringing the Iraq war “to a responsible end,” and “successfully leaving Iraq to its people”–as if America in 2003 had wantonly disturbed a perfectly reasonable setup in Baghdad, and deserved credit merely for rectifying the error.

In the course of apologizing (again) for America, faulting his predecessor, reprising a mess of political infighting and lecturing his audience on the need to live up to “the values we hold dear” (while implying that may be too tall an order for a jaded country), Obama delivered the much-rehearsed news that he will send 30,000 more troops to “end” the war in Afghanistan, and will then start pulling them out within 18 months. In this speech, he also said: “The nation I’m most interested in building is our own.” Great. But when does he realize that leading this free and extraordinary country begins with looking up to his fellow Americans, not tearing them down? …

The government can employ better strategies to help the economy than a jobs summit, blogs Jennifer Rubin. She also comments on an article by Robert Samuelson.

The “jobs summit” today typifies the root of the Obama team’s misguided thinking on jobs. In place of policies that would aid in private-sector job creation, the administration has provided an oversold and ineffective stimulus plan, lots of dog-and-pony shows, much heated rhetoric about Wall Street excesses, and a grab bag of policies that makes things worse. For starters, the looming debt, as Robert Samuelson explains, has created ”the perception that the administration will tolerate, despite rhetoric to the contrary, permanently large deficits [that] could ultimately rattle investors and lead to large, self-defeating increases in interest rates. There are risks in overaggressive government job-creation programs that can be sustained only by borrowing or taxes.” But that’s not all, as Samuelson observes:

Obama can’t be fairly blamed for most job losses, which stemmed from a crisis predating his election. But he has made a bad situation somewhat worse. His unwillingness to advance trade agreements (notably, with Colombia and South Korea) has hurt exports. The hostility to oil and gas drilling penalizes one source of domestic investment spending. More important, the decision to press controversial proposals (health care, climate change) was bound to increase uncertainty and undermine confidence. Some firms are postponing spending projects “until there is more clarity,” [Moody's Economy.com Mark] Zandi notes. Others are put off by anti-business rhetoric.

The jobs summit ignores all that and offers up yet another campaign-type event in lieu of productive governance. This is at the heart of not only the jobs problem but also much of what ails the administration. Rather than a useless summit, the administration would do well to consider a package of tax cuts designed to bolster hiring and an agreement to hold off on job-killing legislation. (Gary Andres highlights a useful model for economic revival: the state of Texas.) But in fact, the administration is going in the opposition direction. That — and another dopey jobs summit — are surefire signs that the administration is a long way from getting its act together.

Jennifer Rubin posts that they are discovering the obvious at the jobs summit, and still can’t figure out the appropriate next step.

At his “jobs summit,” Obama discovered: “Ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.” Mon dieu! You mean lambasting business, hiking taxes, imposing a flurry of mandates, and regulating carbon emissions aren’t the way to go? No, no. The Obami still want to do all that. They just expect the private sector to grow and hire workers in spite of all that. I guess. …

…Clinton economic guru Roger C. Altman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, warns that the Democrats are heading for an electoral wipeout and suggests:

By providing new incentives for job creation and bank lending, offering more detailed and forceful commitment to deficit reduction, improving relations with industry, and taking a more forceful stance towards Wall Street, the Obama administration can reduce next year’s election risk.

Sounds like a good idea. They could have a summit. Perhaps they could call it the “Undo the Damage Summit.” Well, I’ll leave the marketing to others, but you get the idea. If you want the private sector to create jobs, you first have to stop bludgeoning employers.

Jason Zengerle, in the New Republic, discusses summit-mania at the White House in a piece titled, So Much Gasbaggery, So Little Time

…It should hardly have been a surprise, then, that Obama would go a bit summit-crazy once he was actually in the White House. Little more than a month after taking office, he held a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” where he solicited ideas for battling the deficit; a few weeks after that he hosted a “Health Care Summit” to kick off his drive for health care reform; and later still came the “H1N1 Preparedness Summit” and the “Distracted Driving Summit.” Then there were the assortment of international summits (Summit of the Americas, NATO Summit, G-8 Summit, G-20 Summit, ASEAN Summit), head-of-state summits (Karzai, Zardari, Medvedev, Hatoyama, Hu), and, of course, the Beer Summit with Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley. And last week Obama’s summitry comes full circle when he held another jobs summit, where he and 130 other people (including Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, and even Eric Schmidt, in case he has any new ideas he didn’t put forth 14 months ago) chewed over how to get the unemployment rate out of double digits. Add it all up and that’s an astounding amount of gas-baggery in such a relatively short period of time. …

…But at some point summits became less about results or even about drama and became all about gabbing. I’d argue that the change can be traced to December of 1992, when Bill Clinton convened his Economic Summit. …Prior to Clinton’s economic confab, the term summit had generally been given only to big international meetings or tête-à-têtes between world leaders. But Clinton took the “summit” label and slapped it on the two-day, 20-hour, 300-person gabfest he organized in a convention center in Little Rock to talk about the economy. As The New York Times reported [2] at the time:

“For nearly 10 hours, he sat in a swivel chair at the head of a large oval arrangement of tables at the downtown convention center here, taking notes, asking questions and offering his views about topics ranging from the declining military industry to rising health costs, from public works projects at home to international trade policy.”

[…]

“No new substantive ground was broken either in terms of the problems or of Mr. Clinton’s positions. The grim statistics the economists provided about the slow rate of economic growth, the staggering deficit, rising health costs and other problems are familiar to economists and politicians and were staples of this year’s election campaign.”

Sounds productive and scintillating, huh? So what did Clinton get out of his economic summit? A lot. Even if it was devoid of drama and ideas, the summit, which was nationally televised, allowed Clinton to flex his wonk muscles and deliver the message that he cared …

Here is Robert Samuelson’s article on the economy and the tough road ahead for jobs creation.

…Meanwhile, empty office buildings, shuttered retail stores and underutilized factories have depressed business investment spending. In the third quarter, it was down 20 percent from its 2008 peak. Despite huge federal budget deficits, total borrowing in the economy dropped in the first half of the year; this hasn’t happened in statistics dating to 1952.

Companies hire mainly when they see greater demand for their products and believe that extra workers will generate higher profits. More jobs then elevate confidence and demand. But for now, the logic is running in reverse. To restore profitability, companies are firing workers, and the ensuing pessimism erodes confidence and spending. Beyond households’ $12 trillion loss in net worth, mostly reflecting lower stock and home values, Americans are saving more to guard against joblessness, lost overtime or lower wages.

The good news is that the bad news may be peaking. Surplus inventories are declining; new orders will spur production. There is pent-up demand for cars and appliances. The devastated housing market is showing signs of revival — more sales, stable prices. Initial claims for unemployment insurance have dropped, as have monthly job losses (from about 700,000 per month early in the year to about 200,000 recently). Corporate profits have recovered from lows, easing pressure for layoffs. …

John Stossel has an excellent article on jobs creation.

…When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.

Hong Kong demonstrates this.  Last century, Hong Kong was third world poor.  50 years ago, its citizens’ average income was under $700 (in today’s dollars) per year.  Today, it’s $43,800.  Hong Kong got rich because Hong Kong’s rulers, stuffy British bureaucrats, practiced what I’ll call “benign neglect”: they enforced rule of law—kept  people from stealing from each other, or killing each other— but then sat around and drank tea.  They left people alone, and free people, left alone, created prosperity.

America’s founders did the same thing.  The Constitution announced that American would be a country of limited government.  That provided the simple and understandable rules that allowed America to grow into the richest country ever.

Today’s political class thinks that they can improve on that, but they can’t.  Their micromanagement kills jobs.  When Washington threatens to drastically change the rules of the game with health care mandates, cap and trade, financial regulation, a second stimulus, and (of course) a “jobs bill”, the private sector can’t make investments with any confidence. …

In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger says the Climategate scandal has wider implications for society’s belief in the scientific community’s standards of conduct and truthful inquiry.

…I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).  …

…Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as “the precautionary principle.” As defined by one official version: “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The global-warming establishment says we know “enough” to impose new rules on the world’s use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science’s traditional standards of evidence.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted “varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues.” Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory. …

John Tierney writes how the Climategate scientists have hurt their cause.

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. …

…Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium. …

…In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. …

Under the category of; You Can’t Make It Up, we learn from a Corner Post that a “warm monger” is threatening to cutoff a NY Times reporter for being insufficiently dedicated to the globalony line.

… But, I sense that you are about to experience the ‘Big Cutoff’ from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included. …

Scrappleface ranks number one in sarcasm today as he portrays Obama mystified by citizens who don’t realize the critical role he has in creating jobs.

Just hours before he started his “White House to Main Street” jobs tour with a visit to Lehigh County, Pa., President Obama reportedly told top advisers he was “shocked at the level of ignorance among the common people regarding what it takes to generate jobs,” according to unnamed aides.

The tour is billed as an opportunity to get the president out of the White House, where he’s been holed up for nearly a full working day, to mingle among the citizenry in order to “take the temperature on what Americans are experiencing during these challenging economic times.” …

…”You would think that entrepreneurs and CEOs would realize the vital role the federal government plays in generating economic prosperity,” the president reportedly told his inner circle. “But instead they’ll probably prattle on about something called ‘free enterprise.’ I know now that I’ll have to spend a lot of time explaining that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone a free enterprise. In this country, you have to make your money the old-fashioned way … by lobbying Congress to appropriate it, or writing memoirs and such.” …

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Mark Steyn on the speech will be first up.

