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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Camp David Agreements, far from being a Jimmy Carter accomplishment, succeeded in spite of him. He was spinning his wheels trying to impose a comprehensive settlement of all Mid-East problems. Arthur Herman has the story.

… Interestingly, the man who ultimately prevented this Carter-led calamity from unfolding was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sadat decided that Egypt needed to start from scratch in its relationship with Israel. Sadat found natural allies in Nixon and Mr. Kissinger after throwing out his Soviet patrons in 1972. With American support, he came to a disengagement agreement with Israel in 1973, and again in 1975. The culmination of this process was Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, where he discussed a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, and forestalled Mr. Carter’s plan for a Geneva peace conference.

It was this trip — not Camp David — that marked the true seismic shift in Middle East relations since Israel’s founding. It came as an unwelcome surprise to the Carter foreign policy team, who still wanted their grandiose Geneva conference. In fact, for the better part of 1977, as Israel and Egypt negotiated, the White House persisted in acting as if nothing had happened. Even after Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Mr. Carter announced that “a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.”

But by the autumn of 1978, the rest of Mr. Carter’s foreign policy had crumbled. He had pushed through an unpopular giveaway of the Panama Canal, allowed the Sandinistas to take power in Nicaragua as proxies of Cuba, and stood by while chaos grew in the Shah’s Iran. Desperate for some kind of foreign policy success in order to bolster his chances for re-election in 1980, Mr. Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David. …

Forget the economics, David Warren wants to understand the psychology of stimulus.

There is no good reason to listen to economists just now. This is no fault of the economists themselves, some of whom I have found to be very sensible fellows. (I wasted several years of my life in economic journalism, learning just how sensible.) But the discipline of economics, which is partly a science, and partly an art, and partly pure bluster like other human enterprises, is founded and can only be founded on the notion that human beings behave rationally (on the analogy of lab rats).

Sometimes they do, as David Brooks, a token “conservative” columnist in the New York Times, was arguing on Thursday, using biological jargon from our contemporary phrenologists, or “cognitive scientists” as they call themselves.

When the human animal is placed in a game with fairly predictable rewards and punishments, only the stupidest consistently reach for the punishments.

But when the rules of the game are suddenly changed, or rather, withdrawn and replaced by chaos, decision-making is transferred to that region of the brain our phrenologists call the “amygdala.” It is where they think emotions originate. We have what is politely called “non-linear” thinking.

I might disagree with Mr. Brooks about how the chaos is being created. He seems to think the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress are acting on economic models and analyses that are rational in themselves, but cannot anticipate human behaviour. I think they are acting in a state of growing panic, in which they cite whichever “expert” spoke to them last, to justify lining the pockets of their cronies with whatever money they can find. But the result, on either view, is the same. ..

$8 Billion for high speed rail between Disneyland and Las Vegas!? Bill Kristol tells us how that happened.

One of many highlights of the stimulus bill the Democrats just rammed through Congress is $8 billion for high-speed rail. What makes this appropriation special is that there was no money for high-speed rail in the original House legislation. The Senate bill had $2 billion. The legislation coming out of conference “compromised” on $8 billion.

How did this happen? Well, some of that $8 billion, as the Washington Post reported Friday, seems intended for “a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.” Reid of course played a major role in putting together the final bill.

That’s the kind of policymaking the new Obama administration has embraced in its signature legislative proposal: a congressional process as unseemly as ever; an emergency bill that barely addresses the emergency; a “stimulus” bill short on stimulus (is that magnetic-levitation rail line “shovel-ready”?).

What accounts for this debacle? You could start with a lack of presidential leadership. Who would have thought the missing player in the first month of the administration would be Barack Obama? He let his signature economic legislation, the stimulus, be shaped by congressional Democrats. …

Mark Steyn Corner posts.

Re Cambridge University’s de-imperialized “Empire Ball“, many many readers write to insist I point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups”‘ litany of evil - “the British Empire’s association with slavery”.

The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Thanks to William Wilberforce and the brave men of the Royal Navy, an institution that hitherto had been regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky was expunged from most of the globe. …

Volokh post on corrupt Eastern PA judges that will turn your stomach.

Before The Bill, the latest disaster from our government was ethanol. Even the NY Times got the message.

… “The ethanol industry is on its back despite the billions of dollars they have gotten in taxpayer assistance, and a guaranteed market,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy analyst at Rice University.

