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Remember a few days ago we discovered John Kerry worrying about tax cuts providing too much freedom. John Fund gives his thoughts on the matter. John also highlights a particularly egregious eminent domain case in Gulfport, TX.

In the years since the in famous 2003 Kelo case in which the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the right of government to seize property through eminent domain and then transfer it to private interests, abuses have proliferated. But not all merely involve the loss of property; some also threaten the basic right of free speech.

In recent years, lawsuits have been filed in Tennessee, Missouri, Texas and other states seeking to silence critics of private entities that stand to gain from eminent domain actions. The most brazen suit was filed last year by Dallas developer H. Walker Royall, who has worked for years to condemn a generations-old shrimp business owned by the Gore family of Gulfport, Texas, so he can build a marina. The project represented such a vivid clash between personal freedom and private interest that legal journalist Carla Main highlighted it in her book “Bulldozed: “Kelo, Eminent Domain and the American Lust for Land.” Her book was reviewed favorably in many newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal. …

Karl Rove compliments the GOP for their work on the stimulus bill.

Congressional Republicans lack President Barack Obama’s bully pulpit and do not have the majorities that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid enjoy. But they are playing their hand extraordinarily well.

Over the past month, House Republicans have used the stimulus bill to redefine their party, present ideas on how to revive the economy, and force congressional Democrats and the president to take ownership of the spending programs soon to be signed into law.

The first smart move House Republicans made was to raise objections to specific parts of the House stimulus bill. Pointing out that there is money in the bill for condoms, livestock insurance, refurbishing the National Mall, and other outlandish things revealed that it is a massive spending spree, not an economic stimulus.

House Republicans had the wisdom to continue to talk to the Obama White House. This made them look gracious, even as the president edged toward a “my way or the highway” attitude.

Writing in The WSJ, Steve Hayward suggests Obama study what worked for Reagan.

… Reagan and his team didn’t assume that a landslide victory meant they had a mandate to do whatever they wanted. To the contrary, the report’s authors, Richard Wirthlin and David Gergen, wrote: “The election was not a bestowal of political power, but a stewardship opportunity for us to reconsider and restructure the political agenda for the next two decades. The public has sanctioned the search for a new public philosophy to govern America.”

Establishing a new governing philosophy, in other words, would require sustained public argument — something for which Reagan had an abiding instinct. Even in private sessions with Democrats, Reagan relished vigorous arguments about the welfare state. This was much to the annoyance of then House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who just wanted to cut deals.

Reagan never attempted to stifle debate by saying “I won.” The IAP noted that President Jimmy Carter “failed to realize that leadership means more than ‘laying it all out;’ it also means keeping at it.” Like Mr. Carter, Mr. Obama seems peeved that Washington won’t roll over for him. …

Mort Kondracke horrifies himself by agreeing with Rush Limbaugh.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Rush Limbaugh actually has (or had) a good idea on the stimulus. Or, at least the germ of one.

On his radio show Jan. 26 and in the Wall Street Journal Jan. 29, America’s arch-polarizer — amazingly enough — proposed the outlines of a reasonable bipartisan stimulus package of both spending and tax cuts.

It may be moot now, given an apparent House-Senate-administration agreement, but Limbaugh’s contribution illustrates how decision-making on the stimulus might have proceeded usefully — and how to think about fighting recessions.

The proposal was couched, of course, in Limbaugh’s customary disdain for government spending (“porkulus”) and disparagement of Democratic Party motives, but it contained a genuinely bipartisan idea.

Which was: President Barack Obama won 53 percent of the two-party vote last year and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won 46 percent, so Obama would dictate the contents of 53 percent of the stimulus and Republicans — Limbaugh said, “me” — would dictate 46 percent.

Well, it was never going to happen exactly that way, since the election handed control of both political branches of government to the Democrats.

But, if Obama truly wanted to establish a post-partisan atmosphere in Washington, he would have not only met and had cocktails with Republicans, but would have given them a real say in drafting the stimulus. …

Contentions post wonders if the only thing Obama can do is campaign.

As President Obama continues his full-court press for the passage of the so-called stimulus bill, we find that him reverting to type: the tireless campaigner.

It must be remembered that Obama has spent his entire career campaigning for the next office, and has only lost one election. He won the first time he ran for the Illinois State Senate, and then started eying Washington. He was defeated the first time he ran for the House, but two years later won election to the Senate. And he barely had time to warm his seat there before he began running for the presidency.

So Obama has plenty of success in campaigning. How about in governing?

Not so much.

Barack Obama’s fluid ability to turn every political station into a launching pad from which he may reach the next is his defining career achievement. …

Ed Morrissey posts on Obama’s press conference. As an aside, Pickerhead will note the prez started the conference with the normal introductory remarks. What wasn’t normal was his use of the teleprompter while making those remarks.

An oft-repeated aphorism instructs us that we can have our own opinions, but not our own facts — or at least not unless we get to stand behind the podium at the White House.  When Barack Obama explained his economic package last night to the American people in a prime-time press conference, he made two flat-out false statements regarding his opposition.  He also added a completely incorrect reading of history, one that turns out to be very instructive about his own economic incompetence. …

George Will calls it the “Runaway Stimulus.”

… John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as “generational theft.”

The federal government, with its separation of powers and myriad blocking mechanisms, was not made for speed but for safety. This is particularly pertinent today because if $789 billion is spent ineffectively or destructively, government does not get to say “oops” and take a mulligan. Senate Republicans have slowed and altered the course of the “disaster! catastrophe!” stampede. Still, as Anthony Trollope wrote in one of his parliamentary novels, “The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill.”

Not yet a third of the way through the president’s “first 100 days,” he and we should remember that it was not FDR’s initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase “100 days” into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon’s frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.

Absent from these pages for too long, Theodore Dalrymple writes on the persistence of Ideology.

… Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.

If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be. …

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John Fund tells us why Obama wants to control the census.

President Obama said in his inaugural address that he planned to “restore science to its rightful place” in government. That’s a worthy goal. But statisticians at the Commerce Department didn’t think it would mean having the director of next year’s Census report directly to the White House rather than to the Commerce secretary, as is customary. “There’s only one reason to have that high level of White House involvement,” a career professional at the Census Bureau tells me. “And it’s called politics, not science.”

The decision was made last week after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House that Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head Commerce, couldn’t be trusted to conduct a complete Census. …

More on the census from Jennifer Rubin.

Bruce Chapman, a former Census Director, calls foul on the White House claim that other census directors have reported to the political operatives in the White House:

[T]he White House and its Congressional allies are wrong in asserting that the Census in the past has reported directly to the president through his staff. Directors of the Bureau often brief presidents and their staffs, but, as a former director (under President Reagan), I don’t know of any cases where the conduct of the Bureau was directly under White House supervision. That includes Clinton in 2000, Bush 41 in 1990 and Carter in 1980.

The clash between Obama’s platitudes and his brazen attempt to control the system that counts the citizenry could not be more stark. …

Camille Paglia likes some of Obama’s first moves, but is mostly unstimulated.

Money by the barrelful, by the truckload. Mountains of money, heaped like gassy pyramids in the national dump. Scrounging packs of politicos, snapping, snarling and sending green bills flying sky-high as they root through the tangled mass with ragged claws. The stale hot air filled with cries of rage, the gnashing of teeth and dark prophecies of doom.

Yes, this grotesque scene, like a claustrophobic circle in Dante’s “Inferno,” was what the U.S. government has looked like for the past two weeks as it fights on over Barack Obama’s stimulus package — a mammoth, chaotic grab bag of treasures, toys and gimcracks. Could popular opinion of our feckless Congress sink any lower? You betcha!

Why in the cosmos would the new administration, smoothly sailing out of Obama’s classy inauguration, repeat the embarrassing blunders of Bill Clinton’s first term? By foolishly promising a complete overhaul of healthcare within 100 days (and by putting his secretive, ill-prepared wife in charge of it), Clinton made himself look naive and incompetent and set healthcare reform back for more than 15 years.

President Obama was ill-served by his advisors (shall we thump that checkered piñata, Rahm Emanuel?), who evidently did not help him to produce a strong, focused, coherent bill that he could have explained and defended to the nation before it was set upon by partisan wolves. To defer to the House of Representatives and let the bill be thrown together by cacophonous mob rule made the president seem passive and behind the curve. …

Claudia Rosett has a stimulus idea for Elkhart, Indiana. It also improves parking in NY.

President Obama picked Elkhart, Indiana to make a townhall-meeting pitch on Monday for the porker of an $800-billion-plus stimulus spending package — his rational being that “Elkhart is a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America.”

