Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Our major focus today is on the debt crisis in Europe. A WSJ op-ed starts us off.

… At the end of the G7 meeting in Canada last weekend, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told reporters, “I just want to underscore they made it clear to us—they, the European authorities—that they will manage this [Greek debt crisis] with great care.”

But the Europeans have not been careful so far. The issues for troubled euro zone countries are straightforward: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (known to the financial markets, and not in a polite way, as the PIIGS) had varying degrees of foreign- and bank credit-financed rapid expansions over the past decade. In fall 2008, these bubbles collapsed.

As custodian of their shared currency, the European Central Bank responded by quietly opening lifelines to all these countries, effectively buying government bonds through special credit windows. Europe’s periphery was fragile but surviving on this intravenous line of credit from the ECB until a few weeks ago, when it suddenly became apparent that Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB, and his German backers were finally lining up to cut Greece off from that implicit subsidy. The Germans have become tired of supporting countries that do not, to their minds, try hard enough. Investors naturally flew from Greek debt—Greece’s debt yields rose, and its banking system verged near collapse as investors and savers ran from the country.

But it’s not just about Greece any more. …

Niall Ferguson is next with a piece from the Financial Times.

It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate. …

Paul Johnson wrote in Forbes about the mistakes made by the U. S. and the U. K. following current Keynesian nostrums.

… However, the European Union, led by Germany, proved reluctant to tread the Keynesian road and shoulder vast burdens of government debt. The result of this decision can be seen in the rise of the euro against the dollar and the pound and in the fact that Germany and France are now pulling out of recession.

China and India declined to go for a full-bloodied Keynesian solution. Their economies have continued to expand, if more slowly than before the crisis, and both are in a strong position to exploit the new decade’s opportunities. China has notably narrowed the gap between its economy and that of the U.S.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain are still deeply mired in recession, having acquired a vast amount of new government debt to no constructive purpose. No amount of juggling with unemployment figures can obscure the fact that in both countries real jobs are still being lost and that the creation of phony government ones is not altering the drop in family incomes. The public senses the truth, and the signs point to voters taking a fearful revenge on the Keynesian “miracle workers.” …

Jake Tapper notes Obama just signed a bill into law with no fanfare; no bells and whistles; no fellow conspirators waiting around for a pen.

Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion. …

Peter Schiff explains why values of asset classes are moving in tandem.

Over the past three or four years a strange phenomenon has developed in the global investment markets. With some exceptions, many asset classes, in particular domestic and foreign equities, commodities, and foreign currencies have tended to move in the same direction on a day to day basis. The mega-correlation has lasted so long that most now take it for granted. This leaves investors with relatively simple choices: when to get in to the market in general and when to park assets in cash and U.S. Treasuries.

However, few recall that this pattern is relatively new in the annals of financial history. Fewer still realize the reason for the current anomaly. From my perspective the most logical explanation is fear, which has become global, pervasive, and persistent. …

Caroline Baum from Bloomberg News looks at small business attitudes.

… “Stay out of our way,” says Sherry Pymer, vice president of Pymer Plastering Inc., a 124-year-old family owned business in Columbus, Ohio. She sounded more like an Ayn Rand hero than a woman dealing with a payroll, unemployment insurance and Ohio’s commercial activity tax. “We don’t want them bailing out banks and big business. We want them to go away with their mandating and meddling and return this country to the principles it was founded on over 200 years ago.”

We’re a long way from the Founding Fathers, that’s for sure. The handful of small-business owners I talked to across the country are about as close to the entrepreneurial spirit as it gets. They all had one implied piece of advice for Washington: Less is more. Specifically, you do less — and get your fiscal house in order — and we’ll do more, Henderson says.

And as for the closing of the federal government this past week due to weather, these small-business owners had one wish: more snow.

Mark Steyn alerts us to Phil Jones, head of the infamous Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University, saying there’s been no warming since 1995. More on this tomorrow.

Say it loud, he’s unsettled and proud. Hide-the-decliner Phil Jones is embracing his inner decline:

“Climategate U-turn as Scientist at Centre of Row Admits: There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995″

That would be 1995 as in a decade and a half ago? Gee, you wouldn’t get that impression from reading the papers. …

Now that it is increasing clear we’ve been lied to for years, thank God some of the more idiotic green initiatives never passed. David Harsanyi says the founders of our republic wanted our country to be hard to govern.

If you’ve been paying attention to the left-wing punditry these days, you may be under the impression that the nation’s institutions are on the verge of collapse. Or that the rule of law is unraveling. Or maybe that this once-great nation is crippled and nearly beyond repair.

You know why? Because the 40 percent (or so) political minority has far too much influence in Washington. Don’t you know? This minority, egged on by a howling mob of nitwits, is holding progress hostage with their revolting politics and parliamentary trickery.

Leading the charge to fix this dire problem is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who advocates abolishing the Senate filibuster to make way for direct democracy’s magic. …

Ilya Somin blogs on snow storm entrepreneurship and seasonal property rights enforced without government.

The massive “Snowmageddon” snowstorm is a good time to consider this interesting 2001 article about snowstorms and parking space property rights by Northwestern University law professor Fred McChesney [HT: Alex Tabarrok]:

“Before snowfalls, a parking space belongs to the one who occupies it: you leave it, you lose it. In wintertime Chicago, however, excavating one’s car changes the system of property rights. Once car owners dig themselves out of their snow cocoon (Chicagoans carry snow shovels in their trunks for this), they claim the place they cleared as their own. How? Diggers routinely place lawn furniture, buckets, two-by-fours, bar stools, orange highway construction cones and other markers in the space they have just dug out. That means the space now belongs to the excavator. When he leaves, the markers dictate that the space must sit empty until the owner returns. “People do look at these spaces as their own property,” a local law professor comments.

The space belongs to the original snow-mining engineer until the snow melts along the curb. Woe betide anyone who would take that space while its owner is away. Others in the neighborhood—who have undertaken similar excavations and staked out their own spaces—will protect the space for its absent owner. Broken windows, scratched paint, deflated tires and other punishments often follow parking in a space designated by whatever debris marks the excavator’s property….”

If you have been paying attention, you might have noticed Camille Paglia has not graced our pages since November. She explains why.

The inventor of the Frisbee has passed. WSJ has the obit.

Dilbert says products that don’t work are the causes of our economic problems.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Veronique de Rugy says it is time to stop blaming Bush.

… In his latest budget request, President Obama added roughly $1.6 trillion in spending over the next ten years on top of what he requested last year. Can President Obama blame that extra $1.6 trillion on former President Bush? …

Pickings is unusually mono-focused today as it looks at some of the firestorm of criticism of members of the administration. Calls for resignations of Holder and Brennan have now led to detailed portraits of the “Chicago Four”; Axelrod, Jarrett, Emanuel, and Gibbs. The catalyst for this was an article by Edward Luce in Financial Times about the people surrounding the president who, while good at winning the job, apparently have no clue how to govern. This piece, which is below, and related items are being followed in the blogospere with intense interest. We start with a Daniel Foster Corner Post on the subject.

There is a great deal of back-and-forth in the blogosphere today on the subject of a Financial Times piece (subscription required) that lays the blame for Obama’s floundering first year in office on an advisory staff geared for campaigning, not governing.

Based on extensive anonymous interviews with people around the Obama White House, the Financial Times’ Edward Luce paints a picture of an administration run almost entirely from within the president’s political machine — with campaign-managers-turned-advisers David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs, along with Chicagoan legislative tactician Rahm Emanuel, in the room for every major decision. …

Jonah Goldberg is next. We’ll keep pull quotes short so we don’t get too long.

… it seems to me Obama is to blame for his current woes and in a way that is unique to him. The upshot of the Luce article is that Obama is still in campaign mode. That’s a point conservatives have been making for a year, so it’s a bit funny to hear liberals suddenly credit this analysis. …

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note introduces the article.

… this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation’s top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the “four horsepersons of the Obama White House” will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay ‘legs.’ …

Here is the Edward Luce piece in Financial Times.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong? …

Andrew Malcolm of LA Times also weighs in on the subject.

… In the last few days at least three major outlets have published well-informed evaluations of Obama’s first year in office. All are well worth reading. The dominant themes: disappointment and disillusionment with the Chicago way.

In one respect it’s not surprising that a capitol city with its own style of take-no-prisoners politics should find a professed outsider’s style of smoother-spoken take-no-prisoners discomforting.

But now, no less than the Huffington Post headlined its Obama evaluation by Steve Clemons: “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama presidency.”

The devastating Financial Times report by Edward Luce: “A fearsome foursome”

And the Washington Post story by Ann Gerhart: “A year later, where did the hopes for Obama go?”  …

Streetwise Professor rhetorically asks why he can never remember Gibbs’ first name.

I know that his name is “Robert,” but I always find myself calling him “Dick.”  I wonder why that is?

Actually, I don’t.  He is the most insufferable, appalling, obnoxious, dishonest, and thuggish press secretary in memory.  And stupid, too.  What is his mission in life?  To make Scott McClellan look good?  One would have thought that Mission Impossible, but Gibbs has succeeded beyond anything Tom Cruise could ever aspire to. …

… the coalescing conventional wisdom is that these jokers are responsible for Obama’s cliff dive.  (A competing explanation is that you idiotic people are to blame for not recognizing the wonderfulness that is the modern Washington political class.)

Surely, they have contributed.  But this explanation wreaks of the old story of the Czar being betrayed by his boyars and officials.  The Czar, of course, is faultless: it is his underlings that have failed him.

It’s an old explanation/rationalization/excuse, and almost always wrong.  It’s wrong in this case.  As usual, responsibility ultimately rests at the top–with Obama. …

Jennifer Rubin picks up on the Czar/Boyar analogy with a piece titled with the age old cry of Russian reformers, “If the Czar Only Knew.”

Democrats are loathe to say outright what a political disaster Obama has been for their party. So they have seized upon his right-hand man:

“Democrats in Congress are holding White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accountable for his part in the collapse of healthcare reform.The emerging consensus among critics in both chambers is that Emanuel’s lack of Senate experience slowed President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority. …”

In a follow-up, Rubin introduces Doug Wilder’s essay in Politico.

Former Virginia Governor Doug Wilder vividly writes:

“Indeed, even before Bob McDonnell’s resounding victory, the canary had been dead on the floor for months. In Virginia’s most Democratic-friendly regions, the Democrats had been narrowly winning — or outright losing — special elections that should have been taken easily. …”

Summing up this look at Obama’s administration we have the Doug Wilder piece mentioned by J. Rubin above. More on Wilder with this from November 5, 2008 Pickings upon the election of the kid president;

“Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. A testament to the open-minded tolerance of this country’s citizens; at least, the majority of them.

