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Here’s some great news from the Obama administration. Times, UK says he’s going after Mugabe.

President Obama wants a fresh approach to toppling Robert Mugabe and is discussing with aides an unprecedented, US-led diplomatic push to get tough new UN sanctions imposed against the Zimbabwe regime, The Times has learned.

During talks Mr Obama has had with his top Africa advisers in recent weeks, the central idea they focused on was taking the issue of Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council, but for the first time to combine such a move with an intense diplomatic effort to persuade Russia and China not to block the initiative. …

George Friedman of Stratfor examines the coming push in Afghanistan.

Washington’s attention is now zeroing in on Afghanistan. There is talk of doubling U.S. forces there, and preparations are being made for another supply line into Afghanistan — this one running through the former Soviet Union — as an alternative or a supplement to the current Pakistani route. To free up more resources for Afghanistan, the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq probably will be accelerated. And there is discussion about whether the Karzai government serves the purposes of the war in Afghanistan. In short, U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign promise to focus on Afghanistan seems to be taking shape.

We have discussed many aspects of the Afghan war in the past; it is now time to focus on the central issue. What are the strategic goals of the United States in Afghanistan? What resources will be devoted to this mission? What are the intentions and capabilities of the Taliban and others fighting the United States and its NATO allies? Most important, what is the relationship between the war against the Taliban and the war against al Qaeda? If the United States encounters difficulties in the war against the Taliban, will it still be able to contain not only al Qaeda but other terrorist groups? Does the United States need to succeed against the Taliban to be successful against transnational Islamist terrorists? And assuming that U.S. forces are built up in Afghanistan and that the supply problem through Pakistan is solved, are the defeat of Taliban and the disruption of al Qaeda likely? …

David Harsanyi on the stimulus.

Democrats have concocted a surefire political victory. They’ve notified America that the so-called “stimulus” bill might take a long time to work — which is exceptionally handy, considering we always come out of a recession at some point.

The problem is there is no evidence that colossal government spending and expansion will help a nation claw its way out of economic trouble or, more importantly, generate a single job through real economic growth.

So what do you do with an unproven idea? Well, you go big. Make the proposal the most expensive to ever adorn paper — or, more precisely, a trillion scraps of paper. Scare the holy living hell out of detractors with doomsday scenarios worthy of Nostradamus.

And for God’s sake, unite! Those pikers in Congress can do a lot better than $825 billion. Surely there are more states to bribe, more special interests to reward, more unions to pacify?

And Republicans? Just throw in a tax cut. They’re easier than Holly Golightly. …

Contentions post on the stimulus.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said, and he meant it.

The epic bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies, the credit crunch and dwindling consumer confidence, all compounded by the media’s hysterics have served to make despairing Americans uniquely pliant. Political leaders and financial giants are now rushing to parlay the nation’s panic into the easy passage of a massive government “stimulus” package.

The arguments most often employed in defense of the stimulus bill maintain that now is not the time for idle thinking but for bold action — any action. …

Politico piece argues the case for doing nothing.

Most of Washington has reached quick consensus: Government must do something big to shock the economy, and it should cost between $800 billion and $900 billion.

But dissident economists and investment professionals offer a much different take: Most of Washington is dead wrong.

Instead of fighting over what should go in the economic stimulus bill, pitting infrastructure spending against tax cuts and contractors against contraceptives, they say lawmakers should be fighting against the very idea of any economic stimulus at all. Call them the Do-Nothing Crowd.

“The economy was too big. It was all phantom wealth borrowed from abroad,” says Andrew Schiff, an investment consultant at Euro Pacific Capital and a card-carrying member of the stand-tall-against-the-stimulus lobby. “All this stimulus money is geared toward getting consumers spending and borrowing again. But spending and borrowing were the problem in the first place.”

Washington has a habit of passing legislation in a crisis and suffering from morning-after regrets — the Iraq war, the Patriot Act and last year’s original bank bailout plan come to mind. So we thought it would be wise to air the views of the naysayers toward Washington’s latest consensus approach. …

Thanks to President Obama, Rush Limbaugh gets a WSJ Op-Ed with his stimulus proposal.

… Congress is currently haggling over how to spend $900 billion generated by American taxpayers in the private sector. (It’s important to remember that it’s the people’s money, not Washington’s.) In a Jan. 23 meeting between President Obama and Republican leaders, Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.) proposed a moderate tax cut plan. President Obama responded, “I won. I’m going to trump you on that.”

Yes, elections have consequences. But where’s the bipartisanship, Mr. Obama? This does not have to be a divisive issue. My proposal is a genuine compromise.

Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos. Give that 1% to President Obama. Let’s say the vote was 54% to 46%. As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion — $486 billion — will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46% — $414 billion — will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me.

Then we compare. We see which stimulus actually works. This is bipartisanship! It would satisfy the American people’s wishes, as polls currently note; and it would also serve as a measurable test as to which approach best stimulates job growth.

I say, cut the U.S. corporate tax rate — at 35%, among the highest of all industrialized nations — in half. Suspend the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%. Then get out of the way! Once Wall Street starts ticking up 500 points a day, the rest of the private sector will follow. There’s no reason to tell the American people their future is bleak. There’s no reason, as the administration is doing, to depress their hopes. There’s no reason to insist that recovery can’t happen quickly, because it can. …

Ed Morrissey has kudos for the GOP and Eric Kantor for the House stimulus vote yesterday.

… Politically as well as economically, Republicans made the right choice in refusing to sign onto this stimulus package.  In the first place, only 12% of this bill has any actual stimulus value, and it comes too slowly to help.  The rest, filled mostly with historical Democratic spending priorities for government like family planning, education spending, and poverty programs, should have been handled through normal appropriations and not emergency economic stimulus spending, which it clearly is not.  If this package passes Congress and it works, the Democrats will get all the credit, as Pelosi especially ensured that Republicans couldn’t offer any of their ideas for improvements.  If it fails (and it surely will), the blame falls squarely on Obama, Pelosi, and Harry Reid, which is exactly what Obama hoped to avoid — and why the vote was actually more of a defeat than a victory.

So who did win yesterday?  John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and I’d argue especially Cantor.  He took the first major vote of the Republican wilderness era and managed to score a shutout, despite obvious impulses among some Republicans to appear cooperative with Obama.  They never let their discourse get hyperpartisan, and they continued to offer their own alternatives to the plan as well as invite House Democrats to negotiate the terms of the bill to win their support.  When that failed, the GOP stripped the Democrats of any bipartisan fig leaves, and managed to take eleven Blue Dog Democrats with them.

Some suggested that the Republicans couldn’t oppose it because they’d already lost their credibility on spending and accountability.  That’s rubbish.  One doesn’t regain credibility by refusing to take a stand on principle just because of mistakes made three years ago.  The way to build credibility on principle is to start acting on it.  Let’s hope Senate Republicans figure that out when the bill hits the upper chamber.

Karl Rove writes today on the coming confusion in Obama’s White House. It brings to mind something in Pickings Jan. 4th. “Many of our favorites write on expectations for an Obama administration. Pickerhead has grown very tired of the media’s over use of ‘team of rivals’ suggesting there is some prairie wisdom in Obama’s picks. Seems like we will have chaos instead, since our new president is a rather unformed immature 46 years old. Is there any guiding thought or idea that lies behind his quest, other than narcissism and change?

We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him. As a consequence Washington’s policies will be guided by those most skilled at leaking. The media will love this as they will be the conduit for all the back-biting.”

January 20th Pickings carried a story from Forbes on the worth of over-promised college degrees. John Stossel takes up the subject today.