Obama — this is his description, not mine — presented Elkhart as a place of bewildered, helpless people, wandering the ruins of a dying private sector, picking through the debris of tested-and-failed-and-junked capitalism, waiting for the only possible form of salvation to arrive in the form of torrents of government funding for roadworks, extended unemployment insurance, etc… people with “no idea what to do or who to turn to.” So there he was, to save the day.

But even accepting Obama’s vision (in which it is hard to recognize any vestige of America’s pre-change character), there is, for Elkhart, a much better solution:

Move the United Nations to Elkhart! …

John Stossel on the continued attempts at protectionism in the stimulus.

How do you make a dreadfully bad piece of legislation — the nearly $900-billion so-called “stimulus” bill — worse? Simple — add protectionism.

The “Buy American” provision of the stimulus bill, which mandates the use of domestic iron, steel and manufactured goods even if imports are cheaper, makes our trading partners nervous. That created a problem for President Obama: “I think it would be a mistake … at a time when worldwide trade is declining for us to start sending a message that somehow we’re just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade,” he said.

But some members of his party were elected on protectionist platforms, and they are not about to blow this chance to reward their union and industrial constituencies. What was Obama to do?

He did what old-style politicians always do: tried to have it both ways by resorting to vague rhetoric. He said he’d “see what kind of language we can work on this issue.”

The Senate then added a line saying that the “Buy American” section must be “applied in a manner consistent with U.S. obligations under international agreements.” …

Last week we had a short blog post defending Wal-Mart. The author expanded on the theme for Sunday’s NY Post.

…Considering this is a company that is helping families ride out the economic downturn, which is providing jobs and stimulus while Congress bickers, which had sales growth of 2% this last quarter while other companies struggled, you have to wonder why. At least, I wondered why. And in that spirit of curiosity, I applied for an entry-level position at my local Wal-Mart.

Getting hired turned out to be a challenge. The personnel manager told me she had received more than 100 applications during that month alone, chasing just a handful of jobs. Thus the mystery deepened. If Wal-Mart was such an exploiter of the working poor, why were the working poor so eager to be exploited? And after they were hired, why did they seem so happy to be there? Anytime I shopped at the store, blue-clad Walmartians encouraged me to “Have a nice day” with the sincerity of the pope issuing a benediction.

I found my first clue in the application screening process. A diabolically ingenious quiz probed for my slightest hesitation or uncertainty regarding four big no-nos of retailing: theft, insubordination, poor timekeeping and substance abuse. …

… A week later, I found myself in an elite group of 10 successful applicants convening for two (paid) days of training in the same claustrophobic, windowless room. As we introduced ourselves, I discovered that more than half had already worked at other Wal-Marts. Having relocated to this area, they were eager for more of the same.

Why? Gradually the answer became clear. Imagine that you are young and relatively unskilled, lacking academic qualifications. Which would you prefer: standing behind the register at a local gas station, or doing the same thing in the most aggressively successful retailer in the world, where ruthless expansion is a way of life, creating a constant demand for people to fill low-level managerial positions? A future at Wal-Mart may sound a less-than-stellar prospect, but it’s a whole lot better than no future at all. …

… After my two days of instruction I returned for the first real day of work. Inevitably, it was anticlimactic. The essence of life on the sales floor should be obvious to anyone: It is extremely boring.

I had chosen the pet department, which sells goldfish, cat food, dog food and accessories. As I patrolled the aisles, repositioning misplaced items and filling gaps in the shelves, I realized that Wal-Mart “guests” really are like guests. They are visitors who move things around and create a mess before they go home. Cleaning up after them was not very different from doing housework.

My amiable, laid-back department supervisor had been doing this kind of thing for 15 years. When I asked him why, he took a moment to process the question. He had to think back to other employers he’d worked for in the distant past. None of them, he said, had treated him so well.

What exactly did he mean by that?

His answer lay in the structure of the store. “It’s deceptive, because Wal-Mart isn’t divided into separate stores like a mall,” he said. “But really, that’s how it works. Each section is separate. This is – my pet store! No one comes here and tells me how to run it. I could go for weeks without a supervisor asking any questions.” Here was the unseen, unreported side of the corporate behemoth. Big as it was, it was smart enough to give employees a feeling of autonomy. …

International Herald Tribune says Sweden is reconsidering nuclear power plants.

Borowitz reports A-Rod backs stimulus.

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Yuval Levin profiles Sarah Palin and the country’s reaction to her.

… The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.

“Her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman,” wrote Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago. “Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them,” said Gloria Steinem, “who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary, is worse than having no one.”

This preposterous effort to excommunicate Palin from her gender suggests that the kind of new-order feminism she represents—a feminism that embraces cultural traditionalism and workplace egalitarianism at the same time—is especially frightening to those on the feminist Left because they recognize its power and appeal. The attempt to destroy Sarah Palin by rushing to paint her as a backwoods extremist was not a show of strength, but rather a sign of desperation.

Meanwhile, on the Right, Palin was the cause of a manic episode of a different sort. The governor’s touching life story, her folksy way of speaking, and her gut-level appeal to the culture of the lower middle class exercised tremendous power over many conservatives, which inclined them to fill the sizable blanks in Palin’s political profile with their own wishful assumptions, and to make flustered excuses for her shortcomings.

There was a strong case to be made in her defense. Palin had as much foreign-policy experience as most governors do, and Americans have been willing time and again to overlook such inexperience in their hunger for proven executive acumen in Washington. (Four of the last five Presidents had been governors, after all, and Palin was running for Vice President with a foreign-policy expert at the top of the ticket.) And while Palin seemed out of her depth in several television interviews, she was extraordinarily effective on the stump, was a quick study, and proved to be at least an even match for Joe Biden, a six-term senator, in the vice-presidential debate.

Yet, for all these defenses, there could be no denying Palin’s real deficiencies. Nonetheless, Palin was embraced practically without reservation in many conservative circles. The very heat of the Left’s campaign against her made her all the more a darling of the Right. She became the 2008 poster child for the longstanding conservative grudge against the mainstream media. And, of course, having warmly accepted her unborn child with Down syndrome and having supported and encouraged her teenage daughter’s decision to bring to term an unplanned pregnancy and to marry the baby’s father, Palin instantly became an icon of the pro-life cause.

It seemed to matter not a whit that Palin had never taken any action on abortion in her time as governor, and rarely had much to say on the subject. Indeed, even as she campaigned before captivated audiences, drawing tens of thousands of proud conservatives to rallies in a display of rock-star popularity no vice-presidential candidate had ever earned, Palin barely spoke about abortion or social issues.

Palin did not merit her instantaneous conversion into the Joan of Arc of the American Right, just as she did not deserve the opprobrium that was heaped upon her by the Left. …

… In the end, Palin had a modest impact on the race. About 60 percent of those interviewed in the exit polls said McCain’s choice of Palin had been a factor in their vote. Of these, 56 percent voted for McCain while only 43 percent voted for Obama. In other words, she appears to have helped McCain more than she hurt him, but not by much, which is as it should be; we were voting for a President, after all. In the face of unprecedented attack, Palin succeeded where almost no vice-presidential candidate ever has before in winning sustained support for the ticket.

This suggests Palin’s potent combination of cultural populism and social conservatism might provide the roadmap a Republican politician will need in the future to make headway against the Democratic tide. But that roadmap will only take that Republican politician so far. The rest of the journey requires the articulation of a broader vision for American families, American prosperity and freedom, and American security; a vision of conservatism, not only a nimbus of populism.

There is every reason to believe Palin will try to accomplish just this in a future national election. It may be, however, that other ambitious Republicans will be better suited to the task of perfecting the formula for electoral success she introduced last fall.

Either way, the Palin moment shed a powerful light on the power, the potential, and the ultimate inadequacy of a conservatism grounded solely in cultural populism. It also exposed the vulnerability of the Left to a challenge to its most cherished claims—as the sole representative of the interests of the working class and the only legitimate path to political power for an ambitious woman.

And, perhaps even more telling, it revealed the unfortunate and unattractive propensity of the American cultural elite to treat those who are not deemed part of the elect with condescension and contumely.

John Fund reveals Sen. Stabenow’s interests and provides informed Supreme speculation.

… So let me get this straight. Senator Stabenow is married to a left-wing radio executive whose efforts to get listeners for his programming has largely flopped. Now she wants to use her legislative powers to rein in the competition and ensure the views pushed by her husband get an artificial advantage in the marketplace. These days it really does feel as if we are living out scenes from an Ayn Rand novel in which “looters” try to tie down and suppress the “producers” in an economy.

John Kerry doesn’t like the tax cuts in the stimulus package because of all that freaky ”freedom.” Weekly Standard Blog has the story.

… “If you put a tax cut into the hands of a business or family, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to invest that or invest it in America.

They’re free to go invest anywhere that they want if they choose to invest.” …

David Warren points out some of the ways our new nanny state will get rid of much of the freedom we have left.

