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James Pethokoukis posts on the drop in GDP.

US economic output fell at a 0.1% annualized rate in the fourth quarter, adjusted for inflation. Blame spending cuts, say the Democrats. Blame Republican “austerity.” And one more thing: Stop the sequester. As the Center for American Progress put it: “The economy most certainly would have grown at a faster rate were it not for the ongoing political brinksmanship over the debt ceiling and the risk of sharp fiscal contraction in the form of the pending automatic ‘sequestration’ budget cuts.”

If you break down the GDP report, you begin to see the problem with this line of argument. Private-sector GDP actually added 1.2 percentage points to overall GDP during the past three months. A decent rise in consumer spending was slightly offset by a drop in business investment and a rise in imports. Government spending, however, subtracted 1.3 percentage points, turning the overall GDP number slightly negative.

But so what? Liberals are confusing a metric used to measure the size of the US economy with the actual US economy. What if GDP internals were reversed? What if government spending contributed 1.2 percentage points, and the private sector subtracted 1.3 percentage points? The overall GDP report would have been superficially the same, but in reality much, much worse with the real economy contracting.

Or what if government spending added 6 percentage points, and the private sector subtracted 2 percentage points? The news headline would say GDP rose by 4%, but that growth would be illusory and unsustainable. Should we have more government spending just to prop up the GDP numbers? As economist Tyler Cowen notes in The Great Stagnation: “We are still valuing government expenditures at cost rather than being able to measure prices set in a competitive market. … The larger the role of government, the more the published figures for GDP growth are overstating the improvements in our standard of living.”

Instead of kvetching about how spending cuts are hurting growth, liberals should focus on the fourth-quarter drop in business investment — and the impact this year of the 60% rise in investment taxes. From 1994 through 1999, GDP growth averaged 4% a year. But government spending added, on average, just 0.3 percentage points to that total. The other 3.7 percentage points came from private sector growth, with business investment adding a healthy 1.3 percentage points to that total. (Also note that federal spending as a  share of GDP fell from 21% of GDP in 1994 to 18.5% in 1999. Still the economy boomed.)

Of course, liberals might argue that the drop in government spending is hurting the private sector. But that’s just the reverse of the theory that held the $800 stimulus would ignite the private sector into a multi-year, mini-boom of 4%-plus growth. In August of 2009, the White House predicted GDP would rise 4.3% in 2011, followed by 4.3% growth in 2012 and 2013, too. In its 2010 forecast, the White House said it was looking for 3.5% GDP growth in 2012, followed by 4.4% in 2013. In its 2011 forecast, the White House predicted 3.1% growth in 2011, 4.0% in 2012 and 4.5% in 2013.

But the fiscal multiplier didn’t multiply as predicted. The problem isn’t too little government spending, but too much government regulation and taxation.

Jennifer Rubin too.

No wonder the president didn’t want to talk in his inaugural address about economic growth — we don’t have any. In fact, the economy is contracting, as Bloomberg reports: “Gross domestic product, the volume of all goods and services produced, dropped at a 0.1 percent annual rate, weaker than any economist forecast in a Bloomberg survey and the worst performance since the second quarter of 2009, when the world’s largest economy was still in the recession, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. A decline in government outlays and smaller gain in stockpiles subtracted a combined 2.6 percentage points from growth.”

In large part, the drop is driven by the looming defense sequestration: “Government outlays dropped at a 6.6 percent annual pace from October through December, subtracting 1.3 percentage points from GDP. The decrease was led by a 22.2 percent fall in defense that was the biggest since 1972, following the Vietnam War.”

I don’t know why they say the drop is unexpected. We are preparing to decimate national security, at a cost of perhaps 1.2 million jobs. The country was and still is poised to accept more tax hikes. The regulatory burden on employers and the prospect of Obamacare hang over our heads. No wonder we are in an economic slump. One more quarter of this, and, according to the technical definition, we will be in a recession.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)  via his communications director Kevin Smith tells Right Turn: “Today’s report is another warning sign that families and small businesses are still struggling, and our economy isn’t creating enough jobs under President Obama.  That’s why Republicans are focusing on pro-growth policies such as reforming our burdensome tax code and stopping excessive regulations to create jobs and promote a healthier, more robust economy.”

