Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Former Reagan speechwriter, Anthony Dolan, in WSJ, described the genesis of Reagan’s famous Berlin speech. Dolan ends by articulating Reagan’s thoughts on appeasement, and how to effectively deal with communist and other oppressive governments.

…Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind’s abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan’s understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall’s collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran’s rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan’s. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration’s systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what “good vs. evil” rhetoric can do.

Also in WSJ, Mark Spitznagel has an excellent article on how government, through the Federal Reserve, causes market distortions that threaten the economy.

Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists world-wide as he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s. We ignore the great Austrian at our peril today.

… Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.

Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our “time preferences,” or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.

Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system—the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning. But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse. …

…With interest rates at zero, monetary engines humming as never before, and a self-proclaimed Keynesian government, we are back again embracing the brave new era of government-sponsored prosperity and debt. And, more than ever, the system is piling uncertainties on top of uncertainties, turning an otherwise resilient economy into a brittle one.

How curious it is that the guy who wrote the script depicting our never ending story of government-induced credit expansion, inflation and collapse has remained so persistently forgotten. Must we sit through yet another performance of this tragic tale?

Peter Schiff, writing in Euro Pacific Capital, looks deeper into the pseudo recovery and gives a prescription for true market corrections and growth.

…To generate legitimate economic growth and meaningful jobs, we must reverse the trends that brought us down. Consumers may have led us into this recession, but they can’t lead us out. The road to recovery is a one-way street, and it’s paved with savings, capital investment, and production. It’s not an easy road, but we must follow it to ensure our future prosperity.

As a first step, our politicians must stop pushing us backward. Rather than imposing more market-distorting regulations, we should repeal those most responsible for inefficient resource allocation. Rather than creating new moral hazards, we should withdraw guarantees for large financial institutions and irresponsible consumers. Rather than continuing the Greenspan policy of keeping interest rates too low, we should let them rise. Rather than trying to prop up asset prices, we should let them fall to market levels. Rather than increasing the burden of bureaucracy on the economy, we should look for ways to lighten the load. Rather than encouraging people to borrow and spend, we should reward those who save and produce.

Until we acknowledge these fundamental errors, more of our citizens will lose their jobs. As those that stay employed are funneled into unproductive industries like the federal bureaucracy, the country will sink further into stagnation. Worse still, everyone taking jobs in these sectors will be laid off in the next phase of the crisis – and will have lost this opportunity to build practical skills for the new economy.

Reviewing the Obamacare passage, Jennifer Rubin posts on the congressmen that crossed party lines, and looks at what’s to come in the Senate.

The New York Times has a handy chart and concise description of which lawmakers voted against PelosiCare:

Only one Republican voted for the bill, and 39 Democrats opposed it, including 24 members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition. An overwhelming majority of the Democratic lawmakers who opposed the bill — 31 of the 39 — represent districts that were won by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, in the 2008 presidential election, and a third of them were freshmen. Nearly all of the fourteen freshmen Democrats who voted “no” represent districts that were previously Republican and are considered vulnerable in 2010. Geographically, 22 lawmakers from southern states formed the largest opposition bloc.

The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is doubtful that it, or any variation with the public option, can pass. Lindsay Graham on Face the Nation declared that it was “dead on arrival to the Senate.” As he noted, Pelosi’s bill is ”written for liberals, by liberals.” It is not only Graham, all his Republican colleagues and Joe Lieberman who stand in the way. What about the Senate counterparts to those 39 House “no” voters — Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Michael Bennett of Colorado, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, for example. All are in unsafe seats with considerable numbers of independent and Republican voters who are not likely to look kindly on the massive tax and regulatory measure or on the new mandates and fines requiring them to purchase insurance. …

In the Corner, Jeffrey Anderson also comments on the Obamacare drama.

It was always clear that the real health-care battle would be in the Senate.  But what would have been shocking eight months ago is to hear that it would take until November for the Democrats to pass a bill even in the House.  It would have been even more shocking to have heard that, even after a full-court-press by the White House, the bill would pass by only five votes — meaning that if just three of the 435 members had changed their minds, it would have changed the bill’s fate.  And it would have been shocking to have heard that 39 Democrats would jump ship.

The House bill has passed — barely and belatedly — and it is now dead.  Nothing like it will ever pass the Senate.  The question now is whether anything will, now that the voters have spoken in New Jersey and Virginia — and now that the exceedingly narrow margin in the House will likely invite even greater scrutiny of that which is being proposed. …

Thomas Sowell continues to use economic theory and logic to dispel the illusions and false promises made in Washington.

…If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?

…Price controls create lower prices for open and legal transactions — but also black markets where the prices are higher than they were before, because the risks of punishment for illegal activity has to be compensated. Price controls also lead to shortages and quality deterioration.

But politicians who take credit for lower prices blame all these bad consequences on others. Diocletian did this in the days of the Roman Empire, leaders of the French Revolution did this when their price controls on food led to hungry and angry people, and American politicians denounced the oil companies when price controls on gasoline led to long lines at filling stations in the 1970s. It is the same story, whatever the country, the times or the product or service. …

…Waiting in long gasoline lines at filling stations was exasperating back in the 1970s, but waiting weeks to get an MRI to find out why you are sick, and then waiting months for an operation, as happens in countries with government-run medical systems, can be not only painful but dangerous.

You can be dead by the time they find out what is wrong with you and do something about it. But that will “bring down the cost of medical care” because you won’t be around to require any.

David Harsanyi discusses a study about stress, and points out the silver lining.

…For me, the most stressful element of life has been the mysterious emergence of children. Kids, bless them, are a pain. They’re expensive. Though rarely coherent, they never shut up. They are as insubordinate as they are willfully unhygienic. Yet, you love them so much that your existence is now one of everlasting anxiety.

How many parents would trade children for serenity? In many other ways, stress signifies positive life experiences. Stressing about a mortgage and work can mean you own a home worth caring about and a job worth keeping.

…The underlying concern, says the APA, is how long-term stress contributes to chronic health disorders. (Talk to a psychologist for more information!) No doubt. But according to a recent NBC report, some researchers believe temporary increases in stress can strengthen the immune system, help fight Alzheimer’s and keep your brain cells busy. Another study suggested that stress can help prevent breast cancer. …

Shorts from National Review.

When democratic protests broke out in Iran last summer, the Obama administration gave the impression of considering such protests a nuisance — a hindrance to the real work of dealing with the regime in place. The administration has now cut off funding to several groups working to help the Iranian democrats. One of them is the Connecticut-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, which does much to let the world know what is going on inside that dark country. The center will have to shut down unless private funds come in. The administration is right to deal with the world as it is. But the Iranian democracy movement, and the weakness of the regime of the mullahs, are realities too.

Back to the Economics Nobels, Richard Epstein, in Forbes, comments on the impact of microeconomics.

This year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics to two Americans, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. The description that the Academy gave for its award will sound as dry as dust to people who are not familiar with the nature of economic inquiry.

Ostrom received her prize for showing the various mechanisms that parties can use to control the operations of various forms of common pool resources, e.g., fisheries, in order to prevent their overconsumption and premature exhaustion. Williamson has written extensively on the various devices that are used to control the internal operations of the firm, including internal hierarchies, i.e., permanent relations among individuals in a firm that can be used to eliminate conflicts of interests, and opportunistic behavior in various exchange transactions that might otherwise be conducted on a case-by-case basis.

Issuing the award to these two economists is a welcome trend because it once again leads us to focus on the microeconomic issues that have, when aggregated, macroeconomic consequences. In times of great economic stress, the tendency of many people is to think that the cure for all our social ailments lies in macroeconomics. …

A short column of this sort cannot begin to describe the complex institutional trade-offs that must be mastered to secure the efficient deployment of these resources. But it is important for these purposes to note that these so-called microeconomic issues quickly multiply. There are thousands of firms and thousands of commons. Generating improvements to all these multiple challenges goes straight to the bottom line. Better management of firm and common resources can increase the level of social production and human satisfaction. In their own way, each of these small adjustments may seem to be of no consequence relative to the big macroeconomic changes. But the small changes are additive in a way the large ones are not. Understanding the processes to which Ostrom and Williamson have devoted their professional lives shows us how quiet ventures, properly executed, can generate immense improvements in individual and social welfare. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Ronald Reagan comments on the fall of the wall.

For the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rich Noyes, at Newsbusters.com, posts an interview with Ronald Reagan and footage of Germans celebrating at the Wall. Follow the link above to see the video.

On June 12, 1987, as the liberal media elite were toasting the leader of the Soviet Union as a great champion of progress, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to put his money where his mouth was: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Gorbachev did not open the gate or tear down the Berlin Wall, but two years later the people of East Germany did. News broke in the U.S. late in the afternoon (Eastern Time) on November 9, 1989 that the communist government would no longer restrict travel to West Berlin. Just a few hours later, ABC’s PrimeTime Live hosted former President Ronald Reagan to celebrate what would turn out to be the death blow against communism in Eastern Europe. We found the tape in our archives, and posted a video …

Looking back at communism in WaPo, Paul Hollander explains how the supposedly noble ends justified murderous means in the eyes of many idealists.

…While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — hostile or sympathetic — actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media’s fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.  …

…The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience. But communism’s collapse also suggests that under certain conditions people can tell the difference between right and wrong. The embrace and rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deluded and destructive idealism to the realization that human nature precludes utopian social arrangements and that the careful balancing of ends and means is the essential precondition of creating and preserving a decent society.

Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts on Paul Hollander’s article.

…As he points out, communist atrocities have not received their full due in the West, despite the fact that the victims of communism (including some 100 million dead) far outnumber even those of the Nazis. Part of the reason is that the communists, unlike the Nazis, were perceived as having noble motives. However, this is a poor distinction. After all, Hitler and his supporters also believed they were doing the right thing, every bit as strongly as Lenin or Stalin did.

The second distinction often drawn between the two is that the Nazis killed people because of immutable characteristics such as race and ethnicity, while the communists did not. This argument also fails, for two reasons that I discussed in greater detail in this series of posts. First, Communist regimes often did kill people based on immutable characteristics. For instance, they often murdered people because of their class origins; no one could help being born a “Kulak” or a “bourgeois.” Also, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and several other communist rulers targeted various ethnic minorities for deportation and extermination. Second, it is not clear that the distinction between killing innocent people for immutable characteristics and killing them because of mutable ones carries any moral weight. In my view, the case for distinguishing them falls apart on close inspection (see here and here).