One of the key functions of modern government is to reduce, by law, the options people have, especially when they are facing challenges to survival.

A classic example of this is socialized medicine. Like all socialist systems, government health care creates big shortages and surpluses, beyond the reach of market correction: in this case, serious shortages of doctors, nurses and essential equipment, balanced by huge surpluses of administration and unspecialized support staff.

By contrast, one need never go far to find a dentist or a veterinarian in Canada, because these fields have not been fully “socialized.”

So if you have a toothache, or your cat is ill, you know where to go. If the case is serious, you hardly need an appointment. It will cost you or your insurer money, of course, but within reason, and there will be no waiting lists, or all-night encampments in a crowded lounge outside the emergency ward, among the moaning and wheezing. (Then later, the waiting room inside.)

If you need serious tests, because you are stressed-out by medical symptoms, you may wait for a very long time. If you have money, and are still mobile (unlike so many of our old and ill), you may consider crossing the border. But in principle, in Canada, you wait your turn — and if symptoms get worse you can try emergency. You might be extremely willing to pay for the tests, but the government won’t let you. You could, in more than theory, die, because the government has restricted your options.

Guns are another good example. …

Cato’s Alan Reynolds says it’s not the worst economy since the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter in 1980 owns that distinction.

… A wise adviser to President John Kennedy, Arthur Okun of Yale, devised the “misery index” to gauge the pain of economic crisis – a measure that simply adds together the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It hit 22 percent in June 1980, during an inflationary recession that preceded the Fed’s disinflationary squeeze of 1981-82. The misery index was nearly as bad in January 1975, at 19.9 percent.

Assuming inflation was close to zero this January, the misery index would have been roughly the same as the unemployment rate, or 7.6 percent. By this standard, we have a very long way to go before the economy feels nearly as miserable as it did in 1975 or 1980. …

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We start with the Iraq election portion of Hugh Hewitt’s Friday interview with Mark Steyn. Barack Obama diminishes himself with his indifference to the election’s success.

HH: I began a series of interviews yesterday with Thomas P.M. Barnett, the author of the Pentagon’s New Map. He’s got a new book out called Great Powers which I recommend to you. He’s a pretty fierce Bush critic, but even he has to grudgingly admit that the best part of the Bush administration was strategic patience with regards to Iraq, a willingness to change, and the big bang theory, which is you could never cure the Middle East until you turned all the tables over.

MS: Absolutely. Absolutely right. And you know, a lot of us were saying this in 2002-2003. And that phrase you used, strategic patience, does not come naturally to America, because America isn’t an imperial power. And so it doesn’t like to do, put in the time and effort required to change a political culture, and to change even the broader culture. And I think that actually it’s unfinished work, but I think in the last five years, tremendous progress has been made in doing that. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the election for Contentions.

… Even if you accept the premise that Iraq was a “mistake” or that “it wasn’t worth it,” it is the Obama administration’s responsibility to ensure Iraq remains stable, that the democratic process goes forward, and the drawing down of troops proceeds smoothly. Perhaps the studied silence is a function of not having the full foreign-policy apparatus in place. (Or maybe Christopher Hill is busy in his basic Arabic language course.) But General Odierno’s job is not made easier by the obvious lack of interest that the President is displaying in what is perhaps the only good news coming out of the Middle East these days.

Amir Taheri writes in the NY Post.

WITH the results of Iraq’s latest elections nearly complete, it’s clear that the nation has taken another major step toward lasting democratization.

A robust campaign – more than 14,000 candidates and 400-plus political parties and alliances competing for 440 seats in the provincial assemblies – gave Iraqis the widest possible choice of personalities and policies. …

… This time, Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the principal Shiite clerical leader, refused to endorse any group or Shiite list. He believes Iraqis no longer need his guidance in elections, having gained enough political experience to make considered choices on their own. Opposed to the intervention of the clergy in politics, Sistani insists that Iraq today has a working democracy that needs no religious chaperon.

Since no single party is likely to win a majority in any of the 14 states, all will end up having coalition governments. Maybe Iraq is emerging as a model of democratization for the Arab world, after all.

Robert Samuelson provides a forward look at what the next TARP program might look like.

If this were a movie, we’d call it “TARP, the Sequel.” The Obama administration will soon unveil its plan to bolster the nation’s financial system. Given the widespread revulsion to financial “fat cats,” the public reception may be underwhelming. But we need to move beyond populist denunciations of “bailing out Wall Street.” The purpose of action is more compelling. It is to reverse a massive worldwide credit contraction that’s clobbering the real economy of production and jobs.

Global finance has swung from one extreme to the other. Having engaged in excessive risk-taking — by misjudging the hazards of “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) and other feats of financial engineering — banks and investors have become terrified of almost any risk. The result is paradoxical. As individual financial institutions try to minimize their risks, they increase the risk for the broader economy by denying needed credit or dumping securities (bonds, mortgages).

Here’s how the vicious circle works. …

London’s Daily Telegraph has a look at Obama’s start.

During last year’s epic election campaign, Hillary Clinton said that in the White House “there is no time for on-the-job training”. Joe Biden, too, remarked that the presidency was “not something that lends itself to on-the-job training”. Both were aiming barbs at their then primary opponent. Mrs Clinton has since brought what she would refer to as her “lifetime of experience” to the role of Secretary of State, while Mr Biden has traded 36 years in the Senate for the vice-presidency. And the rookie they derided is President.

Now, the words of his former rivals are returning to haunt President Obama. After a distinctly rocky start to his presidency, he has admitted he “screwed up” and is returning to one thing in his political career that he has perfected – campaigning. In Elkhart, Indiana, today and Fort Myers, Florida, tomorrow, Mr Obama will try to seize back control of the political agenda with question-and-answer sessions with voters in two of the swing states that gave him victory.

Already, however, he is struggling, and the product he is now selling is not himself but a near-trillion-dollar economic “stimulus” package loaded with pet Democratic spending projects that has awakened slumbering Republicans in Congress and is now supported by barely a third of Americans. …

Now we have a series of posts on the new administration’s astonishing lack of competence in the personnel sphere. Roger Simon starts it off.

… An interesting review of recent books about Abraham Lincoln in this weekend’s WSJ by John A. Barnes has this quote about our greatest president: “He knew men on the instant.” Considering the current fiasco of seemingly half his cabinet appointments being tax cheats, including the Secretary of the Treasury, Barack Obama appears to be the opposite of that.

But we knew that, didn’t we? Or we should have. Barack Obama picked as his spiritual mentor the most execrable of men, a racist even, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It should have been apparent from that alone that Obama was no judge of character – or, even worse, he simply didn’t care. He was more concerned with his own advancement.

But the country ignored that as the media papered it over. …

Posts from The Corner and the Weekly Standard explore the Zinni disaster.

This morning a story in the Washington Times reported “The Obama administration asked retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq but abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation, Gen. Zinni said Tuesday.”

This is a seemingly inexplicable move by the Obama administration. Zinni, who has a reputation for being very straightforward, claims he was offered the job by Hillary Clinton personally and had begun planning before the offer was revoked. Circumstances surrounding Zinni’s alleged ambassadorship may yet come to light and perhaps explain what happened. However, for the time being it looks just like another in a very long line of problems the Obama administration has had staffing the new administration. …

… Barely two weeks into his presidency, the media is bewildered by the daily snafus coming from the White House: the galactic mismanagement of the corrupt stimulus bill, the Daschle debacle, the Geithner outrage, the Zinni circus, the Killefer embarrassment. These are hardly the products of a well-oiled machine. Then there’s the utter lack of seriousness conveyed by Obama’s claim that we are at war with “some” terrorist organizations and his disingenuous handling of Gitmo and rendition.

These screw-ups portend ill for bigger issues down the road. As Victor Davis Hanson noted yesterday,  Obama will soon need to address issues percolating in Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan—not to mention Iran. He won’t be able to safely vote “present”.

It’s early in the presidency. The last two weeks don’t necessarily signal that the administration is incompetent or that things can’t be righted.

But it sure highlights the incompetency of many in major media.

In 2006 the British medical journal Lancet interfered in our political campaign by publishing a bogus story on Iraqi civilian deaths. The end of that is at hand. Max Boot has the story in Contentions.

Back in 2006 the British medical journal Lancet published a study claiming that 655,000 Iraqis had died since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. No one denied that there had been lots of civilian casualties but that figure struck most observers as being ridiculously high-designed perhaps to make a political point, but hardly a serious accounting of the costs of war.

As is the nature of these things, however, such findings, no matter how outlandish, make big news. The follow-up does not. One has to search far and wide to learn that the study’s author, Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins, has been censured by his professional peers at the American Association for Public Opinion Research for ethics violations related to this study. …

Shorts from National Review.