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the American people have already moved on.

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble, follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.”

Here’s Wilder today;

… It would be a grave mistake for the president and those around him to misread the current polls and analyses. They suggest that 1) the American people do not like the direction in which the country is heading; 2) they do not believe that either Democrats or Republicans are showing that they get the message and are doing the business of the people; 3) they hold Congress in very low regard; but 4) they really like the president. Yet, they keep going to the polls to rebuke him resoundingly every chance it is presented.

Unless changes are made at the top, by the top, when the time comes for voters to show how they really feel about Obama, his policies and the messages he sends directly or through the people around him, the president will discover that Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were not just temporary aberrations but, rather, timely expressions of voters who always show that they are ahead of the politicians.

The president should keep uppermost in his mind the biblical admonition as to what happens to those trees that do not bear “good fruit”: The ax is already at the tree.

Dilbert makes peace with his shop vac.

Now that I have a manly garage, with a manly workbench, I was delighted to receive for Christmas a Shop Vac. It’s a magical device that sucks up all sorts of debris, even liquid. It has attachments for everything. I think one attachment is for haircuts, but I haven’t tried it yet. The Shop Vac is gray and black and reminds me of R2D2 so much that I expect it to jack into my breaker panels and reprogram my DVR. …

Very good cartoons tonight.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner says that Obama has another opportunity to stand up for the Iranian revolutionaries.

This week may prove another defining moment for Barack Obama on the world stage, and a major test of his failing leadership. As tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators prepare to take to the streets of Tehran on February 11 in defiance of the security forces on the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution, the president will have to make it clear whose side he is on – the brutal Islamist dictatorship or dissidents fighting for their freedom. He can no longer sit on the fence as a dispassionate neutral observer. As the leader of the free world President Obama has a responsibility to speak out in support of those who are bravely laying down their lives in opposition to a dictatorship that has emerged as America’s most dangerous state-based threat. …

…The Obama administration’s shameful appeasement of the Iranian regime has been a spectacular failure, which has significantly undermined Obama’s standing on the world stage and demonstrated the bankruptcy of his strategy of engagement. It is not too late however for the president to change course and show some backbone, both in confronting the mounting Iranian nuclear threat as well as by backing those bravely fighting for freedom against the Mullahs.

American leadership is not about currying favour with Washington’s enemies. It is forged in the defence of freedom and through standing up to the forces of tyranny. This week Barack Obama has a major opportunity to take a clear stand against a sadistic Islamist theocracy, by sending a clear message that the American people are united with the protesters, and will support their drive for freedom. He should follow the example and courage of Ronald Reagan when he aggressively confronted and defeated the Soviet Empire, and actively advance the cause of liberty in Iran and across the Middle East.

The Economist has more numbers on the jobless recovery.

A week ago, Americans were told that their economy had expanded for a second consecutive quarter, and rapidly at that: output grew at an annual rate of 5.7%. This week, they are reminded that a return to growth has yet to benefit the jobless. The economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, a decline driven by the loss of 75,000 jobs in the construction sector. Economists had forecast an increase in employment of around 15,000. The unemployment rate, based on household rather than establishment data, showed a slight improvement, dropping from 10% to 9.7%, but nearly 15m Americans remain unemployed. As Larry Summers put it in Davos last week, the American economy is experiencing “a statistical recovery and a human recession”.

Several positive trends continued in January. Firms added 52,000 temporary workers and increased hours, just as they did in December, hinting at growing if cautious optimism. Employment rose in health, education and professional services, and retail employment grew by 42,000 in January, on a seasonally adjusted basis, after declining in December. Manufacturing employment also grew, by 11,000, the first increase since the beginning of recession. Analysts point out that the adjustment of the data is tricky around the holiday season, and actual underlying employment may have grown in January. …

…Most troubling of all is the continued failure of economic growth to benefit the labour market. Employment fell by over 300,000 jobs during the last three months of 2009, despite strong expansion in GDP. The first quarter of 2010 is unlikely to show as big an output gain, suggesting that the pace of improvement in employment may be slowing, even as regular job growth has yet to return. And the situation may be more dire still; initial jobless claims have grown in recent weeks, indicating that what momentum there was in labour markets has been lost. …

Thomas Sowell provides some clear thinking on the idea of fairness.

…Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and “unfair” to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity — David Riesman, I believe — who said: “The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results.”

If by “fair” you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense. …

…Many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing — whether a mental test or an institution — is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups. …

Michael Barone discusses how unions in government workplaces force excess financial burdens on taxpayers. But Barone ends on an optimist note of sorts.

…Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy. Not surprisingly, Americans have been steadily migrating out of such states and into states like Texas, where public-sector unions are weak and taxes are much lower. …

…Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic party.

But it may not turn out to be a perpetual motion machine. Public-sector employees are still heavily outnumbered by those who depend on the private sector for their livelihoods. The next Congress may not be as willing as this one has been to bail out state governments dominated by public-sector unions. Voters may bridle at the higher taxes needed to pay for $100,000-plus pensions for public employees who retire in their 50s. Or they may move, as so many have already done, to states like Texas. …

In the WaPo, Fred Hiatt discusses an example, well-known to our regular readers, of public-sector unions destroying the D.C. voucher program out of “fairness” to those that aren’t given vouchers. A more jaded opinion is that they are protecting their jobs to the detriment of children’s futures.

…The second objection is that if children or families with get-up-and-go actually get up and go, things will be even worse for those left behind. There are a lot of problems with this argument, but the main one is that the people who make it usually aren’t willing to condemn their own children to attend terrible high schools in order to improve things for the other kids there. Why should we demand that of families who have high aspirations but can’t afford to move?

But even if you’re inclined against vouchers, why not embrace a program that has a chance to shed real light on the long-running, fraught and inconclusive argument about their effectiveness? The D.C. program was established to provide such evidence. It enrolled a control group of children who applied for vouchers but didn’t get them, and it is following them along with the kids with vouchers. In a couple more years, if funded robustly, it would give us a real sense of what worked and what didn’t. That could be helpful to lots of children.

Yet the Obama administration seems to be doing everything it can to wind down the program. Why? Early research results have been positive — certainly in terms of parental satisfaction, but also for achievement. Maybe the Democratic Party, and the teachers union leaders who support it, would rather not see any more evidence. …

The WSJ editors note the irony of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo pursuing legal action against BofA. Cuomo’s share of responsibility for the mortgage crisis appears much more serious.

…Entitled, “Highlights of HUD Accomplishments 1997-1999,” the document chronicles the “accomplishments under the leadership of Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who took office in January 1997.”

HUD’s Web visitors learn that in 1999 “Secretary Cuomo established new Affordable Housing Goals requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—two government sponsored enterprises involved in housing finance—to buy $2.4 trillion in mortgages in the next 10 years. This will mean new affordable housing for about 28.1 million low- and moderate-income families. The historic action raised the required percentage of mortgage loans for low- and moderate-income families that the companies must buy from the current 42 percent of their total purchases to a new high of 50 percent—a 19 percent increase—in the year 2001.” …

…We know that in the wake of Mr. Cuomo’s agitation, Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of subprime loans skyrocketed. Subprime and “liar” loans became loss leaders that eventually caused the two mortgage giants to fail—with taxpayers so far on the hook for $111 billion in losses and perhaps hundreds of billions more to come. …

…Even if one believes the allegations hurled by the New York Attorney General at Bank of America—and there is much reason to doubt them—Mr. Cuomo has arguably done far more harm to taxpayers and investors than the defendants have. Before he is handed the New York governorship by Democratic and media acclamation, voters deserve a full accounting of Mr. Cuomo’s complicity in the mortgage meltdown.

Jonathan Pearce makes a good point about the Toyota recalls. Toyota isn’t telling you that they need more of your money to fix a problem that they created. To continue the analogy, Toyota would then have to make the problem even worse and then blame Bush or Wall Street.

Toyota is recalling thousands of motor vehicles around the world to deal with certain problems, such as possible brake failures. The story was the lead item on the BBC TV news today, not surprisingly, given the large number of people who now drive Toyota cars. On one level, this issue is being billed as a terrible embarrassment for the Japanese company, but to an extent I find the comprehensive recall of the cars to be a pretty good example, in fact, of how private businesses with a huge brand-name investment have to act when their products have a problem. Can you imagine, say, a government department doing such a massive “recall” of a failed policy? With private business, the penalties for failure are bankruptcy. For government, the consequence of a mess is often more of the same, only with more lumps of taxpayers’ money. To put it more technically, there is little in the way of a negative feedback loop when governments are involved. …

David Kopel blogs about a surprising coincidence. The Obama Birther conspiracy and the Bush National Guard conspiracy appear to have the same source.

So suggests John Avalon, in a Daily Beast column “The Secret History of the Birthers.” He traces birtherism to a Texas woman named Linda Starr, who was a Hillary Clinton delegate to the 2008 Texas state Democratic Convention. Avalon writes that Starr “was also cited as a key source for CBS’ discredited election year investigation into George W. Bush’s National Guard records that led to Dan Rather’s replacement after 24 years as the evening news anchor.” Avalon links to the Thornburgh/Boccardi report, which was conducted at the request of CBS News to examine CBS’s conduct in producing the infamous 60 Minutes story about Bush supposedly evading National Guard service and then having the records scrubbed. As the report details, Starr made the claim about Bush in an article on her website, three days before the 2000 presidential election. She also played a key role in serving as an intermediary for CBS to obtain the document which purported to be National Guard memo regarding the removal of NG records about Bush. The Thornburgh/Boccardi report does not claim that Ms. Starr knew that the document  was a clumsy fabrication.

At the very least, however, the fiasco of the Bush National Guard story shows that Ms. Starr did not provide her Internet readers, or CBS, with a story which could withstand factual scrutiny. Accordingly, if Avalon’s reporting is correct, he has provided yet another reason for people to disbelieve the (already-implausible) assertion that President Obama was not born in the United States. In contrast to the way the mainstream media initially handled the 2004 Bush National Guard story, the mainstream media did a better job in 2008 by not embracing a story about a presidential candidate which could not be supported by solid, verifiable facts.

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente, while hedging her bets, rounds up the current climate science scandals.

…Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.” …

…Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labeled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they’re bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain’s Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri’s resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC. …

In the American Interest, Walter Russell Mead reviews more of the IPCC “science”.

…Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away.  A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC.

“The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.”