The government’s Energy Information Administration recently projected that the industry would fall short of the targets for expanded use of ethanol and other biofuels that Congress set in a 2007 energy law. “It’s possible we may have to look at the targets again,” said Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

VeraSun Energy, one of the nation’s largest ethanol producers, has suspended production at 12 of its 16 plants and is planning to sell production facilities. In recent days Renew Energy, Cascade Grain Products and Northeast Biofuels have filed for bankruptcy protection. Pacific Ethanol said it would suspend operations at its Madera, Calif. plant.

Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group, estimated that of the country’s 150 ethanol companies and 180 plants, 10 or more companies have shut down 24 plants over the last three months. That has idled about 2 billion gallons out of 12.5 billion gallons of annual production capacity. Mr. Dinneen estimated that a dozen more companies were in distress. …

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John Fund starts off our coverage of The Bill, and he has a short on Gregg’s withdrawal too.

Members of Congress were scrambling last night to find copies of the gigantic $789 billion stimulus bill that conferees for the Senate and House had agreed to. After all, the vote is today and members are supposed to have a minimum of 48 hours to examine bills. That rule clearly has been ignored by Congressional leaders, but what infuriates members even more is that Beltway lobbyists had large portions of the bill yesterday while they did not. …

… When President Obama met with Senator Gregg at the White House on Wednesday, he could have simply told him he hadn’t known of the White House power grab and that the Census Bureau would continue to report directly to the Commerce Secretary. But he didn’t, which played a major role in Mr. Gregg’s decision to withdraw. Given a choice between his vaunted “new politics” and the left-wing pressure groups that were demanding White House influence over the Census, Mr. Obama made a clear choice to side with the liberal base of his party.

So you think its tough for Obama now, Mark Steyn says wait until things start to happen.

Few pieces of political “wisdom” are more tediously recycled than a well-retailed bon mot of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Asked what he feared most in the months ahead, he gave an amused Edwardian response: “Events, dear boy, events.” In other words, you can plan all you want, but next month, next year some guy off the radar screen will launch a war, or there’ll be an earthquake, or … something. Governments get thrown off course by “events.”

It requires a perverse kind of genius for the 44th president not to have waited for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead, he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly) “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (The Financial Times). Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama chose to nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their own urge to contribute to it. He chose to nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both of them.

To be sure, the present state of the economy is an “event,” and has blown many governments around the world off course. But again: The hideous drooling blob of toxic pustules dignified as the “stimulus” bill is something the incoming Obama had months to prepare for and oodles of bipartisan goodwill and fawning press coverage to waft him along on. Instead, he choseto outsource it to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank and the rest of the congressional pork barons. So that, too, is not an “event” but merely, like his Cabinet picks, a matter of judgment and executive competence. …

A couple of the Journal’s best look at stimulus and its environs. Bill McGurn first.

Historians tell us it was Roman custom to place a slave in the chariot behind a conquering hero, there to whisper warnings about the fleeting nature of fame amid the accolades of adoring crowds.

Barack Obama is no stranger to the cheers of roaring crowds. If his prime-time press conference last night is any clue, moreover, he intends to use this personal popularity to help Congress get a stimulus bill to his desk quickly. As he does, those who wish his presidency success might do well to whisper in his ear two words of tempering wisdom: “Nancy Pelosi.”

In the public eye as well as on Capitol Hill, the California Democrat has become the mother of all stimulus packages. Whatever issues Mrs. Pelosi may claim with the Senate version, her leadership has defined the direction. Her intransigence has set the tone. And her penchant for excess helps explain why out of 535 members of Congress, only three Republicans seem willing to go anywhere near the thing.

Therein lies a cautionary tale. …

Kimberley Strassel on the GOP 3.

… Barack Obama meanwhile can thank them for providing cover for the fiction that the bill, post-”compromise,” had somehow been shorn of its worst waste. Going into the Collins huddle, the “stimulus” contained $2 billion for a power plant in Illinois, $75 million for the Smithsonian, $300 million for government cars, and dozens of other embarrassing projects. Coming out of the Senate it contained $2 billion for a power plant in Illinois, $75 million for the Smithsonian, $300 million for government cars, dozens of other embarrassing projects, an additional $420 million for Maine’s Medicaid program, and an additional $6.5 billion for the National Institutes for Health (courtesy of Mr. Specter). There’s good reason why the Senate’s true fiscal disciplinarians — say, Tom Coburn or Jim DeMint — didn’t get down with the “compromise” party.

