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It might seem like splitting hairs, but Christopher Hitchens is not happy with the media’s “dissident” designation applied to terrorists.

… The term describes only attitudes and not actions, and it is most famously associated with the intellectual opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. (Prior to that usage, it was principally applied to those religious people of conscience who refused allegiance to the established Catholic and Episcopalian churches, which ironically would perhaps qualify the word dissident as being “overwhelmingly Protestant.”)

Plainly, something has been lost when such a historic term of honor and respect is loosely applied to homicidal thugs who shoot a Catholic policeman in the head and use pizza delivery workers as human shields. But in a media world where Bin Laden’s murderous surrogates in Iraq can be given a homely moniker, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. As a novel about the Nazi era has recently reminded us, the Furies of antiquity were so much dreaded that they were sometimes apotropaically named “the Kindly Ones,” or Eumenides. If you want a quick definition of euphemism, this would do: It consists of inventing nice terms for nasty things (perhaps to make them seem less nasty) and soft words for frightening things (perhaps to make them seem less scary). We should have learned by now that this form of dishonesty is also a form of cowardice, by which some of the enemy’s work is done for him. We have seen through propaganda terms like collateral damage and ethnic cleansing. Let us not put up with homegrown for something vile and alien, or the abuse of the moral term dissident for something that is both cruel and coercive.

Christopher Booker in the Telegraph, UK reports on the climate conference you won’t hear about.

Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world’s politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker. …

Bill Kristol has advice for the GOP. Don’t allow a Dem administration to go to waste.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” chief-of-staff-designate Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times the Sunday after Barack Obama’s election. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

Emanuel deserves points for candor. But perhaps not for perspicacity. His assumption was that the economic crisis was and would remain Bush’s crisis and that the opportunities were and would remain Obama’s opportunities. But what if the crisis becomes Obama’s crisis? Then the opportunities can be Republican opportunities.

The first two months of the Age of Obama haven’t turned out quite the way Emanuel and Obama’s legions hoped and expected. The early momentum is flagging. …

Thomas Sowell comments on the GOP civil war.

As if it is not enough that they have been decimated by the Democrats in the past couple of elections, the Republican survivors are now turning their guns on each other.

At the heart of these internal battles have been attacks on Rush Limbaugh by Republicans who imagine themselves to be so much more sophisticated because they are so much more in step with the political fashions of the time.

New Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele’s cheap shot at Rush’s program as “ugly” set off the latest round of in-fighting. That is the kind of thing that is usually said by liberals who have never listened to the program.

Regular listeners to the Rush Limbaugh program or subscribers to the Limbaugh newsletter know that both contain far more factual information and in-depth analysis than in the programs or writings of pundits with more of a ponderous tone or intellectual airs.

Why Michael Steele found it necessary to say such a thing— except as a sop to the liberal intelligentsia— is one of the many mysteries of the Republican Party. Steele has since apologized to Rush but you cannot unring the bell. …

Debra Saunders says it is amazing to hear Obama talking up the economy.

How the tables have turned. In September 2008, when GOP presidential nominee John McCain said “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” unemployment was 6.1 percent, the credit crunch had yet to reach the point that prompted President George W. Bush to propose a bailout, and Team Obama proclaimed that an out-of-touch McCain “just doesn’t get it” on the economy.

Now with unemployment at 8.1 percent, the $700 billion-plus Bush bailout has been followed by the $787 billion Obama stimulus package, and some D.C. Democrats already are arguing for another stimulus package because the first Obama stimulus bill didn’t do the trick. Yet top Obama economic adviser Christina Romer told “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “Of course, the fundamentals (of the U.S.) economy are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology.” (Those qualifying statements sound a lot like the McCain explanation for his positive diagnosis of the economy – “that the workers of America are the fundamentals of the economy.”)

President Obama himself said last week, “If we are keeping focused on all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy … then we’re going to get through this.”

If Obama is confident about the soundness of the U.S. economy, does that mean he “just doesn’t get it?” …

Interesting Corner post on the quality of the armies in our Revolutionary War.

Scrappleface says Dodd and Obama are outraged over the cash AIG gave their campaigns last year.

… President Obama and Sen. Dodd were the two largest recipients of campaign contributions from the beleaguered company, and the only politicians to garner six-figure amounts from AIG in 2008 — $103,100 for Sen. Dodd and $100,332 for presidential candidate Obama. …

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Obama re-opened a trade war with Mexico. WSJ’s O’Grady has the story.

When G-20 finance ministers met in England over the weekend to discuss a way out of the global financial crisis, the group pledged to eschew trade protectionism.

That sounds good. But some of the governments represented at the meeting aren’t walking the walk on global commerce at home. Instead they’re taking the side of special interests that want to weaken foreign competition. One culprit that comes to mind is the U.S.

In violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. last week again closed its southern border to any Mexican trucks additional to those with existing permits. It did so on the usual grounds that Mexican trucks are unsafe, even though that hoary claim has been demolished by extensive testing. But Congress and President Barack Obama are catering to the Teamsters union, which has spent more than a decade lobbying to keep Mexican competition off U.S. highways.

Candidate Obama ran for president as a protectionist, with a special emphasis on a promise to block ratification of U.S. free trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia. Big Labor was a big giver to Mr. Obama’s campaign and he owes it big time. Last week he began paying up. …

Michael Goodwin says more and more people are having Obama doubts.

Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, “Do you think they know what they’re doing?”

The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts.

Yes, it’s early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It’s a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House. …

The White House continues to think their attacks on Limbaugh are very clever. Now Power Line has the story of the anti-Rush billboard.

The Democrats’ strategy of diverting attention from their failures with attacks on Rush Limbaugh continues. They have been holding a contest among the party faithful; the Democrats intend to erect an anti-Rush billboard “where Rush can’t miss it,” which I assume means near his home or studio in Florida. Today the Democratic Party sent out an email saying that they have received “tens of thousands” of submissions. These are the five finalists: …

And Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has the finalist.

The Democratic Party has to do something to distract people from the parade of flopped nominations in the Barack Obama administration, the botched diplomacy of Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street meltdown, and the insane spending spree of the Democratic-controlled Congress.  Rather than have people actually pay attention to what Democrats do, the party has decided to hold an anti-Rush Limbaugh contest — to gin up a slogan for a billboard near the Excellence in Broadcasting studios in Florida.  My friend Tommy Christopher reports that they’ve picked a winner: …

Morrissey also posts on the most offensive idea to surface from the fever swamps of the Obama administration.