There is however one teensy-weensy little problem.  As Professor Chris Field, the lead author of the IPCC’s climate impact team has now told reporters that he can find “no evidence” to support the claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report. …

…But there’s more. Much, much more.  Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes.  The former head of IPCC has publicly said the organization risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act.  The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC.  (At Greenpeace, they want Pachauri to resign.)  The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level.  Actually, it’s only about a quarter.  A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation.  The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in the need to address global warming. …

Terence Corcoran, in the National Post, contrasts Toyota and the IPCC.

…In fact, Toyota’s troubles mounted when it spoke honestly of its struggles in finding a cause and solution to the acceleration problem. Maybe Toyota could learn a few things from the IPCC. The wheels are practically falling off the climate change organization, with fresh evidence of faulty science, false advertising and flawed procedures being revealed almost daily. Even worse, the records show that the IPCC has a long history of scientific crashes, data manufacturing and out-of-control spins.

Clearly the IPCC is not taking any instruction from the corporate goodness community. For example, it took the IPCC more than two months to officially acknowledge its false claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Rather than rush to come clean on the mistake, the IPCC dragged its feet for weeks, calling it “voodoo” science, before issuing a self-congratulatory statement. “It has…recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.” …

…Note that the IPPC admits to a mistake only in “a paragraph,” thus implying that the thousands of other pages of IPCC reports and science material over the years contain nothing but rock-solid science—an untenable implication given what we know about the IPCC. If the IPCC were a private-enterprise auto company, the class-action suits would have been piling up at the agency’s doors and the U.S. Congress would be parading the IPCC’s executives through a public humiliation. So far, however, most media and just about all governments seem willing to accept the IPCC’s response on its Himalayan junk science. Just a little thing. Nothing to worry about. …

Roger Simon wants your help to find who has been making money by making climate science fiction.

Since it’s clear the Internet (notably the blogosphere) exposed the dubious science of anthropogenic global warming, thankfully before we all went broke (or more broke than we already are), it’s time to turn to our next assignment – following the money.

Cui bono in this giant metastasizing scam? Yes, we already know that the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri may have some ill-gotten gains, not to mention a few scientists who may have flown first class to Bali and other such boondoggles, but they are indeed small potatoes. Big money was – or was intended to be – made with carbon exchanges set up in Europe and the USA. Fraud at the European exchange to the tune of one and half billion dollars is already under investigation by Scotland Yard. But that’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As far back as July 2009, the Science and Public Policy Institute published a broadside – Climate Money – alleging that 79 billion had already been spent on this unproven science. That’s an extraordinary sum, even if exaggerated by eighty or ninety percent. Who knows how much has been spent and who has benefited?

Well, we at Pajamas Media would like to know – and we imagine you would too. And speaking of the tip of that proverbial iceberg, this is not only about Al Gore. There are plenty of high rent dots to be connected here with much pertinent information to be revealed and names to be named. I am writing this post to solicit your help. Just as the blogosphere was so instrumental in dissecting the science, it can also help track the money. If you have knowledge or expertise in this area, please contact us at webmaster@pajamasmedia.com. We will forward this on to Charles Martin – our resident guru on all matters climatic – who will collate and report back. Thanks for your help.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the WaPo, Gerard Alexander discusses liberal condescension.

…Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals. …

Jennifer Rubin extends a glorious ray of hope that Eric Holder may soon be dumped.

…But Holder seems to be on thin ice and the White House might now view him as a liability. The New Yorker quotes a source close to the White House:

“The White House doesn’t trust his judgment, and doesn’t think he’s mindful enough of all the things he should be,” such as protecting the President from political fallout. “They think he wants to protect his own image, and to make himself untouchable politically, the way Reno did, by doing the righteous thing.”

Even more ominous for Holder: Rahm Emanuel is making it clear to all those concerned that he disagreed with a string of highly controversial and politically disastrous decisions by Holder. We learn: “Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions.” And then there is the KSM trial:

At the White House, Emanuel, who is not a lawyer, opposed Holder’s position on the 9/11 cases. He argued that the Administration needed the support of key Republicans to help close Guantánamo, and that a fight over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could alienate them. “…the informed source said. . . .  “Rahm felt very, very strongly that it was a mistake to prosecute the 9/11 people in the federal courts, and that it was picking an unnecessary fight with the military-commission people,” the informed source said. “Rahm had a good relationship with [Sen. Lindsay] Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don’t prosecute these people in military commissions I won’t support the closing of Guantánamo. . . . Rahm said, ‘If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!’ ”

Interesting that Emanuel and his spinners are now distancing the White House from their attorney general. One wonders where Obama stands in this drama. Isn’t he, after all, the commander in chief? Either the president was content to go along with Holder’s decisions until they went south or he subcontracted, with no oversight, some of the most critical decisions of his presidency to a lawyer who is prone to making the kind of mistakes a “first-year lawyer would get fired for. …

In the Corner, Bill Burck and Dana Perino blog about the Obami leaking that Abdulmutallab is talking again. So once again national security is compromised to try to make the White House look better.

Yesterday, we talked about the White House’s outrageous decision to leak that the underwear bomber was now cooperating with the FBI. We said that these coordinated leaks would damage national security by, among other things, telling the underwear bomber’s fellow terrorists that he had flipped on them and it was time to go to ground.

The White House dismissed this criticism, saying that revealing the underwear bomber’s cooperation would not harm national security. Well, apparently FBI director Robert Mueller didn’t get the memo. According to this letter from Senator Bond on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director Mueller on Monday “personally stressed [to Senator Bond] that keeping the fact of his cooperation quiet was vital to preventing future attacks against the United States.”

Less than 24 hours later, the White House was deliberately leaking this very information to the press. What changed in those 24 hours? Nothing except the White House decided the political benefits of leaking outweighed the national security costs.

Also in the Corner, Daniel Foster blogs about the moving of the Obama statue in Indonesia.

Further evidence that the thrill is gone for President Obama, from my friend Aaron Connelly’s Indonesia-based blog:

Earlier today, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo authorized the removal of a recently erected statue of Barack Obama as a child, from its current spot in a park in the city’s classy old Menteng neighborhood to the nearby school that he attended. The order followed the creation of a Facebook group campaigning for the statue to be torn down. Newspapers and television stations here reported on the group extensively, and newswires picked it up and sent it global. After all that attention, the group’s membership soared to over 50,000 members.

The story has been played back home– and will no doubt be played again today– as an amusing piece of news that sums up succinctly the narrative which the media has settled on for President Obama’s current predicament: fading enthusiasm for the president, even in his old strongholds like Menteng and Massachusetts! The Facebook group creators have been quoted arguing that Obama has not yet accomplished enough for a statue to have been erected in his honor, which of course sounds like an echo to anyone who has turned on FoxNews since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in September.

The permutations of clever leads are endless. The blog Ironic Surrealism remarked when the news of the group broke: “Obama is not only falling off of his pedestal here in the US. In Indonesia where he spent a few years as a child, he may soon be literally knocked off of his pedestal.”

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor gives us an idea of how a liberal deals with facts when they have to admit to errors. Not entirely forthcoming, soft-pedaling the number and the seriousness of the mistakes made, and “empathizing” with those involved.

“I have some experience with interrogation, and 50 minutes does not get you what you need,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He also understands a distinction that appears to escape Holder: Although torture is a moral horror, aggressive interrogation is a moral imperative when lives could be at stake.

…After all, Mirandizing is the law-enforcement routine in this country, a routine that the Bush administration followed in similar cases. It took me a while to realize that Mirandizing was a big mistake in this case. So I empathize with those who made the mistake. I also defended Holder’s plan to hold the 9/11 trial in Manhattan, which seems a very bad idea now that the initial enthusiasm of many New York politicians has morphed into nightmare visions.

And I would still defend his decision to maximize the trial’s legitimacy by prosecuting Mohammed under civilian rather than military law. Too bad that Holder almost immediately made the trial sound like a charade by declaring that “failure is not an option.” Then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs went him one better by asserting that Mohammed is “likely to be executed.” …

…But if Obama wants to fend off the soft-on-terrorism label, he will have to think less like a law professor and more like a war leader.

In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson tells us what the politicians aren’t saying and the MSM haven’t analyzed. It’s about our deficit.

…First, from 2011 to 2020, the administration projects total federal spending of $45.8 trillion against taxes and receipts of $37.3 trillion. The $8.5 trillion deficit is almost a fifth of spending. In 2020, the gap is $1 trillion, again approaching a fifth: Spending is $5.7 trillion, taxes $4.7 trillion. All amounts assume a full economic recovery; all projections may be optimistic. The message: There’s a huge mismatch between Americans’ desire for low taxes and high government services.

Second, almost $20 trillion of the $45.8 trillion of spending involves three programs — Social Security, Medicare (health insurance for those 65 and over) and Medicaid (health insurance for the poor — two-thirds goes to the elderly and disabled). The message: The budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes. As more baby boomers retire in the 2020s, deficits would grow.

Third, there is no way to close the massive deficits without big cuts in existing government programs or stupendous tax increases. Suppose we decided to cover all future deficits by raising taxes. Taxes would rise in the 2020s by roughly 50 percent from the average 1970-2009 tax burden. …

In Forbes, John Tamny says that government actions are increasing healthcare costs. Decreasing government intervention would reduce costs.

…Specifically, the federal government should stop protecting the pharmaceutical firms that sell their wares more cheaply in foreign markets, only to block the entrance of those drugs into the U.S. This isn’t to suggest for one second that Big Pharma shouldn’t achieve the highest profits possible on its innovations, but it is to say that Americans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize the consumption of foreigners. Allowing drug re-importation would quickly force drugmakers to sell their products at market rates overseas, which would allow them
to charge us a non-subsidizing rate in the states. Re-importation would quickly become a non-issue if this “tariff” were removed.

Also, the tax-deductible nature of company health insurance is a subsidy like any other. The better solution would be to get rid of all health care tax subsidies so that companies have a greater incentive to offer their employees health savings accounts, as opposed to insurance that creates the illusion of “free” care. As individuals we’re always most careful with our own money, and if our employers require us to pay out of pocket for routine, non-catastrophic care, we’ll necessarily use the funds provided more wisely.

Back to GDP: Health care certainly constitutes 16% of our economy, but this is not a good thing. It’s the result of unconstitutional government efforts to subsidize with transfer payments and tax breaks a lot of wasteful spending. In that sense, the only proper reform would involve the federal government exiting health care altogether so that spending on what is a good as opposed to a “right” is rationalized to our economic betterment.

And don’t miss the cartoons!

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn says to the president, it’s the spending, Stupid.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike? …

…Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690. …

Peter Schiff explains how government is strangling the American economy.

