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Thomas Sowell on the “Rookie President.”

Someone once said that, for every rookie you have on your starting team in the National Football League, you will lose a game. Somewhere, at some time during the season, a rookie will make a mistake that will cost you a game.

We now have a rookie President of the United States and, in the dangerous world we live in, with terrorist nations going nuclear, just one rookie mistake can bring disaster down on this generation and generations yet to come.

Barack Obama is a rookie in a sense that few other Presidents in American history have ever been. It is not just that he has never been President before. He has never had any position of major executive responsibility in any kind of organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome.

Other first-term Presidents have been governors, generals, cabinet members or others in positions of personal responsibility. A few have been senators, like Barack Obama, but usually for longer than Obama, and had not spent half their few years in the senate running for President.

What is even worse than making mistakes is having sycophants telling you that you are doing fine when you are not. In addition to all the usual hangers-on and supplicants for government favors that every President has, Barack Obama has a media that will see no evil, hear no evil and certainly speak no evil. …

Writing for the Weekly Standard, Reuel Marc Gerecht decries the weakness demonstrated by Obama.

In diplomacy and espionage, there is no worse mistake than “mirror-imaging,” that is, ascribing to foreigners your own actions and views. For Westerners this is especially debilitating, given our modern proclivity to assume that others pursue their interests in secular, material, and guilt-ridden ways. Confession is an important part of the Western tradition; self-criticism is less acute elsewhere. Americans, the British, the Spanish, and the French have written libraries about their own imperialistic sins; Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Russians have not. In an unsuccessful effort to reach out to Iran’s clerical regime in 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the actions of the entire Western world. Last week, in response to President Barack Obama’s let’s-talk greetings broadcast to Iran, theocratic overlord Ali Khamenei, “supreme leader” of the Islamic Republic of Iran, enumerated 30 years’ worth of America’s dastardly deeds against the Islamic revolution–but not a peccadillo that the clerical regime had committed against any Western country.

Looking overseas, many Americans are feeling guilty. George W. Bush and his wars have embarrassed Democrats and Republicans. So the Obama administration has tried to push the “reset” button, and not just with Russia. Nowhere has this American sense of guilt been more on display than in the Middle East: Obama has picked up where Bill Clinton left off, trying to engage diplomatically Iran and Syria, and perhaps down the road the Palestinian fundamentalist movement Hamas. Yet nowhere is guilt-fueled mirror-imaging more dangerous.

Washington is again putting U.S.-Iranian relations on the psychiatrist’s couch, treating the mullahs as if they were something other than masters of Islamic machtpolitik. Obama’s message to Khamenei emphasizes “mutual respect,” “shared hopes,” “common dreams,” and Iran’s great historic “ability to build and create.” I would bet the national debt that the president and the supreme leader share not a single hope or dream that could possibly have any bearing on the relations between their two countries. Khamenei is a serious revolutionary cleric and a man of considerable personal integrity who has suffered severely for his beliefs (in 1981 a bomb blast mangled his right arm). He is a faithful son of the Islamic revolution. …

David Limbaugh spots another terrible Obama appointment.

As usual, President Barack Obama is multi-tasking the dismantling of the American system on so many fronts that not all of the outrages can be properly monitored. So while you should be mortified by his dictatorial power grab with General Motors, please don’t miss his recent nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as legal adviser for the State Department.

In his new position, Koh not only would represent the United States before international bodies, such as the U.N. and the International Court of Justice, but also would influence the degree to which laws of other countries should influence American jurisprudence.

After reading an alarming piece by Meghan Clyne in the New York Post concerning the Koh nomination and the degree to which Koh believes it’s appropriate for courts to consider other nations’ laws in interpreting our Constitution, I read a number of Koh’s legal writings and speeches.

Clyne reported that New York lawyer Steven Stein said that Koh, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, claimed that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.”  …

Victor Davis Hanson on how to spot a narcissist.

Left libertarian Nat Hentoff, formerly of The Village Voice writes on the teacher’s unions’ war against the kids.

The “education president” remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.

Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.

First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year. …

John Fund with more details on the loss of DC’s vouchers.

Christopher Booker in London’s Sunday Telegraph says ocean’s rising is so much bunk.

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. …

American.com piece on how the administration will weaken the drug industry.

The pharmaceutical industry is programmed to lurch from crisis to crisis. Even the most promising drugs can fail in development, as happened to Pfizer when it spent a billion dollars on a cholesterol drug that failed in a late-stage trial and precipitated Pfizer’s exit from heart drug research altogether. The rare blockbuster success brings huge profits but those profits typically plummet when patents expire, sometimes wreaking havoc on entire firms. And there is government shock—cuts in reimbursement levels, controls over pricing, shifting regulatory standards, and massive litigation.

Now, in addition, the Obama budget and the pronouncements of the Democratic-majority Congress make clear that the industry that has given us so many lifesaving drugs will soon face politically inspired assaults, ranging from tougher FDA standards to expanded controls over drug prices in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. There will be debate, of course, but the pharmaceutical industry will be peeking out from behind the eight ball. The news media and academic pundits will declare that the industry’s best days are behind it, that most R&D money is wasted in chasing after so-called me-too or copycat drugs of negligible clinical value, and that political and financial interference in today’s fumbling and inefficient R&D enterprise would do little harm despite the familiar warnings from economists about undermining research incentives.

Correcting these dangerous misimpressions could fill a book. But for now, let’s take a look at the February 21 issue of The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest continuously published medical journals. Rather left of center in its political orientation, The Lancet has solid drug-industry bashing credentials. …

Dilbert’s here to tell us how he became a cartoonist.

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John Fund tells us about tomorrow’s congressional race in upstate New York.

With so many contradictory polls out there, it’s useful information when actual voters cast ballots. That’s why this coming Tuesday’s special House election in New York’s Hudson River Valley is important.

It will be the first gauge of President Barack Obama’s early days, and as the National Journal reports “it’s his stimulus package that’s the focus of the debate here.” The furor over the bonuses given out by American International Group (AIG), which a loophole in the stimulus bill allowed, has only heightened the attention that the race is getting both in New York and in Washington where officials in both parties are hoping for a win. …

The Economist thinks the kid president has been very weak. Jennifer Rubin wonders why they’re surprised.

David Broder thinks the kid president is getting rolled by Nancy Pelosi. Jennifer Rubin wonders why he’s surprised.

Stephen Moore exposes some of the lies in the kid’s budget.

… Welcome to the Obama doctrine. It is built on the high stakes economic gamble that the public and the bond markets will tolerate trillions of dollars of borrowing to pay for massive expansions in government spending on popular income transfer programs. The corollary to this doctrine is that the left will create a political imperative to jack up tax rates to pay for higher spending commitments made today.

But the news on the red ink front is much worse than the president or even the CBO’s budget report suggests. If all of Obama’s “transformational” policy objectives–from global warming taxes to universal health care to doubling the Department of Energy’s budget–are enacted, the debt is likely to increase from about 40 percent of GDP today to close to 100 percent of GDP by 2018. The ten-year debt is likely to be at least $6 trillion higher–or more than one-half trillion of higher deficits a year from now until forever–than the Obama budget projects.