… “Our goal in war,” wrote Basil Liddell Hart, the great strategist of armored warfare, “can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will.” In other words, the object of war is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but the enemy’s will. That goes treble if, like the Taliban and al-Qaida, he hasn’t got any tanks in the first place. So what do you think Obama’s speech did for the enemy’s will? He basically told ‘em: We can only stick another 19 months, so all you gotta do is hang in there for 20. And in an astonishingly vulgar line even by the standards of this White House’s crass speechwriters, he justified his announcement of an exit date by saying it was “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” …

… Obama’s speech is only about Afghanistan if you’re in Afghanistan. If you’re in Moscow or Tehran, Pyongyang or Caracas, it’s about America. And what it told them is that, if you’re a local strongman with regional ambitions, or a rogue state going nuclear, or a mischief-making kleptocracy dusting off old tsarist dreams, this president is not going to be pressing your reset button. Strange how an allegedly compelling speaker is unable to fake even perfunctory determination and resilience. Strange, too, how all the sophisticated nuances of post-Bush foreign policy “realism” seem so unreal when you’re up there trying to sell them as a coherent strategy. Go back half-a-decade, to when the administration was threatening to shove democracy down the throats of every two-bit basket case whether they want it or not. Democratizing the planet is, in a Council of Foreign Relations sense, “unrealistic,” but talking it up is a very realistic way of messing with the dictators’ heads. A pipsqueak like Boy Assad sleeps far more soundly today than he did back when he thought Bush meant it, and so did the demonstrators threatening his local enforcers in Lebanon. …

Charles Krauthammer also was underwhelmed by the speech.

…No one expected Obama to do a Henry V or a Churchill. But Obama could not even manage a George W. Bush, who, at an infinitely lower ebb in power and popularity, opposed by the political and foreign policy establishments and dealing with a war effort in far more dire straits, announced his surge — Iraq 2007 — with outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat. His implacability was widely decried at home as stubbornness, but heard loudly in Iraq by those fighting for and against us as unflinching — and salutary — determination.

Obama’s surge speech wasn’t that of a commander in chief but of a politician, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right — you get the troops; placate the left — we are on our way out.

And apart from Obama’s personal commitment is the question of his ability as a wartime leader. If he feels compelled to placate his left with an exit date today — while he is still personally popular, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and even before the surge begins — how will he stand up to the left when the going gets tough and the casualties mount, and he really has to choose between support from his party and success on the battlefield? …

Tunku Varadarajan blogs about it in The Daily Beast.

1. In the parlance of Olympic diving, President Obama’s speech at West Point had a significant “degree of difficulty”: How to impress upon a nation, weary and wary of war, the importance of winning in Afghanistan? It would have helped him immensely if he’d actually used the word “winning”—or any kindred words—somewhere, anywhere, in his speech. But he did not: “Successful conclusion” and “responsible transition” just do not hack it. One gets the sense that for this president, winning at something as unseemly as war is an aesthetic choke-in-the-throat. (That said, and to persevere with the diving metaphor, the speech was not a belly flop: It had that inevitable, clockwork, wind-up-and-whirr elegance that we’ve come to expect from Obama. There’s no question: He’s a theater jock.)

2. This correspondent has always found simplistic the dichotomous belief ascribed to Obama, that the war in Iraq is “bad” and the one in Afghanistan “good.” In Obama’s view, both wars are “bad,” the difference being that Iraq’s is diplomatically toxic, while Afghanistan’s is not inherently so. The contrast, in effect, has never been one of moral value, but one of manageability. Eager to wash his hands of the diplomatically “unmanageable” war, he wasted no time in signing a treaty of withdrawal from Iraq, with a neat-o timetable. But to paraphrase Lady Bracknell: To pull out of one war may be regarded as a misfortune. To pull out of both looks like carelessness. And so, with the decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan—the “surge” that dare not speak its name—Obama has acquired uncontestable title to the war against the Taliban. If Obama has not won “Obama’s War” by early 2011, he will not, in all likelihood, win a second term.

3. What has struck me most about Obama’s Afghan enterprise—and his speech did not cause me to alter my view—is how obvious it is that he doesn’t really want to do it. He wants to do health care. Obama has tried every delaying trick in the book—waiting for three months after Gen. McChrystal’s request for more troops, having meeting after meeting after meeting, sending Gen. Jones to tell McChrystal not to ask for more troops, having his economic team say it will cost too much, framing the venture in terms of “exit strategies” rather than victory, etc. His ambivalence was on naked display tonight. Can you imagine Churchill delivering a speech like this, one so full of a sense of the limitation of national possibilities? No wonder Hillary—when the camera panned to her—looked like she needed a drink. No wonder the cadets all looked so depressed. Would you want Eeyore for commander in chief? …

David Warren has well-deserved criticisms for the president.

…Indeed, the very delivery of these extra troops “a day late and a dollar short” was accompanied by dark insinuations in Obama’s speech that the Bush administration before him had failed to provide the resources their generals had requested. Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, quiet in his retirement, rightly spoke up on this, knowing it to be a lie, and demanded an inquiry.

It is extremely bad form on the part of the current U.S. president, to continue slandering the previous administration, as a source of cheap excuses. This shows a terrible inability to assume responsibility; and is the more reprehensible in light of Bush’s refusal to blame the Clinton administration for ghastly oversights that contributed to 9/11. It was not in the American interest to backbite; and a president is obliged to remember that national interest.

…Having telegraphed the escalation last March, Obama will certainly find an enemy that is ready for it. The Taliban have been experimenting with new locales for insurgency in the north of Afghanistan, for the express purpose of draining and diffusing allied anti-insurgency efforts. They will be very grateful for Obama’s precise exit schedule; for while they were expecting U.S. stamina to run out within a couple of years, they now have a time-tabled commitment to surrender.

Peter Wehner reminds us that Obama was against the Iraq surge before he was for the Afghanistan surge.

…Second, it’s worth recalling that Obama himself was a fierce critic of the surge/counterinsurgency strategy he now embraces. On January 10, 2007, the night the surge was announced, Obama declared, “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” A few days later he insisted the surge strategy would “not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly.” And responding to President Bush’s January 23 State of the Union address, Obama said

“I don’t think the president’s strategy is going to work. … My suggestion to the president has been that the only way we’re going to change the dynamic in Iraq and start seeing political accommodation is actually if we create a system of phased redeployment. And, frankly, the president, I think, has not been willing to consider that option, not because it’s not militarily sound but because he continues to cling to the belief that somehow military solutions are going to lead to victory in Iraq”.

As late as July 2008, when asked by ABC’s Terry Moran whether, “knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?” Obama answered, “No.” This was one of the most misinformed and foolish comments of the entire campaign. …

…I fully expected Barack Obama would be arrogant as president; what genuinely surprises me is how graceless he has turned out. This is but one way — and not the only way — in which Barack Obama resembles Jimmy Carter.

Karl Rove has an upbeat take on the prospects of winning.

…Still, Tuesday’s speech should improve Mr. Obama’s standing at home. It wasn’t just former Vice President Dick Cheney who disapproved of what he called the president’s dithering on Afghanistan. So did the American people: Mr. Obama’s job approval on Afghanistan slid to 35% immediately before his speech this week, from 56% in July.

Yet the American people seem poised to accept Mr. Obama’s action. In late November, 47% told Gallup they supported a troop increase in Afghanistan, while only 39% backed a reduction. This was up from 42% in favor and 44% opposed about two weeks earlier. Unleashing his military and national security team to swarm Congress and TV talk shows will help his case.

…Fortunately, the antiwar left has little power to stop the president from making good on his commitments. Notwithstanding Mr. Obama’s vote against funding the war in Afghanistan in May 2007, the White House can win a battle over war funding by standing with a coalition of victory-centered Republicans and Democrats who don’t want their president embarrassed.

Only a failure of presidential nerve or an unwillingness to make further midcourse corrections as the need arises will keep Mr. Obama from achieving the goals he has spelled out.

Victory can still be won. It won’t be quick and it won’t be easy, and it will take active leadership from Mr. Obama. But it is now within his grasp.

Climategate has given new meaning to the phrase inconvenient truth, and we toast the hacker who shared the e-mails with the world. Senator Boxer, however, wants the person(s) prosecuted. David Harsanyi fills us in on this and more.

…Yet, Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is off hunting bigger game.

“You call it Climategate; I call it e-mail-theft-gate,” Boxer clarified during a committee shindig. “We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not.” Boxer, as steady as they come, went on to put the focus where it belongs: hackers. She warned that part “of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated . . . . This is a crime.”

If this hacker(s) is unearthed on U.S. soil (or anywhere in the Middle East, actually), Boxer can jettison the guilty party to Gitmo for some well-deserved sleep deprivation.

But surely there is time for some sort of investigation? This is, after all, the senator who ran a vital committee hearing in 2008 so that an Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower who accused the Bush administration of failing to address greenhouse-gas emissions appropriately could have his say. …

James Delingpole is back in the Telegraph, UK with a Climategate update. Here are three of his bullet points.

1. Australia’s Senate rejects Emissions Trading Scheme for a second time. Or: so turkeys don’t vote Christmas. Expect to see a lot more of this: politicians starting to become aware their party’s position on AGW is completely out of kilter with the public mood and economic reality. Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme – what Andrew Bolt calls “a $114 billion green tax on everything” – would have wreaked havoc on the coal-dependent Australian economy. That’s why several opposition Liberal frontbenchers resigned rather than vote with the Government on ETS; why Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull lost his job; and why the Senate voted down the ETS.

3. Hats off to The Daily Express – the first British newspaper to make the AGW scam its front page story.

The piece was inspired by another bravura performance by Professor Ian Plimer, the Aussie geologist who argues that climate change has been going on quite naturally, oblivious of human activity, for the last 4,567 million years.

5. Legal actions ahoy! Over the next few weeks, one thing we can be absolutely certain of is concerted efforts by the rich, powerful and influential AGW lobby to squash the Climategate story. We’ve seen this already in the “nothing to see here” response of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting, troll-impersonating railway engineer who runs the IPCC and wants to stop ice being served with water in restaurants. This is why those of us who oppose his scheme to carbon-tax the global economy back to the dark ages must do everything in our power to bring the scandal to a wider audience. One way to do this is law suits.

At Ian Plimer’s lunch talk yesterday, Viscount Monckton talked of at least two in the offing – both by scientists, one British, one Canadian, who intend to pursue the CRU for criminal fraud. Their case, quite simply, is that the scientists implicated in Climategate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process. More news on this, as I hear it.

Lord Monckton has written an indispensible summary of the Climategate revelations so far.

In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia gives a well-written review of the Climategate e-mails. She bookends this review by asking Obama to act with integrity.

