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In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff builds an explanation of the Chinese pegging the yuan to the US dollar, and what will happen when the Chinese stop this practice.

During President Obama’s high profile visit to China this week, the most frequently discussed, yet least understood, topic was how currency valuations are affecting the economic relationship between the United States and China. The focal problem is the Chinese government’s policy of fixing the value of the renminbi against the U.S. dollar. While many correctly perceive that this ‘peg’ has contributed greatly to the current global imbalances, few fully comprehend the ramifications should that peg be discarded.

The common understanding is both incomplete and naive. Most analysts simply see the peg as China’s principal weapon in an economic struggle for global ascendancy. The peg, they argue, offers China a competitive advantage by making its products cheaper in U.S. markets, thus allowing Chinese firms to gobble up market share and steal jobs from U.S. manufacturers. The thought is that were China to allow its currency to rise, American manufactures would regain their lost edge, and both manufacturing firms and the jobs formerly associated with them would return. In this narrative, the struggle centers on the United States’ diminishing leverage in persuading the Chinese to lay down their unfair weaponry. It’s a sympathetic picture, but it tells the wrong story.

While the peg certainly is responsible for much of the world’s problems, its abandonment would cause severe hardship in the United States. In fact, for the U.S., de-pegging would cause the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. Our economy is currently on life support provided by an endless flow of debt financing from China. These purchases are the means by which China maintains the relative value of its currency against the dollar. As the dollar comes under even more downward pressure, China’s purchases must increase to keep the renminbi from rising. By maintaining the peg, China enables our politicians and citizens to continue spending more than they have and avoiding the hard choices necessary to restore our long-term economic health. …

In WaPo, Robert Samuelson comments on Obamacare’s transfer of wealth from the young to the old.

One of our long-running political stories is the economic assault on the young by the old. We have become a society that invests in its past and disfavors the future. This makes no sense for the nation, but as politics it makes complete sense. The elderly and near elderly are better organized, focus obsessively on their government benefits and seem deserving. Grandmas and Grandpas command sympathy.

Everyone knows that the resulting “entitlements” dominate government spending and squeeze education, research, defense and almost everything else. In fiscal 2008 — the last “normal” year before the economic crisis — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43 percent of federal spending and more than twice military spending. Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old.

Now comes the House-passed health-care “reform” bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of that for younger Americans. That’s much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those age 60 to 64 is four to five times greater than those 18 to 24. So, the young would overpay for insurance that — under the House bill — people must buy: Twenty- and thirtysomethings would subsidize premiums for fifty-and sixtysomethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.) …

In Der Spiegel, Gabor Steingart assesses Obama’s Asian trip, and reviews Obama’s foreign policy paradigm.

…The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences. …

We hear from another disillusioned liberal. In Politico, Elizabeth Drew discusses Greg Craig’s departure.

…While he (Obama) was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason – not the first or only reason – to conclude that he wasn’t the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign. …

In the Daily Beast, Lee Siegel looks at Obama’s governing style in light of the KSM decision.

…This illusion of national participation in his decision-making process, with the promise of a happy ending that excludes no one, has been Obama’s method almost from Day One. Call it the American Idol style of governing—except that no possibility ever gets voted out of the competition. …

…On health care, once again, Obama proclaimed his desire for an ideal solution, held himself aloof from the fray, and let the public, the media, and the politicians turn it into a World Wrestling match that made almost any sort of compromise a victory. On Afghanistan, the same process: The president might deplore the leaks that came from inside and outside his administration, but they dripped slowly, and from widely scattered places, just like the slowly dripping, all-inclusive way he appears to think.

Obama seems not so much to govern as to preside. And yet for all the prudent pragmatism of his style, he doesn’t seem merely to want to please everyone. He seems determined not to be held responsible for the displeasure he causes. In the end, Obama won’t be blamed for what will likely be the health-care bill’s substantial flaws. Instead, the transparency of the process leading up to the bill ensures that at every point where the bill seems to fail one constituency or another, a particular person or people will be blamed for thwarting Obama. …

In News Busters, Noel Sheppard has a surprising post on Chris Matthews’ opinion of Obama.

Chris Matthews appears to have lost that loving feeling for Barack Obama.

On “The Chris Matthews Show” Sunday, the once smitten MSNBCer called some of Obama’s recent mistakes “Carteresque” …

…Potentially as surprising as Matthews bringing these issues up was the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut and David Ignatius agreeing with him

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Welcome back. The word these days is optics, visuals, signals. In the Carter presidency, the optics were not exactly robust, and Ronald Reagan rode that to a big victory in 1980. Is the Obama White House sending some Carteresque signals these days? Some see that in the deep bow to the Emperor of Japan, an unforced error say critics. Then there was, there was what happened in China: Obama got nothing in the way of concessions over there in spite of playing the polite visitor. And his effort to speak directly to the Chinese was jammed by the government. Third, that decision to try the terrorists up in that federal court in New York City. Again, nothing that had to be done, and critics say it shows that Obama, his team doesn’t understand this is a war we’re in. David, that’s the question. These optics are everything in a president. Carter used to carry that garment bag over his shoulder. This president is he making mistakes like in China like in Japan?

DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST : I think he is coming across as stiff. He is talking too much sometimes and communicating too little. So the opposite of what we saw during the campaign. Although the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York apparently was Eric Holder’s, it strikes me that it really is a mistake. I mean, there are too many bad things that could happen. There is no reason to have to have done this. …

Sometimes you have to laugh at the ludicrous liberal politicians. Jonah Goldberg has an article in National Review that helps us do that.

…The point of that emasculating exercise was ostensibly to tell the world that Joe Biden was going to be riding herd over how the stimulus money was spent. It’s worth revisiting exactly what he said:

“That is why I have asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort — because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my Cabinet, as well as mayors and governors across the country, that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend. I have appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general to ferret out any and all cases of waste and fraud. And we have created a new website called Recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.”

In the cold, bracing light of today’s facts, this is just plain bladder-draining hilarious. We’ve all heard the stories of vast sums of money funding a tiny number of jobs, and tiny amounts of money paying for vast numbers of jobs. Even better, the stories have for the most part been broken by such non-right-wing-decoder-ring-wearers as the AP and the Boston Globe. A story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that after spending $608.9 million, the White House got 1,458 jobs. That’s nearly half a million dollars per job. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Talladega County alone claimed that it stretched $42,000 into 5,000 jobs “saved or created.”

“Saved or created” is itself the greatest weaselly locution yet coined in the 21st century. Just for the record, I save or create 500 push-ups every morning. …

Another great T-Shirt. This from Boing Boing.net.

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In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne makes a bleak evaluation of our economic situation. Here’s the opening, and a realistic assessment of how Obama got votes.

The U.S. economy is in uncertain times. Analysts are split between those seeing recovery and those fearing a second downturn. This confusion is being echoed in the highest levels of government as President Obama simultaneously speaks about the need for more federal spending and warns of the dangers of increased debt. As the volatile markets indicate, investors are not only confused – they are seriously concerned.

The country appears to be going through a period of buyer’s remorse over the election of Barack Obama. The majority cobbled together by the President one year ago included the Democratic base, independents hoping for “change,” and many disaffected Republicans betrayed by the Bush Administration’s big-government neoconservatism. It is unlikely that most of these voters favored an overt push toward socialism; however, this is what they have received. As the ‘tea parties’ illustrate, voters are not only confused – they are seriously concerned.

These concerns are justified. The Administration’s hard-left turn was evident from the outset. Ignoring expert advice to spend on job-creating infrastructure, Obama spent wildly on entitlements. Now, with rising grassroots discontent, a falling currency, and threats to America’s AAA credit rating, there is some evidence that the Administration is trying to hedge its bets through tough talk. Yet, they still have not taken any tough action. As their gold stockpiling highlights, foreign governments are not only confused – they are seriously concerned. …

14 percent of mortgages are in trouble. One out of seven. In WaPo, Renae Merle reports that foreclosures are increasing due to unemployment.

More than 14 percent of borrowers were in trouble on their mortgage during the third quarter, a new record, according to an industry survey released Thursday, which also suggests that the foreclosure rate is likely not to peak until next year as unemployment rates continue to rise.

Unemployment remains a big driver of the problem, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, which conducts the survey. Those with delinquent loans now include a growing portion of people traditionally considered creditworthy and people whose mortgages are insured by the Federal Housing Administration. …

…About 9.6 percent of borrowers were delinquent on their mortgage during the third quarter, according to the survey, and another 4.5 percent more were somewhere in the foreclosure process. Overall, about 14 percent of mortgage loans or 7.4 million households were delinquent or in the foreclosure process during the quarter, according to the group.

That is the highest level recorded by the survey, which has been conducted since 1972, and is up from about 10 percent of borrowers who were in trouble during the same period last year.

If unemployment rates peak by the middle of next year, foreclosures could reach their highest levels by the end of the year, Brinkmann said. But even after peaking, foreclosure rates are likely to remain elevated as borrowers in regions that have had steep price declines and now owe more than their home is worth continue to struggle, he said. …

In Contentions, John Steele Gordon has commentary on the national debt.

…The national debt was for most of American history, as Hamilton said it would be, a “national blessing.” It allowed us to fight and win our wars and to relieve suffering in an economic depression far worse than what the country is experiencing now. But in the last thirty years — the most prosperous and relatively peaceful thirty-year period in American history — liberals and “conservatives,” Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington have allowed the debt to explode for their short-term political benefit while they hid the truth with phony accounting.

How bad was it? Consider this: In 1980, the debt was 33.3 percent of the country’s GDP. By 1990 the GDP had increased by 37.6 percent in real terms. But the debt had grown much faster. It was 55.9 percent of the much larger GDP. In the 1990’s GDP increased by 39.7 percent, and the debt more than kept pace. It was 58 percent of GDP in 2000. At the end of 2008, GDP had grown 18.5 percent over 2000, and the debt was fast approaching 80 percent of GDP.  And the debt, being denominated in dollars, is made smaller by inflation while GDP is enlarged.

No one believes that the debt can be kept under 100 percent of GDP in the near future. And if Obamacare gets passed in anything like its present form, it will only makes matters far worse. As Mr. Holtz-Eakin explains, President Obama’s promise not to sign a bill that adds to the deficit is false:

. . . the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.

If you’re disturbed by the long-term outlook for the country’s fiscal health, you shouldn’t be. You should be terrified.

Vermont and Europe may have more in common than Vermont might like, says Mark Steyn.

… In fact, Vermont school enrollments have declined 13 years in a row. Since 1996, they’ve fallen by 13 percent, slumping below 100,000 in 2004 and projected to fall below 90,000 in 2014. The part of the state that my corner of New Hampshire borders is admittedly rural, and it’s not an unusual phenomenon for small towns to drain population to the big cities. But a couple of days later I was in the capital, Montpelier, and its school board is in merger talks with the neighboring towns of Berlin and Calais.

If schoolkids are thin on the ground, the state’s total population has held steady — 604,000 in 1999, 621,000 today. So Vermont is getting proportionately more childless. Which is to say that Vermont, literally, has no future. …

…Graying ponytailed hippies and chichi gay couples aren’t enough of a population base to run a functioning jurisdiction. To modify Howard Dean, Vermont is the way liberals think America ought to be, and you can’t make a living in it. So if you’re a cash-poor but land-rich native Vermonter taxed and regulated and hedged in on every front, you face a choice: In the new North Country folk wisdom, they won’t let you fish, so you might as well cut bait. Your outhouse is in breach of zoning regulations, so you might as well get off the pot. Etc. When he ran for president, Howard Dean was said to have inspired America’s youth. In Vermont, he mainly inspired them to move somewhere else. The number of young adults fell by 20 percent during the Dean years. And what’s left is a demographic disaster: The state’s women have the second lowest birthrate in the nation, and the state’s workforce is already America’s oldest. Last year, Chris Lafakis of Moody’s predicted Vermont would have “a really stagnant economy” not this year or this half-decade but for the next 30 years. …

…Nowhere in the news reports of school-merger talks does anyone suggest trying to reverse the policies that drive out young families and make Vermont — what’s the word the eco-types dig? — “unsustainable.” …

In the Enterprise blog, Charles Murray has a thoughtful post on Glenn Beck.