These are uncharted levels of debt for the United States–though not for such high-flying nations as Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico. This hemorrhaging of U.S. government debt will be happening at precisely the time when, in a rational world, the government would be running surpluses, in anticipation of the retirement of some 80 million baby boomers who will soon collect multiple trillions of dollars of government benefits from Medicare and Social Security.

There are three ways that the Obama administration is understating the spending and debt levels embedded in the president’s budget policies. …

Interesting Columbia University related piece comparing the life of a 60′s pretend radical to the real hardships of growing up in war-torn England. Rick Richman has the story in Contentions.

… Everybody is influenced to some extent by the circumstances in which they grew up. I grew up in England after the Second World War, after a period of destruction on a global scale. It’s hard for people in the United States to grasp how long the effects of that war lingered in England. The bombed and derelict buildings stayed that way for many, many years. Rationing of food was still typical into the early and mid-1950s. Normal life certainly didn’t resume when peace came in 1945. I vividly recall to this day the first time I went to a candy store (sometime in the 1950s) when I could finally buy anything I wanted without producing the dreaded coupons that rationed out some tiny portion for so many years.

Growing up in that post-war environment in one of the many devastated European countries leaves a lasting mark on you. And in England, it wasn’t just that our industrial base was bombed or obsolete but that what was lost with it was an international role and standing that would never be recovered. After two world wars involving incalculable sacrifice, the post-war world was one of shortage and struggle, and the future looked dim.

Many families I knew, including my own, had missing members buried in distant graves somewhere at home or abroad. Lots of survivors had broken bodies and no jobs. Two generations of women who might have chosen to marry found themselves single after the slaughter of the two world wars, with no opportunity to have partners and families of their own. The physical damage, the bomb sites and the derelict factories also signaled the end of an earlier way of life, and large pockets of past grandeur remained to remind us of what had been, along with the glorious English countryside. Magnificent public buildings and parks, and marvelous museums, theaters and galleries preserved the great residue of English culture, for better or worse. …

David Harsanyi wants out of the drug war.

This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that our nation’s “insatiable” appetite for illegal drugs is in large part to blame for the violence in northern Mexico.

And it would, clearly, be poor form to single out violent Mexican drug cartels for the violence. It does, after all, take a village.

Clinton went on to say that over the past three decades, the drug war has failed to control demand and, with weapons smuggled from the United States, we are fueling Mexico’s drug wars and murder.

So what are we going to do about it? Continue the drug war, of course.

A war on drugs — in whatever form it is implemented — will never alleviate our “insatiable” appetite for illicit drugs, anyway. Appetite, or demand, is not affected by laws. Laws only affect the cost. And I don’t know how many times I cursed Nancy Reagan’s name for the outrageous price of Californian Skunk. …

Shut your lights off for an hour and save the world. Hardly says Bjorn Lomborg.

… It will take more than the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, population 152,000, to solve global warming. Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China’s emissions for six short seconds. In economic terms, the environmental and humanitarian benefits from the efforts of the entire developed world would add up to just $21,000.

The campaign doesn’t ask anybody to do anything difficult, such as coping without heating, airconditioning, telephones, the internet, hot food or cold drinks. Conceivably, if you or I sat in our houses watching television, with the heater and computer running, we could claim we’re part of an answer to global warming, so long as the lights are switched off. The symbolism is almost perverse. …

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James Kirchick thinks critics need to give Israel the same pass they give to Muslim leaders.

With Benjamin Netanyahu set to become Israel‘s prime minister, critics around the world are proclaiming the death of the peace process. And the fact that Avigdor Lieberman – who has called for all Israeli citizens (not just Arabs) to swear a loyalty oath and supports population transfers with the Palestinians – may become Israel’s foreign minister has only exacerbated the fervor of these predictions.

In this analysis, it is the incoming conservative government of Israel which poses a threat to regional stability, not Palestinian rejectionism or the machinations of Iran and Syria and their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. The height of this thinking was apparent at Tuesday night’s White House press conference, when Agence France-Presse reporter Stefan Collison asked President Obama, “How realistic do you think those hopes [for Middle East peace] are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?”

When was the last time a journalist asked the leader of a democratic country whether Muslim states’ not being “fully signed up” to the existence of Israel and having ministers in its employ who “insult” Jews threatened Middle East peace? …

Roger Simon posts on the anti-Semitic cartoon in the Washington Post.

… this whole state of affairs makes me very sad indeed, because reasoning with, even getting through to, the Oliphant’s of the world – reminding them that it was the Israelis who voluntarily left Gaza only to have their towns bombarded month after month, that Gaza is ruled by a regime of religious fanatics who are pathologically misogynistic and homophobic and believe the entire globe should be Islamic, etc., etc. – is hopeless. Oliphant and company are unreachable, permanently reified. It is all depressing beyond words.

David Brooks thinks we can win in Afghanistan.

… the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.

In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.

That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war. …

Robert Kagan likes Obama’s Afghan moves too.

Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan. With many of his supporters, and some of his own advisers, calling either for a rapid exit or a “minimal” counterterrorist strategy in Afghanistan, the president announced today that he will instead expand and deepen the American commitment. He clearly believes that an effective counterterrorism approach requires an effective counterinsurgency strategy, aimed not only at killing bad guys but at strengthening Afghan civil society …

WSJ Editors likewise. Now we will see if Obama has the courage of George W. Bush.

President Obama unveiled his strategy for the war in Afghanistan yesterday, and there is much to like in it. Our main question — and, we suspect, the world’s — is whether the new Commander in Chief is really prepared to devote the resources and political capital that his plan will need to succeed. …

… Mr. Obama’s strategy takes some important steps. The most significant is to reclaim the battle from NATO, which never really wanted the job. The U.S. will create a new command in Southern Afghanistan, where U.S. and Afghan troops will apply the lessons of Iraq. The irony here is that Mr. Obama is asserting U.S. primacy from the failing “multilateralism” of the Bush Administration, which made the mistake of assuming Europeans really believed in the fight. In the end, as usual, the 60,000 or so Yanks will have to do the bloodiest fighting and the Germans can man the supply lines out of harm’s way. …

And Abe Greenwald and Peter Wehner are pleased with Obama’s Afghan moves.

The Brit blog Samizdata provides a transcript and links to MEP Daniel Hannan’s rip of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. …

… You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.

They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.

Mark Steyn says soon there will be no escape from Mega-Gov as Tim Geithner tries for global reach.

… “We can’t,” he continued, “allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints.”

Just as a matter of interest, why not? If you don’t want to be subject to the punitive “oversight” of economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barney Frank, why shouldn’t you be “allowed” to move your business to some jurisdiction with a lighter regulatory touch?

Borders give you choices. Your town has a crummy grade school? Move 10 miles north, and there’s a better one. Sick of Massachusetts taxes? Move to New Hampshire, as thousands do. To modify the abortionists’ bumper sticker: “I’m Pro-Choice And I Vote With My Feet.” That’s part of the self-correcting dynamism of capitalism: For example, Bono, the global do-gooder who was last in Washington to play at the Obama inauguration, recently moved much of his business from Ireland to the Netherlands, in order to pay less tax. And good for him. To be sure, he’s always calling on governments to give more money to Africa and whatnot, but it’s heartening to know that, when it comes to his wallet as opposed to yours, Bono, like Secretary Geithner, has no desire to toss any more of his money into the great sucking maw of the government treasury than the absolute minimum he can get away with. I’m with Bono and Tim: They can spend their money more effectively than hack bureaucrats can. We should do as they do, not as they say.