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Before we get to the trainwreck known as the stimulus package, let’s enjoy thinking about the airliner wreck where everyone walked away. The UK’s Independent has some of the interview with US Air Captain Chesley Sullenberger.

He may have sounded matter of fact on the radio to traffic controllers but as his aircraft lost every ounce of power on 15 January just after take-off from La Guardia airport in New York, Captain Chesley Sullenberger was suffering intense inner turmoil, ranging from denial to physical nausea.

In his first formal interview since the incident, Captain Sullenberger admits to an interviewer on 60 Minutes, the CBS news magazine that will be broadcast tomorrow evening, that his first thoughts were not, as she suggests to him, “how do we get out of this”, but rather, “this can’t be happening”.

“I knew immediately it was very bad,” describing his first thoughts after the so-called double-bird strike that instantly disabled both engines on the Airbus A320 aircraft at about 5,000ft less than three minutes after its departure. “My initial reaction was one of disbelief”. …

Most of our favorites have comments on the vanishing Obama magic. Mark Steyn first.

… A president doesn’t have to be able to walk on water. But he does have to choose the right crew for the ship, especially if he’s planning on spending most of his time at the captain’s table, schmoozing the celebrity guests with a lot of deep thoughts about “hope” and “change.” Far worse than his Cabinet picks was President Obama’s decision to make the “stimulus” racket the all-but-sole-priority of his first month and then outsource the project to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reid.

Appearing on “The Rush Limbaugh Show” last week, I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings – one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California – and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone’s hammering that mom – she’s divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks’ worth of debt, and she’s already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn’t that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to $850 billion of bailout they couldn’t afford and didn’t have enough time to keep an eye on, and now, four months later, they’re going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget. And it’s the taxpayers who’ll get stuck with the diapers. …

… the foreigners made the mistake of actually reading the “stimulus” bill, and the protectionist measures buried on page 739 subsection XII(d) ended, instantly, the Obama honeymoon overseas. The European Union has threatened a trade war. Up in Canada, provincial premiers called it “a march to insanity.” Wait a minute, I thought the Obama era was meant to be the retreat from insanity, a blessed return to multilateral transnational harmony.

As longtime readers will know, I’m all in favor of flipping the bird to the global community. But at least, when Rummy was doing his shtick about “Old Europe,” he did it intentionally. To cheese off the foreigners entirely accidentally before you’ve even had your first black-tie banquet is quite an accomplishment. Protectionism is serious business to the Continentals. Oh, to be sure, if the swaggering unilateralist Yank cowboy invades some Third World basket-case they’ll seize on it as an opportunity for some cheap moral posturing. But in the end they don’t much care one way or the other. Plunging the planet into global depression, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. …

It is amazing how quickly this new president has come unglued. Our favorite Davids have comments. Mr. Warren from Ottawa first.

A fortnight is a long time in politics. It corresponds most recently to the time between Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, on the final crest of the “politics of hope,” and his definitive exploitation of the “politics of fear” to get a near trillion-dollar stimulus package through the U.S. Senate.

In an article he at least limned and signed, for the Washington Post on Thursday, Mr. Obama supplied a memorable quote: “This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose five million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Compare, if you will, another Democrat president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office under considerably grimmer circumstances — at the very bottom of the Depression — in 1933: “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” … …  For all retrospective disagreements with that genuinely great president, I will not confuse the liberalism that animated his judgment, with the sound-bite gliberalism that characterizes his current successor. …

David Harsanyi from Denver next.

In a Washington Post op-ed this week, Obama, who has quickly transformed from an inspirational candidate to the Pessimist-In-Chief, admitted that his spending plan “is more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.”

Well, then, it is not a stimulus bill. It is a left-wing omnibus bill to restructure the economy without much debate. Unless you believe $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities” — or any of the everlasting partisan pork in the bill — can save a job. …

… Then again, what could possibly be more reckless than spending $1 trillion, you don’t have, on a plan that you have no evidence will work?

What could be more irresponsible than doubling the generational debt for your partisan pet projects in a time of crisis?

And what could be more selfish than stifling debate by deploying fear to induce voters into supporting it all?

Charles Krauthammer has his way with the bill.

… And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said. …

Jonah Goldberg too.

… The stimulus bill was a bridge too far, an overplayed hand, ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag. The legislation’s primary duty was never to stimulate the economy, but to stimulate the growth of government, the scope of the state.

By spending hundreds of billions on things that have absolutely nothing to do with providing an immediate stimulus for the economy, Democrats hoped to make a down payment on their dream government. The billions for student aid, expanded welfare and health-care benefits, and bailouts for profligate state governments; the hundreds of millions for better museums and prettier government buildings; and the millions for smoking-cessation programs and bee insurance aren’t just items on crapulent Democrats’ wish list. The budget bloating was deliberate.

Remember what passes for a “cut” in Washington. Any decrease in the rate of increase counts as reduced spending. If you spend 20 percent more this year than you did last year, that’s a spending increase. But next year, that additional 20 percent is part of the baseline. And if your budget grows by “only” an additional ten percent, you’ve just “drastically cut” spending!

The stimulus bill was designed to give Democrats maximum maneuvering room. It would increase non-defense discretionary spending by more than 80 percent in a single year, in a single bill! Moving forward, they could grow government by smaller percentages while seeming to be responsible budget balancers. By putting chips on every square of social spending, they could let it ride for years to come. …

WSJ Editors sum it up.

… Speaking to a House Democratic retreat on Thursday night, Mr. Obama took on those critics. “So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That’s the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That’s the point. (Applause.)”

So there it is: Mr. Obama is now endorsing a sort of reductionist Keynesianism that argues that any government spending is an economic stimulus. This is so manifestly false that we doubt Mr. Obama really believes it. He has to know that it matters what the government spends the money on, as well as how it is financed. A dollar doled out in jobless benefits may well be spent by the worker who receives it. That $1 of spending will count as economic activity and add to GDP.

But that same dollar can’t be conjured out of thin air. The government has to take that dollar away from someone else — either in higher taxes, or by issuing new debt in the form of a bond. The person who is taxed or buys the bond will have $1 less to spend. If the beneficiary of that $1 spends it on something less productive than the taxed American or the lender would have, then the net impact on growth will be negative. …

Gingrich says Obama reminds him of Jimmy Carter. Sam Donaldson agrees, kind of. Politico has the story.

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Here is an astounding statistic from Sen. David Vitter on Laura Ingraham’s show two days ago. He said one way to understand the size of the proposed stimulus bill was to imagine that if every DAY since the birth of Jesus we spent a million dollars, the total would not equal the $820 billion of the bill. Thinking about it later, the thought came to mind he really meant every year. But banging on the calculator proved he meant EVERY DAY! So when Jesus was three years old the spending would equal $1,095,000,000 or 1,095 millions. Two thousand years later the spending of a million dollars a day would total $730 billion; quite a bit less than the proposed stimulus package.

The Corner shows us just one of the ridiculous items in the bill. Milwaukee, which has a declining school population and 15 empty school buildings, gets $89 million for new schools.

John Fund says Rep. Jim Cooper might have committed the unforgiveable Washington sin; telling the truth.

Is President Obama already playing “triangulation” with the Democratic Congress? Some circumstantial evidence surfaced yesterday when Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee — a prominent Blue Dog Democrat — told a liberal radio network that the Obama White House quietly encouraged him to reject the stimulus package pushed through the House by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the end, every Republican opposed the measure along with 11 Democrats. Mr. Cooper was also one of 55 Democrats who wrote a letter to Ms. Pelosi criticizing her for suspending normal debate on the $819 billion package.

“Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I actually got some quiet encouragement from the Obama folks for what I’m doing,” Rep. Cooper told the Liberadio network. “They know it’s a messy bill and they wanted a clean bill. Now, I got in terrible trouble with our [Democratic House] leadership because they don’t care what’s in the bill, they just want it passed and they want it to be unanimous. They don’t mind the partisan fighting ’cause that’s what they are used to. In fact, they’re really good at it. And they’re a little bit worried about what a post-partisan future might look like — if members actually had to read the bills and figure out whether they are any good or not. We’re just told how to vote. We’re treated like mushrooms most of the time. . . .”

Well. If the definition of a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, Mr. Cooper committed a gaffe of mega-proportions. …

Daniel Henninger wonders just what Congress is stimulating.

Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom, the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus “package” is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties. If the GOP line holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its big-government adventures the past eight years.

For starters, notwithstanding the new president’s high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghost-written by Nancy Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are nervous.