Yet even if one ultimately concludes that the Nazis were somewhat worse than the communists, that still does not justify the massive size of the disparity between the enormous attention paid to the crimes of the former and the relative neglect of the latter. …

Mark Steyn sees balloon boy as a metaphor for something else full of gas.

…Thus, Frank Rich of the New York Times decided to treat his readers to a dissertation of “what ‘balloon boy’ says about 2009.” So off trots Frank Rich, marveling at “how practised we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labelled news,” whether it’s a balloon drifting “buoyantly through the skies for hours with a six-year-old boy hidden within its contours” or “WMDs in Iraq.” “The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources,” observed Rich. “But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq.”

…Democrats run everything—the presidency, the House, the Senate, the media, the movies, the lot. Yet, “George W. Bush” remains the only answer on the liberal Rorschach test: whatever ink blot you lay before them, it’s Bush’s fault. …

…Any self-respecting cultural critic not trapped in the spring of ’03 ought to be able to do this in his sleep: there he was, Barack the Balloon Boy, wafted ever upwards on great gaseous clouds of hope and change, only to have his approval numbers crash farther faster than any president of the last 60 years. He found the reality TV show of campaigning more congenial than the reality of governing. He thought his multi-trillion-dollar ballooning debt could defy the laws of economic gravity …

In the LA Times, Peter Nicholas reports that the Obama administration has changed strategies for attacking Fox News.

…One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox, he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.

The message was, ” ‘We better not see you on again,’ ” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.” …

…White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said Thursday night that she had checked with colleagues who “deal with TV issues” and they had not told people to avoid Fox. On the contrary, they had urged people to appear on the network, Dunn wrote in an e-mail.

But Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and a former pollster for President Carter, said he has spoken to Democratic consultants who have been told by the White House to avoid appearances on Fox. He declined to give their names. …

Ann Coulter uses the election night results to set up lots of zingers, from the title to the end. Democrats, please skip to the next article.

…At 49 percent for Republican Chris Christie versus 44 percent for Corzine, the election wasn’t even close enough to be stolen by ACORN. (Although Corzine did extremely well among underaged Salvadoran prostitutes living in government housing.) …

… the problem is that voting for Obama a year ago was a fashion statement, much like it was once a fad to buy Beanie Babies, pet rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids. But instead of ending up with a ridiculous dust-collector at the bottom of your closet, the Obama fad leaves you with higher taxes, a reduced retirement fund, no job and a one-year wait for an MRI. …

…The good news: Next time Corzine is in a major car accident after speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, he’ll be able to see a doctor right away.

The media will try to rescue health care by talking about nothing but the 23rd district of New York, where the Democrat won Tuesday night. Congratulations, Democrats — you won a congressional seat in New York! Next up: A Catholic elected pope! …

Clive Crook, in the Atlantic, posts on liberal pundits’ comments on the elections. Says if he was a Dem, he wouldn’t be smiling.

…Even Charlie Cook, doyen of poll-gazers and a reliably informative commentator, comes off a little blase in this piece for National Journal. He says Tuesday did not tell us anything we didn’t already know. (Maybe he meant anything he didn’t already know.) We already knew that independents were turning in droves against the Democratic party. We already knew that Jon Corzine was so unpopular he would lose even to a divided opposition. We already knew that a staunchly conservative Republican could win a purple state by a big margin if he “projects a moderate, mainstream, nonthreatening, tolerant image”. Did we really know all those things? If I were a Republican, I’d still be pleased to have them confirmed, and if I were a Democrat I definitely wouldn’t be smiling.

Veronique de Rugy posts on the Corner about the negative effect of the homebuyers’ tax credit.

…Here the president identifies several state actions that caused or enabled the financial meltdown, ranging from problems in the financial sector to the collapse of housing prices. He noted both monetary and fiscal policy that made money incredibly cheap, thus incentivizing anybody who could to borrow more and more money. The government spent too much money AND he tips his hat to government programs designed to increase the percentage of people who owned homes.

Yet, all he has done since he took office is to do more of the same things that got us in this mess in the first place — just at a bigger scale. The extension and expansion of the $8,000 tax credit is a good example of that. The cost of the whole thing is $11 billion. And who wants to bet it will be more, not to mention the terrible distortions such a program introduces to the economy?

This morning, even the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized against the tax credit.

Here is the Post:

The credit is a bad idea. It merely shifts demand from elsewhere in the economy to one sector government has chosen to help — having been urged to do so by a powerful lobby — and from the future to the present. …

de Rugy also comments on the jobless numbers in the context of other economic indicators.

One of the obvious implications is that the stimulus spending is far from having the impact promised by the administration back in February. It is also a rather burning indictment of  Christina Romer’s ability to predict job-creation numbers. Remember that the statement about unemployment reaching 8.8 percent next year without the stimulus?

Here is something intriguing: According to this piece in yesterday’s New York Times, worker productivity in the U.S. has surged in the third quarter:

In the first report, the Labor Department says productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, was rising at an annual rate of 9.5 percent in the third quarter, much better than the 6.4 percent gain economists had expected. Unit labor costs fell at a 5.2 percent rate.

Usually, a productivity surge is the sign of looming recovery. In this case, it isn’t. Are we about to become like Europe, where many economies have high productivity and high unemployment? Or are we entering a lost decade, as the Japanese did in the 1990s?

Thomas Sowell clarifies several important points about Obamacare. First, he explains health care in economic terms:

…There is no question that you can reduce the payments for medical care by having either a lower quantity or a lower quality of medical care. That has already been done in countries with government-run medical systems.

In the United States, the government has already reduced payments for patients on Medicare and Medicaid, with the result that some doctors no longer accept new patients with Medicare or Medicaid. That has not reduced the cost of medical care. It has reduced the availability of medical care…

…You can even save money by cutting down on medications to relieve pain, as is already being done in Britain’s government-run medical system. You can save money by not having as many high-tech medical devices like CAT scans or MRIs, and not using the latest medications. Countries with government-run medical systems have less of all these things than the United States has.

But reducing these things is not “bringing down the cost of medical care.” It is simply refusing to pay those costs — and taking the consequences. …

He then explains the difference between health care and medical care, and comments on the higher US rates of cancer survival:

For those who live by talking points, one of their biggest talking points is that Americans do not get any longer life span than people in other Western nations by all the additional money we spend on medical care.

Like so many clever things that are said, this argument depends on confusing very different things — namely, “health care” and “medical care.” Medical care is a limited part of health care. What we do and don’t do in the way we live our lives affects our health and our longevity, in many cases more so than what doctors can do to provide medical care.

Americans have higher rates of obesity, homicide and narcotics addiction than people in many other Western nations. There are severe limits on what doctors and medical care can do about that.

…If we want to compare the effects of medical care, as such, in the United States with that in other countries with government-run medical systems, then we need to compare things where medical care is what matters most, such as survival rates of people with cancer. The United States has one of the highest rates of cancer survival in the world — and for some cancers, the number one rate of survival. …

In Forbes, Diana Furchtgott-Roth shreds the medical bankruptcy argument, and also backs up the higher rates of cancer survival in the US.

…Some proponents support a public option on the grounds that 62% of personal bankruptcies are due to high medical expenses. They contend that even Americans with health insurance are being bankrupted by health care costs.

This argument for a larger government role ignores data from the Federal Reserve showing that debt from buying goods and services, including medical care, rose from only 5.5% of all debt in 2001 to 5.8% in 2007, and that less than 1% of Americans enter bankruptcy each year. …

…In fact, the cancers are survivable precisely because we find them early. Study after study has shown that cancer patients live longer in America than in Europe. …

…Evidence shows that more advanced technology and drugs result in longer life even across different states in the United States. Columbia Business School professor Frank Lichtenberg has examined the effects on life expectancy in the 50 states of diagnostic imaging procedures, drugs and physician quality. Not surprisingly, he found that “our indicators of the quality of diagnostic imaging procedures, drugs and physicians almost always had positive and statistically significant effects on life expectancy.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn points to the blind spot in tolerating diversity that made the Ft Hood shootings possible.

…And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base. …

…Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers, recommend, judged people by their actions – flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own.

But we’re scrupulously nonjudgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from nonradical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate.  …

Lots of commentary on the elections. Up first is John Fund with a breakdown of the Republican gains.

…”What we’re seeing is the suburbs that drifted away from Republicans in the 1990s over social issues, and were even further estranged by the economic strains of the last few years, are coming back to them,” notes Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, who says the results should give the White House pause. “You combine that with the crushing victory of Republicans in the coal-producing rural counties of Virginia, and I would be very nervous if I were a Blue Dog Democratic member of Congress,” he tells me.

The pattern of GOP gains in the suburbs was repeated in other states. Joan Orie Melvin, a Republican judge from Pittsburgh, won control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for Republicans by winning key Philadelphia suburbs that have trended Democratic for the past two decades. She won every suburban county around Philadelphia except for Montgomery, which she lost to Democrat Jack Panella by a few hundred votes. …

…In New York, Republicans were disappointed in losing the wild and widely-watched special House election in the rural North Country near Canada. But in the suburbs around New York City, they made surprising gains. Four years ago, Republican Rob Astorino won only 42% of the vote in his challenge to Democratic County Executive Andrew Spano in tony Westchester County, which includes Scarsdale and White Plains. This year the results were exactly reversed as Mr. Astorino ousted Mr. Spano by a 16-point margin. In Nassau County, on Long Island, Republicans won back control of the county legislature and the race for county executive will head to a recount. …

John Fund also says that Speaker Pelosi is out of touch with the nation, and out of touch with political reality.