If the Obama administration wanted to come up with the most politically offensive policy it could imagine, within the bounds of reason and reality, what elements would it have to include?  Insulting veterans and looking like cheapskates in a time when massive government outlays to private industry would certainly help it along.  Comes now Hero of the Anti-War Left, retired General Eric Shinseki, who wants to save a few bucks at the Veterans Administration by making men and women injured in the service of our country pay for their care:

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance. …

Since he’s on a roll, let’s look at Ed Morrissey’s post on the latest personnel problem for the kid president.

And Andy McCarthy tells us how that turned out.

As a third top Treasury nominee withdraws from consideration (see Mark’s item, below) and Vivek Kundra, President Obama’s Chief White House Information Officer, takes a leave of absence following the FBI’s raid on his former office, the administration announces that attorney Tony West, who volunteered his services to represent John Walker Lindh (the so-called “American Taliban” convicted after making war against his country), is the president’s choice to lead the Civil Division at the Department of Justice. …

And McCarthy has another great appointment. The secret service is going to be very busy protecting Obama from the people that work for him.

I was remiss last night in not adding the news that the White House has announced President Obama’s selection of ”social justice” activist Van Jones as his “special adviser on green jobs” according to U.S. News & World Report.  This appointment’s a doozy.  Here’s a description of Jones from a 2007 interview by Campus Progress: …

Power Line reports another Obama nominee has bit the dust.

Claudia Rosett comments on the DVD set and the Reset Button.

Over the weekend, Mark Steyn had some fun at the Corner. First he picks on the Economist. That’s always popular with Pickerhead.

I don’t agree much with The Economist on anything, although I’ve always admired their ability to pluck callow youths off the streets and get them writing unsigned editorials in that snotty-Brit house-style in nothing flat. But I must say this piece dismissing the views of yours truly and others on the Europeanization of America is pretty lame: …

And Steyn posts on the administration’s desire to drop the phrase “enemy combatants.”

Maybe Connecticut will get a new senator next year. Now the London Times is reporting on Chris Dodd’s real estate transactions.

A holiday home in Connemara is at the centre of a growing row in America involving a prominent Democrat politician, a convicted insider trader and the former president Bill Clinton.

The purchase of the home by Senator Christopher Dodd is being examined by the US Senate ethics committee after allegations that Edward Downe Jr, a businessman convicted of insider trading, acted as a “middle man” in the deal.

Eight years ago Dodd, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against Barack Obama, lobbied Clinton, the then president, to grant Downe a pardon. This has prompted further questions about the financier’s involvement with the Galway house. …

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Mark Steyn welcomes the ‘brokest generation.’

… I had the pleasure of talking to the students of Hillsdale College last week, and I endeavored to explain what it is they’re being lined up for in a 21st century America of more government, more regulation, less opportunity and less prosperity: When you come to take your seat at the American table (to use another phrase politicians are fond of), you’ll find the geezers, boomers and X-ers have all gone to the men’s room, and you’re the only one sitting there when the waiter presents the check. That’s you: Generation Checks.

The Teleprompter Kid says not to worry: His budget numbers are based on projections that the economy will decline 1.2 percent this year and then grow 4 percent every year thereafter. Do you believe that? In fact, does he believe that? This is the guy who keeps telling us this is the worst economic crisis in 70 years, and it turns out it’s just a 1-percent decline for a couple more months, and then party time resumes? And, come to that, wasn’t there a (notably unprojected) 6.2 percent drop in GDP just in the last quarter of 2008?

Whatever. Growth may be lower than projected, but who’s to say all those new programs, agencies, entitlements and other boondoggles won’t also turn out to cost less than anticipated? Might as well be optimistic, right? …

Jan. 4th Pickings was introduced with these words; … Pickerhead has grown very tired of the media’s over use of “team of rivals” suggesting there is some prairie wisdom in Obama’s picks. Seems like we will have chaos instead, since our new president is a rather unformed immature 46 years old. Is there any guiding thought or idea that lies behind his quest, other than narcissism and change? We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him. … Cafe Hayek posts on the present confusion in Washington with excerpts from Andy Grove of Intel and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. From Fineman;

… But, in ways both large and small, what’s left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking.

They have some reasons to be concerned. I trace them to a central trait of the president’s character: he’s not really an in-your-face guy. By recent standards—and that includes Bill Clinton as well as George Bush—Obama for the most part is seeking to govern from the left, looking to solidify and rely on his own party more than woo Republicans. And yet he is by temperament judicious, even judicial. He’d have made a fine judge. But we don’t need a judge. We need a blunt-spoken coach.

Obama may be mistaking motion for progress, calling signals for a game plan. A busy, industrious overachiever, he likes to check off boxes on a long to-do list. A genial, amenable guy, he likes to appeal to every constituency, or at least not write off any. …

Pickings believes the adage that Jews are the “canaries in the coal mine” and that anti-Semitism is a leading indicator of problems in a society. The Charles Freeman nomination is more than the latest Obama personnel debacle. Freeman’s intemperate farewell on the Foreign Policy website make it plain we dodged a bullet when he withdrew. But he exposed the real problem, which is; how the hell did he get nominated? Wesley Pruden has some thoughts and then, as is her style, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post goes into some detail about the Washington thinking exposed by this nomination. She doesn’t say it, but certainly believes, it is time for Israel to take things in their own hands, and destroy the Iranian nukes.

Wesley Pruden disposes of Charles Freeman.

… Mr. Freeman, to put a fine point on it, does not like the Israelis very much. … … Mr. Freeman doesn’t like anybody who makes trouble for China very much, either, particularly if they’re demonstrating for democracy at Tiananmen Square or Tibetans struggling to get their country back.

Fortunately, it occurred to a few key Republicans and several Democrats that he was a very odd choice for the job. The Republicans were mostly Christians, the Democrats were mostly Jewish, and it’s a shame this is important but Mr. Freeman’s friends on the left are trying to make this a religious issue. It’s time to blame the Jews again, this time for ruining poor Mr. Freeman’s new career as the chef in charge of cooking the intelligence served in the Oval Office. …

Caroline Glick with more background on l’affaire Freeman.

Ill winds are blowing out of Washington these days. On Thursday, The Washington Post headline blared, “Intelligence Pick Blames ‘Israel Lobby’ for Withdrawal.”

