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Nile Gardiner has some surprising poll numbers on the change in attitude toward W.
Several months ago a huge billboard appeared near Wyoming, Minnesota, with a beaming photo of George W. Bush with the caption “Miss me yet?” The answer to that question is clearly yes, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, which shows the former president staging a remarkable political recovery despite having largely disappeared from public life since leaving office:
By 47 to 45 percent, Americans say Obama is a better president than George W. Bush. But that two point margin is down from a 23 point advantage one year ago.
“Democrats may want to think twice about bringing up former President George W. Bush’s name while campaigning this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
This has to be one of the most extraordinary political comebacks in decades. And as this week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll showed, nearly 25 percent of Democrats now believe “a return to Bush’s policies would be good,” a staggeringly high figure. …
Charles Krauthammer indicts the Democrat Congressional leadership for their reckless, irresponsible actions.
…For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling — largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.
That’s not all. Congress has not passed a single appropriations bill. To keep the government going, Congress passed a so-called continuing resolution (CR) before adjourning to campaign. The problem with continuing to spend at the current level is that the last two years have seen a huge 28 percent jump in non-defense discretionary spending. The CR continues this profligacy, aggravating an already serious debt problem.
As if this were not enough, Congress adjourned without even a vote — nay, without even a Democratic bill — on the expiring Bush tax cuts. This is the ultimate in incompetence. After 20 months of control of the White House and Congress — during which they passed an elaborate, 1,000-page micromanagement of every detail of American health care — the Democrats adjourned without being able to tell the country what its tax rates will be on Jan. 1.
It’s not just income taxes. It’s capital gains and dividends, too. And the estate tax, which will careen insanely from 0 to 55 percent when the ball drops on Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Nor is this harmless incompetence. To do this at a time when $2 trillion of capital is sitting on the sidelines because of rising uncertainty — and there is no greater uncertainty than next year’s tax rates — is staggeringly irresponsible. …
The NY Daily News editors tell us what happens when Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder insist on trying a military criminal case in a civilan court.
The disastrous folly of trying Al Qaeda enemy combatants in civilian court stands proven beyond a reasonable doubt in the case of the first Guantanamo detainee brought to New York to face justice.
There is abundantly conclusive proof that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani participated in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. At least 5,000 were wounded.
…These facts come courtesy of Ghailani’s own mouth. He revealed them under interrogation while in clandestine CIA custody before transfer to Guantanamo. Therein lies the legal absurdity.
The CIA grilled Ghailani in the interest of national security – to prevent further terrorist attacks – and not as a run-of-the-mill criminal suspect with full U.S. constitutional rights. …
In the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Patrick McIlheran has a great piece following a visit to Wisconsin by New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
We and Jersey reached this pass not because public employees are greedy. They aren’t. They just took the offered deal. Were your boss to say you could get premium-free health, free pension, high pay and ironclad security, of course you’d take it. I would.
Nor is it because unions are greedy, exactly. Their purpose is to maximize what members get, and they’re doing it. Where they can be faulted is that they’ve become huge players in politics, electing the officials with whom they bargain.
The main fault lies with those elected officials. They have, over decades, tended to give in, buying themselves peace with taxpayer money. Both Republicans and Democrats have been among the spineless.
… Unless fiscal conservatives who are willing to push hard on labor costs and spending make it into office, the public sector will ever more resemble a racket existing chiefly for the enrichment of public servants. …
It is truly amazing to watch a politician who demonstrates responsibility and accountability. Jonathan Tobin blogs about another instance where Governor Chris Christie is halting the spending spree by New Jersey’s government.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is still acting as if he means what he says about controlling the costs of government. By canceling the long-planned construction of a second commuter tunnel under the Hudson River today, Christie has reaffirmed the principle that government should not try to do more than it can afford. A close look at the finances of the scheme showed that cost overruns were likely to send the bill on the project to as much as $14 billion, almost $6 billion more than the original estimate. That means that New Jersey — which is to say, New Jersey’s taxpayers — would have to pay at least $8 billion of that amount, the remainder being contributed by New York’s Port Authority and the federal government. But in the absence of givebacks by the state’s civil-service unions, whose contracts and pensions threaten to send the state into the red even if the tunnel were not to be paid for, Christie said no, to the utter consternation of the unions, the rest of the political class, and New York Times’s columnist Paul Krugman.