A college diploma is supposed to be the ticket to the good life. Colleges and politicians tell students, “Your life will be much better if you go to college. On average during your lifetime you will earn a million dollars more if you get a bachelor’s degree.” Barack Obama, stumping on the campaign trail, said, “We expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college.”

Rachele Percel heard the promises. She borrowed big to pay about $24,000 a year to attend Rivier College in New Hampshire. She got a degree in human development. “I was told just to take out the loans and get the degree because when you graduate you’re going to be able to get that good job and pay them off no problem,” she told me.

But for three years she failed to find a decent job. Now she holds a low-level desk job doing work she says she could have done straight out of high school. And she’s still $85,000 in debt. This month she had to move out of her apartment because she couldn’t pay the rent.

The promise about college? “I definitely feel like it was a scam,” says Rachele. Her college wrote us that that many of its graduates have launched successful careers. But Rachele’s problem isn’t uncommon. A recent survey asked thousands of students: Would you go to your college again? About 40 percent said no.

“The bachelor’s degree? It’s America’s most overrated product,” says education consultant and career counselor Dr. Marty Nemko, a JWR columnist. …

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David Warren on the upcoming elections in Israel.

… From this distance, it appears the old Israeli notion — that peace happens only while her neighbours are afraid to attack — has revived. It is a notion that corresponds well to the country’s hard experience since independence. Strong and immediate retaliation for any breach of the peace is necessary: “You do this, we do that.” It goes without saying, this is not the way to court the affection of liberals throughout the West, but Israel has nothing to lose on that front, for she has never been rewarded for heroic restraint.

The West Bank stayed quiet throughout the Gaza campaign, and except a couple of errant rockets on the northern frontier — mere jeux d’esprit from Hezbollah — the thoroughness of the operation was noted. Moreover, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other so-called “moderate” regional powers have become sufficiently alarmed by the threat from Iran — for which both Hamas and Hezbollah serve as proxies — that they will not even “run interference” on the terrorists’ behalf. This does not mean they will sign new peace agreements with Israel, however.

Mr. Netanyahu’s likely victory in the upcoming election will be explained, correctly for a change, by Israel’s “shift to the right,” after a decade of setbacks. Not only Netanyahu’s Likud, but all parties have shifted, in the same direction. Netanyahu simply represents the most plausible way to hang tough, given an Obama administration that will itself be merely responding to events.

The Corner had a discussion about interrogation techniques. First Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter.

… A few months after 9/11, a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah was captured. He was a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and ran a camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers had trained. And he helped al Qaeda leaders escape from Afghanistan after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, including the future leader of al Qaeda’s Iraqi branch, Abu Mussab al Zarqawi.

Zubaydah was captured in a gun battle and severely injured. The CIA arranged medical care, saving his life. After he recovered, Zubaydah provided what he thought was nominal information—including that KSM’s alias was “Muktar,” something our intelligence community did not know. But he soon ceased all cooperation. It was clear to his interrogators that he had received interrogation resistance training, and the traditional methods were not working. So the CIA employed alternative interrogation techniques. And Zubaydah started talking.

He provided information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh—one of the key plotters of the 9/11 attacks and a close associated of KSM. Bin al Shibh was the mastermind behind a plot for a follow-on attack to hijack airplanes in Europe, and fly them into Heathrow airport. Now he was off the street and the Heathrow plot was setback.

Together, bin al Shibh and Zubaydah provided information that led to the capture of KSM.

Once in custody, KSM refused to cooperate, until enhanced interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—were used. Then he began to talk. …

Marc then posts on the moral basis for harsh interrogation.

Several readers have questioned whether, even if the CIA program did in fact save lives, using these techniques crosses a moral line. I don’t believe it does—any more than I believe going to war when national security requires it crosses a moral line or puts us at odds with our principles.

Those who oppose this program are preaching the moral equivalent of radical pacifism. Pacifism holds that killing is always wrong, therefore war—official killing by the state—is always wrong as well. This is both noble and naïve. Standing against this view is the Judeo-Christian tradition of “Just War” theory, which holds that there are circumstances under which war is permissible and indeed necessary, and ways in which it can be ethically conducted.

The same holds true for interrogations. …

Ramesh Ponnuru takes exception.

Andy McCarthy defends Thiessen.

Now some looks at Obama’s appearance on Arab TV. Fouad Ajami first.

… Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.

The argument that liberty springs from within and can’t be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power — or powers — in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation.

In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.

Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later.

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so. …

Eric Trager in Contentions.

… Barack Obama ran for U.S. President as the anti-Bush – the candidate who wasn’t going to fight wars for idealistic purposes, such as spreading democracy.  Well, Obama might abhor “stupid wars,” but that hardly makes him a realist: true to his community-organizing roots, he apparently sees impoverished foreigners as one of the many constituencies he represents – right up there with the Americans.

The take-away from this miserable performance is rather straightforward: Obama’s personal charisma cannot mask his utter lack of substance on the Middle East.  Here’s to hoping that Obama can fix this shortcoming before people start listening to what he’s actually saying.

And Jennifer Rubin.

… All of this suggests there is no one in the administration empowered to tell the President just how counterproductive this sort of meandering, touchy-feely routine is to establishing his bona fides on the world stage. After hearing this, is Iran more or less likely to be deterred from pursuing its nuclear program? Certainly he’s not suggesting there is a line in the sand — or any penalty to be paid when Iran ignores the entreaties of his envoys to halt its nuclear program. As Michael Goldfarb explains:

Wouldn’t a simple ‘no, a nuclear Iran is unacceptable to the United States and our allies’ have sufficed? Instead Obama says that Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon is “unhelpful,” that it’s “not conducive to peace.” When Obama was in Israel, he said that “a nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat and the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He added that he would “take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat.” In the first debate of the general election, Obama reiterated that the United States “cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran.” But when Obama has the chance to speak directly to the Muslim world, he can only muster retread rhetoric from his inaugural address about clenched fists and open hands.

If the President is going to be taken seriously, he’ll have to do better than this. Or at the very least, keep his encounter-group chit-chat to himself.

Dilbert’s 19 year-old cat gets a touching send-off.

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Peter Robinson’s Corner post on the money supply sets the tone for the day.

Peter Schiff, the man who saw the crash coming, says we are asking foreign creditors to pay for our “trillion dollar deficits for years to come.”

Barack Obama has spoken often of sacrifice. And as recently as a week ago, he said that to stave off the deepening recession Americans should be prepared to face “trillion dollar deficits for years to come.”

But apart from a stirring call for volunteerism in his inaugural address, the only specific sacrifices the president has outlined thus far include lower taxes, millions of federally funded jobs, expanded corporate bailouts, and direct stimulus checks to consumers. Could this be described as sacrificial?

What he might have said was that the nations funding the majority of America’s public debt — most notably the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis — need to be prepared to sacrifice. They have to fund America’s annual trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. These creditor nations, who already own trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt, are the only entities capable of underwriting the spending that Mr. Obama envisions and that U.S. citizens demand.

These nations, in other words, must never use the money to buy other assets or fund domestic spending initiatives for their own people. …

In order to provide some background for Schiff, we have an article he wrote for Forbes 22 months ago.

… In reality, the problem goes way beyond housing. Nearly every big-ticket item that Americans consume is paid for with borrowed money, with foreign lenders supplying the credit. Without access to low-cost credit, the spending stops. When the spending stops, the service sector jobs associated with robust spending will disappear as well. Without paychecks, even those with low fixed-rate mortgages and high credit scores will not make their payments.

Should this happen, there will be no shortage of pain to go around. Even companies that you don’t traditionally associate with the mortgage business–from General Motors to General Electric and tax-prep jockeys like H&R Block–will feel the blunt force of this blow.

