Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It seems there are two components to the causes of our current economic distress. The first, was affirmative action in mortgages. It had the same toxic effects affirmative action has had in the field of education, but in education there is no objective market mechanism to say, “This is bullshit.” So it can run along forever. However, there’s no ‘pretend’ option in the economy, so eventually the bad loans were found out. The second component, one harder to understand, is how the affirmative action mortgage bacillus infected the whole economy of the whole world. An article from Wired is one of the best attempts Pickerhead has seen in providing that understanding.

… Yet during the ’90s, as global markets expanded, there were trillions of new dollars waiting to be put to use lending to borrowers around the world—not just mortgage seekers but also corporations and car buyers and anybody running a balance on their credit card—if only investors could put a number on the correlations between them. The problem is excruciatingly hard, especially when you’re talking about thousands of moving parts. Whoever solved it would earn the eternal gratitude of Wall Street and quite possibly the attention of the Nobel committee as well.

To understand the mathematics of correlation better, consider something simple, like a kid in an elementary school: Let’s call her Alice. The probability that her parents will get divorced this year is about 5 percent, the risk of her getting head lice is about 5 percent, the chance of her seeing a teacher slip on a banana peel is about 5 percent, and the likelihood of her winning the class spelling bee is about 5 percent. If investors were trading securities based on the chances of those things happening only to Alice, they would all trade at more or less the same price.

But something important happens when we start looking at two kids rather than one—not just Alice but also the girl she sits next to, Britney. If Britney’s parents get divorced, what are the chances that Alice’s parents will get divorced, too? Still about 5 percent: The correlation there is close to zero. But if Britney gets head lice, the chance that Alice will get head lice is much higher, about 50 percent—which means the correlation is probably up in the 0.5 range. If Britney sees a teacher slip on a banana peel, what is the chance that Alice will see it, too? Very high indeed, since they sit next to each other: It could be as much as 95 percent, which means the correlation is close to 1. And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1.

If investors were trading securities based on the chances of these things happening to both Alice and Britney, the prices would be all over the place, because the correlations vary so much.

But it’s a very inexact science. Just measuring those initial 5 percent probabilities involves collecting lots of disparate data points and subjecting them to all manner of statistical and error analysis. Trying to assess the conditional probabilities—the chance that Alice will get head lice if Britney gets head lice—is an order of magnitude harder, since those data points are much rarer. As a result of the scarcity of historical data, the errors there are likely to be much greater.

In the world of mortgages, it’s harder still. What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation’s macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well? …

London Times editors appraise the president’s first month.

… It is a political commonplace that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But the sound of Mr Obama’s prose has begun to jangle. “Now is the time,” he said lulling his congressional audience, “to act boldly and wisely – to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.” The trouble is that this wasn’t the first time that Mr Obama told Americans that “it’s time to act”. Nobody doubts that now, in the teeth of the cruelest economic crisis in decades, it is time to act. But the world is still not clear what actions Mr Obama plans to take. What unnerves it even more is that when he has acted, his judgment has not always matched the sturdiness of his campaign rhetoric, let alone its slick, skilful execution. He has been ambushed in traps too often of his own making. …

Union-Leader editors too.

In nine words of his Wednesday night address to Congress, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he was not for big government. In the remaining 5,893 words, he proved those nine untrue.

The agenda the President put forward is the largest expansion of the federal government at least since the Great Society and probably since the New Deal. It would not simply pump short-term cash into the economy and the credit markets. It would fundamentally reorder America’s relationship with Washington.

Worse, it would do so in ways that are economically destructive. …

NewsBusters has more on Bill Moyers.

… Moyers has a reason to hope that everyone under 60 forgets, after all his PBS moralizing on shows with titles like The Secret Government, and after suggesting Reagan should be impeached for Iran-Contra dishonesty in a documentary suggestively titled High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The more that uncooperative writers peek under the rocks of Bill Moyers in government service, the phonier he looks. He looks, unsurprisingly, like a Democratic hack who became a Democratic hack media star on PBS, a network launched by LBJ’s Democratic hacks.

The Economist reports Atlas Shrugged is selling especially well during triple T. (These Troubled Times)

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We are going to have another shot looking at Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” remarks. Marty Peretz starts it off calling attention to a piece by one our favorites, Abigail Thernstrom. Another of our faves, Stuart Taylor, quotes Abby in his commentary.

Here’s Abby Thernstrom’s piece.

I don’t know what nation the attorney general is living in, but it’s not the one I know. Eric Holder’s speech to Justice Department staff on February 18 was scandalously uninformed, as well as arrogant and incoherent. It should be an embarrassment to the president.

Given the already splendid commentary on this speech by Jonah Goldberg and others, I had intended to hold my tongue. But after reading the attorney general’s remarks in full, I changed my mind. “A nation of cowards” — those attention-grabbing words have been much remarked upon. In fact, the rest of the speech is even more disturbing than that mud-slinging phrase.

Take the charge that “outside the workplace” the racial scene is “bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.”

A little fact-checking is in order. …

And Stuart Taylor was in the National Journal.

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Your speech commemorating Black History Month by calling America “a nation of cowards” because we “do not talk enough with each other about race” — a topic about which we talk incessantly — was unworthy of the admirable public servant I believe you to be.

The speech was, as others have pointed out, embarrassingly misinformed, hackneyed, and devoid of thoughtful contributions to racial dialogue.

You can do much better. Please use your bully pulpit in the future to cut through the usual cant and state some politically incorrect truths about race in America that would carry special weight if they came from you. That would require mustering the courage to take on the Democratic Party’s powerful racial-grievance lobby. But it would do the country a lot of good.

The one point that you developed in a bit of detail in the February 18 speech was especially silly: “Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment…. Until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so-called ‘real’ American history.”

Bosh. The reality is that our high schools and universities are quite clearly focusing disproportionate attention on black history. …

Mark Steyn has a look at the budget.

… The Wall Street Journal calculated that if you took every single dime – that’s 100 percent – of the over-250K crowd, it barely begins to pay for this program, even before half of them flee the country. The $4 trillion Congress is planning on spending next year (2010) could just about be covered if you took every single dime of the taxable income of every American earning over $75,000.

But it doesn’t matter. Because Big Government is the ultimate hero, and the private sector is merely a supporting role. Last week, the president redefined the relationship between the citizen and the state, in ways that make America closer to Europe. If you’ve still got the Webster’s to hand, “closer to Europe” is a sociopolitical colloquialism meaning “much worse.”

Is the new all-powerful Statezilla vulnerable to anything? Unfortunately, yes. He loses all his superpowers when he comes into contact with something called Reality. But happily Reality is nowhere in sight. There are believed to be some small surviving shards somewhere on the planet – maybe on an uninhabited atoll somewhere in the Pacific – but that’s just a rumor, and Barack Obama isn’t planning on running into Reality any time soon.

Thomas Sowell thinks Sarah Palin is a modern day Whittaker Chambers.

… Governor Palin’s candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, “He’s not one of us.”

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was “one of us.” As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today. …

LA Times Op-Ed on the havoc in Mexico wrought by our drug war.