…More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy losses in Tuesday’s elections. “It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the obsessed British major in the film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai,’” one Democrat told me. “She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge even as she’s lost sight of where it’s going and what damage it could cause to her own troops.” …

…That’s also the message from Moody’s Mark Zandi, who has become the de facto chief outside economic adviser to the Democratic Congress in recent months and has been telling House Democrats to expect unemployment to be “sticky and stubborn,” remaining near 10% a year from now. A similar warning comes from Christina Romer, chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, who predicts unemployment will be 9.5% when midterm elections occur a year from now. …

…One Democratic House moderate says the leadership has mislearned a lesson from the 1994 collapse of Hillary Clinton’s health care bill. “They believe they lost the elections that year because they failed to pass anything,” he says. “But they forget it might have been even worse if they’d passed the wrong bill.”  …

Toby Harnden lists the points to take home from the elections. Here are three:

2. Sarah Palin roared and had a considerable impact in New York’s 23rd District, which the Democrat narrowly won. Trouble is for her that the result showed the limits of her appeal. There was no exit polling and so there is much supposition but it seems that her intervention energised conservatives but alienated centrists. Perhaps the national Republican who came out best was Mitt Romney, who decided not to get involved.

5. The national Republican party is in disarray. If they don’t get their act together then Obama will win a second term by default if nothing else.

10. It’s the economy stupid and despite all the White House spin, it seems they get that.

Giles Whittell, in the Times, UK, reviews the top stories from election night, comments on some back stories, and looks to the future.

…In northern Virginia, turnout was low among the young and black voters who backed Mr Obama in droves last year. As one analyst put it last night: “This shows that the Obama coalition came out for him but can’t be counted on to come out for other Democrats.”  …

…Besides campaigning in person for both Mr Deeds and Mr Corzine, Mr Obama deployed his political campaign arm, Organising for America, to try to ensure the swarms of party loyalists and new voters he attracted in 2008 would turn out. …

…The Democrats’ most serious challenges next year will come in swing states like Ohio, Colorado and Nevada. In 2010, most governors, a third of the Senate and all members of the House of Representatives will be up for re-election.

Karl Rove looks to 2010 and the damage that Obamacare could do to the nation and the Democrat party.

…Even a five-point swing in 2010 could bring a tidal wave of change. Today, Democrats enjoy 60 votes in the Senate, Republicans a mere 40. Had there been a five-point swing away from Democrats last fall, the party would have started this year with 54 seats and the Republicans 46.

A five-point shift in 2006 would have left the GOP in control of the House. In 2008, a five-point shift would have produced a Democratic loss of six House seats rather than a gain of 21. It would also have put John McCain into the White House with 279 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama’s 259.

Looking ahead, the bad news for Democrats is that the legislation that helped lead to the collapse of support for their party on Tuesday could yet inflict more pain on those foolish enough to support it. The health-care bill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to vote on this week could sink an entire fleet of Democratic boats in 2010. …

…Tuesday’s results were the first sign that voters are revolting against runaway spending and government expansion. But Democrats likely ain’t seen nothin’ yet if they try to ram through health-care reform. There is nothing in the House bill that would do anything to reverse the voter trend we saw this week.

Charles Krauthammer says the 2009 election allows us to see the 2008 election in proper perspective.

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008. …

…This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The ’08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points. …

…The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy. …

Samuel Thernstrom, at American.com, takes a closer look at Kyoto and helps us understand why Obama, when it comes to the environment, has become Bush-Lite.

The Obama administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol (ensuring it will expire), adopted some of former President George W. Bush’s key positions in international climate negotiations, and demurred when asked about reports that the president has decided to skip the December climate summit in Copenhagen. United Nations climate negotiator Yvo de Boer has concluded that it is “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive climate treaty—which also describes the once-fond hopes for passage of domestic climate legislation this year—or even in Obama’s first term.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

Among all the things that President Bush did to infuriate environmentalists, none was more inexcusable than his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and it was assumed that Obama’s election meant a triumphant American return to the Kyoto fold—symbolically, at least, if not literally. Backed by large majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama was widely expected to quickly pass a Kyoto-style domestic cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, positioning America to take the moral high ground in Copenhagen, thus luring (or compelling) China and India to accept emissions targets.

Congress’s inaction—and its continued concern about trade competitiveness questions—has forced Obama, in effect, to take the Bush position.

The story, at least on the international side, is complicated by our actual history with Kyoto, which is not as simple as some greens would portray it today. Rejection of Kyoto—in 1997, three years before Bush’s election—was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on climate policy; the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against its basic tenets, and the Clinton-Gore administration never submitted it for ratification. (Even a little-known state legislator from Illinois named Barack Obama voted to condemn Kyoto and prohibit the state from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.) …

Jeff Jacoby advocates three revisions to make health care more affordable.

Tear down the barriers to buying insurance across state lines. …

…When it comes to almost any other product or service, Americans would find a ban on interstate commerce and competition intolerable: Imagine being told that you could buy a car only if it was manufactured in your state. Consumers in the market for a mortgage are free to do business with an out-of-state lender; those in the market for health insurance should be equally free to do business with an out-of-state insurer.

Repeal mandatory benefits that make health insurance needlessly expensive. Compounding the lack of interstate competition is the way states drive up the cost of health insurance by making certain types of coverage compulsory. Consumers and insurers should be free to work out for themselves just how comprehensive or limited a policy should be. But state mandates prevent such flexibility by requiring insurance companies to sell a fixed array of benefits that many customers may not want. Individuals seeking plain-vanilla health insurance – a policy that will cover them, say, in case of major surgery or catastrophic illness – may find themselves forced to pay for a policy that also covers acupuncture, in vitro fertilization, alcoholism therapy, and a dozen additional treatments.

When compulsion takes the place of competition, the result is invariably less choice at higher cost.

De-link health insurance from employment. Nothing distorts America’s health insurance market like the misbegotten tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance. Until that preference is removed, millions will continue to rely on their employers’ health plan, rather than buying insurance for themselves. Fix the tax code, and no longer could insurance companies routinely bypass employees and deal only with their employers. Instead we would see intense competition for individual customers – and the lower premiums such competition would yield.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Spengler takes a surprising and ruthlessly pragmatic view of foreign affairs and where the US should direct its attention.

…The Pentagon, as I noted two weeks ago, views with realistic horror the possibility that Israel might exchange military technology with Russia and India. An immediate concern is the Russian-Indian joint venture to produce a fifth-generation fighter, but drone, anti-missile, and other technology are also a concern. That, there is reason to believe, explains why the US administration abruptly dropped its demand for a complete Israeli freeze on settlement construction and accepted the Israeli offer of a freeze on acquiring new land, once 3,000 homes at present under construction are complete. …

…Israel’s contribution might be decisive in a number of fields, for example avionics and especially drone technology. Among the million Russians who emigrated to Israel during the breakdown of the Soviet Empire are more than 10,000 scientists, including some who designed Russia’s best weapons systems. Moscow’s impulse to reunite the old team is understandable. Throw Israel into the briar patch, and America might not like the result. …

…China is the fulcrum of American strategy. The world’s two largest economies have a natural self-interest in strengthening each other. Francesco Sisci and I proposed an economic alliance between America and China in this space a year ago (see US’s road to recovery runs through Beijing Asia Times Online, November 15, 2008). …

…Russia is a spoiler, but a bargainer. America has no interest in color revolutions in the Russian “near abroad” (just what is the strategic significance of the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrzgyzstan?). Georgia and the Ukraine are respectively last and second-to-last in the world fertility tables and will cease to exist as national entities by mid-century. Why should America make commitments there? …

…I have maintained that Iran faces internal implosion, not only because of the disaffection of its educated youth, but because it will run out of young people and run out of oil at roughly the same time, that is, about 20 years from now (see Why Iran will fight, not compromise Asia Times Online, May 30, 2007). Iran is in a position similar to that of the Soviet Union in 1980: it must break out, or break down. …

…America requires the cooperation of other countries, and in different ways. China is crucial to economic and monetary success; Russia is crucial to containing nuclear weapons; and India has a key role to play in deterring potential terrorists, including (as my Asia Times Online colleague M K Bhadrakumar has suggested) training and arming Afghanistan’s northern tribes against the Taliban.

In lean times, even hyper-powers cannot indulge themselves in the sort of luxuries that feed their sense of moral superiority, or coddle their squeamishness: for example hosting the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer or the Dalai Lama, or helping brave little Georgia stand up to nasty big Russia, or promoting color revolutions in odd fragments of the former Soviet Union.

We have to focus on core interests and concentrate on those countries that have the competence and will to assist us in pursuing our core interests. Most of the world will ruin itself quickly enough without our help. Our attention should abide with those countries that demonstrate long-term viability.

David Harsanyi pinpoints the heart of the political struggle we are in.

…The angry-hard-right-radical-insane (etc.) conservative base has hijacked the Republican Party, and in the process, further alienated a beleaguered nation — a nation that is apparently hankering for tripling deficits and government takeovers of the health care, energy, banking and car industries.

Like Democrats, I too hope Republicans suffer. By focusing on needless culture wars, nurturing government centralization and growth, and spending without restraint, the GOP has downgraded fiscal conservatism to nothing more than election-time rhetoric over the past decade. And, not surprisingly, Republican identification is also at an all-time low.

So how is it, some wondered, that a recent Gallup poll claims that “conservative” remains the dominant ideological group in this nation — with between 39 percent and 41 percent voters identifying themselves as either “very conservative” or “conservative”? …

…In the real world, I imagine many non-ideologically inclined voters tend to see themselves as conservative as well. And with a president who has yet to meet an industry he doesn’t believe needs to be managed by the loving, but firm, hands of Washington, this must increasingly mean fiscal conservatism. …

…In fact, as Arthur C. Brooks, American Enterprise Institute president, summed up, “There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.” …

We’ll do this more thoroughly at the beginning of next week, but for now, let’s hear about the election from Peter Wehner. He closes reminding us of Dem triumphalism just a few months ago.

… “Today,” proclaimed the Democratic strategist James Carville earlier this year, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” Added Michael Lind after last November’s campaign: “The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.” That 40-year, beginning-of-the-Fourth-Republic reign on power seems to be in a good deal of trouble after only nine months.

Democrats still hold power, however, and Republicans still have ground to make up for. Things can change quickly again. Nothing is set in stone. Still, last night was a significant political moment, one that might be a harbinger for much worse things for Obama and Obamaism.

Democrats have reason to be afraid, very afraid.

In the National Review, Conrad Black explains that the liberals’ fear that Afghanistan will turn into another Vietnam is unjustified.