If you listen to the principal spokesmen for U.S. economic policy – Obama and Geithner – they grow daily ever more explicitly hostile to the private sector and ever more comfortable with the language of micromanaged government-approved capitalism – which, of course, isn’t capitalism at all. They’ll have an easier time getting away with it in a world of “global oversight” where there’s nowhere to move to. ..

David Harsanyi wants to know if the government bailouts will ever end.

“Most men die of their remedies and not of their diseases,” a smart-alecky Frenchman once observed. At this point many Americans might be pondering a similar thought: What’s worse — the recession or the prescription?

It began with the federal government rescuing financial institutions because they were, allegedly, too big to fail. Somewhere along the line treating this ailment included cajoling perfectly healthy financial institutions into accepting taxpayer medicine (some of those have returned the TARP funds) for the common good. …

John Stossel wants the government to drop the drug war.

Corner post on a premature explosion in jihadi land. Good start to the humor section.

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Mark Steyn wants to know why more and more people depend on government, rather than themselves.

In his not–quite–State of the Union address the other week, President Obama said the following: “I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina — a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says, ‘We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters.’ That’s what she said. ‘We are not quitters.’”

There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (i.e., record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American exceptionalism.

I think not. “We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen . . .” The doctors are on track to becoming yet another group of state employees; the lawyers sue the doctors for medical malpractice and, when they’ve made enough dough, like John Edwards, they get elected to Congress. Is there no one in Miss Bethea’s school who’d like to be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a salesman, a generator of wealth? Someone’s got to make the dough Obama’s already spent. …

And Karl Rove says Obama is pointing out the future of the GOP. Of course, the last time they had this chance they let folks like Trent Lott and Tom Delay throw it away.

Something powerful is stirring in the land, and it may not be good news for President Barack Obama, his agenda or the Democratic Party. Mr. Obama said Tuesday night his budget moves America “from an era of borrow and spend” to “save and invest.” But people are realizing he would add $9.3 trillion to the national debt, doubling it in six years and nearly tripling it in 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). How can that be “save and invest”?

In his inaugural address, Mr. Obama told us, “The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” He wants to turn to new issues of education, health care and green jobs, which he plugged at every opportunity in Tuesday’s press conference.

Suddenly, though, it doesn’t seem like a time of new politics and new concerns. Many Americans are anxious — and in some cases angry — about a set of old issues: deficits, taxes and the national debt. …

Jennifer Rubin says we should take note of yesterday’s auction for Treasury notes.

Jennifer also posts on next Tuesday’s vote for a seat in Congress.

This interesting piece on the NY-20 race reveals that the president and the DNC are not going all out — an odd development for a race that has gotten a lot of press and will be seen as an early indicator as to how the president’s personal popularity manifests itself in congressional races. The report notes:

While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent more than $373,000 on the race through Monday, according to Federal Election Commission records, Obama waited until Wednesday morning to endorse Democrat Scott Murphy and still hasn’t cut a TV ad touting the candidate — despite the fact that the election is less than a week away. . .

National Review piece reminds us not to overlook George W’s accomplishments in India/U.S. relations.

Shortly before George W. Bush left office, Harvard historian Sugata Bose told me that strengthening U.S. relations with India “may turn out to be the most significant foreign-policy achievement of the Bush administration.” It is an achievement that Indians greatly appreciate: In mid-February, a spokesman for the ruling Congress party said that Bush deserves India’s top civilian award, the Bharat Ratna (“Jewel of India”), an honor rarely conferred on non-Indians.

“The people of India deeply love you,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Bush last September. In the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey, India was one of only three countries out of 24 in which a majority of respondents expressed “a lot” or “some” confidence in Bush to “do the right thing regarding foreign affairs.” (The others were Tanzania and Nigeria.)

Unfortunately, Indian officials have notably less confidence in Barack Obama than they had in Bush. And so far, Obama has done little to assuage their worries. “There’s no question that the Indians are uncertain about this administration,” says a Democratic Senate aide who works on foreign-policy issues. “They had such a good relationship with Bush, and [Obama] ran as the anti-Bush.” Since Obama’s election, an accumulation of perceived slights — some more trivial than others — has intensified New Delhi’s anxiety and fostered an atmosphere of “deteriorating trust.” …

Anne Applebaum says when it comes to relations with Russia, we need a little more than a reset button.

… It would be nice, of course, if U.S.-Russia relations really had been frozen as a result of irrelevant technical complications and could begin afresh. Unfortunately, while America may have a new president, Russia does not. And while America may want to make the past vanish — as a nation, we’ve never been all that keen on foreigners’ histories — alas, the past cannot be changed. The profound differences in psychology, philosophy and policy that have been the central source of friction between the American and Russian governments for the past decade remain very much in place. Sooner or later, the Obama administration will have to grapple with them. …

Thomas Sowell writes on the degradation of our politics evidenced by Barney Frank.

Death threats to executives at AIG, because of the bonuses they received, are one more sign of the utter degeneration of politics in our time.

Congressman Barney Frank has threatened to summon these executives before his committee and force them to reveal their home addresses— which would of course put their wives and children at the mercy of whatever kooks might want to literally take a shot at them.

Whatever the political or economic issues involved, this is not the way such issues should be resolved in America. We are not yet a banana republic, though that is the direction in which some of our politicians are taking us— especially those politicians who make a lot of noise about “compassion” and “social justice.”

What makes this all the more painfully ironic is that it is precisely those members of Congress who have had the most to do with creating the risks that led to the current economic crisis who are making the most noise against others, and summoning people before their committee to be browbeaten and humiliated on nationwide television. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on what we would miss should the government take over health care.

The administration is insistent on pursuing health-care “reform” this year. But before we go uprooting what’s in place perhaps we should take note of what we have. Scott Atlas, M.D. a Hoover Institute fellow, puts out ten helpful facts here. Each is worth reading and references some rather stunning statistics, but the summary is as follows:

Fact No. 1:  Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.
Fact No. 2:  Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. …

One of India’s leading IT entreprenuers writes on the country’s changes.

NANDAN NILEKANI, the co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s biggest IT firms, is a corporate icon in his homeland. But to many readers outside the country he is best known for a stray comment he made to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in February 2004. His remark (“Tom, the playing field is being levelled”) inspired the title and thesis of Mr Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, a big-think book about offshoring and globalisation that sold millions. The publishers of “Imagining India”, Mr Nilekani’s admirable first book, must hope that many of those readers will be eager to hear the Indian side of the story, straight from the source.

Not to disappoint them, Mr Nilekani provides a chapter on globalisation and two on information technology. But “Imagining India” is a very different book from Mr Friedman’s bestseller. Mr Nilekani, an intellectual trapped in an entrepreneur’s body, seeks to understand India through the “ebb and flow of its ideas” and debates. …

Scott Ott of Scrappleface was in the Washington Examiner with the news Geithner has taken his junk assets on the road as “Legacy Assets Roadshow.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner today announced a public-public partnership with PBS to produce and host a program tentatively dubbed ‘Legacy Assets Roadshow’, with a format reminiscent of the network’s popular ‘Antiques Roadshow.’

Part adventure, part history lesson, and part treasure hunt, the Legacy Assets Roadshow hopes to “tap the viewer’s ongoing curiosity about whether that dusty old thing that looks virtually worthless might turn out to be a precious keepsake worth big bucks.”