The bursting of the technology stock bubble of the 1990s was simply the opening act. What we are about to experience with the real estate bubble is the main event. In that respect, though it may be March 2007,it sure feels a lot like March 2000. However, instead of a mild recession, this collapse will be followed by the most severe recession since the Great Depression.

The main risk is that Ben Bernanke and his buddies at the Fed panic, producing something far worse: a hyper-inflationary bust similar to the one experienced by the Weimar Republic in Germany. Let’s hope that cooler heads prevail–but get your wheelbarrow ready just in case.

And from a current issue of Forbes, Bruce Bartlett on whether the stimulus will stimulate.

… Thus the argument really boils down to a question of timing. In the short run, the case for stimulus is overwhelming. But in the longer run, we can’t enrich ourselves by borrowing and printing money. That just causes inflation.

The trick is to front-load the stimulus as much as possible while putting in place policies that will tighten both fiscal and monetary policy next year. As terrible as our economic crisis is right now, we don’t want to repeat the errors of the past and set off a new round of stagflation.

For this reason, I think there is a better case for stimulating the economy through tax policy than has been made. Congress can change incentives instantly by, for example, saying that new investments in machinery and equipment made after today would qualify for a 10% Investment Tax Credit, and this measure would be in effect only for investments largely completed this year. Businesses will start placing orders tomorrow. By contrast, it will take many months before spending on public works begins to flow through the economy, and it is very hard to stop it when the economy turns around.

Stimulus based on private investment also has the added virtue of establishing a foundation for future growth, whereas consumption spending does not. As economist Hal Varian of the University of California at Berkeley recently put it, “Private investment is what makes possible future increases in production and consumption. Investment tax credits or other subsidies for private sector investment are not as politically appealing as tax cuts for consumers or increases in government expenditure. But if private investment doesn’t increase, where will the extra consumption come from in the future?”

Jennifer Rubin has stimulus comments.

… And on a political level, the Democrats have given Republicans every reason to oppose the bill and no reason to support it. As a result the “bipartisan” stimulus will be the Democrats’ bill.

Could the bill be revised to cut out the junk and corral Republican votes? The longer this goes on and the more TV appearances Democrats make extolling the virtues of their spend-a-thon, the more difficult it becomes to reverse course. Perhaps this was what President Obama had in mind all along. Maybe all the talk about focused spending and bipartisanship was just fluffy rhetoric for the easily impressed media pundits. Or maybe this is a sign that President Obama lacks the tenacity and skill to go toe-to-toe with his own party.

The result is the same: a horrid bill and a failure to breach the partisan divide. A smartly designed bill which could garner bipartisan support seems increasingly out of reach.  It would have been nice to suspend disbelief for at least a week, but either by intention or neglect we now see that Washington may in fact be the place where good ideas go to die.

Robert Samuelson says our economic crisis is actually three different problems.

WSJ Op-Ed on how the law is strangling our economy and culture.

… But there’s a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don’t feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not “Yes We Can” but “No You Can’t.” Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn’t advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can’t even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.

The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom — where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices — by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers — are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there’s an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that “I don’t deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn’t want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you.” …

Proof God has a sense of humor, Drudge Report says Gore’s Capitol Hill globalony hearings may be cancelled due to a winter storm.

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When it comes to thinking about our foreign policy, Obama has some precedent. Comments from Commentary’s Arthur Herman. First, he sums up the views of the incoming administration.

… Obama’s own formulation of that hopeful new direction appeared last summer in an essay in Foreign Affairs. “The American moment is not over,” wrote the then-candidate, “but [it] needs a new burst of visionary leadership.” Promising a definitive end to the Bush doctrine, whose serial abuses had made the world lose “trust in our purposes and principles,” Obama foresaw an era of “sustained, direct, and aggressive diplomacy” that would rebuild America’s alliances and deal successfully with global threats ranging from terrorism to climate change.

America’s other important foreign-policy goal, Obama wrote, was reducing global poverty: the root cause, in his view, of terrorism and political extremism around the world. By “sharing more of our riches to help those most in need,” by building up the social and economic “pillars of a just society” both at home and abroad, America could bring security and stability to the entire world—if, he added, the task were undertaken “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner—a partner mindful of his own imperfections.”

In short, instead of being the world’s swaggering policeman, America would become the world’s self-effacing social worker. The sentiment is hardly unique to Obama; it was a point of virtually unanimous agreement among those competing with him for the Democratic nomination. Specifically, it was the view of Hillary Clinton, his arch-rival and now his nominee as Secretary of State. In her own Foreign Affairs article (November-December 2007), she, too, blasted the Bush administration for its “unprecedented course of unilateralism,” which had “squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends.” And she, too, promised a new start, focusing on international cooperation and multilateralism, exhausting every avenue of diplomacy before resorting to military action, “avoiding false choices driven by ideology,” and devoting our resources to problems like global warming and third-world poverty. If pursued sincerely and consistently, such a course, she was confident, would keep us safe, restore America’s image, and win the respect of the planet. …

… For a little historical perspective, it might be useful to look at the last President who embraced exactly the same analysis of America’s foreign-policy problems and enacted exactly the same strategy for resolving them.

“The result of the 1976 election,” Michael Barone writes, “was Democratic government as far as the eye could see.” After the debacle of Vietnam, Jimmy Carter entered office determined to clean up America’s image abroad. Abetting him in his endeavor was the fact that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress by a substantial majority, while Republicans were broken and dispirited. Much as with Obama and his team today, the basic operating assumption of the Carter team was that U.S. assertiveness abroad, or what Senator William Fulbright called America’s “arrogance of power,” had become the primary source of international tension. It was time for a humbler, gentler posture: the post-World War II Pax Americana was over, discredited by Vietnam, and so were the cold-war assumptions on which it was based. …

… The one area where Carter seemed fitfully to grasp the nature of reality was in relation to Iran. Having inherited the Nixon-Ford commitment to the authoritarian Shah Mohammed Reza as a key American “proxy” in the Middle East, the administration found itself squeezed between its need for an ally in a strategically sensitive region and its selectively defined human-rights agenda. In 1977, tilting in one direction, Carter received the shah in the White House. The following January, the President paid a visit to Tehran and at a banquet toasted the shah’s regime as “an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.”

Having made it appear that Washington approved of the regime’s brutal practices, which included jailing and torturing thousands of Iranians, and having compounded the error by making the shah appear to be America’s puppet, Carter then tilted all the way in the other direction by backing America out of Iran even as the shah’s grip on power tottered and collapsed in the face both of genuine popular protest and of the Islamist campaign waged against him by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. By December 1978, Carter announced that the United States “would not get directly involved” in keeping the shah in power. “That,” he said, “is a decision for the Iranian people to make.” What few knew at the time was that Carter and his principal advisers, including Brzezinski, were urging the shah to crack down, something he refused to do unless he could announce to the world that the United States had ordered him to kill Iranian protesters.

In the end, the shah chose to run rather than fight, abdicating his throne and fleeing the country on January 16, 1979. The ironies were cruel. One was that a President publicly committed to supporting human rights and ending support for dictators had wound up urging a dictator to shoot his own citizens in the streets. Another was that the United States had lost its “island of stability” in the Middle East—and lost it, moreover, to Khomeini, who would soon present to the world an exceptionally vicious demonstration of the distinction between authoritarianism and outright totalitarianism. …

… Some of Obama’s early choices for high-level foreign-policy positions—particularly General James Jones as National Security Adviser and the incumbent Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense—suggest that the President-elect may be reconsidering his priorities. One can only hope so. In his book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger writes that the experience of history is a statesman’s one sure guide. As the historical experience of the last 30 years has demonstrated over and over again, and as the historical experience of the last eight years underlines once more with blinding clarity, Carterism is not the way.