This is why Republicans must talk growth, jobs and economic opportunity. The president isn’t because his policies stifle all three.

The immature One continues his fight against dissent. Bethany Mandel from Contentions has the story.  

Recently in an interview with the liberal magazine the NewRepublic on “his enemies, the media and the future of football,” President Obama took aim not just at his antagonists on Capitol Hill but also those in the press, particularly Fox News. He told the NewRepublic: 

“One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.”

The swipe at Fox wasn’t the president’s first, though it appears to have struck a nerve at the network. Two Fox personalities, Megyn Kelly and Kirsten Powers, responded to the president’s remarks. In a blog post on the Fox website, Kelly’s remarks were partially transcribed by the network, indicating the following was the main thrust of Fox’s argument against the statement:

“For me this isn’t about what he said about Fox News [...] it’s about once again the president saying that if somebody disagrees with him, if Republicans disagree with him, it’s because someone has ‘gotten’ to them,” she told Fox News Digital political editor Chris Stirewalt. “It sounds dismissive of heartfelt beliefs that Republicans may hold or their constituents may hold that just don’t line up with his.”

One of Fox’s most vocal liberals, Kirsten Powers, took to the Fox opinion page to discuss Obama’s “war on Fox News.” 

“Whether you are liberal or conservative, libertarian, moderate or politically agnostic, everyone should be concerned when leaders of our government believe they can intentionally try to delegitimize a news organization they don’t like.” …

Roger Simon was asked to cheer up some Republicans. He talks about his conversion from leftist and the founding of PJ Media.

Thanks for having me here. When my friend Todd Hermann emailed me to invite me to speak to this group, he directed me to Steve Buri, whom I suspect many of you must know. Anyway, by way of advice, Steve told me this audience was depressed by the election. (No surprise there.) They need cheering up. So I thought — oh, great… a group of Republicans in the northwest during the dead of winter need cheering up from a disastrous election, Obama’s inaugural speech announcing the installation of socialism in America followed by Hillary testa-lying about Benghazi. That’s going to be a real walk in the park…

All right, here are five words that should make you smile:  You don’t live in California…. I would imagine that saves many of you ten thousand dollars a year or more right there. There’s something to be happy about. Speaking of which, since I live in L.A. but spend a lot of time in this state, I’ve always been perplexed why everything seems to work better up here… the roads are better, the services are better… but we pay the ridiculous amount of state income tax. I don’t have to tell this crowd — don’t ever go there.

So I will try to cheer up you up, but I’m not going to make any false promises.  Years ago I wrote a movie for Richard Pryor who was then supposed to be the funniest man in America and I never met anyone gloomier — unless it was Woody Allen with whom I worked several years later.

But Pryor did tell me something interesting when I asked him why he never cracked a joke in person during our meetings. (BTW, I was always trying to make Pryor and Allen laugh… probably to prove myself in some way, kind of a guy thing… I never did get even a smile out of Richard, but finally did get one out of Woody.  You won’t be surprised to know it was a dirty joke.)  Anyway, Pryor said the secret to his standup is he just got up and told the truth and that, by itself, made everybody laugh. …

… This was all at the beginning of blogging and I had been reading the work of this Tennessee law professor, Glenn Reynolds, whose pioneering blog Instapundit went live just a few weeks before September 11. I decided, in imitation of Glenn who eventually became my business partner, that I would blog to promote my new novel.

It didn’t work.  The novel sunk like the proverbial stone.  But something else happened.  The blog itself became immensely popular with tens of thousands of readers online every day because I was writing about… political change…. something a lot of people were undergoing in those days, as I mentioned.