Then after Tim Geithner scampered through the tax minefield and into a Cabinet seat, the Daschle tax bomb went off, laying open for public view the world of Washington’s pay-for-favors that makes the average Wall Street banker look like Little Bo-Peep.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican refuseniks shot themselves in the foot by staying off the House stimulus package. Real wisdom holds that congressional Republicans should consider putting distance between themselves and anything Democratic just now. The party’s crypts are opening.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with an apparently recession-proof cash hoard, is running radio ads against 28 House Republicans. The theme of the ads is “Putting Families First.”

Families first? The only family standing at the front of the stimulus pay line is the federal family. Read the bill. …

John Stossel says we can’t spend our way to prosperity.

… We should be suspicious when politicians, economists and the media declare a “consensus” and marginalize dissent. President Obama says, “There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”

That’s not true. Last week, the Cato Institute ran a full-page newspaper ad signed by more than 200 economists, including Nobel laureates stating:

“We the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s … Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

Let’s hear no more about “everyone” agreeing that politicians can spend the economy into recovery.

Jennifer Rubin has stimulus thoughts.

An illustration of how long it takes for facts to get in the way of fanciful notions, is the continuing idea of FDR as the president who conquered the great depression. In fact, his policies did just the opposite. We have a couple of items today to illustrate the point. Amity Shlaes is first with a WaPo Op-Ed.

One evening in the 1930s, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

William’s father was laid up in Kings County Hospital awaiting surgery for an injury he’d suffered on the job at Brooklyn Edison. A federal jobs program was paying William’s older brother Harold for temporary work. But the amount wasn’t nearly enough to make ends meet. Gas and electricity to the family’s apartment had been shut off for half a year. Harold told a New York Times reporter that both hunger and modesty had driven William to act. “He was reluctant about asking for food,” read the headline in the paper.

The surprising part of this story is not that it happened; most Americans know that after the 1929 stock-market crash, hard times sometimes led to suicide. The surprising part is that William Troeller killed himself not in 1930, when Herbert Hoover was president, but in 1937, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term. The New Deal was almost five years old, but the economy was not back. In fact, the country seemed farther from recovery than before. A new sense of futility was overcoming Americans. The British magazine the Economist sneered that the United States “seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, how to grow.”

The date matters, because our new president has made it clear that his model is Roosevelt. …

And a WSJ Op-Ed on how the government prolonged the depression.

The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a “new” New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR’s policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.

The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn’t restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. Total hours worked per adult, including government employees, were 18% below their 1929 level between 1930-32, but were 23% lower on average during the New Deal (1933-39). Private hours worked were even lower after FDR took office, averaging 27% below their 1929 level, compared to 18% lower between in 1930-32.

Even comparing hours worked at the end of 1930s to those at the beginning of FDR’s presidency doesn’t paint a picture of recovery. Total hours worked per adult in 1939 remained about 21% below their 1929 level, compared to a decline of 27% in 1933. And it wasn’t just work that remained scarce during the New Deal. Per capita consumption did not recover at all, remaining 25% below its trend level throughout the New Deal, and per-capita nonresidential investment averaged about 60% below trend. The Great Depression clearly continued long after FDR took office. …

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Interesting defense of Wal-Mart from an unlikely source.

As I begin my second week here as a guest blogger, I’m going to risk venturing into a couple of contentious political areas. My aim is not to provoke dissent; I simply feel that some stories are not being told.

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world’s largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn’t ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

Getting in was not easy, as more than 100 applicants were competing for fewer than 10 job openings. Still, I made it through a very clever screening quiz, then through a series of three interviews, followed by two days of training. I felt ambivalent about taking advantage of the company’s resources in this way, but I was certainly willing to do my part by working hard at the store, at least for a limited period. …

… If you haven’t heard of Adam Shepard, this illustrates my point. His remarkable book Scratch Beginnings, now being promoted through www.scratchbeginnings.com, describes how he went through an experience far more gruelling than my brief flirtation with low-paying work. He placed himself in a homeless shelter with $25 in his pocket, found a job as a day laborer, then worked for a moving company, and after 10 months had a pickup truck, an apartment, and $2,500 in savings. His conclusion: People can still make it in the United States if they are willing to live carefully on a budget and work hard.

Somehow that kind of news is never as popular as denunciations of the free market written by professional handwringers such as Barbara Ehrenreich.

Spengler listened when Obama said the Muslim world was filled with “extraordinary people.” He begs to differ, and tries to explain why it is the Muslim world is so backward.

… The failsafe definition of an “extraordinary person” is what an ambitious mother will tell her feckless children, “Work hard and you might grow up to be like him (or her).” Successful cultures produce people whose contributions resonate through the world – scientists, poets, musicians, entrepreneurs, or philosophers. Just one great individual can transform a nation, by setting an example for ambitious youth. Thanks to the composer Jan Sibelius, Finland with just 5 million people became a force in the world of classical music. But woe unto cultures whence comes no contribution to the rest of humanity. Where are the Muslim scientists, novelists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians?

Apart from political leaders, a reasonably diligent reader of a quality newspaper in the West will not be able to name a single Muslim distinguished in any field of human endeavor. Excluding the politically awarded Peace Prize, Muslims have won only three Nobel prizes since their inception more than a century ago, or one for every 450 million Muslims alive today. By contrast, there have been 169 Jewish Nobel Laureates (excluding the Peace Prize), or about one for every 89,000 Jews alive today. During the past century, a Jew was 5,000 times more likely to win the Nobel than a Muslim.

The last native of a Muslim country to receive the Nobel was the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, a secular critic of his native country now living in New York City in virtual exile, unable to return to Istanbul in safety. I favorably reviewed his last novel Snow. Only one Muslim writer today is mentioned as a frontrunner for the literature prize today: the Syrian poet Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Sa’id), whom I profiled (Are the Arabs already extinct? Asia Times Online, May 8, 2007). …

WSJ Editors lead off a hat trick of Daschle observations.

Just as Tom Daschle’s Senate pals were preparing to grant absolution for his six-figure tax-free limousine — could’ve happened to anyone — the former Majority Leader yesterday withdrew his nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Give Mr. Daschle credit for making the honorable choice, and sparing President Obama from a bipartisan populist revolt.

Before this episode vanishes into Beltway lore, however, it’s worth drawing a few lessons. Especially because the political left seems to want to make this a morality play about Mr. Daschle’s $5.2 million post-Senate windfall as lobbyist and speaking-circuit regular, notably in front of the health-care industry. Apparently these people expected Mr. Daschle to return to Sioux Falls after his 2004 re-election defeat and eke out a hardscrabble existence as a farmer.

But Mr. Daschle’s embarrassment of riches is a typical story, and in fact is the result of the liberal ideology his critics have been advocating for decades. The main story of the Obama Presidency so far isn’t the contradiction between Mr. Obama’s campaign promises and the messier reality of his nominees. That was always inevitable. The real story is the massive transfer of power and wealth now underway from the private sector to the political class. Mr. Daschle could make so much money and achieve such prominence because he was expected to be a central broker in that wealth transfer. …

Power Line has a good take on Daschle and his career.

Tom Daschle is a man of little ability who, as far as history records, has never had a creative or original idea about any public policy issue. Nevertheless, through a combination of assiduous delivery of pork to his constituents, slavish devotion to the Democratic Party and ethical flexibility, he rose almost to the top of the heap in Washington, DC. In my view, Daschle has been a borderline crook through most if not all of his Senate career. But that didn’t stop the Democrats from electing him their leader in the Senate, nor did it deter a highly lucrative career after John Thune defeated him in 2004.

Barack Obama’s nomination of Daschle to head the Department of Health and Human Services has brought to light one aspect of the seamy underside of life in Washington. After his defeat, Daschle went to work for Alston & Bird, a law firm that also does lobbying. Daschle isn’t a lawyer, so he can only have been working on the lobbying side of the shop, yet he has never registered as a lobbyist. Still, his connections apparently were valuable enough that Alston & Bird paid him $2.1 over the past two years. …

Philly Inquirer blog on the Daschle mess.

… On the other hand, it was Obama’s decision to nominate Daschle in the first place; presumably, he knew all along that this guy was a classic Beltway animal. Scads of lawmakers have left Capitol Hill and promptly cashed in on their connections and expertise by signing up with the deep-pocket companies that they once regulated. Daschle epitomizes that traditional Washington two-step. He has taken in roughly $5.3 million in the last two years alone – including $300,000 from health-care companies that he would have to regulate if he is confirmed as HHS secretary. And he was savvy enough to elude the strictures that are imposed (on) lobbyists, because, while he has been giving “policy advice” to private sector clients, he has never registered as a lobbyist.

Will Daschle be confirmed? A Senate Democratic spokesman said yes, citing Daschle’s “long and distinguished career and record in public service.” Translation: Daschle is a member in good standing of the Senate club, and it’s hard to imagine that club members will sandbag one of their own, for the behavior that they too would indulge in the private sector if given the chance.