…If the Democrats will not fight in Afghanistan, it is hard to imagine a campaign they would support. In Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq, the United States has serious allies and a multilaterally (NATO and the U.N.) approved mission. Unlike the Vietnam intervention, it has been properly endorsed by Congress, and the governing party was elected promising a decisive and escalated prosecution of the war. There is not the slightest doubt that this conflict is morally justified, and unassailable in international law, and that it involves the national security of all countries that have been attacked by Islamist terrorists, or might be, including Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. And there is little doubt that it is winnable; a military plan has been put together by the world’s foremost authorities in antiterrorist and counterinsurgency warfare, American generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. …

…There are about 20,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan; the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had over 600,000 exactingly trained and heavily armed soldiers and guerrillas. The allied casualty rate in Afghanistan, even in October, the costliest month in casualties thus far, is about 4 percent of what the U.S. casualty rate was through most of the Vietnam War.

…This isn’t the attempted “occupation” of Afghanistan; it is counterterrorism, not nation-building. It is assistance to a crudely legitimate government in resisting a barbarously primitive movement that enjoys almost no spontaneous popular support, while the civilized world attacks the principal infestation of terrorists in the world. …

David Warren waxes eloquent in discussing the environmental damage wrought by the first renewable energy source that big government fell in love with: hydroelectric power. His overarching points on renewable energy are as follows:

Will technology solve our energy problems? This seemingly fatuous question is actually stupider than first appears. For we already have the technology to power anything within reason, with minimal if any environmental fallout.

Yet under the inspiration of the Green Zeitgeist, I cannot go into a magazine shop without finding some science-lite cover story on new prospects for harnessing solar, thermal, wind, tidal, or whatever “renewable” forces. There is an immense credulous audience out there, willing to be entertained by such nonsense.

No one with a grasp of high school physics should take any of these schemes seriously. In each case, we are looking at a crank idea from the hippie era, which has not since been significantly improved, because it can’t be. …

…Moreover, we can know that the environmentalists who demand these things will turn on them as soon as they are built. They are, as all utopians, not people who can be satisfied, and it makes sense to frustrate their ambitions decisively — before, rather than after, their tyranny has been consolidated. …

Thomas Sowell states that when you don’t pay the cost of medical services, you pay in consequences.

…There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor’s office and more in taxes — or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

Costs are not reduced simply because you don’t pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past. …

…Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors’ income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences. …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, writes that health insurance companies aren’t making the obscene profits that liberals rail about.

…For all the impassioned talk about obscene profits and bodies piling up, reports AP’s Calvin Woodward, “health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent’’ of revenue, a return “that’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries.’’

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was a mere 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals, which showed a profit margin of 19.3 percent, railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which showed a profit of 5.4 percent. “That’s a less profitable margin,’’ AP noted, “than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.’’

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. Makers of software applications, by contrast, are pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent. Strangely, however, MoveOn and the Democrats aren’t demanding a “public option’’ to compete with Oracle and Adobe to drive down their “immoral’’ profits. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The race in the 23rd congressional district in New York is a good example of the competing narratives in the GOP. We have four items on the subject. First Toby Harnden updates his weekend column in the Telegraph, UK, on the race.

NEW YORK state’s 23rd District, which juts into Canada and is bordered by the People’s Republic of Vermont, is an unlikely place to send a message to the Republican party about how to defeat President Barack Obama in 2012. …

…The local Republican bosses feared that the district was trending to the Left and that a conservative candidate might alienate swing voters. What has happened to Mrs Scozzafava, however, is what conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh described before her ignominious withdrawal as a “teachable moment”.

Mr Hoffman shouldn’t have had a prayer but polls indicated he was neck and neck with Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate. Under pressure from Republican leaders who were rapidly re-thinking their initial stance, Mrs Scozzafava, in third place and sinking fast, pulled out of the race yesterday (Sat), making it probable Mr Hoffman will be elected. …

…Candidates imposed from above by party bosses are liable to be rejected in an environment in which trust in government, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this week, is at a 12-year low.

It is, moreover, self-defeating to have a broad church that admits anyone no matter what their beliefs. The message Republican activists have sent from the 23rd is that abandoning conservative principles and going Obama-lite is no way to win back the White House …

We also have Toby Harnden’s post after Scozzafava’s telling endorsement.

If Dede Scozzafava had a shred of political integrity about her she would have backed Doug Hoffman or declined to endorse anyone. The fact that she took the Republican party’s cash, failed miserably as a candidate and then vented her spleen by trying to torpedo the new de facto Republican candidate (the one who would have beaten her in a primary had there been one) underlines what a losing bet she was right from the start. …

…The Scozzafava debacle underlines how badly the 11 local Republican honchos who chose her screwed things up. That’s what happens when an arrogant party imposes an inappropriate candidate. That’s why the primary system in the US tends to work so well – it’s democratic.

This all underscores the potential depth of popular anger against Barack Obama and Obama-lite Republicans.
While the whole thing is being portrayed as Right-wing nutters hijacking poor Dede’s candidacy, the reality is that this is local democracy in action – despite the backing of a major party, ordinary voters, including a substantial number of independents, were rejecting her. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin didn’t fix the polls. …

…There is an angry electorate out there and the Democratic attempts to smear Hoffman as some kind of crazy zealot and their embrace of the politically amoral Scozzafava will only underline the growing feeling that Obama and Co they will do or say anything to cling to power.

Dr. Zero from Hot Air posts on the “stupid party.”

… Meanwhile, the Republicans keep running “moderates” who prove to be very useful to the Democrats… which keeps the growth of the State bubbling along at Bush levels.  The radical nature of the current Administration makes the idea of “moderate” compromise laughable. What’s the moderate position on freedom-crushing trillion-dollar health care and environmentalist legislation? They’re okay, as long as the Democrats pinky-swear to keep the cost under $800 billion? That’s the kind of promise no politician could keep, even if it was made in earnest. A moderate Republican is someone who lives in a state of perpetual surprise as he ponders the monthly bills for nanny-state government. What’s the point of electing people who are guaranteed to spend the rest of their political careers complaining about how they’ve been played for fools?

Too much of the Republicans’ “Stupid Party” strategy is based on the mechanics of getting people with little elephants on their campaign signs elected. They view the election as the conclusion of a contest, when in fact it’s only the beginning. A successful Republican Party doesn’t have to be ideologically rigid, but it should insist on candidates who possess an intellectual foundation of conservative theory, and the ability to explain it at least as well as the thousands of people posting comments on conservative blogs.

Republican voters would be well-advised to ignore the people who engineered the Scozzafava debacle, and listen for the sound of Sarah Palin’s monster truck instead. America needs conservatives more than it needs Republicans.  Both the party, and the country, benefit when they are one and the same.  Next Halloween, just to be on the safe side, we should test the blood of every “moderate” Republican with a hot wire and a petri dish, just to make sure we don’t have another DIABLO on our hands.

Closing the section, Roger Simon has thoughts.

… Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign, however, tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state – you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.

There is, of course, a message in this for the Republican Party going forward. You can choose to emphasize the social issues or not. Today may show the former is a losing proposition.

Victor Davis Hanson pens a mild-mannered Jeremiad.

Obama’s mega-borrowing is predicated on a rather thin margin of safety. We can service nearly $2 trillion in additional debt this year—on top of the existing $11 trillion—only because interest rates are so low.

But as a veteran of the near usury of the 1970s and early 1980s, I see no reason why interest rates won’t shoot up to 10% once the economy recovers and the U.S. has to convince lenders to buy our paper in an inflationary spiral. In other words, we could fork out each year about $150-200 billion in interest costs on our annual red ink, in addition to paying annually another trillion dollars to service the existing debt. (We forget that many of us young people in the 1970s and 1980s simply never bought anything new due to high interest: my first new car was not purchased until 1989 when interest was only 7.2% on it; my parents bought a small condo in 1980 for the unbelievably low rate of 8.8%, due only to redevelopment incentives in a bad neighborhood of Fresno. Inflation will be back, even in this quite different age of globalized competition and low wages.)

When Obama talks of a trillion here for health care, a trillion there for cap-and-trade, it has a chilling effect. Does he include the cost of interest? Where will the money came from? Who will pay the interest? Has he ever experienced the wages of such borrowing in his own life? Did he cut back and save for his college or law school tuition, with part-time jobs? Did he ever run a business and see how hard it was to be $200 ahead at day’s end? …

…Integral to public debt are two eternal truths: a public demands of the state ever more subsidies, and those who pay for them shrink in number as they seek to avoid the increased burden. …

Robert Samuelson says that with governments continuing to spend more than they take in, the levels of debt amassed is bringing us to uncharted finance territory.

The idea that the government of a major advanced country would default on its debt—that is, tell lenders that it won’t repay them all they’re owed—was, until recently, a preposterous proposition. Argentina or Russia might stiff their creditors, but surely not the likes of the United States, Japan, or Great Britain. Well, it’s still a very, very long shot, but it’s no longer entirely unimaginable. Governments of rich countries are borrowing so much that it’s conceivable that one day the twin assumptions underlying their burgeoning debt (that lenders will continue to lend and that governments will continue to pay) might collapse. What happens then?

The question is so unfamiliar that the past provides few clues to the future. Psychology is decisive. To take a parallel example: the dollar. The fear is that foreigners (and Americans, too) lose confidence in its value and dump it for yen, euros, gold, or oil. If too many investors do that, a self-fulfilling stampede could trigger sell-offs in U.S. stocks and bonds. People have predicted such a crisis for decades. It hasn’t happened yet. The currency’s decline has been orderly, because the dollar retains a bedrock confidence based on America’s political stability, openness, huge wealth, and low inflation. But something could shatter that confidence, tomorrow or 10 years from tomorrow.

The same logic applies to exploding government debt. We have moved into uncharted territory and are prisoners of psychology. Consider Japan. In 2009, its budget deficit—the gap between spending and taxes—amounts to about 10 percent or more of gross domestic product (GDP). Its total government debt—the borrowing to cover all past deficits—is approaching 200 percent of GDP. That’s twice the size of the economy. The mountainous debt reflects years of slow economic growth, many “stimulus” plans, an aging society, and the impact of the global recession. By 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio could hit 300 percent, says a report from JPMorgan Chase. …

In Forbes, Paul Johnson discusses some of the different types of conservatives, and ends with these thoughts:

…A true conservative today should stress construction, encouragement, moderation and understanding instead of destruction, prohibition, extremism and slogans. A conservative thinks in terms of countless minor corrections and improvements based on experience and experiment rather than in terms of a universal, uniform solution based on theory and enforced by inflexible law.