…Beck was, as usual, standing in front of his blackboard. Chalked on it was:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson

It is a sentiment with which I completely agree. I’ve written whole books with that sentiment as the subtext. The problem: The quote is a fake. Thomas Jefferson never said it. Jefferson would have been sympathetic to the idea, as other writings clearly imply. But he didn’t actually say it. In front of a national television audience, Glenn Beck put up a quote that his researchers would have discovered is a fake if they had done the slightest bit of Googling.

…So here’s the unbearable paradox. Beck really has had important effects on the way the Obama administration and its legislation is perceived. It is conceivable that if healthcare goes down to a razor-thin defeat, Beck will have made the difference. If that turns out to be the case, he will have made a far greater contribution to the survival of the American project than ink-stained wretches like me can dream of having. And I want to shut him up?

I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework. ..

David Harsanyi’s article merits a pithy introduction, but I can’t find the words. Speaking of words, will Facebook be responsible for, “Don’t unfriend me, Bro!”

One needn’t be William Safire, though, to be unsettled that the word “philanderer” is a major mystery to so many people. According to a new list by Merriam-Webster, “philanderer” (a national pastime, meaning to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife) was one of the most searched words of the past year because of the crush of politicians and celebrities busy hiking the Appalachian Trail.

The word receiving the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time was “admonish” (to express warning or disapproval). It was triggered by a crude outburst of a South Carolina congressman and the subsequent moralistic “admonishment” of him by Congress. …

…The 2009 Word of the Year, announced this week, is “unfriend.” Unfriend is a verb, meaning the removal of a virtual acquaintance from your social networking’s pretend “friends” list. It would appear in sentence as so: “Oh, yeah, now I remember why I didn’t keep in touch with those bozos from high school. I’m not sure how they found me, but I must remember to unfriend them.”…

Late last week, a group of Russians hacked into computers at a university in England. Specifically, it was the U of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in Hadley (Hadley CRU). The hackers posted 3,000 documents (mostly emails) on the web. They have proven to be an embarrassment to people who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW); the belief that humans have been the cause of the past increase in earth’s temperatures. The news has been breathlessly reported by a number of bloggers. The best we’ve seen so far has been James Delingpole in the Telegraph, UK.

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

…But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. …

Richard Brookhiser weaves an interesting discourse on apples.

…Left to themselves, apples mutate uncontrollably, so growers employ grafts to make sure they get what they want. Agricultural-research stations produce new varieties by careful cross-fertilization. But once in a while, some new seedling pops up that everyone decides he likes; such varieties often retain the word “pippin” (Middle English for seed) in their names.

Some varieties do go back only a few centuries shy of Chaucer. …but in the last half century they fell by the wayside, largely thanks to their looks. Calville Blanc d’Hiver is yellow-green and bulbous, Esopus Spitzenberg is yellow and red, Newtown Pippin is often russeted, or marked by rough brown streaks. In the mass market they were supplanted by apples like Macintosh and Red Delicious, red and sturdy enough to survive shipping: fine fruits in themselves, but a bit drained of zest by overproduction. …

…But most of the time the apple tree is a sturdy and amenable creature. After its apples and leaves fall, it stands naked all winter. Ice can maim it, but it does not bother about snow. In the spring it wraps itself in a turban of blossoms. When it becomes old and unfruitful, morel mushrooms grow at its feet. A thrifty grower will not let that happen; he culls his old trees (the wood is excellent for smoking), and plants young ones. They look fragile as a kindergartner’s stick drawing, but they get right to work, putting out blossoms, and soon enough fruits. …

Pickerhead has been shopping. The Nose on Your Face has a clever t-shirt.

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Mark Steyn writes about how lost our president is.

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama “doesn’t know how to be president.” It was a low but effective crack, and I didn’t pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the past week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don’t just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan – though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower’s previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi king, one assumed there’d be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don’t bow to foreign monarchs. Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic – or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

Tear down that wall …so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who, at a critical moment in history, decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal, they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours. It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it. …

…Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: “OK, we know you’re gay. Now try being funny.” I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: OK, we know you’re black. Now try being president. But a few days later, Obama dropped in on U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea for the latest episode of The Barack Obama Show (With Full Supporting Chorus). “You guys make a pretty good photo op,” he told them. …

…The above are mostly offenses against good taste, but they are, cumulatively, revealing. And they help explain why, whenever the president’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin agrees with David Gergen’s assessment of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.

…The media did not miss the way the Chinese leadership handled Obama. Even such a purveyor of the conventional wisdom as David Gergen wrote on CNN.com to compare Obama’s poor performance with that of another young and inexperienced president, John F. Kennedy, whose disastrous 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Russians the impression that the Americans didn’t know what they were doing and that they could be pushed around. That led to the nearly catastrophic showdown over missiles in Cuba a year later. …

…Gergen is right. Though the most embarrassing moment of the trip was Obama’s obsequious deep bow to the Japanese emperor — which was duly noted by American bloggers and dismissed by the liberal punditry as well as by the White House — the real damage done to the national interest by Obama’s travels is the way he has come across to America’s rivals and foes, not to our allies. The Chinese, like the Iranians and the Russians, all think they have the measure of Barack Obama. He strikes them as a weak man more interested in trying to please and to evoke applause than in standing up for principles such as human rights or even the danger of nuclear proliferation. The occasional tough talk that has come from Obama has been undermined by his relentless devotion to engagement, which has convinced these countries that he is a leader to be trifled with. That is the only explanation for the disrespect that the Iranians have shown to his diplomatic outreach as well as for the harsh way in which the Chinese demonstrated their disdain for the president.

Gergen believes that Obama must treat this as a moment for a “wake up call” to revive his foreign policy. “For the President, the challenge is whether he will start approaching international affairs with a greater measure of toughness, standing up more firmly and assertively for American interests.”

We will soon see whether Obama is capable of doing that or whether his blind faith in engagement as well as his unbounded desire for adulation will lead to similar or worse fiascoes in the future. The problem, as the Kennedy example highlights, is that the country’s margin for error on dangerous foreign-policy issues is limited. Obama’s ongoing failure to act to halt Iran’s nuclear program is evidence of the price the country is paying for the president’s on-the-job education. … But Obama’s weakness, a fault rooted deeply in his inexperience in foreign affairs as well as in his overweening vanity, has become a major liability for the United States, the price of which has yet to be fully assessed.

America in the World shows the November 21st 2009 cover of the Spectator, UK showing the empty suit in the oval office, with the title “The Worst Kind of Ally” and posted this quote from Con Coughlin’s article:

“The astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain has been made clear by his deliberations over the Afghan issue. As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan — a decision which will fundamentally affect the scope of the mission — Britain is reduced to guesswork. The White House does not even pretend to portray this as a joint decision. It is a diplomatic cold-shouldering that stands in contrast not just to the Blair–Bush era, but to the togetherness of the soldiers on the ground… There will, though, inevitably come a time when Obama discovers who America’s true friends really are. Sooner or later he will have to deal with the considerably more taxing issues of Islamist militancy, rogue nuclear states and other tangible threats to the West’s security. At that point, Obama will discover a simple but essential truth. The world divides between those who support American values of freedom and democracy, and those who seek to destroy them. Few nations have been more committed to supporting those values with both blood and treasure than Britain. This country, and especially those British troops fighting alongside their American counterparts, deserve far better than this president’s disregard.”

President Obama did not want KSM tried by military tribunal. For that reason alone, we now have an upcoming trial that is illogical in many respects, writes Charles Krauthammer.

…What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning. …

…What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times? …

…Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadist is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform — everything but your own blog.

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Barack Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice. …

On his blog, Roger Simon posts a criticism of Obamacare from the Dean of Harvard Medical School.

Jeffrey S. Flier – the dean of Harvard Med – has thrown a haymaker at Obamacare in today’s WSJ – Health ‘Debate’ Deserves a Failing Grade:

“In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.”

Game, set, match, tournament. But, hey, it’s only the Dean of Harvard Med. What would he know compared to such great clinicians as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? This would be magnificent black comedy were it not our lives and – more importantly – those of our children that were hanging in the balance. The rush to enact this self-serving legislation is pretty much the most disgraceful US governmental act of my lifetime …

In the WSJ, we have Dean Flier’s full article.

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade. …

…Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform. …

…So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

John Stossel points out that some states have created their fiscal troubles by increased spending. He then discusses the hidden taxes that will be assessed by some states to make up for their lack of fiscal responsibility.

…Last week on “The O’Reilly Factor” , we talked about California’s and New York’s enormous budget deficits and planned tax increases. Those states would have big surpluses had they just grown their governments in pace with inflation. But of course they didn’t. Now the politicians act like their current deficits are something imposed on them by the recession.

But that’s nonsense. They created the problem with their reckless spending.

Let’s look at the particulars. Had the government of New York state grown at the rate of population and inflation over the past 10 years, it would have a $14 billion surplus today. Instead, spending grew at twice the rate of inflation. So New York has a $3 billion deficit. …

…Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government. We blame merchants, not our legislators, for the high price of gasoline, liquor, cigarettes and phone calls, but the money goes to the political thieves. …

… It reminds me of Walter Williams’ riff: “Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don’t expect you to thank them for it.”

Taxes, even counting hidden taxes, are not the real measure of what the thieves take. The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is the spending level. …

David Harsanyi comments on the MSM attack coverage of Sarah Palin.

…There’s nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin’s book, “Going Rogue” (HarperCollins, November 2009) for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking was applied to President Barack Obama’s two self-aggrandizing tomes — or even the health care or cap and trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to non-existent congressional districts — which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one’s nose demands a constant struggle, I guess. …

…Newsweek must have a point. Palin is a populist dead end. “Just over half of Americans,” a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, “have an unfavorable opinion” of Palin overall, “as many say they wouldn’t consider supporting her for president and more — six in 10 — see her as unqualified for the job.”

Similarly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation recently found that 48 percent disapprove of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a woman busy writing policy that affects all of us. …

Now it’s time for some entertainment. In a post on The Corner, John Miller tells us about the little ferry that could. Less than 20 miles from the DC beltway there is a small privately owned ferry service with one craft named the Gen. Jubal A. Early. Early attacked Washington in July 1864, and Lincoln observed the fighting from Fort Stevens which is located just south of the site of Walter Reed Medical Center. Imagine if Early had succeeded; New Yorkers might need visas to enter Virginia. We need Gen. Early to come out of internment.

It has been a goal of mine for some years to cross the Potomac River at White’s Ferry — the river’s last remaining ferry crossing. I finally had a chance yesterday, when my daughter had a soccer game in Maryland. The ferry wasn’t a novelty; it was actually the quickest and most convenient way to travel between Virginia and Maryland, given where we had to go.

And it felt good to support this family-owned throwback enterprise, which has gotten into scraps with federal government. Three years ago, the Coast Guard tried to shut down White’s Ferry for having an unlicensed operater on the ferry. You know, because the Coast Guard doesn’t have more pressing things to do. The ferry’s 86-year-old owner, Edwin Brown, was plucky and defiant:

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before they collect any money from me,” Brown, 86, said yesterday, adding that he had made his fortune defending property owners in eminent-domain disputes with the authorities. “I have never had any fear of the government.”