…Regulation acts like a tax on job creation. By subjecting employers to all sorts of extra expenses when they hire people, regulations increase the cost of employment far beyond the wages employers actually pay their workers. In fact, some regulations are specifically tied to the number of workers employed. This provides some employers with a strong incentive to stay small and not hire.  …

…Subsidies produce the opposite effect of regulation, but sometimes the results can be just as harmful. Government subsidies divert resources towards politically favored activities, resulting in more jobs in areas such as health care and education, but fewer jobs in other sectors such as manufacturing. The net effect of this transfer is to diminish the productive capacity and efficiency of the economy, which lowers real economic growth and diminishes employment opportunities.

Although not as visible as regulations and subsidies, government spending also plays a large role in job destruction. The more money government spends, the more resources it drains from the private sector. The fiscal 2011 budget proposed by President Obama contains $3.8 trillion in federal spending. Think of government as a cancer feeding off the private sector. The larger it grows, the more jobs it kills. …

Jennifer Rubin knows why the administration can’t figure out how to get jobs created.

… Perhaps if the president or anyone in his administration had ever run a business or been responsible for a payroll, there would be more understanding about the negative impact Obama’s policies (including his mandate- and fine-filled health-care bill) have on those we must rely on to fuel the economic recovery. Unfortunately, this administration is long on academic types and government bureaucrats and short on entrepreneurs. We could use a few about now.

David Goldman (aka Spengler) comments on last Friday’s jobless numbers.

… I don’t think that government statisticians are faking the data; they simply are running the old statistical routines out of the canned econometrics program to generate seasonal adjustment factors which are–to put it mildly–a lot less meaningful in the present environment than in a normal economy.

The Liberal death march continues. Charles Krauthammer explains why.

…A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly. …

In the Detroit News, Nolan Finley discusses the condescension and the irresponsibility that we are seeing from the president.

There’s always been a disconnect between what Barack Obama says and what he does, but for the last few weeks, the president’s rhetoric has been wholly detached from reality. …

…After unveiling his budget earlier this week, Obama crisscrossed the country, lecturing Americans on the virtues of frugality. “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences,” the president said, adding that the government has to make hard choices and set priorities.

That’s a good message. Except that this is entirely Obama’s budget. He’s the one who failed to set priorities, who didn’t make hard choices. The nearly $1.3 trillion deficit built into this budget is historic in its fiscal recklessness, and it belongs to him. …

In the WaPo, Charles Lane comments on a request from Senator Blanche Lincoln to Obama, asking for a more centrist approach. The president refused on the grounds that anything other than Obama policies are Bush policies.

…The first was the ease with which he cast Lincoln’s plea for a bit more centrism as a call for a return to Bushism — the “exact same proposals that were in place for the last eight years.” That’s not what she was advocating; it’s not what any Democrat who’s questioning his approach is advocating. But the president set up this strawman, and he pummeled it, rather than engaging Lincoln’s valid concerns.

The second striking thing was how easily he appeared to write off Lincoln politically. Conceding nothing, he implied that her defeat was not only a foregone conclusion, but also an acceptable price to pay for staying the course on policy. …

…Still, give the president credit: No one can accuse him of bending his principles to politics. Of course, if there’s a price to be paid for that this year, he won’t be the one paying it. Blanche Lincoln, among others, will get to do that.

Jennifer Rubin adds excellent comments to Charles Lane’s piece.

Charles Lane catches Obama writing Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s political obituary. During the meeting Senate Democrats had with Obama, the imperiled Red State senator practically pleaded with the president to turn to the Center. (”Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”) Her request was summarily denied. Any accommodation to “centrism” is a return to Bush policies, said Obama. Lane is stunned on two grounds by Obama’s stridency…

Well, at least the Red State senators and Blue Dog Democrats know where they stand. They are about to be pushed off that “precipice” Obama keeps talking about. But, as Lane notes, the dogmatic fidelity to leftism requires Obama to ignore some fairly convincing political evidence that this is the way to ruin for the Democratic party — and for Obama. (”If Virginia and New Jersey didn’t prove that, Massachusetts did. And November could prove it again.”)

This is what happens when arrogance and political extremism meet political tone-deafness. The Obami haven’t learned anything from Massachusetts; they simply are more candid that the Blanche Lincolns have no place in their party. But in doing so, they’re also writing off the majority of the electorate, which doesn’t share their fascination with big government and doesn’t appreciate their disdain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make decisions on their own. When Obama tells Lincoln to get lost, he’s also telling the voters of Arkansas (and a bunch of other states) that his agenda and his party’s political goals aren’t for them. Does he suppose that he can govern and win re-election by dismissing all centrists in this fashion? That’s a recipe for becoming a fringe minority party, not a broad governing majority. I suspect Lane is right: it will take a November 2010 election to ram that message home.

Ed Morrissey has some interesting thoughts on Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goldman’s comments about Obama. You know, like the one where the mayor said, “I gotta tell you this, everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I gotta tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner.”

…I find myself in the odd position of defending Obama on this score.  His speech contained very clear conditionals (emphases mine):

When times are tough, you — you tighten your belts.  You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage.  You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.

Well … yeah.  Maybe Obama would have been better advised to keep it generic by saying “in the casinos” rather than “on Vegas”, but otherwise, this is only remarkable for its banality.  You’d hear the same kind of advice from your parents, and probably would have rolled your eyes at its obvious nature. …

…But the man who will pay most will be Harry Reid, who has spent the past year carrying Obama’s water on Capitol Hill.  He can’t win re-election without a huge turnout in Sin City and a big spread.  If Obama becomes unpopular in Las Vegas, Reid’s re-election will become an impossibility rather than the improbability it is at the moment. …

John Stossel calls him Spiro T. Obama.

This week the President again showed how thin-skinned he is about criticism in the media. Maybe he’s so sensitive to criticism because he’s gotten so little of it. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner says that Obama can stop apologizing for America, and start apologizing for himself. Gardiner recommends 10 items. Here are three:

4. Apology to the victims of Communism

Barack Obama made Berlin a central stage of his presidential election campaign when he addressed an adoring crowd of hundreds of thousands of Germans in July 2008. However in November 2009, President Obama could not be bothered to fly to Berlin to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when even the Russian president showed up. Hillary Clinton stood in for the commander-in-chief and delivered an underwhelming speech that was more about Obama than American leadership in the Cold War. The White House decision to snub the Berlin ceremony was an insult to the memory of the tens of millions who perished at the hands of Communism in Europe. It demonstrated a callous disregard for human suffering and a refusal to acknowledge the huge role played by Ronald Reagan and the American people in bringing down the Iron Curtain. It also displayed what can only de described as an arrogant disdain for the transatlantic alliance.

5. Apology to the victims of the Sudan genocide

The Obama administration’s decision to engage with the brutal regime in Khartoum led by Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was both shocking and morally sickening. Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Major General J. Scott Gration summed up the new US strategy when he ludicrously declared: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.” This sent an appalling signal to would be genocidal regimes across the world that even they can be rehabilitated after murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Although it has received relatively little attention, the White House’s offer to lift sanctions against Sudan in exchange for “concrete steps in a new direction”, was one of the worst decisions made by Barack Obama since he took office.

6. Apology to the people of Honduras

It is still difficult to fathom the reasoning behind the White House’s incredible decision to side with Marxist despot Manuel Zelaya after he was removed by the Honduran Congress with the backing of the country’s Supreme Court. The Obama administration immediately condemned the fully constitutional actions of pro-American legislators who acted against a power-hungry figure determined to stay in power beyond his fixed term of office. Bizarrely, the White House aligned itself with the likes of America-hating tyrants like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega against pro-democracy forces who love the United States.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Saturday was the 99th anniversary of Reagan’s birth. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, and one of Reagan’s biographers shares a story.

… Reagan was just plain likable. Of all the subjects I’ve studied, few were as universally liked. Sure, Reagan, as president, was demonized by the Left, but that’s what the Left does: indecent, ugly rage. Still, even most liberals muster nice words about Reagan personally.

Central to that likability was Reagan’s humility. The word “I” didn’t dominate his conversation, unless he was poking fun at himself. He was no narcissist. Ronald Reagan was not full of pride; he was thoroughly unpossessed of self-love.

And so, with that background, I’d like to take the opportunity presented by Reagan’s time of year — not to mention the month of Presidents’ Day — to share an anecdote that was told to me by Bill Clark, Reagan’s close friend and most significant adviser. …

David Warren discusses how every major claim of “climate science” was fabricated.

…To my survey, there is not a single aspect of the “anthropogenic global warming” hypothesis that has been left standing by recent revelations, and more shoes drop every day. …

…the disgraced Dr. Phil Jones, the former boss of the East Anglia operation, now implicated in various cover-ups, attempts to intimidate and silence skeptics, and purposeful breaches of Britain’s freedom of information act. I’m sure he “believed” in what he was doing.

Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may “honestly” think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on “the right side of history,” that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.

Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind “AGW” — not “most,” but all — have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don’t know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow. …

Michael Barone says climate scientists are on his list of the most distrusted professions. We take exception to his inclusion of trial lawyers being on the list, as we know some who are good, principled people. Perhaps he might include politicians and MSM reporters instead. Speaking of the MSM, where are they on this story?

Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty scuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word “clunker.”

But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist. …

…”The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.”

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling. …

It’s Mark Steyn’s turn to roast the global-warming-sky-is-falling crowd.

Whenever I write about “climate change,” a week or two later there’s a flurry of letters whose general line is: la-la-la can’t hear you. Dan Gajewski of Ottawa provided a typical example in our Dec. 28 issue. I’d written about the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s efforts to “hide the decline,” and mentioned that Phil Jones, their head honcho, had now conceded what I’d been saying for years—that there has been no “global warming” since 1997. Tim Flannery, Australia’s numero uno warm-monger, subsequently confirmed this on Oz TV, although he never had before. …

…But where did all these experts get the data from?…

…That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scienti?c evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons. …

V. K. Raina, of the Geological Survey of India, produced a special report demonstrating that the run-for-your-life-the-glaciers-are-melting IPCC scenario was utterly false. For his pains, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the self-aggrandizing old bruiser and former railroad engineer who serves as head honcho of the IPCC jet set, dismissed Mr. Raina’s research as “voodoo science.” He’s now been obliged to admit the voodoo was all on his side. But don’t worry. By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it. …

In the WSJ, Eric Felten says that the corruption, deception, and back-stabbing we are witnessing in various scientific communities is better drama than most soap-opera writers could produce.