A conservative, in the best sense, sees the world and its inhabitants as an interdependent organism, comprising innumerable local communities and territories, each adapting to particular conditions. A conservative is someone who goes with the grain of humanity and the nature of the physical world, rather than trying to regiment and fashion a utopia through force of law. And, needless to say, an acceptable conservative is not one who thinks all the answers are obvious but is a modest person who admits that problems are not easily solved, that perfection is unattainable in this world and that it is often necessary to admit mistakes, change one’s mind and start again.

Republicans should start looking now for a person who embodies these characteristics. If one can be found there should be no difficulty in putting Mr. Obama into his true historical place as an interesting and instructive one-term President.

The Economist reports on amazing new technology that desalinates water using solar power

THERE is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers. Meanwhile, around a fifth of the world’s population suffers from a shortage of drinking water and that fraction is expected to grow. One answer is desalination—but it is an expensive answer because it requires a lot of energy. Now, though, a pair of Canadian engineers have come up with an ingenious way of using the heat of the sun to drive the process. Such heat, in many places that have a shortage of fresh water, is one thing that is in abundant supply.

Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi met at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, while completing their MBAs. Their company, Saltworks Technologies, has set up a test plant beside the sea in Vancouver and will open for business in November. …

…Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi, by contrast, reckon they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation. …

…It is a simple idea that could be built equally well on a grand scale or as rooftop units the size of refrigerators. Of course, a lot of clever engineering is involved to make it work, but the low pressure of the pumps needed (in contradistinction to those employed in reverse osmosis) means the brine can be transported through plastic pipes rather than steel ones. Since brine is corrosive to steel, that is another advantage of Mr Sparrow’s and Mr Zoshi’s technology. Moreover, the only electricity needed is the small amount required to pump the streams of water through the apparatus. All the rest of the energy has come free, via the air, from the sun.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Scott Rasmussen has interesting NY 23rd analysis.

… the New York 23rd Congressional District race will end up being between a Conservative Party candidate and a Democrat. In many ways, that pairing reflects the reality of national match-ups more than the typical partisan competition. There are more conservatives than Democrats in America, and there are more Democrats than Republicans.

One reason for this is that while Republican voters overwhelmingly consider themselves conservative, only 56% of conservative voters consider themselves to be Republicans. In other words, nearly half of all conservatives nationwide reject the Republican Party label. …

Mark Steyn updates us on the current strategies of militant environmentalists.

I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means. Tim Flannery, the jet-setting doomsaying global warm-monger from down under, was in Ottawa the other day promoting his latest eco-tract, and offered a few thoughts on “Copenhagen”—which is transnational-speak for December’s UN Convention on Climate Change. “We all too often mistake the nature of those negotiations in Copenhagen,” remarked professor Flannery. “We think of them as being concerned with some sort of environmental treaty. That is far from the case. The negotiations now ongoing toward the Copenhagen agreement are in effect diplomacy at the most profound global level. They deal with every aspect of our life and they will in?uence every aspect of our life, our economy, our society.”

Hold that thought: “They deal with every aspect of our life.” Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? But in a good way! So no need to worry. After all, we all care about the environment, don’t we? So we ought to do something about it, right? And, since “the environment” isn’t just in your town or county but spreads across the entire planet, we can only really do something at the planetary level. But what to do? According to paragraph 38 on page 18 of the latest negotiating text, the convention will set up a “government” to manage the “new funds” and the “related facilitative processes.” …

…“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You ?oat a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you. …

… At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition.

The problem, alas, is that, for the moment, there’s still more than one party. But why? Last year, David Suzuki suggested that denialist politicians should be thrown in jail. And only last month the New York Times’s Great Thinker Thomas Friedman channelled his inner Walter Duranty and decided that democracy has f*cked up the planet. Why, in Beijing, where they don’t have that disadvantage, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically dif?cult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Forward to where? …

The Washington Examiner editorialists comment on the bogus stimulus job numbers and the wasted money.

…Featherbedding occurs when paychecks are issued for nonexistent employees and the money goes directly into union coffers. Thousands of the jobs Obama officials say were saved or created by the stimulus program are no more real than those invisible positions invented by unions to bulk up their treasuries. We know this to be the case because as Obama’s chief economist, Christina Romer, admitted several weeks ago, “It’s very hard to say exactly because you don’t know what the baseline is, right, because you don’t know what the economy would have done without [the economic stimulus program].”

Even if we take at face value the White House claim that it created or saved all these jobs with approximately $150 billion of the economic stimulus money, a little simple math shows the taxpayers aren’t getting any bargains here: $150 billion divided by 650,000 jobs equals $230,000 per job saved or created. Instead of taking all that time required to write the 1,588-page stimulus bill, Congress could have passed a one-pager saying the first 650,000 jobless persons to report for work at the White House will receive a voucher worth $230,000 redeemable at the university, community college or trade school of their choice. That would have been enough for a degree plus a hefty down payment on a mortgage.

Actually, taxpayers would be better off with such a deal, too, compared with the reality of the Obama stimulus program. Among the top 10 stimulus contracts awarded, there is the one for nearly $339 million that allegedly created or saved 41.19 jobs, or about $8.3 million per position. It was even worse with the $258 million contract to Brookhaven Science Associates in New York, where 25 jobs were saved or created, at a cost of $10.3 million per position. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, the ranking House minority member of the Joint Economic Committee, said it best: “What we know for certain is that 2.7 million payroll jobs have been lost since the Obama stimulus was signed into law, hundreds of thousands of more jobs are being lost each month, and America is so deep in debt, China and France are lecturing us to get our financial house in order.”

The IBD editors also criticize the phony results from the ineffective stimulus program.

…As we have noted, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Christina Romer told Congress on Oct. 22: “Most analysts predict that the fiscal stimulus will have its greatest impact on growth in the second and third quarters of 2009. By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to growth.”

In other words, stimulus is dead. This moment of honesty makes it tough for White House officials to pretend the best is yet to come. And if they can’t show real results, they can’t make a case for a second stimulus — as the White House and Congress want. …

…The problem, again, is that none of these numbers is real. No one has gone out and counted actual jobs. It’s all made up. In a scathing critique, the nonpartisan Americans for Tax Reform wrote:

“The data will show that the bulk of the jobs ‘saved/created’ are government jobs, mostly jobs in the unproductive sector of the economy furthering no economic growth, and preventing necessary streamlining of an already bloated bureaucracy.”

Precisely. So don’t be fooled. No jobs are being generated by the stimulus, but a lot are being lost — along with the wealth of an entire generation. What a waste.

Caroline Baum, in Bloomberg.com, states the fundamental flaw behind the stimulus.

…When the government distributes lucre or loot, people spend it. If your interest is national income accounting, spending other people’s money is great. Spending is a back-door way for government statisticians to measure what matters, which is the real output of goods and services.

But the government has no money of its own to spend; only what it borrows or confiscates from us via taxation. Oops.

“Government job creation is an oxymoron,” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. It is only by depriving the private sector of funds that government can hire or subsidize hiring.

That’s why “jobs created or saved” is such pure fiction. It ignores what’s unseen, as our old friend Frederic Bastiat explained so eloquently 160 years ago in an essay.  …

Jennifer Rubin says the government is merely demonstrating that it is not fit for any serious duty.

…Aside from the taxes, fees, mandates, regulations, and anti-tort-reform provisions, the major failing of the Democrats’ health-care approach is that it asks us to give immense authority to a government that has not earned the trust of the people nor demonstrated its competency in dealing with far less complex issues. How’s this: when they can tell us with precision which jobs were created and which saved, what the baseline for counting was, which are private and which are public sector, and whether those include jobs lost from defense-spending cuts (e.g., the elimination of the F-22), then we can talk about giving them some more responsibility for health care.

The Economist reviews the book Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King, written by Brad Matsen. Jacques, we hardly knew ye.

THIRTY years ago Jacques-Yves Cousteau … was reckoned to be one of the ten most recognised men in the world. This biography, uncritical but revealing, shows how that happened. Nominally a captain in the French navy, Cousteau spent most of his working life pioneering a new form of celebrity, that of the TV explorer. With his ship, the converted minesweeper Calypso, and a crew of divers with attractive French accents and film-star looks, he patrolled the more photogenic corners of the oceans and documented these exploits in books and television programmes that turned him into a global godfather of undersea adventure.

The secret of this success, explains Brad Matsen, the author of many books and articles about the sea, was nothing to do with the science of oceanography or indeed the science of anything. It was to do with television. In “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau”, the documentary series that ran from 1968 and was shown all over the world …, he hit on the thing of which every TV producer dreams: a near-perfect small-screen formula. …

…So what is Cousteau’s legacy? If you consult the index of “A History of Oceanography”, a scholarly account published at the very height of his fame, you will find no entries at all under his name. His real contribution was to stoke the popular imagination with images of life beneath the surface of the seas, as seen by men in well-tailored diving gear.

In Slate.com, Farhad Manjoo tells us how to stay charged up.

Our daily struggle with batteries has spawned a cottage industry of advice about their proper care and feeding. …

…To clear up these annoyances and conflicting theories, I called up Isidor Buchmann, the CEO of Cadex Electronics, a Canadian company that makes battery-testing equipment. Buchman also runs Battery University, a very helpful Web site for battery enthusiasts and engineers. I asked Buchmann how we can make sure that our batteries last a long time. …

… Here are some of Buchmann’s tips:

Laptops: The typical lifespan of a lithium-ion laptop battery is about 18 months to 2 years, Buchmann says, but yours will last much longer if you don’t punish it too much. The main stresses include undercharging, overcharging, and one that few of us consider: heat. Temperatures inside a laptop can reach more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hell for a battery.

Ideally, Buchmann says, you should try to keep your battery charged from 20 percent to 80 percent. Keep in mind that these are guidelines for ideal use—it’s generally inconvenient to unplug your machine before it goes all the way to 100. But even if you’re not on constant guard, be mindful of charging your machine constantly, well past when you know it’s full. You also should be conscious of letting your battery run all the way to zero.

Try to keep your laptop as cool as possible. The best technique here is to charge up your battery when the computer is turned off. When your laptop is turned on and plugged in, you should pull the battery out of your computer. Yes, pull it out. “I know that’s inconvenient,” Buchmann says, “but keeping your laptop plugged in when the battery’s fully charged—that combination is bad for your battery.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin has a short piece on the election tomorrow titled; New Jersey Too!