The article, by Walter Pincus, described how former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles “Chas” Freeman is blaming Israel’s Jewish American supporters for his resignation Tuesday from his post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In a diatribe published on Foreign Policy’s Web site on Wednesday, Freeman accused the alleged “Israel Lobby” of torpedoing his appointment. In his words, “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency… The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views… and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.”

He continued, “I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the State of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.”

The Washington Post’s article quoted liberally from Freeman’s diatribe. It also identified the Jewish Americans who wrote against Freeman’s appointment, and insinuated that AIPAC – which took no stand on his appointment – actually worked behind the scenes to undermine it.

While it described in lurid detail how one anti-Freeman Jewish blogger quoted other anti-Freeman Jewish bloggers on his Web site, Pincus’s article failed to report what it was about Freeman that caused the Jewish cabal to criticize his appointment. Consequently, by default, Pincus effectively endorsed Freeman’s diatribe against the all-powerful “Israel Lobby.” …

The GOP doesn’t want you to know who the biggest earmark pigs were. Slate’s Tim Noah has the story.

… No fewer than six out of these 10 senators are Republicans, including the two top earmark hogs, Cochran and Wicker. Cochran, Wicker, Bond, and Shelby at least had the decency to vote for the bill after they stuffed it with earmarks. Vitter and Grassley followed McConnell’s hypocritical lead, inserting earmarks but then voting against the final bill, knowing it would pass anyway. …

Charles Krauthammer ruminates on the stem cell signing ceremonies.

… That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making” — would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush’s nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not. …

David Harsanyi wants in on the stem cell debate too.

This week, President Barack Obama lifted the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research that destroys human embryos — and instantly one of most intellectually deceitful debates of the past decade was re-ignited.

The president claimed that from now on we would “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Others dropped inane phrases regarding the “proper role of science” and the need to “remove politics from science,” as if science existed in a vacuum.

To begin with — though I disagree with the position — opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is not the equivalent of opposition to “science.” Opponents have an ethical position that concerns policy. They are not alone.

Many liberals oppose the expansion of nuclear energy or genetically modified foods, to offer just two examples. Why would they stand in the way of science? Well, I assume, they hold some principled reservations about the repercussions of those activities. …

WSJ editors comment on the success of the HBO original film ‘Taking Chance” which was reviewed in these pages in Pickings of March 1st. The schedule for the rest of the month is below.

It’s been widely observed that movies about the Iraq war have tended to bomb at the box office. One newspaper report speculated that films like “Home of the Brave” and “Stop-Loss” failed because “the audience might prefer a longer interval before viewing events as troubling as war.”

“Taking Chance” refutes this notion. When it debuted February 21 on HBO, it became the network’s most-watched original movie in five years, drawing two million viewers — especially impressive given that it aired on Saturday, traditionally not a big TV-watching night. An HBO spokesman estimates that another 5.5 million have watched subsequent airings of the film, and that doesn’t count DVR viewers. …

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Karl Rove discourses on the White House attack on Rush.

Presidents throughout history have kept lists of political foes. But the Obama White House is the first I am aware of to pick targets based on polls. Even Richard Nixon didn’t focus-group his enemies list.

Team Obama — aided by Clintonistas Paul Begala, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg — decided to attack Rush Limbaugh after poring over opinion research. White House senior adviser David Axelrod explicitly authorized the assault. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned a White House official to coordinate the push. And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gleefully punched the launch button at his podium, suckering the White House press corps into dropping what they were doing to get Mr. Limbaugh.

Was it smart politics and good policy? No. For one thing, it gave the lie to Barack Obama’s talk about ending “the political strategy that’s been all about division” and “the score-keeping and the name-calling.” The West Wing looked populated by petulant teenagers intent on taking down a popular rival. …

Forbes has a piece on the rosy economic scenarios.

… The forecast is rosy from the get-go. The budget forecasters assumed that the economy would grow at a 3% annual rate starting in April and that real GDP would fall just 1.2% in 2009 from 2008. Then, from 2010 through 2013, the administration assumes that real GDP will grow at a 4% annual rate. To put this in perspective, that is twice as fast as the economy’s 2% annual rate of growth between 2004 and 2008. This is not impossible, but the only other periods that came close to this 4% growth rate for such a prolonged period of time were in the late-1990s and mid-1980s. Forgive us for pointing this out, but both of these periods followed major shifts toward freer markets and tax cuts, not bigger government and tax hikes.

There is no period in U.S. history where tax rates and the size of government both increased, and yet real GDP growth accelerated as sharply as the Obama team forecasts. …

And Obama fan Megan McArdle posts on the economic forecasts.

Our sister publication (National Journal) asks analysts whether the administration’s economic forecasts are too optimistic.  They would have gotten a more interesting discussion if their query had been “Is the Pope Catholic?”  Of course they’re too optimistic.  In fact, the word optimistic is too optimistic.  A better choice might have been “insane”.  Like Greg Mankiw, I would love to find a sucker investor who is willing to take the other end of a bet that both growth and revenue will fall short of the administration’s predictions.

Having defended Obama’s candidacy largely on his economic team, I’m having serious buyer’s remorse.  Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. …

David Harsanyi thinks working on the economy should have come before the far-left agenda.

… Obama, who promised not to raise taxes during a recession, now plans to raise nearly $1 trillion in new taxes directly from the investor class. He plans to raise capital gains (a disincentive to investment), corporate taxes (for you, the consumer, to ultimately pay) and on the “rich” (which the non-partisan Tax Foundation estimates will affect 1.3 million small-business owners).

This recession already has passed the 15-month threshold, the historical average for downturns. Most presidents helped ease us out of these tough spots by easing the burden on Americans. Obama has engaged in the opposite. That’s his gamble.

And most polls show the president’s approval rating around 60 percent — similar to other modern presidents at this point. But now that Obama has used his political capital to further ideology rather than economic growth, one thing is clear: He owns this mess.

Ed Morrissey wants to know why Treasury is neglected.

President Barack Obama’s handy excuse for all sorts of goofs and missteps is that he’s too busy working on fixing the economy.  In order to do that, one might expect that Obama would concentrate on building his economic team at the Department of the Treasury, where most of those efforts would originate and get managed.  Instead, as noted earlier today, phones go unanswered at Treasury — and our allies and trading partners have begun complaining about the lack of effort in the White House.