Geithner plans to travel to locations around the nation inviting bankers and other financial firm executives to bring in mortgages, mortgaged-backed securities and other items formerly known as “troubled or toxic” but now called “legacy” assets. At the mobile “Roadshow” studio,  Geithner and a panel of leading financial experts will offer their appraisals of the debt instruments. …

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Stuart Taylor says Card-check will deny employees free choice.

I don’t know whether it would be good for employees, or for the country, if millions more were unionized, as will eventually occur if Congress passes the Obama-backed Employee Free Choice Act, now the subject of a titanic lobbying battle focused on a handful of moderate senators.

I am pretty sure that it has become unduly hard for workers to embrace collective bargaining if they choose, in part because the penalties for employers who fire and intimidate pro-union employees and stall unionization elections are too weak to deter such misconduct.

But I am very sure that the radical changes that the proposed law would make in long-established labor laws are overkill. The most publicized “card-check” provision would essentially end use of the secret-ballot elections that have been required (at the option of employers) for more than 60 years to determine whether a majority of employees want to unionize their workplaces. Even more alarming to some employers is another provision that would empower government arbitrators to dictate contractual terms when unions and management cannot agree.

These measures are not necessary to remedy the employer abuses of which unions complain. They would probably be bad for employees and employers alike, and they might kill countless jobs at a time when unemployment is already soaring. …

Washington spends more and more on education. National Review says most is wasted.

In his first address to Congress, President Obama called it every American’s patriotic duty to enroll in post-secondary education, repeating the thesis, long discredited by careful research, that maximizing university attendance creates large economic benefits. “That,” the president said, “is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

While challenging young people to achieve their potential is praiseworthy, the president is mistaken on two important points. First, the goal of leading the world in college graduation is neither achievable (because of our demographics) nor particularly worthwhile. Far greater economic and social benefits would accrue from boosting high-school graduation and encouraging hands-on vocational and technical training. Second, spending tens of billions of additional federal dollars on grants, loans, and tax credits is unlikely to boost college graduation much anyway — though it may well boost attendance, and thus revenue for the colleges.

The Obama administration is certainly committed to the spending part. …

… Much of this agenda is deeply misguided. Unfortunately, much of it is also popular. Millions of Americans are either saddled with big student debts, struggling to pay tuition for current college students, or worried that they won’t be able to afford the tuition when their younger children grow up. Many will welcome another political promise that help is on the way — but when universities raise their prices again to capture most of the new federal aid, these voters won’t know to blame Obama and the Democratic Congress. …

We have a piece from Forbes Magazine about the collapse of Harvard’s endowment. What is surreal about this, is they are months away from knowing what the endowment has really lost. That is some serious sophistication; financial instruments that cannot be priced.

Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school year began, but at Harvard University it was as if the boom had never ended. Workers were digging across the river from Harvard’s Cambridge, Mass. home, the start of a grand expansion that was to eventually almost double the size of the university. Budgets were plump, and students from middle-class families were getting big tuition breaks under an ambitious new financial aid program. The lavish spending was made possible by the earnings from Harvard’s $36.9 billion endowment, the world’s largest. That pot was supposed to be good for $1.4 billion in annual earnings.

Behind the scenes, though, a different story was unfolding. In a glassed-walled conference room overlooking downtown Boston, traders at Harvard Management Co., the subsidiary that invests the school’s money, were fielding questions from their new boss, Jane Mendillo, about exotic financial instruments that were suddenly backfiring. Harvard had derivatives that gave it exposure to $7.2 billion in commodities and foreign stocks. With prices of both crashing, the university was getting margin calls–demands from counterparties (among them, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) for more collateral. Another bunch of derivatives burdened Harvard with a multibillion-dollar bet on interest rates that went against it.

It would have been nice to have cash on hand to meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none. That was because these supremely self-confident money managers were more than fully invested. As of June 30 they had, thanks to the fancy derivatives, a 105% long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy more stocks.

Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep parked away for a long time. It tried to sell off illiquid stakes in private equity partnerships but couldn’t get a decent price. It unloaded two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio into a falling market. And now, in the last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money, much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off credit card bills. …

Speaking of ephemeral assets, Hernando De Soto has some suggestions how we can prevent creation of toxic assets next time.

The Obama administration has finally come up with a plan to deal with the real cause of the credit crunch: the infamous “toxic assets” on bank balance sheets that have scared off investors and borrowers, clogging credit markets around the world. But if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hopes to prevent a repeat of this global economic crisis, his rescue plan must recognize that the real problem is not the bad loans, but the debasement of the paper they are printed on.

Today’s global crisis — a loss on paper of more than $50 trillion in stocks, real estate, commodities and operational earnings within 15 months — cannot be explained only by the default on a meager 7% of subprime mortgages (worth probably no more than $1 trillion) that triggered it. The real villain is the lack of trust in the paper on which they — and all other assets — are printed. If we don’t restore trust in paper, the next default — on credit cards or student loans — will trigger another collapse in paper and bring the world economy to its knees.

If you think about it, everything of value we own travels on property paper. At the beginning of the decade there was about $100 trillion worth of property paper representing tangible goods such as land, buildings, and patents world-wide, and some $170 trillion representing ownership over such semiliquid assets as mortgages, stocks and bonds. Since then, however, aggressive financiers have manufactured what the Bank for International Settlements estimates to be $1 quadrillion worth of new derivatives (mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps) that have flooded the market.

These derivatives are the root of the credit crunch. Why? Unlike all other property paper, derivatives are not required by law to be recorded, continually tracked and tied to the assets they represent. Nobody knows precisely how many there are, where they are, and who is finally accountable for them. …

In the trench war of the American Episcopal Church, Fred Barnes is a foot soldier. He reflects on it for the WSJ.

In 2007, my wife Barbara and I left The Falls Church, which we had happily attended from the time we became Christians a quarter-century ago. It’s a 277-year-old church in northern Virginia well-known for its popular preacher, the Rev. John Yates, its adherence to traditional biblical teachings and its withdrawal in 2005 from the national Episcopal church. Our three grown daughters and their families stayed behind at The Falls Church.

We didn’t leave in anger. We didn’t have political or theological anxieties. Rather, we left for a new church because our old church wanted us to. The Falls Church has become entrepreneurial as well as evangelical. It’s in the church-planting business. And we were encouraged by Mr. Yates to join Christ the King, the church “planted” near our home in Alexandria. We were a bit ambivalent about the move, but when Christ the King opened its doors in September 2007, we were there. ..

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Abe Greenwald has an interesting post on the Iraq problems Obama doesn’t have.

Imagine for a moment that you are George W. Bush. You switch on 60 Minutes last night and there is Barack Obama telling Steve Kroft, “Sometime my team talks about the fact that if you had said to us a year ago that the least of my problems would be Iraq . . .”

Which brought to mind Bret Stephens WSJ piece on the strategic importance of a democratic Iraq.

Imagine yourself as Barack Obama, gazing at a map of the greater Middle East and wondering how, and where, the United States can best make a fresh start in the region.

Your gaze wanders rightward to Pakistan, where preventing war with India, economic collapse or the Talibanization of half the country would be achievement enough. Next door is Afghanistan, where you are committing more troops, all so you can prop up a government that is by turns hapless and corrupt.

