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Christopher Booker, in the Telegraph, UK, elaborates on the scandals of Climategate.

…There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU. …

Ed Morrissey posts on the New York Times editorial board taking Obama to task over his Middle East foreign policy blunders.

It only took them three years to figure it out, of course.  The Gray Lady’s ire focuses on the disaster Obama has made of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which is usually a rolling disaster anyway.  American Presidents haven’t been able to do much to make it better, but as the Times explains, this one’s made it a lot worse than it had to be — mainly because he’s a diplomatic novice with team full of incompetents (via Geoff A) …

…The editors go on to castigate George Mitchell a little more for blowing the effort with the Saudis, who took their signals from Team Obama.  When Obama publicly demanded a halt to all settlements, the Saudis made that their line in the sand.  The Times scolds them for doing so, but the fact is that once the US made that demand, it put all the pressure on Israel and took all the pressure off of the other parties in the talks.

As the editorial says, Obama and Mitchell couldn’t think past their own opening move and game out the possibilities.  Why might that be?  The foreign-policy team that includes Emanuel and Samantha Power (at the National Security Council) has ideological interests in getting Israel to surrender.  Power suggested a few years ago that the Western nations should invade and occupy Israel in order to set the Palestinians free.  With that kind of advice flowing at the White House, this diktat on settlements is hardly surprising, nor is its end result.

When Newsweek and the New York Times tells a Democratic president that he’s screwing up foreign policy, it’s time to clean house and start getting professional help.  Unfortunately, neither of these publications considered the ramifications of endorsing an inexperienced ideologue for the top job when it counted.

And here’s the New York Times editorial.

…Peacemaking takes strategic skill. But we see no sign that President Obama and Mr. Mitchell were thinking more than one move down the board. The president went public with his demand for a full freeze on settlements before securing Israel’s commitment. And he and his aides apparently had no plan for what they would do if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said no.

Most important, they allowed the controversy to obscure the real goal: nudging Israel and the Palestinians into peace talks. (We don’t know exactly what happened but we are told that Mr. Obama relied more on the judgment of his political advisers — specifically his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel — than of his Mideast specialists.) …

…Mr. Netanyahu has since offered a compromise 10-month freeze that exempts Jerusalem, schools and synagogues and permits Israel to complete 3,000 housing units already under construction. The irony is that while this offer goes beyond what past Israeli governments accepted, Mr. Obama had called for more. And the Palestinians promptly rejected the compromise. …

In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson says that the US must get its fiscal house in order if we are to remain a global superpower, and thus to remain safe and keep our high standard of living.

…But if the United States succumbs to a fiscal crisis, as an increasing number of economic experts fear it may, then the entire balance of global economic power could shift. Military experts talk as if the president’s decision about whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan is a make-or-break moment. In reality, his indecision about the deficit could matter much more for the country’s long-term national security. Call the United States what you like—superpower, hegemon, or empire—but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power. …

…As interest payments eat into the budget, something has to give—and that something is nearly always defense expenditure. According to the CBO, a significant decline in the relative share of national security in the federal budget is already baked into the cake. On the Pentagon’s present plan, defense spending is set to fall from above 4 percent now to 3.2 percent of GDP in 2015 and to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2028.

Over the longer run, to my own estimated departure date of 2039, spending on health care rises from 16 percent to 33 percent of GDP (some of the money presumably is going to keep me from expiring even sooner). But spending on everything other than health, Social Security, and interest payments drops from 12 percent to 8.4 percent.

This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America’s debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term should be the administration’s most important task—significantly more than the 24 percent who see health-care reform as the No. 1 priority. But cutting the deficit in half is simply not enough. If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don’t forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

In the WSJ, Fred Barnes reviews the mistakes that have cost the president much of his political capital

…First, Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn’t a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda. …

…Second, Mr. Obama misread his own ability to sway the public. He is a glib, cool, likeable speaker whose sentences have subjects and verbs. During the campaign, he gave dazzling speeches about hope and change that excited voters. …

…But campaign speeches don’t have to be specific, and candidates aren’t accountable. Presidential speeches are different. The object is to persuade voters to back a certain policy, and it turns out Mr. Obama is not good at this. He failed to stop the steady decline in support for any of his policies, most notably health care. …

…Third, Mr. Obama misread Republicans. They felt weak and vulnerable after losing two straight congressional elections and watching John McCain’s presidential bid fall flat. They were afraid to criticize the newly elected president. If he had offered them minimal concessions, many of them would have jumped aboard his policies. If that had happened, the president could have boasted of achieving bipartisan compromise on the stimulus and other policies. He let the chance slip away. …

Thomas Sowell explains that every politician in Washington thinks his job is to take care of himself.

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems— of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind. …

…The current economic downturn that has cost millions of people their jobs began with successive administrations of both parties pushing banks and other lenders to make mortgage loans to people whose incomes, credit history and inability or unwillingness to make a substantial down payment on a house made them bad risks.

Was that stupid? Not at all. The money that was being put at risk was not the politicians’ money, and in most cases was not even the government’s money. Moreover, the jobs that are being lost by the millions are not the politicians’ jobs— and jobs in the government’s bureaucracies are increasing. …

…Very few people are likely to connect the dots back to those members of Congress who voted for bigger mortgage guarantees and bailouts by the FHA. So the Congressmen’s and the bureaucrats’ jobs are safe, even if millions of other people’s jobs are not. …

Investor’s Business Daily has an article from Svetlana Kunin, a Soviet refugee who has understands the evils of socialism.

…When I came to America in 1980 and experienced life in this country, I thought it was fortunate that those living in the USSR did not know how unfortunate they were.

Now in 2009, I realize how unfortunate it is that many Americans do not understand how fortunate they are. They vote to give government more and more power without understanding the consequences

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The climate “warm-mongers” aren’t going to let a little thing like evidence get in the way of their global warming beliefs says Mark Steyn.

My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the “climate change” racket was Stuart Varney’s interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama “St Elsewhere” but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an “activist.” … Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit, in which the world’s leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to “hide the decline” and other interesting matters. …

…”Peer-reviewed studies. Go to Science magazine, folks. Go to Nature,” babbled Ed. “Read peer-reviewed studies. That’s all you need to do. Don’t get it from you or me.”

Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you! …

…Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review”. When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. …

Charles Krauthammer discusses three efficient reforms for health care.

…First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do. …

…Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter. …

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues — the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget. …

Matthew Continetti thinks it is time to try to talk some sense into starry-eyed Dems about the nightmare their health reform will be.

Next time you run into a group of Democrats, offer to splash water on their faces. They’ve spent 2009 in a dream state, and it’s time they wake up. They’re convinced that they can subsidize health insurance for millions of people while also “bending the cost curve” of health care spending. They want to sign us up for the political equivalent of one of those three-step “eat more to lose weight” diets. Step one: Pile on the expenditures, regulations, taxes, and fees. Step two: Close your eyes. Step three: Pray it all works out in the end.

Sorry, it won’t. Entitlements cost money, and they almost invariably cost more than the government’s initial predictions. When you increase demand for a product and the supply remains fixed, the price rises. Thanks to the individual mandate, the Democratic health care bills lasso Americans into a heavily regulated health insurance oligopoly. All these new consumers will wander through the government-run “exchanges,” buying the plans they can afford with taxpayer subsidies. As demand for health care increases, so will the cost.

The idea that expanding coverage will save the country money has always been a fantasy. …

Poll numbers show that Dems can’t have their cake and eat it too, says Karl Rove.

…However, since taking office Mr. Obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion expansion of the child health program known as S-chip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations spending bill, and an $80 billion car company bailout. He also pushed a $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the House and is now urging Congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health-care bill.

An honest appraisal of the nation’s finances would recommend dropping both of these last two priorities. But the administration has long planned to run up the federal credit card. …

…This spending has been matched by a decline in the president’s poll numbers. This week, Gallup found that his job approval rating slipped below 50%. Last March, Americans approved of Mr. Obama’s handling of the deficit by a 52% to 43% margin in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. By October, his standing had flipped in the same poll, with 45% approving and 51% disapproving.

Anger over deficits was picked up in a late October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which asked voters if they’d rather boost “the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits” or keep the “budget deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.” Only 31% chose boosting the economy; 62% wanted to keep the deficit down. …

David Harsanyi writes that at least two Democrat congressmen have not seen the recent polls.

W ith good reason, the prevailing economic concern of most Americans is jobs.

With this in mind, two Democratic congressmen have cooked up a plan to help us out. The strategy entails sucking another $150 billion of capital investment out of the market each year and handing it to an organization that can’t balance a budget, borrows money with abandon, runs massive deficits and excels at creating fairy tale jobs.

Under a bill being drafted by Democratic Reps. Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, every purchase of a financial instrument like stocks, options, derivatives and futures would face an additional .25 percent tax — because capital gains taxes simply haven’t been hampering private investment enough.

… Here’s a restorative idea: Spend less. …

John Tierney makes the case for keeping archaeological treasures widespread. Is a cultural heritage tied solely to a geographic region? And does the government currently in power in that region own the history of that region?

…In some cases, it makes aesthetic or archaeological sense to keep artifacts grouped together where they were found, but it can also be risky to leave everything in one place, particularly if the country is in turmoil or can’t afford to excavate or guard all its treasures. After the Metropolitan Museum was pressured to hand over a collection called the Lydian Hoard, one of the most valuable pieces was stolen several years ago from its new home in Turkey.

Restricting the export of artifacts hasn’t ended their theft and looting any more than the war on drugs has ended narcotics smuggling. Instead, the restrictions promote the black market and discourage the kind of open research that would benefit everyone except criminals. …

…Some of the most culturally protectionist nations today, like Egypt, Italy and Turkey, are trying to hoard treasures that couldn’t have been created without the inspiration provided by imported works of art. (Imagine the Renaissance without the influence of “looted” Greek antiquities.) And the current political rulers of those countries often have little in common culturally with the creators of the artifacts they claim to own. …

Dr. Hawass may consider the Rosetta Stone to be the property of his government agency, but the modern state of Egypt didn’t even exist when it was discovered in 1799 (much less when it was inscribed in 196 B.C., during the Hellenistic era). The land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the local historians were most interested in studying their Islamic heritage.