Other politicians (like Christie’s predecessor Jon Corzine, who authorized ground breaking on the project without thinking about the costs to the taxpayers) are shocked by Christie’s chutzpah. The idea that government should only undertake those projects it can pay for without having to further bilk the taxpayers is considered a shocking concept.
Krugman, the Times editorial page, the unions, and many of the politicians who have worked for this project all think the mere fact that the tunnel is needed justifies any amount of debt to build it. They also seem to think that worrying about where the extra $6 billion will come from is just silly. …
Peter Schiff writes that the time for government inaction is now.
…In Crash Proof, I talked about how our economy suffered from the co-morbid diseases of asset bubbles, excessive debt and consumption, and insufficient savings, capital investment, and production. These conditions did not arise as a result of market forces, but from foolish monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies that distorted market forces. The proper cure would have been to remove the distortions and allow the markets to correct.
…By electing to bail out the financial sector, prop up housing prices, allow excess spending and borrowing to continue, and maintain superfluous government and service-sector jobs, the government has pushed our economy to the edge of a very dangerous precipice.
The right choice is to admit past mistakes and reverse course. The Fed must raise interest rates aggressively, shrink its bloated balance sheet, and allow the real recession to finally run its course. It will be much more painful now than it would have been in 2008, but at least this time the pain will end and real recovery will take hold. By forcing the federal and state governments to slash spending, sound monetary policy will allow market forces to rebuild a solid foundation upon which future prosperity may be built.
The wrong choice is for the Fed to continue quantitative easing as planned, allowing the government to grow at the expense of the economy. This will widen the economic imbalances that lie at the root of our problems. As a side effect, the US dollar will continue spiraling downward as it becomes clear to foreign creditors that the Fed has no interest in protecting their investments. A weaker dollar will lead to higher inflation and higher interest rates, which will make the Fed’s task that much more difficult.
In the end, our bubble economy will not just deflate, it will burst. The dollar will collapse, consumer prices will skyrocket, real credit will completely evaporate, millions more will lose their jobs, and our economy will change in ways few of us can imagine. Our standard of living will plummet and legions of middle- and upper-class Americans will be impoverished. It is not a pretty picture, but unfortunately, it’s the one our government is painting. Unfortunately, we are running out of time to change artists.
David Goldman has a short post on the lost government jobs.
The biggest contributor to the 95,000 reduction in non-farm payrolls was declining state and local government employment. I’ve been warning about that all year. Municipal finances were an extension of the real estate boom and are having their Wile E. Coyote moment.
We’re in a miserable meta-equilibrium. The collapse of the Obama administration is good for the economy — it can’t do any more damage — but the Republicans will not be in any position to roll back the damage already done, for example, Obamacare. That leaves us in a 2% or so growth environment.
David Harsanyi tells Republicans not to give into the Left’s fear tactics on trade protectionism. And Harsanyi makes a key point that tariffs amount to taxes that Americans will pay on imports.
…We’re losing manufacturing jobs. Scary stuff. Which candidate is going to explain to the voters that outsourcing has allowed the American workforce to trade up to better jobs, and allows companies to grow their businesses and expand their workforces?
Which candidate is going to point out that manufacturing jobs have declined in the past 20 years because there has been an incredible rise in the productivity of the American worker? The output at U.S. factories was 37 percent higher in 2009 than it was in 1993.