“Science and scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my administration on a wide range of issues, including … mitigation of climate change,” President Barack Obama declared in a not-so-subtle dig at his predecessor soon after assuming office. “The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process. Public officials should not suppress or alter scientific technological findings.”

Last week’s Climategate scandal is putting Obama’s promise to the test. If he wants to pass, there are two things he should do, pronto: (1) Start singing hosannas to whoever broke the scandal instead of acting like nothing has happened; and (2) Ask eco-warriors at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit next week to declare an immediate cease-fire in their war against global warming pending a complete review of the science. …

However, Climategate is fast shattering the global warming consensus, and so Obama won’t have even that to hide behind should he go ahead and sign up the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 at Copenhagen next week. There is zero chance right now that Congress will endorse these cuts, which will dwarf the trillion-dollar Iraq price tag. So Obama won’t really be able to advance his foolish crusade, but he will lose the opportunity to protect his own integrity by joining the growing chorus of voices–some of them of global warming believers–demanding a thorough investigation of this episode. Former Chancellor Lord Lawson is asking the British government to launch a formal inquiry about it. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, is doing the same here in the U.S. Penn State is launching an investigation of Mr. Hockey Stick Mann’s conduct. Calls for Phil Jones resignation are rising in England. …

…A complete airing of the science of global warming, which is looking less and less avoidable by the day, might eventually vindicate the claims of climate warriors. Or it might not. The only thing Obama can control in this matter is which side he will support: The truth, or–what he accused his predecessor of–ideology.

In Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin comments on Heather Wilhelm’s WSJ article about Ayn Rand. She thinks Rand is bad for libertarianism. Somin does not agree.

…In this Wall Street Journal article, Heather Wilhelm argues that Ayn Rand is bad for libertarianism because her personal obnoxiousness and emphasis on the “virtue of selfishness” and celebration of a small entrepreneurial elite tends to alienate potential adherents. I too dislike some aspects of Rand’s personality and disagree with many parts of her philosophy. Nonetheless, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Rand has done more to popularize libertarian ideas than any other writer of the last century or so — a point I emphasized in my own recent critical assessment of Rand . Literally millions of people have been influenced by her, including the vast majority of the last two generations of libertarian scholars, activists, and intellectuals, many of whom first became libertarian in the first place after reading her books. No other modern libertarian writer has won over so many people, and only a handful of nonlibertarian ones have equaled Rand’s achievements in popularizing an ideology. …

…Economist Bryan Caplan has an excellent article explaining how Atlas Shrugged vividly (and often realistically) portrays the dangers that government control of the economy creates for the general public.

It is true, of course, that this theme is a less prominent element of Atlas than Rand’s valorization of elite entrepreneurial “supermen and superwomen.” Had I written the book, I would have concentrated a lot more on the former and a lot less on the latter. I would have done many other things differently, too. Then again, if I had written the book it probably wouldn’t have attained even a fraction of its vast popularity.

Rereading Atlas Shrugged today, I come away with a more favorable impression of Rand than before. Rand’s positive heroes still seem unrealistic and sometimes unappealing. On the other hand, I find her villains and her portrayal of government generally compelling. I still think that her philosophy and her literary style have many shortcomings. Today’s free market advocates shouldn’t ignore Rand’s weaknesses, nor should they accept all of her ideas. They certainly shouldn’t imitate her authoritarian leadership style and her intolerance for opposing views. But it would be wrong to deny that her influence has been a huge net benefit for the movement.

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Sunday evening we will cover the West Point speech in detail. For now though we have Gabor Steingart from Germany’s der Spiegel.

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly. …

Christopher Hitchens thinks that we should be focusing more on strengthening ties with India.

…Monday’s New York Times carried an extensive report, based on deep-background diplomatic sources, of the likely contours of President Barack Obama’s Tuesday night speech at West Point. A salient paragraph read as follows:

“Officials of one allied nation who have been extensively briefed on the president’s plan said that Mr. Obama would describe how the American presence would be ratcheted back after the buildup, while making clear that a significant American presence in Afghanistan would remain for a long while. That is designed in part to signal to Pakistan that the United States will not abandon the region and to allay Pakistani fears that India will fill the vacuum created as America pulls back. [Underline mine.]”

If this interpretation is correct, then it is consistent with the report recently delivered to the president by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in which our senior in-country military official spoke of Indian influence in Afghanistan as a danger to be combated. The visit of Prime Minister Singh should have been the occasion for a vigorous public debate on whether this growing tendency—the Pakistanization of U.S. policy in the region—is the wise or correct one.

India was supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban long before the events of 9/11, and it has been providing a great deal of reconstruction aid since the Taliban were removed. It has excellent sources of intelligence in the region and is itself a frequent target of the very same forces against which we are committed to fight. Its national parliament, the multifariously pluralistic and democratic Lok Sabha, was the target of a massive car bomb attack in the fall of 2001, its large embassy in Kabul has been singled out for special attention from the Taliban/al-Qaida alliance, and of course we must never forget Mumbai. Nor ought we to forget that India’s massive economic and military power on the subcontinent is accompanied by a system of regular elections, a free press, a secular constitution under which almost as many Muslims live as live in Pakistan, and a business class that extends all the way to Silicon Valley and uses the English language.

Of Pakistan, a state that has flirted with the word failure ever since its inception, it is not possible to speak in the same terms. Only with the greatest reluctance does it withdraw its troops from the front with India in Kashmir, the confrontation that is the main obsession of its overmighty and Punjabi-dominated officer corps. This same corps makes no secret of its second obsession, which is the attainment of a pro-Pakistani regime in Kabul. (This objective, too, is determined by the desire to acquire Afghanistan for the purpose of “strategic depth” in the fight with India.) The original Talibanization of Afghanistan was itself an official project of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the CIA has spent the last eight years admitting, or in some cases discovering, what everyone else already knew: that the Taliban still enjoy barely concealed support from the same highly placed Pakistani institutions. …

You might have noticed we don’t let a day pass without something about the emails of the “warm mongers” in ”Climmaquidick.” (Thank you Mark Steyn, for adding to the language’s 600,000 words.) First we’ll hear from David Harsanyi who thinks it is a good idea to be skeptical.

…You may suppose that those with a resilient faith in end-of-days global warming would be more distraught than anyone over these actions. You’d be wrong. In the wake of the scandal, we are told there is nothing to see. The administration, the United Nations, most of the left-wing punditry and political establishment have shrugged it off. What else can they do?

To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean — at least temporarily — ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated “new energy economies,” among many other intrusive policies.

… a conscientious citizen has little choice but to be uneasy when those with financial, ideological and political interest in peddling the most over-the-top ecological doomsday scenarios also become the most zealous evangelizers. …

Next item on climate is from Neal Boortz’ Nealz Nuze.

…OK … so you have all these half-assed third world countries with their dictators of various stripes eyeing the wealth of the developed, industrial nations. They want some of that wealth, though they aren’t willing to earn it. Why would some dictator tolerate a productive economy that might threaten his continued rule? Freedom – the necessary ingredient for a productive economy – has a way of causing domestic intranquility for dictators. So working through free markets isn’t going to cut it. They will simply have to arrange whatever wealth they cannot seize handed to them. The best conduit for this wealth would be the UN.

OK … so you’re going to use the United Nations to transfer wealth from the big, fat wealthy nations to the corruption-plagued third world. But you’re going to need a pretext? Hmmmmm. You need to come up with some way these nations are hurting you; some action these ugly rich nations are taking that is causing you harm. You’re not under military attack. Your property isn’t being conquered and seized … at least not by the U.S. and Western Europe. But there is one thing! Now I don’t have any idea how this idea was brought to fruition … but it’s brilliant! …

…Many of us already knew global warming to be a fraud. When scientists refuse to acknowledge the cyclical nature of solar activity in a discussion on global warming you have to scratch your head in wonder. Plus – when someone tells you that the science “is settled” and that there is “nothing left to debate;” you know that the science is anything but settled and there is plenty to debate. …

…None of this seems to be slowing down The Community Organizer. He’s heading to Copenhagen where the left and those after our wealth are going to try to cobble together a replacement for the hideous Kyoto Treaty. …

In the WSJ, John Cassidy discusses Arthur Cecil Pigou’s economic theories as they attempt to explain last year’s credsis.

…Mr. Pigou drew an important distinction between the private and social value of economic activities, such as the opening of a new railway line. The savings in time and effort that users of the railway enjoy are private benefits, which will be reflected in the prices they are willing to pay for tickets. Similarly, the railroad’s expenditures on tracks, rolling stock, employee wages are private costs, which will help to determine the prices it charges. But the opening of the railway may also create costs for “people not directly concerned, through, say, uncompensated damage done to surrounding woods by sparks from railway engines,” Mr. Pigou pointed out.

Such social costs—modern economists call them “externalities”—don’t enter the calculations of the railroads or its customers, but in tallying up the ultimate worth of any economic activity, “[a]ll such effects must be included,” Mr. Pigou insisted. In focusing exclusively on private costs and private benefits, the traditional defense of the free market misses out on a vital element of reality.

To correct the problems that spillovers created, Mr. Pigou advocated government intervention. Where the social value of an activity was lower than its private value, as in the case of a railroad setting ablaze the surrounding woodland, the authorities should introduce “extraordinary restraints” in the form of user taxes, he said. Conversely, some activities have a social value that exceeds their private value. The providers of recreational parks, street lamps, and other “public goods” have difficulty charging people to use them, which means the free market may fail to ensure their adequate supply. To rectify this shortcoming, Mr. Pigou advocated “extraordinary encouragements” in the form of government subsidies. …

…The mere existence of negative spillovers doesn’t necessarily justify government intervention, Mr. Pigou conceded. In some cases, the parties concerned might be able to come to a voluntary agreement about how to compensate innocent bystanders. A landlord, for instance, may reduce the rents for tenants who have to live over a noisy bar.

With spillovers from the financial industry, however, too many parties are involved for private bargaining to provide a practical solution. During the credit bubble of 2002-2006, the entire housing market turned into a speculative bazaar. Mortgage companies that were supposed to apportion credit on the basis of ability to pay distributed it willy-nilly. And banks and other financial intermediaries, which exist to channel capital to its most productive uses, misallocated resources on a vast scale.