Early in the last century, near the end of his 34 bloody years in power, the aging Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz mused that his country’s great misfortune was to be located “so far from God and so near the United States.”

The shrewd old thief’s observation came to mind this week when U.S. officials announced they’d joined with Mexican authorities in arresting more than 730 people allegedly linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel. That gang is the most powerful of the numerous criminal organizations smuggling drugs into the United States. Their intramural quarrels and resistance to a government crackdown have plunged Mexico into a round of violence unseen since the Cristero Wars in the 1920s. Over the last year, about 6,000 Mexicans have been killed.

Many fear that Mexico could be sliding into civil instability because of the cartels’ increasing willingness to use violence and bribery to protect their business. It’s an old story in other parts of Latin America, and for that reason, three of the region’s former heads of state — including onetime Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo — recently issued a report urging the U.S. to consider legalizing at least marijuana. Fat chance. …

Marine Private First Class Chance Phelps was killed in Rumadi, Iraq Good Friday 2004. Nine days later he was buried in Dubois, Wyoming. His escort home was Lt Col. Michael Strobl whose recollections formed the basis for an original HBO film Taking Chance which first aired a week ago this past Saturday. Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the film for the WSJ.

It was impossible to imagine, beforehand, all the ways a film like “Taking Chance”  could work its power. There are no conflicts, no warring sides, no mysteries of character — the usual stuff of drama. The story’s outcome is clear from the beginning. Yet it’s no less clear that “Taking Chance” is not only high drama, but a kind that is, in the most literal way, breathtaking — watching parts of it can make breathing an effort, and those parts come at every turn. It’s no less obvious that this film, about a Marine killed in combat, could have gone wrong in all sorts of ways and did so in none of them. There is in this work, at once so crushing and exhilarating, not a false note.

The credit for that belongs to Lt. Col. Michael Stroble, U.S. Marine Corps, on whose journal the film is based; to producer, writer and director Ross Katz; and, not least, to Kevin Bacon, whose portrayal of the devoted Col. Stroble is a masterwork — flawless in its fierce economy, eloquent in its testimony, most of it wordless, to everything that is going on.

You can watch this film on HBO today, Sunday, at 2:30pm, Monday morning at midnight, Wednesday noon and 8:00pm, and Sat. 4:30pm. Barack Obama diminishes himself by ignoring our success in Iraq. He would do well to watch this film. Perhaps he would come to understand some things about this country that, so far, have escaped his notice.

The Onion reports blacks are tired of all the high fives after Obama’s election.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Karl Rove discourses on Obama’s straw man techniques.

President Barack Obama reveres Abraham Lincoln. But among the glaring differences between the two men is that Lincoln offered careful, rigorous, sustained arguments to advance his aims and, when disagreeing with political opponents, rarely relied on the lazy rhetorical device of “straw men.” Mr. Obama, on the other hand, routinely ascribes to others views they don’t espouse and says opposition to his policies is grounded in views no one really advocates.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, “I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.” Who exactly has that view? Certainly not congressional Republicans, who believe that through reasonable tax cuts, fiscal restraint, and prudent monetary policies government contributes to prosperity.

Mr. Obama also said that America’s economic difficulties resulted when “regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.” Who gutted which regulations?

Perhaps it was President Bill Clinton who, along with then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, removed restrictions on banks owning insurance companies in 1999. If so, were Mr. Clinton and Mr. Summers (now an Obama adviser) motivated by quick profit, or by the belief that the reform was necessary to modernize our financial industry? …

Barack has Tony Blankley missing Clinton.

I hate to admit it, but I miss Bill Clinton. At least that lecherous old charmer was more amusing than his successor as a Democratic president, our new mortician in chief, Barack “End of the World” Obama.

Although, our new president’s spokesman did deliver the funniest line of this so-far-not-too-funny millennium. Last week, Robert Gibbs called the president — who, in the previous couple of weeks, had talked about our economy being a catastrophe from which we might never recover — “an eternal optimist.”

I appreciate that presidential spokesmen are not always known for their candor. And putting a positive gloss on his boss’s image is barely an infraction, given the howlers that often have come from that podium. But really, one prefers one’s perfidy to be at least plausible. If our economy in a death spiral is Obama’s upbeat version of events, one can only tremble at what he would sound like if he turned a little glum. …

Abe Greenwald and Jennifer Rubin have Contentions’ posts on the budget.

Ann Coulter is getting tired of all the “African-American president” milestones.

… But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the house?

Obama spent more than twice as much time in his historic speech genuflecting to the teachers’ unions than talking about terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan. So it was historic only in the sense that Obama is the first African-American president, but was the same old Democratic claptrap in every other respect.

After claiming that the disastrous stimulus bill would create or save 3.5 million jobs — “more than 90 percent” in the private sector — Obama then enumerated a long list of exclusively government jobs that would be “saved.”

He was suspiciously verbose about saving the jobs of public schoolteachers. Because nothing says “economic stimulus” better than saving the jobs of lethargic incompetents who kick off at 2 p.m. every day and get summers off. Actually, that’s not fair: Some teachers spend long hours after school having sex with their students.

As with the Clintons, Obama so earnestly believes in public school education that he sends his girls to … an expensive private school. He demands that taxpayers support the very public schoolteachers he won’t trust with his own children.

It is one thing to tell voters that school choice is wrong, because, you know, the public schools won’t get better unless Americans sacrifice their children to the teachers’ union’s maw. But it is quite another for Democrats to feed their own kids to the union incinerator.

Consequently, no Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send his own children to a public school.

And yet the stimulus bill expressly prohibits money earmarked for “education” to be spent on financial aid at private or parochial schools. Private schools might use it for some nefarious purpose like actually teaching their students, rather than indoctrinating them in anti-American propaganda.

The stimulus bill includes about $100 billion to education. By “education,” Democrats don’t mean anything a normal person would think of as education, such as learning how to talk good. “Education” means creating lots of useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with teaching. …

David Bernstein in Volokh Conspiracy has this quaint idea campaign promises were going to mean something.

Obama, in the third debate, within the first minute: “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut…. What I want to emphasize … is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.”

Also, I wonder how Obama’s high-income supporters in high-tax, high-cost areas like NYC, California, and DC are feeling right now? According to an article I read today, the top 7% of taxpaying families make over 250K a year, while the top 1% make over 380K. So the vast majority of those affected by Obama’s tax plans are in the 250-380K range. …

The Heritage Foundation has produced a video of DC voucher kids asking the president to save their scholarships.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Peter Wehner tries to set the Iraq record straight.