Jonah Goldberg wonders just what Al Qaeda was doing with the plague.

Howie Carr lets it all hang out.

… But Caroline was so uniquely qualified.

She is both “wife and mother” (cited by both Caroline and her cousin Kerry).

She hails her own cabs (a revelation by Albert “Scoop” Hunt).

But my favorite argument came from the daughter of the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, who in the Daily News cited the fact that Caroline is a “good hostess.”

Hey, Ms. Moynihan, it’s not so hard to be a good hostess when you have 400 million bucks, a penthouse on Park Avenue and a 60-acre spread on the Vineyard. …

NY Post reports on Obama’s complaints about Rush Limbaugh.

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts. …

Rush answers via Byron York at the Corner.

According to an account in the New York Post, President Barack Obama yesterday told Republican leaders, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”  With George W. Bush now off the stage, it may be that Obama and some of his fellow Democrats view Limbaugh, and not John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, or any other elected official, as the true leader of the Republican opposition.  This morning I asked Rush for his thoughts on all this, and here is his response:

There are two things going on here. One prong of the Great Unifier’s plan is to isolate elected Republicans from their voters and supporters by making the argument about me and not about his plan. He is hoping that these Republicans will also publicly denounce me and thus marginalize me. …

WSJ Editors agree it is hard to find anything with better karma than the Cape (Cod) Wind project.

For all the hype about the Bush Administration’s oil-and-gas energy bias, one of its last official acts was to give the go-ahead to what could be America’s first offshore wind farm — thus enraging more than a few self-deputized environmentalists. Such are the ironies of the wilderness of mirrors known as the Cape Wind project.

For the last seven years and counting, the green entrepreneur Jim Gordon has been trying to build a fleet of wind turbines in federal waters near the upscale seascapes of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The site seemed ideal, given the stiff ocean breezes and the eco-friendly politics in Massachusetts. The company says its 130 towers could meet 75% of the region’s electricity needs and reduce carbon emissions by some 734,000 tons every year.

The sort of people who can afford to use “summer” as a verb are in favor of all that. Completely in favor, really. But they did want to raise one quibble. Unfortunately, the wind farm would create “visual pollution” in Nantucket Sound, particularly the parts within sight of their beachfront vacation homes. …

Health note from Future Pundit. Don’t forget to get out in the sun, or you’ll forget.

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If Barack Obama wants to be remembered for the ages, he should find a way to reverse the devastation suffered by black families ever since the government decided to help. Before 1950 less than 25% of black children were born to single mothers. Now the number is close to 70%. Remember Pickerhead’s Iron Rule of government -Whenever the state tries to help, it makes the problem worse. The short form of that is – The government always f**ks up!

Deroy Murdock wonders if the fact of Barack will so something to reverse black ghetto culture.

Item: Amid crisp breezes and bright sunshine, Barack Obama took the presidential oath Tuesday, to the thunderous applause of his supporters, the cautious hopes of the loyal opposition and the well wishes of all Americans.

Item: Three days earlier, four men were stabbed, one critically, at a Brooklyn party celebrating “Notorious,” the new movie about rapper Notorious B.I.G. He released the album “Ready to Die” before being killed in Los Angeles in 1997. Rapper Jamal “Gravy” Woolard – who portrays B.I.G. – was charged with misdemeanor assault and harassment against his wife last September, the New York Post reports. “She wouldn’t stop pushing me, so I snuffed her,” he allegedly said.

Question: Will Obama’s erudition and elegance finally eclipse the corrosive, often deadly scourge of hip-hop culture and the ghetto mentality that gnaw away like termites beneath black America’s floorboards? …

Mark Steyn on the speech.

… perhaps the silliest part of the new president’s speech was this: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Put aside the bitter partisanship, so “childish” and “petty,” and we can all be grown up about this and do the things that need to be done. The idea of a politics conducted within less ideological and more technocratic bounds is seductive. It’s how things work in much of Europe: You have a choice between a left-of-center candidate and an ever so slightly right-of-left-of-center candidate, and, regardless of which one you plump for, you wind up with the same old smidgeonette right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-center government. The result has been to deliver a society of permanent high unemployment, unaffordable entitlements and deathbed demographics – even before the economic downturn put more immediate question marks over the future. As Obama was inaugurated, rioters were besieging their parliaments in Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria, the beginnings of a civil unrest that will spread inward from the fringes of the European map. …

David Warren on the lesser evil.

… To set any of the Guantanamo inmates free, on some jurisprudential technicality, is to smear one’s hands with the blood of their victims when they return to their trade. This is not a hypothetical proposition: for while the numbers are disputed, a proportion of “low risk” inmates already freed from Guantanamo have returned to action.

This is why families of 9/11 victims were outraged by the executive orders. It is why Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, who lost 17 of his men in the attack on the USS Cole (at Aden in 2000), said of the order, “It demeans their deaths.” For among the apparent beneficiaries of President Obama’s “symbolic” measure is a “suspect” in the Cole attack.

It is why American and allied soldiers, whose lives are on the line against Islamist terrorists not yet captured, must necessarily feel demoralized. Conversely, it gives them a powerful motive to overlook the niceties when another of the enemy falls into their hands.

Barack Obama is not a complete fool, and the measures he has ordered are likely to prove cosmetic. Paradoxically, many of the prisoners at Guantanamo may well now suffer worse fates than if they had remained on location untried, or been processed through the military tribunals. For they will have to be sent somewhere. No country, whose citizenship they may nominally carry, is eager to receive them. Dump them on the authorities in, say, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, and I daresay their prison conditions will not improve.

The liberal mind — now fully restored to power in the United States — is in love with symbolic gestures. It is not much enamoured of the hard prudential reasoning that is involved in choosing between two or more evils. The mystery, to me, is the consistency with which it chooses to ignore the greater evil, in order to address the lesser.

Philly Daily News Op-Ed sums it up for the non Kool-Aid drinking half of the country.

AT THE risk of sounding like I’ve been sucking on sour grapes for the past few days, let me say something that, for me at least, needs to be said:

We non-Obama voters shouldn’t be bullied into supporting our new president.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, allow me to explain.

It’s become common since the election to hear people say “even if you didn’t vote for him, even if you don’t agree with his policies, we as Americans should all support Barack Obama.” The implication: If we love this country, we want its leader to succeed. You know, the old “If we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.”

We all know how well that worked with George Bush, don’t we? (In fact, haven’t we had eight years of hearing that the highest form of patriotism is dissent?) …

WSJ Editors on Obama’s lawyers’ attempted slight of hand on interrogation. Improbable as it may seem now, this is how we get another Bush presidency. If our country is successfully attacked again, the visuals of Obama sitting at a desk surrounded by grown men are bad for him. He looks like a kid who won President for a Day which includes a photo-op of him signing a bill. His people and the media were always on message with flattering cameras angles. Now the camera is looking down and he looks like a small pretend president while he signs.

Most politicians would rather do anything than make a difficult choice, and it seems President Obama hasn’t abandoned this Senatorial habit. To wit, yesterday’s executive order on interrogation: It imposes broad limits on how aggressively U.S. intelligence officers can question terrorists, but it also keeps open the prospect of legal loopholes that would allow them to press harder in tough cases.

While that kind of double standard may resolve a domestic political problem, it’s no way to fight a war. The human-rights lobby and many Democrats are still experiencing hypochondria about the Bush Administration’s supposed torture program, and their cheering about this “clean break” means they may be appeased. But the larger risk is that Mr. Obama’s restrictions end up disabling an essential tool in the U.S. antiterror arsenal. …

Lisa Schiffren with a good Corner post on Caroline Kennedy.

