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John Fund reviews an interesting new Reagan book.
Ronald Reagan was known as “The Great Communicator.” What isn’t well-known is just how hard he worked to earn that title. One of his secrets was a stack of 3 x 5 inch note cards that he compiled throughout his public life. Consisting of quotes, economic statistics, jokes and anecdotes, they became the core of Ronald Reagan’s traveling research files.
An annotated selection of those cards has just been published as a book. “The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom” is edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, and the book’s release is being accompanied by a display of some of the note cards at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
…While Reagan was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me — a 15-year-old high school student — how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches. …
Mark Steyn has strong words about the train wreck called Romneycare, and other government interventions that have made Americans worse off. If Republicans actually select Romney as their 2012 candidate, the silver lining will be the Tea Party transformation that follows. Mark also has some sobering words about the debt ceiling.
… In the real world, debt ceilings are determined by the lenders, not the borrowers. In March, Pimco (which manages the world’s largest mutual fund) calculated that 70 percent of U.S. Treasury debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve.
So under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day, the United States government spends $188 million it doesn’t have, $130 million of which is “borrowed” from itself. There’s nobody else out there.
In other words, however Congress votes, we’re rubbing up against the real debt ceiling – the willingness of the world to continue bankrolling American debauchery.
Barack Obama is offering us a Latin American future – that’s to say, a United States in which a corrupt governing class rules a dysfunctional morass. He’s confident that, when the moat with alligators is put in, he’ll be on the secure side. If you figure you’ll be, too, you can afford to vote for him. …
…The problems with RomneyCare are well known: Mitt argued that Massachusetts needed to reform its health care system because the uninsured were placing huge strains on the state’s emergency rooms, and the rest of the population had to pick up the tab for the free-riders, and that was driving up Massachusetts health costs. So, as a famous can-do technocrat, he looked at the problem and came up with a can-do technocratic solution. Three years later, everyone was insured, but emergency room use was higher than ever, and 70 percent of those newly insured were all but entirely subsidized by the state, and Massachusetts residents were paying 30 percent more for their health care than the U.S. average, and Boston had the longest wait time in the nation to see a new doctor. …
American conservatives’ problem with RomneyCare is the same as with ObamaCare – that, if the government (whether state or federal) can compel you to make arrangements for the care of your body parts that meet the approval of state commissars, then the Constitution is dead. …
The inflationary factor in Massachusetts health care was not caused by deadbeats using emergency rooms as their family doctor but by the metastasizing cost distortions of government intervention in health care: Mitt should have known that. As he should know that government intervention in college loans has absurdly inflated the cost of ludicrously overvalued credentials and, in a broader sense, helped debauch America’s human capital. As he should know that government intervention in the mortgage market is why, every day, more and more American homeowners are drowning in negative equity.
So RomneyCare is not just an argument about health care. It exemplifies what’s wrong with American political structures: It suggests that our institutions are incapable of course correction; it reminds us…that Republicans are either easily suckered or too eager to be bipartisan fig leaves in embarrassing kindergarten kabuki; it confirms that “technocracy” in politics is a synonym for “more” – more government, more spending, more laws, more bureaucrats, more regulations, more paperwork, more of what’s killing this once-great republic every hour of every day. In defense of Romney, one might argue that politics is the art of the possible. But in Massachusetts what was possible made things worse. …
Richard Epstein writes a well-measured explanation of the problems with executive overreach.
…One of my constant concerns with the Obama administration is that its vision of executive power means that it has not recognized the need to rein in its discretion. Quite the contrary, in a variety of areas it seems only too eager to use its discretion to maximum advantage, often to support its own political agenda. That is the chief charge against the way Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has instituted litigation against The Boeing Company [3] for imagined unfair labor practices when the company decided to open up its new assembly plants in management-friendly South Carolina.
That same tendency toward mischief has been revealed in two of its other recent actions, each of which sheds light on the risks of the abuse of discretion. I speak here of criminal punishment for off-label drug uses and mandatory disclosures of campaign contributions by prospective government contractors.
…The dangers of executive discretion are, if anything, greater in the Obama administration’s proposal to require key federal contractors to disclose political contributions that they have made to various parties. As reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel, [8] the Obama administration is about to sign an executive order requiring all contractors that do business with the government to disclose contributions that they and their chief officers have made to political parties during the past two years as a condition of getting government business. Needless to say, this restriction does not apply to the president’s favored clientele, including unions and environmental groups.