The inscribed stone fragment, which had been used as construction material at a fort, didn’t acquire any significance until it was noticed by Napoleon’s soldiers and examined by the scholars on the expedition. …

Nick Schulz, in the Enterprise Blog, has a fascinating chart that helps explain some of the poor choices coming from the Obama administration.

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

In Bloomberg News, Caroline Baum takes the Obama administration to task for the bogus job numbers.

At first it was just an unverifiable assertion. Now it turns out to have been a case of bureaucratic ineptitude and possible fraud. Transparency and accountability aren’t working out the way President Barack Obama had hoped.

The administration was already skating on thin ice when it announced on Oct. 30, with great fanfare, that 640,329 jobs had been created or saved as a result of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. …

…Watchdog.org, a collection of independent journalists covering state and local government, has put together a “Guide to the Stimulus, District by (Phantom) District.” Overall the group found that 440 phantom districts in 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories received $6.4 billion and created or saved — let’s consolidate to “craved” — 30,000 jobs. That works out to $213,333 per job. Think how much easier, not to mention transparent, it would have been to hand out that kind of real money to real people who will spend it! …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reminds us that we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the failure of collectivism in the US.

Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving. And there is no better time to remember an underappreciated lesson of the original Thanksgiving: that the Pilgrims nearly starved to death because of collectivism and eventually saved themselves by adopting a system of private property. Economist Benjamin Powell tells the story here:

Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did. …

…Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. While not a complete private property system, the move away from communal ownership had dramatic results.

…Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years. It was only after allowing greater property rights that they could feast without worrying that famine was just around the corner. …

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National Review OnLine with a symposium on things for which we might want to give thanks.

David Warren is the first of our favorites to column on the hacked emails of the globalony specialists in England; what Mark Steyn has called Warmergate.

A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which “human-induced global warming” claims have been advanced over the years.

By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia — in some respects the international clearing house for climate change “science” — he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.

More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various “progressive” causes require a particular scientific result.

There is little doubt that the e-mails were real. Even so warmist a true-believer as George Monbiot led his column in the Guardian yesterday with: “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The e-mails extracted … could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” …

Debra Saunders writes on the misuse of pardon power.

On Wednesday, President Obama will issue the White House’s standard hokey pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey. It goes with the job.

That’s good news for the lucky turkey, but not much help for the many nonviolent first offenders languishing in federal prisons because, nine months into office, Obama has yet to exercise his presidential pardon power. …

… the new president doesn’t seem eager to use his unfettered pardon power to correct sentencing injustices for the politically unconnected.

Look at Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder. When Holder worked for the Clinton administration, Ruckman noted, “he wouldn’t take the time, energy or effort to make it a regular feature of government.”

“But he would, if you will, make an effort in wildly controversial situations.” Such as Holder’s “neutral leaning positive” recommendation for the pardon sought by fugitive gazillionaire Marc Rich and his role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists.

When you think about it, the pardon petition is the rare Washington exercise that encourages politically unconnected people to petition their president for relief. But like Bush and Clinton before him, Obama seems to be hoarding this power. It’s as if Team Obama sees justice as perk, not an equal right.

David Harsanyi on Washington “courage.”

… These days, the idea of courage — especially in Washington — flows freely.

Recently, Newt Gingrich called Obama “a liberal Democratic president who has the courage to take on the establishment on education,” as if the tepid education reforms of the administration were akin to a power move against the Gambino crime syndicate (though, admittedly, the National Education Association comes close).

Actress Angie Harmon this week declared Sarah Palin was a “woman who has her own set of values and morals and ethics and has the courage to live her life accordingly.” How many of you have the steely courage to sell 700,000 books in a week? …

John Stossel says we pay politicians to lie to us.

When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician.

President Obama insists that health care “reform” not “add a dime” to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow “$900 billion over 10 years” has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit.

It’s amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion.

How do they do that? …

Jennifer Rubin has a couple of posts on the KSM New York trial. First on how the prez might get out of this. She also posts on KSM’s lawyer who has made frivolous pleadings in the past. And has been admonished by the court and ordered to pay the costs his opponents incurred defending against his bogus motions.

… The president can blame Greg Graig or Holder, if he must. Obama reversed course on the detainee photos after advice from Justice, so he’s not unaccustomed to the process. Embarrassing? Sure. But if he thinks about what years and years of a show trial will mean, and the impact it will have on his image as commander in chief as the public realizes that this could easily have been avoided, Obama may come to see that a quick dose of embarrassment now is preferable to years of humiliation down the road.

Someone’s polls are crashing and J. Rubin posts on that also.

… You might have to strain to get the point, but the Times is explaining that the health-care debate is making things worse because it’s proving conservatives’ point about Obama’s statist tendencies. It’s also significant that Obama did not get a bump, in fact got a slide, out of his overseas trip, which reminded Americans of their president’s cringey incompetence. (The Times, again, spins this: “The media coverage of Mr. Obama’s visit to China was critical of the way he dealt with Chinese leaders.”)

Well, rational people would look at this and reassess, see what has gone wrong, fire those whose judgment was flawed, and try to get the presidency back on track. This crowd? A combination of true believers and purveyors of “damn the consequences for the moderates,” I suspect, will prevent much if any alteration in the course of this administration. Only elections, I suspect, will have much impact.

Ryan Streeter at American.com says Texas v. California might be a metaphor for the divisions in our country.

New Geography, the online magazine created by Joel Kotkin and others with a special focus on demographics and trends, has been tracking the implosion of California in an interesting way: by comparing it to Texas.

Texas and California are America’s two most populous states, together numbering approximately 55 million people, which is only about 6 million less than the United Kingdom, where I live. California, as everyone knows, has a coolness factor that Texas cannot match. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and wine. Say no more. But, unless one has been living in a cave, everyone knows that the cool state is also the broke state. If Hollywood turned California’s budget and fiscal position into a movie, it would be a blockbuster horror film indeed.

Texas, on the other hand, is growing, creating wealth, and attracting the entrepreneurial and creative classes that too many people think only go to places like New York and California. This interesting post by Tory Gattis at New Geography explains why. He shares a four-point analysis from Trends magazine: …

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For a long time it looked like the new administration would be Welcome Back Carter time. Read this from Spengler and see if you don’t agree with Pickerhead we are instead seeing Carter Lite. Amazing, the luck of Jimmy Carter; somebody worse than him. Think that’s unfair? Read next about Obama’s policy towards India. W’s policy there was a major American success. So, the petulant president ignores the country.

… Obama’s fecklessness has allowed the unimaginable to occur: Russia’s influence in the Middle East rivals that of the United States.

David Samuels wrote on November 13 in Slate magazine about “the elegant and brutal way that the Russians have leveraged their position as the arms supplier of last resort to Iran and Syria”. Russia feints towards Iran by offering to sell Tehran a top-of-the-line air-defense system, the S-300. It then extorts concessions from the West (or Israel) in return for delaying shipment of the system. One result of Russia’s rocket diplomacy, Samuels observes, is a three-way alliance between Russia, India and Israel to develop high-tech weapons, including a so-called fifth-generation fighter that may be able to challenge America’s F-35.

If Israel does attempt an air strike against Iran’s nuclear program, it will do so in response to the visible failure of American diplomacy, and with the tacit permission of Russia – which has the capacity to veto such a strike by giving Iran anti-aircraft missiles of sufficient capability (or by not giving Israel the key to the counter-measures, for Russia never sells a weapons system to another country that it cannot neutralize).

Obama’s foreign policy in every manifestation – Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia – has come to grief, and the White House so far has shown no reaction except lockjaw. The great decisions of the world are being taken outside Washington. Too many things have gone wrong to secure the outcome. The game now is in the hands of the spoilers, the players who draw strength from chaos, and first among them is Russia. That creates positive feedback, for the powers who thrive on uncertainty will do their best to generate more

With India’s prime minister currently visiting the US, Tunku Varadarajan takes the opportunity to discuss the importance of India in US foreign relations.

…It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the political, strategic, and moral worth to America, the world’s most powerful democracy, of a strong alliance with India, the world’s largest. Mr. Obama, by no stretch a man of tepid intelligence, has calibrated things artfully: Not only is Mr. Singh the first state visitor to Washington since the president took office in January, his trip is the first time that India has headed an American president’s list for a state visit—ever. (Richard Nixon must be turning in his grave.) …

…Given all this swirl, Mr. Obama has had scant inclination to pay much attention to, let alone court, Delhi. This has not gone down well in India, a country surrounded by a wall of thin skin. India had grown used, under Mr. Obama’s predecessor, to alpha-dog treatment. George W. Bush was the best American president India ever had, and Mr. Obama’s ability to take India for granted is, in some measure, a tribute to the extent to which Mr. Bush locked the two countries into a presumptively inseparable alliance. But for all his emphasis on diplomacy in dealing with hostile states, like Iran, or inveterate competitor-states, like China, Mr. Obama has failed to grasp the diplomatic importance of tending to alliances, whether they be old and true ones, such as the one with Israel, or young and sensitive ones, such as the one with India. …

…Finally, a broader word about India and its relationship with America: Unlike China, which is inherently competitive for global leadership—and which will never accept American leadership or direction—India is a country that would, like Britain or Japan or Germany, settle for a partnership with the United States that guaranteed mutual benefit and respect. India’s natural state, if nations can be said to have such a thing, is neither triumphalist nor antagonist; it is cooperative and redemptive, much as America’s tends to be. One trusts that Mr. Obama will come to see these qualities as clearly as his predecessor did. If not, this could be one area in which history will judge Mr. Obama to have been “dumb,” and Mr. Bush to have been the “smart” one.

Pickerhead thinks that Beltway bias shows when discussing Palin’s supposed lack of qualifications to be president, considering the empty suit who currently occupies the position. Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts his thoughts.

Longtime readers may recall that I was initially positive about Sarah Palin because her record was much more libertarian than that of most other major national politicians. Later, I had to reassess my view of Palin, as her ignorance of many important policy issues became apparent. But I also emphasized that ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity, and that in my view Palin suffers from the former, not the latter — a conclusion also reached by liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. I do a lot of research on political ignorance, and the distinction between ignorance and stupidity is one that I have often urged people to keep in mind. For reasons that I discuss here and here, even professional politicians often find it rational to devote their time to activities other than learning about major national issues.