Reports have floated around that “dozens” of positions remain unfilled at Treasury, most recently in the New York Times’ profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: …

New Ledger.com reviews the vetting process.

… 2009 is the anti-2008 for Team Obama. Whereas, last year, the Obama campaign was able to demonstrate its supreme competence at running a campaign, raising money, and using technology to further Barack Obama’s political goals and personal ambitions, once Team Obama moved into the White House, it seemed that its hold on managerial competence disappeared. Thus, we have a Treasury Secretary whose tax delinquencies were not discovered by the Obama vetting system, and who is Home Alone at the Treasury Department because the White House can’t get its nominees confirmed quickly enough to provide the Treasury Secretary the personnel support he needs to deal with the greatest economic crisis since the recession of the early 1980s. …

If you are wondering what to think of the Freeman fiasco, James Taranto has a good backgrounder.

A year ago, Barack Obama was running for president and people were starting to pay attention to his “spiritual mentor,” Jeremiah Wright. Obama tried to have it every way: He claimed he had no idea about Wright’s crackpot ravings, which of course he did not agree with, but he proclaimed his personal loyalty to a man he portrayed as merely eccentric and avuncular. Months later, when this approach was no longer political tenable, Obama threw Wright under the bus, as the vivid campaign metaphor had it.

The pattern has repeated itself, and because Obama is president, now his choice of associates really matter. Charles Freeman, described by our colleague Bret Stephens as “Obama’s national intelligence crackpot,” met the bus’s underside yesterday, withdrawing from consideration to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

As Stephens notes, Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, heads an outfit called the Middle East Policy Council, “generously funded by Saudi money.” Freeman has “amply repaid” this generosity, Stephens writes–among other things by parroting the Saudi line that American support for Israel provoked the attacks of Sept. 11. Freeman’s bizarre views aren’t limited to the Middle East: He criticized Red China after the Tiananmen Square massacre–not for brutality but for being, as he put it, “overly cautious.” …

A welcome change of pace comes from a NY Times article on a cross country Amtrak adventure.

… Almost every veteran conductor I talked with on the trip lamented that something of train travel’s former magic had slipped away. Yet I witnessed something very precious that remains.

Mr. Kinsinger, the Amish butcher, had remarked in astonishment: “I met a man who said he spent 12 hours on an airplane, sitting right next to someone, and they never said a word to each other!” A former New York City cop-turned-massage-therapist from Oregon, who had ridden the Zephyr with her husband, carried cards printed with their contact information, and the headline: “There Are No Strangers on a Train.”

Abraham Lincoln’s idealism about the first transcontinental railroad’s forging national unity may have been bound up in political pragmatism and economic ambition, but a core sentiment remains true: as a train crosses borders, the boundaries between its riders dissolve. Those crosshatched lines on the map stitching the country together are also a metaphor. I witnessed community and saw everybody cherishing it.

At least for now, train travel remains in what the former flight attendant I met called an “age of innocence,” by which she meant that you can keep your shoes on to board. It is a relapse into a simpler time.

With some cash, Amtrak could add modern amenities like Wi-Fi and still preserve that slower pace that makes train travel a salve for our modern psyche, the perpetual motion lulling the rider to stillness, like a rocking cradle, and that hushing sound: choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k.

SPECTACULAR TRIPS ON 2 RAILS …

Mark Steyn Corner post on controlling cow flatulence starts the humor section.

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Obama fan, Camille Paglia blames it all on his staff.

Free Barack!

Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.

Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama’s first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)

First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration’s weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don’t they read the “Iliad” anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years. …

Imagine what the Brits are thinking about Obama now; what with the gift snit and then more omniously, the inability of this administration to concentrate on Job 1 which is the economy. London Times has the story of the empty jobs at Treasury.

Alarm is growing that President Obama’s Administration, as it seeks to navigate a course away from the jagged rocks of the worst recession in a generation, lacks hands on deck. Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is being forced to operate virtually on his own without any of the 17 deputies his department is supposed to have representing him in important negotiations or helping make crucial decisions.

British officials and other diplomatic sources are already privately expressing concern that the crucial G20 summit in London, now less than a month away, could be disrupted by the US failing to prepare properly for the talks. …

In their efforts to be different from Bush, the new administration has started silly season with the idea of “moderate Talibans.” Tunku Varadarajan has the story for Forbes.

In an interview with The New York Times, published on March 8, President Obama appeared to suggest that his administration might be willing to talk to people in Afghanistan whom the newspaper characterized as the “more moderate elements of the Taliban.”

One wonders, here, what makes for “moderate” Taliban. While it is tempting to explore the darker recesses of humor–and define as moderates those who’d draw the line at filming beheadings, stoning and public bastinadoes–what we mean, surely, are those who’d contemplate an abandonment of their jihad against Western forces in Afghanistan in exchange for some sort of power-sharing arrangement with the government of Hamid Karzai. It is their willingness to do deals, in other words, that makes them moderate, not the essential make-up of their beliefs and culture. That said, if they are willing to set aside their adamantine opposition to the infidel West and its puppet, Karzai, they are clearly less purist in their pursuit of an Islamist society than those who would fight to the finish. That makes them relatively moderate, if you like. Or just plain cynical.

I prefer to regard them as cynical. Why? Because I’ve met two senior Taliban “moderates,” both masterful–and disconcerting–practitioners of the cynical arts. …

Which brings us to Christopher Hitchens’ thoughts about the deal struck in Pakistan with elements of the Taliban.

… one should be careful of the seductions of this compromise. In a wishful attempt to bring peace with the Taliban in Pakistan itself, the government has recently ceded a fertile and prosperous and modernized valley province—the former princedom of Swat—to the ultraviolent votaries of the one party and the one God. This is not some desolate tribal area where government and frontier have been poorly delineated for decades, as in Waziristan. It is a short commute from the capital city of Islamabad. The Taliban have never won an election in the area; indeed, the last vote went exactly the other way. And refugees are pouring out of Swat as the fundamentalists take hold and begin their campaign of cultural and economic obliteration: no music, no schooling for females, no recognition of the writ of the central government. (See the excellent report by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the March 5 New York Times.)