And then there’s the self-cover. Ms. Snowe had to be worried that someone might remember that she’s spent 13.99 of her 14 years in the Senate publicly agonizing, usually in view of a camera, about the “deficit.” Or that as recently as, oh, January, she was fervently devoted to “paygo” — which she waived in deference to $839 billion in deficit spending. She might have even worried her enthusiasm for this bill might finally, after all these years, highlight that her fiscal responsibility only surfaces when it is time to oppose a tax cut, and that she’s never met spending she didn’t love.

But no worries! Who has time to remember all those obvious facts? If there’s one thing the Maine duo love and understand it’s the press, which has a habit of forgetting everything in the face of a hearty, happy compromise. These days, the most dangerous place for Chuck Schumer in Washington is between Susan Collins and a camera. …

IBD Editors have a stimulus opinion.

Congress is confident it will send President Obama a stimulus bill to sign by Monday’s holiday. Unless something unforeseen happens, what lawmakers will put on his desk is a $789 billion waste.

The old quip that no one should watch while laws or sausages get made is true — especially with this Congress. America’s legislative body has moved away from creating anything of value and instead habitually turns out things that belong in a landfill.

None have ever been more dump-worthy than the spending bill being sold as economic stimulus.

Harvard economist Robert Barro calls the legislation “probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s.”

“I mean it’s wasting a tremendous amount of money,” he said in an interview with the Atlantic. “I don’t think it will expand the economy. . . . I think it’s garbage.”

Rep. Tom Cole, Republican from Oklahoma, was a bit more refined but no less biting in his commentary. Borrowing from Winston Churchill, he wryly observed from the House floor Thursday morning that “Never have so few spent so much so quickly to do so little.” …

Jennifer Rubin too.

It is not surprising that a hugely popular Democratic president with large Democratic majorities pushed through a gigantic spending bill. But certain things are surprising in the extreme.

It was a surprise after all the soothing bipartisan rhetoric that the president chose not to include Republicans in the legislative process – or to include their ideas in the substance of the bill – in any meaningful way. It was a surprise that only three Republicans in the entire Congress voted for it, a political discipline and unity unheard of in modern times. (By contrast the barely elected George W. Bush got 28 Democratic House members and 12 Senators for his 2001 tax cut plan.) It was a surprise that the president deferred entirely to the House Democrats who showed so little inclination to actually focus their largess on short term, job enhancing activities. …

Karl Rove’s Gregg thoughts.

… What Judd Gregg showed today is that he’s not willing to swap his integrity for a place in the Cabinet. When the administration insisted on gutting Commerce Department supervision of the Census and putting it under direct White House political control, it stung Gregg. And when the administration set aside its own principles of “temporary, targeted and timely” stimulus measures to embrace a big spending measure full of programs that Gregg has opposed since coming to Congress, New Hampshire’s senior senator realized that he was window dressing and that the administration had a greater interest in grabbing his Senate seat in 2010 than in listening to his counsel today. …

Jennifer Rubin notices the White House dumping on Gregg.

The Economist with an overview of electronic books.

JEFF BEZOS, Amazon’s boss, pays attention to symbolism. He named his e-commerce company after the world’s largest river to suggest a flood of books and other products. He named Amazon’s e-book reader, launched in 2007, the Kindle to suggest that it would spark a fire (and not of the book-burning sort). This week he unveiled the Kindle 2, an improved version for the same $359, against the backdrop of a library that was once the private collection of John Pierpont Morgan. Assisting him was Stephen King, a popular author who has written a novella that will be available only on the device. The Kindle 2, Mr Bezos means to say, is about preserving a great tradition—book reading—and improving it, not about replacing it.

In many ways, this is true. The Kindle is an unusual gadget in that it does not obviously target young people, or early-adopting technophiles. Instead it appeals to passionate readers, who want no fiddling with cables (the Kindle works without a computer) or complicated pricing plans (Kindle users pay to buy books and other content, but do not have to pay wireless-subscription fees). It is, in short, perfect for older people. …

Scrappleface says details of The Bill will be released in a music video.

Borowitz reports Obama is looking for a Commerce Sec. on Craigslist

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