… this post is about Caroline Kennedy, who may or may not be depressed for whichever reason one chooses to believe was behind her withdrawal from contention for the NY Senate appointment: wasn’t going to get the job anyway, or Uncle Ted’s worsening health—or nanny and tax problems as it now seems.

I am quite gratified that our Park Avenue Princess will not be my Senator. First, because I always root for the underdog. I was really offended to see the accidental Governor Paterson, with no constituency or fund-raising apparatus of his own and a visible lack of intellectual ballast, get pushed around by the united Kennedy, Obama, and Bloomberg forces into annointing Ms. Kennedy. Notwithstanding the decent job he has done as mayor in some regards, I find Bloomberg’s characteristic bullying streak downright offensive. …

A J. G. Thayer Contentions post on the same subject.

Mr. Thayer also posts on Joe Biden’s latest gaff.

… The one blessing here is that now Biden is out of the Senate and holds what is historically the least powerful position in government, only possessing whatever power the president chooses to imbue to the holder  — and Obama doesn’t strike me as the sort who would let a lot of real power slip out of his hands.

And Jennifer Rubin.

… President Obama would do well to keep Biden away from the press, foreign leaders, other senior officials, and Congress. The motto for Biden must be “do no harm.” And for Biden that amounts to doing nothing. The perfect job description for the Vice President.

Further Corner analysis on the most watched inaugural.

Scrappleface notes the War Against Terror has turned into the Case Against Terror.

… While Bush administration tactics produced nothing measurable, beyond seven years of attack-free living on American soil, the source said, the Case Against Terror will be effective, legal and morally right, thus engendering respect among those who wish to destroy America’s way of life.

“If a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for example, knows he’s not going to be waterboarded, he’ll sense our inherent fairness and probably be more forthcoming with information.” the administration source said, “If he resists, then he knows with certainty that he’ll spend months, and perhaps years sitting in a courtroom, listening to attorneys argue fine points of process. He’ll be begging for the waterboard.”

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Pickerhead’s particularly proud of today’s practically perfect Pickings. It is a bit long because of an expanded humor section. The cartoonists were busy, and Borowitz hit one out of the park.

Abigail Thernstrom starts us out on an upbeat note by reminding us how far we have come since the Democrat party in the American South kept its collective boot on the necks of black Americans. Pickerhead’s favorite story from “America in Black and White’ written by Abby and husband Steve, was about one county in Georgia facing a dilemma when automobiles came into widespread use. They considered having two sets of roads; one for whites and one for blacks. (I think it was Georgia. Abby can correct if she wishes.) (Abby says it was Macon County, Georgia)

If you think Pickerhead is unfair to Dems, do you remember Bull Conner, the quintessential southern sheriff in any black person’s nightmare? He was a member in good standing of the Democratic National Committee. Now, back to Abby’s piece.

… Black electoral exclusion had made all other forms of racial subordination in the Jim Crow South possible. Mississippi was the worst of southern states, with fewer than 7 percent of blacks allowed to register to vote. Today, the state has more than 900 black elected officials. Blacks serve on school boards and county councils, in the state Legislature and the US House delegation.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery yesterday was a reminder of just how far we have come. He was a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, a colleague of Martin Luther King. Today, he is the voice of yesterday – still depicting blacks being told to go to the back of the bus, whites still not ready to “embrace what is right.”

Most blacks today see an altered nation. A recent CNN poll found that 69 percent of blacks believe that the vision of which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has been fulfilled. In a similar poll taken just last March, only 34 percent of blacks expressed such a belief. Black spirits have been rising at a remarkable pace.

There is still much work to do on the road to racial equality. But, by unleashing imagination and energy, dreams come true. Already, Barack Obama is changing black America.

Then we get back to the task at hand. Spengler comments on the inauguration activities.

Barack Obama “signaled a commitment to pragmatism not just as a governing strategy but as a basic value”, according to unintentionally hilarious inauguration dispatch by the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief David Sanger. Pragmatism, of course, is not a value, but rather the triumph of expediency over values. To call pragmatism a “basic value” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, like “studied ignorance”, or “impassioned apathy”. Obama had plenty of that today, too.

“[Obama's] appearance on the Capitol steps was so historic that the address became larger than its own language, more imbued with meaning than anything he could say,” added Sanger, which is to say that Obama said nothing memorable. Just what was historic?

This half-Luo tribesman from Hawaii whose African father had no connection whatsoever with the West African ancestors of American slaves, was not imbued, but rather hued, with significance. His melanin carried the meaning, which is to say that he was judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character, in a precise reversal of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous phrase. …

David Harsanyi wants to know if dissent is still patriotic.

… Obama challenges Americans to have “a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.” So if you find massive concentrated power in Washington a turn-on, you’ve found your higher purpose.

But surely, most of you have found meaning in something greater than yourselves long before some politician demanded it.

To require such fealty to power in the name of patriotism was once repugnant to the left. Now, with the right guy in charge, apparently it can once again be embraced.

Change, indeed.

David Warren, another of our favorites, thinks something was amiss in DC on Tuesday.

… Journalists who followed the U.S. presidential campaign — including several very Democratic journalists — remarked on how accessible, friendly, and helpful the McCain staff were, and by contrast how contemptuously they were treated by Obama’s entourage. But we expect to be treated contemptuously, and lose all respect for a man who is presented as our equal.

That was John McCain’s tragic flaw, as it was also George Bush’s to some considerable degree. Both benefitted from aristocratic birth and disposition; both remain noble spirits; but each also became a compassionate “man of the people” — and how sad for their political legacies.

Mr. Obama had the royal jelly, as the journalists soon determined, and while Americans at large were skeptical at first, they finally came around. More than two million assembled themselves yesterday to salute His Majesty (according to an early estimate), a notable improvement on the 400,000 drawn to the last inauguration of King George. For whether before the masses in Berlin’s Tiergarten, or along Pennsylvania Avenue and in Washington’s National Mall, the people have recognized “Our Leader.”

And Juan Williams reminds us of something we should all know.

… If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else — fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism — then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors. To treat the first black president as if he is a fragile flower is certain to hobble him. It is also to waste a tremendous opportunity for improving race relations by doing away with stereotypes and seeing the potential in all Americans.

Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist.

This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise. …

Ye of little faith, there’s hope. Obama’s Nielsen ratings were second to Reagan’s first inauguration.

Here’s another way Barack Obama’s inauguration made history.

Nielsen Media Research says 37.8 million TV viewers watched Tuesday’s coverage — the largest inaugural audience in decades.

Obama’s viewership is bigger than any presidential inauguration in 28 years. It’s 27% higher than Bill Clinton’s in 1993 and 30% larger than George Bush’s in 2001. Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981 drew a larger tally, however, with 41.8 million. …

Ever wonder if Garrison Keillor is an idiot?. Jonah Goldberg and Yuval Levin have answers.

Jonah, the Garrison Keillor comment you cite is really an astonishing display of ignorance and puppy love, of the sort I suppose we should now expect from the cult of Obama. …

Mark Steyn noticed some bad news from Holland. And from France.

… The latest jurisdiction to get way too “comfortable with the regulation of opinion” is the Netherlands. As Andrew noted below, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal has ordered prosecutors to put the politician and film-maker Geert Wilders on trial for “making anti-Islamic statements”. …

Jennifer Rubin leads us to the Caroline Kennedy dénouement.

If it happens in Albany, Fred Dicker is the best.

… Kennedy’s entrance into the bidding for Clinton’s seat was intended to have the effect of clearing the field, forcing other contenders to see her as the inevitable choice for the seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy.

Bloomberg privately backed her and publicly praised her abilities. His top deputy, Kevin Sheekey, worked the phones aggressively on Kennedy’s behalf, and set her up with powerhouse consulting firm Knickerbocker SKD.