Obama has signaled that he is sticking with Daschle. No doubt Daschle believes that the president is sincere. Last June, Daschle offered this praise for his patron: “Those who accomplish the most are those who don’t make perfect the enemy of the good. Barack is a pragmatist.”

Daschle, demonstrably less than perfect, appears to be reading Obama correctly.

Jim Taranto has a good idea, Marion Barry for Drug Czar.

Over the weekend, meanwhile, we noticed this story in the Washington Post:

D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) has again failed to file his tax returns.

The former District mayor has not submitted federal or city tax forms for 2007–the second instance in which he has not filed required returns while on probation for tax offenses, said two sources familiar with the situation.

Two years ago, federal prosecutors failed to convince a federal judge that Barry should be jailed for violating the terms of his probation, which was ordered in 2006, because he did not file 2005 tax returns.

Like everyone else, we immediately thought that Barry must be angling for a position in the administration.

McClatchy Newspapers report that the president “has yet to nominate a new head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.” Coincidence?

The Onion has ideas for keeping kids safe. They think this is a joke. They need to meet more people from the nanny state.

WASHINGTON, DC—The Department of Health and Human Services issued a series of guidelines Monday designed to help parents curtail their children’s boundless imaginations, which child-safety advocates say have the potential to rival motor vehicle accidents and congenital diseases as a leading cause of disability and death among youths ages 3 to 14.

“Defuse the ticking time-bomb known as your child’s imagination before it explodes and destroys her completely,” said child-safety expert Kenneth McMillan, who advised the HHS in composing the guidelines. “New data shows a disturbing correlation between serious accidents and the ability of children to envision a world full of exciting possibility.” …

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At the end of next week there will be happy news – pitchers and catchers report, and the baseball season starts anew. It was baseball that gave us Ladies Day, and we’ll celebrate with our own;

Noemie Emery on Caroline Kennedy

Jennifer Rubin on various subjects

Anne Bayefsky on UN rot

Debra Saunders on CA craziness

Dorothy Rabinowitz on Obama’s self regard

Star Parker on Obama priorities

Pickerhead’s # 4 daughter on getting organized

Melanie Kirkpatrick reviews book about Suzette Kelo

Our last day like this was Dec. 24th 2007. http://www.pickerhead.com/?p=633 Interestingly enough, Claudia Rosett was there talking about the UN’s plans for another trash Israel conference like Durban in 2001. Anne Bayefsky carries that torch with her offering today.

Noemie Emery is well qualified to give us the Caroline Kennedy back-story.

Political dynasties die in different ways, and the ends are not pretty. The Adamses eased themselves out by degrees, becoming more self-absorbed and less consequential over four generations. Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest son Ted made an effort to follow his father, but was displaced early on by his fifth cousin Franklin and sank into a bitterness that was relieved only when he returned to his first love, the Army, and died a great hero in the Second World War. His oldest son, as unsuited as he was for politics, was wooed in his turn by his state’s Republican party but bowed out when he discovered campaigns made him sick. Would this had happened to three of the sons of Franklin and Eleanor, who used public life to disparage their parents, becoming in the end such colossal embarrassments that no Roosevelt has since held high public office. But nothing can match what the Kennedys did over eight weeks this winter, when they torpedoed what may be their last hope for a comeback in a mishandled effort to regain their lost power. …

… On her own, she would not have been considered by anyone as an appointee to the Senate, but it was her identity as a Kennedy heir that made her valuable to family members most interested in extending their line: They wanted her back story and her standing as the rare Kennedy who was both scandal free and (more or less) above politics to stir public sentiment, quell opposition, and make it difficult for a Democratic governor in a Democratic state in which her uncle had served at the time of his murder to reject her appointment.

The evidence seems to suggest that this was not her idea, and that she was ambivalent, but that she finally succumbed to the burden of family duty. On December 3, she called Governor David Paterson expressing her interest in becoming the senator, and the game was on. …

… ”Caroline Kennedy would like to be a Senator. I don’t blame her. So would I!” Katha Pollitt wrote in the Nation. “Especially if Governor Paterson could just waft me into office, and I didn’t have to, um, you know, campaign.” If Marcus saw this as a fairy tale come true for America’s princess, others saw a toxic combination of very high powered money and muscle, masked by an effort to play on the family tragedies for all their political worth. “The forces behind Caroline . . . are too powerful and too well-heeled to be resisted,” said Joel Kotkin. In the New York Post, Fred Dicker warned Paterson, “Let’s just say there’ll be hell to pay from Uncle Teddy, Cousin Robert Jr., and a dozen other Kennedy family members . . . if you end up picking someone other than their current favorite to carry on the Camelot dream.”

Caroline’s candidacy enraged the dozen or more New York politicians who saw themselves as more than well-qualified for the job that she wanted, and mocked her as a know-nothing dilettante trying to trade on the family name; it became a nightmare in the life of the governor, who had been tempted to pick state attorney general Andrew Cuomo, son of the former governor, to get him out of the way as a possible rival for reelection. Now he had to choose between enraging the Kennedys (and Mayor Bloomberg) and enraging the Cuomos. As Dicker warned Paterson, “If you don’t offer [Cuomo] the Senate job, you’ll have delivered a major public humiliation to New York’s only statewide elected state official. . . . Not a good thing to do for a hard-driving guy who rides a Harley, hunts with a shotgun . . . and would like to follow in the footsteps of a father named Mario.”

As if to rub in all the more what it was she was doing, Caroline used as a principal spokesman her cousin Kerry, ex-wife of Andrew Cuomo, who had blown up the marriage five years earlier when she had an affair with one of his friends.

Caroline might have pulled all this off if she had charmed the press and the public, or wowed them with a dazzling display of depth on the issues. Instead, she bombed.

We couldn’t have Ladies Day without gobs of stuff from Jennifer Rubin. Here’s her take on the stimulus package.

… Well, then we will see just how assertive the President can be and how effective Rahm Emanuel is in corralling his former colleagues. And we will get a glimpse of Harry Reid’s statesmanship. Then we will see if they can put the spending genie back in the bottle. I tend to think they will fake it — try some cosmetic changes, remove some more egregious elements, and try to jam it through again. But Republicans, at least in the House, learned an important lesson last week: political courage, steady tone, and a principled stand can win praise. The President’s personal popularity does not earn him a pass with the American people. …

And the Daschle mess.

… And the President? He (along with Max Baucus) doubles down on Daschle and expresses his continued support. This merely heightens the nagging sense that he and his team have a tin-ear for corruption and venality. They, who marinated in the juices of Chicago, seem dense when it comes to this sort of thing. They didn’t know enough to stay away from Blago, nix Bill Richardson, stick to their own lobbyist rules, dump Geithner and now lose Daschle. And this comes from the campaign that ran against the Clintons and the Washington tradition of sleazy dealing. …

And the growing evidence of Obama’s cluelessness.

… President Obama wanted to keep his blackberry to prevent being sealed in the presidential bubble. Someone needs to email him — quick! — and urge him to stop underestimating how tuned in the American people are. If he keeps this up, he’ll tax the ability of the MSM to maintain the storyline that he is the smartest, savviest, least ideological president ever.

Anne Bayefsky continues the work of exposing the rot at the United Nations.

The United Nations “anti-racism” forum, known as Durban II, is becoming a more important test for President Obama’s multilateralist ambitions with each passing day. Durban I was the anti-Semitic hatefest that ended three days before 9/11. Durban II – the UN equivalent of the Son of Sam – will take place in April in Geneva. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has called on Obama not to legitimize the meeting, or its message, and not to attend. Canada has decided to stay away. But Obama has still not decided whether the United States will go. This Wednesday, however, the stakes got a lot higher with the UN’s release of the latest negotiating text.

Negotiators have now put on the table claims that (1) a homeland for the Jewish people is racism – a “racially based law of return,” (2) Israel is guilty of “apartheid” and (3) the veracity of the murder of one-third of the Jewish people during the Holocaust is subject to question. …

If you’ve ever wondered why California is broke, Debra Saunders’ piece on proposals to build seven hospitals at a total cost of 8 billion dollars for the CA prison system will provide some hints.

Dorothy Rabinowitz thinks Americans might get tired of Obama telling the world how terrible our country was BO (Before Obama).

… His view of America’s new position in the world — following the announcement of those orders — was amply clear, its tone familiar. America had entered upon a new day — we once were lost and now we’re found, a people restored to the paths of principle and honor. Hillary Clinton, speaking as secretary of state, would a few days later add her voice to the general thanksgiving for our rebirth, declaring, “There is a great exhalation of breath going on in the world.”