Peter Baker, the excellent New York Times reporter, wrote an interesting Week in Review piece yesterday  contrasting  President Bush’s effort at promoting democracy with that of President Obama, who has said nary a word in defense of it and whose administration seems to be downplaying human rights as a centerpiece of American foreign policy (see Hillary Clinton’s remarks in China). …

… It seems that for many people, the mistakes made in Iraq in the aftermath of 2003 permanently tainted their views of that nation; it is as if they decided the war was wrong and the effort to transform it into a functioning democracy was a mistake, come what may. Fortunately the Iraqi people have, with the support and skill of the American military, carried on; they have continued with the difficult task of self-government. Given all they have suffered through, what Iraqis have achieved is fairly extraordinary, and even heroic. And with the passage of time, Iraq may well demonstrate to the world all over again that freedom is still the best path to human flourishing and the cause of peace. Championing freedom and human rights isn’t easy, but it remains a noble cause. Those who want to make the opposite case — who want to argue on behalf of the benefits of authoritarianism, dictatorships, and tyranny, or why we should be indifferent to them — are free to do so. My hope and expectation is that America will, in the main, remain on the side of liberty. That is, after all, right where she belongs.

John Tierney gives us pause to be careful of scientists with a political agenda; like John Holdren, nominated to be Obama’s science advisor. You will be interested in Holdren’s reaction to one of our favorites; Bjørn Lomborg.

… “Some scientists want to influence policy in a certain direction and still be able to claim to be above politics,” Dr. Pielke says. “So they engage in what I call ‘stealth issue advocacy’ by smuggling political arguments into putative scientific ones.”

In Dr. Pielke’s book, one example of this stealthy advocate is the nominee for White House science adviser, Dr. Holdren, a longtime proponent of policies to slow population growth and control energy use. (See TierneyLab, for more on his background.) He appears in a chapter analyzing the reaction of scientists to “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” a 2001 book arguing that many ecological dangers had been exaggerated.

Dr. Holdren called it his “scientific duty” to expose the “complete incompetence” of the book’s author, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist. Dr. Holdren was one of the authors of an extraordinary 11-page attack on the book that ran in Scientific American under the headline, “Science defends itself against ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ ” — as if “science” spoke with one voice.

After reviewing the criticisms, Dr. Pielke concludes that a more accurate headline would have been, “Our political perspective defends itself against the political agenda of ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’ ” …

Seems like California might be a preview of what Obama has in store for us. Mark Steyn kicks off the coverage.

The Times of London put it this way: “Arnie Schwarzenegger Joins the Ranks of Girlie Men.”

Quite. As is well known, the Terminator has been unable to terminate anything — not even the impact study group studying the impact of expanding the Department of Impact Studies. The man who walloped his predecessor for fiscal profligacy has managed to preside over a California budget that’s expanded 40 percent (so far) since the good old Gray days. Sacramento is piling on an extra million-and-three-quarter dollars of debt every hour, 24/7. The Golden State is a foldin’ state, going out of business — a far cry from when Ahnuld arrived as a penniless immigrant in a land of plenty. Now he’s an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land. Another Californian actor-governor famously observed that “we are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” In Collyvornya, it’s the other way round. Doing your ’08 tax return? If you’re expecting a refund, Sacramento’s stopped the check: Instead you receive an IOU saying they’ll get around to it when they can. On the other hand, if you owe them money, don’t expect reciprocal treatment. As the governor’s celebrated catchphrase has it: “Ah’ll be back — for more of your money.” …

And Matthew Kaminski tells us how California became France.

… The parallels are also disquieting. The French have long experienced the unintended consequences of a large public sector. Ask them about it. As the number of people who get money from government grows, so does the power of constituencies dedicated to keep this honey dripping. Even when voters recognize the model carries drawbacks, such as subpar growth, high taxes, an uncompetitive business climate and above-average unemployment, their elected leaders find it near impossible to tweak the system. This has been the story of France for decades, and lately of California.

Six years ago, Mr. Schwarzenegger arrived in Sacramento to “cut up the credit card” and give the girlie men at the State Capitol a testosterone shot. California languished then in a fiscal crisis whose causes were pretty much the same as today. The hapless Gray Davis had been recalled, and the Austrian-born actor made a promising start to break the pattern.

In 2005, banking on his popularity, the governor pushed an ambitious ballot initiative to impose a hard state spending cap, limit the unions’ political buying power, tighten requirements for teacher tenure, and overhaul a gerrymandered state political map. Arnold lost.

After that setback, Mr. Schwarzenegger shifted his attention to green jobs and energy, winning fans in Europe and among Democrats. “He’s recognized that California’s a pretty moderate place,” says Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic president pro tem of the Senate. “You’ve got to govern from the middle.”

People closer to the governor offer a different take. “Once he got beat, he reverted back to, ‘I want to be liked,’” says a former Schwarzenegger aide. “It’s classic narcissism.” …

WSJ Editors on last night’s speech.

Anyone who thought the recession and financial market turmoil would moderate President Obama’s policy ambitions discovered the opposite last night. Far from suggesting limits on Congress or federal spending, the new President made clear in his first State of the Union address that he believes in government power as the answer to our current difficulties, and he intends to use it. …

Jennifer Rubin has some speech thoughts.

… There is not the slightest recognition that the growth of government retards economic vitality or impairs innovation. There is no sense that all that money we are going to spend comes from somewhere — businesses and individuals who will have fewer and fewer resources of their own. This is a fantasyland. There is no responsibility in sight, no mature discipline. It is all just a flood of government goodies.

Abe Greenwald too.

In listening to President Obama’s address tonight, I thought I  heard something a little extreme about education, but then tossed it up to being distracted and a little sleepy. I just went back and looked at the transcript and, sure enough, this startling little passage was actually uttered:

And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option.

Every American should go back to school for at least a year on the president’s orders? Really? …

Michael Goldfarb from the Blog at the Weekly Standard.

… It’s only been a few weeks, but so far all the American people have to show for Obama’s election is $1 trillion in new debt and a thousand point drop in the Dow. Everything else is still just talk, some of which has the potential to damage the economy even further if implemented poorly or, in the case of cap and trade, implemented at all. The only thing Obama’s certain to deliver is the one thing he claimed tonight he didn’t believe in — bigger government.

Jack Shafer at Slate continues with the Moyers story.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Now that we have a president universally loved by the world, we are going to get some more help in Afghanistan. Right? Abe Greenwald says not so much.

… It was always the height of silliness to suppose that leaders would readily send their countries’ citizens to fight alongside Americans if only America would ask more nicely. Other countries will fight with us when they believe our cause is their own, and when it comes to the War on Terror, there was never much hope of convincing an increasingly Muslim Europe to publicly join the U.S. in fighting jihadists.

Other Western countries desperately want America to get the job done; they just don’t want to risk the domestic upheaval that would come should they join in the fight. …

Mark Steyn chronicles the rise of radical Islam.

… From Islamabad, let us zip a world away to London. Among the growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He threatened “to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords” if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film “Fitna.”

Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested and returned to the Netherlands.

Smith is best known for an inspired change of terminology: last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism (an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as “anti-Islamic activity.” Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much for Islam’s reputation – i.e., it’s an “anti-Islamic activity” in the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.

Anyway, Geert Wilders’ short film is a compilation video of footage from recent Muslim terrorist atrocities – whoops, sorry, “anti-Islamic activities” – accompanied by the relevant chapter and verse from the Koran. …

And Spengler reports on surprising trends in Iran.