But the rollout of her Senate bid received stiff criticism, as she ducked press questions during her first trip upstate and fared poorly in her initial round of media interviews. Several critics said the 51-year-old novice politician lacked a clear rationale for her candidacy.

The decision leaves a crowded field of about 15 people, mostly elected officials, vying to replace Clinton – including Cuomo, Rep. Steve Israel of Long Island, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, upstate Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, Manhattan Rep. Carolyn Maloney and teachers union President Randi Weingarten. …

We have a correction of sorts to make. Two days ago we had a post on the number of government employees in the country passing the number of people employed by manufacturing companies. Turns out there is another way to look at those numbers.  Mark Perry at Carpe Diem does the honors.

… But before getting too depressed about that trend, I decided to check something else: Government employees as a percent of total nonfarm employment, and the interesting results are presented here: …

 

Another correction that is important. This from Contentions’ Jim Kirchick on Pete Seeger. Once a Stalinist stooge, always …..

One hates to dampen the feelings of national euphoria that have taken hold over the past few days, but there’s one moment from the week’s festivities that still sticks in my craw: the worshipful attention heaped upon Pete Seeger, icon of American folk music and lapsed Stalinist.

Seeger was a prominent campaigner in the struggle for African-American civil rights, and his legacy there ought be applauded. But racial equality was not the only cause to which Seeger committed himself. International communism, and in particular its Stalinist variant, was an equal, if not more, significant cause in Seeger’s public life. He was “Stalin’s songbird,” as David Boaz describes, writing about how Seeger zigged and zagged, with the rest of American communists in the 1930’s and 1940’s, in blind obedience to orders from Moscow. Seeger’s vaunted opposition to American “militarism” has persuaded him to oppose U.S. military intervention wherever and whenever it has occurred, including, for instance, the mission to displace the Taliban. …

Borowitz reports Obama has sent Biden on a mission to Antarctica.

… While some witnesses to the scene said that Mr. Biden seemed surprised by the news, his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, offered another version of events during an appearance later in the day on “Oprah.”

“Joe was given a choice of places to go and he picked Antarctica,” she said.  “President Obama said he could also go to the moon or Mars.”

Dr. Biden’s remarks were cut short when President Obama appeared on the set and unplugged her microphone.

Other than the Biden news, Mr. Obama’s day went as planned, meeting with senior staff, drawing up a budget, and being sworn in as President for the third time.

And in England News Biscuit reports….

The government has announced an extensive package of measures to help Mr Bob Warner of Shrewsbury after he admitted losing £300 in an online poker game this weekend. Alistair Darling said that the measures were in place to restore confidence in the local black economy. With a £10 scratchcard win on Monday morning there is already talk of ‘green shoots of recovery. …

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Spengler comments on the new economic powers of the presidency.

Inauguration day brings to mind the reason I don’t read science fiction. It’s never weird enough. Yesterday, America placed more power than any peacetime president ever has wielded into the hands of a man nobody knows. He has convinced more incompatible constituencies that he takes their side than any politician in American history. And through no fault or merit of his own, he has stumbled into more power than the White House has had since World War II.

From the day Obama was elected to 9:30am Tokyo time on Monday morning, the S&P 500 index has lost 17% of its value, after absorbing Obama’s proposed cabinet and hearing the gist of his economic stimulus plan. That can’t be blamed on Bush. It counts as the “Obama crash”. With the unprecedented power of his office, Obama inherits a commensurately high level of accountability. Unless he offers something radically different, the boomerang of expectations could flatten him faster and more thoroughly than the swift ascent of his star. People in power get blamed; people with absolute power get blamed absolutely. As the economy continues to deteriorate, there will be no one left standing to blame but Obama.

Before America entered World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt borrowed no more than 6% of gross national product in a given year. During his first year in office, Obama will have borrowed perhaps double that amount. …

George Will on the same theme.

… Obama’s unprecedented power derives from the astonishing events of the past four months that have made indistinct the line between public and private sectors. Neither the public as currently alarmed, nor Congress as currently constituted, nor the Constitution as currently construed is an impediment to hitherto unimagined executive discretion in allocating vast portions of the nation’s wealth.

He acquires power just as the retreat of the state has been abruptly reversed. The retreat began 30 years ago this May, when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s prime minister; it accelerated 20 months later when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated; it acquired an exclamation point a year after that, when adverse market forces compelled French President Francois Mitterrand to abandon socialism in a nation receptive to it.

Obama, whose trumpet never sounds retreat, overstated the scale of our difficulties with his comparison of them with those the nation faced in the almost extinguishing winter of 1776-77. Still, the lyrics of cultural traditionalism with which he ended — the apostle of “change we can believe in” urging the nation to believe in “old” values — reinforced his theme of responsibility, summoning the nation up from childishness.

John Stossel on the “choices” we will get from the left.

Jennifer Rubin calls attention to Rick Warren’s invocation.

And here is Pastor Warren’s effort.

Comments on the speech from some of our favorites.

First the folks from Contentions. John Podhoretz, Abe Greenwald, and Jennifer Rubin.

Yuval Levin from the Corner.

Thomas Sowell, in an essay titled “Lured to Disaster,” points out the problems of the phrase “affordable housing.”

… The ultimate irony is that increasing government intervention in the housing market over the years has generally made housing less affordable than before, by any standard.

A hundred years ago, Americans spent a smaller percentage of their incomes on housing than they do today. In 1901, housing costs took 23 percent of the average American’s income. By 2003, it took 33 percent of a far larger income.

In particular places where government regulations and restrictions have been especially severe, such as coastal California, rents or monthly mortgage payments have averaged as high as 50 percent of the average person’s income.

Most of our problems are not nearly as severe as political “solutions.” In housing, government policies have lured people into situations that were untenable to them and to the country.

Guess whose Presidential Inauguration UVA cancelled classes for; George Bush or Barack Obama?

ABC News reports Carter snubbed Bill and Hillary at the inauguration. Why is there so much hate in Jimmy Carter? Is that why he keeps trashing his successors?

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Both George Bush and Barack Obama have been class acts during the transition. In that spirit, James Taranto has a good take on Obama’s speech.

Those who’ve feared that President Obama will be a soft touch for tyrants and terrorists can take comfort in his Inaugural Address, in which he declared:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. …

One of Bush’s better speech writers, Peter Wehner, sees him off.

… George W. Bush’s unpopularity created the context for what I believe was easily his most impressive act as President: his advocacy of the surge despite the enormous opposition to it. People forget what many of us in the White House at the time never will: the across-the-board resistance — from all Democrats, most Republicans, the entire foreign policy establishment, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President’s own commanding general in Iraq, and the overwhelming majority of Americans — to the surge. There was the very real sense that this plan might be strangled in its crib.

I recall e-mailing Josh Bolten, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett two days after the President’s January 10th, 2007 speech announcing the surge, expressing my profound concern that it would be derailed even before it had a chance to be implemented. Josh called me from Camp David, which was quite rare. When I picked up the call and asked him how he was, Josh replied, “Alarmed,” because I was so alarmed (Josh knew my pendulum doesn’t swing all that widely and I wasn’t in the habit of sending up emergency flares). It is still remarkable to me that President Bush was able to fight off the efforts by so many — including prominent leaders in his own party — trying to undercut the new counterinsurgency strategy.

To have seen President Bush hold shape in the midst of such white-hot political heat and cascading criticisms is something those of us who served him can never forget. We understood — or should have understood — what an extraordinary act this was. It will one day rank among the most important and impressive decisions ever made by an American president. The outcome of a war rested on it. …

Enough of looking at the past, we now have to confront our gargantuan government. Mark Steyn starts with comments on government’s “mission creep.”