…When a government official knows that a business bidder or its top officials have supported the opposition candidate, that information can be used to steer lucrative contracts toward those organizations whose political contributions line up with the Obama administration’s own political agenda. The point here is not that Democrats are inevitably corrupt while Republicans are undyingly noble. Rather, it is that sensitive information often can do harm when it is put in the hands of government officials who use it in pursuit of their own political ambitions. …
2012 can’t come too soon, with the damage that this administration is inflicting. The Investor’s Business Daily editors explain.
…Before the mortgage crisis, Attorney General Janet Reno accused banks of racism for failing to market mortgages to poor minorities with weak credit. Fear of prosecution set off a stampede of risky inner-city lending that led, in part, to today’s record home foreclosures.
Now Reno’s deputy — current Attorney General Eric Holder — is prosecuting banks for doing too well what he and Reno ordered them to do before the crisis: “targeting of minority communities” for subprime and other high-cost loans. He calls this “reverse redlining,” or the opposite of what banks were accused of doing in the past — drawing red lines around inner-city areas deemed too risky for lending. Only, Holder’s also suing lenders for tightening credit in now-devastated urban areas to guard against future defaults.
…He’s also appointed a special lending cop to run the new crusade — Special Counsel for Fair Lending Eric Halperin, who also happens to have worked for Reno. Featured in the anti-bank film “Inside Job,” Halperin answers to Civil Rights Division chief Tom Perez.
Another Reno-era retread, Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference, he says, is bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print.” He says this kind of racism — though more subtle — is “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.” …
In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm has a story about Beltway ethics for us.
…July 2009 — President Obama appoints Meredith Attwell Baker as one of two Republican members among the five on the Federal Communications Commission.
January 2011 — Baker joins three other commission members in approving the mega-takeover of NBCUniversal by Comcast Corp.
May 11, 2011, early — Baker announces her FCC resignation effective June 3.
May 11, 2011, later — Comcast announces Baker will become senior vice president of government affairs for the same NBCUniversal unit that she recently agreed could be swallowed by Comcast.
That’s how smoothly it works.
Bill McGurn gives a cogent review of the interrogation debate.
In scarcely a week, we have seen two of the most important advances in the war on terror since the 9/11 attacks. And President Obama deserves full credit.
The first was his go-ahead for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The second was more inadvertent, but arguably more important. This is the opening his spin has given to Republicans to force what we should have had in 2008: an honest debate on America’s antiterror policies.
The opening began Sunday night, when Mr. Obama rushed a national address on the bin Laden killing. Notwithstanding his later comment to “60 Minutes” that Americans do not “spike the football,” the president appears incapable of doing what would serve him best here: Letting the action speak for itself, and heaping praise on his predecessors (Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush) for their contributions. Instead we got the implication that no one was trying to get bin Laden until Barack Obama arrived in town.
At the same time, all the president’s men were put in the position of denying something the Navy SEALs had made obvious: They owed much of their success to information resulting from policies authorized by President Bush but opposed by Mr. Obama. Thus Leon Panetta found himself bobbing and weaving when NBC’s Brian Williams kept asking the CIA chief whether waterboarding had anything to do with finding bin Laden. When you’ve lost Brian Williams, you’re really lost. …
In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff talks gold.
…In a remarkably under-reported story, the University of Texas’ endowment fund-the second largest in the country, after Harvard’s-added about half of a billion dollars worth of gold to its portfolio just this month, on top of the half-billion it purchased several months prior.
The university’s endowment now owns a staggering 6,643 bars of bullion (664,300 ounces) – which have already appreciated by nearly $40 million since mid-April , when the bars were delivered to a dedicated HSBC-owned vault in New York City. Not a bad start.
Kyle Bass, the well-known Hayman Capital hedge fund manager and UT endowment board member, advised the university on the purchase. He stated his reasoning plainly: “Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services? I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.” …
If you read last Thursday’s post, you might remember this prediction: Soon there will be a SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit with Obama patting himself on the back. Guess what showed up Saturday night?
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-situation-room-cold-open/1327352/