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David Warren says Islamofacists are on the march because the West is beginning to look the part of bin Laden’s weak horse.

… The reasons for this resurgence are ready to hand. To the Islamist mind, the United States and her allies appear mortally wounded by a financial crisis that is metastasizing into an international depression. While they, too, suffer from the collapse of the oil price, and such funding as depends upon it, their war against the “Great Satan” remains asymmetrical, and material setbacks count harder against their enemy.

But there is a larger, though less tangible reason for their renewed confidence. “Bush and Blair” — the enemies Islamists most feared and detested — are now gone from the world stage, and the vision and determination with which they resisted Islamism has become suddenly a thing of the past.

The new American president, Barack Obama, has come to power with a promise to negotiate with America’s most deadly enemies; he signalled weakness unambiguously in a television interview to the Muslim world; he wants out of Iraq, and does not know what he is doing in Afghanistan. The very gloom and doom he is preaching on the home front, in order to get huge “progressive” spending measures through Congress, is the final confirmation that the United States is down and ready for the kicking. …

Looking at the collapsing markets, Roger Simon can follow the clues.

Jennifer Rubin learns from markets too.

… the president seems unconcerned with the private-sector slump. He’s out to expand government into new areas of regulation and control, inflict new taxes on investors, and remake the U.S. economy in the mold of its European counterparts so it will absorb more and more of the nation’s GDP than at any time since World War II.

Liberal pundits and other supporters of the president feign ignorance as to why the markets are crashing or they contend the downturn is unrelated to the Obama economic agenda. This is hogwash. CNBC analyst Charlie Gasparino, who spends his day with traders, investors, and other analysts, asks them why markets are in a downward spiral. Lo and behold, the administration’s policies and uncertainty have freaked them out. He describes their buyers’ remorse: …

Rubin says now Obama has lost David Brooks.

It’s not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War, but the president has lost David Brooks:

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.”

Well, well. First Chris Buckley and now Brooks. Usually it takes more than a month for presidents to disappoint those they have bamboozled during the campaign. But, as Brooks points out, Obama threw caution to the winds when he unveiled his monstrous budget: …

Abe Greenwald on how the Russians said nyet.

… Barack Obama is turning into a bizarro Don Corleone: He makes offers you can’t not refuse. Here are the fruits of “smart power” so far: Iran responds to President Obama’s “extended hand” by demanding apologies for a litany of American crimes; China has been given an American green-light to ramp up undisguised human rights abuses; the Russian president brushed off Obama’s appeal for help like so much dandruff; and Eastern Europe, where George W. Bush had successfully built up a spate of American allies, has been cut loose.

Next stop on the Smart Power ‘09 Tour: Syria, where the Assad regime is undoubtedly astounded by its own good fortune.

Bill McGurn wants to know if Obama will stand up for his children’s classmates.

Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama’s new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position.

The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation’s capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program — and with it perhaps the Parker children’s hopes for a Sidwell diploma. …

Cato posts on the DC voucher program.

WaPo editors defend the vouchers in DC.

CONGRESSIONAL Democrats want to mandate that the District’s unique school voucher program be reauthorized before more federal money can be allocated for it. It is a seemingly innocuous requirement. In truth it is an ill-disguised bid to kill a program that gives some poor parents a choice regarding where their children go to school. Many of the Democrats have never liked vouchers, and it seems they won’t let fairness or the interests of low-income, minority children stand in the way of their politics. But it also seems they’re too ashamed — and with good reason — to admit to what they’re doing. …

Walter Williams has words for Eric Holder.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the United States is “a nation of cowards” when it comes to race relations. In one sense, he is absolutely right. Many whites, from university administrators and professors, schoolteachers to employers and public officials accept behavior from black people that they wouldn’t begin to accept from whites. For example, some of the nation’s most elite universities, such as Vanderbilt, Stanford University and the University of California, have yielded to black student demands for separate graduation ceremonies and separate “celebratory events.” Universities such as Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and Cal Berkeley have, or have had, segregated dorms. If white students demanded whites-only graduation ceremonies or whites-only dorms, administrators would have labeled their demands as intolerable racism. When black students demand the same thing, these administrators cowardly capitulate. Calling these university administrators cowards is the most flattering characterization of their behavior. They might actually be stupid enough to believe nonsense taught by their some of sociology and psychology professors that blacks can’t be racists because they don’t have power. …

Jonah Goldberg defends Rush Limbaugh.

Here we go again. Rush Limbaugh is public enemy No. 1.

Liberal bloggers and media chin-strokers are aghast at Limbaugh’s statement that he hopes Barack Obama fails.

Well, given what Obama wants to do, I hope he fails too. Of course I want the financial crisis to end — who doesn’t? But Obama’s agenda is much more audacious. Pretty much every major news outlet in the country has said as a matter of objective analysis that Obama wants to repeal the legacy of Ronald Reagan and remake the country as a European welfare state. And yet people are shocked that conservatives, Limbaugh included, want Obama to fail in this effort?