Political Islam returned to the world stage with Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran, which became the most aggressive patron of Muslim radicals outside its borders, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and abroad. How, then, should we explain an eruption of social pathologies in Iran such as drug addiction and prostitution, on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay.

Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran’s birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran’s population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.

But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the “decadent” West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed.

“Iran is dying for a fight,” I wrote in 2007 (Please see Why Iran is dying for a fight, November 13, 2007.) in the literal sense that its decline is so visible that some of its leaders think that they have nothing to lose. …

Christopher Hitchens has ideas how Obama should talk to Iranians.

… For decades, we have wondered what might happen when or if an apocalyptic weapon came into the hands of a messianic group or irrational regime. We are surely now quite close to finding out. I am not one of those who believe that the mullahs will immediately try to incinerate the Jewish state. This is for several reasons. First, the Iranian theocracy is fat and corrupt and runs a potentially wealthy country in such a way as to enrich only itself. A nuclear conflict with Israel would be—in a grimly literal sense—the very last thing that it would embark upon. Second, and even taking into account the officially messianic and jihadist rhetoric of the regime, it remains the case that a thermonuclear weapon detonated on the Zionist foe would also annihilate the Palestinians and destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. (Even Saddam Hussein at his craziest recognized this fact, promising with uncharacteristic modesty only to “burn up half of Israel” with the weapons of mass destruction that he then boasted of possessing.)

Nor, I think, would the mullahs hand over their hard-won nuclear devices to a proxy party such as Hezbollah or seek to make a nuclear confrontation with the United States or Western Europe. What they almost certainly will do, however, is use the possession of nuclear weapons for some sort of nuclear blackmail against the neighboring gulf states, most of them Arab and Sunni rather than Persian and Shiite, but at least one of them (Bahrain) with a large Shiite population and a close geographical propinquity to Iran. Already you hear the odd rumble in hard-line circles in Tehran to the effect that Bahrain ought properly to be part of the Persian motherland. Imagine if Saddam Hussein had acquired a nuke before invading Kuwait. (This is why so many Arab governments and newspapers have been so tepid about supporting Iran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in the most recent confrontations with Israel.) …

Mark Steyn has some Corner posts on Obama’s responsibility summit and the markets.

On the Is-he-wingin’-it-or-is-he-a-Machiavellian-genius? thing that Derb started this morning, I’d say the president is wingin’ it. That summit today was hilarious, especially the bit before all the bigshots went off to their “breakout sessions” and Obama told them, in best Community-Organizer-in-Chief mode, “not just to identify problems, but to identify solutions.” …

Even Chris Matthews has figured out Obama is a fool.

I can hardly believe what I’m watching on MSNBC right now. Chris Matthews is almost critical — no, not even almost, he’s flat-out critical of President Obama on the economic front. He mentions an earlier conversation with CNBC’s manic stock analyst Jim Cramer and a University of Maryland professor (Peter Morici?) knocking Obama for several economic decisions — that the stimulus bill needed more real infrastructure and less pork, that the housing bill isn’t inspiring confidence and doesn’t look like it will work, and that no one has faith in Tim Geithner’s solution for the banks. …

David Brooks too.

… Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. …

Obama doesn’t have enough to do here, he’s going to send $900 million to Hamas. Gaza first for window dressing, but Hamas eventually. Andy McCarthy has the story.

Various la-la land conservatives and moderates assured us that Obama, despite a career spent in the Left’s fever swamps, is really a “pragmatist” who would govern from the center.  They pooh-poohed us knuckle-draggers who doggedly pointed to his radical intimates, like Hamas-apologist Rashid Khalidi.  I wonder what they’re thinking today as Obama takes time out from destroying the economy to send $900M from the mint’s busy printing press to Hamas. …

VDH comments on the Hamas Stimulus Program.

More on Bill Moyers. This time from Jack Shafer at Slate.

… When Moyers was Johnson’s press secretary, he believed that journalists existed to serve the president. James Deakin writes in Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truth that Johnson’s assistant press secretary Joe Laitin told Moyers that it was OK to plant a question with reporters every once in a while at presidential news conferences. A bogus idea, for sure, but Laitin thought the technique was useful in getting important information out. “When [the president] volunteers something, everybody immediately is on guard: what’s he trying to sell?” Laitin told Deakin.

Moyers pitched the idea of planting questions to Johnson, who embraced it, giving Moyers a couple of questions for Laitin to distribute, which he did.

Johnson so loved this innovation that he was determined to plant every question at his next news conference. About 15 minutes before the session started, Moyers brought Laitin about 10 questions from the president. When Laitin protested that this was too much—”Bill, this isn’t the way it’s done”—Moyers said, “Do it!” …

The country might be having troubles, but things are great in DC. Business Week with the story.

Look out, New York. Washington is gaining on you.

As the nation’s most populous metro area feels Wall Street’s pain, the fourth-largest — Washington — is barely sensing the recession. In fact, Moody’s Economy.com estimates that metro Washington‘s economy will actually grow 2.5% from mid-2008 through mid-2010. New York’s economy is expected to shrink 4.2%. …

Apropos of David Warren’s latest column, a new T shirt for Welcome Back Carter.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

WSJ Editors sum up the recent Bill Moyers news.

… Memories are short in Washington, and Mr. Moyers has gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies. Since 9/11, he has been particularly intense in criticizing President Bush for his antiterror policies, such as warrantless wiretapping against al Qaeda.

Yet the historical record suggests that when Mr. Moyers was in a position of actual power, he was complicit in FBI dirt-digging against U.S. citizens solely for political purposes. As Judge Silberman put it in 2005, “I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.” …

Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post writes on the Obama choice to attend Durban II conferences.

While most Americans were busy celebrating Valentine’s Day, last Saturday the Obama administration announced that it would send a delegation to Geneva to participate in planning the UN’s so-called Durban II conference, scheduled to take place in late April. Although largely overlooked in the US, the announcement sent shock waves through Jerusalem.

The Durban II conference was announced in the summer of 2007. Its stated purpose is to review the implementation of the declaration adopted at the UN’s anti-Israel hate-fest that took place in Durban, South Africa, the week before the September 11, 2001, attacks against America.

At Durban, both the UN-sponsored NGO conclave and the UN’s governmental conference passed declarations denouncing Israel as a racist state. The NGO conference called for a coordinated international campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, and belittling the Holocaust.

The NGO conference also called for curbs on freedom of expression throughout the world in order to prevent critical discussion of Islam. As far as the world’s leading NGOs – including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – were concerned, critical discussions of Islam are inherently racist.

In defending US participation in the Durban II planning sessions, Gordon Duguid, the State Department’s spokesman, argued, “If you are not engaged, you don’t have a voice.”

He continued, “We wanted to put forward our view and see if there is some way we can make the document [which sets the agenda and dictates the outcome of the Durban II conference] a better document than it appears it is going to be.”

WHILE THIS seems like a noble goal, both the State Department and the Obama White House ought to know that there is absolutely no chance that they can accomplish it. This is the case for two reasons. …

David Warren, writing from Ottawa where he had a front row seat when Obama visited, says, “Welcome back, Carter.”