Brown also was shocked that Coast Guard investigators in Baltimore were considering hefty penalties, saying he thought he had worked out a settlement with officers who had visited the ferry’s offices in Dickerson.

“You can’t trust the government,” he said.

To give you a little more background on the ferry, here’s an article from 2006 that Fredrick Kunkle wrote for the Post.

True to its Confederate namesake, the Gen. Jubal A. Early ferryboat yesterday defied orders by the federal government to halt operations because of a licensing dispute and instead kept chugging back and forth across the Potomac River carrying hundreds of commuters.

The penalties risked by the 70-year-old family-run service, known as White’s Ferry, were not trifling, either. U.S. Coast Guard officials said yesterday that investigators were considering seeking criminal charges and fines that could run into the thousands of dollars per trip for allowing an unlicensed mariner to operate the ferry and disobeying an order to terminate a voyage.

But that did not seem to rattle the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, who bought the ferry in 1946 and christened its first wooden barge in honor of the flamboyant cavalry officer whose great-niece was a regular passenger. …

…The controversy could not have alighted on a more peaceful stretch of the Potomac. The river is wide and shallow there — no more than four feet deep on the Maryland side, maybe twice that on the Virginia shore. …

The 87-foot vessel has a ship’s bell, a pilot house, a fire ax, a lifeboat and a grand old silver anchor, but it looks more like a hunk of driveway that has broken loose and floated downstream with a bunch of cars. Each trip takes about 15 minutes, and the round-trip fare is $6. …

What happened to the little ferry that could, you ask? Shannon Sollinger has the denouement in a 2006 Loudoun Times article.

…Capt. Brian Kelley, Coast Guard commander of the Port of Baltimore, met Tuesday morning with the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, at the ramp down to the Potomac just west of Poolesville, Md.

“He found everything to be very pleasing and very satisfactory,” Brown said. “He’s happy the ferry is operating and everything is fine.”

The key word in his fracas with the authorities, Brown said, is “substantial. We were in substantial compliance, and there was never a safety risk of any kind.”

Commander Brian Penoyer said the ferry now is “street legal and safe” and will continue operating. Although the Coast Guard has a history of issues with Brown, Penoyer said, his office has opted to assess fines for a first-time offense. Brown can pay a fine of about $8,000, or appeal the tickets to a Coast Guard hearing officer.

White’s Ferry made the news again in 2008 for a less rebellious reason. Debbi Wilgoren reported the excitement in WaPo.

…The vehicle ferry that crosses the Potomac River between Poolesville and Leesburg became mired in a floating debris field yesterday morning, forcing about two dozen passengers to be removed by smaller boats.

The ferry became stuck in the unusually large amounts of debris flushed into the river by the heavy rain of recent days, according to ferry operators. …

…”The river hadn’t been up like this for months, and there was a lot of stuff piled up along the banks,” said Malcolm Brown, whose family owns and operates the White’s Ferry barge. “Debris is a constant problem on any river, but we had a big mass of trees coming down.”

Montgomery County fire and rescue workers took passengers to shore, leaving about 20 cars aboard as ferry operators cleared branches and logs from the cable that guides the barge across the river. There were no injuries, and drivers got their cars about an hour later. …

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If you’re like Pickerhead, the daily Obama drama is getting tiring. So how about an edition that ignores the current DC mess? We start with John Tierney’s famous NY Times Magazine article on recycling. Then a Mark Steyn send-off for Dominick Dunne, late of Vanity Fair. Next we learn the good news that scallops are making a comeback in Long Island’s Peconic Bay. Dilbert and Dave Barry close things out in the humor section.

Thirteen years ago this June, John Tierney set a NY Times record for irate reader’s letters with a piece he wrote suggesting recycling was a waste. Now that is something to aspire to when contemplating what might be on your tombstone.

…We’re a wicked throwaway society. Plastic packaging and fast-food containers may seem wasteful, but they actually save resources and reduce trash. The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale. Those apples in Dittersdorf’s slide, protected by plastic wrap and foam, are less likely to spoil. The lightweight plastic packaging requires much less energy to manufacture and transport than traditional alternatives like cardboard or paper. Food companies have switched to plastic packaging because they make money by using resources efficiently. A typical McDonald’s discards less than two ounces of garbage for each customer served — less than what’s generated by a typical meal at home.

Plastic packaging is routinely criticized because it doesn’t decay in landfills, but neither does most other packaging, as William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, has discovered from his excavations of landfills. Rathje found that paper, cardboard and other organic materials — while technically biodegradable — tend to remain intact in the airless confines of a landfill. These mummified materials actually use much more landfill space than plastic packaging, which has steadily been getting smaller as manufacturers develop stronger, thinner materials. Juice cartons take up half the landfill space occupied by the glass bottles they replaced; 12 plastic grocery bags fit in the space occupied by one paper bag. …

…”I don’t understand why anyone thinks New York City has a garbage crisis because it can’t handle all its own waste,” says James DeLong, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. “With that kind of logic, you’d have to conclude that New York City has a food crisis because it can’t grow all the vegetables its people need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and ration New Yorkers’ consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there.” Some politicians in other states have threatened to stop the importing of New York’s garbage — it’s an easy way to appeal to some voters’ chauvinism — but in the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would only be depriving their own constituents of jobs and tax revenue.

We’re cursing future generations with our waste. Dittersdorf’s slide showing New Yorkers’ annual garbage output — 15 square blocks, 20 stories high — looked frightening because the trash was sitting, uncompressed, in the middle of the city. But consider a different perspective — a national, long-term perspective. A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. …

…Are reusable cups and plates better than disposables? A ceramic mug may seem a more virtuous choice than a cup made of polystyrene, the foam banned by ecologically conscious local governments. But it takes much more energy to manufacture the mug, and then each washing consumes more energy (not to mention water). According to calculations by Martin Hocking, a chemist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, you would have to use the mug 1,000 times before its energy-consumption-per-use is equal to the cup. (If the mug breaks after your 900th coffee, you would have been better off using 900 polystyrene cups.) A more immediate environmental impact has been demonstrated by studies in restaurants: the average number of bacterial organisms on reusable cups, plates and flatware is 200 times greater than on disposable ones. …

Mark Steyn writes about the life, and coincidental events, of the late Dominick Dunne.

…In 1991 the diminutive scribbler in the owlish glasses and the baggy suit was in Palm Beach covering the rape trial of Ted’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Had he not been there, he would never have heard the tantalizing tidbit that young William had been in the Skakel house in Connecticut on the night in 1975 when Martha Moxley was murdered. Had he not picked up that unfounded bit of gossip, his curiosity might not have been awakened and he might never have written a fictionalized account of the case, A Season In Purgatory, a roman à clef compressing three generations of Kennedy gossip into one book. Had his novel not reactivated interest in the murder, he might not have had leaked to him a copy of a private investigator’s report on Michael Skakel. Had he not been in court in Los Angeles in 1995 when O.J.’s dream team played the “race card” crudely but effectively against Mark Fuhrman, he might not have felt so sorry for the LAPD detective that he struck up a friendship and forwarded the Skakel investigator’s leaked report. Had Fuhrman not used the Skakel report to write a damning book on the Moxley case, the state of Connecticut might never have reopened it and put Michael Skakel on trial. It was a very slender thread that led to a rare Kennedy conviction. “It is a fact of my life that coincidences happen to me,” says the narrator in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. For Dunne, the greatest coincidence was as stark as a gravestone: Martha Moxley was killed on the same date—Oct. 30—as his own daughter. …

…Dunne was a stage manager on The Howdy Doody Show and a producer of C-list movies before a chance encounter with Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown led to his reinvention as a writer. The preoccupations of the last half of his adult life are summed up in the title of another book, An Inconvenient Woman, a thinly disguised fictionalization of Alfred Bloomingdale’s murdered mistress Vicki Morgan. In both his crime reporting and his novels, there’s usually a powerful man and an “inconvenient woman”—sure, she’s hot, she’s fun, she’s cute, but there comes a point when she’s an inconvenience. And then you lawyer up and make the inconvenience go away. That’s what Kennedys do, with both the passing fancies—the waitresses, the campaign cuties, the gal next door—and with their routinely “annulled” first marriages. That’s what Ted did with Joan, the wife he drove to alcoholism. That’s what he did with Mary Jo, swimming up from the depths of that Chappaquiddick pond and leaving her down there pressed up against a shrinking air pocket waiting for the rescue team he never called. Nice girl, but inconvenient. So he got back to the hotel, worked the phones, called in the family fixers, squared the local authorities, started the speechwriters working on the statement.

Dominick Dunne couldn’t go along with the “dream teams” and the rest of the flim-flam, not after the murderer of his 22-year- old daughter got a three-year sentence. So he was there for the “inconvenient women,” all the way to his last big trial, when Phil Spector became the latest big shot to date a gal to death. Poor Lana Clarkson wasn’t a “legend” or a “troubled genius,” like Phil, just a one-time B-movie queen who wound up in a B-movie ending. …

…An assistant of mine loved his fiction. “This is the way airport novels should be,” she said. Which is a good way of putting it. Any competent hack can do the brand names and the restaurants and the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous stuff, but Dunne understood the subtler currents coursing just below the surface. He liked the parties and the gossip and the name-dropping; the movie stars and the dispossessed Euro-princelings and the Kennedy cousins. He was of them, but not one of them, not entirely. And so, notwithstanding who got top billing, there was a kind of symmetry in his and Ted Kennedy’s all but simultaneous expiry: a man who disposed of inconvenient women, and a man who ensured they weren’t forgotten. …

In the NY Times, Dindya Bhanoo reports on the scallop restoration effort and the mysterious brown tide that had decimated the bivalve population.

…The recovery resulted partly from dedicated efforts by scientists to rebuild the scallop population, said Stephen Tettelbach, a professor of biology at Long Island University.

Dr. Tettelbach is in the fifth year of a five-year, $2.3 million bay scallop restoration project, financed by Suffolk County, that has released nearly five million scallops into Peconic Bay waters. Working with researchers from Cornell Cooperative Extension — a university outreach group — and the State University at Stony Brook, Dr. Tettelbach has helped create densely packed scallop sanctuaries, primarily in Orient Harbor, Hallock Bay and Flanders Bay. …

…In a separate effort, the Nature Conservancy in New York has released hundreds of thousands of baby scallops into the Peconic Bay since 2002.

Yet, considerable mystery still surrounds the onset and the waning of brown tide, said Christopher J. Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook who studies toxic algae.

Scientists know that the toxins in brown tide, which tints the water a coffee brown, slow the rhythmic movements of scallop gills and prevent feeding. Brown tide also blocks sunlight from reaching the bay’s bottom, where eelgrass beds grow and scallops nest.

…“We know if a water body is more likely to get brown tide,” Dr. Gobler said. “But it can also break suddenly, and we have no idea why.” …

Dilbert’s Scott Adams has a hilarious story. Here’s the warm-up.

Now that I’m married, one of the questions I fear the most is “Can you look in the X and see if you can find the Y?” Oh, I try. But my wife refuses to learn that I will never succeed.

X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the fridge, or the “good pillow” hiding in the bedroom, or the yellow folder hiding in the kitchen. There are a variety of reasons I will not succeed in finding the desired item. About 25% of the time the item is not in the room, or pile, or container where it should be. Another 25% of the time the item is inadequately described, as in “the light brown socks in the drawer with the other brown socks, but not camel colored or reddish brown, and not the old ones.”