I spent the weekend in Virginia covering the upcoming election, which is shaping up to be an historic sweep for Republicans. A bit of trivia: keep your eye on the House of Delegates race in the third district, where the Republican challenger in coal country in southwest Virginia is running on cap-and-trade. Democratic handicappers are throwing in the towel on that one. (If that bill weren’t dead before, it will be. At least with the Virginia delegation and other similarly situated lawmakers, the race would turn almost solely on this issue.)

But everywhere I went, the question was the same: what do you hear about New Jersey? This is what happens when a blowout is coming – political observers begin to look for something of interest that isn’t a foregone conclusion.

The last few polls have shown an uptick for Chris Christie and a leveling off in support for Chris Daggett. Then Sunday night, the Democratic Public Policy Polling found Christie leading 47 to 41 percent, with 11 percent for Daggett. The explanation: …

In World Affairs Journal, John McWhorter has a fascinating discussion about the death of languages and the ubiquitousness of English.

…Yet the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.

… Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem. …

…What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation. For example, most Americans pronounce disgusting as “diss-kussting” with a k sound. (Try it—you probably do too.) However, some people say “dizz-gusting”—it’s easier to pronounce the g after a softer sound like z. Imagine a language with the word pronounced as it is spelled (and as it was in Latin): “diss-gusting.” The group speaking the language splits into two groups that go their separate ways. Come back five hundred years later, and one group is pronouncing the word “diss-kussting,” while the other is pronouncing it “dizz-gusting.” After even more time, the word would start shortening, just as we pronounce “let us” as “let’s.” After a thousand years, in one place it would be something like “skussting,” while in the other it might be “zgustin.” After another thousand, perhaps “skusty” and “zguss.” By this time, these are no longer even the same language.

…Notice that this is not about culture, any more than saying “diss-kusting” rather than “diz-gusting” reflects anything about one’s soul. …

… language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it. …

Jonah Goldberg, in the National Review, comments on NEA director Rocco Landesman’s tribute to Obama, in the wake of Sargent’s demise.

…Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” …

… Lincoln never wrote any books.

In short, Landesman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But he does know what he’s doing.

What matters to him is not the power of Obama’s writing but the power of the writer. Why else compare a democratically elected president to one of history’s most iconic dictators? That is, unless we are to believe he is a huge fan of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. …

…By demonstrating with brazenly self-abasing ignorance that he is wholly Obama’s man, Landesman is making it clear that the NEA is completely committed to Obamaism. There’s no need for any more of Mr. Sergant’s tacky, Chicago-style pay-to-play. Self-humiliation sends a far more powerful signal. …

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor points out that a recent UN resolution could be the top of a slippery slope. Or perhaps a tipping point?

…But the real problem is a provision, which the U.S. championed jointly with Egypt, exuding hostility to free expression.

That provision “expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world, and condemns, in this context, any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human-rights law, to address and combat such incidents” (emphasis added). …

…It could be read narrowly as a commitment merely to denounce and eschew hate speech. But it could more logically be read broadly as requiring the United States and other nations to punish “hostile” speech about — and perhaps also “negative stereotyping” of — any race or religion. It’s a safe bet, however, that the Islamic nations that are so concerned about criticisms of their religion will not be prosecuting anyone for the rampant “negative racial and ethnic stereotyping” and hate speech in their own countries directed at Jews and sometimes Christians.

Eugene Volokh of the University of California (Los Angeles) Law School pointed out on his Volokh Conspiracy blog that the reference to “obligations under international human-rights law” could be seen as binding the United States to a provision of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requiring that hate speech “shall be prohibited by law.” The U.S. has previously rejected that provision.

Added Volokh: “Advocacy of mere hostility — for instance… to radical strains of Islam [or any other religion] — is clearly constitutionally protected here in the U.S.; but the resolution seems to call for its prohibition. [And] if we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic Constitution, then [the administration's vote was] implicitly criticizing that Constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it.” Such a stance could be seen as obliging the executive branch to urge the Supreme Court to overrule decades of First Amendment decisions.

Far-fetched? Not according to the hopes and expectations of many international law scholars. “An international norm against hate speech would supply a basis for prohibiting it, the First Amendment notwithstanding…. In the long run, it may point to the Constitution’s more complete subordination,” Peter Spiro, a professor at Temple University Law School, asserted in a 2003 Stanford Law Review article. …

Toby Harneden posts a piece of Plouffe on Biden, on his blog in the Telegraph, UK.

This is priceless. An extract from Time.com from a new book by David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, on interviewing Joe Biden for the veep slot. One of the best bits is the notion that being a Senator is being a “top dog” – that and his shtick that he didn’t really want the vice-presidential job:

The [first] meeting started with Biden launching into a nearly 20-minute monologue that ranged from the strength of our campaign in Iowa (”I literally wouldn’t have run if I knew the steamroller you guys would put together”); to his evolving views of Obama (”I wasn’t sure about him in the beginning of the campaign, but I am now”); why he didn’t want to be VP (”The last thing I should do is VP; after 36 years of being the top dog, it will be hard to be No. 2?); why he was a good choice (”But I would be a good soldier and could provide real value, domestically and internationally”); and everything else under the sun. Ax and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It confirmed what we suspected: this dog could not be taught new tricks.

But Obama still chose him.

Brian Palmer has an interesting linguistic piece in Slate. Must be language day.

Former Bosnian leader and accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic did not appear for the start of his trial on Monday in the Dutch city of The Hague. Why do we call it The Hague, rather than just Hague?

Blame the locals. Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means “the counts’ hedge” and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting. Many other place names started off as descriptions with definite articles. For example, the city of Bath, England, famous for its purportedly health-supporting natural spring, was referred to as “The Bath” until the 19th century. The town of Devizes, about 20 miles east of Bath, used to be called “The Devizes,” because it once divided the estates of two large landowners. In these cases, the definite articles dropped off when the locals started thinking of their town’s name as more than a mere descriptor. But people in The Hague have stuck with the original phrase—even to the point of using the longer “Counts’ Hedge” title from time to time. …

… Place names change over time, but in general the movement is away from the use of the definite article. Until approximately 50 years ago, Ukraine, whose name is derived from the Proto-Slavic term for a borderland, was almost always referred to as “The Ukraine.” Now, according to the Ukrainian government—and a federal judge who presided over a case in which the U.S. government and a Ukrainian deportee couldn’t even agree on how to refer to the country—the proper name is simply Ukraine. …

… The Bronx is another interesting case. …

In the Times, UK, Jenny Booth reports on a fatal coyote attack.

A teenage folk singer has died after being set upon by two coyotes as she hiked alone in a national park in Nova Scotia.

Taylor Mitchell, 19, a rising star of the Canadian music scene, died in Halifax hospital yesterday after the normally shy animals attacked her as she hiked one of the most scenic trails in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Walkers who heard her frantic screams alerted park rangers, who shot one of the coyotes. …

…”Coyotes are normally afraid of humans. This is a very irregular occurrence,” Ms Leger said. …

…”There’s been some reports of aggressive animals, so it’s not unknown,” said Helene Robichaud, the park’s superintendent. “But we certainly never have had anything so dramatic and tragic.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn speaks witty truth to the ”rebels” in the Obama administration.

Valerie Jarrett announced the other day that “we’re going to speak truth to power.”

Who’s Valerie Jarrett? She’s “Senior Adviser” to the president of the United States – i.e., the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth. You would think the most powerful man in the most powerful nation would find a hard job finding anyone on the planet to “speak truth to power” to. But I suppose if you’re as eager to do so as his Senior Adviser, there’s always somebody out there: The Supreme Leader of Iran. The Prime Minister of Belgium. The Deputy Tourism Minister of the Solomon Islands. But no. The Senior Adviser has selected targets closer to home: “I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. When we saw all of the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death.”

Ah, right. People “putting up signs.” Can’t have that, can we? The most powerful woman in the inner circle of the most powerful man on Earth has decided to speak truth to powerful people standing in the street with handwritten placards saying “THIS GRAN’MA ISN’T SHOVEL READY.” Was it only a week ago that I wrote about this administration’s peculiar need for domestic enemies?

The Senior Adviser seems to have forgotten that she is the power. Admittedly, this is a recurring lapse on the part of the administration. There was Barack Obama only the other day, blaming everything on the president – no, no, silly, not him, the other fellow, the Designated Fall Guy who stepped down as head of state in January to accept the new constitutional position of Blame Czar. Musing on problems in Afghanistan, Obama blamed the “long years of drift” under his predecessor. The new president – OK, newish president – has been Drifter-in-Chief for almost a year but he’s too busy speaking truth to the former power to get on top of the situation. …

Charles Krauthammer explains that in war, strategies are adjusted for unexpected circumstances.

…In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. For obvious reasons: less risk and fewer losses for our troops, while reducing the intrusiveness of the occupation and thus the chances of creating an anti-foreigner backlash that would fan an insurgency. …

…It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it proved wrong. The strategy failed. Not just because the enemy proved highly resilient but because the allegiance of the population turned out to hinge far less on resentment of foreign intrusiveness (in fact the locals came to hate the insurgents — al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan — far more than us) than on physical insecurity, which made them side with the insurgents out of sheer fear. …

…In both places, the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of “drift,” but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time but that ultimately turned out to be wrong. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on an article by David Brooks about how Obama’s indecision has been detrimental to the Afghanistan conflict.

As Brooks observes:

“The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. …”

What is critical is whether we lack a commander in chief who inspires confidence and seems prepared to lead the country to victory. If Obama isn’t convincing Brooks, he’s not going to convince the country, our allies, the military, and especially our enemies. Running a seminar is not leading the nation in war, and the endless seminar has now made it infinitely more difficult to succeed at the latter. The president is seemingly unaware that others are watching his equivocation and making their own calculations, ones that will further complicate our war strategy, if we ever get one.

Peter Wehner also has comments about the Brooks’ article.

As Jennifer has pointed out, David Brooks has penned an interesting column on Afghanistan and President Obama. After interviewing many experts on Afghanistan, he reports:

“Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence. But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.”