According to this and other reports, the surrender of authority by the already crumbling Pakistani authorities has had an emboldening effect on the extremists rather than an appeasing one. The nominal interlocutor, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, with whom the deal was signed, is related by clan and ideology to much fiercer and younger figures, including those suspected in the murder of Benazir Bhutto, in the burning of hundreds of girls’ schools, in the killing of Pakistani soldiers, and in the slaughter of local tribal leaders who have resisted Taliban rule. Numberless witnesses attest that the militants show not the smallest intention of abiding by the terms of the so-called “truce.” Instead of purchasing peace, the Pakistani government has surrendered part of its heartland without a fight to those who can and will convert it into a base for further and more exorbitant demands. This is not even a postponement of the coming nightmare, which is the utter disintegration of Pakistan as a state. It is a stage in that disintegration. …

Rich Lowry says, “At least he’s calm.”

… As the financial crisis hit, he never took a position on the first AIG bailout. Perhaps this was the truest indication of his instincts on the financial crisis — namely, avoidance. To sidestep the politically risky imperative of asking Congress for even more funds to address the crisis, Geithner has resorted to complex schemes that haven’t yet been thoroughly formulated.

Perhaps Obama’s muddle-through approach to the banks will suffice until the natural resilience of the economy brings a recovery. Or perhaps, as Obama temporizes, the problem gets bigger and worse, discrediting his leadership and exposing the vision of his budget as, in the words of a headline in The Economist, “wishful, and dangerous, thinking.” Either way, Obama will be calm.

Bill Sammon broke an important story today. Turns out James Carville claimed he wanted Bush to fail and worked towards that end.

The press never reported that Democratic strategist James Carville said he wanted President Bush to fail before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But a feeding frenzy ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president. …

Ed Morrissey reports the NY Times has confirmed it was David Axelrod who turned the administration to the Rush Limbaugh attack mode.

… And for that matter, why didn’t the New York Times report this separately?  The White House has ginned up an attack machine to pillory Rush Limbaugh, but meanwhile dozens of high-level appointments have yet to be made at Treasury.  They’re too overwhelmed to figure out correct protocol for Gordon Brown’s visit (and too busy to offer decent gifts), but they have the time to coordinate attacks on a radio-show host.

That’s an interesting set of priorities — for both Obama and the New York Times.

Cafe Hayek tells Paul Krugman, “Or course the Obama is screwing up. He’s the government now.”

… It takes a long time for government to spring into action. It takes a long time for government to do stuff. It even takes a long time for government to spend money. On top of all that, it is very hard for politicians, Republicans or Democrats, to say the words, “I made a mistake.” So even though I sympathize with Krugman’s view that Obama doesn’t seem to realize that we’re in a bigger mess than he may have thought and the solutions so far aren’t working, I don’t really expect a change of course until, oh, sometime close to the next Congressional election. Close means a year or so in advance.

The title of the Krugman’s piece is “Behind the Curve.” That’s the essence of government. Behind the curve. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

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Vaclav Klaus, Czech president, has some advice for the U. S..

Massive government spending and tighter regulation would prolong recession, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Monday, as he urged U.S. President Barack Obama not to endanger the free market economy in his response to the financial crisis. …

Mark Steyn thinks America should be wary of Canadian imports.

Writing about Europe a couple of pages back, I didn’t mention Canada — mainly because Canada isn’t in Europe, although it has a European mien. But, when I do raise the subject of Her Majesty’s northern dominion in this space, American conservatives sometimes query the relevance: “What’s Canada to do with me?”

Hey, wake up and smell the syrup! The road to hell is paved with Trudeaupian public policy. Every malign Canadian idea (from multiculturalism to socialized health care) heads south a generation later, while every American idea (from the First Amendment to non-confiscatory taxation) foolish enough to attempt the journey north gets gunned down on the 49th parallel. …

WSJ Editors think it is time to stand up to teachers’ unions.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that poor children receiving federally financed vouchers to attend private schools in Washington, D.C., shouldn’t be forced out of those schools. Bully for Mr. Duncan. But the voice that matters most is President Obama’s, and so far he’s been shouting at zero decibels. …

… It’s no surprise that the Obamas opted out of D.C. public schools for their own daughters and instead chose an exclusive private institution. Come on, Mr. President, find your voice for families of lesser means.

Peter Robinson celebrates the partial return of some prodigal sons.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously asserted, “needs a constant struggle.”

Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken. …

In Contentions, Peter Wehner introduces us to a new column by Robert Samuelson.

Robert Samuelson is one of the most influential economic columnists in America, and for good reason: he’s informed, intelligent, and measured. That’s why his column today is significant. …

Here is Samuelson’s column.

To those who believe that Barack Obama is a different kind of politician — more honest, more courageous — please don’t examine his administration’s budget. If you do, you may sadly conclude that he resembles presidents stretching back to John Kennedy in one crucial respect. He won’t tax voters for all the government services they want. That’s the main reason we’ve run budget deficits in 43 of the past 48 years.

Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he is doing things that he isn’t, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made “responsibility” a personal theme; the budget’s cover line is “A New Era of Responsibility.” He says the budget begins “making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline.” It doesn’t. …

Yuval Levin says Obama’s budget ignores and will probably exacerbate the economic crisis.

Last September, during the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, moderator Jim Lehrer asked Obama what the growing economic crisis would mean for his policy ambitions: “What are you going to have to give up, in terms of the priorities that you would bring as president of the United States, as a result of having to pay for the financial rescue plan?” Obama’s answer was so evasive that Lehrer asked him if he really meant to say that essentially nothing would change.

Over the past two weeks, we have seen something of a reiteration of that answer in practice. Obama indeed meant that no part of his agenda would be given up to pay for the economic recovery. On the contrary, recovery efforts will be undercut in favor of the new administration’s sweeping liberal ambitions. …

Thomas Sowell asks if we want government to subsidize bad decisions.

Now that the federal government has decided to bail out homeowners in trouble, with mortgage loans up to $729,000, that raises some questions that ought to be asked, but are seldom being asked.

Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand— for the very good reason that he could not afford it— why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?

Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?  …

Yesterday Chris Dodd, Dem of CT figured prominently in the Director Blue recap of the mortgage meltdown. According to the Hartford Courant, Sen. Dodd has strange real estate dealings all over the place. Some of them up close and personal – and corrupt.

It takes considerable political skill for a U.S. senator to win a presidential pardon for a friend without the traditional review by the Justice Department. Sen. Christopher Dodd moved the furtive levers of power in 2001 for Edward R. Downe, convicted of tax and securities fraud eight years before. A man will do a lot for a former real estate partner.