When other industries do a bad job, the fallout is usually limited. If Budweiser and Miller marketed undrinkable beers, it would be bad news for those companies and their customers, but the rest of the economy would be largely unscathed.

In banking, the negative spillover can be catastrophic. Many millions of households and firms rely on credit to finance their expenditures. If this credit is suddenly curtailed, spending can fall precipitously throughout the economy. That is what we witnessed at the end of last year. …

Every so often, Thomas Sowell aggregates the notes to himself that didn’t make full columns. Here’s some more of his random thoughts.

…Since this is an era when many people are concerned about “fairness” and “social justice,” what is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

Many colleges claim that they develop “leaders.” All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else’s freedom. …

…Government pressures on mortgage lenders to accept less than the full amount they are owed may win votes for politicians, since there are far more borrowers than lenders. But how much future lending can be expected when the lenders know that politicians are ready to intervene at any time to prevent them from getting their money back?

Some people think that the Obama administration is going to get rid of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, making him the scapegoat for its economics failures. This would be consistent with the President’s acting as if the people under him are not carrying out his policies. But if they get rid of Geithner too early, that will not help if things still do not get better after he is gone and before the 2010 elections. …

The Economist’s – Democracy In America interviews Radley Balko about problems in the justice system, and about being a libertarian.

DIA: A lot of politicians pay lip service to the principles of smaller government, lower taxes, and more freedom. Yet the result is often the opposite. As a libertarian, do you ever get frustrated with the lack of representation for your views in the halls of government? Is there anything that can be done to improve the standing of libertarians?

Mr Balko: In theory, libertarians share about half of our positions with the right, and about half with the left. Broadly speaking, we’re social liberals and fiscal conservatives. The problem is that once in power, neither side pays much heed to the issues they have in common with libertarians, because that would require them to voluntarily put limits on their own power. And politicians don’t generally seek higher office for the purpose of limiting what they can do when they get there. So the libertarian stuff is where they’re most willing to compromise. And it’s what they’re least willing to spend political capital defending.

So we saw George W. Bush hold the line on social issues, but completely sell out on federal spending, regulation, and general growth of government. We’re seeing the same thing with Barack Obama, only in reverse. I put up a blog post at Reason about this a few months ago. Obama’s holding fast to his campaign promises that expand the size, scope, and power of government. The few promises he made that involve limiting government in some way—generally on social and civil liberties issues—are the promises he’s been less interested in keeping. This isn’t really surprising. But it speaks to the difficulty libertarians have in getting their ideas taken seriously. It’s made worse by the fact that libertarians by definition generally aren’t interested in seeking political power. That leaves public office and the reins of power open to those who crave it.

That said, I think there’s reason for some optimism for libertarians. The generations raised on the internet will be more educated, aware, and informed than any before them, and I think that has instilled in them some naturally libertarian instincts, particularly when it comes to issues like government transparency, accountability, censorship, and police power. Perhaps I’m a bit pollyanna-ish, but it’s at least possible that once the Obama administration proves just as inept, corrupt, and hopeless as the Bush administration, the younger people who flocked to Obama will start to understand that the problem isn’t who’s running government, it’s that government power itself corrupts–and that we’re better off keeping as much of our lives as possible off limits to the whims of politicians instead of this repeating cycle of putting all of our hope into the idea that someday, the right politicians will finally get elected. …

In Slate’s Books, Jon Meacham reviews Paul Johnson’s new biography of Winston Churchill.

In November 1940, on learning of Franklin Roosevelt’s defeat of Wendell Willkie, Winston Churchill composed one of his many flattering and importuning telegrams to the president in Washington. He had, he told FDR, prayed for the president’s re-election. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe,” Churchill wrote, “and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.” It was a brilliant and lovely note—and Roosevelt never replied, an omission that bothered Churchill for years. …

…In this small incident, we glimpse the human Churchill beneath the grandeur of the deity of history he has long since become. The human Churchill is Paul Johnson’s chief concern in his brief new biography, Churchill, but I raise the Case of the Unacknowledged Telegram because it contains one of Churchill’s finest forgotten phrases: “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.” It is an interesting test of the significance of any event, that: Will the problem or crisis of the hour be remembered—cue kettle drums—as long the English language is spoken? Damn little will meet that criterion, but Winston Churchill is among the things that will. …

…In his 166 pages, Johnson gives us what amounts to an elegant survey with a maxim-filled epilogue: in essence, the best possible dinner conversation about Churchill one could ever have with a gifted interlocutor, followed by what PowerPointers might think of as “take-away points.” The book’s most original offering is—in characteristically vivid prose and a consistent intelligence and urbanity—Johnson’s distillation of life lessons from Churchill’s storied career. This is biography as commencement speech—think highbrow how-to. (Examples of didactic wisdom: “always aim high”; “there is no substitute for hard work.”) …

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Peter Wehner posts on the bad reviews that the President’s foreign policy is receiving from abroad. To be sure, there’s no doubt Pickerhead didn’t lose any sleep when W was savaged this way. But, it is amazing to see foreigners grow out of love so quickly with the wonder child.

The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:

Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.

The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Wehner’s post.

Pete, your smart critique raises two key points, which supporters of the president might want to mull over as they consider whether a course correction is in order.

First, the roundup of international public opinion highlights what the Obama team often forgets: the whole world is watching wherever the president goes and whatever venue or crisis is occupying him at that moment. The Russians pay attention when he bows in Japan. The Iranians perk up when he meekly agrees to avoid free encounters with Chinese dissidents. The Syrians watch closely when the Obami try to finesse the reaction to the Goldstone report. And the North Koreans breathe a sigh of relief as they watch the farcical negotiations in Iran unravel. One senses that the Obami don’t quite grasp this, that they believe they are simply catering to this or that despot, trying as best as they can to ingratiate themselves and meet the “concerns” of whichever thugocracy occupies their attention that day. But in fact everyone watches everything, and the portrait of accommodation and concession is taken in by many audiences. That image of irresoluteness becomes fixed in our adversaries’ minds, even when they are not the immediate subject of the president’s focus on that visit or in that particular negotiation. Slowly, our adversaries begin to learn and to test us again and again, motivated by a sense that this president can be pushed and intimidated. The task of keeping foes at bay and allies in line becomes more difficult as a result.

Second, Pete observes: “Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the unique responsibility of the president.” And when national security does rise to the top of the list of voters’ concerns, it is generally because the public is becoming very, very alarmed. …

Jeffrey Goldberg blogs in the Atlantic that the Obama administration got in the way of the Middle East peace process.

This is what the President had to say after the Israeli announcement that 900 apartment units would be built in the South Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo:

“I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security. I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbors. I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous.”

Two issues. The first is that this Administration, unlike previous Administrations, doesn’t seem to understand that all settlements are not created equal. Palestinian negotiators have fairly consistently recognized that Gilo, a Jerusalem suburb built over the 1967 Green Line, but south, not east, of the city, would remain inside Israel in a final-status peace deal, as part of a dunam-for-dunam land-swap with the Palestinian Authority. So it doesn’t matter if Israel adds 900 apartments, or 90 shopping malls, to Gilo. It’s staying inside Israel.

The second issue is the more consequential one: Having made Gilo an issue when it did not previously exist as an issue (as a matter of fact, Gilo, during the second Uprising, stood for Israeli resilience in the face of Palestinian violence) Obama then warned that Gilo is making Palestinians embittered “in a way that could end up being very dangerous.” This is euphemistic, of course, but not too euphemistic, given the history of Palestinian violence. Obama’s statement reads almost as a kind of preemptive rationalization for violent Palestinian protest. It’s never a good idea, of course, for an American president to forecast Palestinian violence, but it’s especially unfortunate now, just when Israel had announced a moratorium on new settlement building. In fact, if the Obama Administration hadn’t made such a hash of the peace process, the Palestinians would now be returning to the negotiating table, acknowledging that the Netanyahu settlement moratorium is, as Hillary Clinton said, unprecedented. But since the moratorium didn’t meet the maximalist conditions set by the Administration, there’s no possible way the Palestinians could have been seen demanding less of the Israelis than Obama did.

In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft has Chris Matthews criticizing Obama’s indecision on Afghanistan.

This was weird.
Chris “Tingles” Matthews says Barack Obama needs to act a little less like Neville Chamberlain and more like Winston Churchill.

Via NewsBusters from this weekend’s “The Chris Matthews Show” …

…DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is, he is going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed and I think this is not…

MATTHEWS: So, too much Chamberlain and not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much, too much college professor.

For the record… It’s been at least 93 days since the Ditherer in Chief was asked by his top general in Afghanistan for reinforcements.

As for the speech, Victor Davis Hanson had some thoughts.

That was such a strange speech. Deploring partisanship while serially trashing Bush at each new talking point. Sending more troops, but talking more about when they will come home rather than what they will do to the enemy. There was nothing much new in the speech, yet apparently it took the president months to decide whether even to give it.

Ostensibly the talk was to be on Afghanistan; instead, the second half mostly consisted of the usual hope-and-change platitudes.

Still, the president, to his credit, is trying to give the best picture of the Afghanistan war. Obama started well in his review of why George Bush removed the Taliban. But that disinterested narrative lasted about two minutes. Then came the typical Obama talking points that characterize his reset-button foreign policy and don’t offer a high degree of confidence that our commander in chief wants to defeat the enemy or believes that he can win the war: …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Obama feels the need to bash Bush.

… It has become a nervous tic with Obama. Something is wrong, people are upset — blame Bush! Obama is going to need to rely on conservative support to prosecute the war since his own crowd certainly won’t be cheerleading for him. So it would have been politically smart and classy to have credited Bush with the surge or with leaving him the assessment for the Afghanistan war, which he relied on in the spring (the one his team previously denied receiving). But that’s not this president’s style. For reasons that aren’t quite clear — either personal peevishness or political expediency — even in a wartime speech in which bipartisanship would have been essential, he felt compelled to get in his digs. If President Obama seems smaller than candidate Obama it’s because he allows pettiness to get the best of him. He should give it up. He’s now president after all.