What movie have they been watching? Because I could swear that conservatives opposing the expansion of big government is what conservatives do. It’s Aesopian. The scorpion must sting the frog. The conservative must object to socialized medicine. …

Scott Ott of Scrappleface reports in the DC Examiner that soon AIG will not be too big to fail.

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It seems there are two components to the causes of our current economic distress. The first, was affirmative action in mortgages. It had the same toxic effects affirmative action has had in the field of education, but in education there is no objective market mechanism to say, “This is bullshit.” So it can run along forever. However, there’s no ‘pretend’ option in the economy, so eventually the bad loans were found out. The second component, one harder to understand, is how the affirmative action mortgage bacillus infected the whole economy of the whole world. An article from Wired is one of the best attempts Pickerhead has seen in providing that understanding.

… Yet during the ’90s, as global markets expanded, there were trillions of new dollars waiting to be put to use lending to borrowers around the world—not just mortgage seekers but also corporations and car buyers and anybody running a balance on their credit card—if only investors could put a number on the correlations between them. The problem is excruciatingly hard, especially when you’re talking about thousands of moving parts. Whoever solved it would earn the eternal gratitude of Wall Street and quite possibly the attention of the Nobel committee as well.

To understand the mathematics of correlation better, consider something simple, like a kid in an elementary school: Let’s call her Alice. The probability that her parents will get divorced this year is about 5 percent, the risk of her getting head lice is about 5 percent, the chance of her seeing a teacher slip on a banana peel is about 5 percent, and the likelihood of her winning the class spelling bee is about 5 percent. If investors were trading securities based on the chances of those things happening only to Alice, they would all trade at more or less the same price.

But something important happens when we start looking at two kids rather than one—not just Alice but also the girl she sits next to, Britney. If Britney’s parents get divorced, what are the chances that Alice’s parents will get divorced, too? Still about 5 percent: The correlation there is close to zero. But if Britney gets head lice, the chance that Alice will get head lice is much higher, about 50 percent—which means the correlation is probably up in the 0.5 range. If Britney sees a teacher slip on a banana peel, what is the chance that Alice will see it, too? Very high indeed, since they sit next to each other: It could be as much as 95 percent, which means the correlation is close to 1. And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1.

If investors were trading securities based on the chances of these things happening to both Alice and Britney, the prices would be all over the place, because the correlations vary so much.

But it’s a very inexact science. Just measuring those initial 5 percent probabilities involves collecting lots of disparate data points and subjecting them to all manner of statistical and error analysis. Trying to assess the conditional probabilities—the chance that Alice will get head lice if Britney gets head lice—is an order of magnitude harder, since those data points are much rarer. As a result of the scarcity of historical data, the errors there are likely to be much greater.

In the world of mortgages, it’s harder still. What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation’s macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well? …

London Times editors appraise the president’s first month.

… It is a political commonplace that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But the sound of Mr Obama’s prose has begun to jangle. “Now is the time,” he said lulling his congressional audience, “to act boldly and wisely – to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.” The trouble is that this wasn’t the first time that Mr Obama told Americans that “it’s time to act”. Nobody doubts that now, in the teeth of the cruelest economic crisis in decades, it is time to act. But the world is still not clear what actions Mr Obama plans to take. What unnerves it even more is that when he has acted, his judgment has not always matched the sturdiness of his campaign rhetoric, let alone its slick, skilful execution. He has been ambushed in traps too often of his own making. …

Union-Leader editors too.

In nine words of his Wednesday night address to Congress, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he was not for big government. In the remaining 5,893 words, he proved those nine untrue.

The agenda the President put forward is the largest expansion of the federal government at least since the Great Society and probably since the New Deal. It would not simply pump short-term cash into the economy and the credit markets. It would fundamentally reorder America’s relationship with Washington.

Worse, it would do so in ways that are economically destructive. …

NewsBusters has more on Bill Moyers.

… Moyers has a reason to hope that everyone under 60 forgets, after all his PBS moralizing on shows with titles like The Secret Government, and after suggesting Reagan should be impeached for Iran-Contra dishonesty in a documentary suggestively titled High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The more that uncooperative writers peek under the rocks of Bill Moyers in government service, the phonier he looks. He looks, unsurprisingly, like a Democratic hack who became a Democratic hack media star on PBS, a network launched by LBJ’s Democratic hacks.

The Economist reports Atlas Shrugged is selling especially well during triple T. (These Troubled Times)

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We are going to have another shot looking at Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” remarks. Marty Peretz starts it off calling attention to a piece by one our favorites, Abigail Thernstrom. Another of our faves, Stuart Taylor, quotes Abby in his commentary.

Here’s Abby Thernstrom’s piece.

I don’t know what nation the attorney general is living in, but it’s not the one I know. Eric Holder’s speech to Justice Department staff on February 18 was scandalously uninformed, as well as arrogant and incoherent. It should be an embarrassment to the president.