But the biggest reason for my seek-and-find failures can be attributed to Transdimensional Materialization Phenomena (TMP). This involves items not being where they belong when I look for them, but tunneling through a wormhole and materializing right where they belong when my wife looks in the same place two minutes later. Apparently this phenomenon is triggered by just the right coupling of exasperation and sarcasm. …

Parents of young children, in particular, will appreciate stories of theme birthday parties gone wild. Dave Barry tells an amusing tale.

Things are tense in our house. Our daughter is about to turn 4, which means we have to hold a birthday party, which means my wife is, at the moment, insane.

Like many moms, my wife believes that a child’s birthday party requires as much planning as a lunar landing — more, actually, because you have to hire a clown. Serious moms plan birthday parties months in advance, choosing a theme …and relentlessly incorporate this theme in every element of the party, including invitations, decorations, music, games, craft projects, snacks, cake, entertainment, favors, little gift bags for the favors, ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, name tags for the ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, and on and on until the mom has lost all touch with human reality. If you want proof, go to one of the Internet sites devoted to birthday planning, such as birthdaypartyideas.com, where moms report, in detail, the deranged lengths to which they have gone to stage birthday parties for small children. They sound like this:

“Our theme for Meghan’s third birthday was `The Enchanted Fairy Forest.’ To create a `forest’ in the family room, I made full-size `trees’ out of fiberglass, which I painted brown and festooned with 17,000 `leaves’ I cut by hand from green felt, accented with live squirrels that I caught using a galvanized-steel trap baited with Peter Pan creamy peanut butter. For the `forest floor,’ I brought in four tons of mulch with a Lawn Boy yard tractor. For the `sky,’ I used the actual sky, which was visible because I removed the ceiling and roof with a chainsaw, which is when my husband, Ed, left me, but the overall effect was well worth it.”

You think I’m exaggerating, but that’s only because you haven’t browsed “birthdaypartyideas.com.”

It would be different if dads planned birthday parties. First off, the party would be about a month after the child’s actual birthday, which is when Dad would remember it. Dad’s party theme would be “delivery pizza,” which would also serve as the cake, the craft project and the party favor. The entertainment would be pulling Dad’s finger. The kids would have just as much fun. …

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Today’s themes are jobs and recovery. We start with Peter Schiff, then add Ed Morrissey, IBD editors, Nouriel Roubini, James Pethokoukis, and Robert Samuelson. Daniel Gross was the one outlier who said job growth will start soon. So he’s here too. Fair and (somewhat) balanced, you decide.

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff explains why Obama’s economic policies are not creating jobs.

…Obama is pursuing, with unprecedented vigor, the same policies that have for decades undermined our industrial base and yoked us to an unsustainable consumer/credit driven economy. This doubling down on Washington’s past failures is destroying jobs at an alarming rate. Today we learned that the September trade deficit surged by 18.2%, the largest gain in ten years. Much of the deficit resulted from Americans spending Cash-for-Clunkers stimulus money on imported cars – or “American” cars loaded to the sunroof with imported parts. In exchange for more domestic debt, we have succeeded only in creating foreign jobs. …

…As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. …

…If profit opportunities exist, jobs will be created. Otherwise, they will not. Of course, anything the government does to raise the cost of employment, such as a higher minimum wage, mandated heath care, or greater regulatory burdens, not only prevents new jobs from being created but also causes many that already exist to be destroyed. Anything that diminishes the profit potential of extra hiring will diminish the number of job opportunities that are created. Also, since it is after-tax profits against which employers measure risk, the higher the marginal rate of income tax, the less likely employers will be able to hire. …

In Hot Air, Ed Morrissey comments on the last month’s deficit that is even higher than predicted. The deficit for the first month of the fiscal year was $176.36. Eleven more months like that we’ll have a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit; just about $6 billion a day.

What better way to kick off Barack Obama’s first full budget year as President than with a deficit that exceeded the White House’s own projections as well as analysts’ expectations?  The federal government busted the budget worse than last October by $20 billion with a deficit of $176.36 billion for the month.  That used to be considered a decent deficit target … for an entire year…

…Higher deficits mean more borrowing.  More borrowing means more debt service.  As deficits continue to rise, the federal government will have to direct more and more of its revenues to paying the interest on the accumulated debt.  In September, that came to over $17 billion — just for the interest, not for principle reduction.  Investors Business Daily warns that Obama’s spending spree will eventually force Washington to spend 40% of its revenues on debt service…

…Obama now says he wants to attack the deficit, but without serious spending cuts and reduction in the size of government, any such reductions would have to rely on heavier taxation — which would kill the economy, reduce federal revenues, and put us even further behind on debt reduction.  The only way to fix the problem is to dismantle Leviathan, and unfortunately Obama is headed in the opposite direction.

Call off the jobs summit! The IBD Editorial board has a simple plan to create jobs.

…This isn’t rocket science. Any business owner, entrepreneur or manager can tell you that job creation requires new businesses, new investment in plant and equipment, and economic policies conducive to both….

…Job creation closely tracks investment in plants and equipment. So anything the government does to remove barriers to business investment — whether by cutting regulations, slashing taxes or reducing government spending — will lead to more jobs.

Of particular importance are small businesses, which — as a new report from the Kauffman Foundation noted — created virtually all the new jobs from 1980 to 2005.

Today, small firms suffer the most damage from congressional incompetence. The newly passed health care bill, for example, slaps families with more than $500,000 in income with an added 5.4% tax. But, according to Congress’ Joint Tax Committee, a third of this will be paid by small, family-owned businesses. …

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Nouriel Roubini says there are two economies and the larger one is still suffering.

While the United States recently reported 3.5 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the most severe recession since the Great Depression is over, the American economy is actually much weaker than official data suggest. In fact, official measures of GDP may grossly overstate growth in the economy, as they don’t capture the fact that business sentiment among small firms is abysmal and their output is still falling sharply. Properly corrected for this, third-quarter GDP may have been 2 per cent rather than 3.5 per cent.

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Consider the following facts. While America’s official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million. …

In The Street.com, Doug Kass does a take-off of an SNL skit in a piece titled; “What Recovery!?!”

Of course, this is a takeoff from “Saturday Night Live’s” Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. If you are not familiar with their “SNL” schtick during their Weekend Updates, here are a few of their Really!?! segments.

Really, the economy is recovering? Really, economists?

I mean, really!?! …

…And, really, an economic recovery without job growth? According to the household survey, nearly 600,000 jobs were lost last month, and 15.7 million Americans are out of work. Really!?!

The credit mechanisms of the shadow-banking system and the securitization market remain adrift, and banks aren’t lending. An economic recovery without credit? Really!?!

How about the state and local governments that have provided an anchor to growth in previous economic periods? Only two states have balanced budgets, and New York is letting out prisoners early to save money. Really!?!  …

In Reuters, James Pethokoukis reviews a report from economist David Rosenberg, who says that unemployment will get worse.

Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, thinks the unemployment rate is going to at least 12 percent, maybe even 13 percent. Optimists, Rosenberg explains, underestimate the incredible damage done to the labor market during this downturn. And even before this downturn, the economy was not generating jobs in huge numbers. If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate.  I think you would also be talking about the ise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

So here is what I gleaned from Rosenberg’s latest report (bold is mine):

2. During this two-year recession, employment has declined a record 8 million. Even in percent terms, this is a record in the post-WWII experience.

10. But when we do start to see the economic clouds part in a more decisive fashion, what are employers likely to do first? Well, naturally they will begin to boost the workweek and just getting back to pre-recession levels would be the same as hiring more than two million people. Then there are the record number of people who got furloughed into part-time work and again, they total over nine million, and these folks are not counted as unemployed even if they are working considerably fewer days than they were before the credit crunch began.

12. After all, the recession ended in November 2001 with an unemployment rate at 5.5% and yet the unemployment rate did not peak until June 2003, at 6.3%. The recession ended in March 1991 when the jobless rate was 6.8% and it did not peak until June 1992, at 7.8%. In both cases, the unemployment rate peaked well more than a year after the recession technically ended. The 2001 cycle was a tech capital stock deflation; the 1991 cycle was the Savings & Loan debacle; this past cycle was an asset deflation and credit collapse of epic proportions. And economists think that the unemployment rate is in the process of cresting now? Just remember it is the same consensus community that predicted at the beginning of 2008 that the jobless rate would peak out below 6% this cycle.

Pethokoukis also blogs on Obamacare.

…It turns out the Chinese are curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Nothing happening in Washington today should give Beijing any comfort or confidence about what may happen tomorrow. Healthcare reform was originally promoted as a way to “bend the curve” on escalating entitlement costs, the major part of which is financing Medicare and Medicaid. That is looking more and more like an overpromise that can’t be delivered. …

In WaPo, Robert Samuelson discusses the hypocrisy of forcing Obamacare on the nation during such a serious recession.

There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called “health-care reform.” Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it’s widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.

So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system — which Congress is halfway toward enacting — would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he’s doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both. …

…Equally misleading, Obama’s top economic advisers assert that the present proposals would slow the growth of overall national health spending. Outside studies disagree. Three studies (two by the consulting firm the Lewin Group for the Peterson Foundation and one by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency) conclude that various congressional plans would increase national health spending compared with the effect of no legislation. The studies variously estimate that the extra spending, over the next decade, would be $750 billion, $525 billion and $114 billion. The reasoning: Greater use of the health-care system by the newly insured would overwhelm cost-saving measures (bundled payments, comparative effectiveness research, tort reform), which are either weak or experimental. …

With a different take on the economy, Daniel Gross, in Slate, thinks that unemployment will improve soon. Gross is here often, so we thought we should include his job comments.

…But some recent data points, and an understanding of the behavior of companies at different phases of the business cycle, suggest we’ll have job creation sooner rather than later.

Before things get better, they have to get worse more slowly. That’s already happening. After the credit meltdown, companies prepared for Armageddon by hacking jobs indiscriminately. Between November 2008 and April 2009, employers reduced payrolls by 645,000 per month. But in October, BLS reported that the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, and it revised down the job loss figures for August and September. First-time unemployment claims are falling.

Other data give more reason to hope. In the third quarter, productivity—econospeak for companies doing more work with the same amount of labor—rose at a 9.5 percent annual rate. We’ve just witnessed the fastest two-quarter productivity surge since the first year of the Kennedy administration. Economists can read these omens the way Roman priests read chicken entrails. And here’s one of their explanations: Just as investors and businesspeople don’t believe things could ever go wrong at the peak of the boom, they have difficulty imagining things can get better at the trough of the bust. And so they respond to rising demand not by hiring new employees but by coaxing existing employees to work harder. But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth. “If you look at economies over many centuries, you can’t grow productivity for 7 or 9 percent for more than two or three quarters,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute, whose leading employment indicators are looking up. “At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work.” Should the economy expand in the fourth quarter at the same 3.5 percent annual rate it did in the third quarter—as it shows every sign of doing—companies won’t have any choice but to hire, says Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners. “There’s an outside chance we could see job growth by the end of the year.” …

The Economist reports on the increase in college enrollment.

A business that jacks up its prices during a recession is usually asking to lose customers. Not so America’s colleges, which are simultaneously raising tuition fees and experiencing record levels of enrolment. The Technical College System of Georgia, for instance, whose 28 campuses teach everything from power-line maintenance to dental hygiene, has sharply raised its fees, yet the number of students is up 24% from a year earlier. Campus parking lots are so full that “we got them parking in cow pastures,” says a spokesman.

Across the country, college enrolment rates are at an all-time high. In October 41% of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in either two-year colleges (which specialise in vocational training) or four-year colleges (which grant undergraduate degrees) or higher, up from 39% a year earlier. Yet tuition fees have risen by an average of 4-7%.