Clive Crook posts a thoughtful review of Climategate in the Atlantic.

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. …
…One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson’s study raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy. Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre’s campaign to get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work. …

…While I’m listing surprises, let me note how disappointed I was by The Economist’s coverage of all this. “Leaked emails do not show climate scientists at their best,” it observes. No indeed. I should say I worked at the magazine for years, admire it as much as ever, and rely on the science coverage especially. But I was baffled by its reaction to the scandal. “Little wonder that the scientists are looking tribal and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny scraps as proof of a conspiracy,” its report concludes. Tiny scraps?  I detest anti-scientific thinking as much as The Economist does. I admire expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is outrageous. …

…Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods–notably, peer review–that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards–at least whenever “the science” calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.

Roger Simon makes a good point about the IPCC chair’s defense of global warming theory.

Rajendra K. Pachauri – chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – sounded as if he was auditioning for Saturday Night Live when he said Sunday:

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.” …

…Here’s a thought. From now on, when there’s something to research of true scientific importance, let’s keep it as far away from the UN as possible. We might also want to put all findings on the Internet, so the real United Nations of Human Beings can evaluate them. Oh, I forgot. Pachauri tells us their process was “very transparent.” Note the “very” – the true sign of a liar. When something is transparent, it doesn’t need qualification. It is – or it isn’t.

Mark Steyn also posts on the IPCC chair. Apparently Rajendra Pachauri has taken jetsetting to a new level.

In order to save the planet from global roasting, it seems entirely reasonable to ask Mr. and Mrs. Joe Peasant to subordinate their freedom of movement to an annual “carbon allowance” preventing them flying hither and yon and devastating the environment. As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explains:

Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.

Rajendra Pachauri? Hey, if you’re manning the VIP lounge at Heathrow, that name may ring a bell:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

Wow. 443,243 miles. How many flying polar bears does Dr. Pachauri kill in an average quarter? Well, not to worry, he probably offsets his record-breaking ursocide with carbon credits from carbon billionaire Al Gore.

And in any case it’s okay to devastate the planet on IPCC business — plus the occasional cricket match:

So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.

…If you’re waiting for some journalist to ask him about the contradictions between his lifestyle and the one he wants the rest of us to submit to, that sound you hear is cricketers chirping.

In the Boston Globe, Beth Healy looks more closely at the making of Harvard’s financial crisis.

It happened at least once a year, every year. In a roomful of a dozen Harvard University financial officials, Jack Meyer, the hugely successful head of Harvard’s endowment, and Lawrence Summers, then the school’s president, would face off in a heated debate. The topic: cash and how the university was managing – or mismanaging – its basic operating funds.

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members. …

…But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses.

So how did one of the world’s great universities err so badly in something so basic? It is a story with many actors, the story of an institution that grew complacent as its endowment soared ever higher – an institution that, when the crunch hit, was operating on financial auto-pilot, with many key players gone, and those remaining inattentive, in retrospect, to the risks ahead. …

Charles Krauthammer’s take on the party crashers at the White House.

…What you have here is a harmless little con job pulled off by a middling, fairly shady, social-climbing set of publicity hounds, not very different from your average invitee to a White House state dinner. …

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Jennifer Rubin comments on Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s writings about the heartening and historic outcome of this chapter in the democracy of Honduras.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the elections in Honduras:

Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution. Yesterday’s elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle. National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo was the favorite to win in pre-election polls. Yet the name of the victor is almost beside the point. The completion of these elections is a national triumph in itself and a win for all people who yearn for liberty. …

…Almost 400 foreign observers from Japan, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. traveled to Honduras for yesterday’s elections. Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, the German parliament and Japan will also recognize the vote. The outpouring of international support demonstrates that Hondurans were never as alone these past five months as they thought. A good part of the world backs their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.

What is disturbing is that Obama did not count himself among those desiring to back “their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.” It’s hard to fathom what motivates the president and his team, and why they seem so reluctant to oppose our allies’ enemies. Perhaps they have so internalized the criticism leveled by America’s foes that they can no longer discern when the gang in Foggy Bottom is being “played” and what is in our own national interests. We do have them — national interests, that is — and it would be nice if the Obami recognized, articulated, and vigorously defended them, regardless of how loudly Brazil, Venezuela, and much of the rest of the “international community” squawks.

Rick Richman also posts on the Honduran resolution and on the State Department finally joining the party.

…On Friday, the State Department finally endorsed the election, describing it in terms that would have made Simon Bolivar blush:

The electoral process — launched well before June 28 and involving legitimate candidates representing parties with longstanding democratic traditions from a broad ideological spectrum — is conducted under the stewardship of the multi-party and autonomous Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which was also selected before the coup. The electoral renewal of presidential, congressional and mayoral mandates, enshrined in the Honduran constitution, is an inalienable expression of the sovereign will of the citizens of Honduras.

Honduras now holds the Guinness record for shortest Latin American “coup” ever. Yesterday, the election officials announced that more than 61.5 percent of registered Hondurans went to the polls, a historic record turnout:

The announcement from the TSE [Tribunal Supremo Electoral] received a standing ovation from the attentive room of official observers and spectators.

The TSE stated they would welcome any international audit of the results.

The Obama administration deserves credit for finally recognizing that its misguided policy had reached a dead end and reversing course before it was too late. It is a lesson the administration could profitably apply in other foreign-policy areas as well.

We have three items anticipating the speech tonight on our new Afghan policy. Jennifer Rubin comments on Obama’s Afghanistan indecision, and what he must do now that he has decided on a strategy.

…Here Obama has made his own job worse. By empowering the likes of Joe Biden and his domestic policy advisers to second-guess the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and to warn openly of the domestic consequences of embracing the only viable plan for victory, the president has signaled that he’s looking over his shoulder. The sole target of his concern has not been the enemy and the horrendous potential consequences of a halfhearted effort. Instead he’s been fixated on his left-wing base. He’s obsessed over an exit strategy, forgetting that his predecessor won a war without one and that George W. Bush’s wartime troubles stemmed not from failing to  promise an end date but from letting a losing strategy persist too long. Obama’s also muddied the waters on the identity of the enemy and whether we can achieve “victory,” a word never uttered but essential to leading a war effort.

Now, as the editors note, “Both Americans and Afghans wonder whether the president believes in the war and has the will to win it.” One way for Obama to demonstrate that he takes being commander in chief seriously would be to dismiss his left-wingers’ “tax the war” gambit, designed to undermine support for the effort we are about to undertake. He should be clear that this is sheer hypocrisy (where’s the stimulus surtax?) and won’t be realistically entertained.

Frankly, it might be a good time for the president to battle his left flank and demonstrate some moxie, if he has it. The world and a vast number of centrists in America, not to mention conservatives, think he’s a wimp. This is his time to prove them wrong.

In the Daily News, Michael Goodwin says we should evaluate three aspects of Obama’s Afghanistan speech.

How does Obama define the goal? He’s not likely to use the “V-word” because victory is verboten in a war on terror that doesn’t exist to this White House. But if Obama doesn’t say success is our goal and be specific about what that means, the commander in chief will be ducking his chief responsibility. …

How does Obama define the enemy? Last March, he announced a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and repeatedly referred to the Taliban as well as al Qaeda. They were inseparable when he said, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

He was right then, but there is considerable doubt he still believes in that linkage. …

…The medieval Sharia government the Taliban wants to impose marches in lockstep with al Qaeda goals. Obama himself cited 9/11 as proof of the connection. Any suggestion now that the Taliban is not part of the problem will reveal he has chosen the path of least political resistance at home.

How much emphasis will Obama put on getting out? Let’s hope press secretary Robert Gibbs’ comment that the president would focus on the exit strategy is only a sop to Democratic liberals opposed to more troops. While some explanation of the endgame is inevitable, a disproportionate emphasis could undercut the new troops before they are deployed. …

Toby Harnden discusses some of the political issues that likely factored into Obama’s indecision.

…He still defines himself principally as the unBush, at every turn reflexively adding the caveat that his predecessor bequeathed him a “mess”. By the time he finally reveals his decision on Afghanistan on Tuesday night, it will be just a day short of three months since General Stanley McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops to stave off American defeat.

This extraordinarily long process has been dubbed “dithering” by his critics, led by former vice-president Dick Cheney, and “deliberative” by his admirers. In fact, it is principally an ostentatious attempt to show that he is not President George W Bush, who once stated that he was “a gut player”.

Alongside that, Obama wants to avoid being President Lyndon Johnson, whose “escalation” (a negative term that is now common currency in news reports) of the Vietnam war condemned him to a one-term presidency despite his Great Society domestic reforms.

…Support for the war in Afghanistan now stands at barely a third of Americans, despite the reality that this was the country from which the 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned – quite a feat for a man who declared it the “good war” in his election campaign. …

…The 90-day “hiatus” – a plainly appropriate word for Bob Ainsworth, the British Defence Secretary to have used last week – in strategic direction from Washington has had a cost in terms of momentum and perception in Afghanistan that will not be easy to overcome.  …

Roger Simon blogs on an amazing development in Switzerland. The tolerant worldly Swiss have decided; no more minarets.

In a supposedly surprising development, the Swiss just voted to ban minarets on mosques in their country:

Over 57% of Swiss voters chose to approve a blanket ban on the construction of Muslim minarets, according to official results posted by Swiss news agency ATS.

Just days before the election only 37% of people polled by state-owned television station DRS said they would support the ban.

Swiss feminists were apparently in the lead in the “Stop the Minarets” campaign. No surprise there really. Salman Rushdie is not the only one to read Islamic texts (and behavior) as an assault on women. Anyone with eyes open, certainly an intelligent female, would. If only our own feminists could get off their reactionary multi-culturalist behinds in this regard. …

…Of course this is called a “right-wing proposal.” That must be news to those feminists. And, of course, there is no mention that throughout much of the Islamic world – forget minarets or spires – churches and synagogues are banned altogether (not to mention apostates have their throats slit).