This has not been the proudest of weeks for science. Twelve years after publishing an article purporting to prove a link between childhood vaccines and autism, the prominent British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the paper in its entirety. But only after Britain’s General Medical Council found that the author of that article had been “irresponsible and dishonest” in his research, bringing medical science “into disrepute.”

That wasn’t the only controversy involving scholarly journals and the repute of researchers to flare up this week. Also in Britain, two prominent stem-cell researchers went to the BBC with their complaint that the peer review system has become corrupt. Flawed and unoriginal work gets published and promoted, while publication of truly original findings is often delayed or rejected, according to Austin Smith of Cambridge University and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research.

…Not all such news comes from Britain, of course. Scott S. Reuben, formerly of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and until recently a prominent researcher in pain medications, agreed last month to plead guilty to a federal charge of fabricating scientific data. The anesthesiologist had phonied-up results in as many as 21 articles published in scientific journals to secure funding from credulous pharmaceutical companies.

Or how about the case of Cello Energy of Alabama? Investors had poured millions into the company, which claimed it had devised a high-tech process for turning wood pulp and grasses into biodiesel. The Environmental Protection Agency had been counting on the firm to produce more than half of the “cellulosic biofuel” in the country this year. Belatedly, the moneymen decided to do some due diligence and took a sample of Cello’s biodiesel to an independent lab—and found that it was just old-fashioned fossil fuel dressed up in a new green bottle. In June a federal jury in Alabama found that investors had been defrauded and ordered Cello to pay $10.4 million in punitive damages. What are the odds that, with the government belching billions into green technology research, we will see repeats of the Cello fiasco?…

David Harsanyi has an interesting opinion on Rahm Emmanuel’s comment.

…In truth, in nearly every way the lives of the mentally disabled have vastly improved, from the care they receive to the quality of their lives to the respect they are given.

Though I’ve heard the r-word thrown around plenty (often, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn, directed at me) I can’t recall anyone using it as a pejorative to describe a person who was actually disabled. Far from ridiculing the disabled, our culture has humanized them.

Emanuel certainly deserves to be reprimanded. But if his offense is worthy of losing a job, you have to wonder if we really are a nation of the perpetually offended.

In American.com. Max Schultz takes a fascinating look at the new technology in drilling and transporting natural gas, and discusses the political and economic implications that will be felt worldwide. Here is an overview of the drilling advances:

…The first profound shift was made possible by a little-noticed technological breakthrough in the last three years that has changed the way we extract natural gas. Engineers now make use of two important innovations. One is horizontal, or directional, drilling, which permits wells to move laterally beneath the surface instead of going straight down. This technology minimizes the number of holes that have to be drilled, leaving a smaller surface footprint and accessing a larger area. The other technology is hydraulic fracturing, used to extract gas trapped in porous shale rock. In this process, also known as fracking, water and chemicals are pumped at tremendous pressure into shale rock formations to push gas into pockets for easier recovery.

By marrying and perfecting the two processes into a technology called horizontal fracking, engineering has virtually created, from nothing, new natural gas resources, previously regarded as inaccessibly locked in useless shale deposits. Suddenly, the mammoth shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Dakota, and elsewhere have the potential to produce abundant amounts of gas for decades to come. …

Proven reserves of natural gas in the United States have been revised upward by 50 percent in the last decade, and those numbers are sure to climb higher as more shale gas is discovered. Perhaps not surprisingly, other nations are sending geologists to the United States to study techniques for extracting gas from unconventional sources. China, India, and Australia all have enormous shale fields. In the coming decades, the shale gale won’t be just an American phenomenon; it will blow all over the globe. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Christopher Hitchens reviews B.R. Myers new book on North Korea, and the serious danger that the nation presents.

…I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters…The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that. …

…Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one. …

The WSJ editors comment on The Big Spender’s budget.

One rule of budget reporting is to watch what the politicians are spending this year, not the frugality they promise down the road. By that measure, the budget that President Obama released yesterday for fiscal 2011 is one of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history. …

…If this budget is Mr. Obama’s first clear demonstration of his long-term governing priorities, then it’s hard not to conclude that this spending boom is deliberate. It is an effort to put in place programs and spending commitments that will require vast new tax increases and give the political class a claim on far more private American wealth. …

…But the reality is that even these still-high deficits are based on assumptions for growth and revenue gains from record tax increases starting January 1, 2011. And what a list of tax increases it is—no less than $2 trillion worth over the decade. The nearby table lists some of the largest, all of which the Administration and its economists claim to believe will have little or no impact on growth. If they’re wrong, the deficits will be even larger. …

…Even these tax increases won’t be enough to pay for the spending that this Administration is unleashing in its first two remarkable years. On the evidence of this budget, the Massachusetts Senate election never happened.

Obama really is a one-trick President. More government is what he’s forcing on the us, despite public opinion and common sense. Jennifer Rubin comments.

…One marvels at the cognitive dissonance at work. The Obama team declares “jobs” to be the top priority. But job creators are getting a hefty tax hike. The Obama team declares its conviction that the private sector is the engine of recovery. But those who do the most hiring—small business—are getting whacked and money is being sucked out off the private sector and going into the public sector. (As Americans for Tax Reform spells it out, “Taxes are scheduled to rise from 14.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 19.6 percent by 2020.”)

Nor are all these taxes helping to close the deficit. As Keith Hennessey lays it out, “the president’s own figures show deficits averaging 5.1% of GDP over the next 5 years, and 4.5% of GDP over the next ten years. They further show debt held by the public increasing from 63.6% of GDP this year to 77.2% of GDP ten years from now. I think it’s a safe assumption that CBO’s rescore of the President’s budget will be even worse.” And the reason for this, of course, is that as much as Obama is raising taxes, he’s spending even faster than we can take them in. Hennessey again:

The President is proposing significantly more spending than he proposed last year:  1.8% of GDP more in 2011, and roughly 1 percentage point more each year over time. Spending is and will continue to be way above historic averages. At its lowest point in the next decade federal spending would still be 1.7 percentage points above the 30-year historic average.  Over the next decade, President Obama proposes spending be 12% higher as a share of the economy than it has averaged over the past three decades.

This is not a recipe for economic recovery. It is a formula to retard growth, investment, and job creation. It is also, I think, a political fiasco, the exemplification of tax-and-spend policies to which the public is forcefully averse. Once again taxes and fiscal sobriety will top the list of issues in the upcoming elections. You can understand why Democrats expect a brutal political season.

In Investor’s Business Daily, Betsy McCaughey points out that most of Congress is happy to spend more of our money, too.

…Almost no one in Washington, D.C., is calling for spending controls. In the nation’s capitol, the cause célèbre is deficit reduction. Last month, numerous senators from both parties called for a deficit-reduction commission to close the gap between federal spending and tax revenues.

To avoid burdening the next generation, they said, Americans must “pay as they go.” Nothing should be “off the table,” including tax increases, said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. President Obama joined in, announcing in his State of the Union message that if Congress won’t set up a deficit-reduction commission, he will.

Don’t be bamboozled by these sanctimonious calls for deficit reduction. In plain English, it means raising your taxes to keep pace with what politicians are spending. The real danger to our freedom is the level of spending, not whether it’s paid for with taxes now or borrowing. They’ll come after you and your children later. What’s needed is a cap on overall spending.

During the last 18 months, federal spending as a percentage of what the nation produces (gross domestic product) soared to 28% from 20%. Add in state and local government spending, and the result crossed that critical 40% threshold.

The president said in his State of the Union message that the federal government must tighten its belt, just the way American families are doing. But his budget proposal increases federal spending by $85 billion. That is belt-loosening. …

It must be hard when the facts aren’t on your side. Dick Morris corrects the president, and explains how Obama could lower the deficit.

President Obama was disingenuous when he said that the budget deficit he faced “when I walked in the door” of the White House was $1.3 trillion. He went on to say that he only increased it to $1.4 trillion in 2009 and was raising it to $1.6 trillion in 2010.

As Joe Wilson said, “You lie.”

Here are the facts:

In 2008, George W. Bush ran a deficit of $485 billion. By the time the fiscal year started on Oct.1, 2008, it had gone up by another $100 billion due to increased recession-related spending and depressed revenues. So it was $600 billion. That was the real Bush deficit.

But when the fiscal crisis hit, Bush had to pass TARP in the final months of his presidency, which cost $700 billion. Under the federal budget rules, a loan and a grant are treated the same. So the $700 billion pushed the deficit — officially — up to $1.3 trillion. But not really. The $700 billion was a short-term loan, and $500 billion of it has already been repaid.

So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited. …

In the Arizona Republic, Robert Robb also comments on the budget, and Obama’s reflexive spending and blaming.

…Obama likes to depict himself as a deficit victim. He inherited a huge deficit and a deep recession. Not his fault.

Certainly the Republicans during the Bush years were fiscally irresponsible. But within historical bounds. The deficits in Obama’s budget are beyond historical bounds and are his alone.

Even with Bush’s tax cuts, federal revenues in 2007 were at the average as a percentage of GDP, 18.5 percent, going back to 1960. The deficit was just 1.2 percent of GDP, historically on the low side. Accumulated federal debt was 36 percent of GDP.

Then the recession hit. From 2008 to 2009, federal spending increased 18 percent. This was a budget year that straddled the Bush and Obama presidencies. But the spending increase was driven by anti-recession measures, predominately the Bush stimulus and bailouts.

Obama supported these measures. In fact, his complaint about the Bush stimulus was that it was too small.

This raises a question of political ontology: If Obama agreed with Bush, is it still just Bush’s fault? …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Gerald Warner reports on the surprising story of a German family recently receiving political asylum in the US.

…Burman said: “We can’t expect every country to follow our constitution. The world might be a better place if it did. However, the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate.” He observed: “Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress. This family has a well-founded fear of persecution… therefore, they are eligible for asylum…”

…Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

That offers a useful insight into how Americans, living in a free country, view the creeping totalitarianism that has engulfed Europe. …

…The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. …

In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez blogs about Scott Brown’s interview on a morning radio show.

Boston radio presence Michael Graham shares a morning surprise:

I’m in the middle of some rant or another, and my producer tells me that Scott Brown is on the line. I didn’t have a scheduled interview, but I’m always happy to have him on.

So I put him on the air and I quickly realize that he wasn’t expecting to be interviewed.  So what was he doing on my phone?

It turns out that Sen-elect Brown had taken time out of his insanely busy schedule to call my producer about a fundraiser for the Fisher House Boston that he and his daughter participated in a few weeks ago.  One of the donors who was supposed to get one of Ayla’s CDs as a thank-you gift for donating to Fisher House hadn’t gotten his.  So Sen.-Elect Brown called in to follow up on that one CD.