The economy is the most immediate culprit. The unemployment rate hit 10.2% in October, up sharply from 9.8% in September, the first time it has reached double digits since 1983. Among 16-to-24-year-olds, it was a dismal 19.1%. Faced with the worst job prospects in a generation, many young people are deciding to go to college instead. …

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Yesterday it was Afghan force levels. Today the KSM trial in New York City.

The decision to prosecute terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through the US court system is being criticized for the national security threat it poses, the damage to intelligence and intelligence-gathering, and the security threat for New York and those involved in the trial. We hear from a number of commentators on these topics, and on the inefficiency and illogical disruption of the military prosecutorial process already started, as well as the political ideology and poor judgment by Obama and Holder that led to this.

Investor’s Business Daily starts a five part series on the housing crisis written by Thomas Sowell.

And the cartoonists go crazy with Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan.

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions about the upcoming terrorist trial.

The Obama administration is pursuing the prosecution of the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York. In light of this astonishing decision, I was reminded by a friend that, according to the New York Times, Sheikh Mohammed met his captors with cocky defiance at first, telling one veteran CIA officer that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer. It looks as though Sheikh Mohammed has seen his defiance vindicated. He has now found an administration more amenable to his view of justice than was the previous one. The Holderization of American justice continues. And I suspect that there will be bad consequences all around for this action.

Bill Kristol comments on Holder’s lack of judgment regarding several aspects of the upcoming trial.

Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York will be “truly the trial of the century.”

It’s unbelievable that the attorney general would use that phrase in the course of justifying his decision. …

…Leave aside all the practical problems with trying KSM and his henchmen in a civilian court. Doesn’t Eric Holder realize he’s inviting a circus-like “juicy tabloid trial” for men who have the blood of thousands of Americans on their hands? Does he really think such a trial will contribute to “fairness and justice,” as he claims? Does he think military tribunals aren’t fair and just? And did it never occur to him to ask whether giving the terrorists the chance to create a tabloid spectacle is an appropriate way to honor our dead and those who continue to fight the jihadists?

I’m very doubtful a “trial of the century” will serve the cause of fairness and justice. I’m certain it won’t help the cause of victory.

Andy McCarthy comments that Obama’s and Holder’s political agenda is more important to them than national security. He gives some background, then discusses the trial.

…Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today. …

…So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Turns out David Paterson, NY Governor, also thinks it’s a terrible decision.

Gov. David Paterson openly criticized the White House on Monday, saying he thought it was a terrible idea to move alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists to New York for trial.

“This is not a decision that I would have made. I think terrorism isn’t just attack, it’s anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country,” he said.

Paterson’s comments break with Democrats, who generally support the President’s decision.

“Our country was attacked on its own soil on September 11, 2001 and New York was very much the epicenter of that attack. Over 2,700 lives were lost,” he said. “It’s very painful. We’re still having trouble getting over it. We still have been unable to rebuild that site and having those terrorists so close to the attack is gonna be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers.”

Paterson also said that the White House warned him six months ago this very situation would happen. …

Jennifer Rubin joins in the condemnation. She includes a statement from Senator Lieberman expressing his disapproval.

Pete, the decision to transport Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the U.S. to be tried in an Article III court, presumably with the same rights as common American criminals, is shocking and entirely unnecessary. I would submit that someone in the Obama administration recognizes this. As pointed out to me today by a congressman infuriated by the decision, the president is out of the country. Congress is not in session. It’s a Friday. The ultimate bad-news dump. In this context, it suggests not only a queasy awareness that the American people won’t like this but also, frankly, political cowardice. This is a major decision with long-term consequences. If the president believes what he is doing is right, he should exercise leadership and explain it to the American people. Himself.

But, again, the decision itself is utterly unnecessary. As Sen. Joe Lieberman has pointed out, we have a military-tribunal system designed for precisely these cases. His statement reminded us:

“The military commission system recently signed into law by the President as part of the National Defense Authorization Act provides standards of due process and fairness that fully comply with the requirements established by the Supreme Court and the Geneva Conventions. Earlier this year, when passing the National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate also passed language expressing its clear intent that military commissions rather than civilian courts in the U.S. are the appropriate forum for the trial of these alleged terrorists. I share the views of more than 140 family members of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks who recently wrote to the Senate urging that the individuals charged with responsibility for those attacks should be tried by military commission rather than in civilian courts in the United States: It is inconceivable that we would bring these alleged terrorists back to New York for trial, to the scene of the carnage they created eight years ago, and give them a platform to mock the suffering of their victims and the victims’ families, and rally their followers to continue waging jihad against America.”

And let’s recall how we got here. An informed legal guru observes that we decided to prosecute KSM in a military commission in part because past trials (e.g., those of the “Blind Sheikh” and Ramzi Yousef) may have compromised intelligence. So now we’ve gone back to the very system that, for legitimate national-security reasons, we had abandoned. …

Writing in WSJ, John Yoo has an excellent article on KSM’s background, how the intelligence information from the trial will be used by Al Qaeda, and the military commission option designed to handle such cases.

…Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the “blind Sheikh”), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be. …

In the American Spectator, Philip Klein writes about the security issues that former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted in a talk. Mukasey was the judge in the trial from the first World Trade Center attack.

…There would also be tremendous security issues involved with making sure that courthouses, jails, the judge and jury, were all safe.

“It would take a whole lot more credulousness than I have available to be optimistic about the outcome of this latest experiment,” Mukasey said at the conclusion of his formal remarks.

During a question and answer session that followed, Mukasey was asked if he felt the jails in New York were secure enough to make sure terrorists would not escape, but he said that wasn’t really the issue.

“If you ask the wrong question, you’re sure to get the wrong answer,” Mukasey responded. “Of course it’s secure. They’re not going to escape. The question is not whether they’re going to escape, the question is whether not only that facility, but the city at large will then become the focus for mischief in the form of murder by adherents of KSM, whether this raises the odds that it will. And I would suggest to you that it raises them very high. It is also whether the proceeding, even assuming that it goes forward within the lifetime of anybody in this room, is one where confidential information is able to be kept confidential, and a trial is able to proceed in an orderly way.”

He later added that, “to the extent that they are within prisons, they are a threat there as well. Any of these people would be a virtually totemic figure in a prison.” He argued that “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s success in challenging his solitary confinement shows that there’s no guarantee that convicted terrorists would stay isolated from the rest of the prison population. …

Rachel Adams, in a Weekly Standard blog, posts on Holder’s arrogance and hypocrisy.

Though it is a piece of superficiality worthy of People magazine, the Washington Post’s account of the process by which Eric Holder came to make his decision to try war criminals in federal court is a remarkable–if inadvertent–revelation of just how much, despite their vastly disparate backgrounds, the attorney general resembles his coolly remote boss, the president. …

“…But I think if people will, in a neutral and detached way, look at the decision that I have made today, understand the reasons why I made those decisions, and try to do something that’s rare in Washington–leave the politics out of it and focus on what’s in the best interest of this country–I think the criticism will be relatively muted.”

And there you have it. The dispassion, the self-reverence, the blindness of the man, are marvelous to behold, and so perfectly reflect the president he so perfectly serves. “Neutral and detached” people shall “understand the reasons why” he made those decisions, shall see he has left “the politics out of it,” and shall recognize what’s right–something the rest of us, benighted and bellicose souls that we are, have never managed to do with respect to the disposition of those committing mass murders of Americans in their ongoing war against our civilization.

Investor’s Business Daily hosts a five-part series on housing from one of our favorites, Thomas Sowell. Today Sowell discusses how government intervention drove the housing bubble.

…In reality, government agencies not only approved the more lax standards for mortgage loan applicants, government officials were in fact the driving force behind the loosening of mortgage loan requirements.

Members of Congress from both political parties have urged federal regulatory agencies to press banks and other lenders to lower mortgage loan requirements, and have passed legislation to that end and to subsidize or guarantee loans made under lowered standards. …

…Despite the widespread assumption that government intervention is the key to making housing affordable to people of moderate or low incomes, history shows that it has been precisely in the times and places where government intervention has been greatest that housing costs have been both highest in absolute terms and have taken a larger share of the average income.

This is true whether we compare different places at the same time or different time periods with one another. If we look back to the beginning of the 20th century, when government played a much smaller role in the housing market and there were far fewer restrictions on building, the average American’s housing costs were a smaller share of consumer expenditures than at the end of that century. …

In the Times, UK, Giles Whittell may be left of center, but he sees the big picture: Obamacare is not about health care; it’s about power.

…Deep down, Barack Obama believes it’s his turn. He ran for President promising change, and won. “Change” could mean anything to anyone. That was its chief merit as a slogan. But this Administration believes in its soul that the many meanings of the word should include a willingness to expand the role of the State itself if nothing else works. On economic management that meant taking controlling stakes in banks and car giants to stop them failing. On healthcare, it means proving that the Federal Government can move into running a nationwide low-cost insurance programme, and not screw it up.

My father-in-law believes a screw-up is inevitable. For his generation of Eisenhower Republicans it is axiomatic that anything the private sector can do, the public sector can do only worse. Dick Armey and the army of Tea Party activists that he informally leads go much farther. They call the slightest expansion of the State a step towards Marxism. They say so politely, seriously, despairingly, on battle buses and in town halls across the country, and it is a great mistake to doubt their sincerity. …

…The insurgents also smell blood. As Mr Armey said, this is about power and political control. Mr Obama has staked his presidency on showing that he can win reforms that eluded Mr Clinton in 1994 and generations before that. He has majorities in both houses. Even the legal tussle for a disputed Minnesota Senate seat went the Democrats’ way, adding a self-important comedian to their caucus in the upper house and giving them, in principle, a filibuster-proof majority. Yet the President seems unable to use it. …

…The Tea Party insurgency has blunted the health crusade from the Right. Democratic infighting over tax-funded abortions may do the same from the Left. Slippage deep into next year is entirely possible. So is complete failure, and if Mr Obama fails on healthcare what remains of the bubble of hope he created in his 2008 campaign will deflate faster than a blood pressure cuff in an overpriced private hospital. He will be, at best, a Clinton facsimile; at worst another Carter, undone by his own naivety and shorn of his unused majorities in next year’s mid-terms. …

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Today we explore at length the decision making process regarding force levels in Afghanistan. This foolishness has taken so long, card carrying liberals like David Broder and Doyle McManus are fed up. We elected this sophomoric president and now we watch as he apparently thinks there is some perfect decision. There isn’t. There are only less bad choices. The important thing is we make sure no country allows al-Qaeda to set up shop again.

We start with an illustration by Gary Schmitt in American.com who notes that after the 9/11 attack we asked Afghanistan to turn over bin Laden. (Remember Bush; “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”) They refused. So on October 7th we started airstrikes and on November 14th Kabul fell to our forces. That took 64 days. Obama got McChrystal’s request August 30th. That was 78 days ago; and six or seven years since Obama and the Dems began telling us we were ignoring the war of necessity in Afghanistan. Makes you long for ”the Decider.”

Sarah Palin’s book is upon us. Telegraph, UK’s Toby Harnden, who has recently become a favorite, has amusing and perceptive thoughts about her future role.

Obama wants to be the anti-Bush president. Unfortunately Obama is succeeding in one instance, as evidenced by Gary Schmitt’s post in the American.com.

A friend from overseas emailed me to note that it was a span of 65 days between when the World Trade Center towers fell in New York on 9/11 and Kabul fell to American and coalition forces on 11/14. And between the attacks on 9/11 and the start of airstrikes against Kabul on 10/7, less than a month. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of American and allied forces in Afghanistan, delivered his Afghanistan strategy to President Obama on 8/30 this year and President Obama has yet to make a decision. That’s 73 days and counting. Maybe there is something to being “the decider” after all.