Glenn, I, and others started talking to each other about this new form and, being pro-capitalist, decided to do something with all this Internet traffic we were getting,.  That led to the debut of PJ Media in the fall of 2005 and of PJTV at the Republican Convention of 2008.

Our company got its name from a slur by CNN executive vice-president Jonathan Klein.  When some of us alleged that a document being flogged by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes as proof that George W. Bush had not completed his National Guard service was a forgery — Klein called us “amateurs in our pajamas.” We thought that would be a nice name — hence, PJ Media. Of course, we were right about those National Guard papers.  The exec, like Rather, lost his job.  PJ Media is a thriving online media company with page views roughly equivalent to National Review and Weekly Standard, with many of the same writers like Victor Davis Hanson and Andrew McCarthy.  We have recently added former Congressman Allen West for a new television initiative.

And I have been an accidental CEO for over seven rather amazing, incredibly fast-moving, years. My only regret is in that time I have not done as much screen and novel writing. That’s about to change.  The last election… not that I want to bring up that ugly subject again (my mission being to make you laugh)… has convinced me, if I even needed convincing, that my friend the late Andrew Breitbart was right when he said “politics was downstream of culture.”

Many on the right love to attack Hollywood and make fun of the likes of Sean Penn and Oliver Stone and they deserve it. But this abjuring of the entertainment industry happens at our peril. The rest of the world is watching that entertainment no matter what you say or do, most especially your children.  Rather than boycott Hollywood, take it over – at least part of it.  But do it well and professionally. Otherwise there’s no point.  No one’s interested. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: Video game maker Atari has filed for bankruptcy. Atari fans are so upset, they’re organizing a massive letter-writing campaign to President Reagan.

Fallon: Today is the 200th birthday of Jane Austen’s classic novel “Pride and Prejudice.” Fans celebrated the historic anniversary as always, reading half-way through and then giving up.

Fallon: Iran has successfully launched a monkey into space. And it actually returned to Earth alive. Which was great news for their space program, but terrible news for the monkey. He thought he’d finally escaped Iran.

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Mort Zuckerman on our “long misery.”

Six years ago, when the global financial crisis first broke, few realized how close we were to a catastrophic collapse of the world order we’d known for six decades. We escaped anarchy by the skin of our teeth. When the Great Recession exerted its grip, we knew we were in for some hard times. We had been through them before: good times, bad times, and then more good times. Yes, that’s how it would be.

But it hasn’t worked out that way at all. Where there was hope, there is now despair. Where there was conviction, there is now cynicism. Where there was community, there is now division. We don’t feel we are inaugurating a new beginning this month so much as enduring the continuation of what we might reasonably call The Long Misery. …

… Only 1 in 5 Americans is basically content with our government. No matter which party has the ascendancy, we are burdened by a dysfunctional government. For years we have spent like a big-government country but taxed like a small-government one; as the population ages, our entitlement programs, particularly pensions and healthcare, are gradually bankrupting us. As Harvard’s Joseph Nye once noted, the country “lacks the will, not the wallet.” Today, the problem of the “wallet” has become as pressing as willpower. Why do we continue to tolerate budgets that underestimate spending while overestimating revenue?

Thus it is that a country long celebrated for optimism amid adversity is having trouble finding the spirit that saw it through past times that were, in fact, much more threatening. The broad sense of unease is due to the fact that we have so mismanaged our finances we have become an “enfeebled” international player. As Henry Kissinger puts it, “The United States cannot afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a half … only self-delusion can keep us from admitting our decline to ourselves.”

The Long Misery is marked by a cultural and an economic crisis. Here’s one symptom: In the 1990s, California spent twice as much on its universities as on its prisons. Today it spends almost twice as much on prisons as on its universities. We face a significant decline in family cohesion, with about one third of American children being raised by a single parent, a condition that all too often has deleterious effects on their academic achievements, social skills, and character formation. We have many teachers who are unable to meet the challenge of educating our children to the appropriate level. One third of all of our doctoral students are foreigners, yet remarkably, once they earn their advanced degrees we escort them to the border to go and join our biggest competitors. We ignore the benefits of immigrant talent and the experience of Silicon Valley, where over half the science and engineering workforce is foreign-born and where 1 in 4 engineering and technology companies—firms that have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs—have at least one immigrant founder.