Next there is Iran, drawing ever closer to its bomb. You’re mulling the shape of a grand bargain, but Israel is talking pre-emption. Speaking of Israel, you’re girding for a contentious relationship with the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, the all-but certain next prime minister.

What about Israel’s neighbors? Palestine is riven between feckless moderates and pitiless fanatics. Lebanon and Hezbollah are nearly synonyms. You’d love to nudge Syria out of Iran’s orbit, but Bashar Assad isn’t inclined. In Egypt, a succession crisis looms the moment its octogenarian president retires to his grave.

And then there is Iraq, the country in the middle that you would have just as soon banished from sight. How’s it doing? Perplexingly well. …

Yesterday’s market increase has been attributed to the latest bail-out plan. Pickerhead thinks much of the euphoria comes from the increasing realization Obama’s budget is dead on arrival because a number of centrist Dem senators have announced reservations. In addition, this was the weekend when the NY Times had seen enough of the kid president. Peter Wehner has the story.

The New York Times carries a good deal more weight in Obamaland than it did within the Bush Administration. (It was a Times editorial that convinced Senator Daschle to withdraw his nomination as HHS Secretary, for example.) And so, as Politico.com pointed out, yesterday could not have been a good day for President Obama and his aides, particularly given the fawning coverage and commentary reserved for Obama in the past. …

Joe Nocera’s article in Saturday’s NY Times has received a lot of attention. Mark Steyn is first with his comments. Also from the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford.  Jennifer Rubin too.

Even the New York Times has figured it out. Well, at least one columnist. Joe Nocera writes:

By week’s end, I was more depressed about the financial crisis than I’ve been since last September. Back then, the issue was the disintegration of the financial system, as the Lehman bankruptcy set off a terrible chain reaction. Now I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse. The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news. …

Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn post on the White House Whiner.

We hear a lot about narcissists these days. Pickerhead is guilty of using the word as a substitute for Bubba (aka Bill Clinton). Slate has a scientific piece on the subject.

The narcissists did it. Some commentators are fingering them as the culprits of the financial meltdown. A Bloomberg columnist blamed the conceited for our financial troubles in a piece titled “Harvard Narcissists With MBAs Killed Wall Street.” A Wall Street Journal op-ed on California’s economy suggested that Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desire for voter’s love (“It’s classic narcissism”) helped cause the state’s budget debacle. A forthcoming book, The Narcissism Epidemic, says we went on a national binge of I-deserve-it consumption that’s now resulting in our economic purging.

This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. In a New Yorker cartoon, Roz Chast suggests a line of narcissist greeting cards (“Wow! Your Birthday’s Really Close to Mine!”). John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.) New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley wrote of journalists who Twitter, “it’s beginning to look more like yet another gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism.” And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom? …

… Those involved with someone with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) frequently say they feel as if they are interacting with a kindergartener. In some way they are. According to a study in the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatments, narcissists are stuck with the emotional development of 5-year-olds. It’s about at age 5 that children start realizing their feelings are not just the result of other people or events but occur within themselves, and that they have control over them. But this understanding does not take place for the narcissist, who continues to see all internal states as having an external cause. Because of narcissists’ inability to control their own emotions, they unconsciously experience the world as constantly threatening—thus the tendency toward inexplicable rages, the wild overreactions to the slightest perception of criticism. …

Speaking of narcissists, Newser’s - Off the Grid posts on the Leno appearance.

Sheesh, this guy’s so Jimmy Carter. …

… It’s instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit.

What happens when you move into the White House?

Well, shit, of course. The true secret of the power of language is in quickness. Barack Obama can’t keep up. He evidently needs too much preparation. …

Couple of items today on the Kindle. First Roger Simon.

As some may recall, I bought Sheryl a Kindle for her birthday this year, just before the new version came out (typical of me). So to make it up to her – and so I could have one for myself – we purchased a Kindle II for Sheryl and I took over her Kindle I, reregistering it in my name. The new one arrived the other day and it’s obvious the Kindle 2 is better, especially in the important area of page advancement. Nevertheless, I have been ploughing through Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man on my Kindle I and am already a convert. (I know – beware the convert, but read on.)

Reasons? Let’s start with that other important area: book-shelving. It’s almost a given that every time you either buy, or have built, new bookshelves, they are not enough. …

Then Jacob Weisberg at Slate.

I’m doing my best not to become a Kindle bore. When I catch myself evangelizing to someone who couldn’t care less about the marvels of the 2.0 version of Amazon’s reading machine—I can take a whole library on vacation! Adjust the type size! Peruse the morning paper without getting out of bed!—I pause and remember my boyhood friend Scott H., who loved showing off the capabilities of his state of-the-art stereo but had only four records because he wasn’t really that into music.

So apologies in advance if I’m irksomely enthusiastic about my cool new literature delivery system. …

Club for Growth has a good post on U-Haul Economics.

A long time ago, I blogged about how U-Haul reservation rates can help identify which states people are leaving from and which states they are flocking towards. Today, I used Dallas as an anchor in the following examples. It’s a large city in the very low-tax, business-friendly state of Texas. I then picked large cities from high-tax, business-hostile states. …

Borowitz reports Bernie Madoff will help sell the toxic assets.

News Biscuit says Wildebeests are tired of being portrayed as victims.

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The Guardian, UK gives us a view inside Moscow. There is a picture below of a woman begging on the street outside of GUM, the indoor mall on Red Square. It reminds Pickerhead of similar scenes when he travelled there in the early 90′s. Then it was on Gorky Street, just up from the Kremlin, where bent old women offered things for sale. They stood in the lee of buildings stamping their feet, snow collecting on their clothes, while they offered pathetic things like a fork or a bar of soap. Meanwhile over on Arbat Street, young Russians attracted by the scent of hard currency, proclaimed themselves “businessmean” in an eerie prophesy of what was in store for Russia.

… Russia‘s dependency on oil is pushing the country’s economy into a tailspin. Oil peaked at $147 a barrel in July but has since plunged as low as $35 a barrel. As a result of the plummeting oil price and the global financial crisis, gross domestic product shrank by 8.8% in the 12 months to January, the rouble has lost one-third of its value since September and unemployment is expected to rise to 10 million by the end of the year. The Kremlin has spent more than $200bn of its reserves to cushion the devaluation of the rouble and avoid public panic.

Neil Shearing, emerging Europe economist at consultants Capital Economics, believes the situation is going to get much worse. “The news from Russia has gone from bad to worse in recent weeks. The economy looks likely to contract by 5% this year, which would be close to the drop in output witnessed during the 1998 rouble crisis,” he said, referring to the year when the government defaulted on its debts, sending shockwaves through the global financial system. “In contrast to the 1998 crisis, a weak external environment makes a sharp bounceback in growth unlikely.”

“The situation is worse than at the beginning of the 1990s,” said Ilya Roytman, president of IBR Consulting in Moscow, which helps companies such as Nestlé set up shop in Russia. “Before it was just in Russia. Around Russia there was a stable economic climate which helped us. But now there is a global economic crisis and because many governments have protectionist values it will not be possible to borrow resources.” …

The London Sunday Telegraph’s DC correspondent writes on Obama’s troubles. It is surprising to see the press turn on him so quickly. Most of the home team media has too much invested in him to start so soon, but the Brit press, especially after the gift gaffe, is pouring it on.