Jennifer Rubin comments on the news that the ambassador to Afghanistan is against troop buildup, and Obama is giving this some thought.

Are we back to square one, or is someone in the Obami camp simply trying to gum up the works? Maybe the president would like some more research. Maybe another round of meetings. Who knows? The process seems to have taken on a life of its own, and the president appears unwilling to make a decision, any decision.

Certainly even the most die-hard defenders of the president must be appalled. This is no way to run a war. We are close to a decision. No we aren’t. Gen. Stanley McChrystal will get his men. Oh, maybe not. It is hard to recall a more excruciating decision-making process.

And yet we are told, “The White House has chafed under criticism from Republicans and some outside critics that Obama is dragging his feet to make a decision.” They seem blissfully unaware that the Obami are becoming a ludicrous spectacle, a cringe-inducing display of equivocation. So maybe they’ll take a few more weeks. Consider some more options. Have some more meetings. And what about the troops who are in the field, week after week, awaiting a strategy and support? Oh yes, them. Well, the president can’t be rushed.

NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s comments about Afghanistan.

…And the other uncertainty is about Obama’s commitment himself. The issue is: If he takes this long, and if he gives all these excuses — which you talked about just a moment ago, about how we may not have a partner in Afghanistan, we may not have a partner in Pakistan — you’re expressing doubts about our allies in the region, and you’re implying that somehow this is a kind of social work, that the reason that we’re at war is to bolster these allies.

It’s protection of the American homeland. It’s what Petraeus had talked about — keeping out al-Qaeda and preventing the regrouping of al-Qaeda and their allies. It’s our war, and it’s in the name of our security.

If the president expresses all of this uncertainty and takes this long in agonizing, you got to wonder, is his heart in it? He has to make a speech after his decision to demonstrate that he really is committed to success in this, because all of this delay and these excuses about Afghan/Pakistani partners gives the impression of an administration that will be looking for an excuse of a certain point of withdrawing or pulling back.

In Contentions, Max Boot had this reaction to the possibility of more extended reviews.

This quote from an unnamed White House official, reported in today’s New York Times, filled me with dread:

“I’m not saying that we’ll be in a perpetual state of review, but the time the president has taken so far should signal to people that he will not hesitate to take a hard look at things and question assumptions if things are not moving in the right direction,” a senior White House official said.

Please, please say it ain’t so — that we won’t see another review like the present one for a long, long time. Bad enough that the White House has been ostentatiously and publicly reviewing all options in Afghanistan since August — for the second time this year! — while efforts to win the war are effectively put on hold. Worse is the possibility that we could see another such process as soon as next year.

Every president reacts, I suppose, to the perceived mistakes of his predecessors. George W. Bush thought that Bill Clinton was too professorial and vowed not to hold any of the aimless, grad-school-type chat sessions that were a hallmark of the Clinton decision-making process. Bush styled himself as the decider-in-chief and placed a premium on reaching decisions with a minimum of hand-wringing or second thoughts. The result was, as we know, some terrible decisions — especially in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. So now Obama, reacting to what he perceives as the lack of thought and debate that characterized decision-making in the Bush White House, is going too far in the other direction by publicizing every permutation of his Afghanistan thought process, and letting his subordinates suggest that the second-guessing and questioning will never stop.

Obviously it’s a good thing to be thoughtful and reflective and to take all factors into account before reaching a decision. But at some point the commander in chief has to say, “Enough! I’ve reached my decision, and now I’m going to give my commanders time and room to carry out the plan.” President Obama has not yet reached that point, and as the quote from his unnamed aide suggests, he may never reach that point. If he doesn’t, he will be doing terrible damage to our war effort. Success in war requires determination and will above all — even more than resources. If the commander in chief does not convey the determination to prevail, no matter what setbacks may arise, then the commitment of extra resources will not be all that effective because our enemies will be encouraged to think that they can simply wait us out and expect our will to snap at some point not too far in the future.

In the Corner, Rich Lowry thinks that the Procrastinator in Chief needs to decide on the big picture and leave the details to the generals.

At this point, Obama needs to settle for a “dumb” Afghan strategy. He’s clearly trying to be too cute and clever, and micro-managing aspects of the military campaign that are beneath his pay-grade. If he believes success in Afghanistan is important and a counter-insurgency campaign is the best way to achieve it, he should give McChrystal the troops he says he needs (actually, he should probably give him more if possible, to reduce the risk of failure). This business of examining the troop numbers province-by-province, and devising various “off ramps,” and parsing out what troop commitment will best pressure Karzai is a foolish attempt at an impossible exactitude. No plan so finely tuned from on high is going to survive its first contact with reality. Obama needs a “dumb” approach — figure out the basic strategy, resource it, and leave it at that. If it’s a successful strategy, most of the other things will probably follow — the off ramps, the welcome effect on Karzai, etc. This is not to say the implementation of the strategy shouldn’t be savvy and adaptive. But that’s for his generals. Obama just needs to make the simple — if not easy — decision and provide the political leadership to back it up. The world is waiting.

And in another post in Contentions, Peter Wehner makes some important points about the Afghanistan indecision.

…I have not begrudged President Obama the time to carefully think through a decision on Afghanistan — but this is ridiculous. This issue should have been front and center for the administration the moment it was clear Obama won the presidency. He has already presented (in March) his “new” strategy for Afghanistan. The fact that he wants to revisit his decision may be understandable, except for the fact that his foot-dragging is now harming us. Sometimes presidents are forced to make decisions based on external events and pressing outside needs. “The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance,” Henry Kissinger wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Governing the nation does not afford you the luxuries you have when conducting a college seminar.

President Obama not only needs to make a decision soon; once he does, assuming he does, we face the logistical challenges of getting the troops in place. Precious time has already been lost. If after all the time that’s been lost, Obama is now jettisoning all the options he has been presented with, including the McChrystal option, then what we are witnessing is extraordinarily irresponsible. Sometimes you can lose a war by not choosing. And that is the path we may well be on right now, if media reports are correct. …

Jamie Fly also posts about Afghanistan indecision in the Corner, and ends with an e-mail from a veteran.

As a retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant emailed to me after reading one of my Corner posts:

“Our service members are dying and the president is dithering. I have been in the military while a president dithered or failed to make a tough decision, it is eviscerating, and a rot settles in. “Commander in Chief” is not just a fancy title. The president is the ultimate officer and like any poor officer his failure to make tough decisions is seen as a weakness by his NCOs and men. Morale, that most fragile base of any good military unit suffers immediately. When our officers are fearful and indecisive, we become fearful and indecisive.

NCOs find reasons not to patrol or to avoid high-risk areas, Convoys are diverted to avoid possible confrontation, our allies desert us and the advantage is ceded to the enemy.

And this happens quickly, weeks are all that’s left to keep the advantage in Afghanistan. After a certain point in time “mission weariness” begins to settle in and the edge is lost on our weapon and almost impossible to regain. Quite frankly I fear that the time to make a difference is quickly slipping away and even if he eventually approves the fully levy of Gen McChrystal’s request the momentum may have been permanently lost.”

Now it’s the liberal’s turn to lose patience. Time to back McChrystal, says David Broder.

…In all this dithering, it’s easy to forget a few fundamentals. Why are we in Afghanistan? Not because of its own claim on us but because the Taliban rulers welcomed the al-Qaeda plotters who hatched the destruction of Sept. 11, 2001. The Taliban also oppressed its own people, especially women, but we sent troops because Afghanistan was the hide-out for the terrorists who attacked our country.

We knew that governing Afghanistan would never be easy. It had resisted outside forces through the ages, and its geography, tribal structure, absence of a democratic tradition and poverty all argued that once we went in, it would be hard to get out. …

…That imperative is reinforced by the presence of Pakistan, a shaky nuclear-armed power across a porous mountain border. If the Taliban comes back in Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda cells already in Pakistan will operate even more freely — and nuclear weapons could fall into the most dangerous hands.

Given all of this, I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress — as it has done in Iraq. …

Jennifer Rubin picks up another from the Washington Post.

Jackson Diehl points out that the decision on an Afghanistan-war policy isn’t really as difficult as the Iraq challenge that George W. Bush faced when “there was no clear way forward.” For one thing, there was no precedent of an Iraq surge precedent to look at. But Obama has plenty of data, the experience of Iraq, and the best military team ever to wrestle with such issue already in place. For all the whining and protestations from the Obami that this is such a hard decision, it really isn’t. Diehl observes: …

And now Doyle McManus from the LA Times.

… the battle in Washington is causing real problems for U.S. foreign policy, beginning with mixed messages to both allies and adversaries.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates described the dilemma succinctly last week: “How do we signal resolve — and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this isn’t an open-ended commitment?”

The long debate has made Obama look indecisive and uncertain — because he has been. And the leaks of conflicting positions have given his critics ammunition for the postmortem debate over any decision he makes. If Obama chooses to go small, hawks will accuse him of ignoring the advice of his own military commander, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who asked for 40,000 additional troops. If he goes big, doves will accuse him of ignoring the advice of Ambassador Eikenberry, who said the additional troops wouldn’t do much good.

When he ran for president, “no drama Obama” prided himself on a campaign organization that never aired internal disputes and always closed ranks in common cause. Not in this process, which has turned into a very un-Obamalike battle of leaks and counterleaks. This much transparency, alas, creates a problem: Washingtonians love to keep track of winners and losers. A well-managed process gives losers a chance to lick their wounds in private, without suffering public damage to their reputations. This one is more likely to end in public recriminations. …

Rick Richman is back with more commentary on the bit parts that world events play in the Obama epic.

President Obama’s decision to send a video of himself to Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he said that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that . . . their American ally would be led by a man of African descent,” is not the first time he assigned that world-historical event a bit part in his own saga. The Wall also played a walk-on role in his election-night victory speech, included in a long litany of “Yes We Can” paragraphs (“A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination”). He mentioned it in his Berlin citizens-of-the-world speech, attributing the fall to the world standing as one.

Benjamin Kerstein has written an eloquent reminder that the fall of Communism was not the result of the world standing as one, but of the long and often despairing efforts of certain people to fight a future to which much of the world was resigned:

This anniversary, this triumph, this vindication, does not belong to all of us. It belongs to the anti-communists of all countries and all parties who fought for it, sometimes at great cost to reputation, family, friendship, sanity, and often life and limb. …

Some, like Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, and many, many others, had to face prison, expulsion, harassment, and the constant threat of death in order to make their plight known to the world. …

…“Tear down this wall” has entered the lexicon of great presidential utterances, but the president who uttered it went unmentioned this week by President Obama. Undoubtedly, as huge numbers of people rushed to freedom 20 years ago, few of them would have foreseen that Obama would become president of the United States. Even fewer would have foreseen that one day an American president would decline to join his fellow heads of state in Berlin to celebrate what happened that day.

In the Boston Phoenix, Steven Stark writes that Obama has already peaked.

…Obama still doesn’t seem to grasp that the collective Election Night reverie is over, and that now we are waiting for him to lead us in real time. Sure, a little bit of hubris was probably inevitable, but it led Obama to conclude, despite what he said back then, that the historic election had been about him. When in the end, as always, it was about us.