It was reported here two weeks ago that Downe’s real estate development partner, William “Bucky” Kessinger of Kansas City, Mo., purchased a 1,700-square-foot home in Ireland with Dodd in 1994 for $160,000. Downe’s name appeared on the transfer document filed in the Irish Land Registry as the witness to Kessinger’s signature. Kessinger owned two-thirds of the property, Dodd one-third.

Dodd’s spokesman told The Courant in 2001 that the senator and Downe, who pleaded guilty to insider trading in 1993, had been friends for many years. No one mentioned that Dodd and Downe together purchased a condominium in Washington, D.C., in 1986. Dodd bought Downe’s share 3 1/2 years later. …

Borowitz reports March Madness has been changed to March Bipolar Disorder.

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Mark Steyn thinks Obama is trying to turn us into Europe.

Back during the election campaign, I was on the radio and a caller demanded to know what I made of the persistent rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “I doubt it,” I said. “It’s perfectly obvious he was born in Stockholm. Okay, maybe Brussels or Strasbourg.” And the host gave an appreciative titter, and I made a mental note to start working up a little “Barack Obama, the first European prime minister to be elected president of the United States” shtick for maybe a year into the first term.

But here we are 20 minutes in, and full-scale Europeanization is already under way: Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized college education, Europeanized climate-change policy . . . Obama’s pseudo-SOTU speech was America’s first State of the European Union address, in which the president deftly yoked the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance, entrepreneurial energy, and the can-do spirit like joining the vast army of robotic extras droning in unison: “The government needs to do more for me.” For the moment, Washington is offering Euro-sized government with Euro-sized economic intervention, Euro-sized social programs, and Euro-sized regulation. But apparently not Euro-sized taxation.

Hmm. Even the Europeans haven’t attempted that trick. But don’t worry, if that pledge not to increase taxes on families earning under $250,000 doesn’t have quite the Continental sophistication you’re looking for in your federal government, I doubt it will be operative very long.

Most Americans don’t yet grasp the scale of the Obama project. The naysayers complain, Oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or It’s the new New Deal, or It’s LBJ’s Great Society applied to health care. You should be so lucky. …

If that the case, asks Claudia Rosett, who is going to defend Europe, or invent stuff, or . . .

Europe — sclerotic, bureaucratized and social-democratized – has for decades enjoyed the protection, inventions and security afforded by its more laissez-fair, strapping, and exuberant cousin across the Pond, the United States. America, with its free markets, its market incentives, and its relatively large private sector, has been the engine of global growth. America’s system, based fundamentally on individual risk and responsibility, has been the great incubator of innovations that have become the staples of the modern age — from medical advances, to computers, to the internet and beyond. Around the world, people have benefited in ways beyond measure. …

Director Blue, a new blog for us, has an interesting picture postcard way of explaining the sub-prime mess.

Steve Forbes faults a couple of Treasury regs for a lot of the banking troubles.

… The most disastrous Bush policy that Mr. Obama is perpetuating is mark-to-market or “fair value” accounting for banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. The idea seems harmless: Financial institutions should adjust their balance sheets and their capital accounts when the market value of the financial assets they hold goes up or down.

That works when you have very liquid securities, such as Treasurys, or the common stock of IBM or GE. But when the credit crisis hit in 2007, there was no market for subprime securities and other suspect assets. Yet regulators and auditors kept pressing banks and other financial firms to knock down the book value of this paper, even in cases where these obligations were being fully serviced in the payment of principal and interest. Thus, under mark-to-market, even non-suspect assets are being artificially knocked down in value for regulatory capital (the amount of capital required by regulators for industries like banks and life insurance).

Banks and life insurance companies that have positive cash flows now find themselves in a death spiral. …

Politico reports on the president’s training wheels – the telepromptors.

The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.

Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.

Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.

After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck. …

Jeff Jacoby suggests, since it’s been so cold lately, maybe some of the global warming folks could climb down from some of their extreme rhetoric.

… But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.

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Stuart Taylor has always been a fair minded liberal which is why his work has graced these pages many times. He starts us off today with his concerns about the “left turn” of the new administration.

Having praised President Obama’s job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

But with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama’s proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both. …

Pickerhead was delighted with Stuart Taylor’s column. Mark Steyn not so much. Seems he might have confused David Brooks’ thoughts for Taylor’s

… As for Stuart Taylor, he still doesn’t quite get it:

The house is burning down. It’s no time to be watering the grass.

If only. The house is burning down. And Obama’s soaking the neighboring buildings in Exxon-Mobil’s finest. Fortunately for Mr Taylor’s fit of the wobbles, the alternative to the Obama Fire Department is a GOP “dominated by such hard-right conservatives as Rush Limbaugh”. Twenty-five million people listened to Rush last week. Millions of them have listened to him for 20 years. That makes them “hard-right” extremists.

Whereas being one of a few thousand who listened to Jeremiah Wright every week for 20 years makes you a mainstream moderate.

Which leads us to Mark’s weekly column in the Orange County Register. Since Mark is a Brit educated Canadian immigrant to the U. S., he is particularly well situated to comment on last week’s gift gaffe.

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.

The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.

And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.”

Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of “MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT” T-shirts. Still, the “classic American movies” set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I’m sure – “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Sound Of Music” – though this sort of collection always slip in a couple of “Dude, Where’s My Car? 3″ and “Police Academy 12″ just to make up the numbers. I’ll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don’t work in United Kingdom DVD players. …

Ed Morrissey deconstructs the proposed excuse for the gag gift for Gordon Brown.

After insulting Gordon Brown during the British prime minister’s visit this week by ignoring protocol and cheaping out on the traditional gift exchange, the UK media has erupted in outrage.  The Obama White House has now started to recognize the firestorm the new President created with our closest ally, and wants to assure the Brits that he meant no disrespect.  Instead, Obama apparently wants to assure them that he’s simply in over his head and floundering …

Continuing on the gift gaffe riff, Morrissey covers Hillary’s hilarious gift to the Russian foreign minister.

… Some will say, Come on, it’s just a light moment, but let’s think about what Hillary was doing here.  She was making fun of the previous administration’s diplomacy with her “reset” button, a rather nasty piece of work.  I’ll bet the Bush administration and Condi Rice would have gotten the translation correct before making that joke — and I’d bet even more money they wouldn’t have thought to make fun of Hillary’s husband in that fashion in the first place.