In just about his last act as president, George W. Bush has declared Washington, D.C., a federal disaster area.

No, seriously. I’m not setting up some lame-o punchline here, like we used to do a decade back in the good old Monica days: “President Clinton today declared his pants a federal disaster area,” etc. What happened last week was that the Bush administration formally declared a federal emergency in the District of Columbia.

So what was it? An ice storm? A hurricane?

No, it’s the inauguration of his successor. The inauguration is scheduled to make landfall on Tuesday and wreak havoc all night long, as Category Five conga lines buckle highways round town, and emergency busboy crews find themselves overwhelmed as they struggle to clear drained champagne flutes. So the mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, put in a request for more federal money, and, apparently, the easiest way to sluice the cash to him no questions asked was for the president to declare a state of emergency in the District and funnel however many extra gazillions he wants through FEMA – the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I don’t know if anybody’s ever done that,” said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary.

Indeed. One reason why nobody’s ever done that before is because a presidential inauguration is not (to be boringly technical about it) an “emergency.” It’s penciled in well in advance – in this case, so well in advance that for years Democrats have been driving around with “1-20-09″ bumper stickers on the back of their Priuses. …

Good time for Milton Friedman’s answer to JFK’s inaugural. Carpe Diem does the honors.

Milton Friedman

… In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your ‘country” implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. …

Some of the wealthiest counties in the country are around DC. Reason writes on the implications.

Take a look at this map. The areas shaded in red are the 100 wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income. At first glance, it’s a little misleading, because in the American West, counties tend to be larger in geographic area. But look closely, and you’ll see that after the New York City metropolitan area, the largest cluster of wealth in the U.S. is huddled around Washington, D.C.

If we look at household income, the picture grows starker. After the 2000 Census, the richest county in America was Douglas County, Colorado. By 2007, Douglas County had fallen to sixth. The new top three are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2007, it was nine of the richest 20.

All of this is fine if you happen to live in the D.C. area. It’s not so great for the country as a whole. …

Fabius Maximus says there are now more people working for governments than in manufacturing.

One of the biggest frauds of our over-reaching governments is in education. Forbes did some research.

As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history.

Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn’t swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.

Kellum’s law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.

Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. “Two people with this much debt just shouldn’t be together,” Kellum says.

The two disillusioned attorneys were victims of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that’s just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.

College graduates will earn $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, brags Mercy College radio ads running in the New York area. The $1 million shibboleth is a favorite of college barkers. …

Borowitz says Bush has repealed the English language.

… Scrawling his name on the official document, Mr. Bush said that in abolishing English he had vanquished his “greaterest enemy.” …

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Some of our favorites see off George W. Bush.  Charles Krauthammer first.

Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman’s rehabilitation took decades. Bush’s will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama.

Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds — the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition. It’s not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It’s the continuity of policy.

It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned.

It is the great care Obama is taking in not preemptively abandoning the anti-terror infrastructure that the Bush administration leaves behind. …

Thomas Sowell is next.

Whatever history’s verdict on the Bush administration might be, it is likely to be very different from what we hear from the talking heads on television or read from the know-it-alls on editorial pages.

President Bush’s number one achievement was also the number one function of government— to protect its citizens. Nobody on September 11, 2001 believed that there would never be another such attack for more than seven years.

Unfortunately, people who are protected from dangers often conclude that there are no dangers. This is most painfully visible among those Americans who are hysterical over the government’s intercepting international phone calls, in order to disrupt international terrorist networks. …

Debra Saunders.

From the day President Bush took office, the long knives were out for him – in ways they will not (and should not) be out for President-elect Barack Obama. The chattering class saw Dubya as a walking style crime in a cowboy suit. They hit Bush for everything – for the way he mangled syntax, for the books he read, because he worked out too much.

Note now that the buff Obama is taking office, stories gushing about Obama’s daily workouts flood the channels. Oh, yes, and the same people who belittled Bush for sending troops to war even though he only served in the National Guard somehow do not seem to notice Obama’s utter lack of military experience.

To trash Bush was to belong. There was little upside in supporting Bush, even if you had supported his agenda.

Most of the Democratic candidates for president in 2004 and 2008 voted for the Patriot Act – and then campaigned against it. They voted for the resolution authorizing U.S. military force in Iraq – then bolted from the war itself. Likewise with No Child Left Behind. Somehow Bush was the guy who looked bad as he withstood the heat, while his caving critics preened. …

Today, three of our favorites stop to say nice things about the outgoing prez. Would you believe the NY Times has done the same? Last weekend they paid tribute to his success in India.

Manmohan Singh leads the largest democracy on earth. But India’s prime minister is gentle of manner and speaks in whispers. One struggles to imagine him professing love without shyness to his own wife. And so it meant something when he recently laid the L-word on a little-loved man: George W. Bush.

“This may be my last visit to you during your presidency,” Mr. Singh told Mr. Bush in Washington in September, “and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”

Laura Bush is not alone, after all.

Among the least coveted jobs in the world today, along with grave digging, is the task of burnishing President Bush’s foreign legacy: the complex, competing challenges of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, China and what many in Europe and the third world see as a tarnished national brand.

But love is an unpredictable thing, and it is possible that the love-fest stoked by Mr. Singh and Mr. Bush will, with time, come to be seen as President Bush’s enduring overseas accomplishment: the cultivation of India, long prickly about empires, as a partner of the sole superpower. …

Of course, the above mentioned NY Times article makes sure to slap Bush around some, so the author can maintain his bona fides in the community of the great media elite. All of that tiresome claptrap goes to ridiculous lengths in a Newsweek piece co-authored by Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas, in which this appeared;

… Last summer, the U.S. Senate (with Obama absent) voted to require the CIA to use no interrogation methods other than those permitted in the Army Field Manual. These are extremely restrictive: strictly speaking, the interrogator cannot ever threaten bodily harm or even put a prisoner on cold rations until he talks. Bush vetoed this measure, not unwisely.   …

Get that? The authors couldn’t write; Bush wisely vetoed this measure. The words Bush and wisely cannot appear together. The default judgement is that if Bush did it, it was unwise. So if in fact he got something right, they will say he was - not unwise.

Jonah Goldberg has fun with Blago and Burris.

The Democrats are folding like an ironing board over this Roland Burris business, and for some reason people are surprised.

Just to catch up: The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is in scalding-hot water over allegations he wanted to sell Barack Obama’s still-warm Senate seat. This was discovered via federal wiretaps of the helmet-haired governor’s phone conversations and fueled by some juicy dialogue better suited for fleet week in Manila.

In response, Senate Democrats took a Churchillian stand, vowing that no Blago appointee would ever be accepted by the Senate. No appointee, the Democrats insisted, so tainted with scandal could be allowed to sit in the same chamber that Ted Kennedy calls home.

The party of the infinitely elastic “living Constitution” suddenly planted their flag of principle in the terra firma of constitutional concrete and watched it flap in the hot wind of their political bloviation. Even after Blagojevich announced he was appointing Roland Burris, a respected but unremarkable black Illinois politician, to Obama’s seat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada stood his ground, pronouncing the move “unacceptable.”

But that resolve melted like a Hershey bar in a Nevada parking lot the moment Mr. Burris came to Washington. Apparently, the Constitution wasn’t on the Democrats’ side (Fancy that!) and liberals lacked the stomach to stand in the doorway of the Capitol and block admittance of a black man. …

Mark Perry at Carpe Diem has a great post on the continuing reduction in the costs of living.

I have been purchasing some old Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs on Ebay to have accurate, historical retail price data on typical consumer goods in various years, and then be able to compare the prices consumers pay today for various household goods to prices in previous periods, measured in the number of minutes or hours worked at the average wage to earn enough money to purchase the items. …

The globalony fraud is becoming apparent in the hinterlands. Flint, MI Journal with details. Now we must pray for global warming.