… Likewise, foreign affairs were suddenly thrust into the back trunk. I argued last year that it was hard to take seriously a foreign policy that seemed to consist of punishing America’s friends, and encouraging her enemies; that offered, for example, threats to Pakistan but dialogue with Iran.

I did not at the time expect that it would ever come into play, however, for I assumed that even if Obama won the election, more sober influences within the Democratic Party would prevail, and in the end he would find himself with something that secretly resembled the Bush doctrines.

I have lost that confidence since watching the new White House destructively criticize Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, congratulate Venezuelans on constitutional changes that will enable Hugo Chavez to be president-for-life, deliver an entirely gratuitous apology for American behaviour towards the Islamic world, and send George Mitchell off to the Middle East to strike a more “balanced” posture between Israel and Hamas. This, after decisions on Guantanamo that signal a new “catch and release” approach to the world’s most dangerous terrorists.

While I doubt Americans intentionally voted for any of that, they did sign a blank cheque for unspecified “hope” and “change,” and they did endorse a candidate whose popularity was not only greater abroad than at home, but especially high among anti-Americans. They now have a President who is taking lectures from such as Desmond Tutu. He warns that Obama will squander the world’s goodwill if he does not immediately apologize to the Iraqi people for the “unmitigated disaster” in which George Bush freed them from Saddam Hussein. …

David Harsanyi says, “Be a patriot, and pay up!”

… The more irresponsibly you behave, the more government works for you. This week, the federal government doubled its commitment to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, promising to reimburse the companies up to $400,000,000,000 in losses on their investments in mortgage loans.

Yes, the same Freddie and Fannie — once implicitly guaranteed by government and now explicitly run by government — that helped, through social engineering, to push us into recession. It is vital, apparently, that we keep them afloat.

The only business plan that is more staggeringly counterproductive came from the auto industry, which is back for another bite. In last year’s second quarter, GM lost about $118,000 a minute. So, naturally, GM would like another $16,600,000,000 so it can fire 47,000 people. Because you decide not to spend your money on a GMC Acadia, the government will make you pay for one anyway. …

Robert Samuelson calls the stimulus ‘disappointing.’

Judged by his own standards, President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program, which he signed into law last week, is deeply disappointing. For weeks, Obama has described the economy in grim terms. “This is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession,” he said at his Feb. 9 press conference. It’s “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Given these dire warnings, you’d expect the stimulus package to focus exclusively on reviving the economy. It doesn’t, and for that, Obama bears much of the blame. …

Abe Greenwald calls our attention to the Bush policy that military detainees in Afghanistan have no standing in U. S. constitutional rights. Makes sense to Pickerhead. It also makes sense to the Obama Justice Department. That’s right, the One, who is purer than the driven snow, likes the Bush ideas.

Andy McCarthy has fun with that in The Corner.

… Jonah mentioned on Friday that the Obama administration’s Friday bad/embarrassing news dump included a curt two-liner by which DOJ agreed with the Bush position that alien enemy combatants held at the Bagram base in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.  This (correct) position has much of Obama’s base up in rebellion mode.  But what is most stunning is that it came at around the same time that, as Greg details, Vice President Biden and CIA Director Panetta gave speeches braying about how just these sorts of Bush detention policies (that we follow in every war) were contrary to “our values” and would not be tolerated in the Obama administration. …

Power Line post traces the stock market since it became apparent Obama would win.

Ilya Somin in Volokh Conspiracy reviews Jeff Benedict’s Little Pick House. The was previously mentioned here on February 3, 2009.

… Finally, Benedict highlights an often-overlooked aspect of Kelo-style “economic development” takings: their all too common failure to actually produce the economic development that supposedly justified them in the first place. As he points out, almost four years after the legal battle ended and nearly ten years after the NLDC’s development project began, the City still hasn’t built anything on the condemned land and there is no prospect of doing so anytime soon. So far, the net result of the NLDC’s condemnation efforts has been to destroy an entire neighborhood and waste some $80 million in public funds. The failure of the Kelo condemnations to actually benefit the local economy is a predictable result of the perverse incentives facing the NLDC and other similar agencies.

Benedict’s book does have a few shortcomings. In several places, he misstates a few of the legal issues involved in the case. For example, he claims that the Kelo decision “changed the rules” in favor of a more permissive standard for condemnations. In reality, as I explained in this article (pp. 224-25), previous Supreme Court precedent was so lax as to allow the government condemn virtually any property for virtually any reason. The true effect of Kelo was not a “change in the rules,” but heightened public awareness of the gross abuses permitted by existing legal doctrine.

Despite a few such errors, Little Pink House is an impressive account of the events leading up to the most controversial property rights decision in Supreme Court history

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Looking at the markets’ reaction, Jennifer Rubin suggests Obama reconsider the direction he has taken.

… At some level Obama understood during the campaign Americans’ aversion to liberal economic policies. Until Joe the Plumber caught him in an unguarded moment, he had done his best to appear the model of moderation on economic matters. He was going to go line-by-line through the budget and give 95% of Americans tax relief. He took issue with then rival Hillary Clinton’s idea for a health care mandate and he objected to her idea for a suspension of mortgage foreclosures. He did his best to give the appearance that he might govern less in the mold of 1970s liberal Democrats and more in the style of Bill Clinton. At least before the election he knew better than to jettison basic tenets of free market capitalism.

Now Obama is only a month into his presidency. It may be that he adjusts course, puts the brakes on the bailouts, and provides some relief for beleaguered investors and businesses. He would of course need to backtrack on some nasty rhetoric about the Republicans pushing “failed theories.” And he would have to finally cross the Democrats in Congress. But the alternative is a risky one, a high stakes gamble.

If he pursues this course of action — a government-centric recovery plan that in fact does little to spur private sector recovery — he puts his presidency and his vision of a new Democratic “permanent” majority at risk. The public did not vote for a European-style social welfare state. They did not vote for an acceleration of the failed economic policies of the last year of the Bush administration. And they certainly did not expect a trillion dollar spending bill with only double digit unemployment and inflation to show for it.

There is time for a course correction, but the window of opportunity is closing. Both the markets and the public have limited patience. If he was listening, the president this week would have heard the message: turn back while there is still time.

Even Michael Kinsley, a liberal’s liberal, has seen enough of these foolish policies.

… But even if the stimulus is a magnificent success, the money still has to be paid back. The plan of record apparently is that we keep borrowing, spending and stimulating, faster and faster, until suddenly, on some signal from heaven or Timothy Geithner, we all stop spending and start saving in recordbreaking amounts. Oh sure, that will work.

There is another way. If it’s not the actual, secret plan, it will be an overwhelming temptation: Don’t pay the money back. So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt — public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages — in half.

Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you’ll get 20. Plan for 20 and you’ll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that’s not the plan, what is?

IBD Editors say of course the market is sinking.

… But it still looks, as we said four months ago, “like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.”