Barack Obama’s gaffe mocking the disabled by comparing his (inept but improving) 10 pin bowling skills to the “special Olympics” illustrates the problem he now has in communicating with the American people.

Obama seems incapable of balancing the need to be a national leader and his childish desire to retain his image as the uber cool dude he so clearly believes that he is.

The fact that he felt the need to go on Jay Leno at all to sell his stimulus plan, budget and banking bailouts shows that he has communications issues. The public are not buying his spending splurge, or his administration’s confused attempt to kill off executive bonuses.

Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at Politico wrote a characteristically insightful piece on Thursday that began: “Of all the pitfalls Barack Obama might face in the presidency, here is one not many people predicted: He is struggling as a public communicator.” …

Richard Epstein writes on the problems caused by powerful public sector unions.

Each new day brings further evidence of a financial breakdown that stems in large measure from the inability of the federal and state governments to live within their means. Unfortunately, the endless attention focused on the ongoing Congressional spending orgy shields from scrutiny the intolerable budgetary pressures that face many of our states, most notably California and New York, which risk entering into bankruptcy on the installment plan.

Much of their distress is attributable to the rich labor contracts routinely extended to public employees as an ostensible quid pro quo for their giving up the right to strike. But the collective bargaining negotiations mandated under state law are always an unfair match. The state, county and local government officials don’t face the certain wrath of shareholders. Rather, they operate in uncertain political waters that allow them to escape voter wrath by granting public employees highly favorable, but less visible, pension packages that become payable only down the road. …

Forbes gives us some examples of the pensions that will bring state and local governments to their knees.

Don’t let anyone tell you the American dream has faded. the truth is the U.S. is still minting lots of millionaires. Glenn Goss is one of them.

Goss retired four years ago, at 42, from a $90,000 job as a police commander in Delray Beach, Fla. He immediately began drawing a $65,000 annual pension that is guaranteed for life, is indexed to keep up with inflation and comes with full health benefits.

Goss promptly took a new job as police chief in nearby Highland Beach. One big lure: the benefits.

Given that the average man his age will live to 78, Goss is already worth nearly $2 million, based on the present value of his vested retirement benefits. Looked at another way, he is a $2 million liability to Florida taxpayers.

“When I got the job at 21, I knew it was a dangerous profession but that I’d be rewarded on the back end,” says Goss. Even so, he adds, “The benefits back then weren’t anywhere near what they’ve become today.”

The problem with this picture is not Glenn Goss. By all accounts he was a good cop. The problem is that there are millions of Glenn Gosses from Highland Beach to Honolulu. So many that they pose a vast, debilitating burden to state and local finances. …

The Economist reports on advances in LED lighting.

“INCANDESCENT” might well describe the rage of those who prefer traditional light bulbs to their low-energy alternatives. This week, the European Commission formally adopted new regulations that will phase such bulbs out in Europe by 2012. America will do so by 2014. Some countries, such as Australia, Brazil and Switzerland, have got rid of them already. When a voluntary agreement came into force in Britain, at the start of the year, people rushed out to buy the last 100-watt light bulbs. Next to go are lower-wattage bulbs.

But what will replace the light bulb? Although obtaining illumination by incandescence (ie, heating something up) goes back to prehistory, it was not until 1879 that Thomas Edison demonstrated a practical example that used a wire filament encased in glass. Modern bulbs, the descendants of that demonstration, are cheap (around 50 cents) but inefficient, because only about 5% of the energy they use is turned into light and the rest is wasted as heat. A typical bulb also has to be replaced every 1,000 hours or so.

Without changing light fittings, the cheapest direct replacement for an incandescent bulb at the moment is a compact fluorescent light (CFL). These use up to 75% less power and last ten times longer, but they cost around $3 each. That price puts some people off, which explains part of the hoarding of incandescent bulbs. But others object not to the price but to the quality of the light, which has a different spectrum from the one they are used to. …

… The most promising alternatives are light-emitting diodes (LEDs). …

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David Warren writes on the first 60 days.

… we would be wrong to think of Mr. Obama as an ideologue. I think he was perfectly sincere in denying that he was anything of the sort, and in claiming that he would be looking for bipartisan consensus. I also think he is sincere in proceeding with an agenda — on bail-outs, the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, etc. — that leaves most Republicans, and quite a few of the more conservative Democrats, utterly aghast.

How to explain this apparent contradiction? I’m afraid it is easy. As I mentioned during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.

All his life, from childhood through university through “community organizing” and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.

He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as “avant-garde.” His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, “Middle America” is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today. …

Taking a cue from a Yuval Levin Corner post today we will examine the recent Fed move.

Yesterday’s announcement from the Federal Reserve should be getting a lot more attention than it has amidst the AIG circus. …

Levin linked to a series of items. Larry Kudlow is first.

… The Obama budget raises tax rates on investors and businesses, and supports a cap-and-trade tax, universal health care, and various regulations for unionization. Meanwhile, a spate of trade protectionism is breaking out with Mexico and China. All of these are anti-growth policies. And now the Fed is ramping up its monetary pump-priming. So the obvious risk is too much money chasing too few goods producing a stagflationary recovery.

The dollar is out the window. Monetizing debt is back in style.

I go back to Art Laffer’s four prosperity killers: inflation, higher tax rates, re-regulation, and trade protectionism. You can put a check mark next to each box. …

And from Contentions, Francis Cianfrocca.

The Federal Reserve announced a momentous shift in policy yesterday. Its import was easy to miss because, as always with the Fed, it was written in a jargon only superficially resembling English. But its intention is to take actions that will deeply shift the policy landscape, probably to a much greater extent than Congress’s various stimulus plans.

The Fed announced an American version of what has been called “quantitative easing,” or QE. The Japanese have done this before, and the British got into it a few weeks ago. You can think of it, with no loss of accuracy, as inflation. …

Jack McHugh from The Big Picture.

… After months of threats, the Fed finally pushed the monetization button. Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and the rest of the FOMC decided today to embark upon the one strategy central bankers have always considered the dreaded last option — Quantitative Easing. It’s one thing for the Fed to push the “Easy” button and lower rates or temporarily inject reserves into the banking system, but to push the “QE” button (creating currency out of thin air with which to purchase assets) is an action reserved for only the direst of circumstances. If such a device truly existed in the Board room of the Eccles building (Fed hdqrters), it would be a red button under glass with a “Press Only in Case of Emergency” warning stenciled underneath. That market participants responded to this monetary jolt by buying stocks, bonds, and precious metals while thumping the dollar is not a surprise. How investors react over the longer term to these actions and the inevitable unintended consequences will be far less easy to predict. …

Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution.

… The more the Fed takes on its balance sheet, the more the long-run independence of the central bank is damaged.  Monetizing so much government debt is what Third World nations do.  Draining the new money from the system will someday be a problem. …

WSJ Editors also express concerns about Federal Reserve independence with “Secretary of the Fed.”

In case there was any residual doubt, the Bernanke Fed threw itself all in this week to unlock financial markets and spur the economy. With its announced plan to make a mammoth purchase of Treasury securities, the Fed essentially said that the considerable risks of future inflation and permanent damage to the Fed’s political independence are details that can be put off, or cleaned up, at a later date. Whatever else people will say about his chairmanship, Ben Bernanke does not want deflation or Depression on his resume.