To hear Mr. Obama speak now on matters like the national defense is to recognize that the leader now in the White House is in every respect the person he seemed on the campaign trail: a man of immense moral certitude, prone to an abstract idealism, and pronouncements that range between the rational and the otherworldly.

That’s not counting the occasional touches of pure rubbish. Having, on the second day of his presidency, issued executive orders effectively undermining efforts to extract (from captured al Qaeda operatives) intelligence essential to the prevention of terror attacks — and in addition seriously hampering the prosecution of terrorist detainees — Mr. Obama argued that it was just by such steps that we strengthened our security. In his own words: “It is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world.”

What can this mean? What moral high ground, exactly, would have enabled us to deter the designs of the religious fanatics in search of martyrdom and the slaughter of as many Americans as possible on September 11? …

Star Parker has similar thoughts.

The Obama administration, completing its first full week, wasted no time getting priorities in order. First, issue formal apologies to the world, and then begin advancing massive, intrusive government at home.

The president chose Arab television, Al Arabiya, to give his first sit down interview. He took the opportunity to confirm the long held Arab view that the real problem is America and President Obama apologized on our behalf.

“…America was not born as a colonial power,” he told the Arab viewing audience – implying we are now. And he regretfully confessed that “We sometimes make mistakes. We are not perfect.”

Sorry, but weren’t we the ones that were attacked? Do we not stand in long lines and disrobe in airports because of them? Does anyone recall anywhere, anytime hearing apologies from any Arab or Muslim leader? …

Virginia Tech student, and Pickerhead’s number four daughter, wants you to think about getting organized.

… According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, there are almost 100,000 people currently awaiting transplants. And 18 people die everyday waiting for organs in America. While this is happening, tens of thousands of usable organs are buried or cremated each year.

The truth is none of us anticipate the worst happening to us.

Neither did Greg.

But because of a choice he made that he probably thought would never matter, four people are alive. And we shouldn’t take that decision lightly. Not only because it brings hope and joy to the harsh reality of death, but because we never know when one of those four lives could be one we want saved.

A good book is out on the most notorious Supreme Court ruling on the last few years; Kelo.     Melanie Kirkpatrick reviews for the Journal.

Roughly 70% of Americans own their own homes, a statistic that goes a long way toward explaining why the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2005 in Kelo v. City of New London was so widely reviled. Before Kelo, most Americans probably took it for granted that their home was their castle, protected by the Constitution from arbitrary seizure by government. The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause says: ” . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

In Kelo, a majority of five justices came up with an extremely broad interpretation of “public use.” The high court’s four liberal members, joined by the ever-changeable Anthony Kennedy, ruled that government has the right to seize a private home for virtually any purpose — including handing it over to private developers.

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The Dems and their applause section in the media made a lot of noise about Ledbetter’s law. Stuart Taylor begs to differ.

This has been a good week, and may be a good year, for lawyers, civil-rights groups and others who think that America needs many more lawsuits to combat what they portray as pervasive job discrimination against women, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled.

Things are not going so well for those of us who fear that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which President Obama co-sponsored as a senator and signed on Thursday, and other job discrimination bills in the congressional pipeline may be bad for most workers and may benefit mainly lawyers.

Ledbetter waited more than five years after learning that she was paid substantially less than most male co-workers to file her Title VII claim.

These measures seem likely to make it harder than ever for employers to defend themselves against bogus (as well as valid) discrimination claims, effectively adding to the cost of each new hire.

This would be justified if job discrimination were indeed pervasive. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Study after study has, for example, cast grave doubt on what appears to be the myth that sex discrimination in the workplace remains rampant more than 40 years after Congress adopted one law broadly banning job discrimination and another requiring equal pay for women and men doing equal work.

Congressional Democrats, liberal groups, and the media have thoroughly distorted the facts underlying the Ledbetter law to advance their agenda of opening the door wide to all manner of job-discrimination lawsuits. …

… This is not to suggest that sex discrimination is no longer a serious problem. I worry that my two daughters may run into the barriers that still lurk in some unknown percentage of workplaces. But I worry more that they and their peers will have a harder and harder time finding jobs in the first place if the government burdens employers with lawsuits that make it more and more expensive to bring in new.

Sarah Baxter of the London Times wonders if the GOP can make the ‘Jimmy Carter’ label stick to Obama.

LESS than two weeks into his administration, President Barack Obama is being portrayed by opponents as a new Jimmy Carter – weak at home and naive abroad – in an attempt to dim his post-election glow and ensure that he serves only one term.

The charge has stung because it was made privately by Hillary Clinton supporters during a hard-fought primary campaign and plays to fears about Obama’s inexperience.

He is engaged in early trials of strength with Republicans in Washington and critics of the United States around the world – not least Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. Obama faces battles to talk Wall Street into giving up its addiction to large bonuses and US banks to start lending again.

“Barack Obama thinks he can charm his adversaries into changing their ways but his personality can’t change the dynamics,” said Tom Edmonds, a Republican consultant.“Carter [president from 1977 to 1981] had the same belief in naive symbolism. Their styles are very different but the political similarities are there.”

The Republicans are in fighting mood after Obama failed to secure a single vote on their side for his $819 billion financial stimulus package in the House of Representatives, despite intensive wooing.

The bill came laden with spending on Democratic pet projects, including $50m for the arts and $400m for global warming research that critics said had little to do with boosting the economy. It also contains “buy American” protectionist provisions that have alarmed trading partners, including Britain. …

David Harsanyi on the stimulus bill passed by the House.

Imagine that. The most expensive social experiment in American history — one that will cost taxpayers more than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined — was allotted less than a single day of debate in Congress.

How many speed-reading whiz-kid representatives do you think slogged past their own pork to read the entire 647 (or so) pages of the “stimulus” menu?

This week, more than 200 notable economists — including three Nobel laureates — signed an open letter in The New York Times challenging President Barack Obama’s false suggestion that all economists agree a bailout is needed. It was titled: “With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.”

So though Nobel laureates can’t reach anything resembling a consensus, your former community organizing/car-dealing/ambulance-chasing congressperson has the intellectual capacity to digest a $900 million piece of legislation in mere days.

Amazing. …

Robert Samuelson too.

… The decision by Obama and Democratic congressional leaders to load the stimulus with so many partisan projects is politically shrewd and economically suspect. The president’s claims of bipartisanship were mostly a sham, as he skillfully maneuvered Republicans into a no-win position: Either support a Democratic program, or oppose it — and seem passive and uncaring.

But the result is that the stimulus, as an act of economic policy, is hobbled. A package so large can be defended only because the economy is so weak — and seems to be getting weaker by the moment. The central purpose is simple: halt downward momentum. Perhaps some of the out-year spending might ultimately prove useful. But the immediate need is for the stimulus package to stimulate — now. It needs to be front-loaded; it isn’t.

Obama’s political strategy fails to address adequately the economy’s present needs while also worsening the long-term budget outlook. Some of his “temporary” spending increases in practice will almost certainly become permanent. There were tough choices to be made — and Obama ducked them.

Jennifer Rubin kicks off the Tom Daschle coverage.

You think you’ve seen everything and then Washington surprises you once again. It turns out that Tom Daschle waited nearly a month after his nomination to fess up to the Obama team about his tax liability. It seems incomprehensible that he could actually be confirmed, especially when you couple that with this one sentence description: “Daschle’s expertise and insights, gleaned over 26 years in Congress, earned him more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry, and perks such as a chauffeured Cadillac, according to the documents.” …

Corner posts too.

… If President Obama were really serious about ending business as usual, he would immediately withdraw the nomination of someone who was cheating big-time on his taxes and who didn’t level with Obama about the problem at the outset. …

John Coleman, the man behind the idea of the Weather Channel says Global Warming is a scam.

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints.

Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have led the public to be skeptical that any runaway global warning. There is now awareness that there may be reason to question whether CO2 is a pollutant and a significant greenhouse gas.

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government? And how will we ever stop it? ..

.

… So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over.
And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.

Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a high jacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

Shorts from National Review.

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The American left and the Dems have set a trap for themselves in Afghanistan. Some of our favorites explain how. Corner posts from James Robbins and Kathryn Jean Lopez explain some of the problems.

They were just for openers, Victor Davis Hanson goes into detail in World Affairs Journal.

… It is worth remembering that when the United States invaded Afghanistan on October 6, 2001, many on the left forecast immediate doom. The craggy peaks of the Hindu Kush were too high. The weather was too icy. With Ahmad Shah Massoud’s assassination by al-Qaeda, the Northern Alliance would surely not fight effectively. The same fate that had defeated both past British and Russian imperial occupiers lay in wait for us. New York Times writer R. W. Apple summed up such liberal unease—shortly before the rout of the Taliban—when he declared the first weeks of war in Afghanistan had already produced a hopeless Vietnam-like debacle.