How else would you explain all that’s happened in a few short weeks? How else would you expect the stock market, where millions cast daily votes and which is still the best indicator of what the future holds, to act when:

Newsweek, a prominent national newsweekly, blares from its cover “We Are All Socialists Now,” without a hint of recognition that socialism in its various forms has been repudiated by history — as communism’s collapse in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China attest.

Even so, a $787 billion “stimulus,” along with a $700 billion bank bailout, $75 billion to refinance bad mortgages, $50 billion for the automakers, and as much as $2 trillion in loans from the Fed and the Treasury are hardly confidence-builders for our free-enterprise system.

Talk of “nationalizing” U.S.’ troubled major banks comes not just from tarnished Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but also from Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan. …

And Maureen Dowd is fed up. Obama is such a whiz, that took only a month.

… In The Times, Eric Dash reported that Wall Street is losing confidence in Washington’s vague and shifting plans, sending shares of bank companies plunging to new lows on Friday.

President Obama disdains sound bites, and he does not have Bill Clinton’s talent for reducing the abstruse to aperçus. We wanted someone smart to gather a bunch of smart people around him to get us out of this fix. But Mr. Obama’s egghead manner has failed to soothe a nation with the jits. Maybe he has been so intent on avoiding the stereotype of the Angry Black Man, as he wrote in his memoir, that it’s hard for him to connect with and articulate public anger about our diminishment.

Though he demonstrated in the campaign that he has a rare gift for inspiring the country with new belief in itself, Mr. Obama has not yet captured either the grit the moment requires or the fury it provokes. He has not explained in a compelling way why Americans who followed the rules need to sacrifice more to help those who flouted the rules.

That is why the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli struck a populist nerve with his screed about the unfairness of responsible homeowners picking up the tab for irresponsible homeowners — following the unfairness of taxpayers who are losing jobs, homes and savings propping up the exact same bankers and carmakers whose greed and myopia caused the economy to crash. …

They are getting old very quickly and we have 47 months left of this noise. Eric Holder’s claim that Americans are “cowards” when it comes to race, gets the Jonah Goldberg treatment.

Hey, black folks, do you know any white folks? Good. O.K., I want you to go up to them right now and, as politely as you can, start sharing your most deeply held racial views. Hey, white folks, you’re not off the hook. I want you to go and do likewise with any black people you know.

Don’t want to do that? Really? Well, then, you’re a coward.

That’s the short version of Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech this week celebrating Black History Month.

Holder says we are “a nation of cowards” because we’re unwilling to discuss race to his satisfaction. Some might say that’s an ironic diagnosis given that Holder is the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president of the United States. …

Heather Mac Donald says, “Hey Eric, you want a conversation about race? Converse with this.”

Attorney General Eric Holder, a Clinton administration retread, wants to revive Bill Clinton’s National Conversation on Race. (What’s next? Hillarycare?) Holder recently told his Justice Department employees that the United States was a “nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable,” Holder said. “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

Is he nuts? Leave aside for a moment Holder’s purely decorative call for a “frank” conversation about race. The Clinton-era Conversation also purported to be frank, and we know what that meant: a one-sided litany of white injustices. Please raise your hand if you haven’t heard the following bromides about “the racial matters that continue to divide us” more times than you can count: Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism. I will stop there.

Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation’s elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have “conversations about . . . racial matters”; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism—notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades—has been in a coma throughout his time there.

Education bureaucrats maintain an incessant harangue on white racism because they see the writing on the wall: most students are indifferent to race and just want to get along. If left to themselves, they would go about their business perfectly happily and color-blindly, and the race industry would wither on the vine. Thus the institutional imperative to remind black students constantly about their victimization and the white students about their guilt. Last month, the elite Phillips Academy at Andover proudly announced a student presentation on White Privilege: A History and Its Role in Education. Would the student have come up with such a topic on her own without the school’s educators deliberately immersing her in such trivial matters? Of course not.

But if Attorney General Holder is really sincere about wanting a “frank” conversation about race, he should put the following items on the agenda: …

The Corner covers Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC.

Posts from The Corner and Contentions cover new revelations of Bill Moyers’ use of Hoover and the FBI to investigate possible gays in Johnson and Goldwater camps.

There are few things more insufferable than Bill Moyers on PBS every week holding forth on how intolerant conservatives are. This is because given his history of political activities in LBJ’s administration, he has no standing to do so. Moyers and J. Edgar Hoover worked together to illegally bug Martin Luther King jr. as well as leak unflattering information about political enemies to the press. Andy Ferguson wrote the definitive Bill Moyers takedown years ago, but sadly it’s not online (it is collected in one of Ferguson’s books). Anyway, in lieu of the main course, as an appetizer here’s a very damning excerpt on Moyers from Morley Safer’s autobiography.

Well, as it turns out things are even worse than that. The Washington Post has unearthed FBI files showing that Moyers might have been a party to investigating whether Jack Valenti and any White House staff members were in the closet: …

This will give you confidence in the science studying the “warming” of the earth. Estimates of Antarctic sea ice were off by a California sized error (193,000 square miles). Story from Bloomberg News.

According to Scrappleface, Dems are complaining Obama’s new budget is unfair to the poor.

Of course we have the NY Post cartoon that has everyone in a lather.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Tony Blankley says now we can begin to fill in the blanks on Obama’s management style.

In the Middle Ages, when a young prince suddenly and prematurely became king, the royal court, the church leadership and other senior aristocrats would scrutinize his every word and habit for signs of what kind of mind would be deciding their country’s fate and their personal prosperity and safety. Today, around the world, President Barack Obama’s every word, every action, every inaction is being likewise scrutinized for similar reasons.

Prior to the November election, the only evidence we had of Mr. Obama’s managing style — and that evidence was indirect — was the management of his campaign, which was brilliant. But whether he was its active manager or merely took guidance from a shrewd Svengali remains to be known.

Since the election, we have begun to get hints of his management style in four items Mr. Obama himself has described as of the highest priority to him — and thus, one presumes, items to which he would have given his personal attention: Cabinet selection, closing Gitmo, the stimulus package and bipartisanship. …

Karl Rove is beginning to suspect the administration is winging it.

… Team Obama was winging it when it declared the stimulus would “save or create” 2.5 million, then three million, then 3.7 million, and then four million new jobs. These were arbitrary and erratic numbers, and they knew there’s no way to count “saved” jobs. Americans, being commonsensical, will focus on Mr. Obama’s promise to “create” jobs. It’s highly unlikely that more than 180,000 jobs will be created each month by the end of next year. The precise, state-by-state job numbers the administration used to sell the stimulus are likely to come back to haunt them as well.

Bipartisanship? The administration failed even to respond to GOP offers to endorse an Obama campaign proposal to suspend capital gains taxes for new small businesses.

Inexplicably, the president, in a prime-time press conference, raised expectations for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s bank rescue plan, which turned out the next day to be no plan at all. The markets craved details; they got none. When markets cratered, spokesmen didn’t acknowledge the administration’s poor planning, but blamed the markets.

Team Obama was also winging it on enhanced interrogation of terrorists. First it nullified all the Bush administration’s legal authorities before considering what rules it should have in place. When the CIA briefed White House officials on the results obtained from these techniques, the administration backtracked and organized a four-month study of what rules were appropriate.