Still, an ignorant but intelligent person is capable of remedying her ignorance to a greater extent than one who is both ignorant and stupid. In reading Palin’s recent memoir, Going Rogue, I wanted to see if there was any evidence that she has taken steps to address what many people see as her biggest weakness — myself included. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say either way. As a sympathetic WSJ reviewer points out, the book devotes little attention to national policy issues. Palin does come across as knowledgeable about Alaska state issues, but her facility in that area was never seriously in question.

The book argues at length that the various gaffes that revealed Palin’s ignorance during the 2008 campaign were mostly the fault of McCain’s consultants and a biased media. I remain unpersuaded. Yes, many people in the media were biased against Palin, and perhaps the consultants made mistakes (it’s hard for me to assess that claim without knowing more about the consultants’ side of the story). Even so, there is no excuse for Palin’s inability to give competent answers to relatively simple questions about such things as which newspapers and magazines she read, which Supreme Court decisions she disagrees with, or describing the basics of her position on US policy towards Russia. If Katie Couric really was out to get Palin, as the book suggests, she could surely have asked tougher questions than these. In any event, a candidate facing a biased media should be all the more careful to avoid obvious mistakes. …

Ilya Somin also has optimistic comments about right-wing populism, despite his somewhat exaggerated concerns about the irrational fringe elements and their sway.

I am no fan of populism of either the left or right-wing variety. In my view, most populist movements exploit voter ignorance and irrationality to promote policies that tend to do far more harm than good. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the right-wing populist reaction to the economic crisis and Obama’s policies. With rare exceptions, right-wing populists such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the Tea Party protesters, have advocated free market approaches to dealing with the crisis, and have attacked Obama and the Democratic Congress for seeking massive increases in government spending and regulation. They have not responded in any of several much worse ways that seemed like plausible alternatives a year ago, and may still be today.

True, much of their rhetoric is oversimplified, doesn’t take account of counterarguments, and is unfair to opponents. But the same can be said for nearly all political rhetoric directed at a popular audience made up of rationally ignorant voters who pay only very limited attention to politics and don’t understand the details of policy debates. On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars. There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories. Indeed, efforts to paint the Tea Partiers and others as merely closet racists usually have to rely on unsupported claims about “unspoken” assumptions and subtexts. Most, if not all, of the right-wing populists would have reacted in much the same way if the policies advocated by Obama had instead been put forward by a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton or President John Edwards.

Things could have been a lot worse. For example, the right-wing populists could have reacted to Obama and the financial crisis by embracing the kind of big government social conservatism advocated by Mike Huckabee during the presidential campaign. Still worse, they could have flocked to the protectionism and nativism advocated by people like Pat Buchanan. This latter possibility would have been in line with the anti-illegal immigration hysteria that swept the populist right just two years ago. …

Thomas Sowell’s series on the housing bubble continues. Sowell explains how the government forced banks to meet racial quotas, rather than assessing loans on creditworthiness.

…Although the Community Reinvestment Act had no major immediate impact, over the years its underlying assumptions and provisions provided the basis for ever more insistent pressure on lenders from a variety of government officials and agencies to lend to those whom politicians and bureaucrats wanted them to lend to, rather than to those whom lenders would have chosen to lend to on the basis of the lenders’ own experience and expertise.

These pressures began to build in the 1990s and increased exponentially thereafter. Studies in the early 1990s, showing different mortgage-loan approval rates for blacks and whites, set off media sensations and denunciations, leading to both congressional and White House pressures on agencies regulating banks to impose new lending rules, and to monitor statistics on the loan approval rates by race, by community and by income, with penalties on banks and other lenders for failing to meet politically-imposed norms or quotas.

These stepped-up pressures began during the George H.W. Bush administration and escalated during the Clinton administration, when Attorney General Janet Reno threatened legal action against lenders whose racial statistics raised her suspicions.

It would be too much of a detour at this point to go into the details of these claims of racial discrimination by mortgage lenders. However, even at this point, the idea that lenders would be offended by receiving monthly mortgage payment checks in the mail from blacks should at least give us pause to assess whether or not it seems plausible — especially since a substantial majority of both blacks and whites had their mortgage-loan applications approved.

The issue has been about the statistical difference between these approval rates, not any claim that most blacks could not get mortgage loans. …

…For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn’t enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of “innovative or flexible” lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods.

In plain English, the regulators imposed quotas — and, if lenders had to resort to “innovative or flexible” standards and methods to meet those quotas, so be it. …

…These were not the only government pressures on banks to fulfill lending quotas. In 1993, the Department of Housing and Urban Development “began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers that declined a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants.” Lenders then began lowering their down payment and income requirements. …

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In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff builds an explanation of the Chinese pegging the yuan to the US dollar, and what will happen when the Chinese stop this practice.

During President Obama’s high profile visit to China this week, the most frequently discussed, yet least understood, topic was how currency valuations are affecting the economic relationship between the United States and China. The focal problem is the Chinese government’s policy of fixing the value of the renminbi against the U.S. dollar. While many correctly perceive that this ‘peg’ has contributed greatly to the current global imbalances, few fully comprehend the ramifications should that peg be discarded.

The common understanding is both incomplete and naive. Most analysts simply see the peg as China’s principal weapon in an economic struggle for global ascendancy. The peg, they argue, offers China a competitive advantage by making its products cheaper in U.S. markets, thus allowing Chinese firms to gobble up market share and steal jobs from U.S. manufacturers. The thought is that were China to allow its currency to rise, American manufactures would regain their lost edge, and both manufacturing firms and the jobs formerly associated with them would return. In this narrative, the struggle centers on the United States’ diminishing leverage in persuading the Chinese to lay down their unfair weaponry. It’s a sympathetic picture, but it tells the wrong story.

While the peg certainly is responsible for much of the world’s problems, its abandonment would cause severe hardship in the United States. In fact, for the U.S., de-pegging would cause the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. Our economy is currently on life support provided by an endless flow of debt financing from China. These purchases are the means by which China maintains the relative value of its currency against the dollar. As the dollar comes under even more downward pressure, China’s purchases must increase to keep the renminbi from rising. By maintaining the peg, China enables our politicians and citizens to continue spending more than they have and avoiding the hard choices necessary to restore our long-term economic health. …

In WaPo, Robert Samuelson comments on Obamacare’s transfer of wealth from the young to the old.

One of our long-running political stories is the economic assault on the young by the old. We have become a society that invests in its past and disfavors the future. This makes no sense for the nation, but as politics it makes complete sense. The elderly and near elderly are better organized, focus obsessively on their government benefits and seem deserving. Grandmas and Grandpas command sympathy.

Everyone knows that the resulting “entitlements” dominate government spending and squeeze education, research, defense and almost everything else. In fiscal 2008 — the last “normal” year before the economic crisis — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43 percent of federal spending and more than twice military spending. Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old.

Now comes the House-passed health-care “reform” bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of that for younger Americans. That’s much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those age 60 to 64 is four to five times greater than those 18 to 24. So, the young would overpay for insurance that — under the House bill — people must buy: Twenty- and thirtysomethings would subsidize premiums for fifty-and sixtysomethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.) …

In Der Spiegel, Gabor Steingart assesses Obama’s Asian trip, and reviews Obama’s foreign policy paradigm.

…The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences. …

We hear from another disillusioned liberal. In Politico, Elizabeth Drew discusses Greg Craig’s departure.

…While he (Obama) was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason – not the first or only reason – to conclude that he wasn’t the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign. …

In the Daily Beast, Lee Siegel looks at Obama’s governing style in light of the KSM decision.

…This illusion of national participation in his decision-making process, with the promise of a happy ending that excludes no one, has been Obama’s method almost from Day One. Call it the American Idol style of governing—except that no possibility ever gets voted out of the competition. …

…On health care, once again, Obama proclaimed his desire for an ideal solution, held himself aloof from the fray, and let the public, the media, and the politicians turn it into a World Wrestling match that made almost any sort of compromise a victory. On Afghanistan, the same process: The president might deplore the leaks that came from inside and outside his administration, but they dripped slowly, and from widely scattered places, just like the slowly dripping, all-inclusive way he appears to think.

Obama seems not so much to govern as to preside. And yet for all the prudent pragmatism of his style, he doesn’t seem merely to want to please everyone. He seems determined not to be held responsible for the displeasure he causes. In the end, Obama won’t be blamed for what will likely be the health-care bill’s substantial flaws. Instead, the transparency of the process leading up to the bill ensures that at every point where the bill seems to fail one constituency or another, a particular person or people will be blamed for thwarting Obama. …

In News Busters, Noel Sheppard has a surprising post on Chris Matthews’ opinion of Obama.

Chris Matthews appears to have lost that loving feeling for Barack Obama.

On “The Chris Matthews Show” Sunday, the once smitten MSNBCer called some of Obama’s recent mistakes “Carteresque” …

…Potentially as surprising as Matthews bringing these issues up was the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut and David Ignatius agreeing with him

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Welcome back. The word these days is optics, visuals, signals. In the Carter presidency, the optics were not exactly robust, and Ronald Reagan rode that to a big victory in 1980. Is the Obama White House sending some Carteresque signals these days? Some see that in the deep bow to the Emperor of Japan, an unforced error say critics. Then there was, there was what happened in China: Obama got nothing in the way of concessions over there in spite of playing the polite visitor. And his effort to speak directly to the Chinese was jammed by the government. Third, that decision to try the terrorists up in that federal court in New York City. Again, nothing that had to be done, and critics say it shows that Obama, his team doesn’t understand this is a war we’re in. David, that’s the question. These optics are everything in a president. Carter used to carry that garment bag over his shoulder. This president is he making mistakes like in China like in Japan?

DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST : I think he is coming across as stiff. He is talking too much sometimes and communicating too little. So the opposite of what we saw during the campaign. Although the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York apparently was Eric Holder’s, it strikes me that it really is a mistake. I mean, there are too many bad things that could happen. There is no reason to have to have done this. …

Sometimes you have to laugh at the ludicrous liberal politicians. Jonah Goldberg has an article in National Review that helps us do that.