That night began to reveal an unfortunate truth: having reached a pinnacle on the day he was elected, Obama’s popularity and relationship with the American people had nowhere to go but down. …

…Something similar was bound to happen with Obama. Some figures grow during their time in the presidency; others diminish. Obama’s path was pre-ordained: unless he was able to achieve significant political victories immediately, he was destined to become — at least for a while — the incredible shrinking president. …

…Now that we, as a nation, have awakened from our post-election, post-racial dream state, we’ve begun to notice that our president may not be much interested in being a chief “executive,” given that he’s never run anything before or expressed the slightest inclination to do so. He has big ideas, to be sure, but that’s only a small part of the job. The hard, nitty-gritty labor of figuring out how government can actually work better — the operative word is “governing” — seems to hold no appeal for him. …

Now for a change of pace. One of our favorites, Toby Harnden, thinks the proper role for Sarah in the coming years is to replace Oprah.

…Perhaps there’ll be another vacancy in 2012 that might suit Mrs Palin.

In three years, it might well be time for Oprah Winfrey to move on. Her role as his biggest celebrity cheerleader last year already seems a teeny bit embarrassing and Obamamania will be as old hat as Smurfs and Rubik’s Cubes by then.

There is, though, someone who would be Oprah’s perfect successor. She’s got the fame, the huge book deals and, love her or hate her, she is an object of fascination for every American. We’ll see this week that she makes compulsive viewing while holding forth from that sofa.

I can see the bumper stickers now: “Time for O to go – Sarah Palin in 2012.”

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Mark Steyn says that a mass murder apparently isn’t reason enough to cause the Army to use common sense in assessing diversity.

…Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is, we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out.

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the “shalwar kameez,” to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage. …

In Forbes, Tunku Varadarajan ends with practical processes that the Army should follow in order to keep soldiers and citizens safe.

…The PC–political correctness–problem is an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army’s mission; and yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the “don’t-jump-to-conclusions” mentality was underway long before this man killed his colleagues.

So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.

Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.

Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.

Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.

David Warren comments on the political correctness that aided in the act of terrorism.

…There were reports from within the base (Fox News as usual seized on what other networks didn’t), that accused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had not merely been making anti-war remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan, but adding things like, “Muslims should stand up against the aggressor.” Do we still have a category for treason? He has been quoted from Internet postings comparing Islamist suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade. Another clue? …

…Time is certainly required to sort through such reports, and separate wheat from chaff, but the initial information alone was inconsistent with the media’s clichéd presentation of the “tragedy of a man in despair.”

This deadly enemy of the West — the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination — is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this…

…It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst. …

Karl Rove looks at Obama’s sliding poll numbers.

…That’s only the beginning of Mr. Axelrod’s problems. If the 2010 midterms are nationalized, they will be a referendum on Mr. Obama’s increasingly unpopular policies. For example, in the newest Gallup survey released on Monday, only 29% say they’d advise their congressman to vote for the health-care bill. This is down from 40% last month. A Rasmussen poll out this week shows that 42% of Americans strongly oppose the bill, while only 25% strongly favor it. …

…High unemployment and the president’s low approval on jobs and the economy (which is at 46% in a CNN/Opinion Research poll released last week), won’t by themselves sink Democrats. But what will hurt are the beliefs that Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill was a flop and that he doesn’t know how to speed up the economic recovery.

Mr. Obama’s approval on handling the deficit in the CNN/Opinion Research survey is now 39%. The president’s plans to triple the deficit over the next decade is causing a level of angst among independents that we haven’t seen since Ross Perot ran for president in the 1990s. This angst has given Republicans a four-point lead in Gallup’s generic ballot (48% to 44%), putting the party in a better position than it was in spring 1994, just a few months before its historic takeover of Congress. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts in the Corner about the issues Bush inherited. And he didn’t whine about it.

George W. Bush inherited a recession. He also inherited the Iraq no-fly zones, a Middle East boiling after the failed last-minute Clintonian rush for an imposed peace, an intelligence community wedded to the notion of Saddam’s WMD proliferation, a Congress on record supporting “regime change” in Iraq, a WMD program in Libya, a Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Osama bin Laden enjoying free rein in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a renegade Pakistan that had gone nuclear on Clinton’s watch with Dr. Khan in full export mode, and a pattern of appeasing radical Islam after its serial attacks (on the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, U.S. embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole).

In other words, Bush inherited the regular “stuff” that confronts most presidents when they take office. What is strange is that Obama has established a narrative that he, supposedly unlike any other president, inherited a mess.

At some point, Team Obama might have at least acknowledged that, by January 2009, Iraq was largely quiet; Libya was free of WMD; Syria was out of Lebanon; most of the al-Qaeda leadership had been attrited or was in hiding; a homeland-security protocol was in place to deal with domestic terror plots; European governments were mostly friendly to the U.S. (unlike during the Chirac-Schröder years); and the U.S. enjoyed good relations with one-third of the planet in China and India.

The fact that in the Bush years we were increasingly disliked by Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chávez, Kim Jong Il, Morales, Ortega, and Putin, may in retrospect seem logical, just as their current warming to the U.S. may prove to be cause for alarm, given the repugnant nature of these strongmen. …

John Stossel explains that the current problems we have with health care are caused by the government.

…Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly. They give subsidized loans to “homeowners” who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance. …

…Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that’s impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won’t talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?

Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians’ refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won’t solve our problems.

Freedom will.

Walter Williams, in Townhall, discusses Congress’ unconstitutional attempts to control society.

…Speaker Pelosi’s constitutional contempt, perhaps ignorance, is representative of the majority of members of both the House and the Senate. Their comfort in that ignorance and constitutional contempt, and how readily they articulate it, should be worrisome for every single American. It’s not a matter of whether you are for or against Congress’ health care proposals. It’s not a matter of whether you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, male or female, Democrat or Republican or member of any other group. It’s a matter of whether we are going to remain a relatively free people or permit the insidious encroachment on our liberties to continue.

Where in the U.S. Constitution does it authorize Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance? If Congress gets away with forcing us to buy health insurance, down the line, what else will they force us to buy; or do you naively think they will stop with health insurance? We shouldn’t think that the cure to Congress’ unconstitutional heavy-handedness will end if we only elect Republicans. Republicans have demonstrated nearly as much constitutional contempt as have Democrats. The major difference is the significant escalation of that contempt under today’s Democratically controlled Congress and White House with the massive increase in spending, their proposed legislation and the appointment of tyrannical czars to control our lives. It’s a safe bet that if and when Republicans take over the Congress and White House, they will not give up the massive increase in control over our lives won by the Democrats.

In each new session of Congress since 1995, John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a measure “To require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws, and for other purposes.” The highest number of co-sponsors it has ever had in the House of Representatives is 54 and it has never had co-sponsors in the Senate until this year, when 22 senators signed up. The fact that less than 15 percent of the Congress supports such a measure demonstrates the kind of contempt our elected representatives have for the rules of the game — our Constitution. …

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor Jr. argues for less prison time for nonviolent offenders. Another unintended consequence of the drug war.

The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.

But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it’s a running sore that rarely generates dramatic “news.” That is our criminal-justice system’s incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.

Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men — many of them fathers — to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.) …

The Economist reports on the growing deer problem in the U. S.

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The WSJ editorial board comments on the aftermath of Kelo v New London.

The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London stands as one of the worst in recent years, handing local governments carte blanche to seize private property in the name of economic development. Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo’s land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.’s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

The aftermath of Kelo is the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare. While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other “desirable” elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation. …

…Kelo’s silver lining has been that it transformed eminent domain from an arcane government power into a major concern of voters who suddenly wonder if their own homes are at risk. According to the Institute for Justice, which represented Susette Kelo, 43 states have since passed laws that place limits and safeguards on eminent domain, giving property owners greater security in their homes. State courts have also held local development projects to a higher standard than what prevailed against the condemned neighborhood in New London.

If there is a lesson from Connecticut’s misfortune, it is that economic development that relies on the strong arm of government will never be the kind to create sustainable growth.

Today we hear from Camille Paglia on Pelosi’s version of Obamacare.

…A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it’s printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!

And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies. Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social inequities. The usual GOP floater about private medical savings accounts is a crock — something that, given the astronomical costs of major medical crises, would be utterly unworkable for families of even average household income.

International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what’s the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. Limited, targeted reforms can ban gouging and unfair practices and can streamline communications now wastefully encumbered by red tape. But insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are not the sole cause of mounting healthcare costs, and constantly demonizing them is a demagogic evasion.

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind. …

Jennifer Rubin calls Camille Paglia’s article “a must-read”.

…But amid the rollicking putdowns are some very serious indictments of the Democrats. …

…Moreover, Paglia doesn’t understand why we are doing this at all:

“And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.”

Well yes, they are in the business of passing a liberal fantasy that’s been rattling around for years — government-run health care. They aren’t in the business of making it work or picking up the pieces after its disruptive impact ripples through the economy and the health-care system. …

In an article in Pajamas Media, Rand Simberg discusses what would have helped the economy more than a stimulus pay-off.

…But certainly there were things that could have been done which would have been much more stimulating. And in fact there were things that could have been done even before he became president.

The most straightforward thing would have been a payroll tax holiday. It might have added even more to the deficit this year than the porkulus, but it would have had the benefit of actually encouraging businesses — particularly small businesses — to retain and hire people. He could also have promised to keep in place the Bush tax rate cuts, due to expire next year, providing more confidence in the future of the economy. He could have let his campaign promises about nationalizing health care and dramatically raising the costs of energy with cap ‘n’ tax expire, as all of his statements and promises eventually do.

But something he could have done — that would have cost nothing at all — would have been to not scare the bejesus out of business in the first place during his campaign.

Obama talked of increasing capital gains taxes for reasons of “fairness ,” even if it actually hurt government revenue. He talked of “spreading the wealth around.” He gave soaring speeches exalting the glory of the state and public service, while the contributions of business and capitalism were ignored. He treated “profit” like a four-letter word and promised to “raise taxes on the rich.” He made economically insane and historically ignorant arguments blaming the meltdown of the financial system on “capitalists” and “deregulation.” …

Bloomberg News reports on a speech in Chicago by the head of Emerson Electric who lets fly at the administration’s economic policies.

Emerson Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer David Farr said the U.S. government is hurting manufacturers with regulation and taxes and his company will continue to focus on growth overseas.

“Washington is doing everything in their manpower, capability, to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” Farr said today in Chicago at a Baird Industrial Outlook conference. “Cap and trade, medical reform, labor rules.”

Emerson, the maker of electrical equipment and InSinkErator garbage disposals with $20.9 billion in sales for the year ended September, will keep expanding in emerging markets, which represented 32 percent of revenue in 2009. About 36 percent of manufacturing is now in “best-cost countries” up from 21 percent in 2003, according to slides accompanying his speech.

Companies will create jobs in India and China, “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something,” Farr said.

Clive Crook, in Financial Times, says that the election results were caused by deafness of the Left. Obama and the Democrat leadership will have to start listening to voters if they want to remain in power.

…Last week’s elections went badly for the Democrats. New York was the outlier – unless Democrats expect their opponents to field two warring candidates in every seat. The Republican party is leaderless and incompetent, but not insane – and not, by the way, as divided as the Democrats. For the Republicans the New York loss was salutary, and the lesson inescapable: unite or lose.

The lesson for the Democrats was almost as clear, but their learning disability is more severe. The centre of the US electorate – loosely attached Democratic voters, self-declared independents and loosely attached Republican voters – decides elections. …

…This comes in a country in which 40 per cent of voters call themselves conservatives, 36 per cent moderates and 20 per cent liberals. …

We hear from another voice of reason about effective and affordable health care reforms: this time from Steven Malanga in Real Clear Markets.

…What both sides in this White House debate don’t understand is that they are at loggerheads because the legislation being considered in Washington will attempt to reform the system from the top down, by fiat from the government. As a result, any cost savings will be those dictated from Washington after decades when individual Americans and health providers have grown resistant to such mandates. To take just one recent example out of dozens: some White House advisers want more savings in the legislation from hospitals, but the administration has already promised hospitals that it won’t demand more of them in exchange for their support of health reform. This is the way our health system is being revamped, one political favor at a time.