Something similar happened with the promise to close Guantanamo Bay within a year: The administration has no idea what it will do with the violent terrorists detained there. …

Amity Shlaes says it is a myth that FDR pulled us out of the depression.

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

Leaders around the world are talking up economic stimulus, channeling U.S. President Barack Obama, who in turn is channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Obama bases his confidence on an old story line with some appealing parallels to today:

A disastrously high stock market caused by excessive faith in the private sector generated an epic crash. A Republican, Herbert Hoover (George W. Bush), let us down. A new president, FDR (Obama), knew that action was imperative and understood the value in “bold persistent experimentation.”

FDR stimulated the Dow back up, and unemployment down, saving America and democracy. Massive wartime spending solidified the recovery in the 1940s, proving that when it comes to stimulus, more is better.

So, celebrating the $787 billion stimulus bill Obama signed yesterday depends on ramming through this version of history — and dismissing dissent. That is what Obama did at a news conference when he said those who criticize FDR’s New Deal are “fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.”

In fact, this battle is far from resolved. Economists are arguing more now about the quality of the Roosevelt programs than they were a decade or two ago.

Thomas Sowell says the economic world is upside down.

From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us.

What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market’s “greed.” That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down.

It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case.

An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: “Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century.”

That was what the market was like before the government intervened. Like many government interventions, it began small and later grew. …

John Stossel says only real jobs create wealth.

… Exhibit B is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don’t mean his public-works projects, like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I’m talking about his most serious job-creating operation: the draft.

In September 1940, Roosevelt signed the Selective Act, which ordered all males 21-35 to register for military service. “Of the 16 million persons who served in the armed forces at some time during the war, 10 million were conscripted, and many of those who volunteered did so only to avoid the draft … ” writes Robert Higgs in “Depression, War and Cold War.”

The draft marked the beginning of the end to the double-digit unemployment that had plagued America for a decade. Two years earlier, Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, lamented, “[A]fter eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started”. The draft was the answer they had sought all that time.

So creating jobs is not difficult for government. What is difficult for government is creating jobs that produce wealth. Pyramids, holes in the ground and war do not produce wealth. They destroy wealth. They take valuable resources and convert them into something less valuable. …

Walter Williams on the fools who think they can run an economy.

The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit. Why? It is impossible for anyone to possess the knowledge that would be necessary for such an undertaking. At the risk of boring you, let’s go through a small example that proves such knowledge is impossible.

Imagine you are trying to understand a system consisting of six elements. That means there would be 30, or n(n-1), possible relationships between these elements. Now suppose each element can be characterized by being either on or off. That means the number of possible relationships among those elements grows to the number 2 raised to the 30th power; that’s well over a billion possible relationships among those six elements. …

Ann Coulter noticed historians ranking presidents. She had an opinion too.

Being gracious winners, this week, liberals howled with delight at George Bush for coming in seventh-to-last in a historians’ ranking of the presidents from best to worst.

This was pretty shocking. Most liberals can’t even name seven U.S. presidents.

Being ranked one of the worst presidents by “historians” is like being called “anti-American” by the Nation magazine. And by “historian,” I mean a former member of the Weather Underground, who is subsidized by the taxpayer to engage in left-wing political activism in a cushy university job.

So congratulations, George Bush! Whenever history professors rank you as one of the “worst” presidents, it’s a good bet you were one of America’s greatest.

Six months after America’s all-time greatest president left office in 1989, historians ranked him as only a middling president. (I would rank George Washington as America’s greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world’s greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.)

At the time, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Reagan as “a nice, old uncle, who comes in and all the kids are glad to see him. He sits around telling stories, and they’re all fond of him, but they don’t take him too seriously” — and then Schlesinger fell asleep in his soup. …

According to Borowitz, Madoff blames his problems on youth and immaturity.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF below for full content

WORD

PDF

We start with various Jennifer Rubin Contentions’ posts. First on WaPo’s lack of Obama enthusiasm.

The Washington Post editors can’t quite bring themselves to condemn the president outright, but they sure do give some hints that they aren’t pleased.

First, they dance around the tax cheats and dismal vetting: “The president’s admitted mistakes on nominations have served as a reminder that he is, after all, rather new to the game of national politics and the art of balancing the lofty aims of campaign pledges against the real-world demands of governing.” Translation: the transition looked great, but what’s the matter with the selection process over there?

Next, they hint that the stimulus was not what they had hoped:”The narrow and rushed passage of his stimulus package underscored the difficulty of living up to his grand promises of transparency; the campaign trail talk about not cutting deals behind closed doors yielded to the demands of the moment.” Translation: This is an embarrassing display of business as usual. (And we can’t bring ourselves to defend the substance of the stimulus because it’s a ludicrous mess.) …

On the lack of a Car Czar.

After much anticipation, we learn that the Obama team is not going to name a Car Czar. Instead we’re getting “an inter-agency task force” run byTim Giethner and Larry Summers and advised by a special assistant to the President of the Steelworkers Union. Let’s count the ways in which this is awful news.

First, on the heels of the administration’s failure to deliver on its promise of a detailed bank bailout, the administration now announce it isn’t making good on its stated intention, some would say obligation, to name a Car Czar. This is fast becoming the Unreliable Administration. (It’s a new management style apparently: Overpromise, Underperform.) …

On Jill Zuckman.  On Obama’s stimulus tactics.   And a look at Roland Burris.

Cathy Young says now we get a look at the real Obama.

… The silver lining of this month’s troubles in Washington, DC is that Obamania seems to have passed. The stimulus bill has cooled pro-Obama conservatives and libertarians who hoped Obama would be a “market liberal.” There is also growing discontent among Obama supporters on the left, unhappy with the sacrifice of “progressive” programs. Across the political spectrum, Obama has been assailed for everything from intransigence to panic-mongering excessive eagerness to compromise to lack of political maturity – and much of that criticism has come from people who supported him over John McCain, from liberal Paul Krugman to moderate conservative Kathleen Parker.

“Change we can believe in” is quickly turning out to be business as usual – the messy, day-to-day business of governing, debate, and compromise. It’s not the end of our economic woes or our social discord. It is also not the end of the republic.

Charles Gasparino says Obama lays an egg on Wall Street.

ON the day that President Obama signed the much- hyped “stimulus bill” into law – one of the largest spending plans in US history, billed as nothing short of a savior for a US economy heading toward a possible Great Depression – the stock market reacted loudly and resolutely, falling nearly 300 points.

No one can deny that Obama’s been dealt a crummy hand – he took office with a weak economy and a banking system in shambles. And the markets may ultimately rebound if the “stimulus” actually does a little stimulating.

But the consensus building on Wall Street is that this president doesn’t look to be up to the job of fixing the economy.

Talk to any investor, and he’ll tell you how Obama’s plan offers up nothing more than tired solutions, pork-barrel spending that will do little to reverse the economy’s woes – and may make a bad situation worse. …

According to the Economist, more than half the world is middle class.