…The point of that emasculating exercise was ostensibly to tell the world that Joe Biden was going to be riding herd over how the stimulus money was spent. It’s worth revisiting exactly what he said:

“That is why I have asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort — because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my Cabinet, as well as mayors and governors across the country, that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend. I have appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general to ferret out any and all cases of waste and fraud. And we have created a new website called Recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.”

In the cold, bracing light of today’s facts, this is just plain bladder-draining hilarious. We’ve all heard the stories of vast sums of money funding a tiny number of jobs, and tiny amounts of money paying for vast numbers of jobs. Even better, the stories have for the most part been broken by such non-right-wing-decoder-ring-wearers as the AP and the Boston Globe. A story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that after spending $608.9 million, the White House got 1,458 jobs. That’s nearly half a million dollars per job. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Talladega County alone claimed that it stretched $42,000 into 5,000 jobs “saved or created.”

“Saved or created” is itself the greatest weaselly locution yet coined in the 21st century. Just for the record, I save or create 500 push-ups every morning. …

Another great T-Shirt. This from Boing Boing.net.

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In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne makes a bleak evaluation of our economic situation. Here’s the opening, and a realistic assessment of how Obama got votes.

The U.S. economy is in uncertain times. Analysts are split between those seeing recovery and those fearing a second downturn. This confusion is being echoed in the highest levels of government as President Obama simultaneously speaks about the need for more federal spending and warns of the dangers of increased debt. As the volatile markets indicate, investors are not only confused – they are seriously concerned.

The country appears to be going through a period of buyer’s remorse over the election of Barack Obama. The majority cobbled together by the President one year ago included the Democratic base, independents hoping for “change,” and many disaffected Republicans betrayed by the Bush Administration’s big-government neoconservatism. It is unlikely that most of these voters favored an overt push toward socialism; however, this is what they have received. As the ‘tea parties’ illustrate, voters are not only confused – they are seriously concerned.

These concerns are justified. The Administration’s hard-left turn was evident from the outset. Ignoring expert advice to spend on job-creating infrastructure, Obama spent wildly on entitlements. Now, with rising grassroots discontent, a falling currency, and threats to America’s AAA credit rating, there is some evidence that the Administration is trying to hedge its bets through tough talk. Yet, they still have not taken any tough action. As their gold stockpiling highlights, foreign governments are not only confused – they are seriously concerned. …

14 percent of mortgages are in trouble. One out of seven. In WaPo, Renae Merle reports that foreclosures are increasing due to unemployment.

More than 14 percent of borrowers were in trouble on their mortgage during the third quarter, a new record, according to an industry survey released Thursday, which also suggests that the foreclosure rate is likely not to peak until next year as unemployment rates continue to rise.

Unemployment remains a big driver of the problem, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, which conducts the survey. Those with delinquent loans now include a growing portion of people traditionally considered creditworthy and people whose mortgages are insured by the Federal Housing Administration. …

…About 9.6 percent of borrowers were delinquent on their mortgage during the third quarter, according to the survey, and another 4.5 percent more were somewhere in the foreclosure process. Overall, about 14 percent of mortgage loans or 7.4 million households were delinquent or in the foreclosure process during the quarter, according to the group.

That is the highest level recorded by the survey, which has been conducted since 1972, and is up from about 10 percent of borrowers who were in trouble during the same period last year.

If unemployment rates peak by the middle of next year, foreclosures could reach their highest levels by the end of the year, Brinkmann said. But even after peaking, foreclosure rates are likely to remain elevated as borrowers in regions that have had steep price declines and now owe more than their home is worth continue to struggle, he said. …

In Contentions, John Steele Gordon has commentary on the national debt.

…The national debt was for most of American history, as Hamilton said it would be, a “national blessing.” It allowed us to fight and win our wars and to relieve suffering in an economic depression far worse than what the country is experiencing now. But in the last thirty years — the most prosperous and relatively peaceful thirty-year period in American history — liberals and “conservatives,” Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington have allowed the debt to explode for their short-term political benefit while they hid the truth with phony accounting.

How bad was it? Consider this: In 1980, the debt was 33.3 percent of the country’s GDP. By 1990 the GDP had increased by 37.6 percent in real terms. But the debt had grown much faster. It was 55.9 percent of the much larger GDP. In the 1990’s GDP increased by 39.7 percent, and the debt more than kept pace. It was 58 percent of GDP in 2000. At the end of 2008, GDP had grown 18.5 percent over 2000, and the debt was fast approaching 80 percent of GDP.  And the debt, being denominated in dollars, is made smaller by inflation while GDP is enlarged.

No one believes that the debt can be kept under 100 percent of GDP in the near future. And if Obamacare gets passed in anything like its present form, it will only makes matters far worse. As Mr. Holtz-Eakin explains, President Obama’s promise not to sign a bill that adds to the deficit is false:

. . . the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.

If you’re disturbed by the long-term outlook for the country’s fiscal health, you shouldn’t be. You should be terrified.

Vermont and Europe may have more in common than Vermont might like, says Mark Steyn.

… In fact, Vermont school enrollments have declined 13 years in a row. Since 1996, they’ve fallen by 13 percent, slumping below 100,000 in 2004 and projected to fall below 90,000 in 2014. The part of the state that my corner of New Hampshire borders is admittedly rural, and it’s not an unusual phenomenon for small towns to drain population to the big cities. But a couple of days later I was in the capital, Montpelier, and its school board is in merger talks with the neighboring towns of Berlin and Calais.

If schoolkids are thin on the ground, the state’s total population has held steady — 604,000 in 1999, 621,000 today. So Vermont is getting proportionately more childless. Which is to say that Vermont, literally, has no future. …

…Graying ponytailed hippies and chichi gay couples aren’t enough of a population base to run a functioning jurisdiction. To modify Howard Dean, Vermont is the way liberals think America ought to be, and you can’t make a living in it. So if you’re a cash-poor but land-rich native Vermonter taxed and regulated and hedged in on every front, you face a choice: In the new North Country folk wisdom, they won’t let you fish, so you might as well cut bait. Your outhouse is in breach of zoning regulations, so you might as well get off the pot. Etc. When he ran for president, Howard Dean was said to have inspired America’s youth. In Vermont, he mainly inspired them to move somewhere else. The number of young adults fell by 20 percent during the Dean years. And what’s left is a demographic disaster: The state’s women have the second lowest birthrate in the nation, and the state’s workforce is already America’s oldest. Last year, Chris Lafakis of Moody’s predicted Vermont would have “a really stagnant economy” not this year or this half-decade but for the next 30 years. …

…Nowhere in the news reports of school-merger talks does anyone suggest trying to reverse the policies that drive out young families and make Vermont — what’s the word the eco-types dig? — “unsustainable.” …

In the Enterprise blog, Charles Murray has a thoughtful post on Glenn Beck.

…Beck was, as usual, standing in front of his blackboard. Chalked on it was:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson

It is a sentiment with which I completely agree. I’ve written whole books with that sentiment as the subtext. The problem: The quote is a fake. Thomas Jefferson never said it. Jefferson would have been sympathetic to the idea, as other writings clearly imply. But he didn’t actually say it. In front of a national television audience, Glenn Beck put up a quote that his researchers would have discovered is a fake if they had done the slightest bit of Googling.

…So here’s the unbearable paradox. Beck really has had important effects on the way the Obama administration and its legislation is perceived. It is conceivable that if healthcare goes down to a razor-thin defeat, Beck will have made the difference. If that turns out to be the case, he will have made a far greater contribution to the survival of the American project than ink-stained wretches like me can dream of having. And I want to shut him up?

I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework. ..

David Harsanyi’s article merits a pithy introduction, but I can’t find the words. Speaking of words, will Facebook be responsible for, “Don’t unfriend me, Bro!”

One needn’t be William Safire, though, to be unsettled that the word “philanderer” is a major mystery to so many people. According to a new list by Merriam-Webster, “philanderer” (a national pastime, meaning to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife) was one of the most searched words of the past year because of the crush of politicians and celebrities busy hiking the Appalachian Trail.

The word receiving the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time was “admonish” (to express warning or disapproval). It was triggered by a crude outburst of a South Carolina congressman and the subsequent moralistic “admonishment” of him by Congress. …

…The 2009 Word of the Year, announced this week, is “unfriend.” Unfriend is a verb, meaning the removal of a virtual acquaintance from your social networking’s pretend “friends” list. It would appear in sentence as so: “Oh, yeah, now I remember why I didn’t keep in touch with those bozos from high school. I’m not sure how they found me, but I must remember to unfriend them.”…

Late last week, a group of Russians hacked into computers at a university in England. Specifically, it was the U of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in Hadley (Hadley CRU). The hackers posted 3,000 documents (mostly emails) on the web. They have proven to be an embarrassment to people who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW); the belief that humans have been the cause of the past increase in earth’s temperatures. The news has been breathlessly reported by a number of bloggers. The best we’ve seen so far has been James Delingpole in the Telegraph, UK.

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

…But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. …

Richard Brookhiser weaves an interesting discourse on apples.

…Left to themselves, apples mutate uncontrollably, so growers employ grafts to make sure they get what they want. Agricultural-research stations produce new varieties by careful cross-fertilization. But once in a while, some new seedling pops up that everyone decides he likes; such varieties often retain the word “pippin” (Middle English for seed) in their names.

Some varieties do go back only a few centuries shy of Chaucer. …but in the last half century they fell by the wayside, largely thanks to their looks. Calville Blanc d’Hiver is yellow-green and bulbous, Esopus Spitzenberg is yellow and red, Newtown Pippin is often russeted, or marked by rough brown streaks. In the mass market they were supplanted by apples like Macintosh and Red Delicious, red and sturdy enough to survive shipping: fine fruits in themselves, but a bit drained of zest by overproduction. …

…But most of the time the apple tree is a sturdy and amenable creature. After its apples and leaves fall, it stands naked all winter. Ice can maim it, but it does not bother about snow. In the spring it wraps itself in a turban of blossoms. When it becomes old and unfruitful, morel mushrooms grow at its feet. A thrifty grower will not let that happen; he culls his old trees (the wood is excellent for smoking), and plants young ones. They look fragile as a kindergartner’s stick drawing, but they get right to work, putting out blossoms, and soon enough fruits. …

Pickerhead has been shopping. The Nose on Your Face has a clever t-shirt.

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Mark Steyn writes about how lost our president is.