Relayed in Ping Fu’s new book Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds is a classic example of how we have got our priorities wrong. In the ’80s, when Ping arrived as a young refugee from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she had no money and only three words of English. She worked her way through college, eventually discovered a talent for creating computer software, and cofounded Geomagic, maker of an innovative 3-D system for designing products. Today we lose people like Ping every day. …

Jennifer Rubin noticed the president is clueless about how to create growth. This from a press question of Jay Carney.

… But it was worse than that really. There was also this exchange:

 Q Could it have been possible to craft a recovery that would have benefited the middle class more than the investors, more than Wall Street?

MR. CARNEY: I’m not an economist, Wendell, and what I can tell you is that having been there — working then for the Vice President — the efforts to move forward on the Recovery Act as it was, which included, in part because of insistence by Republicans, a third of the Recovery Act — a much unnoted fact — tax cuts, for example — and some of the other actions the President took in order to try to gain bipartisan support. I guess the point I’m saying is the idea that we would have somehow garnered more support in Congress for something different is a misreading of history.

The answer is nearly unintelligible, but I think the president’s flack is saying that because we didn’t get Son of Stimulus, the middle class is falling further behind. But the stimulus really didn’t create the jobs it was supposed to, and Son of Stimulus (e.g. hiring 100,000 teachers) wasn’t really going to do much of anything. As for the president’s decision to “cut” taxes, I must have missed his insistence on extending the payroll tax break this year. And no, preventing the middle class from getting a tax hike this year is not a tax cut. So what the heck is he talking about?

It is a little frightful, to be honest, how baffled the White House is when it comes to private job creation, investment and growth. Whatever the problem, Obama’s answer is always spend and tax more. But the answer to job growth is not more government spending and tax hikes. So naturally, they are stumped over there. …

The president was interviewed by The New Republic and from that, Nile Gardiner learned we’re going to more of the same.

… There is nothing in this interview that suggests the president is in any way serious about reining in federal spending, introducing entitlement reform, or rolling back the frontiers of the government. For a country with more than $16 trillion of debt, this is a catastrophic approach. It is very clear from this interview that President Obama sees his re-election as a mandate to continue the very policies that will eventually bankrupt the country unless they are reversed, regardless of huge opposition on Capitol Hill. It chimes closely with the president’s second inaugural address last week, which offered absolutely no olive branches to the nearly 61 million Americans who voted for his opponent in November.

Significantly, a major Gallup poll released on Inauguration Day showed that most Americans don’t feel positive about the direction their country is taking:

U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term at a time when Americans are as negative about the state of the country and its prospects going forward as they have been in more than three decades. Fewer than four in 10 Americans (39%) rate the current status of the U.S. at the positive end of a zero to 10 scale. This is about the same as in 2010, but it is fewer than have said so at any point since 1979.

… The challenges President Obama faces as he begins his second term in office are evident from the fact that less than four in 10 Americans rate the nation’s current situation on the positive end of a zero to 10 scale and that slightly less than half project that the state of the nation will be positive in five years. Both of these assessments are among the more negative Gallup has measured since the Eisenhower administration. The bright side for the Obama administration is that the current low assessments leave much room for improvement.

The Gallup poll should be a wake-up call for the White House. For this is a presidency that badly needs a dose of humility, and a fundamental reassessment of its failing policies. Barack Obama’s imperial tone is badly out of tune with the pessimistic mood of the country, and does not augur well for the next four years. As the latest RealClear Politics polling average shows, just 36 percent of Americans believe the country is moving in the right direction, while 56 percent think it is on the wrong track. This is hardly a vote of confidence in the direction the president is taking, one that points to continuing economic decline, a growing culture of dependency, and the relentless rise of big government.

David Harsanyi writes on the bailouts that never end. 