One CD for some guy Scott Brown will probably never meet. …

…In other words, he’s the same guy that spend months driving his pick-up across the Commonwealth.  That’s the political power behind Scott Brown.

John Stossel gives another reason to reduce the government. Politicians are so used to stealing from us that they apparently don’t remember it’s wrong.

…When the CEO said that opening his factory wouldn’t have been possible without the Obama administration, he may have known something we didn’t. Last month, Obama announced a new set of tax credits for so-called green companies. One window company was on the list: Serious Materials. This must be one very special company.

But wait, it gets even more interesting.

On my Fox Business Network show on “crony capitalism”, I displayed a picture of administration officials and so-called “energy leaders” taken at the U.S. Department of Energy. Standing front and center was Cathy Zoi, who oversees $16.8 billion in stimulus funds, much of it for weatherization programs that benefit Serious.

The interesting twist is that Zoi happens to be the wife of Robin Roy, who happens to be vice president of “policy” at Serious Windows. …

…On its website, Serious Materials says it did not get a taxpayer subsidy. But that’s just playing with terms. What it got was a tax credit, an opportunity that its competitors did not get: to keep money it would have paid in taxes. Let’s not be misled. Government is as manipulative with selective tax credits as it is with cash subsidies. It would be more efficient to cut taxes across the board. Why should there be favoritism?

Because politicians like it. Big, complicated government gives them opportunities to do favors for their friends.

In the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker discusses IPCC corruption.

…Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

The blatant bias of each of its four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen “a more disturbing corruption” of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was “incapable of following its most basic procedures”, it was best it should be “abandoned”. …

…It is noticeable how many of those now calling for Dr Pachauri’s resignation, led by Professor Andrew Weaver, a senior IPCC insider, are passionate global warming believers. Fearing that Pachauri damages their cause, they want him thrown overboard in the hope of saving the IPCC itself. But it is not just Pachauri who has been holed below the waterline. So has the entire IPCC process. And beyond that – and despite the pleading of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the BBC that none of this detracts from the evidence for man-made global warming – so has the warmist cause itself. Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end.

In the Corner, Iain Murray blogs about the awaited end of the globalony conspiracy. It’s not over until the funding is pulled.

…Walter Russell Mead pronounces that “the global warming movement as we know it is dead.” He concludes:

The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip. The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank.

…And the upshot of all this is that even President Obama now recognizes that cap-and-trade is dead, as summarized over at Talking Points Memo:

The remarks represent the first time the President has acknowledged that the Senate may not be willing to adopt a cap and trade system: the central feature of the climate change initiative that Obama ran on during the 2008 campaign. …

…This leaves the EPA and its sledgehammer (see Marlo Lewis’s assessment of the proposed regulations here and here) as the only hope left for the global warming alarmists. Given that many people assume that the EPA introduced its unwieldy rule in an attempt to pressure the Senate to act to prevent the EPA rule from taking effect, one has to wonder how much political capital will be put behind the EPA’s regulation now

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Fouad Ajami chronicles the rise and fall of The One.

…There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural “cool” and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama’s campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people “clinging to their guns and religion,” but they had forgiven him. …

Joe Klein didn’t like Ajami’s above piece. Peter Wehner has some things for Joe to think about.

Time magazine’s Joe Klein is angry. Again. This time his animus is aimed at the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and yours truly. Again. And so, one more time — just for the fun of it — let’s take a look at what is fueling Joe’s fury and see if we can make some sense of it.

Here’s what Klein writes: …

In the WaPo, Richard Cohen is one of the disillusioned liberals. He still has to comment on Bush, of course, but the rest of the article is really quite something.

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America’s critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up? …

…Administration officials defend what happened in Detroit and assert, against common sense and the holy truth itself, that they got valuable intelligence — and so what more would you want? But Abdulmutallab went silent before terrorism experts from Washington could get to him. It has been more than a month since he last opened his mouth, and even if he resumes cooperating — a deal may be in the works — he now knows just a bit more about the present-day location of various al-Qaeda operatives than does Regis Philbin. …

…KSM, Abdulmutallab and other accused terrorists should be tried. But these two are not Americans, and they are accused of terrorism, tantamount to an act of war — a virtual Pearl Harbor, in KSM’s case. A military tribunal would fit them fine. If it is good enough for your average GI accused of murder or some such thing, it ought to be good enough for a foreign national with mass murder on his mind. …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, criticizes Obama for his lack of vision and leadership in foreign affairs.

…But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. … Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan. …

…Significantly, the global war against al-Qaeda was hardly mentioned, and there were no measures outlined to enhance US security at a time of mounting threats from Islamist terrorists. Terrorism is a top issue for American voters, but President Obama displayed what can only be described as a stunning indifference towards the defence of the homeland.

The Iranian nuclear threat, likely to be the biggest foreign policy issue of 2010, was given just two lines in the speech, with a half-hearted warning of “growing consequences” for Tehran, with no details given at all. There were no words of support for Iranian protestors who have been murdered, tortured and beaten in large numbers by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thuggish security forces, and no sign at all that the president cared about their plight. Nor was there any condemnation of the brutality of the Iranian regime, as well as its blatant sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the example of Iran showed, the advance of freedom and liberty across the world in the face of tyranny was not even a footnote in the president’s speech. I cannot think of a US president in modern times who has attached less importance to human rights issues. For the hundreds of millions of people across the world, from Burma to Sudan to Zimbabwe, clamouring to be free of oppression, there was not a shred of hope offered in Barack Obama’s address. …

In the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone asks who Obama is trying to score points with by being soft on terrorism.

..If the answer to these questions is that we are trying to impress Islamist terrorists, we have clearly failed.

It is a matter of simple fact that the announcement that we would close Guantanamo and other implement policy changes did not prevent Abdulhakim Muhammad from killing U.S. soldiers at the Little Rock recruiting station last June. It did not prevent Nidal Hasan from killing U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood in November. It did not prevent Abdulmutallab from attempting to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over U.S. or Canadian airspace on Christmas day.

Public opinion polls in the Arab and Muslim world have shown only slight upticks in opinion about America in the months after Barack Obama’s speeches in Cairo and Turkey and after these administration policy changes. Terrorists did not say, “Gosh, now that Obama is closing Guantanamo and terrorists are being given Miranda rights, I’ve got to change my mind and decide that the United States is a really nifty country and that freedom and democracy are good things after all.”

But perhaps our goal was to convince not terrorists but “world opinion.” Are the government and billion people of India going to think better of the United States if we treat terrorists more gently? Not likely; they’re the targets of terrorists themselves. …

In the National Review, Andrew McCarthy reviews commentary from former CIA director, General Michael Hayden, on the amazingly poor judgment of Attorney General Eric Holder. He ends with an important point about the Abdulmutallab situation that the president can still rectify. Perhaps Obama should hold a national security summit to help him make a decision.

…Remember, though, that this is not a done deal. The Obama administration is treating what everyone now agrees was a mistake as if it were a bell that can’t be unrung. That is wrong, and it is irresponsible.

Right this minute, President Obama could designate Abdulmutallab an unlawful enemy combatant (or, as they now call it, an “unprivileged belligerent”) and proceed with his interrogation, unimpeded by a defense lawyer or Miranda restrictions. It is a power he has had every minute since Abdulmutallab’s capture five weeks ago. The case would still be there, and it would still be a slam-dunk, whether it were tried two, three, or five years from now. The only potential downside for the case is no downside at all: Prosecutors would not be able to use any statements he makes. …

…Moreover, we’re not merely rehashing past mistakes. This is an ongoing problem. After four months of al-Qaeda training in Yemen, Abdulmutallab has valuable information. President Obama still has the legal means to get it. Every day he fails to act — every day he elevates trifling trial strategy over vital intelligence collection — is a new, reckless failure to secure the nation.

And in The Corner, Dana Perino points out the problems with leaks about Abdulmutallab talking now.

… Now the administration has begun systematically leaking to the press that he started talking again last week after FBI agents prevailed upon his family in Nigeria to convince him to cooperate.

Last week?! So, first of all: How many of his fellow terrorists have rolled up operations since Christmas Day and headed for the hills? They’ve skedaddled for sure. It’s a classic al-Qaeda tactic: hold out for as long as you can so your fellow terrorists can go underground.

But even worse is that someone in the administration is leaking this at all. How does it further our national-security interests to tell Abdulmutallab’s fellow terrorists overseas that he is informing on them? What would you do if you were one of those fellow terrorists? If you hadn’t already gone to ground, you sure would do so now.

If the administration believed it was important to reassure Congress that Abdulmutallab was cooperating, they should have done so in private in closed session with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. This kind of sensitive information is shared all the time in that way. It is bad practice to tell the world that a terrorist has agreed to spill the beans on his fellow terrorists who are still walking around free overseas. That is, of course, unless the principal motivation is to try to save political hides at home, even at the expense of actually finding the terrorists Abdulmutallab worked with. …

Robert Costa blogs in the Corner about one of the few budget cuts that the White House has proposed. It is in education, no less. It is not much, only one million dollars. But, what it does show is what a nasty piece of work Barack Obama is. The program to be cut is a scholarship program named after the deceased son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich). Rep Stupak did not toe the ObamaCare line.

With tax hikes dominating today’s budget debate, you will not hear much about the smaller federal grants that President Obama is hoping to slash. One proposed cut sticks out: Obama’s budget eliminates a $1 million scholarship program for aspiring Olympic athletes at Northern Michigan University. Here’s why it matters: In 1998, the program was renamed to honor B. J. Stupak, the late son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who committed suicide in 2000. Is the cut related to Stupak’s playing hardball on health care last year?

Stupak won’t speculate on the politics of the decision, but he does tell National Review Online that he is “disappointed” to hear about the cut. He says he found out about it through the media, not the president or the Democratic leadership. He notes, however, “that in the 18 years I’ve been in Congress, never has a presidential staff called me to tell they are cutting something. Usually everyone around here scrambles after a budget is released.”

Stupak pledges to fight for the grant to be reinstated into the budget. “I’ll do my appropriations request and put in testimony. I want it to be funded on its own merit. President Bush did the same thing, and we always restored it. We need to do a better job explaining the program.” Stupak adds that with the Winter Olympics approaching, it is “time to remind Congress why it is important to provide educational assistance to aspiring young Olympic athletes. We’ll all be cheering our athletes next month, but we should remember that programs like this give a major boost to those training for the games. Shani Davis, the first black speed skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, credits the scholarship with keeping in him school. There are hundreds of stories like that. This program has become a small farm team for Olympic education.”