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama “doesn’t know how to be president.” It was a low but effective crack, and I didn’t pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the past week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don’t just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan – though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower’s previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi king, one assumed there’d be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don’t bow to foreign monarchs. Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic – or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

Tear down that wall …so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who, at a critical moment in history, decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal, they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours. It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it. …

…Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: “OK, we know you’re gay. Now try being funny.” I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: OK, we know you’re black. Now try being president. But a few days later, Obama dropped in on U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea for the latest episode of The Barack Obama Show (With Full Supporting Chorus). “You guys make a pretty good photo op,” he told them. …

…The above are mostly offenses against good taste, but they are, cumulatively, revealing. And they help explain why, whenever the president’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin agrees with David Gergen’s assessment of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.

…The media did not miss the way the Chinese leadership handled Obama. Even such a purveyor of the conventional wisdom as David Gergen wrote on CNN.com to compare Obama’s poor performance with that of another young and inexperienced president, John F. Kennedy, whose disastrous 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Russians the impression that the Americans didn’t know what they were doing and that they could be pushed around. That led to the nearly catastrophic showdown over missiles in Cuba a year later. …

…Gergen is right. Though the most embarrassing moment of the trip was Obama’s obsequious deep bow to the Japanese emperor — which was duly noted by American bloggers and dismissed by the liberal punditry as well as by the White House — the real damage done to the national interest by Obama’s travels is the way he has come across to America’s rivals and foes, not to our allies. The Chinese, like the Iranians and the Russians, all think they have the measure of Barack Obama. He strikes them as a weak man more interested in trying to please and to evoke applause than in standing up for principles such as human rights or even the danger of nuclear proliferation. The occasional tough talk that has come from Obama has been undermined by his relentless devotion to engagement, which has convinced these countries that he is a leader to be trifled with. That is the only explanation for the disrespect that the Iranians have shown to his diplomatic outreach as well as for the harsh way in which the Chinese demonstrated their disdain for the president.

Gergen believes that Obama must treat this as a moment for a “wake up call” to revive his foreign policy. “For the President, the challenge is whether he will start approaching international affairs with a greater measure of toughness, standing up more firmly and assertively for American interests.”

We will soon see whether Obama is capable of doing that or whether his blind faith in engagement as well as his unbounded desire for adulation will lead to similar or worse fiascoes in the future. The problem, as the Kennedy example highlights, is that the country’s margin for error on dangerous foreign-policy issues is limited. Obama’s ongoing failure to act to halt Iran’s nuclear program is evidence of the price the country is paying for the president’s on-the-job education. … But Obama’s weakness, a fault rooted deeply in his inexperience in foreign affairs as well as in his overweening vanity, has become a major liability for the United States, the price of which has yet to be fully assessed.

America in the World shows the November 21st 2009 cover of the Spectator, UK showing the empty suit in the oval office, with the title “The Worst Kind of Ally” and posted this quote from Con Coughlin’s article:

“The astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain has been made clear by his deliberations over the Afghan issue. As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan — a decision which will fundamentally affect the scope of the mission — Britain is reduced to guesswork. The White House does not even pretend to portray this as a joint decision. It is a diplomatic cold-shouldering that stands in contrast not just to the Blair–Bush era, but to the togetherness of the soldiers on the ground… There will, though, inevitably come a time when Obama discovers who America’s true friends really are. Sooner or later he will have to deal with the considerably more taxing issues of Islamist militancy, rogue nuclear states and other tangible threats to the West’s security. At that point, Obama will discover a simple but essential truth. The world divides between those who support American values of freedom and democracy, and those who seek to destroy them. Few nations have been more committed to supporting those values with both blood and treasure than Britain. This country, and especially those British troops fighting alongside their American counterparts, deserve far better than this president’s disregard.”

President Obama did not want KSM tried by military tribunal. For that reason alone, we now have an upcoming trial that is illogical in many respects, writes Charles Krauthammer.

…What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning. …

…What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times? …

…Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadist is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform — everything but your own blog.

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Barack Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice. …

On his blog, Roger Simon posts a criticism of Obamacare from the Dean of Harvard Medical School.

Jeffrey S. Flier – the dean of Harvard Med – has thrown a haymaker at Obamacare in today’s WSJ – Health ‘Debate’ Deserves a Failing Grade:

“In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.”

Game, set, match, tournament. But, hey, it’s only the Dean of Harvard Med. What would he know compared to such great clinicians as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? This would be magnificent black comedy were it not our lives and – more importantly – those of our children that were hanging in the balance. The rush to enact this self-serving legislation is pretty much the most disgraceful US governmental act of my lifetime …

In the WSJ, we have Dean Flier’s full article.

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade. …

…Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform. …

…So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

John Stossel points out that some states have created their fiscal troubles by increased spending. He then discusses the hidden taxes that will be assessed by some states to make up for their lack of fiscal responsibility.

…Last week on “The O’Reilly Factor” , we talked about California’s and New York’s enormous budget deficits and planned tax increases. Those states would have big surpluses had they just grown their governments in pace with inflation. But of course they didn’t. Now the politicians act like their current deficits are something imposed on them by the recession.

But that’s nonsense. They created the problem with their reckless spending.

Let’s look at the particulars. Had the government of New York state grown at the rate of population and inflation over the past 10 years, it would have a $14 billion surplus today. Instead, spending grew at twice the rate of inflation. So New York has a $3 billion deficit. …

…Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government. We blame merchants, not our legislators, for the high price of gasoline, liquor, cigarettes and phone calls, but the money goes to the political thieves. …

… It reminds me of Walter Williams’ riff: “Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don’t expect you to thank them for it.”

Taxes, even counting hidden taxes, are not the real measure of what the thieves take. The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is the spending level. …

David Harsanyi comments on the MSM attack coverage of Sarah Palin.

…There’s nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin’s book, “Going Rogue” (HarperCollins, November 2009) for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking was applied to President Barack Obama’s two self-aggrandizing tomes — or even the health care or cap and trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to non-existent congressional districts — which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one’s nose demands a constant struggle, I guess. …

…Newsweek must have a point. Palin is a populist dead end. “Just over half of Americans,” a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, “have an unfavorable opinion” of Palin overall, “as many say they wouldn’t consider supporting her for president and more — six in 10 — see her as unqualified for the job.”

Similarly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation recently found that 48 percent disapprove of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a woman busy writing policy that affects all of us. …

Now it’s time for some entertainment. In a post on The Corner, John Miller tells us about the little ferry that could. Less than 20 miles from the DC beltway there is a small privately owned ferry service with one craft named the Gen. Jubal A. Early. Early attacked Washington in July 1864, and Lincoln observed the fighting from Fort Stevens which is located just south of the site of Walter Reed Medical Center. Imagine if Early had succeeded; New Yorkers might need visas to enter Virginia. We need Gen. Early to come out of internment.

It has been a goal of mine for some years to cross the Potomac River at White’s Ferry — the river’s last remaining ferry crossing. I finally had a chance yesterday, when my daughter had a soccer game in Maryland. The ferry wasn’t a novelty; it was actually the quickest and most convenient way to travel between Virginia and Maryland, given where we had to go.

And it felt good to support this family-owned throwback enterprise, which has gotten into scraps with federal government. Three years ago, the Coast Guard tried to shut down White’s Ferry for having an unlicensed operater on the ferry. You know, because the Coast Guard doesn’t have more pressing things to do. The ferry’s 86-year-old owner, Edwin Brown, was plucky and defiant:

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before they collect any money from me,” Brown, 86, said yesterday, adding that he had made his fortune defending property owners in eminent-domain disputes with the authorities. “I have never had any fear of the government.”

Brown also was shocked that Coast Guard investigators in Baltimore were considering hefty penalties, saying he thought he had worked out a settlement with officers who had visited the ferry’s offices in Dickerson.

“You can’t trust the government,” he said.

To give you a little more background on the ferry, here’s an article from 2006 that Fredrick Kunkle wrote for the Post.

True to its Confederate namesake, the Gen. Jubal A. Early ferryboat yesterday defied orders by the federal government to halt operations because of a licensing dispute and instead kept chugging back and forth across the Potomac River carrying hundreds of commuters.

The penalties risked by the 70-year-old family-run service, known as White’s Ferry, were not trifling, either. U.S. Coast Guard officials said yesterday that investigators were considering seeking criminal charges and fines that could run into the thousands of dollars per trip for allowing an unlicensed mariner to operate the ferry and disobeying an order to terminate a voyage.

But that did not seem to rattle the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, who bought the ferry in 1946 and christened its first wooden barge in honor of the flamboyant cavalry officer whose great-niece was a regular passenger. …

…The controversy could not have alighted on a more peaceful stretch of the Potomac. The river is wide and shallow there — no more than four feet deep on the Maryland side, maybe twice that on the Virginia shore. …

The 87-foot vessel has a ship’s bell, a pilot house, a fire ax, a lifeboat and a grand old silver anchor, but it looks more like a hunk of driveway that has broken loose and floated downstream with a bunch of cars. Each trip takes about 15 minutes, and the round-trip fare is $6. …

What happened to the little ferry that could, you ask? Shannon Sollinger has the denouement in a 2006 Loudoun Times article.

…Capt. Brian Kelley, Coast Guard commander of the Port of Baltimore, met Tuesday morning with the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, at the ramp down to the Potomac just west of Poolesville, Md.

“He found everything to be very pleasing and very satisfactory,” Brown said. “He’s happy the ferry is operating and everything is fine.”

The key word in his fracas with the authorities, Brown said, is “substantial. We were in substantial compliance, and there was never a safety risk of any kind.”

Commander Brian Penoyer said the ferry now is “street legal and safe” and will continue operating. Although the Coast Guard has a history of issues with Brown, Penoyer said, his office has opted to assess fines for a first-time offense. Brown can pay a fine of about $8,000, or appeal the tickets to a Coast Guard hearing officer.

White’s Ferry made the news again in 2008 for a less rebellious reason. Debbi Wilgoren reported the excitement in WaPo.

…The vehicle ferry that crosses the Potomac River between Poolesville and Leesburg became mired in a floating debris field yesterday morning, forcing about two dozen passengers to be removed by smaller boats.

The ferry became stuck in the unusually large amounts of debris flushed into the river by the heavy rain of recent days, according to ferry operators. …

…”The river hadn’t been up like this for months, and there was a lot of stuff piled up along the banks,” said Malcolm Brown, whose family owns and operates the White’s Ferry barge. “Debris is a constant problem on any river, but we had a big mass of trees coming down.”

Montgomery County fire and rescue workers took passengers to shore, leaving about 20 cars aboard as ferry operators cleared branches and logs from the cable that guides the barge across the river. There were no injuries, and drivers got their cars about an hour later. …

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If you’re like Pickerhead, the daily Obama drama is getting tiring. So how about an edition that ignores the current DC mess? We start with John Tierney’s famous NY Times Magazine article on recycling. Then a Mark Steyn send-off for Dominick Dunne, late of Vanity Fair. Next we learn the good news that scallops are making a comeback in Long Island’s Peconic Bay. Dilbert and Dave Barry close things out in the humor section.

Thirteen years ago this June, John Tierney set a NY Times record for irate reader’s letters with a piece he wrote suggesting recycling was a waste. Now that is something to aspire to when contemplating what might be on your tombstone.

…We’re a wicked throwaway society. Plastic packaging and fast-food containers may seem wasteful, but they actually save resources and reduce trash. The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale. Those apples in Dittersdorf’s slide, protected by plastic wrap and foam, are less likely to spoil. The lightweight plastic packaging requires much less energy to manufacture and transport than traditional alternatives like cardboard or paper. Food companies have switched to plastic packaging because they make money by using resources efficiently. A typical McDonald’s discards less than two ounces of garbage for each customer served — less than what’s generated by a typical meal at home.

Plastic packaging is routinely criticized because it doesn’t decay in landfills, but neither does most other packaging, as William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, has discovered from his excavations of landfills. Rathje found that paper, cardboard and other organic materials — while technically biodegradable — tend to remain intact in the airless confines of a landfill. These mummified materials actually use much more landfill space than plastic packaging, which has steadily been getting smaller as manufacturers develop stronger, thinner materials. Juice cartons take up half the landfill space occupied by the glass bottles they replaced; 12 plastic grocery bags fit in the space occupied by one paper bag. …

…”I don’t understand why anyone thinks New York City has a garbage crisis because it can’t handle all its own waste,” says James DeLong, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. “With that kind of logic, you’d have to conclude that New York City has a food crisis because it can’t grow all the vegetables its people need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and ration New Yorkers’ consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there.” Some politicians in other states have threatened to stop the importing of New York’s garbage — it’s an easy way to appeal to some voters’ chauvinism — but in the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would only be depriving their own constituents of jobs and tax revenue.

We’re cursing future generations with our waste. Dittersdorf’s slide showing New Yorkers’ annual garbage output — 15 square blocks, 20 stories high — looked frightening because the trash was sitting, uncompressed, in the middle of the city. But consider a different perspective — a national, long-term perspective. A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. …

…Are reusable cups and plates better than disposables? A ceramic mug may seem a more virtuous choice than a cup made of polystyrene, the foam banned by ecologically conscious local governments. But it takes much more energy to manufacture the mug, and then each washing consumes more energy (not to mention water). According to calculations by Martin Hocking, a chemist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, you would have to use the mug 1,000 times before its energy-consumption-per-use is equal to the cup. (If the mug breaks after your 900th coffee, you would have been better off using 900 polystyrene cups.) A more immediate environmental impact has been demonstrated by studies in restaurants: the average number of bacterial organisms on reusable cups, plates and flatware is 200 times greater than on disposable ones. …

Mark Steyn writes about the life, and coincidental events, of the late Dominick Dunne.

…In 1991 the diminutive scribbler in the owlish glasses and the baggy suit was in Palm Beach covering the rape trial of Ted’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Had he not been there, he would never have heard the tantalizing tidbit that young William had been in the Skakel house in Connecticut on the night in 1975 when Martha Moxley was murdered. Had he not picked up that unfounded bit of gossip, his curiosity might not have been awakened and he might never have written a fictionalized account of the case, A Season In Purgatory, a roman à clef compressing three generations of Kennedy gossip into one book. Had his novel not reactivated interest in the murder, he might not have had leaked to him a copy of a private investigator’s report on Michael Skakel. Had he not been in court in Los Angeles in 1995 when O.J.’s dream team played the “race card” crudely but effectively against Mark Fuhrman, he might not have felt so sorry for the LAPD detective that he struck up a friendship and forwarded the Skakel investigator’s leaked report. Had Fuhrman not used the Skakel report to write a damning book on the Moxley case, the state of Connecticut might never have reopened it and put Michael Skakel on trial. It was a very slender thread that led to a rare Kennedy conviction. “It is a fact of my life that coincidences happen to me,” says the narrator in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. For Dunne, the greatest coincidence was as stark as a gravestone: Martha Moxley was killed on the same date—Oct. 30—as his own daughter. …

…Dunne was a stage manager on The Howdy Doody Show and a producer of C-list movies before a chance encounter with Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown led to his reinvention as a writer. The preoccupations of the last half of his adult life are summed up in the title of another book, An Inconvenient Woman, a thinly disguised fictionalization of Alfred Bloomingdale’s murdered mistress Vicki Morgan. In both his crime reporting and his novels, there’s usually a powerful man and an “inconvenient woman”—sure, she’s hot, she’s fun, she’s cute, but there comes a point when she’s an inconvenience. And then you lawyer up and make the inconvenience go away. That’s what Kennedys do, with both the passing fancies—the waitresses, the campaign cuties, the gal next door—and with their routinely “annulled” first marriages. That’s what Ted did with Joan, the wife he drove to alcoholism. That’s what he did with Mary Jo, swimming up from the depths of that Chappaquiddick pond and leaving her down there pressed up against a shrinking air pocket waiting for the rescue team he never called. Nice girl, but inconvenient. So he got back to the hotel, worked the phones, called in the family fixers, squared the local authorities, started the speechwriters working on the statement.

Dominick Dunne couldn’t go along with the “dream teams” and the rest of the flim-flam, not after the murderer of his 22-year- old daughter got a three-year sentence. So he was there for the “inconvenient women,” all the way to his last big trial, when Phil Spector became the latest big shot to date a gal to death. Poor Lana Clarkson wasn’t a “legend” or a “troubled genius,” like Phil, just a one-time B-movie queen who wound up in a B-movie ending. …

…An assistant of mine loved his fiction. “This is the way airport novels should be,” she said. Which is a good way of putting it. Any competent hack can do the brand names and the restaurants and the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous stuff, but Dunne understood the subtler currents coursing just below the surface. He liked the parties and the gossip and the name-dropping; the movie stars and the dispossessed Euro-princelings and the Kennedy cousins. He was of them, but not one of them, not entirely. And so, notwithstanding who got top billing, there was a kind of symmetry in his and Ted Kennedy’s all but simultaneous expiry: a man who disposed of inconvenient women, and a man who ensured they weren’t forgotten. …

In the NY Times, Dindya Bhanoo reports on the scallop restoration effort and the mysterious brown tide that had decimated the bivalve population.

…The recovery resulted partly from dedicated efforts by scientists to rebuild the scallop population, said Stephen Tettelbach, a professor of biology at Long Island University.

Dr. Tettelbach is in the fifth year of a five-year, $2.3 million bay scallop restoration project, financed by Suffolk County, that has released nearly five million scallops into Peconic Bay waters. Working with researchers from Cornell Cooperative Extension — a university outreach group — and the State University at Stony Brook, Dr. Tettelbach has helped create densely packed scallop sanctuaries, primarily in Orient Harbor, Hallock Bay and Flanders Bay. …

…In a separate effort, the Nature Conservancy in New York has released hundreds of thousands of baby scallops into the Peconic Bay since 2002.

Yet, considerable mystery still surrounds the onset and the waning of brown tide, said Christopher J. Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook who studies toxic algae.

Scientists know that the toxins in brown tide, which tints the water a coffee brown, slow the rhythmic movements of scallop gills and prevent feeding. Brown tide also blocks sunlight from reaching the bay’s bottom, where eelgrass beds grow and scallops nest.

…“We know if a water body is more likely to get brown tide,” Dr. Gobler said. “But it can also break suddenly, and we have no idea why.” …

Dilbert’s Scott Adams has a hilarious story. Here’s the warm-up.

Now that I’m married, one of the questions I fear the most is “Can you look in the X and see if you can find the Y?” Oh, I try. But my wife refuses to learn that I will never succeed.

X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the fridge, or the “good pillow” hiding in the bedroom, or the yellow folder hiding in the kitchen. There are a variety of reasons I will not succeed in finding the desired item. About 25% of the time the item is not in the room, or pile, or container where it should be. Another 25% of the time the item is inadequately described, as in “the light brown socks in the drawer with the other brown socks, but not camel colored or reddish brown, and not the old ones.”

But the biggest reason for my seek-and-find failures can be attributed to Transdimensional Materialization Phenomena (TMP). This involves items not being where they belong when I look for them, but tunneling through a wormhole and materializing right where they belong when my wife looks in the same place two minutes later. Apparently this phenomenon is triggered by just the right coupling of exasperation and sarcasm. …

Parents of young children, in particular, will appreciate stories of theme birthday parties gone wild. Dave Barry tells an amusing tale.

Things are tense in our house. Our daughter is about to turn 4, which means we have to hold a birthday party, which means my wife is, at the moment, insane.

Like many moms, my wife believes that a child’s birthday party requires as much planning as a lunar landing — more, actually, because you have to hire a clown. Serious moms plan birthday parties months in advance, choosing a theme …and relentlessly incorporate this theme in every element of the party, including invitations, decorations, music, games, craft projects, snacks, cake, entertainment, favors, little gift bags for the favors, ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, name tags for the ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, and on and on until the mom has lost all touch with human reality. If you want proof, go to one of the Internet sites devoted to birthday planning, such as birthdaypartyideas.com, where moms report, in detail, the deranged lengths to which they have gone to stage birthday parties for small children. They sound like this:

“Our theme for Meghan’s third birthday was `The Enchanted Fairy Forest.’ To create a `forest’ in the family room, I made full-size `trees’ out of fiberglass, which I painted brown and festooned with 17,000 `leaves’ I cut by hand from green felt, accented with live squirrels that I caught using a galvanized-steel trap baited with Peter Pan creamy peanut butter. For the `forest floor,’ I brought in four tons of mulch with a Lawn Boy yard tractor. For the `sky,’ I used the actual sky, which was visible because I removed the ceiling and roof with a chainsaw, which is when my husband, Ed, left me, but the overall effect was well worth it.”

You think I’m exaggerating, but that’s only because you haven’t browsed “birthdaypartyideas.com.”

It would be different if dads planned birthday parties. First off, the party would be about a month after the child’s actual birthday, which is when Dad would remember it. Dad’s party theme would be “delivery pizza,” which would also serve as the cake, the craft project and the party favor. The entertainment would be pulling Dad’s finger. The kids would have just as much fun. …

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Today’s themes are jobs and recovery. We start with Peter Schiff, then add Ed Morrissey, IBD editors, Nouriel Roubini, James Pethokoukis, and Robert Samuelson. Daniel Gross was the one outlier who said job growth will start soon. So he’s here too. Fair and (somewhat) balanced, you decide.

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff explains why Obama’s economic policies are not creating jobs.

…Obama is pursuing, with unprecedented vigor, the same policies that have for decades undermined our industrial base and yoked us to an unsustainable consumer/credit driven economy. This doubling down on Washington’s past failures is destroying jobs at an alarming rate. Today we learned that the September trade deficit surged by 18.2%, the largest gain in ten years. Much of the deficit resulted from Americans spending Cash-for-Clunkers stimulus money on imported cars – or “American” cars loaded to the sunroof with imported parts. In exchange for more domestic debt, we have succeeded only in creating foreign jobs. …

…As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. …

…If profit opportunities exist, jobs will be created. Otherwise, they will not. Of course, anything the government does to raise the cost of employment, such as a higher minimum wage, mandated heath care, or greater regulatory burdens, not only prevents new jobs from being created but also causes many that already exist to be destroyed. Anything that diminishes the profit potential of extra hiring will diminish the number of job opportunities that are created. Also, since it is after-tax profits against which employers measure risk, the higher the marginal rate of income tax, the less likely employers will be able to hire. …

In Hot Air, Ed Morrissey comments on the last month’s deficit that is even higher than predicted. The deficit for the first month of the fiscal year was $176.36. Eleven more months like that we’ll have a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit; just about $6 billion a day.

What better way to kick off Barack Obama’s first full budget year as President than with a deficit that exceeded the White House’s own projections as well as analysts’ expectations?  The federal government busted the budget worse than last October by $20 billion with a deficit of $176.36 billion for the month.  That used to be considered a decent deficit target … for an entire year…

…Higher deficits mean more borrowing.  More borrowing means more debt service.  As deficits continue to rise, the federal government will have to direct more and more of its revenues to paying the interest on the accumulated debt.  In September, that came to over $17 billion — just for the interest, not for principle reduction.  Investors Business Daily warns that Obama’s spending spree will eventually force Washington to spend 40% of its revenues on debt service…

…Obama now says he wants to attack the deficit, but without serious spending cuts and reduction in the size of government, any such reductions would have to rely on heavier taxation — which would kill the economy, reduce federal revenues, and put us even further behind on debt reduction.  The only way to fix the problem is to dismantle Leviathan, and unfortunately Obama is headed in the opposite direction.

Call off the jobs summit! The IBD Editorial board has a simple plan to create jobs.

…This isn’t rocket science. Any business owner, entrepreneur or manager can tell you that job creation requires new businesses, new investment in plant and equipment, and economic policies conducive to both….

…Job creation closely tracks investment in plants and equipment. So anything the government does to remove barriers to business investment — whether by cutting regulations, slashing taxes or reducing government spending — will lead to more jobs.

Of particular importance are small businesses, which — as a new report from the Kauffman Foundation noted — created virtually all the new jobs from 1980 to 2005.

Today, small firms suffer the most damage from congressional incompetence. The newly passed health care bill, for example, slaps families with more than $500,000 in income with an added 5.4% tax. But, according to Congress’ Joint Tax Committee, a third of this will be paid by small, family-owned businesses. …

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Nouriel Roubini says there are two economies and the larger one is still suffering.

While the United States recently reported 3.5 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the most severe recession since the Great Depression is over, the American economy is actually much weaker than official data suggest. In fact, official measures of GDP may grossly overstate growth in the economy, as they don’t capture the fact that business sentiment among small firms is abysmal and their output is still falling sharply. Properly corrected for this, third-quarter GDP may have been 2 per cent rather than 3.5 per cent.

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Consider the following facts. While America’s official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million. …

In The Street.com, Doug Kass does a take-off of an SNL skit in a piece titled; “What Recovery!?!”

Of course, this is a takeoff from “Saturday Night Live’s” Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. If you are not familiar with their “SNL” schtick during their Weekend Updates, here are a few of their Really!?! segments.

Really, the economy is recovering? Really, economists?

I mean, really!?! …

…And, really, an economic recovery without job growth? According to the household survey, nearly 600,000 jobs were lost last month, and 15.7 million Americans are out of work. Really!?!

The credit mechanisms of the shadow-banking system and the securitization market remain adrift, and banks aren’t lending. An economic recovery without credit? Really!?!

How about the state and local governments that have provided an anchor to growth in previous economic periods? Only two states have balanced budgets, and New York is letting out prisoners early to save money. Really!?!  …

In Reuters, James Pethokoukis reviews a report from economist David Rosenberg, who says that unemployment will get worse.

Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, thinks the unemployment rate is going to at least 12 percent, maybe even 13 percent. Optimists, Rosenberg explains, underestimate the incredible damage done to the labor market during this downturn. And even before this downturn, the economy was not generating jobs in huge numbers. If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate.  I think you would also be talking about the ise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

So here is what I gleaned from Rosenberg’s latest report (bold is mine):

2. During this two-year recession, employment has declined a record 8 million. Even in percent terms, this is a record in the post-WWII experience.

10. But when we do start to see the economic clouds part in a more decisive fashion, what are employers likely to do first? Well, naturally they will begin to boost the workweek and just getting back to pre-recession levels would be the same as hiring more than two million people. Then there are the record number of people who got furloughed into part-time work and again, they total over nine million, and these folks are not counted as unemployed even if they are working considerably fewer days than they were before the credit crunch began.

12. After all, the recession ended in November 2001 with an unemployment rate at 5.5% and yet the unemployment rate did not peak until June 2003, at 6.3%. The recession ended in March 1991 when the jobless rate was 6.8% and it did not peak until June 1992, at 7.8%. In both cases, the unemployment rate peaked well more than a year after the recession technically ended. The 2001 cycle was a tech capital stock deflation; the 1991 cycle was the Savings & Loan debacle; this past cycle was an asset deflation and credit collapse of epic proportions. And economists think that the unemployment rate is in the process of cresting now? Just remember it is the same consensus community that predicted at the beginning of 2008 that the jobless rate would peak out below 6% this cycle.

Pethokoukis also blogs on Obamacare.

…It turns out the Chinese are curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Nothing happening in Washington today should give Beijing any comfort or confidence about what may happen tomorrow. Healthcare reform was originally promoted as a way to “bend the curve” on escalating entitlement costs, the major part of which is financing Medicare and Medicaid. That is looking more and more like an overpromise that can’t be delivered. …

In WaPo, Robert Samuelson discusses the hypocrisy of forcing Obamacare on the nation during such a serious recession.

There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called “health-care reform.” Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it’s widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.

So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system — which Congress is halfway toward enacting — would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he’s doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both. …

…Equally misleading, Obama’s top economic advisers assert that the present proposals would slow the growth of overall national health spending. Outside studies disagree. Three studies (two by the consulting firm the Lewin Group for the Peterson Foundation and one by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency) conclude that various congressional plans would increase national health spending compared with the effect of no legislation. The studies variously estimate that the extra spending, over the next decade, would be $750 billion, $525 billion and $114 billion. The reasoning: Greater use of the health-care system by the newly insured would overwhelm cost-saving measures (bundled payments, comparative effectiveness research, tort reform), which are either weak or experimental. …

With a different take on the economy, Daniel Gross, in Slate, thinks that unemployment will improve soon. Gross is here often, so we thought we should include his job comments.

…But some recent data points, and an understanding of the behavior of companies at different phases of the business cycle, suggest we’ll have job creation sooner rather than later.

Before things get better, they have to get worse more slowly. That’s already happening. After the credit meltdown, companies prepared for Armageddon by hacking jobs indiscriminately. Between November 2008 and April 2009, employers reduced payrolls by 645,000 per month. But in October, BLS reported that the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, and it revised down the job loss figures for August and September. First-time unemployment claims are falling.

Other data give more reason to hope. In the third quarter, productivity—econospeak for companies doing more work with the same amount of labor—rose at a 9.5 percent annual rate. We’ve just witnessed the fastest two-quarter productivity surge since the first year of the Kennedy administration. Economists can read these omens the way Roman priests read chicken entrails. And here’s one of their explanations: Just as investors and businesspeople don’t believe things could ever go wrong at the peak of the boom, they have difficulty imagining things can get better at the trough of the bust. And so they respond to rising demand not by hiring new employees but by coaxing existing employees to work harder. But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth. “If you look at economies over many centuries, you can’t grow productivity for 7 or 9 percent for more than two or three quarters,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute, whose leading employment indicators are looking up. “At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work.” Should the economy expand in the fourth quarter at the same 3.5 percent annual rate it did in the third quarter—as it shows every sign of doing—companies won’t have any choice but to hire, says Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners. “There’s an outside chance we could see job growth by the end of the year.” …

The Economist reports on the increase in college enrollment.

A business that jacks up its prices during a recession is usually asking to lose customers. Not so America’s colleges, which are simultaneously raising tuition fees and experiencing record levels of enrolment. The Technical College System of Georgia, for instance, whose 28 campuses teach everything from power-line maintenance to dental hygiene, has sharply raised its fees, yet the number of students is up 24% from a year earlier. Campus parking lots are so full that “we got them parking in cow pastures,” says a spokesman.

Across the country, college enrolment rates are at an all-time high. In October 41% of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in either two-year colleges (which specialise in vocational training) or four-year colleges (which grant undergraduate degrees) or higher, up from 39% a year earlier. Yet tuition fees have risen by an average of 4-7%.