Can we get a reset button?

And the London Times is looking askance at all this.

… What has begun to trouble some even within his own party is that Mr Obama’s pledge to spend the US out of recession, while slashing the budget deficit to $533 billion within four years, already looks recklessly optimistic. Few dispute, even among Republicans, the need for healthcare reform or to wean America off foreign oil. It is the scale of debt that Mr Obama is willing to incur to achieve these goals that is causing such heartburn.

And it is not just Americans who desperately need him to prevail. As Gordon Brown said in Washington this week, while pledging faith in the President’s plans, everyone is watching the US economy. The entire developed world is banking on Mr Obama to succeed.

But much of his promise to rein in the deficit rested on a projection that the recession will cease and the US economy grow next year, but nobody can clearly see an end to this slump. The central question – how to stop the banking sector from collapse – is still a work in progress. They prefer huge injections of cash to stop the banks dying – but stop short of nationalisation – while they try to work out how to rid them of at least $2 trillion of toxic assets. There is still a significant chance that the scale of debt involved could devour Mr Obama’s presidency.

The markets are so unnerved about Mr Obama’s ability to rescue the financial sector, and by the numerous bailouts that have had little effect, that wealth is being destroyed on Wall Street at a rate not seen since the 1930s. The President said on Tuesday that he does not worry about “the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market”, but investors have made it clear that his economic prescriptions have so far failed to reassure them.

Mr Obama also says that much of his programme will be paid for by reducing the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet he has just ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan for a war that his Defence Secretary says will be a long and difficult slog, and he is still groping for a strategy in Pakistan.

“We are always better off on the high wire,” David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s campaign manager, said last year. Now Mr Obama is President, watching from below has become both enthralling and terrifying.

James Taranto discovers that even Paul Krugman has Obama reservations.

We never thought we’d say this, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has a pretty good column in today’s New York Times. It’s a tough criticism of the Obama administration but, unlike Krugman’s hundreds of anti-Bush columns, it is not a rant. Krugman is concerned that President Obama is not treating the crisis in America’s financial institutions with sufficient urgency:

Among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern. . . ….

Charles Krauthammer continues commentary on the money spent in DC.

… The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people. …

Jennifer Rubin says he’s just not into governing.

… What does he like to do? Summits. These are in essence campaign events — faux town-halls where nary a discouraging word is heard and no real work is done. And he loves those campaign rallies around the country.

So if the report is accurate that others are crafting his political strategy (just like the Pelosi-Reid machine is drafting his legislation), it should should come as no surprise. George W. Bush was lambasted for poor management skills and excessive delegation. But that was nothing — Obama has delegated the entire task of governing. He will keep the campaigning for himself.

Scrappleface says Obama’s gift to the Queen next month will not be a queen sized bed.

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Tony Blankley comments on the administration so far.

I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died. Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: “Bush lied, people died.” There are, of course, two differences between the slogans.

Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction. In the age of Obama, there is little more important than maintaining the integrity of our language against the onslaught of Orwellian language abuse that is already a babbling brook and soon will be a cataract of verbal deception.

The other difference is that Bush didn’t lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He merely was mistaken. Whereas Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t.”

This he asserted despite the fact that the budget he proposed the next day asks for federal spending as 28 percent of gross domestic product, higher by at least 6 percent than any time since World War II. …

Would you believe Bush was more popular than Obama at this point in their terms? Of course you wouldn’t, because the media wants you to think the Kid walks on water. Peter Wehner Corner post with details.

VDH says he knew he’d be the Great Divider.

I confess I did not believe Barack Obama entirely during the campaign when he bragged on working across the aisle and championing bipartisanship.

You see, as in the case of any other politician, one must look to what he does—and has done—not what he says for election advantage.

And in the case of Sen. Obama, in his nascent career in the Senate, he had already compiled the most partisan record of any Democratic Senator. He had attended religiously one of the most racially divisive and extremist churches in the country. His Chicago friends were not moderates. His campaigns for state legislature, the House and the Senate were hard-ball, no-prisoner affairs of personal destruction, even by Chicago standards. Campaign references to reparations, gun- and bible-clingers, and Rev. Wright’s wisdom were not words of healing. …

Power Line posts on the voice of the market.

… Yesterday Obama was asked about the stock market. He advised his audience not to “spend all your time worrying about that.” Bill Kristol sums up Obama’s response under the heading “Don’t worry, be happy.” Obama explained:

What I’m looking at is not the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world economy to regain its footing. And, you know, the stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. You know, it bobs up and down day to day. And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.

With its likening of the stock market to daily tracking polls, this is certainly a rich text. Most notably, as Bill Kristol observes, “the stock market isn’t gyrating, or bobbing up and down. It’s dropping.”

The sobering voice of Mr. Market is saying that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress have done nothing to brighten the prospects of companies struggling to make a go of it in the private sector. On the contrary, they have dimmed the prospects of these companies. The dimming can be measured in the vast destruction of wealth in the stock market. …

And on whether he will sell out the African-American children who get DC vouchers.

David Warren writes on what he has learned.

… “The people” have discovered that they can vote themselves money, by the simple device of putting into office politicians like Barack Obama, who promise them cash, services, tax breaks, bailouts, and to “make the rich pay.” Democracy has been degenerating into a vicious system in which wealth is transferred by the power of law from “them” to “us.” That this must have a crippling effect on the creation of wealth should be perfectly obvious.

The Nanny State is hardly something new, but it seems that in this year of 2009 we have entered a new phase of it, which might be characterized as the “death spiral.” The U.S. government is suddenly vomiting out trillions — literally, trillions — to the people who voted for it. Partly at the expense of the people who didn’t; but mostly conjured from thin air.

The laws of supply and demand are laws of nature. They do not apply only to free markets, but with a special vengeance to those who try to subvert market disciplines. The effect of summoning huge quantities of dollars out of nothing is extremely well known. It leads to inflation, and when not then very painfully corrected, to hyperinflation.

Inflation, too, has been with us for some time, but seldom on the scale the U.S. is now risking. …

David Harsanyi likes Limbaugh’s ideas of failure.

… Republicans, conversely, are fighting over their future, a future that grassroots figures like Limbaugh will certainly be a part of. In the meantime, Democrats are hoping Republicans fail to come to a consensus and regroup — even though two vibrant parties are always healthier for the nation than one.