Thomas Sowell dispels a few myths that pass as logic for politicians and the MSM.

…The big question that seldom— if ever— gets asked in the mainstream media is whether these are a net increase in jobs. Since the only resources that the government has are the resources it takes from the private sector, using those resources to create jobs means reducing the resources available to create jobs in the private sector.

So long as most people do not look beyond superficial appearances, politicians can get away with playing Santa Claus on all sorts of issues, while leaving havoc in their wake— such as growing unemployment, despite all the jobs being “created.” …

Roger Simon has words for the pseudo-leftism of John Edwards.

Now that we have reached the black comic post-portem stage of the John Edwards scandal with Andrew Young’s book out and pundits playing mop up, it’s time to address an interesting question: To what degree did John Edwards’ “leftism” affect his extraordinarily narcissistic behavior?

The quotes around leftism are, of course, deliberate because Edwards wasn’t a real leftist. He is the poster boy for a faux-leftism that permeates our culture. Nothing could be more obvious than that Edwards, who took the furthest left stance of the three Democratic presidential candidates in the last election, cared next to nothing for “the people” but excessively for himself, building the McMansion of McMansions, etc. And “stance” is the operative word here, because his positions always seemed adopted, not felt.

Is there a cause and effect relationship here? We do live in an era when the private behavior and lifestyles of liberal-left politician seem completely out of whack with their public pronouncements. Besides Edwards, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi come quickly to mind, but there are others. It’s doubtful Gore and Pelosi lived personal lives anywhere near as execrable as Edwards’ but there are parallels, especially in the area of personal enrichment (“green” or otherwise). …

A new blog for us, Doug Jones at Journal us has the lowdown on some of the lowdown uses of military jets by Nancy Pelosi’s family.

Is it a legitimate use of military jets to transport the Speaker of the House and her favored Congressional coterie for routine travel? Even if you believe it is — and, personally, I do not — any rational taxpayer would admit that it is monumental waste of money. Military flights cost between $5,000 and $20,000 per hour to operate. The Speaker and her passengers routinely reimburse the Air Force $120 to $400 for each flight.

Since Nancy Pelosi took over as Speaker in 2006, she’s rung up millions in military travel expenses to commute between San Francisco and Washington.

Worse still, she also appears to have requisitioned entire flights for the personal use of her children and grandchildren. That is, unaccompanied by any member of Congress, her kids, in-laws and grandchildren are utilizing entire military passenger jets for their routine travel needs. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan blogs about Obama coming clean about some of the dirt in Obamacare.

There’s been a remarkable amount of coverage of President Obama’s appearance at the House Republican retreat today, but I haven’t seen anyone focus on the President’s rather stunning admission about the Democrats’ health care legislation (Video):

“The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.” [emphasis added]

…This was one of the core debates on health care throughout last year: Would President Obama and the Democrats’ legislation allow government to come between citizens and their choice of doctors and insurers? Obama promised it wouldn’t. Republicans said it would, and this was one of the aspects of the legislation that led them to characterize it as a government takeover of health care – the same characterization that Obama chastised the GOP for today.

So it’s a bit of shock to find out now – from the President himself, no less – that one or both of the bills that passed Congress late last year (the House passed its version in late November, the Senate on Christmas Eve Day) contained language that would have violated this pledge.

Daniel Foster, in the Corner, posts on how close we were to having Obamacare.

This is how close we were to the “precipice” the president once spoke about:

Sen. Tom Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election. . . .

Harkin (D-Iowa), who attended healthcare talks at the White House, said negotiators were on the cusp of bringing a bill back for final votes in the Senate and House.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15. …

John Steele Gordon comments in Contentions about a post from Jennifer Rubin.

Jennifer referred this morning to the columns of Gail Collins and Charles Blow in the New York Times, in which they complain that the problems the Obama administration face are due to: 1) the wretched selfishness of Americans in general and Republicans in particular; and 2) the intellectual inadequacy of Americans in general and Republicans in particular. If the American people were only of a higher quality morally and intellectually, everything would be just fine, and President Obama would be sailing majestically toward an overwhelming re-election.

This sort of thinking reminds me of a dictum coined by Oscar Hammerstein I, the great theatrical impresario of the turn of the 20th century (and grandfather of the eponymous lyricist). After a play he had produced flopped badly, a friend commiserated with him and blamed it on the Broadway audience. Hammerstein looked at him and said, “When the audience doesn’t like the play, there is something wrong with the play, not the audience.”

Good advice, not likely to be taken.

In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne recommends caution in assessing the stock market and the economy.

As a former army parachutist with a bad head for heights, I recall standing in the doorway of an aircraft while my jumping instructor shouted: “Don’t look down!” He understood that my unease with parachuting combined with the sight of thousands of feet of open air could be enough to elicit panic. Many investors in today’s American stock and bond markets appear to be getting the same advice. While in my predicament, I had a parachute and a rudimentary understanding of how to use it, I fear that American investors have nothing to break their fall.

Looking down from the lofty nominal heights of today’s American stock and bond markets, there is cause for real concern.

First, the Dow has risen 62% over the past ten months.[i] Despite the fact that a market collapse appears to have been averted – for a time, at least – this normally would be considered an unhealthy speed. This rapid rise may be the result of government and media cheerleading, which have been based in part on government statistics whose accuracy gives additional cause for concern. In short, the stock markets appear to be heavily overbought.

Second, the somewhat surprisingly solid earnings posted by American companies over the past year have been achieved largely by savage labor cuts, inventory depletion, margin reductions and reduced research and advertising expenses.[ii] It is doubtful that such cuts can be continued over the longer term. At the same time, the top-line revenues of many companies have been in decline, threatening future earnings. These are not the types of metrics that would normally inspire long term confidence. …

In the National Review, Jay Nordlinger reviews the break-up of the global warming conspiracy.

…In truth, the science was not quite settled. The hockey stick had been called into grave question by those two inconvenient Canadians. When McIntyre first saw the graph, his curiosity was piqued. He had spent his career in mineral exploration, and had witnessed his share of spectacular claims. Dot-com rackets would forecast big profits, using hockey sticks. Most of the time, the forecasts proved bogus. It was necessary to examine the raw data behind a hockey stick. McIntyre had never even heard of the IPCC — how many of us had? — but he was determined to look into its stick. And he was astonished to discover something: No one had challenged that stick, had put it to the test. Was the world to accept the IPCC’s claims about global warming, and alter its economies accordingly, without due diligence? …

…In 2003, he linked up with Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, west of Toronto. McKitrick had co-authored a book called “Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.” Together, the two M’s formed a kind of Team B, doing a rigorous check or audit of the “A” team’s work. McKitrick points out that this is perfectly normal, even mandatory, in business — in the engineering fields, for example. You don’t attempt to put a new plane in the air, or a new space shuttle, without a serious Team B — or C or D — effort. Shouldn’t the U.N.’s climate panel have the soundest information possible, before spooking the world with a hockey stick? Shouldn’t the world’s governments be on the soundest footing possible before spending billions and upsetting their arrangements?…

…But the e-mails were eye-opening to journalists, he says, some of whom were “shocked.” “They’ve been reporting the standard global-warming line for years, and I’ve learned in conversations with them that they had no idea that this group of scientists acted this way.” Hence, the “loss of innocence.” McKitrick says that Climategate “pried the lid off the process behind the IPCC reports and what goes on in journals, and forced people to realize that this is not a pure, rarefied search for truth” but “a very partisan and distorted process.” Reporters, he says, are more respectful to him now. Before, it was basically, “Why don’t you believe what all the world’s scientists are saying?” Now they are humbler, asking more intelligent questions. …

Roger Simon posts on Scientific American getting to eat crow. Cold.

Pity Scientific American. Little did the magazine’s editors know when putting together their February issue that their boneheaded article Negating “Climategate”: Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy now reads as if it were written by David Biello somewhere around 1993. Oh, well, back when this nonsense was written (December?) some people still believed the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear, not to mention the Amazonian rainforests. Nor did we know that not just the East Anglia CRU, but also our own NASA had been playing fast and loose with AGW temperature facts, for some reason needing a FOIA to cough up data that should be public record in such a scientific endeavor. The poor editors of SA are taking a drubbing in the comments, which they richly deserve.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!

Mark Steyn points out the foreign press is reporting all the new global warming embarrassments. Our press – not so much.

You have to assume that America’s dying monodailies are now actively auditioning for state ownership. How else to explain the silence of the massed ranks of salaried “environmental correspondents” on the daily revelations emerging from the fast disintegrating “scientific consensus” on “climate change”? You get livelier coverage from the Chinese press.

But in competitive newspaper markets they still know a story when they see one. Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of “settled science” is that even the eco-lefties at The Guardian and The Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler reports on more trouble for the IPCC. Apparently they also cited a fifth-grader’s science report as proof of their global warming scams. Not really, but awfully close.

…It has also become clear that the IPCC report systematically misrepresents the peer-reviewed literature on the effect of climate change hurricanes and natural disasters.  Specifically, the report falsely claims there is evidence that human-induced climate change is producing an increase in extreme weather events and associated losses and includes a graph that is not based upon published, peer-reviewed work.  Yet the studies upon which the IPCC purports to base its claim — including one that was not peer-reviewed and should not have been cited at all — say no such thing. Worse, when the IPCC’s erroneous claims were challenged during the review process, an IPCC author fabricated a response to defend the erroneous claim.  In response, the IPCC now claims it “carefully followed” its official procedures. Yet as Roger Pielke Jr., one of the researchers whose work is misrepresented in the report, responds, this claim is simply false as the IPCC “relied on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed source to produce its top line conclusions in this section,” ignored the complaints of reviewers, and fabricated a defense of the claim. Indeed, when the then-unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper upon which the IPCC purported to rely was eventually published, it rejected the climate-disaster loss link asserted by the IPCC.

But wait, there’s more.It turns out that other claims in the IPCC’s WGII report were also based upon non-scientific sources, including magazine articles and reports by advocacy groups.  For instance, the IPCC’s claim that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest is based upon a report issued by an environmental advocacy organization, not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and the advocacy report misrepresented peer-reviewed studies to reach its conclusion.  It also appears other IPCC claims about glaciers in the Andes and Alps were based upon a magazine article and student’s dissertation. …

And we have NRO Shorts. Here are three:

Reporters largely ignored it, but the Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing that Head Start’s positive effects peter out by the end of first grade. The study included 44 tests, of which 42 found no statistically significant and lasting improvement. Some positive results are to be expected when you run that many tests, and a footnote points out that the two apparently lasting results disappear after correcting for that tendency. Andrew Coulson and Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute point out that school choice, on the other hand, appears to have lasting positive results. Naturally, the Democrats have expanded funding for Head Start while ending school choice in D.C.