These are of course precisely the qualities that George W. Bush showed during the debate in late 2006 and 2007 about the so-called surge in Iraq. At the time Bush was almost alone in his advocacy. His commending generals, George Casey and John Abizaid, opposed his plan, as did most members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some members of Bush’s own war cabinet. Virtually the entire Democratic party, most of the foreign-policy establishment, and most of the public had turned hard against the war. They were certain the new counterinsurgency plan could not work and shouldn’t be tried.

Despite opposition as fierce and sustained as one can imagine (and far worse than anything President Obama is now experiencing), Bush and a small handful of others — the most important of whom were General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker -– persisted. They displayed raw determination. … And they were proved right. In other words, the qualities Bush displayed in wartime are now the qualities Brooks and others (including me) are hoping Obama possesses. …

Jennifer Rubin picks up an astonishing statistic from the Washington Post.

This sobering report comes from the Washington Post:

“More than 1,000 American troops have been wounded in battle over the past three months in Afghanistan, accounting for one-fourth of all those injured in combat since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. The dramatic increase has filled military hospitals with more amputees and other seriously injured service members and comes as October marks the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan.”

How many were killed or lost a limb, I wonder, while the president dithered and delayed implementing the recommendations of his hand-picked general? It is not an inconsequential question. The president acts as though there were no downside to the lethargic pace of his decision-making. …

…What’s a few more weeks? Or months? Well, we know there is indeed a price to allowing our current approach to languish. There is a very real cost to delaying implementation of the new plan that is the best available to achieve victory as quickly as possible. The enemy is emboldened. More civilians die. The political and security situation in Pakistan worsens. And more brave Americans are asked to sacrifice themselves while Obama considers and reconsiders whether there isn’t any way to shave some money off the tab and reduce the number of troops his commanders say are needed. …

David Harsanyi discusses the latest incarnation of the health care bill.

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton’s Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi’s new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages. …

…The word “shall” — as in “must” or “required to” — appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once. …

Toby Harnden, at the Telegraph, UK, blogs about Valerie Jarrett’s interview with CNN.

…In the middle of all this patent nonsense, Jarrett blurted out the truly bizarre notion that “what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power”. Poor plucky little Barack Obama, United States commander-in-chief and leader of the Free World taking on Goliath. They may still act as if the election campaign is still on but it might be a good idea for Jarrett and Co to reflect that they are power.

As David Zurawik notes: “such a phrase from our collective past that has real resonance because it was once loaded with such integrity, moral authority and wisdom when first uttered, is cheapened when used in such a blatantly and inappropriate political context”. …

…It was such a train wreck of an interview for Jarrett that I’d hazard a guess we might be seeing a little less of her on our screens. Remember, she was the person that Team Obama favoured as the new appointed (i.e. unelected) Senator for Illinois. That was, of course, because she would have been the very best person for the job and nothing to do with the fact that she a long-time Obama family friend.

Burton Folsom, history prof at Hillsdale College blogs on The Corner about how cutting back taxes and government have spurred economic recoveries before.

…Many have compared the current economic crisis to the Great Depression, and it is useful to study FDR’s statistics on recovery to understand the problem with relying on short-term data. Unemployment, for example, was 21.4 percent in May 1934 and dropped to 13.2 percent by May 1937. That impressed many pundits and voters. But in May 1939, unemployment was back up to 20.7 percent. Why? FDR had raised taxes, introduced a new corporate tax, enacted a minimum-wage law, and granted unions unprecedented federal support to organize during the late 1930s. When those government interventions took hold, the economic recovery was thwarted. In fact, capital goods in May 1937 had almost returned to 1929 levels, but in May 1939 capital goods stood at a mere 59 percent of 1929 levels.

The key issue here is economic philosophy. FDR believed that massive intervention (followed by high taxes) would lead to economic recovery. Obama has a similar belief. They are wrong, and thus any short-term recovery we see during 2009 and 2010 is likely to be ephemeral. By contrast, Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge believed that cutting tax rates and reducing federal intervention was the recipe for economic recovery, and both saw economic recoveries during the first terms of their presidencies. Economic growth during the 1920s and 1980s was, in fact, spectacular. When people are unshackled and allowed to be free, they can accomplish much. When that belief takes hold again in the United States, we will likely see a serious recovery.

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff explains that government incentives are creating borrowing and spending where corrections are still needed.

The GDP numbers out yesterday, which showed economic growth at 3.5% in the third quarter, brought a deafening chorus from public and private economists who all agreed that the recession is officially over. With such a strong report, they are happy to tell us that not only has the Fat Lady finished her aria, but she has left the building and is sipping champagne in the bath. As usual, it falls on me to rain on the parade.

Even the giddiest commentators admit that the upside GDP surprise resulted almost entirely from government interventions. But, by pushing up public and private debt, expanding government, deepening trade deficits, and pushing down savings rates, these interventions have succeeded only in putting our economy back on an unsustainable path of borrowing and spending. Accordingly, they have prevented the rebalancing necessary for long-term health. …

… In the end, this stimulus, just like prior doses, will only worsen the condition it is meant to cure. When it wears off, the resulting recession will be even bigger than the one that everyone assumes has just ended. Until the impulse to fight recessions with government stimulus is quashed, genuine economic growth will never return. A string of ever-worsening recessions will eventually lead to what will be the next Great (Inflationary) Depression. But for now, enjoy the bubbly.

David Warren dissects an article in which the journalist incorrectly blamed global warming for an environmental issue.

…Let me give an example of this, from a recent reading of a big feature article that appeared a couple of months ago in the Guardian Weekly. It was a plausible-looking piece (first warning!) — provided the reader knew nothing whatever about the topic. It reported, correctly, that the Nile Delta is being gradually inundated by the destructive salt waters of the Mediterranean Sea, at terrible cost to the agriculture on which tens of millions of Egyptians depend for their basic foods.

But the writer attributes the whole thing to rising sea levels, and thus global warming. And this is nonsense. The Mediterranean has been rising but only on an incremental scale undetectable except over centuries — as all the world’s sea level since the last Ice Age (and at that, not consistently, and apparently not at the moment).

The explanation is instead the High Aswan Dam. For millennia that delta had been accreting from the accumulation of silt washed down the Nile from mountains in Ethiopia and other sources far, far away — rising in the annual inundation which was once the basis for all Egyptian agriculture. Against this, at the mouth of the Nile, the inroads of the sea; but the deposit of silt was greater. Most of this silt is now impounded behind that huge dam, hundreds of miles inland, and has been for decades now. The dam itself is gradually silting over, but the delta lands are no longer being replenished. Hence, the unmitigated inroads of the sea. …

In Slate, Daniel Gross feeds the newspaper pessimists a dose of reality.

Recent data provided newspaper lovers with fodder for despair and newspaper haters with fodder for glee. As Reuters reported, citing Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, “Average weekday circulation at 379 daily newspapers fell 10.6 percent to about 30.4 million copies for the six months that ended on Sept. 30, 2009 from the same period last year.” “Those numbers take my breath away,” said Josh Marshall. “A ten percent decline year over year is the rate of a mode of distribution going out of existence.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones reaffirmed his view that newspapers would be gone by 2025. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic declared, “I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it.”

Chillax, people.

…First of all, there’s nothing ipso facto shocking about a decline in patronage of 10 percent in six months. Many political blogs and cable news shows have seen their audiences fall by much more than 10 percent since the feverish fall of 2008. And advertising at plenty of online publications has fallen by a similar amount. In case anybody has forgotten, we’ve had a deep, long recession, a huge spike in unemployment, and a credit crunch. Consumers have cut back sharply on all sorts of expenditures. There are plenty of members of what I call the 40 percent club: businesses, many tethered to finance and credit, that have seen sales plummet by nearly one-half. These include automobiles, homes, luxury apparel, and diamonds. Many other components of consumer discretionary spending—hotels, restaurants, air travel—have fallen off significantly. Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels? I’m not sure why we would expect consumption of a purely discretionary item that costs a few hundred dollars per year not to fall in the type of macroeconomic climate we’ve had.
Especially when you consider that rather than discounting the product, many newspapers (and magazines) have been jacking up prices aggressively. … they’re planning for survival by slashing costs sharply, trying to boost online advertising, and, here’s the clincher, making people pay more for the product. … When you raise the price of a product, you’re likely to lose a portion of your customer base. And while no newspaper likes to shed readers, some of the shrinkage in circulation is by design. If raising subscription costs by 11 percent causes 10 percent of customers to flee, a newspaper will find that its circulation revenues are stable while it saves a lot of money by manufacturing a smaller number of newspapers. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Peter Wehner has kudos for Obama’s visit to Dover.

… Barack Obama did the right thing in the right way, and he deserves credit for it.

There are three big races in the elections next week. The polls, for all of them, took good turns in the last few days. What will this mean? Jennifer Rubin has ideas.

… If — BIG if — these margins hold, next Tuesday may be an eye-opening vote for the Washington crowd. They have gone blithely on their way, spending and spending and churning this and that plan to take over health care. Meanwhile, the country is fuming. Voters, especially independents, didn’t think that this was what hope-n-change was all about. If Republicans win big next week on messages of fiscal conservatism and opposition to big-government liberalism, maybe the inside-the-Beltway set will wake up. …

Michael Barone saw the first three races and raised one more.

Six days from now the voters of New Jersey and Virginia will elect governors. Voters in the 23rd district of New York and the 10th district of California will elect new members of the House of Representatives to replace incumbents, a Republican and a Democrat, who were appointed to positions in the Obama Defense and State departments.

All four of these constituencies voted for Barack Obama 51 weeks ago. Obama won 57 percent of the vote in New Jersey, 53 percent (his national average) in Virginia, 52 percent in New York 23 and 65 percent in California 10.

Yet all of this territory was once Republican. Suburb-dominated New Jersey voted 56 percent for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Southern-accented Virginia hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. The last time the territory covered by New York 23 elected a Democratic congressman was in 1870. And the incumbent who is being replaced in California 10 won her seat by beating a Republican in 1996.

In other words, the 2009 contests are a reasonably fair test of the strength and durability of the Democratic majority that Obama and his ticketmates assembled in 2008, a majority that was only made possible by gains in hitherto Republican territory. It is also a test of the capacity of Republicans to regain turf they have lost.

Yes, the character of the individual candidates and local issues can make a difference. But the basic issues in these four contests are reasonably congruent with the national issues now being debated in Congress and debated this summer in town halls across the nation. …

Karl Rove’s fourth race was for the PA’s Supreme Court.