This is why the only truly effective way to reform our health system, including slowing the growth of costs, is not from the top down, as mandated by Washington, but from the bottom up, by putting health care dollars and choices back into the hands of individuals. We can do that by eliminating the business deduction for health insurance and transferring tax credits to individuals who can use them to purchase their own insurance. We can establish health savings accounts where people can accumulate the money they save on health insurance to pay big bills. If we feel we need a safety net, we can establish government pools that protect people against the most catastrophic costs.

In these ways we would slow the growth of health costs not by gigantic, unpopular mandates from Washington but through millions of individual decisions by people acting with their own money and in their own best interests. Under such a system there should be no need for the White House to cut Machiavellian deals with hospitals or doctors or AARP for their support in exchange for political favors that undermine the greater goal of reform. …

George Will has good news: global warming hysteria is cooling down.

…In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist, worry about global warming but revive some inconvenient memories of 30 years ago. Then intelligent people agreed (see above) that global cooling threatened human survival. It had, Newsweek reported, “taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.” Some scientists proposed radical measures to cause global warming — for example, covering the arctic ice cap with black soot that would absorb heat and cause melting.

Levitt and Dubner also spoil some of the fun of the sort of the “think globally, act locally” gestures that are liturgically important in the church of climate change. For example, they say the “locavore” movement — people eating locally grown foods from small farms — actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. They cite research showing that only 11 percent of such emissions associated with food are in the transportation of it; 80 percent are in the production phase and, regarding emissions, big farms are much more efficient.

Although the political and media drumbeat of alarm is incessant, a Pew poll shows that only 57 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence of global warming, down 20 points in three years. …

In WSJ, Holman Jenkins Jr. comments on the disappearance of global warming.

…In retrospect, a significant moment was the falling apart or debunking of two key attempts seemingly well-suited to clinch matters for a scientifically literate public. One, the famous hockey stick graph, which suggested the temperature rise of the past 100 years was unprecedentedly steep, was convincingly challenged. The other, a mining of the geological record to show past episodes of warming were sharply coupled with rising CO2 levels, fell victim to a closer look that revealed that past warmings had preceded rather than followed higher CO2 levels.

These episodes from a decade ago testified to one important thing: Even climate activists recognized a need for evidence from the real world. The endless invocation of computer models wasn’t cutting it. Yet today the same circles are more dependent than ever on predictions made by models, whose forecasts lie far enough in the future that those who rely on them to make policy prescriptions are in no danger of being held accountable for their reliability.

For a while the media could patch over the scientific shortfall by reporting evidence of warming as if it were evidence of what causes warming. Inconveniently, however, just as temperature-measuring has become more standardized and disciplined and less reliant on flaky records from the past (massaged to the Nth degree), the warming trend seems to have faded from the recent record. …

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David Harsanyi starts his article on the twentieth anniversary of Eastern Europe’s liberation by telling the story of his parents’ escape. He then discusses the liberation.

…On Sept. 11, 1989, as an Associated Press story from the time relays, “thousands of East Germans, crying, laughing and shouting with happiness, poured into Austria from Hungary early today en route to freedom in West Germany . . . .”

The Hungarian government had opened its border with Austria and allowed citizens from other communist nations to leave. This decision triggered a series of events (from 1989 to 1991) that ended a 40-year war that pitted liberal democracies against communist tyrannies. The lack of blood spilled in this victory was, by any historical standard, an anomaly.

The question today is: Do we give this incredible historical achievement the attention it deserves?

This month is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most lasting image of victory. Matt Welch of Reason magazine recently pointed out that “November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe.” …

In the Telegraph, UK,  Nile Gardiner comments on Obama’s “shameful absence from Berlin”.

…It is shameful when the US president can’t even be bothered to show up at a ceremony marking one of the most momentous events of modern times. As Rich Lowry wrote in his column for National Review, “Obama’s failure to go to Berlin is the most telling nonevent of his presidency.” Newt Gingrich put it well when he described Obama’s foolhardy decision as “a tragedy”. Writing in The Washington Examiner, Gingrich declared:

“To commemorate, after all, is to remember. And Americans need to remember, not just that the Wall fell, but why it fell. We need to remember that the Berlin Wall was the symbol of more than just the Cold War, more than just the division of Europe. It was the symbol of an evil ideology that denied human dignity, denied truth, and respected only power. When the Wall fell, truth and human dignity, in a rare moment in the 20th century, triumphed over power. But that victory is not permanent.” …

…The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to avoid doing anything to offend the Russians, as part of its “reset” strategy. This was exemplified by its monumental surrender to Moscow by reversing the American policy of installing Third Site missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic. In effect, Barack Obama threw key US allies in eastern and central Europe under the bus in order to placate Russian demands. The White House no doubt calculated that Obama’s presence in Berlin would be interpreted by hawks in Russia as provocative triumphalism on the part of the Americans. Embarrassingly for President Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev actually showed up at the Berlin celebrations, while the leader of the free world was nowhere to be seen. …

Toby Harnden is next in the round of criticism, posting in the Telegraph, UK.

There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”. …

…Marty Peretz is gloomy about what his non-appearance says about Obama’s world view and his approach on Iran. Newt Gingrich calls the failure to go to Berlin “a tragedy”. Paul Rahe at Powerline wonders if Obama is signalling his administration’s intent to enact a “process of turning its back on our erstwhile allies in Europe”. Certainly, he seems to have a prickly relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Whatever the reasons, it’s another revealing mistake by Obama. This deserved to be marked by more than just  a proclamation penned by a staffer:

Rick Richman posts in Contentions on Obama’s video clip sent to Berlin. Apparently the fall of the Berlin Wall was really about Obama.

Last summer, Berlin served as a backdrop for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, as he gave his citizen-of-the-world speech that began by noting that he did not “look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” His speech referred to Berlin as a place “where a wall came down,” without describing how that happened (other than through a world that “stands as one”) — and without mentioning the names of the prior U.S. presidents whose Berlin speeches were part of the reason the wall eventually came down.

Yesterday, the heads of state of Germany, France, England, and Russia stood as one in Berlin, marking one of the most historic days of the 20th century. President Obama chose not to attend and sent a two-minute video instead. In it, he noted that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

There used to be a newscaster in Los Angeles whose legendary self-regard generated an oft-repeated description: he thought “the news was there to bring you him.” The fall of the Berlin Wall apparently played a similar role in the history of Barack Obama.

Fouad Ajami reviews the threat that has arisen since the fall of the Wall.

…It would stand to reason that 45 years of vigilance would spawn a desire for repose. The disputations of history had ended, we came to believe. Such was the zeitgeist of the ’90s, the Nasdaq era, a decade of infatuation with globalization. The call of blood and soil had receded, we were certain then. Bill Clinton defined that era, in the way Ronald Reagan had defined his time. This wasn’t quite a time of peace. Terrorists were targeting our military installations and housing compounds and embassies. A skiff in Aden rode against one of our battleships. But we would not give this struggle the label—and the attention—it deserved.

A Harvard academic had foreseen the shape of things to come. In 1993, amid this time of historical and political abdication, the late Samuel P. Huntington came forth with his celebrated “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. With remarkable prescience, he wrote that the end of the Cold War would give rise to civilizational wars.

He stated, in unadorned terms, the threat that would erupt from the lands of Islam: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”  …

Jay Nordlinger, in the National Review, wrote an article about Charles Krauthammer. Did you know that he used to be a liberal?

…After the defeat of Carter-Mondale, Krauthammer joined the staff of The New Republic. In fact, he started on Inauguration Day, when Reagan and Bush were being sworn in, and the American hostages in Iran were being released. While at The New Republic, he wrote sterling essays of tough-minded liberalism. People of various stripes felt they had to read them, and wanted to read them. By 1984, he was not so Democratic — he did not vote in the election that year. He would have voted for Reagan, in a very tight race: if he had had some theoretical decisive vote. But he stayed home from the polls out of respect for Mondale, now the Democratic nominee. What had caused the shift in Krauthammer’s political thinking? According to him, it was more a shift in the Democrats: They were completely irresponsible out of power. For instance, they promoted a nuclear freeze, and they opposed almost everything that contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse. There was more, however — more than foreign policy in Krauthammer’s shifting. Like a good many others, he read Losing Ground, the book by Charles Murray about the effects of a welfare state on the poor. “I have a little bit of a science background,” he says with understatement, “and I’m open to empirical evidence.” Murray provided that evidence, convulsively. It is one thing if welfare is failing to help the poor, another if it is outright hurting them. …

…Many Jews, particularly American ones, are nervous or scornful about the support that American evangelicals have shown for Israel. They say that this support is double-edged, or bad news, or embarrassing. Krauthammer will have none of it. “I embrace their support unequivocally and with gratitude. And when I speak to Jewish groups, whether it’s on the agenda or not, I make a point of scolding them. I say, ‘You may not want to hear this, and you may not have me back, but I’m going to tell you something: It is disgraceful, un-American, un-Jewish, ungrateful, the way you treat people who are so good to the Jewish people. We are almost alone in the world. And here we have 50 million Americans who willingly and enthusiastically support us. You’re going to throw them away, for what? Because of your prejudice.’ Oh, I give ’em hell.” …

…In a recent exchange, a Washington conservative said that Krauthammer reminded him of something Edward R. Murrow said about Churchill: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” A great many are doing this, of course, from Rush Limbaugh, with a mass audience, to skillful bloggers with hardly any audience at all. But no one is doing it better than Krauthammer, whose hour is now.

In the New York Post, Michael Tanner gives some of the specifics that we “shall” be forced to do if the House version of Obamacare passes.

President Obama has gone to great pains to deny that his proposed health-care reform is a government takeover of the health-care system.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he has said.

Yet it’s hard to see the 1,994-page bill that the House passed last night as anything else. After all, the bill uses the command “shall” — as in “you shall do this,” “businesses shall do that” and “government shall do some other thing” — 3,345 times. …

…To make sure that we obey these “shalls,” the bill would create 111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar bearing the Orwellian title “commissioner of health choices.” …

Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, has a fascinating fact from the Constitution.

.. the Constitution does not stipulate the number of House members, other than allowing no more than one representative for every 30,000 residents. Sixty-five men were elected to the first House of Representatives, but it was taken for granted that the membership would increase with the nation’s population. …

…the House remains frozen at 435, even as the US population has surged to 305 million. There are now more than 700,000 Americans per House member, which is another way of saying that the average congressional district is home to 700,000 constituents.

…Since every state is entitled to at least one House seat, and since every state cannot be divided evenly into multiples of 700,000, the number of residents in each congressional district varies sharply. At the extremes, Montana’s lone US representative has 967,000 constituents, while the member from Wyoming represents fewer than 533,000. That disparity – more than 430,000 between the largest congressional district and the smallest – means that residents of some states have considerably more voting power in Congress than residents of others. And that, insist the plaintiffs in a lawsuit making its way through a federal court in Mississippi, violates the principle of one-person, one-vote.

The lawsuit argues that only by enlarging its membership to at least 932 – or better yet, 1,761 – can the House return to districts of equal size. Whether the suit will succeed is an open question. But what a blessing if it did! Quadruple the size of the House, and congressional districts would again be small and compact, ideally suited to the retail politics of an earlier era, and more closely aligned with discrete communities and neighborhoods. Enlarge the House, and it would fill with new blood, new thinking, and new energy. Elections would be more competitive, since it would take fewer votes to win. The House would grow more diverse, more lively, more representative. …