Given the already splendid commentary on this speech by Jonah Goldberg and others, I had intended to hold my tongue. But after reading the attorney general’s remarks in full, I changed my mind. “A nation of cowards” — those attention-grabbing words have been much remarked upon. In fact, the rest of the speech is even more disturbing than that mud-slinging phrase.

Take the charge that “outside the workplace” the racial scene is “bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.”

A little fact-checking is in order. …

And Stuart Taylor was in the National Journal.

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Your speech commemorating Black History Month by calling America “a nation of cowards” because we “do not talk enough with each other about race” — a topic about which we talk incessantly — was unworthy of the admirable public servant I believe you to be.

The speech was, as others have pointed out, embarrassingly misinformed, hackneyed, and devoid of thoughtful contributions to racial dialogue.

You can do much better. Please use your bully pulpit in the future to cut through the usual cant and state some politically incorrect truths about race in America that would carry special weight if they came from you. That would require mustering the courage to take on the Democratic Party’s powerful racial-grievance lobby. But it would do the country a lot of good.

The one point that you developed in a bit of detail in the February 18 speech was especially silly: “Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment…. Until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so-called ‘real’ American history.”

Bosh. The reality is that our high schools and universities are quite clearly focusing disproportionate attention on black history. …

Mark Steyn has a look at the budget.

… The Wall Street Journal calculated that if you took every single dime – that’s 100 percent – of the over-250K crowd, it barely begins to pay for this program, even before half of them flee the country. The $4 trillion Congress is planning on spending next year (2010) could just about be covered if you took every single dime of the taxable income of every American earning over $75,000.

But it doesn’t matter. Because Big Government is the ultimate hero, and the private sector is merely a supporting role. Last week, the president redefined the relationship between the citizen and the state, in ways that make America closer to Europe. If you’ve still got the Webster’s to hand, “closer to Europe” is a sociopolitical colloquialism meaning “much worse.”

Is the new all-powerful Statezilla vulnerable to anything? Unfortunately, yes. He loses all his superpowers when he comes into contact with something called Reality. But happily Reality is nowhere in sight. There are believed to be some small surviving shards somewhere on the planet – maybe on an uninhabited atoll somewhere in the Pacific – but that’s just a rumor, and Barack Obama isn’t planning on running into Reality any time soon.

Thomas Sowell thinks Sarah Palin is a modern day Whittaker Chambers.

… Governor Palin’s candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, “He’s not one of us.”

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was “one of us.” As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today. …

LA Times Op-Ed on the havoc in Mexico wrought by our drug war.

Early in the last century, near the end of his 34 bloody years in power, the aging Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz mused that his country’s great misfortune was to be located “so far from God and so near the United States.”

The shrewd old thief’s observation came to mind this week when U.S. officials announced they’d joined with Mexican authorities in arresting more than 730 people allegedly linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel. That gang is the most powerful of the numerous criminal organizations smuggling drugs into the United States. Their intramural quarrels and resistance to a government crackdown have plunged Mexico into a round of violence unseen since the Cristero Wars in the 1920s. Over the last year, about 6,000 Mexicans have been killed.

Many fear that Mexico could be sliding into civil instability because of the cartels’ increasing willingness to use violence and bribery to protect their business. It’s an old story in other parts of Latin America, and for that reason, three of the region’s former heads of state — including onetime Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo — recently issued a report urging the U.S. to consider legalizing at least marijuana. Fat chance. …

Marine Private First Class Chance Phelps was killed in Rumadi, Iraq Good Friday 2004. Nine days later he was buried in Dubois, Wyoming. His escort home was Lt Col. Michael Strobl whose recollections formed the basis for an original HBO film Taking Chance which first aired a week ago this past Saturday. Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the film for the WSJ.

It was impossible to imagine, beforehand, all the ways a film like “Taking Chance”  could work its power. There are no conflicts, no warring sides, no mysteries of character — the usual stuff of drama. The story’s outcome is clear from the beginning. Yet it’s no less clear that “Taking Chance” is not only high drama, but a kind that is, in the most literal way, breathtaking — watching parts of it can make breathing an effort, and those parts come at every turn. It’s no less obvious that this film, about a Marine killed in combat, could have gone wrong in all sorts of ways and did so in none of them. There is in this work, at once so crushing and exhilarating, not a false note.

The credit for that belongs to Lt. Col. Michael Stroble, U.S. Marine Corps, on whose journal the film is based; to producer, writer and director Ross Katz; and, not least, to Kevin Bacon, whose portrayal of the devoted Col. Stroble is a masterwork — flawless in its fierce economy, eloquent in its testimony, most of it wordless, to everything that is going on.

You can watch this film on HBO today, Sunday, at 2:30pm, Monday morning at midnight, Wednesday noon and 8:00pm, and Sat. 4:30pm. Barack Obama diminishes himself by ignoring our success in Iraq. He would do well to watch this film. Perhaps he would come to understand some things about this country that, so far, have escaped his notice.

The Onion reports blacks are tired of all the high fives after Obama’s election.

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