… Based on core samples from Russia’s Vostok Station in Antarctica, we now know earth’s atmosphere and temperature for the last 420,000 years. This evidence suggests that the 12,000 years of warmth we call the Holocene period is over.

Apparently, we’re headed into an ice age of about 100,000 years — give or take. As for CO2 levels, core samples show conclusively they follow the earth’s temperature rise, not lead it.

It turns out CO2 fluctuations follow the change in sea temperature. As water temperatures rise, oceans release additional dissolved CO2 — like opening a warm brewsky.

To think, early last year, liberals suggested we spend 45 trillion dollars and give up five million jobs to fix global warming. But there is good news: now that we don’t have to spend any of that money, we can give it all to the banks.

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Extraordinary column from Nicholas Kristof. A defense of sweatshops.

Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.

This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough. …

… Look, I know that Americans have a hard time accepting that sweatshops can help people. But take it from 13-year-old Neuo Chanthou, who earns a bit less than $1 a day scavenging in the dump. She’s wearing a “Playboy” shirt and hat that she found amid the filth, and she worries about her sister, who lost part of her hand when a garbage truck ran over her.

“It’s dirty, hot and smelly here,” she said wistfully. “A factory is better.”

A Chinatown sweatshop in lower Manhattan served as one of the first location shoots of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose series on PBS in 1980. The link will take you to IdeaChannel.tv for two versions of Free to Choose. First the 5 episode 1990 edition with an introduction by a version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he went over to the dark side. Next are the original 10 episodes from 1980. You can watch the streaming video of both editions. The sweatshop scene appears 9 minutes 40 seconds into Vol. One of the 1990 edition, and 4 minutes 10 seconds into Vol. One from 1980. Pickerhead can’t think of a better way to spend time in front of a computer.

We continue with our series from Bush fans in the foreign press. Last week we ended with Canada and the U. K.. Now the Australian foreign affairs editor.

THE final word on George W. Bush’s foreign policy belongs, perhaps, to his successor, Barack Obama, who will be inaugurated as president of the US next week. In his most wide-ranging television interview on foreign policy, Obama was asked last week whether he stood by a remark he made in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which has been constantly shelled by Hamas rockets from the Gaza Strip. Obama said that if his town, where his daughters slept each night, was constantly being attacked by rockets he would want to do something about it.

In the light of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the TV interviewer asked if Obama still felt that way?

He replied: “That’s a basic principle of any country: that they’ve got to protect their citizens.”

Obama was further asked to differentiate himself as strongly as possible from the Bush administration’s policy of supporting Israel. Would he instead be ushering in a bold new policy?

Obama replied: “If you look not just at the Bush administration but what happened under the Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outlines of an approach.”

Good grief! These words should shock every true Bush hater in the world. But wait, there’s more.

Obama’s nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the Obama administration would put more emphasis on diplomacy and try to engage Syria and Iran in dialogue. (Just, indeed, as the Bush administration has tried to do.)

But, just like Bush, she and the new administration would not take the military option off the table in dealing with Iran.

On Hamas, she said: “You cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognises Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements. That is an absolute. That is my position and the president-elect’s position.” It is also one of the most contentious positions of President Bush, Democrat Obama’s Republican predecessor. …

David Warren noticed the temperature outside.

… Both Barack Obama in the U.S., and Stephen Harper up here, are on the cusp of announcing ambitious new “climate” plans founded upon last decade’s laughably “settled climate science.” They may be chastened by the economic downturn, and even by the progressive disintegration of the global warming lobby, but the bureaucratic machinery to fight “global warming” is a very great ship, and it is too late to steer her off the shoals. The only new thing will be the excuses.

The current excuse is that governments are on the verge of legislating millions of new “green jobs.” This imposture will work only as long as people refuse to devote the necessary four minutes to thinking the matter through.

The only way to reduce energy consumption is by penalizing it in some way; generally by driving up prices, but occasionally by ham-fisted legal action. Driving up prices does not save jobs, at least, not in that part of the economy responsive to market forces (which generates the taxes to support the rest). It can only cost jobs — as energy itself, and energy-intensive products, are priced out of reach to those whose wealth is diminished. That wealth is diminished, like a candle burning at both ends, by inevitably higher taxes at one end, and inevitably higher prices at the other. …

David Harsanyi says the debate is over, it’s freezing.

The carbon footprint of Barack Obama’s inauguration could exceed 575 million pounds of CO2. According to the Institute for Liberty, it would take the average U.S. household nearly 60,000 years of naughty ecological behavior to produce a carbon footprint equal to the largest self-congratulatory event in the history of humankind.

The same congressfolk who are now handing out thousands of tickets to this ecological disaster only last year mandated the phased elimination of the incandescent light bulb — a mere carbon tiptoe, if you will. The whole thing seems a bit unfair.

And, on the day millions of Americans were freezing their collective backsides off, new Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman announced that Congress would fast-track climate change legislation. Waxman claimed “inaction on the climate issue is causing uncertainties that make it more difficult to emerge from the recession,” according to The Associated Press.

Waxman’s methane emission would merely reek if it weren’t so catastrophically sad. I learned long ago that any dissent on climate alarmism will be met with unflinching fury, but is there anyone who can genuinely argue that inaction on “climate issues” (formerly known as global warming) has had a fundamental impact on the economic downturn? …

Ann Coulter provides more chilling facts as she deconstructs the NY Times’ latest slander of our troops.

In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: “U.S. Military, Psycho Killers.”

The Treason Times’ banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group.

So they waited a year, hoping readers wouldn’t notice they were still including no relevant comparisons.

What, for example, is the percentage of murderers among veterans compared to the percentage of murderers in the population at large — or, more germane, in the general population of young males, inasmuch as violent crime is committed almost exclusively by young men? …

Jimmy Carter’s Zimbabwe issues $100 Trillion dollar bill.

American Thinker from June 2007 blogs on Carter’s work in Zimbabwe.

Michael Barone notices a change might be taking place in migration patterns.

Evidence keeps accumulating that the tide of immigration is ebbing. Tough enforcement laws passed by states like Arizona and Oklahoma and localities like Prince William County, Va., have reportedly spurred Latino immigrants to move elsewhere. Tougher enforcement of federal immigration laws may be having the same effect.

Classrooms in Orange County, Calif., are suddenly half-empty. Latino day laborers seem to be less thick on the ground at their morning gathering places. Remittances to Mexico and other Latin countries are down, and men are returning to some villages from the United States.

Latinos appear to account for a disproportionate share of mortgage foreclosures. The Census Bureau estimates that net immigration in 2007-08 was 14 percent lower than the average for 2000-07, and those estimates don’t cover the period after June 30, when the recession really started hitting.

Demographic forecasters tend to assume that the long-term future will look a lot like the short-term past. That’s why the Census Bureau estimates that there will be more than 100 million people classifying themselves as Hispanics in 2050, compared to 45 million today. But history tells us that trend lines don’t go on forever. Sometimes they turn around and go downward. …

Swedish paper says drinking coffee lessens likelihood of Alzheimer’s.

Our humor section starts with Joe Biden talking about himself. Power Line with the details.

Joe Biden has been talking about his favorite topic — Joe Biden. In particular, he’s been attempting to talk his way past the widespread view that he, Joe Biden, marks a return to the days of the irrelevant vice president. Talkin’ Joe himself has contributed to that perception by insisting that he will not be like Dick Cheney. …

… Joe Biden has found his role in the Obama administration. It will be the self-referential one of defending his importance. Biden is the best suited vice president to play this role since anybody.

Rick Brookhiser comments on Biden.