What’s worse? The existence of a government “pay czar” who dictates the salary of private-sector citizens or the corporate welfare queens who complain about having to deal with a “pay czar” after being rescued with taxpayer funds?

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose.

As it turns out, executives at companies that took the biggest bailouts — A.I.G., GM. and Ally Financial Inc. — had little to worry about as many of them enjoyed “excessive” compensation according to a report by the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Executives “continue to rake in Treasury-approved multimillion-dollar pay packages that often exceed guidelines,” was what Special Inspector General Christy Romero’s office found.

This, even though Treasury officials were monitoring executive pay and had the authority to limit those packages if they felt like it. This, even though, President Obama made a huge populist stink over A.I.G. bonuses in the past:

I want to comment on the news about executive bonuses at A.I.G. This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed. Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?

It always seemed that the president’s sensibilities were more hurt by the idea of big bonuses rather than the idea of taxpayer-funded big bonuses. After all, these pay scales never made sense. First, some of us have a philosophical problem with allowing government to interfere with the private sector every time Washington scares us with tales of doom.

But besides that, though the president knows a thing or two about credit downgrades and liquidity crises, he’s in no position to understand who at A.I.G. or G.M. deserves a bonus or why. …

Turning our attention to the SuperBowl, Jeff Schultz from AJC says one person is persona non grata in New Orleans.

If Atlanta is the city too busy to hate, New Orleans must be the sparks-still-flying-off-the-head city too obsessed to forget.

Seriously, if you were Roger Goodell this week, would you trust anything that comes out of the restaurant’s kitchen? Would something in the gumbo cause you to look sideways? Are you sure that’s crawfish?

“If he’s driving down the street, he better be in one of those Pope-mobiles,” said Laura Bridson, chief beerkeeper at Coop’s Place on Decatur St. “We’re kind of a grudge-holding town.”

New Orleans is a city built on the hospitality industry. That remains the case for almost everybody this week except for the commissioner of the NFL, whose picture can be found plastered on the doors and windows outside of several restaurants and watering holes – like “Wanted” posters.

“Do not serve this man,” the poster reads. …

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National Review has more comment on the second inaugural from the leftist.

In his inaugural address on January 21, President Obama invoked great ideals of human dignity, equality, and most especially “progress” to justify his second-term agenda, a cornerstone of which will be a crusade to limit humanity’s use of carbon.

In fact, nothing could be more antithetical to the goal of advancing the human condition than restricting carbon consumption. A look at the relationship between living standards and humanity’s carbon utilization over the past 200 years, as shown in Figure 1, below, makes this perfectly clear.

The story that Figure 1 tells is remarkable; it is, perhaps, one of the grandest stories ever told. It shows how, over the past two centuries, by using carbon in ever-increasing amounts, the human race has lifted itself out of hopeless poverty and misery to achieve a modicum of dignity and happiness. Look at that line reaching up, in direct proportion to global carbon use, from an average global income of $180 per person in 1800 to $2,200 in 1960 to $9,000 today; that is progress.

Of course, we still have a ways to go. The current $9,000 average world income is just a fifth of the $45,000 U.S. average, yet we still have some poverty here. Still, the achievement is incredible. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for president on the promise of “a chicken in every pot,” and millions found the offer compelling. Today, in the United States, minimum wage is $7 per hour, and chicken sells for less than $2 per pound; so, a person working at minimum wage can buy a pound of chicken with about 17 minutes’ labor. This is freedom from want, indeed, delivered not by the New Deal, but by the terrific expansion of our use of carbon.

Who could be so callous, so cruel, so disparaging of the needs of the world’s poor as to wish to halt to this brilliant march forward before its benefits reach everyone? Yet that is the exact proposal of those who wish to stop the growth of global carbon consumption.

The relationship between carbon consumption and human well-being is causal, not coincidental. …

David Mamet was in Newsweek with a nicely tuned rant about government.

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law. …

… The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependant on his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] fundamentally altered the forms of our government.” …

An Economist piece on the new openings for science in the Muslim world reminds us just how backward their culture can be.