THE crowd surges back and forth, hands above heads, mobile-phone cameras snapping one of Brazil’s best-known samba bands. It could be almost anywhere in Latin America’s largest city on a Saturday night. But this is Paraisopolis, one of São Paulo’s notorious crime-infested favelas (slums). Casas Bahia, the country’s largest retailer, is celebrating the opening there of its first ever store in a favela (pictured above). It is selling television sets and refrigerators in a place that, at first glance, has no running water or electricity.

Among the shacks, though, rise three-storey brick structures with satellite dishes on their tin roofs. In the new shop, Brazilians without bank accounts—plumbers, salesmen, maids—flock to buy on instalment credit. In a country with no credit histories, the system is cumbersome: the staff interview customers about their qualifications and get them to sign stacks of promissory notes, like post-dated cheques, before allowing them to take their purchases home. But it works, more or less. According to Maria, a cleaner, “Everything I have comes from Casas Bahia. Things are very expensive but the means of payment are better for people like us, without any money.” This is the emerging markets’ new middle class out shopping.

Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca, one of Brazil’s most distinguished economists, describes members of the middle class as “people who are not resigned to a life of poverty, who are prepared to make sacrifices to create a better life for themselves but who have not started with life’s material problems solved because they have material assets to make their lives easy.” That covers a broad range of ambitions, as two other examples will show.

Back in 1992 Lu Jian was a dissatisfied mid-level bureaucrat at China’s department of transport and communications who became surplus to requirements. Taking advantage of government measures that encouraged such officials to go into business, he went off for a stint at China’s first commodity-futures trading company. Soon afterwards he found himself designing the country’s first ski resort, near the northern city of Harbin. Now, as chairman of the Nanshan Ski Village, in the desert hills near Beijing, he presides over the capital’s main winter-sports recreation ground. …

National Review had a love story symposium for Valentine’s Day. John Sullivan’s piece on Niles and Daphne from Frasier is here. Follow the link if you want more.

Click on WORD or PDF below for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Apparently, Obama’s foolishness knows no end. Now he has decided to legitimize the UN’s latest bash Israel conference. Anne Bayefsky has the story.

… All his campaign promises to the contrary, sacrificing Israel for the sake of currying favor with others — demagogues included — is clearly at the top of the new president’s agenda. Israel asked Obama not to attend. Canada also pulled out of Durban II and expected American support. Instead, today’s American foreign policy leaves America’s closest ally and its biggest trading partner out in the cold.

The speed at which President Obama is selling off American assets is breathtaking. The speed at which he is selling them out is even faster.

The Brits produce obits like no one else. And from time to time they have produced men like no one else. Max Boot starts this off.

The sun long ago set on the British Empire. In Iraq, Britain even revealed its inability to do the kind of counterinsurgency operations which were the hallmarks of British soldiers for decades. But if you want a taste of how Britain became “great” read this obit of Colonel David Smiley, a swashbuckling hero of World War II and beyond whose exploits sound too fantastic to be true–but true they are. …

Here’s the Daily Telegraph Obit of Col. David Smiley.

Colonel David Smiley, who died on January 9 aged 92, was one of the most celebrated cloak-and-dagger agents of the Second World War, serving behind enemy lines in Albania, Greece, Abyssinia and Japanese-controlled eastern Thailand.

After the war he organised secret operations against the Russians and their allies in Albania and Poland, among other places. Later, as Britain’s era of domination in the Arabian peninsula drew to a close, he commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces in a highly successful counter-insurgency.

After his assignment in Oman, he organised – with the British intelligence service, MI6 – royalist guerrilla resistance against a Soviet-backed Nasserite regime in Yemen. Smiley’s efforts helped force the eventual withdrawal of the Egyptians and their Soviet mentors, paved the way for the emergence of a less anti-Western Yemeni government, and confirmed his reputation as one of Britain’s leading post-war military Arabists.

In more conventional style, while commanding the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues), Smiley rode alongside the Queen as commander of her escort at the Coronation in 1953.

During the Second World War he was parachuted four times behind enemy lines. On one occasion he was obliged to escape from Albania in a rowing boat. On another mission, in Japanese-controlled eastern Thailand, he was stretchered for three days through the jungle with severe burns after a booby-trap meant for a senior Japanese officer exploded prematurely. …

And from the London Sunday Times, an appraisal of The Bill.

… the $787 billion fiscal stimulus that passed through Congress last week was almost too prescriptive, since Obama had allowed the House Democrats to write the cheques themselves: so, for example, there was $335m for STD prevention, $400m for research on global warming, $198m for Filipino veterans of the second world war. Noble of them, I’m sure, but how much is all of that guaranteed to “get America back to work”? Yet Obama mocked those who made such complaints: “You get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill; this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point.”

In other words, Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus. He is almost blind to supply-side economics, which suggests that if you want to encourage profitable job creation, you should concentrate on reducing companies’ payroll taxes – and then leave individual businesses to decide how best to employ the funds released.

Instead, the young president seems to want to take us back to some of the failed policies of the 1930s, under the mistaken impression that they were a great triumph. He illustrates with dreadful clarity George Santayana’s most-quoted aphorism: those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

Remember Tom Friedman’s frequent breathless prose about Dubai? If he reads his own paper, he’ll learn about Dubai’s downward spiral.

Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai’s fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.

Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city — or worse.

“I’m really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here,” said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still hunting for a new job. “If I can’t pay it off, I was told I could end up in debtors’ prison.”

With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield. …

As for the modernity of Dubai, Roger Simon notes an Israeli tennis player is barred from a tennis tournament there.

David Brooks says Americans dream of Denver, not Dubai.

You may not know it to look at them, but urban planners are human and have dreams. One dream many share is that Americans will give up their love affair with suburban sprawl and will rediscover denser, more environmentally friendly, less auto-dependent ways of living.

Those dreams have been aroused over the past few months. The economic crisis has devastated the fast-growing developments on the far suburban fringe. Americans now taste the bitter fruit of their overconsumption.

The time has finally come, some writers are predicting, when Americans will finally repent. They’ll move back to the urban core. They will ride more bicycles, have smaller homes and tinier fridges and rediscover the joys of dense community — and maybe even superior beer.

America will, in short, finally begin to look a little more like Amsterdam.

Well, Amsterdam is a wonderful city, but Americans never seem to want to live there. And even now, in this moment of chastening pain, they don’t seem to want the Dutch option. …

There is no end to what the triumphant Dems wish to do. Next, according to the Detroit News, the fairness doctrine?

… You’d think the Democrats would savor their victory and ignore their critics.

That they can’t suggests an insecurity about the ability of their ideas and policies to hold the hearts and minds of the electorate.

Stifling dissent is a favored weapon of those who are convinced they know what’s best for the people and are willing to trample the people’s rights to give it to them.

The Fairness Doctrine is right out of the playbooks of Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and others who so value popularity they’ll protect it by any means necessary.

This is censorship, poorly masked. And whether you cheer Limbaugh or detest him, if you don’t stand up for his right to speak against the tide, you’ll ultimately lose your right to do the same.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF