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Sunday evening we will cover the West Point speech in detail. For now though we have Gabor Steingart from Germany’s der Spiegel.

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly. …

Christopher Hitchens thinks that we should be focusing more on strengthening ties with India.

…Monday’s New York Times carried an extensive report, based on deep-background diplomatic sources, of the likely contours of President Barack Obama’s Tuesday night speech at West Point. A salient paragraph read as follows:

“Officials of one allied nation who have been extensively briefed on the president’s plan said that Mr. Obama would describe how the American presence would be ratcheted back after the buildup, while making clear that a significant American presence in Afghanistan would remain for a long while. That is designed in part to signal to Pakistan that the United States will not abandon the region and to allay Pakistani fears that India will fill the vacuum created as America pulls back. [Underline mine.]”

If this interpretation is correct, then it is consistent with the report recently delivered to the president by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in which our senior in-country military official spoke of Indian influence in Afghanistan as a danger to be combated. The visit of Prime Minister Singh should have been the occasion for a vigorous public debate on whether this growing tendency—the Pakistanization of U.S. policy in the region—is the wise or correct one.

India was supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban long before the events of 9/11, and it has been providing a great deal of reconstruction aid since the Taliban were removed. It has excellent sources of intelligence in the region and is itself a frequent target of the very same forces against which we are committed to fight. Its national parliament, the multifariously pluralistic and democratic Lok Sabha, was the target of a massive car bomb attack in the fall of 2001, its large embassy in Kabul has been singled out for special attention from the Taliban/al-Qaida alliance, and of course we must never forget Mumbai. Nor ought we to forget that India’s massive economic and military power on the subcontinent is accompanied by a system of regular elections, a free press, a secular constitution under which almost as many Muslims live as live in Pakistan, and a business class that extends all the way to Silicon Valley and uses the English language.

Of Pakistan, a state that has flirted with the word failure ever since its inception, it is not possible to speak in the same terms. Only with the greatest reluctance does it withdraw its troops from the front with India in Kashmir, the confrontation that is the main obsession of its overmighty and Punjabi-dominated officer corps. This same corps makes no secret of its second obsession, which is the attainment of a pro-Pakistani regime in Kabul. (This objective, too, is determined by the desire to acquire Afghanistan for the purpose of “strategic depth” in the fight with India.) The original Talibanization of Afghanistan was itself an official project of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the CIA has spent the last eight years admitting, or in some cases discovering, what everyone else already knew: that the Taliban still enjoy barely concealed support from the same highly placed Pakistani institutions. …

You might have noticed we don’t let a day pass without something about the emails of the “warm mongers” in ”Climmaquidick.” (Thank you Mark Steyn, for adding to the language’s 600,000 words.) First we’ll hear from David Harsanyi who thinks it is a good idea to be skeptical.

…You may suppose that those with a resilient faith in end-of-days global warming would be more distraught than anyone over these actions. You’d be wrong. In the wake of the scandal, we are told there is nothing to see. The administration, the United Nations, most of the left-wing punditry and political establishment have shrugged it off. What else can they do?

To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean — at least temporarily — ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated “new energy economies,” among many other intrusive policies.

… a conscientious citizen has little choice but to be uneasy when those with financial, ideological and political interest in peddling the most over-the-top ecological doomsday scenarios also become the most zealous evangelizers. …

Next item on climate is from Neal Boortz’ Nealz Nuze.

…OK … so you have all these half-assed third world countries with their dictators of various stripes eyeing the wealth of the developed, industrial nations. They want some of that wealth, though they aren’t willing to earn it. Why would some dictator tolerate a productive economy that might threaten his continued rule? Freedom – the necessary ingredient for a productive economy – has a way of causing domestic intranquility for dictators. So working through free markets isn’t going to cut it. They will simply have to arrange whatever wealth they cannot seize handed to them. The best conduit for this wealth would be the UN.

OK … so you’re going to use the United Nations to transfer wealth from the big, fat wealthy nations to the corruption-plagued third world. But you’re going to need a pretext? Hmmmmm. You need to come up with some way these nations are hurting you; some action these ugly rich nations are taking that is causing you harm. You’re not under military attack. Your property isn’t being conquered and seized … at least not by the U.S. and Western Europe. But there is one thing! Now I don’t have any idea how this idea was brought to fruition … but it’s brilliant! …

…Many of us already knew global warming to be a fraud. When scientists refuse to acknowledge the cyclical nature of solar activity in a discussion on global warming you have to scratch your head in wonder. Plus – when someone tells you that the science “is settled” and that there is “nothing left to debate;” you know that the science is anything but settled and there is plenty to debate. …

…None of this seems to be slowing down The Community Organizer. He’s heading to Copenhagen where the left and those after our wealth are going to try to cobble together a replacement for the hideous Kyoto Treaty. …

In the WSJ, John Cassidy discusses Arthur Cecil Pigou’s economic theories as they attempt to explain last year’s credsis.

…Mr. Pigou drew an important distinction between the private and social value of economic activities, such as the opening of a new railway line. The savings in time and effort that users of the railway enjoy are private benefits, which will be reflected in the prices they are willing to pay for tickets. Similarly, the railroad’s expenditures on tracks, rolling stock, employee wages are private costs, which will help to determine the prices it charges. But the opening of the railway may also create costs for “people not directly concerned, through, say, uncompensated damage done to surrounding woods by sparks from railway engines,” Mr. Pigou pointed out.

Such social costs—modern economists call them “externalities”—don’t enter the calculations of the railroads or its customers, but in tallying up the ultimate worth of any economic activity, “[a]ll such effects must be included,” Mr. Pigou insisted. In focusing exclusively on private costs and private benefits, the traditional defense of the free market misses out on a vital element of reality.

To correct the problems that spillovers created, Mr. Pigou advocated government intervention. Where the social value of an activity was lower than its private value, as in the case of a railroad setting ablaze the surrounding woodland, the authorities should introduce “extraordinary restraints” in the form of user taxes, he said. Conversely, some activities have a social value that exceeds their private value. The providers of recreational parks, street lamps, and other “public goods” have difficulty charging people to use them, which means the free market may fail to ensure their adequate supply. To rectify this shortcoming, Mr. Pigou advocated “extraordinary encouragements” in the form of government subsidies. …

…The mere existence of negative spillovers doesn’t necessarily justify government intervention, Mr. Pigou conceded. In some cases, the parties concerned might be able to come to a voluntary agreement about how to compensate innocent bystanders. A landlord, for instance, may reduce the rents for tenants who have to live over a noisy bar.

With spillovers from the financial industry, however, too many parties are involved for private bargaining to provide a practical solution. During the credit bubble of 2002-2006, the entire housing market turned into a speculative bazaar. Mortgage companies that were supposed to apportion credit on the basis of ability to pay distributed it willy-nilly. And banks and other financial intermediaries, which exist to channel capital to its most productive uses, misallocated resources on a vast scale.

When other industries do a bad job, the fallout is usually limited. If Budweiser and Miller marketed undrinkable beers, it would be bad news for those companies and their customers, but the rest of the economy would be largely unscathed.

In banking, the negative spillover can be catastrophic. Many millions of households and firms rely on credit to finance their expenditures. If this credit is suddenly curtailed, spending can fall precipitously throughout the economy. That is what we witnessed at the end of last year. …

Every so often, Thomas Sowell aggregates the notes to himself that didn’t make full columns. Here’s some more of his random thoughts.

…Since this is an era when many people are concerned about “fairness” and “social justice,” what is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

Many colleges claim that they develop “leaders.” All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else’s freedom. …

…Government pressures on mortgage lenders to accept less than the full amount they are owed may win votes for politicians, since there are far more borrowers than lenders. But how much future lending can be expected when the lenders know that politicians are ready to intervene at any time to prevent them from getting their money back?

Some people think that the Obama administration is going to get rid of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, making him the scapegoat for its economics failures. This would be consistent with the President’s acting as if the people under him are not carrying out his policies. But if they get rid of Geithner too early, that will not help if things still do not get better after he is gone and before the 2010 elections. …

The Economist’s – Democracy In America interviews Radley Balko about problems in the justice system, and about being a libertarian.

DIA: A lot of politicians pay lip service to the principles of smaller government, lower taxes, and more freedom. Yet the result is often the opposite. As a libertarian, do you ever get frustrated with the lack of representation for your views in the halls of government? Is there anything that can be done to improve the standing of libertarians?

Mr Balko: In theory, libertarians share about half of our positions with the right, and about half with the left. Broadly speaking, we’re social liberals and fiscal conservatives. The problem is that once in power, neither side pays much heed to the issues they have in common with libertarians, because that would require them to voluntarily put limits on their own power. And politicians don’t generally seek higher office for the purpose of limiting what they can do when they get there. So the libertarian stuff is where they’re most willing to compromise. And it’s what they’re least willing to spend political capital defending.

So we saw George W. Bush hold the line on social issues, but completely sell out on federal spending, regulation, and general growth of government. We’re seeing the same thing with Barack Obama, only in reverse. I put up a blog post at Reason about this a few months ago. Obama’s holding fast to his campaign promises that expand the size, scope, and power of government. The few promises he made that involve limiting government in some way—generally on social and civil liberties issues—are the promises he’s been less interested in keeping. This isn’t really surprising. But it speaks to the difficulty libertarians have in getting their ideas taken seriously. It’s made worse by the fact that libertarians by definition generally aren’t interested in seeking political power. That leaves public office and the reins of power open to those who crave it.

That said, I think there’s reason for some optimism for libertarians. The generations raised on the internet will be more educated, aware, and informed than any before them, and I think that has instilled in them some naturally libertarian instincts, particularly when it comes to issues like government transparency, accountability, censorship, and police power. Perhaps I’m a bit pollyanna-ish, but it’s at least possible that once the Obama administration proves just as inept, corrupt, and hopeless as the Bush administration, the younger people who flocked to Obama will start to understand that the problem isn’t who’s running government, it’s that government power itself corrupts–and that we’re better off keeping as much of our lives as possible off limits to the whims of politicians instead of this repeating cycle of putting all of our hope into the idea that someday, the right politicians will finally get elected. …

In Slate’s Books, Jon Meacham reviews Paul Johnson’s new biography of Winston Churchill.

In November 1940, on learning of Franklin Roosevelt’s defeat of Wendell Willkie, Winston Churchill composed one of his many flattering and importuning telegrams to the president in Washington. He had, he told FDR, prayed for the president’s re-election. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe,” Churchill wrote, “and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.” It was a brilliant and lovely note—and Roosevelt never replied, an omission that bothered Churchill for years. …

…In this small incident, we glimpse the human Churchill beneath the grandeur of the deity of history he has long since become. The human Churchill is Paul Johnson’s chief concern in his brief new biography, Churchill, but I raise the Case of the Unacknowledged Telegram because it contains one of Churchill’s finest forgotten phrases: “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.” It is an interesting test of the significance of any event, that: Will the problem or crisis of the hour be remembered—cue kettle drums—as long the English language is spoken? Damn little will meet that criterion, but Winston Churchill is among the things that will. …

…In his 166 pages, Johnson gives us what amounts to an elegant survey with a maxim-filled epilogue: in essence, the best possible dinner conversation about Churchill one could ever have with a gifted interlocutor, followed by what PowerPointers might think of as “take-away points.” The book’s most original offering is—in characteristically vivid prose and a consistent intelligence and urbanity—Johnson’s distillation of life lessons from Churchill’s storied career. This is biography as commencement speech—think highbrow how-to. (Examples of didactic wisdom: “always aim high”; “there is no substitute for hard work.”) …

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Peter Wehner posts on the bad reviews that the President’s foreign policy is receiving from abroad. To be sure, there’s no doubt Pickerhead didn’t lose any sleep when W was savaged this way. But, it is amazing to see foreigners grow out of love so quickly with the wonder child.

The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:

Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.

The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Wehner’s post.

Pete, your smart critique raises two key points, which supporters of the president might want to mull over as they consider whether a course correction is in order.

First, the roundup of international public opinion highlights what the Obama team often forgets: the whole world is watching wherever the president goes and whatever venue or crisis is occupying him at that moment. The Russians pay attention when he bows in Japan. The Iranians perk up when he meekly agrees to avoid free encounters with Chinese dissidents. The Syrians watch closely when the Obami try to finesse the reaction to the Goldstone report. And the North Koreans breathe a sigh of relief as they watch the farcical negotiations in Iran unravel. One senses that the Obami don’t quite grasp this, that they believe they are simply catering to this or that despot, trying as best as they can to ingratiate themselves and meet the “concerns” of whichever thugocracy occupies their attention that day. But in fact everyone watches everything, and the portrait of accommodation and concession is taken in by many audiences. That image of irresoluteness becomes fixed in our adversaries’ minds, even when they are not the immediate subject of the president’s focus on that visit or in that particular negotiation. Slowly, our adversaries begin to learn and to test us again and again, motivated by a sense that this president can be pushed and intimidated. The task of keeping foes at bay and allies in line becomes more difficult as a result.

Second, Pete observes: “Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the unique responsibility of the president.” And when national security does rise to the top of the list of voters’ concerns, it is generally because the public is becoming very, very alarmed. …

Jeffrey Goldberg blogs in the Atlantic that the Obama administration got in the way of the Middle East peace process.

This is what the President had to say after the Israeli announcement that 900 apartment units would be built in the South Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo:

“I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security. I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbors. I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous.”

Two issues. The first is that this Administration, unlike previous Administrations, doesn’t seem to understand that all settlements are not created equal. Palestinian negotiators have fairly consistently recognized that Gilo, a Jerusalem suburb built over the 1967 Green Line, but south, not east, of the city, would remain inside Israel in a final-status peace deal, as part of a dunam-for-dunam land-swap with the Palestinian Authority. So it doesn’t matter if Israel adds 900 apartments, or 90 shopping malls, to Gilo. It’s staying inside Israel.

The second issue is the more consequential one: Having made Gilo an issue when it did not previously exist as an issue (as a matter of fact, Gilo, during the second Uprising, stood for Israeli resilience in the face of Palestinian violence) Obama then warned that Gilo is making Palestinians embittered “in a way that could end up being very dangerous.” This is euphemistic, of course, but not too euphemistic, given the history of Palestinian violence. Obama’s statement reads almost as a kind of preemptive rationalization for violent Palestinian protest. It’s never a good idea, of course, for an American president to forecast Palestinian violence, but it’s especially unfortunate now, just when Israel had announced a moratorium on new settlement building. In fact, if the Obama Administration hadn’t made such a hash of the peace process, the Palestinians would now be returning to the negotiating table, acknowledging that the Netanyahu settlement moratorium is, as Hillary Clinton said, unprecedented. But since the moratorium didn’t meet the maximalist conditions set by the Administration, there’s no possible way the Palestinians could have been seen demanding less of the Israelis than Obama did.

In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft has Chris Matthews criticizing Obama’s indecision on Afghanistan.

This was weird.
Chris “Tingles” Matthews says Barack Obama needs to act a little less like Neville Chamberlain and more like Winston Churchill.

Via NewsBusters from this weekend’s “The Chris Matthews Show” …

…DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is, he is going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed and I think this is not…

MATTHEWS: So, too much Chamberlain and not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much, too much college professor.

For the record… It’s been at least 93 days since the Ditherer in Chief was asked by his top general in Afghanistan for reinforcements.

As for the speech, Victor Davis Hanson had some thoughts.

That was such a strange speech. Deploring partisanship while serially trashing Bush at each new talking point. Sending more troops, but talking more about when they will come home rather than what they will do to the enemy. There was nothing much new in the speech, yet apparently it took the president months to decide whether even to give it.

Ostensibly the talk was to be on Afghanistan; instead, the second half mostly consisted of the usual hope-and-change platitudes.

Still, the president, to his credit, is trying to give the best picture of the Afghanistan war. Obama started well in his review of why George Bush removed the Taliban. But that disinterested narrative lasted about two minutes. Then came the typical Obama talking points that characterize his reset-button foreign policy and don’t offer a high degree of confidence that our commander in chief wants to defeat the enemy or believes that he can win the war: …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Obama feels the need to bash Bush.

… It has become a nervous tic with Obama. Something is wrong, people are upset — blame Bush! Obama is going to need to rely on conservative support to prosecute the war since his own crowd certainly won’t be cheerleading for him. So it would have been politically smart and classy to have credited Bush with the surge or with leaving him the assessment for the Afghanistan war, which he relied on in the spring (the one his team previously denied receiving). But that’s not this president’s style. For reasons that aren’t quite clear — either personal peevishness or political expediency — even in a wartime speech in which bipartisanship would have been essential, he felt compelled to get in his digs. If President Obama seems smaller than candidate Obama it’s because he allows pettiness to get the best of him. He should give it up. He’s now president after all.

Clive Crook posts a thoughtful review of Climategate in the Atlantic.

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. …
…One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson’s study raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy. Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre’s campaign to get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work. …

…While I’m listing surprises, let me note how disappointed I was by The Economist’s coverage of all this. “Leaked emails do not show climate scientists at their best,” it observes. No indeed. I should say I worked at the magazine for years, admire it as much as ever, and rely on the science coverage especially. But I was baffled by its reaction to the scandal. “Little wonder that the scientists are looking tribal and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny scraps as proof of a conspiracy,” its report concludes. Tiny scraps?  I detest anti-scientific thinking as much as The Economist does. I admire expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is outrageous. …

…Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods–notably, peer review–that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards–at least whenever “the science” calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.

Roger Simon makes a good point about the IPCC chair’s defense of global warming theory.

Rajendra K. Pachauri – chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – sounded as if he was auditioning for Saturday Night Live when he said Sunday:

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.” …

…Here’s a thought. From now on, when there’s something to research of true scientific importance, let’s keep it as far away from the UN as possible. We might also want to put all findings on the Internet, so the real United Nations of Human Beings can evaluate them. Oh, I forgot. Pachauri tells us their process was “very transparent.” Note the “very” – the true sign of a liar. When something is transparent, it doesn’t need qualification. It is – or it isn’t.

Mark Steyn also posts on the IPCC chair. Apparently Rajendra Pachauri has taken jetsetting to a new level.

In order to save the planet from global roasting, it seems entirely reasonable to ask Mr. and Mrs. Joe Peasant to subordinate their freedom of movement to an annual “carbon allowance” preventing them flying hither and yon and devastating the environment. As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explains:

Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.

Rajendra Pachauri? Hey, if you’re manning the VIP lounge at Heathrow, that name may ring a bell:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

Wow. 443,243 miles. How many flying polar bears does Dr. Pachauri kill in an average quarter? Well, not to worry, he probably offsets his record-breaking ursocide with carbon credits from carbon billionaire Al Gore.

And in any case it’s okay to devastate the planet on IPCC business — plus the occasional cricket match:

So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.

…If you’re waiting for some journalist to ask him about the contradictions between his lifestyle and the one he wants the rest of us to submit to, that sound you hear is cricketers chirping.

In the Boston Globe, Beth Healy looks more closely at the making of Harvard’s financial crisis.

It happened at least once a year, every year. In a roomful of a dozen Harvard University financial officials, Jack Meyer, the hugely successful head of Harvard’s endowment, and Lawrence Summers, then the school’s president, would face off in a heated debate. The topic: cash and how the university was managing – or mismanaging – its basic operating funds.

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members. …

…But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses.

So how did one of the world’s great universities err so badly in something so basic? It is a story with many actors, the story of an institution that grew complacent as its endowment soared ever higher – an institution that, when the crunch hit, was operating on financial auto-pilot, with many key players gone, and those remaining inattentive, in retrospect, to the risks ahead. …

Charles Krauthammer’s take on the party crashers at the White House.

…What you have here is a harmless little con job pulled off by a middling, fairly shady, social-climbing set of publicity hounds, not very different from your average invitee to a White House state dinner. …

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Jennifer Rubin comments on Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s writings about the heartening and historic outcome of this chapter in the democracy of Honduras.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the elections in Honduras:

Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution. Yesterday’s elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle. National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo was the favorite to win in pre-election polls. Yet the name of the victor is almost beside the point. The completion of these elections is a national triumph in itself and a win for all people who yearn for liberty. …

…Almost 400 foreign observers from Japan, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. traveled to Honduras for yesterday’s elections. Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, the German parliament and Japan will also recognize the vote. The outpouring of international support demonstrates that Hondurans were never as alone these past five months as they thought. A good part of the world backs their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.

What is disturbing is that Obama did not count himself among those desiring to back “their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.” It’s hard to fathom what motivates the president and his team, and why they seem so reluctant to oppose our allies’ enemies. Perhaps they have so internalized the criticism leveled by America’s foes that they can no longer discern when the gang in Foggy Bottom is being “played” and what is in our own national interests. We do have them — national interests, that is — and it would be nice if the Obami recognized, articulated, and vigorously defended them, regardless of how loudly Brazil, Venezuela, and much of the rest of the “international community” squawks.

Rick Richman also posts on the Honduran resolution and on the State Department finally joining the party.

…On Friday, the State Department finally endorsed the election, describing it in terms that would have made Simon Bolivar blush:

The electoral process — launched well before June 28 and involving legitimate candidates representing parties with longstanding democratic traditions from a broad ideological spectrum — is conducted under the stewardship of the multi-party and autonomous Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which was also selected before the coup. The electoral renewal of presidential, congressional and mayoral mandates, enshrined in the Honduran constitution, is an inalienable expression of the sovereign will of the citizens of Honduras.

Honduras now holds the Guinness record for shortest Latin American “coup” ever. Yesterday, the election officials announced that more than 61.5 percent of registered Hondurans went to the polls, a historic record turnout:

The announcement from the TSE [Tribunal Supremo Electoral] received a standing ovation from the attentive room of official observers and spectators.

The TSE stated they would welcome any international audit of the results.

The Obama administration deserves credit for finally recognizing that its misguided policy had reached a dead end and reversing course before it was too late. It is a lesson the administration could profitably apply in other foreign-policy areas as well.

We have three items anticipating the speech tonight on our new Afghan policy. Jennifer Rubin comments on Obama’s Afghanistan indecision, and what he must do now that he has decided on a strategy.

…Here Obama has made his own job worse. By empowering the likes of Joe Biden and his domestic policy advisers to second-guess the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and to warn openly of the domestic consequences of embracing the only viable plan for victory, the president has signaled that he’s looking over his shoulder. The sole target of his concern has not been the enemy and the horrendous potential consequences of a halfhearted effort. Instead he’s been fixated on his left-wing base. He’s obsessed over an exit strategy, forgetting that his predecessor won a war without one and that George W. Bush’s wartime troubles stemmed not from failing to  promise an end date but from letting a losing strategy persist too long. Obama’s also muddied the waters on the identity of the enemy and whether we can achieve “victory,” a word never uttered but essential to leading a war effort.

Now, as the editors note, “Both Americans and Afghans wonder whether the president believes in the war and has the will to win it.” One way for Obama to demonstrate that he takes being commander in chief seriously would be to dismiss his left-wingers’ “tax the war” gambit, designed to undermine support for the effort we are about to undertake. He should be clear that this is sheer hypocrisy (where’s the stimulus surtax?) and won’t be realistically entertained.

Frankly, it might be a good time for the president to battle his left flank and demonstrate some moxie, if he has it. The world and a vast number of centrists in America, not to mention conservatives, think he’s a wimp. This is his time to prove them wrong.

In the Daily News, Michael Goodwin says we should evaluate three aspects of Obama’s Afghanistan speech.

How does Obama define the goal? He’s not likely to use the “V-word” because victory is verboten in a war on terror that doesn’t exist to this White House. But if Obama doesn’t say success is our goal and be specific about what that means, the commander in chief will be ducking his chief responsibility. …

How does Obama define the enemy? Last March, he announced a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and repeatedly referred to the Taliban as well as al Qaeda. They were inseparable when he said, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

He was right then, but there is considerable doubt he still believes in that linkage. …

…The medieval Sharia government the Taliban wants to impose marches in lockstep with al Qaeda goals. Obama himself cited 9/11 as proof of the connection. Any suggestion now that the Taliban is not part of the problem will reveal he has chosen the path of least political resistance at home.

How much emphasis will Obama put on getting out? Let’s hope press secretary Robert Gibbs’ comment that the president would focus on the exit strategy is only a sop to Democratic liberals opposed to more troops. While some explanation of the endgame is inevitable, a disproportionate emphasis could undercut the new troops before they are deployed. …

Toby Harnden discusses some of the political issues that likely factored into Obama’s indecision.

…He still defines himself principally as the unBush, at every turn reflexively adding the caveat that his predecessor bequeathed him a “mess”. By the time he finally reveals his decision on Afghanistan on Tuesday night, it will be just a day short of three months since General Stanley McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops to stave off American defeat.

This extraordinarily long process has been dubbed “dithering” by his critics, led by former vice-president Dick Cheney, and “deliberative” by his admirers. In fact, it is principally an ostentatious attempt to show that he is not President George W Bush, who once stated that he was “a gut player”.

Alongside that, Obama wants to avoid being President Lyndon Johnson, whose “escalation” (a negative term that is now common currency in news reports) of the Vietnam war condemned him to a one-term presidency despite his Great Society domestic reforms.

…Support for the war in Afghanistan now stands at barely a third of Americans, despite the reality that this was the country from which the 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned – quite a feat for a man who declared it the “good war” in his election campaign. …

…The 90-day “hiatus” – a plainly appropriate word for Bob Ainsworth, the British Defence Secretary to have used last week – in strategic direction from Washington has had a cost in terms of momentum and perception in Afghanistan that will not be easy to overcome.  …

Roger Simon blogs on an amazing development in Switzerland. The tolerant worldly Swiss have decided; no more minarets.

In a supposedly surprising development, the Swiss just voted to ban minarets on mosques in their country:

Over 57% of Swiss voters chose to approve a blanket ban on the construction of Muslim minarets, according to official results posted by Swiss news agency ATS.

Just days before the election only 37% of people polled by state-owned television station DRS said they would support the ban.

Swiss feminists were apparently in the lead in the “Stop the Minarets” campaign. No surprise there really. Salman Rushdie is not the only one to read Islamic texts (and behavior) as an assault on women. Anyone with eyes open, certainly an intelligent female, would. If only our own feminists could get off their reactionary multi-culturalist behinds in this regard. …

…Of course this is called a “right-wing proposal.” That must be news to those feminists. And, of course, there is no mention that throughout much of the Islamic world – forget minarets or spires – churches and synagogues are banned altogether (not to mention apostates have their throats slit).

On a personal note I remember Hans-Rudolf Merz well from my recent trip to Geneva for the Durban II Conference where I watched as the Swiss President welcomed the Holocaust-denying-nuclear-bomb-buliding-mega-misogynistic-homosexual-denying-and-now-demonstrator-murdering-religious-psychopath President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Call it ultra-bourgoies multi-culturalism or simply protecting banking interests, the whole thing was despicable. It’s great to see the Swiss people turn their backs on all that. …

We have Thomas Sowell’s third piece on the housing bubble, and the government’s leading role in it’s creation.

…In short, riskier loans were accepted as good loans by one of the key regulators of the housing markets. Moreover, HUD was not just accepting subprime lending but pushing for more. After HUD became a regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, these government-sponsored enterprises were set numerical goals — quotas — for what share of their lending was to be for “affordable housing” mortgages.

In practice, they were pushed to acquire more subprime mortgages.

This was important not only because of the risk to the assets of these two enterprises themselves but, because they are dominant forces in the housing market and major gigantic financial institutions, there were dangers to the whole financial market if things went wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose securities were widely held by other financial institutions on Wall Street and beyond.

The importance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing markets is demonstrated by the magnitude of their mortgage guarantees, which total more than two trillion dollars. That is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four nations.

Ordinarily, financial markets would become less willing to invest in an enterprise with ever-growing risks. But, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are officially private, profit-making enterprises, their size and the federal government’s involvement in both their creation and their ongoing operations led many investors to assume that the federal government would never allow them to fail. …

…In short, the policies and practices of many institutions, local and national, public and private, set the stage for the housing boom and the housing bust that followed.

Placing the roots of the housing boom and bust in the free market and the solution in government is very convenient for politicians and for those who favor government interventions. But such explanations are inconsistent with facts, however impressive they might be as exercises in rhetoric. …

In Jewish World Review, Michael Barone sums up global warming theory in the wake of Climategate.

…The most charitable plausible explanation I have seen comes from The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle. “The CRU’s main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish.”

Australian geologist Ian Plimer, a global warming skeptic, is more blunt. The e-mails “show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.”

Global warming alarmist George Monbiot of the Guardian concedes that the e-mails “could scarcely be more damaging,” adding, “I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” He has called for the resignation of the CRU director. All of which brings to mind the old computer geek’s phrase: garbage in, garbage out. …

The large number of unemployed teenagers should be one of Obama’s priorities. But instead, he pays obeisance to the left’s worship of minimum wage laws; always coercion over freedom. Steven Horwitz, in the Nightly Business Report, reports on one consensus that didn’t require hiding data or rigging numbers.

During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised that, in contrast to his predecessor, his presidency would be a “science presidency.” In his first year, Obama may well have taken some science more seriously than his predecessor, but one set of settled scientific research he has chosen to ignore has been the economics of the minimum wage. The result has been a nightmare for young workers, especially young workers of color.

Economic theory predicts that raising the minimum wage will cause those employees who are least productive to lose their jobs. If we raise the minimum wage from, say, $6 to $7, it’s the same thing as saying “any worker who cannot produce $7 worth of value each hour is not worth hiring.” Younger workers are, of course, among the least skilled in the economy. In addition, thanks to poor schools and historical discrimination, young workers of color are over-represented in this category. Higher minimum wages should disproportionately affect young workers and especially ones of color.

The empirical evidence to support this theoretical claim is abundant. Hundreds of studies of this relationship have been done by economists and they are nearly unanimous that higher minimum wages are associated with some level of increased unemployment among lower-skilled workers. Whatever consensus there might be among climate scientists about global warming, that among economists about minimum wage laws is at least as great (and, as we discovered recently, we don’t need to rig the computer code to make our models reconstruct pre-historic data to come out the way we want). Despite what the science says, the Obama Administration supported a minimum wage increase last July. …

In WSJ, Arch Puddington reviews David Engerman’s new book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. The people living in the pretend world of the academy, came to view the Soviets in the pretend world of their minds.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is today regarded by most of the world as an unalloyed good: the overdue collapse of a system that was incubated in terror and maintained by a vast police-state apparatus. The Soviet Union deprived ordinary people of their liberties, subjected entire nations to colonial rule, and ruined its own economy and that of its neighbors. Even those who objected to America’s policies during the period of superpower rivalry do not dispute that the Soviet “experiment” proved an abject failure, with terrifying human cost.

But as David C. Engerman reminds us in “Know Your Enemy,” his engrossing history of “the rise and fall of America’s Soviet experts,” the center of the scholarly universe had a more benign appraisal of Soviet reality through much of the Cold War. …

…In the early years, the relationship between the U.S. government and the scholarly community was one of happy co-existence. Government funds allowed scholars to conduct pioneering research, which in turn helped the policy community. University officials “could not imagine government work as presenting any challenge to academic autonomy,” Mr. Engerman notes. By the 1970s, however, the relationship had changed. The radical currents that swept through the universities in the 1960s stirred a hostility to cooperating with officialdom.

At the same time, a new generation of specialists emerged: They were determined to assess the Soviet experience—present and past—in a more optimistic light. Social scientists churned out study after study seeking to demonstrate that Soviet institutions functioned much like their counterparts in the U.S. and ridiculing the use of the word “totalitarian” to describe the Soviet system. Likewise, revisionist historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote accounts of the Stalin period that dealt primly with the Terror and upbraided traditionalist historians for being, as she put it, “preoccupied with questions of moral judgment.” …