THE sleep has been long and deep. In 2005 HarvardUniversity produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries combined. The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West: the only living one, the chemist Ahmed Hassan Zewail, is at the California Institute of Technology. By contrast Jews, outnumbered 100 to one by Muslims, have won 79. The 57 countries in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference spend a puny 0.81% of GDP on research and development, about a third of the world average. America, which has the world’s biggest science budget, spends 2.9%; Israel lavishes 4.4%.

Many blame Islam’s supposed innate hostility to science. Some universities seem keener on prayer than study. Quaid-i-AzamUniversity in Islamabad, for example, has three mosques on campus, with a fourth planned, but no bookshop. Rote learning rather than critical thinking is the hallmark of higher education in many countries. The Saudi government supports books for Islamic schools such as “The Unchallengeable Miracles of the Qur’an: The Facts That Can’t Be Denied By Science” suggesting an inherent conflict between belief and reason.

Many universities are timid about courses that touch even tangentially on politics or look at religion from a non-devotional standpoint. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a renowned Pakistani nuclear scientist, introduced a course on science and world affairs, including Islam’s relationship with science, at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the country’s most progressive universities. Students were keen, but Mr Hoodbhoy’s contract was not renewed when it ran out in December; for no proper reason, he says. (The university insists that the decision had nothing to do with the course content.)

But look more closely and two things are clear. A Muslim scientific awakening is under way. And the roots of scientific backwardness lie not with religious leaders, but with secular rulers, who are as stingy with cash as they are lavish with controls over independent thought. …

They named the Housing Index after him, so Robert Shiller’s insights might be valuable.

… So it seems that since 2006, our society — including both buyers and lenders — hasn’t become more speculative in its attitudes toward housing. Instead, it has become more wary, and more regulated.

And, of course, economic clouds are still hovering. Slow overall growth continues in the United States, and European financial markets remain vulnerable.Much of our economy, notably housing, is still supported by taxpayer bailouts, which are clearly not a long-term solution. There are also lingering uncertainties about emerging-market economies, as well as the risk that a disturbance in the Middle East could cause an energy crisis.

Most experts are not predicting any big change in home prices. As of December, the Zillow-Pulsenomics Home Price Expectations Survey, which involves more than 100 forecasters, and the S.& P. Case/Shiller Composite Index Futures were both forecasting modest increases for the next half-decade, implying inflation-adjusted price growth of 1 to 2 percent a year.

The bottom line for potential home buyers or sellers is probably this: Don’t do anything dramatic or difficult. There is too much uncertainty to justify any aggressive speculative moves right now. If you have personal reasons for getting into or out of the housing market, go ahead. Otherwise, don’t stay up worrying about home prices any more than you do about stock prices.

I can’t offer any clearer picture, and I don’t see a solid basis for anyone else to do so, either.

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Charles Krauthammer writes on the second inaugural.

The media herd is stunned to discover that Barack Obama is a man of the left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches, the commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural address, that is.

Where has everyone been these four years? The only surprise is that Obama chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for “malice toward none” ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal manifesto.

But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had unveiled his transformational agenda in his first address to Congress, four years ago (Feb. 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”

Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care, 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. By the White House’s own reckoning, Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.

Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm shellacking that cost him the House. But now that he’s won again, the revolution is back, as announced in Monday’s inaugural address.

It was a paean to big government. At its heart was Obama’s pledge to (1) defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and (2) expand it unrelentingly for the 21st.

The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — is the very definition of reactionary liberalism. …

Robert Samuelson calls him “president make-believe.”

There was a make-believe quality to President Obama’s second inaugural address, as if all that is required to solve serious problems are the intelligence to produce proper policies and the political grit to get them approved. Perish the thought that there are deep conflicts among the things that Americans want, or the possibility that some problems lack easy, obvious and inexpensive remedies. This isn’t the vision Obama was peddling.