On a personal note I remember Hans-Rudolf Merz well from my recent trip to Geneva for the Durban II Conference where I watched as the Swiss President welcomed the Holocaust-denying-nuclear-bomb-buliding-mega-misogynistic-homosexual-denying-and-now-demonstrator-murdering-religious-psychopath President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Call it ultra-bourgoies multi-culturalism or simply protecting banking interests, the whole thing was despicable. It’s great to see the Swiss people turn their backs on all that. …

We have Thomas Sowell’s third piece on the housing bubble, and the government’s leading role in it’s creation.

…In short, riskier loans were accepted as good loans by one of the key regulators of the housing markets. Moreover, HUD was not just accepting subprime lending but pushing for more. After HUD became a regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, these government-sponsored enterprises were set numerical goals — quotas — for what share of their lending was to be for “affordable housing” mortgages.

In practice, they were pushed to acquire more subprime mortgages.

This was important not only because of the risk to the assets of these two enterprises themselves but, because they are dominant forces in the housing market and major gigantic financial institutions, there were dangers to the whole financial market if things went wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose securities were widely held by other financial institutions on Wall Street and beyond.

The importance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing markets is demonstrated by the magnitude of their mortgage guarantees, which total more than two trillion dollars. That is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four nations.

Ordinarily, financial markets would become less willing to invest in an enterprise with ever-growing risks. But, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are officially private, profit-making enterprises, their size and the federal government’s involvement in both their creation and their ongoing operations led many investors to assume that the federal government would never allow them to fail. …

…In short, the policies and practices of many institutions, local and national, public and private, set the stage for the housing boom and the housing bust that followed.

Placing the roots of the housing boom and bust in the free market and the solution in government is very convenient for politicians and for those who favor government interventions. But such explanations are inconsistent with facts, however impressive they might be as exercises in rhetoric. …

In Jewish World Review, Michael Barone sums up global warming theory in the wake of Climategate.

…The most charitable plausible explanation I have seen comes from The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle. “The CRU’s main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish.”

Australian geologist Ian Plimer, a global warming skeptic, is more blunt. The e-mails “show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.”

Global warming alarmist George Monbiot of the Guardian concedes that the e-mails “could scarcely be more damaging,” adding, “I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” He has called for the resignation of the CRU director. All of which brings to mind the old computer geek’s phrase: garbage in, garbage out. …

The large number of unemployed teenagers should be one of Obama’s priorities. But instead, he pays obeisance to the left’s worship of minimum wage laws; always coercion over freedom. Steven Horwitz, in the Nightly Business Report, reports on one consensus that didn’t require hiding data or rigging numbers.

During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised that, in contrast to his predecessor, his presidency would be a “science presidency.” In his first year, Obama may well have taken some science more seriously than his predecessor, but one set of settled scientific research he has chosen to ignore has been the economics of the minimum wage. The result has been a nightmare for young workers, especially young workers of color.

Economic theory predicts that raising the minimum wage will cause those employees who are least productive to lose their jobs. If we raise the minimum wage from, say, $6 to $7, it’s the same thing as saying “any worker who cannot produce $7 worth of value each hour is not worth hiring.” Younger workers are, of course, among the least skilled in the economy. In addition, thanks to poor schools and historical discrimination, young workers of color are over-represented in this category. Higher minimum wages should disproportionately affect young workers and especially ones of color.

The empirical evidence to support this theoretical claim is abundant. Hundreds of studies of this relationship have been done by economists and they are nearly unanimous that higher minimum wages are associated with some level of increased unemployment among lower-skilled workers. Whatever consensus there might be among climate scientists about global warming, that among economists about minimum wage laws is at least as great (and, as we discovered recently, we don’t need to rig the computer code to make our models reconstruct pre-historic data to come out the way we want). Despite what the science says, the Obama Administration supported a minimum wage increase last July. …

In WSJ, Arch Puddington reviews David Engerman’s new book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. The people living in the pretend world of the academy, came to view the Soviets in the pretend world of their minds.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is today regarded by most of the world as an unalloyed good: the overdue collapse of a system that was incubated in terror and maintained by a vast police-state apparatus. The Soviet Union deprived ordinary people of their liberties, subjected entire nations to colonial rule, and ruined its own economy and that of its neighbors. Even those who objected to America’s policies during the period of superpower rivalry do not dispute that the Soviet “experiment” proved an abject failure, with terrifying human cost.

But as David C. Engerman reminds us in “Know Your Enemy,” his engrossing history of “the rise and fall of America’s Soviet experts,” the center of the scholarly universe had a more benign appraisal of Soviet reality through much of the Cold War. …

…In the early years, the relationship between the U.S. government and the scholarly community was one of happy co-existence. Government funds allowed scholars to conduct pioneering research, which in turn helped the policy community. University officials “could not imagine government work as presenting any challenge to academic autonomy,” Mr. Engerman notes. By the 1970s, however, the relationship had changed. The radical currents that swept through the universities in the 1960s stirred a hostility to cooperating with officialdom.

At the same time, a new generation of specialists emerged: They were determined to assess the Soviet experience—present and past—in a more optimistic light. Social scientists churned out study after study seeking to demonstrate that Soviet institutions functioned much like their counterparts in the U.S. and ridiculing the use of the word “totalitarian” to describe the Soviet system. Likewise, revisionist historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote accounts of the Stalin period that dealt primly with the Terror and upbraided traditionalist historians for being, as she put it, “preoccupied with questions of moral judgment.” …

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Christopher Booker, in the Telegraph, UK, elaborates on the scandals of Climategate.

…There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU. …

Ed Morrissey posts on the New York Times editorial board taking Obama to task over his Middle East foreign policy blunders.

It only took them three years to figure it out, of course.  The Gray Lady’s ire focuses on the disaster Obama has made of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which is usually a rolling disaster anyway.  American Presidents haven’t been able to do much to make it better, but as the Times explains, this one’s made it a lot worse than it had to be — mainly because he’s a diplomatic novice with team full of incompetents (via Geoff A) …

…The editors go on to castigate George Mitchell a little more for blowing the effort with the Saudis, who took their signals from Team Obama.  When Obama publicly demanded a halt to all settlements, the Saudis made that their line in the sand.  The Times scolds them for doing so, but the fact is that once the US made that demand, it put all the pressure on Israel and took all the pressure off of the other parties in the talks.

As the editorial says, Obama and Mitchell couldn’t think past their own opening move and game out the possibilities.  Why might that be?  The foreign-policy team that includes Emanuel and Samantha Power (at the National Security Council) has ideological interests in getting Israel to surrender.  Power suggested a few years ago that the Western nations should invade and occupy Israel in order to set the Palestinians free.  With that kind of advice flowing at the White House, this diktat on settlements is hardly surprising, nor is its end result.

When Newsweek and the New York Times tells a Democratic president that he’s screwing up foreign policy, it’s time to clean house and start getting professional help.  Unfortunately, neither of these publications considered the ramifications of endorsing an inexperienced ideologue for the top job when it counted.

And here’s the New York Times editorial.

…Peacemaking takes strategic skill. But we see no sign that President Obama and Mr. Mitchell were thinking more than one move down the board. The president went public with his demand for a full freeze on settlements before securing Israel’s commitment. And he and his aides apparently had no plan for what they would do if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said no.

Most important, they allowed the controversy to obscure the real goal: nudging Israel and the Palestinians into peace talks. (We don’t know exactly what happened but we are told that Mr. Obama relied more on the judgment of his political advisers — specifically his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel — than of his Mideast specialists.) …

…Mr. Netanyahu has since offered a compromise 10-month freeze that exempts Jerusalem, schools and synagogues and permits Israel to complete 3,000 housing units already under construction. The irony is that while this offer goes beyond what past Israeli governments accepted, Mr. Obama had called for more. And the Palestinians promptly rejected the compromise. …

In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson says that the US must get its fiscal house in order if we are to remain a global superpower, and thus to remain safe and keep our high standard of living.

…But if the United States succumbs to a fiscal crisis, as an increasing number of economic experts fear it may, then the entire balance of global economic power could shift. Military experts talk as if the president’s decision about whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan is a make-or-break moment. In reality, his indecision about the deficit could matter much more for the country’s long-term national security. Call the United States what you like—superpower, hegemon, or empire—but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power. …

…As interest payments eat into the budget, something has to give—and that something is nearly always defense expenditure. According to the CBO, a significant decline in the relative share of national security in the federal budget is already baked into the cake. On the Pentagon’s present plan, defense spending is set to fall from above 4 percent now to 3.2 percent of GDP in 2015 and to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2028.

Over the longer run, to my own estimated departure date of 2039, spending on health care rises from 16 percent to 33 percent of GDP (some of the money presumably is going to keep me from expiring even sooner). But spending on everything other than health, Social Security, and interest payments drops from 12 percent to 8.4 percent.

This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America’s debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term should be the administration’s most important task—significantly more than the 24 percent who see health-care reform as the No. 1 priority. But cutting the deficit in half is simply not enough. If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don’t forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

In the WSJ, Fred Barnes reviews the mistakes that have cost the president much of his political capital

…First, Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn’t a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda. …

…Second, Mr. Obama misread his own ability to sway the public. He is a glib, cool, likeable speaker whose sentences have subjects and verbs. During the campaign, he gave dazzling speeches about hope and change that excited voters. …

…But campaign speeches don’t have to be specific, and candidates aren’t accountable. Presidential speeches are different. The object is to persuade voters to back a certain policy, and it turns out Mr. Obama is not good at this. He failed to stop the steady decline in support for any of his policies, most notably health care. …

…Third, Mr. Obama misread Republicans. They felt weak and vulnerable after losing two straight congressional elections and watching John McCain’s presidential bid fall flat. They were afraid to criticize the newly elected president. If he had offered them minimal concessions, many of them would have jumped aboard his policies. If that had happened, the president could have boasted of achieving bipartisan compromise on the stimulus and other policies. He let the chance slip away. …

Thomas Sowell explains that every politician in Washington thinks his job is to take care of himself.

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems— of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind. …

…The current economic downturn that has cost millions of people their jobs began with successive administrations of both parties pushing banks and other lenders to make mortgage loans to people whose incomes, credit history and inability or unwillingness to make a substantial down payment on a house made them bad risks.