In a region traditionally known for producing loud, blustery autocrats who champion failed economic policies (Castro, Ortega, Chávez), Chile is a quietly remarkable success story. On January 11, it signed an accession agreement to become the first South American member of the OECD. Less than a week later, Chilean voters elected a conservative government for the first time since General Pinochet stepped down 20 years ago. The victory of presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire airline mogul, ends two decades of rule by the center-left Concertación coalition, whose multiple governments largely maintained the free-market economic reforms that were adopted under Pinochet. In recent years, Chilean officials moved away from pro-growth policies and toward greater social spending, but they also saved much of their copper windfall during the commodity boom, ensuring that they were in a strong fiscal position when the global financial crisis erupted. Piñera will inherit a well-run economy — one that has the potential to grow much faster. His election, like that of Ricardo Martinelli in Panama last May, affirms that not all Latin American countries are moving left.

Miep Gies used to say she was just an ordinary housewife. Austrian by birth, and Catholic, she married a Dutchman named Jan Gies and lived in Amsterdam. In the war, Miep and Jan helped hide Otto Frank and his family in a secret room, daily risking their own lives to do so. For Miep, Otto Frank’s young daughter Anne was a girl “full of the joy of just being alive,” and she remembered seeing Anne writing her diary with a look of utter intensity in her face. When the Gestapo rounded up the Franks, Miep kept Anne’s diary safe. She also respected Anne’s privacy. If she’d read those pages, she would have found references to herself and Jan, and might well have destroyed the lot for fear that the Gestapo in another search would incriminate them. After the war Otto Frank returned, and he was with Miep when he heard that his wife and daughters were dead. Miep took out the diary, saying, “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.” More than that, it is a legacy to us all. The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in millions of copies in dozens of languages. Miep had her part in rescuing a human document that touches the heart like no other. This admirable lady lived to be 100. The world could do with a lot more ordinariness like hers. R.I.P.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Claudia Rosett has an article on the UN. When corruption and schemes to enrich UN employees are rife, it is hard to understand why we give them money.

…The U.N. already collects billions in both dues and voluntary contributions from the governments of the developed world–first and foremost from the U.S., which typically foots the bill for roughly one-quarter of most major U.N. activities. The actual U.N. budget is a slippery number. The book-keeping is opaque, often tardy or incomplete and spread across many parts of the U.N. archipelago, with no single U.N. office fully accountable for the entire system. In 2006 then-Secretary General Kofi Annan said the U.N. system-wide budget was about $20 billion; by now, with ever-expanding U.N. operations, funding appeals and hazily defined “partnerships,” it is certainly larger. But for U.N. spenders this torrent of other people’s money is not enough.

Since its founding in 1945, as essentially a diplomatic talking shop headquartered in the U.S., the U.N. has ballooned into a sort of post-colonial global empire, involving scores of thousands of staff, peacekeepers, agencies and proliferating agendas worldwide. With that has come a voracious hunger for money, in which U.N. planners keep casting an acquisitive eye at global commerce, looking for ways to tap in and open the spigots straight into the U.N.’s coffers. …

…These campaigns have yet to pan out into the full bonanzas the U.N. hopes for. But for the U.N., there is little cost to trying again and again, gaining traction here and there. All it usually takes is the ability of ambitious U.N. bureaucrats to put together a conference. The planning group for the conference becomes a secretariat. That secretariat becomes the seed of the next U.N. mandate, department or initiative, with the next suite of tax proposals on the table. …

Toby Harnden discusses Andrew Young’s book about John Edwards.

…The story matters because Edwards, a fabulously wealthy lawyer who made his fortune bringing lawsuits against major corporations, could easily have become president. He was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and in 2008 came very close to winning Iowa, beating Hillary Clinton into third place.

…The title of Young’s book is The Politician. That’s appropriate because it’s become a term of abuse and derision. During a Capitol Hill hearing on Wednesday when Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, was being given a good kicking by all, an Ohio congressman thundered: “I want to assure you… that you are absolutely a politician.”

…Against this backdrop, the Edwards scandal merely feeds the sense of cynicism about the American political class that has been gathering pace for years.

Edwards talked about his love for his wife while he was entertaining his mistress in the marital bed. He championed the poor while expressing contempt for them. Obama made promises about televising health care negotiations and then did everything behind closed doors.

Well, Americans ask, what do you expect? They’re politicians.

WSJ has reviewed the new book on John Edwards written by his flunky Andrew Young. A Corner Post by Jonah Goldberg picked up the only paragraph you need to see.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has another article that will turn your stomach. While almost 1 in 5 Americans is unemployed or underemployed, 1 in 5 government workers are drawing six-figure salaries. We aren’t sure of the actual unemployment numbers because no one in the government is making enough money to take on the task of reporting accurate statistics.

LAST MONTH, the US economy shed another 85,000 jobs. It marked a miserable end to a calamitous year in which an estimated 4.2 million American jobs were liquidated, and unemployment rose to 10 percent. In addition, more than 920,000 “discouraged workers’’ left the labor force entirely, having given up on finding work and therefore not included in official unemployment data.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans who do have jobs have been compelled to work part-time or at reduced wages; many others have not seen a raise in years. But not everyone is having a rotten recession.

Since December 2007, when the current downturn began, the ranks of federal employees earning $100,000 and up has skyrocketed. According to a recent analysis by USA Today, federal workers making six-figure salaries – not including overtime and bonuses – “jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months.’’ The surge has been especially pronounced among the highest-paid employees. At the Defense Department, for example, the number of civilian workers making $150,000 or more quintupled from 1,868 to 10,100. At the recession’s start, the Transportation Department was paying only one person a salary of $170,000. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees were drawing paychecks that size. …

In the National Review, Kevin Richardson reviews some ways that unions, politicians, and the minimum wage hurt blacks.

…Asked about the recently defeated plan to convert the gigantic fortress that looms over his neighborhood into a shopping mall, C says he hasn’t heard about it. If the plan had gone through, Manhattan-based developer Related Companies would have received about $50 million in tax subsidies for a project that would have created as many as a thousand retail jobs and, during its construction, employed a thousand or more highly paid union hardhats. But the city council killed the project. The Bronx delegation demanded that Related enforce upon its leaseholders a requirement that all of the jobs in the mall pay at least $10 an hour, plus benefits, much more than the prevailing wage in the Forever21-and-food-court racket, to say nothing of the $7.25 minimum wage. So a $300 million project, and a couple of thousand new jobs in a neighborhood that needs them, never happened. Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. infamously declared: “The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies.” The New York Post pithily pointed out that when it comes to real jobs, Diaz has never had one — not in the private sector, anyway — and neither has any other member of the Bronx’s city-council delegation: All are lifelong politicians, many of them having held elected offices or political appointments since their early 20s. Diaz himself has been an officeholder since he was 23 years old. It’s good work, if you can get it. …

…Democrats will defend everything from partial-birth abortion to distributing gay porn in the classroom, but some subjects are too hot for them to touch: The effect of their minimum-wage enthusiasm on black unemployment is one, and racial discrimination by their organized-labor constituents is another. You’d think that the Democrats would put jobs for blacks at the top of their list — after all, black voters pull the “D” lever about 90 percent of the time. But political calculations are perverse things: Black voters are a cheap date for Democrats, who know that they can sell out the interests of their most loyal constituency with impunity. One of Barack Obama’s first actions in office was to gut a hugely popular school-choice program in Washington, D.C., that benefited black students almost exclusively, and he did so at the behest of the one of the most destructive unions in the country, one that has done more to undermine the future of black Americans than any other and whose members have inflicted more damage on black Americans than Bull Connor and George Wallace ever dreamed of. But the teachers’ unions represent one in ten delegates to the Democratic National Convention, so they have job security — something many, if not most, of the young black men in their classes will never have.

George Will comments on the Supreme Court decision reinstating first amendment rights to corporations. Corporations may use money to express political opinions, but corporate contributions to campaigns is still prohibited.

…How regulated did political speech become during the decades when the court was derelict in its duty to actively defend the Constitution? The Federal Election Commission, which administers the law that rations the quantity and regulates the content and timing of political speech, identifies 33 types of political speech and 71 kinds of “speakers.” The underlying statute and FEC regulations cover more than 800 pages, and FEC explanations of its decisions have filled more than 1,200 pages. The First Amendment requires 10 words for a sufficient stipulation: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

Extending the logic of a 1976 decision, the court has now held that the dissemination of political speech requires money, so restricting money restricts speech. Bringing law into conformity with this 1976 precedent, the court has struck down only federal and state laws that forbid independent expenditures (those not made directly to, or coordinated with, candidates’ campaigns) by corporations and labor unions. Under the censorship regime the court has overturned, corporations were even forbidden to send political communications to all of their employees.

The New York Times calls the court’s decision, which enables political advocacy by (other) corporations, a “blow to democracy.” The Times, a corporate entity, can engage in political advocacy because Congress has granted “media corporations” an exemption from limits.

The Washington Post, also exempt, says the court’s decision, which overturned a previous ruling upholding restrictions on spending for political speech, shows insufficient “respect for precedent.” Does The Post think the court incorrectly overturned precedents that upheld racial segregation and warrantless wiretaps? Are the only sacrosanct precedents those that abridge (others’) right to speak? …

In the NY Times, Judy Battista writes about Kurt Warner’s retirement.

…The humble beginning to Warner’s career — he did not start his first N.F.L. game until he was 28 — gave way to one in which, with surgical precision, he resurrected two also-ran franchises, carrying both to the Super Bowl while also becoming known as one of the league’s most charitable players. Warner, his wife, Brenda, and their seven children routinely select a family at a restaurant and anonymously pay their dinner tab, as a way to teach the children charity.

In 1998, the St. Louis Rams gave Warner the break he needed. Having signed him the previous December, they allocated him to N.F.L. Europe, where he led the league in several statistical categories. By 1999, the Rams had made him the backup to Trent Green. When Green tore a knee ligament during the preseason, the unknown quarterback was thrust into the starting job, and the Greatest Show on Turf was born. He was the league and Super Bowl most valuable player that season. He was the league’s M.V.P. again two years later, when the Rams lost the Super Bowl in the final seconds to a burgeoning dynasty from New England.

“We all learned great lessons from Kurt’s humility, dignity and grace,” the Rams’ owner, Chip Rosenbloom, said in a statement. “We will forever be thankful for the success he brought us and the unparalleled generosity he has shown the St. Louis community and beyond.” …