Take two examples: paying for the retirement of the baby boom, mainly through Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; and responding to climate change.

On the baby boom, Obama said: “We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”

On climate change: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

Against this rousing rhetoric stand daunting realities.

Of course, there are conflicts between the young and old. In 2000, there were 45 million Social Security recipients; by 2025, the Social Security Administration projects the number at 79 million. Already, paying for retirees is the largest source of federal spending. In 2012, Social Security ($762 billion) exceeded defense ($651 billion) by 17 percent; Medicare and Medicaid together ($720 billion) also topped defense. (Two-thirds of Medicaid goes to the elderly and disabled.)

Excluding these programs from even modest budget cuts — as Obama seems inclined to do — imposes huge costs on the young. Their taxes will rise, big deficits will persist or spending cuts will be concentrated on other programs more important to the working population (for starters, grants to state and local governments). There’s no honest way around these conflicts, but Obama pretended they don’t exist.

On climate change, the difficulty is greater. Environmentalists argue that emissions from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) need to be cut 50 percent to 80 percent by mid-century to avoid a ruinous warming. The problem is that there’s simply no plausible way to get from here to there without, in effect, shutting down the world economy. …

And Rich Lowry says Rush Limbaugh was right four years ago.

There should have been something for everyone in President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. For liberals, a full-throated call to arms. For conservatives, vindication.

Obama settled once and for all the debate over his place on the political spectrum and his political designs. He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country irrevocably to the left. In other words, Obama’s foes — if you put aside the birthers and sundry other lunatics — always had him pegged correctly.

If you listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, you got a better appreciation of Obama’s core than by reading the president’s friends and sophisticated interpreters, for whom he was either a moderate or a puzzle yet to be fully worked out.

Rush, et al., doubted that Obama could have emerged from the left-wing milieu of Hyde Park, become in short order the most liberal U.S. senator, run to Hillary Clinton’s left in the 2008 primaries and yet have been a misunderstood centrist all along. They heeded his record and his boast in 2008 about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and discounted the unifying tone of his rhetoric as transparent salesmanship.

They got him right, even as he duped the Obamacons, played the press and fooled his sympathizers. David Brooks, the brilliant and winsome New York Times columnist, has been promising the arrival of the true, pragmatic Obama for years now. In his column praising the second inaugural address, he appeared finally to give up. “Now he is liberated,” Brooks wrote. “Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display.”

Paul Krugman, also of The New York Times, wrote blog posts over the past few years titled “Obama the Moderate” and “Obama the Moderate Conservative.” For Krugman, Obama could never have proved himself a liberal short of an order to liquidate the kulaks. Even he, though, wrote of the second inaugural: “Obama has never been this clear before about what he stands for.” …

Joel Kotkin warns California its policies are becoming anti-family.

For all of human history, family has underpinned the rise, and decline, of nations. This may also prove true for the United States, as demographics, economics and policies divide the nation into what may be seen as child-friendly and increasingly child-free zones.

Where California falls in this division also may tell us much about our state’s future. Indeed, in his semi-triumphalist budget statement, our 74-year-old governor acknowledged California’s rapid aging as one of the more looming threats for our still fiscally challenged state.

Gov. Jerry Brown, unsurprisingly, did not acknowledge or address the many factors driving the aging trend that include his own favored policy prescriptions. Whatever their intent, the usual “progressive” basket of policies have had regressive results: a tougher time for both the poor and middle class, and a set of density-oriented policies that are likely to drive up housing prices, particularly for the single-family houses largely preferred by people with children.

These policies have helped turn California into a state that looks less Sunbelt and more like the long-aging centers of the Northeast and the Midwest. It also mirrors declines in fertility and marriage rates in the most-rapidly aging parts of Europe and east Asia. These regions are shifting toward what ChapmanUniversity’s recent report, in cooperation with the Civil Service College of Singapore, characterized as post-familialism. Released this past fall in Singapore, the report will be presented in OrangeCounty this week.