Was that stupid? Not at all. The money that was being put at risk was not the politicians’ money, and in most cases was not even the government’s money. Moreover, the jobs that are being lost by the millions are not the politicians’ jobs— and jobs in the government’s bureaucracies are increasing. …

…Very few people are likely to connect the dots back to those members of Congress who voted for bigger mortgage guarantees and bailouts by the FHA. So the Congressmen’s and the bureaucrats’ jobs are safe, even if millions of other people’s jobs are not. …

Investor’s Business Daily has an article from Svetlana Kunin, a Soviet refugee who has understands the evils of socialism.

…When I came to America in 1980 and experienced life in this country, I thought it was fortunate that those living in the USSR did not know how unfortunate they were.

Now in 2009, I realize how unfortunate it is that many Americans do not understand how fortunate they are. They vote to give government more and more power without understanding the consequences

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The climate “warm-mongers” aren’t going to let a little thing like evidence get in the way of their global warming beliefs says Mark Steyn.

My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the “climate change” racket was Stuart Varney’s interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama “St Elsewhere” but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an “activist.” … Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit, in which the world’s leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to “hide the decline” and other interesting matters. …

…”Peer-reviewed studies. Go to Science magazine, folks. Go to Nature,” babbled Ed. “Read peer-reviewed studies. That’s all you need to do. Don’t get it from you or me.”

Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you! …

…Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review”. When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. …

Charles Krauthammer discusses three efficient reforms for health care.

…First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do. …

…Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter. …

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues — the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget. …

Matthew Continetti thinks it is time to try to talk some sense into starry-eyed Dems about the nightmare their health reform will be.

Next time you run into a group of Democrats, offer to splash water on their faces. They’ve spent 2009 in a dream state, and it’s time they wake up. They’re convinced that they can subsidize health insurance for millions of people while also “bending the cost curve” of health care spending. They want to sign us up for the political equivalent of one of those three-step “eat more to lose weight” diets. Step one: Pile on the expenditures, regulations, taxes, and fees. Step two: Close your eyes. Step three: Pray it all works out in the end.

Sorry, it won’t. Entitlements cost money, and they almost invariably cost more than the government’s initial predictions. When you increase demand for a product and the supply remains fixed, the price rises. Thanks to the individual mandate, the Democratic health care bills lasso Americans into a heavily regulated health insurance oligopoly. All these new consumers will wander through the government-run “exchanges,” buying the plans they can afford with taxpayer subsidies. As demand for health care increases, so will the cost.

The idea that expanding coverage will save the country money has always been a fantasy. …

Poll numbers show that Dems can’t have their cake and eat it too, says Karl Rove.

…However, since taking office Mr. Obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion expansion of the child health program known as S-chip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations spending bill, and an $80 billion car company bailout. He also pushed a $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the House and is now urging Congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health-care bill.

An honest appraisal of the nation’s finances would recommend dropping both of these last two priorities. But the administration has long planned to run up the federal credit card. …

…This spending has been matched by a decline in the president’s poll numbers. This week, Gallup found that his job approval rating slipped below 50%. Last March, Americans approved of Mr. Obama’s handling of the deficit by a 52% to 43% margin in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. By October, his standing had flipped in the same poll, with 45% approving and 51% disapproving.

Anger over deficits was picked up in a late October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which asked voters if they’d rather boost “the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits” or keep the “budget deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.” Only 31% chose boosting the economy; 62% wanted to keep the deficit down. …

David Harsanyi writes that at least two Democrat congressmen have not seen the recent polls.

W ith good reason, the prevailing economic concern of most Americans is jobs.

With this in mind, two Democratic congressmen have cooked up a plan to help us out. The strategy entails sucking another $150 billion of capital investment out of the market each year and handing it to an organization that can’t balance a budget, borrows money with abandon, runs massive deficits and excels at creating fairy tale jobs.

Under a bill being drafted by Democratic Reps. Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, every purchase of a financial instrument like stocks, options, derivatives and futures would face an additional .25 percent tax — because capital gains taxes simply haven’t been hampering private investment enough.

… Here’s a restorative idea: Spend less. …

John Tierney makes the case for keeping archaeological treasures widespread. Is a cultural heritage tied solely to a geographic region? And does the government currently in power in that region own the history of that region?

…In some cases, it makes aesthetic or archaeological sense to keep artifacts grouped together where they were found, but it can also be risky to leave everything in one place, particularly if the country is in turmoil or can’t afford to excavate or guard all its treasures. After the Metropolitan Museum was pressured to hand over a collection called the Lydian Hoard, one of the most valuable pieces was stolen several years ago from its new home in Turkey.

Restricting the export of artifacts hasn’t ended their theft and looting any more than the war on drugs has ended narcotics smuggling. Instead, the restrictions promote the black market and discourage the kind of open research that would benefit everyone except criminals. …

…Some of the most culturally protectionist nations today, like Egypt, Italy and Turkey, are trying to hoard treasures that couldn’t have been created without the inspiration provided by imported works of art. (Imagine the Renaissance without the influence of “looted” Greek antiquities.) And the current political rulers of those countries often have little in common culturally with the creators of the artifacts they claim to own. …

Dr. Hawass may consider the Rosetta Stone to be the property of his government agency, but the modern state of Egypt didn’t even exist when it was discovered in 1799 (much less when it was inscribed in 196 B.C., during the Hellenistic era). The land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the local historians were most interested in studying their Islamic heritage.

The inscribed stone fragment, which had been used as construction material at a fort, didn’t acquire any significance until it was noticed by Napoleon’s soldiers and examined by the scholars on the expedition. …

Nick Schulz, in the Enterprise Blog, has a fascinating chart that helps explain some of the poor choices coming from the Obama administration.

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

In Bloomberg News, Caroline Baum takes the Obama administration to task for the bogus job numbers.

At first it was just an unverifiable assertion. Now it turns out to have been a case of bureaucratic ineptitude and possible fraud. Transparency and accountability aren’t working out the way President Barack Obama had hoped.

The administration was already skating on thin ice when it announced on Oct. 30, with great fanfare, that 640,329 jobs had been created or saved as a result of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. …

…Watchdog.org, a collection of independent journalists covering state and local government, has put together a “Guide to the Stimulus, District by (Phantom) District.” Overall the group found that 440 phantom districts in 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories received $6.4 billion and created or saved — let’s consolidate to “craved” — 30,000 jobs. That works out to $213,333 per job. Think how much easier, not to mention transparent, it would have been to hand out that kind of real money to real people who will spend it! …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reminds us that we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the failure of collectivism in the US.

Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving. And there is no better time to remember an underappreciated lesson of the original Thanksgiving: that the Pilgrims nearly starved to death because of collectivism and eventually saved themselves by adopting a system of private property. Economist Benjamin Powell tells the story here:

Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did. …

…Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. While not a complete private property system, the move away from communal ownership had dramatic results.

…Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years. It was only after allowing greater property rights that they could feast without worrying that famine was just around the corner. …

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National Review OnLine with a symposium on things for which we might want to give thanks.

David Warren is the first of our favorites to column on the hacked emails of the globalony specialists in England; what Mark Steyn has called Warmergate.

A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which “human-induced global warming” claims have been advanced over the years.

By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia — in some respects the international clearing house for climate change “science” — he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.

More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various “progressive” causes require a particular scientific result.

There is little doubt that the e-mails were real. Even so warmist a true-believer as George Monbiot led his column in the Guardian yesterday with: “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The e-mails extracted … could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” …

Debra Saunders writes on the misuse of pardon power.

On Wednesday, President Obama will issue the White House’s standard hokey pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey. It goes with the job.

That’s good news for the lucky turkey, but not much help for the many nonviolent first offenders languishing in federal prisons because, nine months into office, Obama has yet to exercise his presidential pardon power. …

… the new president doesn’t seem eager to use his unfettered pardon power to correct sentencing injustices for the politically unconnected.

Look at Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder. When Holder worked for the Clinton administration, Ruckman noted, “he wouldn’t take the time, energy or effort to make it a regular feature of government.”

“But he would, if you will, make an effort in wildly controversial situations.” Such as Holder’s “neutral leaning positive” recommendation for the pardon sought by fugitive gazillionaire Marc Rich and his role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists.

When you think about it, the pardon petition is the rare Washington exercise that encourages politically unconnected people to petition their president for relief. But like Bush and Clinton before him, Obama seems to be hoarding this power. It’s as if Team Obama sees justice as perk, not an equal right.

David Harsanyi on Washington “courage.”

… These days, the idea of courage — especially in Washington — flows freely.

Recently, Newt Gingrich called Obama “a liberal Democratic president who has the courage to take on the establishment on education,” as if the tepid education reforms of the administration were akin to a power move against the Gambino crime syndicate (though, admittedly, the National Education Association comes close).

Actress Angie Harmon this week declared Sarah Palin was a “woman who has her own set of values and morals and ethics and has the courage to live her life accordingly.” How many of you have the steely courage to sell 700,000 books in a week? …

John Stossel says we pay politicians to lie to us.

When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician.

President Obama insists that health care “reform” not “add a dime” to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow “$900 billion over 10 years” has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit.

It’s amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion.

How do they do that? …

Jennifer Rubin has a couple of posts on the KSM New York trial. First on how the prez might get out of this. She also posts on KSM’s lawyer who has made frivolous pleadings in the past. And has been admonished by the court and ordered to pay the costs his opponents incurred defending against his bogus motions.

… The president can blame Greg Graig or Holder, if he must. Obama reversed course on the detainee photos after advice from Justice, so he’s not unaccustomed to the process. Embarrassing? Sure. But if he thinks about what years and years of a show trial will mean, and the impact it will have on his image as commander in chief as the public realizes that this could easily have been avoided, Obama may come to see that a quick dose of embarrassment now is preferable to years of humiliation down the road.

Someone’s polls are crashing and J. Rubin posts on that also.

… You might have to strain to get the point, but the Times is explaining that the health-care debate is making things worse because it’s proving conservatives’ point about Obama’s statist tendencies. It’s also significant that Obama did not get a bump, in fact got a slide, out of his overseas trip, which reminded Americans of their president’s cringey incompetence. (The Times, again, spins this: “The media coverage of Mr. Obama’s visit to China was critical of the way he dealt with Chinese leaders.”)