But Afghanistan proved to be the quagmire that wasn’t. The unexpectedly sudden defeat of the Taliban, coupled with the rapid establishment of an elected Karzai government, quieted anti-war opposition for a time—even as fleeing Islamic terrorists began regrouping with near impunity across the border in Pakistan. In the autumn of 2002, about a year after the Taliban’s fall, success in Afghanistan was an attractive argument for more action, not more caution. Surprised by the quick victory of American arms in Afghanistan—but continually worried about being seen as soft on national security amid growing public support for ending the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein—a majority of Democratic congressmen and senators voted in October 2002, weeks before the midterm elections, to authorize a second war in Iraq. Few on the left wished to go on record opposing another successful military operation. …

… then presidential candidate Barack Obama framed the  issue in a debate with John McCain, “We took our eye off Afghanistan. We took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11.” The Democrats strange and twisted journey from supporting the war effort in Iraq, to wanting it immediately ended, while wishing for more fighting in Afghanistan—a war some on the left had once declared impossible to win in October 2001—was now complete.

Such an odyssey was again reflected in self-described anti-war and then senatorial candidate Barack Obama’s July 27, 2004, comment on Iraq: “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.” But later, on January 31, 2007, as a soon-to-be presidential candidate, and with news from the front now far worse and George Bush’s poll ratings diving, Obama scorned the surge, which he claimed had “not worked,” and pledged that all U.S. combat forces should be out of Iraq by March 31, 2008. He hammered that message throughout the summer and autumn of 2007: “The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year—now.”

Such a move would probably have led to an American defeat and Iraqi genocide, as the country would have been effectively trisected into a Kurdish breakaway republic at war with Turkey, an Iranian rump protectorate of Shiites to the south, and a radical Sunni client state of Saudi Arabia—all in perennial terrorist wars with one another, fueled by religious hatred and Iraqi oil.

But anti-war candidate Obama protected himself against charges that he was ignoring the danger posed by Islamic terrorists by making even bolder promises that he would send another 7,000 troops to Afghanistan and invade Pakistan, if need be, in hot pursuit of al-Qaeda. It appeared that Obama, and others who supported his new bellicose calls, was not really against the idea of either surging troops or crossing national borders to hunt down insurgents per se; they were just opposed to doing all that in the politically incorrect Iraq theater, but for doing it in the properly sanctioned Afghanistan war. So President Bush was to be condemned not just for having been too warlike in Iraq, but now also for not being warlike enough in Afghanistan.

In fact, there are a number of historical and practical reasons to doubt both the sincerity and the logic of the new liberal calls for escalation in Afghanistan—especially since it uncharacteristically committed the left to a renewed and difficult struggle against the Taliban that they may soon likewise disown. …

… “Taking our eye off the ball,” and supposedly ignoring Afghanistan, were rather inexpensive ways of voicing partisan attacks on George Bush’s Iraq War. But now the Iraq War has been largely won (the number of U.S. soldiers who died in actual combat operations in Iraq in October 2008 was seven; more than forty Americans were murdered in Chicago each month on average in 2008). And after January 20, 2009, Commander-in-Chief Obama will have the responsibility for the costs and difficulties of the Afghan war he had been apparently eager to take on during the campaign against Senator John McCain. Consequently, we may well see president-elect Obama’s once promised hawkishness dissipate. After all, many liberal hawks figured that they could issue their war cries without ever being forced to hold the reins of governance with commensurate responsibility, or, by that the time they were given responsibility, the Afghan war would be over.

Vowing to do what it takes in the good war by leaving Iraq—infusing more troops into Afghanistan, and occasionally invading Pakistan—was for candidate Obama always a rhetorical stance that proved both his anti-Iraq War bona fides and his larger credibility on matters of national security. But President Obama and his mercurial supporters in Congress will soon face a rather embarrassing dilemma. Without the responsibilities of a commander-in-chief, he once demanded we should leave Iraq when leaving would have lost that war. But now, as commander- in-chief he will soon learn that a few thousand more troops will not guarantee lasting victory over the Taliban. And changing strategy from stealthy attacks by aerial drones in Pakistan to open ground incursions across the border risks widening rather than solving the conflict.

“Taking our eye off the ball” was always a dubious campaign talking point.  Afghanistan was not the only “ball” in the global war against terror; we never took our eye off it; and we were always binocular. What we may well see instead is that those who wished more of an American commitment to Afghanistan as cover for their opposition to Iraq will now desert President Obama, as anti-war critics take their eye off a receding Iraq and focus it instead on an increasingly violent Afghanistan—especially given the sensational terrorist acts associated with the near-rogue state of Pakistan. In that case, President Obama may well have to revert to his earlier manifestation of candidate Obama, who campaigned on the notion that a surge of military forces into an apparent quagmire was little more than an unsophisticated act of desperation—in a complex landscape that required American forces to exit and to allow indigenous tribal folks to sort out their own affairs.

Abe Greenwald with Afghanistan thoughts.

The myth about George W. Bush having traded a successful campaign in Afghanistan for a neoconservative fantasy in Iraq is exploding. Despite his campaign promise to redirect the American military focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, President Obama is unlikely to do anything of the sort. As the A.P. reports, “Obama said he wants to add troops to turn back a resurgent Taliban, but he has not gone beyond the approximately 30,000 additional forces already under consideration by the previous administration.”

At the same time, the President has been receptive to Pentagon officials wary of the 16-month Iraq-withdrawal timetable outlined by Obama the candidate. On Wednesday, Obama made his first presidential visit to the Pentagon and met with Gen. Ray Odierno, who recommends a significantly slower drawdown. …

Before items on the stimulus package, Ilya Somin in Volokh posts on why the size of government matters.

In his inaugural address, President Obama said that “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This is a commonly heard argument in response to concerns about the growth of government. Who could possibly be against government when it “works”? Why not instead consider each proposed expansion of the state on a case by case basis, supporting those that “work” and opposing any that don’t?

Taken seriously, this argument leads to the rejection of any systematic constraints on government power. Why should we have a general presumption against government regulation of speech or religion? Why not instead support censorship when it “works” by improving the marketplace of ideas, and oppose it when it doesn’t? Think of all the misleading speech and religious charlatans that government regulation could potentially save us from! The answer, of course, is that government regulation of speech and religion has systematic dangers that are not unique to any one particular regulation. Given those systematic flaws, it makes sense to have a general presumption against it.

The same holds true for government intervention more generally, including in the economy. It too has systematic flaws that justify a presumption against it. Three of those flaws are particularly relevant to current policy debates. …

David Brooks has figured out the stimulus is a waste.

… Wise heads are now trying to restore structure and safeguards to the enterprise. In testimony this week, Alice Rivlin, Bill Clinton’s former budget director, raised the possibility of separating the temporary from the permanent measures and focusing independently on each. “A long-term investment program should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package,” Rivlin testified. “The elements of the investment program must be carefully planned and will not create many jobs right away.”

The best course is to return to the original Summers parameters — temporary, targeted and timely — thus making the stimulus cleaner and faster.

Strip out the permanent government programs. Many of them are worthy, but we can have that debate another day. Make the short-term stimulus bigger. Many liberal economists have been complaining it is too small, so replace the permanent programs with something like a big payroll tax cut, which would help the working class.

Add in a fiscal exit strategy so the whole thing is budget neutral over the medium term. Finally, coordinate the stimulus package with plans to shore up the housing and financial markets. Until those come to life, no amount of stimulus will do any good.

This recession is scary and complicated. It’s insane to try to tackle it and dozens of other complicated problems, all in one piece of legislation. Leadership involves prioritizing. Those who try to do everything at once will end up with a sprawling, lobbyist-driven mess that does nothing well.

Yuval Levin Corner posts on the stimulus.

When they manage to unify the entire House Republican caucus with David Brooks and Peggy Noonan, you know the Democrats have seriously botched something. And boy, they really have. The more you look at the stimulus bill the clearer it becomes that it is the Congressional Democrats, not the opponents of this bill, who have failed to see that we are in a genuine and exceptional crisis. They’re working to use the moment as an opportunity to advance the same agenda they haven’t been able to move (with good reason) for a decade and more, and in the process are showing that agenda to be what we always knew it was: a massively wasteful, reckless, profligate, slovenly, higgledy-piggledy mess of interest group troughs and technocratic fantasies devoid of any economic thinking or sense of proportion. …

Same with Adam Smith.org.

Scrappleface has kudos for Obama’s tax collection scheme.

… “The president’s plan is simple but ingenious,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “He targets wealthy individuals who filed inaccurate tax forms, cheating the government out of tens of thousands of dollars. Then he just nominates them for cabinet positions. They suddenly see the error of their ways, and they cut checks for the full amount owed, plus interest.” …