It’s important to understand the historic nature of what the Fed is doing. In buying $300 billion worth of long-end Treasurys, it is directly monetizing U.S. government debt. This is what the Federal Reserve did during World War II to finance U.S. government borrowing, before the Fed broke the pattern in a very public spat with the Truman Administration during the Korean War. Now the Bernanke Fed is once again making itself a debt agent of the Treasury, using its balance sheet to finance Congressional spending. …

IBD editors close it out.

… As for those who argue a major cash infusion is desperately needed to end our “credit crunch,” we’d only note that credit, while tight, isn’t close to being in a crunch. Consumer and business loans are running 7.7% ahead of last year, and total commercial bank lending is up about 4.8%.

In short, money is being lent, and the economy is perking up even without benefit of a federal bailout effort that could add $9 trillion or more to our national debt over the next decade.

It may be that Bernanke, a good economist, is tired of waiting for Congress and the White House to do what needs to be done and is moving to do what he can. If so, we applaud his courage and leadership. We just hope we’ll be able to applaud the results.

We broke our AIG bonus vow of silence for David Harsanyi last week. We do it again for Mark Steyn.

Are you outraged by these AIG bonuses?

No, no. For Pete’s sake, you’re an A-list congressional big shot. Try to get a bit of feeling into “outraged.” The president’s teleprompter puts it in italics, bold, capitalized and underlined: OUTRAGED !

That’s better. Don’t forget to furrow your brow and fume. No, not like a camp waiter when you send back the arugula salad drizzled in an aubergine coulis. We’re looking for primal, righteous anger: You’re outraged, OUTRAGED  that bonuses are being handed out at companies the American taxpayer is bailing out. Yes, to be sure, the bonuses were specifically provided for in the legislation, but, like all busy senators and congressmen, you don’t have time to read every footling trillion-dollar bill before you vote in favor of it. And yes, true, the specific passage addressing these particular bonuses was, in fact, added to the bill in your name, but that was nothing to do with you – you just did that because the White House asked you to, and just because their people called your people and some intern in your office drafted some boilerplate with your name on it is no reason for you to be denied 10 minutes of grandstanding on MSNBC. It’s an outrage to suggest you’re anything other than outrageously outraged! …

And Charles Krauthammer starts with the bonuses and morphs to the omnibus spending bill.

… That bill, we now discover, contains, among other depth charges, a Teamster-supported provision inserted by Sen. Byron Dorgan that terminates a Bush-era demonstration project to allow some Mexican trucks onto American highways, as required under NAFTA.

If you thought the AIG hysteria was a display of populist cynicism directed at a relative triviality, consider this: There are more than 6.5 million trucks in the United States. The program Congress terminated allowed 97 Mexican trucks to roam among them. Ninety-seven! Shutting them out not only undermines NAFTA. It caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade coming out of 40 states.

The very last thing we need now is American protectionism. It is guaranteed to start a world trade war. A deeply wounded world economy needs two things to recover: (1) vigorous U.S. government action to loosen credit by detoxifying the zombie banks and insolvent insurers, and (2) avoidance of a trade war.

Free trade is the one area where the world indisputably turns to Washington for leadership. What does it see? Grandstanding, parochialism, petty payoffs to truckers and a rush to mindless populism. Over what? Over 97 Mexican trucks — and bonus money that comes to what the Yankees are paying for CC Sabathia’s left arm.

Speaking of trade wars, Club for Growth lists some of the tariffs newly applied by Mexico.

David Harsanyi, upon learning GW Bush signed a book deal, had this to say.

When news broke this week that former President George W. Bush planned to pen a book exploring the tough decisions of his presidency, my initial thought was: Who cares?

But then I remembered that this kind of assault on our intelligence never ends. And it is not confined to a political party or ideology, and no creed, race or religion is immune from the generic dullness of books authored by politicians. ..

… The most obnoxious of all these books, though, have to be the ones where elected officials give you advice about the real world. A perfect example of this is Nancy Pelosi’s most recent offering: “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters.” The only thing this book taught me is that men are all-powerful chauvinist pigs who spend their time trying to impede the progress of women — well, except women who are third in line for the presidency, I guess.

Then again, the less consequential your political career, the more books you get to write. Jimmy Carter is the author of dozens of books. …

Borowitz reports Cheney will write W’s book.

… A spokesman for Dick Cheney said that he would finish writing the memoir in 2009 and would finish redacting it in 2010.

Mark Steyn Corner posts.

More from the blog of Barack’s teleprompter.

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John Stossel starts us off with a good news piece. He contrasts Barbara Ehrenreich’s downer of a book Nickel and Dimed with Adam Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings which was first reviewed in Pickings April 3, 2008.

… “I read ‘Nickel and Dimed,’” Adam Shepard told me. He was assigned her book in college and decided to test Ehrenreich’s claim.

He picked a city out of a hat, Charleston, S.C., and showed up there with $25. He didn’t tell anyone about his college degree. He soon got an $8/hour job working for a moving company. He kept at it. Within a year, he told me, “I have got $5,500 and a car. I have got a furnished apartment.”

Adam writes about his search for the American Dream in “Scratch Beginnings“. It’s a very different book from “Nickel and Dimed.”

“If you want to fail, go for it, ” he said. …

For some more good news, we go to a Peter Wehner Contentions post on the war in Iraq.

… Iraq ceased to be a popular war long ago. But the American military continued to do its duty, with tremendous valor and skill. So, in fact, did many brave Iraqis. This journey has been longer and harder than we had hoped, and the future of Iraq remains uncertain. But it is light years more hopeful than before. Iraqis now have a peaceful, self-governing nation, if they can keep it. And despite the cost, one can now argue that American interests will have been served in a war that critics once called the worst foreign policy mistake in our history. Thankfully, blessedly, they were as wrong as wrong can be.

More good news comes from a Forbes column by Bjørn Lomborg making the case for free trade. It is good news to have Lomborg’s clear thinking on areas other than the environment.

… Politicians can spend a fortune reducing temperatures ever so slightly within 100 years–or they could spend much less helping the world’s most vulnerable people today. The financial crisis makes it especially imperative that we get our priorities right. Trade reform should be right at the top of our list.

It is hard to ignore the AIG bonus blather. At least we have David Harsanyi making sense of it.

Here’s an idea: If you stop nationalizing banks, there will be no need to engage in phony-baloney indignation over bonus payments anymore.

This cockamamie populism in Washington really hit its stride when Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley suggested that AIG execs who earned bonuses should “follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”

C’mon. If suicide were a proper penalty for piddling away taxpayer dollars, the National Mall would look just like Jonestown after refreshments. …

Peter Wehner also comments on the piece by Charles Murray we featured yesterday. David Brooks has a column with a similar theme which is up next. Wehner contrasts the two.

… Murray seems to believe we are at a key historical moment, and perhaps a hinge point; Brooks less so. Charles believes government policies can profoundly damage what has made America rare, and even unique, throughout the centuries; David believes the habits we have acquired will snap back, as they have in the past. Both are extremely knowledgeable and well-informed men and clear, gifted writers. My hope is that Brooks is right; my fear is that Murray is; and my hunch is the reality is somewhere between the two. …

Here’s the piece by David Brooks.

Over the centuries, the United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy. Americans work longer hours than any other people. We switch jobs more frequently, move more often, earn more and consume more.