And many of us are hoping that all those in power fail. Because those in power have a grating habit of being annoyingly self-righteous, hopelessly corrupt, resolutely incompetent and completely apathetic about the freedoms that they have sworn to protect.

Embrace the failure. It’s patriotic.

Pseudonymous film writer explains why Hollywood hates America.

… Many explanations have been offered to account for our ludicrously parodistic version of liberalism. There is no cause too ridiculous for us to support, as long as it is described as a civil-rights issue and is couched in the language of “fairness,” preferably tinged with self-loathing and anti-Americanism. Among the clichés cited for our conformism are (a) the arts are a natural home for sensitive and suffering souls, (b) like journalism, the movie business has long attracted crusaders for “social justice,” and (c) the immense wealth generated for its creators by a hit movie — or, even better, a long-running television series — provokes an internal backlash of guilt over undeserved good fortune, which is then partially expiated by “good works,” especially when those works involve spending taxpayers’ money. (Taxes? Us? We have accountants for that.)

Forget about it. The origin of our reflexive liberalism lies not in the kinds of people who go into movie-making but in something far deeper: the nature of the movie business itself, which drives us insane. …

Here’s some good news. Remember the bees that were disappearing? They might be coming back. The Economist has the story.

AT THE end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery.

Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut. …

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Finally, a Dem senator with courage. Evan Bayh comes out against the budget. Virginians must be wondering why it wasn’t Webb or Warner leading this charge.

This week, the United States Senate will vote on a spending package to fund the federal government for the remainder of this fiscal year. The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 is a sprawling, $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess.

The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it.

The omnibus increases discretionary spending by 8% over last fiscal year’s levels, dwarfing the rate of inflation across a broad swath of issues including agriculture, financial services, foreign relations, energy and water programs, and legislative branch operations. Such increases might be appropriate for a nation flush with cash or unconcerned with fiscal prudence, but America is neither. …

Maureen Dowd is figuring it out.

… In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork. …

David Brooks continues to learn to understand his mistaken admiration.

… The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.

The U.S. has always been a decentralized nation, skeptical of top-down planning. Yet, the current administration concentrates enormous power in Washington, while plan after plan emanates from a small group of understaffed experts.

The U.S. has always had vibrant neighborhood associations. But in its very first budget, the Obama administration raises the cost of charitable giving. It punishes civic activism and expands state intervention.

The U.S. has traditionally had a relatively limited central government. But federal spending as a share of G.D.P. is zooming from its modern norm of 20 percent to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond.

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.” …

And perhaps David Gergen is tired of being a Dem fool.

… So, the argument comes from the White House, damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead!

Yet… yet… yet: It isn’t popular to say right now but there is growing reason to question whether this is the wisest course in terms of our most urgent and pressing challenge: a collapsing world economy. News on the economic front has to be sobering to even the most optimistic among us. Last Friday, we learned that the economy contracted in the 4th quarter by over 6 percent. Over the weekend, Warren Buffett warned that the economy would be in a “shambles” through 2009 and possibly beyond. On Monday, the government issued its fourth bailout for AIG, European ministers rejected a general bailout for Eastern Europe, and the Dow sank below 7,000 – down some 25% since its run-up in January. This Friday economists expect the latest U.S. unemployment numbers to be dismal. Already, the administration’s optimistic economic forecasts for next year look way too rosy. …

The apostate Chris Buckley.

… “$3.6 trillion budget” can’t be right.The entire national debt is—what—about $11 trillion? He can’t actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, “Well.” …

Happily, the New Republic has made available Andrew Ferguson’s 1991 expose of Bill Moyers.

… He has, for example, used Republican scandals as occasions for sermons about betrayals of trust, government run amok, even as his own involvement in one of the seamier episodes of government malfeasance slips quietly down the memory hole, Johnson once called Movers “my vice president in charge of everything.” By all accounts the tag was accurate. According to classified documents unearthed by the Church Committee on intelligence abuses in 1976, and others obtained by David Garrow for his The FBI and Martin Luther King (1981), while at the White House Moyers tracked the bureau’s infamous campaign against King. The surveillance, begun under Kennedy, was broadened under Johnson. The rationale at the time, and the one Movers clings to on the few occasions he has discussed his involvement, was that King’s association with supposed Communists endangered the civil rights movement.

As the campaign against King progressed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely forwarded to the White House summaries of the King wiretaps, which were placed not only in King’s home and office but also in his hotel rooms around the country. The summaries covered not only King’s dealings with associates but also his sexual activities. After receiving one such summary, Moyers instructed the FBI to disseminate it widely throughout the executive branch, to Dean Rusk. Robert McNamara, Carl Rowan, and many others. Moyers was also aware at the time of Hoover’s efforts to leak the King material to the press.

Moyers’s interest in King was not limited to the “Communist” scare. King was allied with a group even more worrisome to the Johnson White House: dissident Democrats. At the Democratic convention in Atlantic City in 1964, King assisted civil rights associates in a credential challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation. The White House, fearing trouble for the fall campaign, instructed the FBI to intensify surveillance of the dissenters during the convention. As a result a wiretap was installed in King’s Atlantic City hotel room. One bureau memo reported happily that “we have been able to keep the White House and others very currently informed concerning King and these important matters.” The agent in charge of the bugging, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, kept in telephone contact with Moyers and his fellow Johnson aide, Walter Jenkins, throughout the convention, and the two aides successfully countered the King group’s maneuvers, allowing the good old boys to take their seats on the convention floor.

Moyers later wrote a note thanking DeLoach for his help, DeLoach replied: “Thank you for your very thoughtful and generous note concerning our operation in Atlantic City… . I’m certainly glad that we were able to come through with vital tidbits from time to time which were of assistance to you and Walter. You know you have only to call on us when a similar situation arises.”

It soon did. Not long before the election. Jenkins was arrested in a bathroom stall at the YMCA on a charge of “disorderly conduct.” Johnson, convinced that Jenkins was somehow set up by Goldwater’s campaign operatives, ordered Movers to gather information on the sexual histories of Goldwater’s staff. Movers called DeLoach, who reported back that he had been unable to find anything of political use. Ten years later Moyers won an Emmy for two PBS shows on Watergate, both noteworthy for his fiery indignation over Richard Nixon’s abuse of government power for political ends. The outrage was displayed again in the two ninety-minute PBS shows he has produced on the Iran-contra affair. …

Dilbert knows what will improve the economy.

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