… Finally, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, Judge Joan Orie Melvin, is mounting a strong effort against Democrat Jack Panella, despite a $1 million ad blitz targeting her that’s bankrolled by Philadelphia trial lawyers. A GOP victory would indicate trouble for Democrats in a state Mr. Obama carried by 10 points.

A year ago, Democrats crowed that Mr. Obama had reshaped the political landscape to their advantage. Voters have lived under Democratic rule for nine months, and many of them, especially independents, don’t like what they’re seeing.

Tuesday’s election will provide the most tangible evidence so far of how strong a backlash is building—and just how frightened centrist Democrats should be of 2010. For Republicans, it looks as if hope and change are on the way.

German magazine Der Spiegel interviewed Charles Krauthammer.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?

Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it’s not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.

SPIEGEL: Why does it?

Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today’s politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.

SPIEGEL: It hardly makes sense to blame him for losing the Olympic bid in one week, and then for winning the Nobel Prize the next.

Krauthammer: He should have simply said: “This is very nice, I appreciate the gesture, but I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve.” But he is not the kind of man that does that.

SPIEGEL: Should he have turned down the prize?

Krauthammer: He would never turn that down. The presidency is all about him. Just think about the speech he gave in Berlin. There is something so preposterous about a presidential candidate speaking in Berlin. And it was replete with all these universalist clichés, which is basically what he’s been giving us for nine months.

SPIEGEL: Why do Europeans react so positively to him?

Krauthammer: Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chaffing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it’s a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.

John Stossel columns again on Elinor Ostrom’s Economic Nobel.

… Ostrom made her mark through field studies that show people solving one of the more vexing problems: efficient management of a common-pool resource (CPR), such as a pasture or fishery. With an unowned “commons,” each individual has an incentive to get the most out of it without putting anything back.

If I take fish from a common fishing area, I benefit completely from those fish. But if I make an investment to increase the future number of fish, others benefit, too. So why should I risk making the investment? I’ll wait for others to do it. But everyone else faces the same free-rider incentive. So we end up with a depleted resource and what Garrett Harden called “the tragedy of the commons”.

Except, says Ostrom, we often don’t. There is also an “opportunity of the commons.” While most politicians conclude that, depending on the resource, efficient management requires either privatization or government ownership, Ostrom finds examples of a third way: “self-organizing forms of collective action,” as she put it in an interview a few years ago. Her message is to be wary of government promises.

“Field studies in all parts of the world have found that local groups of resource users, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with the assistance of external actors, have created a wide diversity of institutional arrangements for cooperating with common-pool resources.”  …

Ed Morrissey on the latest silliness from global warming freaks.

If people want a glimpse of what the world will be like with global-warming hysterics in charge, Lord Stern of Brentford lets the veil slip in an interview with the Times of London.  Stern admits that the upcoming Copenhagen talks would produce a pact on energy usage that would send the cost of meat “soaring.”  That suits Stern just fine, because he wants to push the world into vegetarianism anyway: …

… Seven hundred years ago, man farmed and raised cows and pigs on the entire island of Greenland.  When they do that again, perhaps I’ll worry about bovine flatulence as a global threat.  Until then, I consider creeping elitism from horse’s asses a much more elitist threat than methane from cow’s butts.

It’s hard to overstate how stupid governments are. Some perfect examples are the simple scams in the first time housing tax-credit. WSJ Editors have the story.

… As a “refundable” tax credit, it guarantees the claimants will get cash back even if they paid no taxes. A lack of documentation requirements also makes this program a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone for scammers. The Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department are pursuing more than 100 criminal investigations related to the credit, and the IRS is reportedly trying to audit almost everyone who claims it this year.

Speaking of the IRS, apparently its own staff couldn’t help but notice this opportunity to snag an easy $8,000. One day after explaining to Congress how many “home-buyers” were climbing aboard this gravy train, Mr. George appeared on Neil Cavuto’s program on the Fox Business Network. Mr. George said his staff has found at least 53 cases of IRS employees filing “illegal or inappropriate” claims for the credit. “In all honesty this is an interim report. I expect that the number would be much larger than that number,” he said.

The program is set to expire at the end of November, so naturally given its record of abuse, Congress is preparing to extend it. Republican Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia is so pleased with the results that he wants to expand the program beyond first-time buyers and double the income limits. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Reason Magazine reviews two books in the historian’s war over the end of the Cold War.

We don’t know the exact hierarchy of motives, but it is certain that Chris Gueffroy was willing to leave his family and friends to avoid conscription into the army. Considering the associated risks, it’s likely that the 20-year-old was also strongly motivated to escape the stultifying sameness, the needless poverty, the cultural black hole that was his homeland. In his passport photo, he wore a small hoop earring, an act of nonconformity in a country that prized conformity above all else. But Gueffroy’s passport was yet another worthless possession, for he had the great misfortune of being born into a walled nation, a country that brutally enforced a ban on travel to “nonfraternal” states.

On February 6, 1989, Gueffroy and a friend attempted to escape from East Berlin by scaling die Mauer—the wall that separated communist east from capitalist west. They didn’t make it far. After tripping an alarm, Gueffroy was shot 10 times by border guards and died instantly. His accomplice was shot in the foot but survived, only to be put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison for “attempted illegal border-crossing in the first degree.”

Twenty years ago this month, and nine months after the murder of Gueffroy, the Berlin Wall, that monument to the barbarism of the Soviet experiment, was finally breached. The countries held captive by Moscow began their long road to economic and cultural recovery, and to reunification with liberal Europe. But in the West, where Cold War divisions defined politics and society for 40 years, the moment was not greeted as a welcome opportunity for intellectual reconciliation, for fact-checking decades of exaggerations and misperceptions. Instead, then as now, despite the overwhelming volume of new data and the exhilaration of hundreds of millions finding freedom, the battle to control the Cold War narrative raged on unabated. Reagan haters and Reagan hagiographers, Sovietophiles and anti-communists, isolationists and Atlanticists, digested this massive moment in history, then carried on as if nothing much had changed. A new flurry of books timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse reinforces the point that the Cold War will never truly be settled by the side that won. …

Paul Greenberg says the UN is outrageous again.

It won’t do, at least not in polite society, to propose wiping a country off the map. That mantra has been left to Iran’s raving leader.

Instead, this year’s tactic at the always-busy United Nations is to deny Israel the right to defend itself. Which would lead to its destruction soon enough. And that would be the practical effect of bringing its generals and ministers to trial for their “war crimes” in Gaza. That’s where the Israelis, after absorbing years of rocket attacks across their southern border, went in and attacked the source of the attacks. Their border with Hamas-controlled Gaza has been quieter since.

Naturally the United Nations, which is a lot better at condoning aggression than enforcing the peace, is outraged — and doing its best to stir things up again. Its “Human Rights” Council, which has little if anything to do with protecting human rights, especially in Islamic dictatorships, has demanded that Israel be brought before the International Court of Justice for daring to defend itself. …

David Warren on making decisions.

The extreme delay in getting decisions out of Washington that were urgent many months ago, on how to proceed in Afghanistan, was made sickly comic on Monday when President Barack Obama told a military audience that he would not “rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm’s way.”

Morale had been descending in Afghanistan, from what I could make out, among an under-manned allied force in serious need of reinforcement; casualties rising on uncovered flanks.

And then they hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and quick, unemotional decision-making process. After all, he announced his (vacuous) “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” to great fanfare last March. All he has to do now is give it substance.

The Bush administration was, for all its misjudgments in other areas, good at making clear, clean, practical decisions with troops in harm’s way. Bush himself commanded overwhelming support in the military vote for his re-election in 2004. John McCain, who could also be taken as having some idea about military issues, largely kept that vote. If Obama thinks he can now win the trust of soldiers, by blathering to them about the solemnity of his own august personal angst, he is as much of a fool as he looks to them already. …

Thomas Sowell wonders if we’ll recognize our country when Obama is finally dispatched back to Chicago.

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments? …

WSJ’s Bill McGurn says he’s not the post-partisan prez. He’s the post-gracious one.

Nine months after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, his most adamant critics must concede he’s delivered on “change.” And we see it in our first post-gracious presidency.

The most visible manifestations of the new ungraciousness are the repeated digs the president and his senior staffers continue to make against George W. Bush. Recently, the administration has given us two fresh examples. The first is about Afghanistan, the other about the economy.

On Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff went on CNN’s “State of the Union” earlier this month to discuss the presidential decision on Afghanistan that everyone is waiting for. “It’s clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that’s adrift,” said Rahm Emanuel. “That we’re beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years.” Translation: If we screw up Afghanistan, blame Mr. Bush. …

Toby Harnden in Telegraph, UK says it’s time to put aside campaigning and start governing.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the land of the permanent campaign has produced a president like Barack Obama. During his White House bid, Mr Obama’s staff argued that his masterful oversight of the machinery that ultimately got him elected was his highest achievement.

In many respects this was true, though Mr Obama was more chairman than CEO. Even Republican political operatives acknowledge that the Obama ’08 campaign was a thing of beauty.

Essentially, however, Mr Obama won because of his persona – post-racial, healing, cool, articulate and inspirational. In a sense, therefore, his greatest achievement in life is being Barack Obama. Or the campaign version, at least.

Therein lies the problem. While campaigning could centre around soaring rhetoric, governing is altogether messier. It involves tough, unpopular choices and cutting deals with opponents. It requires doing things rather than talking about them, let alone just being.

Mr Obama is showing little appetite for this. Instead of being the commander-in-chief, he is the campaigner-in-chief. …

Jillian Melchior in Contentions reports how trade wars get started.

Predictably, Beijing has retaliated against Barack Obama’s protectionist trade policy. (Last week), the Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a preliminary ruling that puts a 36 percent tariff on U.S.-made nylon. That tariff, like the initial one, will hurt American industry and American consumers, and it could have been avoided.

If only Obama had been more … diplomatic. By upholding his campaign promises to labor unions, he backtracked on his promise to avoid protectionism. And tariffs are a surefire way to irk overseas friends.

The fray began in September. The United Steelworkers, who make the metal wiring that goes into tires, complained to the International Trade Commission that the high number of Chinese tire imports was disrupting and directly threatening the market. …