This energy was first aroused by abundance, by the tantalizing sense that dazzling wealth was available just over the next hill. But it has also been sustained by a popular culture that celebrates commercial ambition. From Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, through Horatio Alger and Norman Vincent Peale, up until Donald Trump and Jim Cramer, popular figures have always emerged to champion the American gospel of success, encouraging middle-class people to strive, risk and make money.

This gospel gets dented during each of the nation’s financial crises, but it always returns with a vengeance. …

And the Economist comments on Obama’s endless campaign.

IN 1980 Sidney Blumenthal published a book entitled “The Permanent Campaign”. One of the main reasons that Barack Obama beat Mr Blumenthal’s favoured candidate, Hillary Clinton, was because he promised a new kind of post-partisan politics, supposedly above all that continual warfare. Now that the election is over, however, he is proving to be just as keen on the “permanent campaign” as anybody else in politics. …

Jennifer Rubin has a few things to say.

David Brooks mentions almost in passing (perhaps it is best this way so as not to bring on another horde of presidential spinners):

Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway. This is an administration that has many lawyers and academics but almost no businesspeople in it, let alone self-made entrepreneurs. The president speaks passionately about education and health care reform, but he is strangely aloof from the banking crisis and displays no passion when speaking about commercial drive and success.

This strikes me as an very apt explanation for why the Obama team is so tone deaf and so ineffective in dealing with their main task: economic revival. Their tone veers from hysterical despondency to giddy optimism. They bash industries, threaten executives and then fail to exercise rudimentary oversight with the firms they have supported. Virtually nothing has been proposed to encourage private economic investment and hiring, but the proposals to burden business (e.g. card check, cap-and-trade, capital gains tax hikes, national health care) keep piling up. The president dismisses the stock market as a poll – and then offers stock advice.

All of this is frankly amateurish and unsteady, and belies an ignorance of, if not contempt for, how markets work and investors and businesses plan. …

Barack’s teleprompter has a blog. Here’s the first post.

… So why am I going public now, when for the past two years I’ve let others do the talking? Well, this is a thankless job, and I sure don’t want to take the fall for communications missteps. But more important, I expect you’ll be seeing a lot more of me over the next few months and years. Barack and I don’t go anywhere without each other; we even complete each other’s sentences … well, more mine than his, but let’s not split hairs. …

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The Mexican Ambassador writes on the problems when congress and the president let labor unions run the country. Pickerhead reminds readers it was labor unions that created apartheid in South Africa, and it was labor unions seeking to protect members from competition from southern blacks that created laws like Davis-Bacon here in the US.

Nobody can argue that Mexico hasn’t worked tirelessly for more than a decade to avoid a dispute with the United States over Mexican long-haul trucks traveling through this country. But free and fair trade hit another red light this past week. The U.S. Congress, which has now killed a modest and highly successful U.S.-Mexico trucking demonstration program, has sadly left my government no choice but to impose countermeasures after years of restraint and goodwill.

Then and now, this was never about the safety of American roads or drivers; it was and has been about protectionism, pure and simple. Back in 1995, the U.S. unilaterally blocked the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s cross-border trucking provisions, just as they were about to enter into force. In response, and after three years of constant engagement, Mexico had no alternative but to request the establishment of an arbitration panel as allowed under Nafta. A five-member panel, chaired by a Briton and including two U.S. citizens, ruled unanimously in February 2001 that Washington had violated the trucking provisions contained in Nafta, authorizing Mexico to adopt retaliatory measures. Yet once again, Mexico exercised restraint and sought a resolution of this issue through further dialogue. …

Today’s Pickings contains a 5,000 word essay by Charles Murray derived from an address he gave upon receiving the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Peter Wehner in Contentions introduces us to Murray and his talk.

Last week Charles Murray received the American Enterprise Institute’s highest honor, the Irving Kristol Award, and delivered a lecture, ”The Happiness of the People,” a title taken from James Madison’s phrase in The Federalist Paper #62. Murray’s lecture began with his assertion that President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalents of Europe’s social democrats. According to Murray, the European model is fundamentally flawed because it is not suited to the way human beings flourish. The goal of social policy should be to ensure that the institutions of family, community, vocation, and faith are robust and vital; the European model, Murray argues, enfeebles every single one of these institutions.

Beyond that, Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. While some worry the European model will be embraced here in America, Murray argues there is reason for strategic optimism, based on discoveries in neuroscience and genetics. According to Murray, these discoveries undermine two premises about human beings that are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: “the equality premise” (in a fair society, different groups of people will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life, and when that doesn’t happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society) and “the New Man premise” (human beings are malleable through the right government policies).

Murray concludes his lecture with a reflection on American exceptionalism, and he argues, …

The new administration created a committee of 18 that would oversee the auto industry. Turns out only 2 of those owned American cars. Charles Murray addresses the problem of the American elites who have fallen out of love with all the things that make this country unique.

The advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe? President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe’s social democrats. There’s nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe’s regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America’s and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.

Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There’s a lot to like—a lot to love—about day-to-day life in Europe.

But the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.

So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe’s demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?

I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem. …

… I have two points to make. First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish—it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that 21st-century science will prove me right. …

… Earlier, I said that the sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people need to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people—already has stripped people—of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, “I made a difference.” …

… I use the word “elites” to talk about the small minority of the population that has disproportionate influence over the culture, economy, and governance of the country. I realize that to use that word makes many Americans uncomfortable. But every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America’s elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands.

When I say that something akin to a political Great Awakening is required among America’s elites, what I mean is that America’s elites have to ask themselves how much they really do value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it.

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close. …

… Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. When I visit the small Iowa town where I grew up in the 1950s, I don’t get a sense that community life has changed all that much since then, and I wonder if it has changed all that much in the working class neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens. When I examine the polling data about the values that most Americans prize, not a lot has changed. And while I worry about uncontrolled illegal immigration, I’ve got to say that every immigrant I actually encounter seems as American as apple pie.

The center still holds. It’s the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it’s the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it. The fact is that American elites have increasingly been withdrawing from American life. It’s not a partisan phenomenon. The elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities—“gated” literally or figuratively—where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class.

Haven’t the elites always done this? Not like today. A hundred years ago, the wealth necessary to withdraw was confined to a much smaller percentage of the elites than now. Workplaces where the elites made their livings were much more variegated a hundred years ago than today’s highly specialized workplaces.

Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers—and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn’t gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There’s nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America. …

“Man-caused disasters? Mark Steyn tells us what they are.

Mark Steyn notices the latest teleprompter problem.

Which leads us to Maureen Dowd’s column. After the pull quote, the column goes downhill.

Barack Obama even needs a teleprompter to get mad.

On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.

But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well. He’s got to lop off some heads.

As he watches the fury of ordinary Americans bubble up at those who continue to plunder our economy, he should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”

His lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards. At the White House on Monday, the president read reporters some tough talk from the teleprompter …

Jonah Goldberg posts on President Burgundy.

Scrappleface says Pelosi is concerned now that newspapers are cutting back on printing we will be overcome by forest growth.

… “The primary role of newspapers for the past 50 years or so has been to control the tree population,” said Rep. Pelosi, D-CA. “Without street editions of these papers, we’ll see unchecked multiplication of the worst sorts of pulp-producing species.” …

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