The economy is the most immediate culprit. The unemployment rate hit 10.2% in October, up sharply from 9.8% in September, the first time it has reached double digits since 1983. Among 16-to-24-year-olds, it was a dismal 19.1%. Faced with the worst job prospects in a generation, many young people are deciding to go to college instead. …

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Yesterday it was Afghan force levels. Today the KSM trial in New York City.

The decision to prosecute terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through the US court system is being criticized for the national security threat it poses, the damage to intelligence and intelligence-gathering, and the security threat for New York and those involved in the trial. We hear from a number of commentators on these topics, and on the inefficiency and illogical disruption of the military prosecutorial process already started, as well as the political ideology and poor judgment by Obama and Holder that led to this.

Investor’s Business Daily starts a five part series on the housing crisis written by Thomas Sowell.

And the cartoonists go crazy with Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan.

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions about the upcoming terrorist trial.

The Obama administration is pursuing the prosecution of the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York. In light of this astonishing decision, I was reminded by a friend that, according to the New York Times, Sheikh Mohammed met his captors with cocky defiance at first, telling one veteran CIA officer that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer. It looks as though Sheikh Mohammed has seen his defiance vindicated. He has now found an administration more amenable to his view of justice than was the previous one. The Holderization of American justice continues. And I suspect that there will be bad consequences all around for this action.

Bill Kristol comments on Holder’s lack of judgment regarding several aspects of the upcoming trial.

Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York will be “truly the trial of the century.”

It’s unbelievable that the attorney general would use that phrase in the course of justifying his decision. …

…Leave aside all the practical problems with trying KSM and his henchmen in a civilian court. Doesn’t Eric Holder realize he’s inviting a circus-like “juicy tabloid trial” for men who have the blood of thousands of Americans on their hands? Does he really think such a trial will contribute to “fairness and justice,” as he claims? Does he think military tribunals aren’t fair and just? And did it never occur to him to ask whether giving the terrorists the chance to create a tabloid spectacle is an appropriate way to honor our dead and those who continue to fight the jihadists?

I’m very doubtful a “trial of the century” will serve the cause of fairness and justice. I’m certain it won’t help the cause of victory.

Andy McCarthy comments that Obama’s and Holder’s political agenda is more important to them than national security. He gives some background, then discusses the trial.

…Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today. …

…So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Turns out David Paterson, NY Governor, also thinks it’s a terrible decision.

Gov. David Paterson openly criticized the White House on Monday, saying he thought it was a terrible idea to move alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists to New York for trial.

“This is not a decision that I would have made. I think terrorism isn’t just attack, it’s anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country,” he said.

Paterson’s comments break with Democrats, who generally support the President’s decision.

“Our country was attacked on its own soil on September 11, 2001 and New York was very much the epicenter of that attack. Over 2,700 lives were lost,” he said. “It’s very painful. We’re still having trouble getting over it. We still have been unable to rebuild that site and having those terrorists so close to the attack is gonna be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers.”

Paterson also said that the White House warned him six months ago this very situation would happen. …

Jennifer Rubin joins in the condemnation. She includes a statement from Senator Lieberman expressing his disapproval.

Pete, the decision to transport Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the U.S. to be tried in an Article III court, presumably with the same rights as common American criminals, is shocking and entirely unnecessary. I would submit that someone in the Obama administration recognizes this. As pointed out to me today by a congressman infuriated by the decision, the president is out of the country. Congress is not in session. It’s a Friday. The ultimate bad-news dump. In this context, it suggests not only a queasy awareness that the American people won’t like this but also, frankly, political cowardice. This is a major decision with long-term consequences. If the president believes what he is doing is right, he should exercise leadership and explain it to the American people. Himself.

But, again, the decision itself is utterly unnecessary. As Sen. Joe Lieberman has pointed out, we have a military-tribunal system designed for precisely these cases. His statement reminded us:

“The military commission system recently signed into law by the President as part of the National Defense Authorization Act provides standards of due process and fairness that fully comply with the requirements established by the Supreme Court and the Geneva Conventions. Earlier this year, when passing the National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate also passed language expressing its clear intent that military commissions rather than civilian courts in the U.S. are the appropriate forum for the trial of these alleged terrorists. I share the views of more than 140 family members of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks who recently wrote to the Senate urging that the individuals charged with responsibility for those attacks should be tried by military commission rather than in civilian courts in the United States: It is inconceivable that we would bring these alleged terrorists back to New York for trial, to the scene of the carnage they created eight years ago, and give them a platform to mock the suffering of their victims and the victims’ families, and rally their followers to continue waging jihad against America.”

And let’s recall how we got here. An informed legal guru observes that we decided to prosecute KSM in a military commission in part because past trials (e.g., those of the “Blind Sheikh” and Ramzi Yousef) may have compromised intelligence. So now we’ve gone back to the very system that, for legitimate national-security reasons, we had abandoned. …

Writing in WSJ, John Yoo has an excellent article on KSM’s background, how the intelligence information from the trial will be used by Al Qaeda, and the military commission option designed to handle such cases.

…Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the “blind Sheikh”), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be. …

In the American Spectator, Philip Klein writes about the security issues that former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted in a talk. Mukasey was the judge in the trial from the first World Trade Center attack.

…There would also be tremendous security issues involved with making sure that courthouses, jails, the judge and jury, were all safe.

“It would take a whole lot more credulousness than I have available to be optimistic about the outcome of this latest experiment,” Mukasey said at the conclusion of his formal remarks.

During a question and answer session that followed, Mukasey was asked if he felt the jails in New York were secure enough to make sure terrorists would not escape, but he said that wasn’t really the issue.

“If you ask the wrong question, you’re sure to get the wrong answer,” Mukasey responded. “Of course it’s secure. They’re not going to escape. The question is not whether they’re going to escape, the question is whether not only that facility, but the city at large will then become the focus for mischief in the form of murder by adherents of KSM, whether this raises the odds that it will. And I would suggest to you that it raises them very high. It is also whether the proceeding, even assuming that it goes forward within the lifetime of anybody in this room, is one where confidential information is able to be kept confidential, and a trial is able to proceed in an orderly way.”

He later added that, “to the extent that they are within prisons, they are a threat there as well. Any of these people would be a virtually totemic figure in a prison.” He argued that “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s success in challenging his solitary confinement shows that there’s no guarantee that convicted terrorists would stay isolated from the rest of the prison population. …

Rachel Adams, in a Weekly Standard blog, posts on Holder’s arrogance and hypocrisy.

Though it is a piece of superficiality worthy of People magazine, the Washington Post’s account of the process by which Eric Holder came to make his decision to try war criminals in federal court is a remarkable–if inadvertent–revelation of just how much, despite their vastly disparate backgrounds, the attorney general resembles his coolly remote boss, the president. …

“…But I think if people will, in a neutral and detached way, look at the decision that I have made today, understand the reasons why I made those decisions, and try to do something that’s rare in Washington–leave the politics out of it and focus on what’s in the best interest of this country–I think the criticism will be relatively muted.”

And there you have it. The dispassion, the self-reverence, the blindness of the man, are marvelous to behold, and so perfectly reflect the president he so perfectly serves. “Neutral and detached” people shall “understand the reasons why” he made those decisions, shall see he has left “the politics out of it,” and shall recognize what’s right–something the rest of us, benighted and bellicose souls that we are, have never managed to do with respect to the disposition of those committing mass murders of Americans in their ongoing war against our civilization.

Investor’s Business Daily hosts a five-part series on housing from one of our favorites, Thomas Sowell. Today Sowell discusses how government intervention drove the housing bubble.

…In reality, government agencies not only approved the more lax standards for mortgage loan applicants, government officials were in fact the driving force behind the loosening of mortgage loan requirements.

Members of Congress from both political parties have urged federal regulatory agencies to press banks and other lenders to lower mortgage loan requirements, and have passed legislation to that end and to subsidize or guarantee loans made under lowered standards. …

…Despite the widespread assumption that government intervention is the key to making housing affordable to people of moderate or low incomes, history shows that it has been precisely in the times and places where government intervention has been greatest that housing costs have been both highest in absolute terms and have taken a larger share of the average income.

This is true whether we compare different places at the same time or different time periods with one another. If we look back to the beginning of the 20th century, when government played a much smaller role in the housing market and there were far fewer restrictions on building, the average American’s housing costs were a smaller share of consumer expenditures than at the end of that century. …

In the Times, UK, Giles Whittell may be left of center, but he sees the big picture: Obamacare is not about health care; it’s about power.

…Deep down, Barack Obama believes it’s his turn. He ran for President promising change, and won. “Change” could mean anything to anyone. That was its chief merit as a slogan. But this Administration believes in its soul that the many meanings of the word should include a willingness to expand the role of the State itself if nothing else works. On economic management that meant taking controlling stakes in banks and car giants to stop them failing. On healthcare, it means proving that the Federal Government can move into running a nationwide low-cost insurance programme, and not screw it up.

My father-in-law believes a screw-up is inevitable. For his generation of Eisenhower Republicans it is axiomatic that anything the private sector can do, the public sector can do only worse. Dick Armey and the army of Tea Party activists that he informally leads go much farther. They call the slightest expansion of the State a step towards Marxism. They say so politely, seriously, despairingly, on battle buses and in town halls across the country, and it is a great mistake to doubt their sincerity. …

…The insurgents also smell blood. As Mr Armey said, this is about power and political control. Mr Obama has staked his presidency on showing that he can win reforms that eluded Mr Clinton in 1994 and generations before that. He has majorities in both houses. Even the legal tussle for a disputed Minnesota Senate seat went the Democrats’ way, adding a self-important comedian to their caucus in the upper house and giving them, in principle, a filibuster-proof majority. Yet the President seems unable to use it. …

…The Tea Party insurgency has blunted the health crusade from the Right. Democratic infighting over tax-funded abortions may do the same from the Left. Slippage deep into next year is entirely possible. So is complete failure, and if Mr Obama fails on healthcare what remains of the bubble of hope he created in his 2008 campaign will deflate faster than a blood pressure cuff in an overpriced private hospital. He will be, at best, a Clinton facsimile; at worst another Carter, undone by his own naivety and shorn of his unused majorities in next year’s mid-terms. …