Well, rational people would look at this and reassess, see what has gone wrong, fire those whose judgment was flawed, and try to get the presidency back on track. This crowd? A combination of true believers and purveyors of “damn the consequences for the moderates,” I suspect, will prevent much if any alteration in the course of this administration. Only elections, I suspect, will have much impact.

Ryan Streeter at American.com says Texas v. California might be a metaphor for the divisions in our country.

New Geography, the online magazine created by Joel Kotkin and others with a special focus on demographics and trends, has been tracking the implosion of California in an interesting way: by comparing it to Texas.

Texas and California are America’s two most populous states, together numbering approximately 55 million people, which is only about 6 million less than the United Kingdom, where I live. California, as everyone knows, has a coolness factor that Texas cannot match. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and wine. Say no more. But, unless one has been living in a cave, everyone knows that the cool state is also the broke state. If Hollywood turned California’s budget and fiscal position into a movie, it would be a blockbuster horror film indeed.

Texas, on the other hand, is growing, creating wealth, and attracting the entrepreneurial and creative classes that too many people think only go to places like New York and California. This interesting post by Tory Gattis at New Geography explains why. He shares a four-point analysis from Trends magazine: …

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For a long time it looked like the new administration would be Welcome Back Carter time. Read this from Spengler and see if you don’t agree with Pickerhead we are instead seeing Carter Lite. Amazing, the luck of Jimmy Carter; somebody worse than him. Think that’s unfair? Read next about Obama’s policy towards India. W’s policy there was a major American success. So, the petulant president ignores the country.

… Obama’s fecklessness has allowed the unimaginable to occur: Russia’s influence in the Middle East rivals that of the United States.

David Samuels wrote on November 13 in Slate magazine about “the elegant and brutal way that the Russians have leveraged their position as the arms supplier of last resort to Iran and Syria”. Russia feints towards Iran by offering to sell Tehran a top-of-the-line air-defense system, the S-300. It then extorts concessions from the West (or Israel) in return for delaying shipment of the system. One result of Russia’s rocket diplomacy, Samuels observes, is a three-way alliance between Russia, India and Israel to develop high-tech weapons, including a so-called fifth-generation fighter that may be able to challenge America’s F-35.

If Israel does attempt an air strike against Iran’s nuclear program, it will do so in response to the visible failure of American diplomacy, and with the tacit permission of Russia – which has the capacity to veto such a strike by giving Iran anti-aircraft missiles of sufficient capability (or by not giving Israel the key to the counter-measures, for Russia never sells a weapons system to another country that it cannot neutralize).

Obama’s foreign policy in every manifestation – Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia – has come to grief, and the White House so far has shown no reaction except lockjaw. The great decisions of the world are being taken outside Washington. Too many things have gone wrong to secure the outcome. The game now is in the hands of the spoilers, the players who draw strength from chaos, and first among them is Russia. That creates positive feedback, for the powers who thrive on uncertainty will do their best to generate more

With India’s prime minister currently visiting the US, Tunku Varadarajan takes the opportunity to discuss the importance of India in US foreign relations.

…It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the political, strategic, and moral worth to America, the world’s most powerful democracy, of a strong alliance with India, the world’s largest. Mr. Obama, by no stretch a man of tepid intelligence, has calibrated things artfully: Not only is Mr. Singh the first state visitor to Washington since the president took office in January, his trip is the first time that India has headed an American president’s list for a state visit—ever. (Richard Nixon must be turning in his grave.) …

…Given all this swirl, Mr. Obama has had scant inclination to pay much attention to, let alone court, Delhi. This has not gone down well in India, a country surrounded by a wall of thin skin. India had grown used, under Mr. Obama’s predecessor, to alpha-dog treatment. George W. Bush was the best American president India ever had, and Mr. Obama’s ability to take India for granted is, in some measure, a tribute to the extent to which Mr. Bush locked the two countries into a presumptively inseparable alliance. But for all his emphasis on diplomacy in dealing with hostile states, like Iran, or inveterate competitor-states, like China, Mr. Obama has failed to grasp the diplomatic importance of tending to alliances, whether they be old and true ones, such as the one with Israel, or young and sensitive ones, such as the one with India. …

…Finally, a broader word about India and its relationship with America: Unlike China, which is inherently competitive for global leadership—and which will never accept American leadership or direction—India is a country that would, like Britain or Japan or Germany, settle for a partnership with the United States that guaranteed mutual benefit and respect. India’s natural state, if nations can be said to have such a thing, is neither triumphalist nor antagonist; it is cooperative and redemptive, much as America’s tends to be. One trusts that Mr. Obama will come to see these qualities as clearly as his predecessor did. If not, this could be one area in which history will judge Mr. Obama to have been “dumb,” and Mr. Bush to have been the “smart” one.

Pickerhead thinks that Beltway bias shows when discussing Palin’s supposed lack of qualifications to be president, considering the empty suit who currently occupies the position. Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts his thoughts.

Longtime readers may recall that I was initially positive about Sarah Palin because her record was much more libertarian than that of most other major national politicians. Later, I had to reassess my view of Palin, as her ignorance of many important policy issues became apparent. But I also emphasized that ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity, and that in my view Palin suffers from the former, not the latter — a conclusion also reached by liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. I do a lot of research on political ignorance, and the distinction between ignorance and stupidity is one that I have often urged people to keep in mind. For reasons that I discuss here and here, even professional politicians often find it rational to devote their time to activities other than learning about major national issues.

Still, an ignorant but intelligent person is capable of remedying her ignorance to a greater extent than one who is both ignorant and stupid. In reading Palin’s recent memoir, Going Rogue, I wanted to see if there was any evidence that she has taken steps to address what many people see as her biggest weakness — myself included. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say either way. As a sympathetic WSJ reviewer points out, the book devotes little attention to national policy issues. Palin does come across as knowledgeable about Alaska state issues, but her facility in that area was never seriously in question.

The book argues at length that the various gaffes that revealed Palin’s ignorance during the 2008 campaign were mostly the fault of McCain’s consultants and a biased media. I remain unpersuaded. Yes, many people in the media were biased against Palin, and perhaps the consultants made mistakes (it’s hard for me to assess that claim without knowing more about the consultants’ side of the story). Even so, there is no excuse for Palin’s inability to give competent answers to relatively simple questions about such things as which newspapers and magazines she read, which Supreme Court decisions she disagrees with, or describing the basics of her position on US policy towards Russia. If Katie Couric really was out to get Palin, as the book suggests, she could surely have asked tougher questions than these. In any event, a candidate facing a biased media should be all the more careful to avoid obvious mistakes. …

Ilya Somin also has optimistic comments about right-wing populism, despite his somewhat exaggerated concerns about the irrational fringe elements and their sway.

I am no fan of populism of either the left or right-wing variety. In my view, most populist movements exploit voter ignorance and irrationality to promote policies that tend to do far more harm than good. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the right-wing populist reaction to the economic crisis and Obama’s policies. With rare exceptions, right-wing populists such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the Tea Party protesters, have advocated free market approaches to dealing with the crisis, and have attacked Obama and the Democratic Congress for seeking massive increases in government spending and regulation. They have not responded in any of several much worse ways that seemed like plausible alternatives a year ago, and may still be today.

True, much of their rhetoric is oversimplified, doesn’t take account of counterarguments, and is unfair to opponents. But the same can be said for nearly all political rhetoric directed at a popular audience made up of rationally ignorant voters who pay only very limited attention to politics and don’t understand the details of policy debates. On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars. There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories. Indeed, efforts to paint the Tea Partiers and others as merely closet racists usually have to rely on unsupported claims about “unspoken” assumptions and subtexts. Most, if not all, of the right-wing populists would have reacted in much the same way if the policies advocated by Obama had instead been put forward by a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton or President John Edwards.

Things could have been a lot worse. For example, the right-wing populists could have reacted to Obama and the financial crisis by embracing the kind of big government social conservatism advocated by Mike Huckabee during the presidential campaign. Still worse, they could have flocked to the protectionism and nativism advocated by people like Pat Buchanan. This latter possibility would have been in line with the anti-illegal immigration hysteria that swept the populist right just two years ago. …

Thomas Sowell’s series on the housing bubble continues. Sowell explains how the government forced banks to meet racial quotas, rather than assessing loans on creditworthiness.

…Although the Community Reinvestment Act had no major immediate impact, over the years its underlying assumptions and provisions provided the basis for ever more insistent pressure on lenders from a variety of government officials and agencies to lend to those whom politicians and bureaucrats wanted them to lend to, rather than to those whom lenders would have chosen to lend to on the basis of the lenders’ own experience and expertise.

These pressures began to build in the 1990s and increased exponentially thereafter. Studies in the early 1990s, showing different mortgage-loan approval rates for blacks and whites, set off media sensations and denunciations, leading to both congressional and White House pressures on agencies regulating banks to impose new lending rules, and to monitor statistics on the loan approval rates by race, by community and by income, with penalties on banks and other lenders for failing to meet politically-imposed norms or quotas.

These stepped-up pressures began during the George H.W. Bush administration and escalated during the Clinton administration, when Attorney General Janet Reno threatened legal action against lenders whose racial statistics raised her suspicions.

It would be too much of a detour at this point to go into the details of these claims of racial discrimination by mortgage lenders. However, even at this point, the idea that lenders would be offended by receiving monthly mortgage payment checks in the mail from blacks should at least give us pause to assess whether or not it seems plausible — especially since a substantial majority of both blacks and whites had their mortgage-loan applications approved.

The issue has been about the statistical difference between these approval rates, not any claim that most blacks could not get mortgage loans. …

…For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn’t enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of “innovative or flexible” lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods.

In plain English, the regulators imposed quotas — and, if lenders had to resort to “innovative or flexible” standards and methods to meet those quotas, so be it. …

…These were not the only government pressures on banks to fulfill lending quotas. In 1993, the Department of Housing and Urban Development “began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers that declined a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants.” Lenders then began lowering their down payment and income requirements. …