…”Our philosophy has to be not how many protectionist measures can we put in place, but how do we invent new things to sell,” Rudy Giuliani once explained, near perfectly. “That’s the view of the future. What [protectionists] are trying to do is lock in the inadequacies of the past.” …
Jeff Jacoby also makes logical points against protectionism. We have featured writers who note that government regulations stifle manufacturing in the US. Blaming the Chinese for the government’s anti-business practices is the easy way out, and politicians are happy to have a scapegoat.
THE POLICIES of the Chinese government make it possible for Americans to acquire a vast array of products at affordable prices. For that high crime and misdemeanor, the US House of Representatives voted last week to punish China.
The vote on HR 2378, which would authorize punitive tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States — which include everything from clothing, furniture, and toys to refrigerators, computers, and sporting goods — was a lopsided 348 to 79….
…But what exactly is so awful about selling good stuff cheap to tens of millions of US consumers?
…The protectionists claim that forcing China to revalue the yuan would boost US manufacturers, adding as many as a million new jobs to American payrolls. That too is debatable. Economist Mark Perry argues that it is the breathtaking increase in US manufacturing productivity, not the value of Chinese currency, that is largely responsible for the disappearance of so many manufacturing jobs in recent years.
Not many firms welcome tough competition, so it isn’t hard to understand why US exporters who compete directly with Chinese firms want to see Congress rig the trade by slapping punitive tariffs on imports made in China. Their concern is with their bottom line; they aren’t thinking about the millions of American households that would be forced to contend with higher prices. …
Jennifer Rubin follows up on the BP oil spill commission’s findings, and comments on Obama’s lack of administrative judgment.
Some on the right, joining the president’s usual defenders, were sympathetic to Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill. A president isn’t all-powerful. We can’t expect him to prevent or repair all mishaps. True, but there were well-founded criticisms (from the affected governors, for starters) about the federal government’s response. It turns out Obama did indeed mismanage things from start to finish:
The Obama administration was slow to ramp up its response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, then overreacted as public criticism turned the disaster into a political liability, the staff of a special commission investigating the disaster say in papers released Wednesday.
…And then there is the most egregious error — the drilling ban, which was legally suspect and economically disastrous for the region.
It is true, as in so many areas of policy, that expectations for the president are unreasonably high. For that, he has only himself and his advisers to blame, for constructing a messianic campaign and operating with an alarming degree of hubris. But the “unfair expectations” defense is a bit of a dodge. In truth, Obama and his team do not perform well in a crisis, lack management skills, and repeatedly fail to gauge public reaction. That’s not a matter of unreasonable expectations; that is a lack of competency and a failure to meet the minimum requirements of the job.
In the Weekly Standard, John McCormack reports on more Obami bad behavior aimed at their political opposition.
The inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department will investigate the allegation that an Obama administration official may have improperly accessed and discussed private taxpayer information.
At an August 27 press briefing, a senior administration official, who appears to have been Austan Goolsbee, discussed the tax status of Koch Industries–a private company that has come under fire from top Democrats, including President Obama himself, for funding conservative and libertarian political causes.
…But on September 24, Republican senators wrote in a letter to the inspector general that they were unsatisfied with this explanation. Senator Chuck Grassley and other Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee requested that the inspector general look into the “very serious allegation that Administration employees may have improperly accessed and disclosed confidential taxpayer information.” …
Instapundit posts one reader’s response to a Chinese dissident winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
UPDATE: Reader David Gerstman writes:
Last year Thomas Friedman was writing that America needed to be more like China and adopt one-party democracy.
Two weeks ago he told us that America needs to be more like China and adopt green technologies.
So now can we expect a Thomas Friedman column telling America to adopt the policy of harrassing the families of Nobel Prize winning dissidents? I guess not, we don’t have Nobel Prize winning dissidents here; political opposition is legal here. Still do you think that we might see a Friedman column soon condemning China? Or is China’s enlightened leadership above criticism in Tom’s benighted opinion?