We believe that the rapid decline of marriage and fertility rates in many advanced countries inevitably leads to economic decline, reduced workforces and, likely, an inevitable fiscal disaster. This may be becoming now more true in the United States, a country which once boasted the most vibrant demographics in the high-income world but since the 2007-09 recession has seen a rapid drop in both its marriage rate and fertility rates to well below 2.1 children per female, what is generally referred to as “the replacement rate.” …

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There’s good news from American higher education. Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor is now the president of Purdue. We have his open letter to the Purdue community. You would think he’s been reading Pickings.

… I doubt that even the most focused and specialized of Purdue researchers has failed to notice the criticisms and the sometimes apocalyptic predictions swirling around higher education these days. They come from outside observers and lifelong academics and from all points of the philosophical compass.

The most frequent attacks include:

College costs too much and delivers too little. Students are leaving, when they graduate at all, with loads of debt but without evidence that they grew much in either knowledge or critical thinking.

Administrative costs, splurging on “resort” amenities, and an obsession with expensive capital projects have run up the cost to students without enhancing the value of the education they receive.

Rigor has weakened. Grade inflation has drained the meaning from grade point averages and left the diploma in many cases as merely a surrogate marker for the intelligence required to gain admission in the first place.

The system lacks accountability for results. No one can tell if one school is performing any better than another.

The mission of undergraduate instruction is increasingly subordinated to research and to work with graduate students.

Too many professors are spending too much time “writing papers for each other,” researching abstruse topics of no real utility and no real incremental contribution to human knowledge or understanding.

Diversity is prized except in the most important realm of all, diversity of thought. The academies that, through the unique system of tenure, once enshrined freedom of opinion and inquiry now frequently are home to the narrowest sort of closed-mindedness and the worst repression of dissident ideas.

Athletics, particularly in NCAA Division I, is out of control both financially and as a priority of university attention.

However fair or unfair these critiques, and whatever their applicability to our university, a growing literature suggests that the operating model employed by Purdue and most American universities is antiquated and soon to be displaced. In the space of a few weeks last fall, a Time cover story called for “Reinventing College,” a Newsweek cover asked “Is College a Lousy Investment?” and a USA Today page one feature declared “College May Never Be the Same.” Other voices, many from inside the academy, had even more striking assessments. Here is just a tiny sampling:

“Bubbles burst when people catch on, and there’s some evidence people are beginning to catch on … kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.” (Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, University of Tennessee)

“Other information industries, from journalism to music to book publishing, enjoyed similar periods of success right before epic change enveloped them, seemingly overnight…Colleges and universities could be next, unless they act to mitigate the poor choices and inaction from the lost decade by looking for ways to lower costs, embrace technology and improve education.” (Jeff Selingo, editorial director, Chronicle of Higher Education)

“Strip away the fancy degrees, the trendy fluff classes, and the personal gadgets, and a new generation of indebted and jobless students has about as much opportunity as the ancient indentured Helots.” (Victor Davis Hanson, StanfordUniversity)

“High prices, low completion rates, and too little accountability.” (Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, asked to sum up the state of today’s higher education)

“Too many kids go to college.” (Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal)

“(U)niversities will be committing slow-motion suicide if they fail to revolutionize their classroom-based models of instruction…The status quo is already disintegrating.” (Ann Kirschner, dean at MacaulayHonorsCollege, the City University of New York)

“In fifty years, if not much sooner, half the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist…nothing can stop it…(T)he residential college will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.” (Nathan Harden, writing in The American Interest magazine)

And, most succinctly and perhaps most credibly, from Stanford’s esteemed President John Hennessy: “There’s a tsunami coming.” …

Two states away in Wisconsin (We jump over the cesspool of Illinois from whence came the criminals now occupying Washington) we find a university system finding practical ways to lower costs and recognize achievement earned outside of normal educational structures. Wall Street Journal has the story. 

David Lando plans to start working toward a diploma from the University of Wisconsin this fall, but he doesn’t intend to set foot on campus or even take a single online course offered by the school’s well-regarded faculty.

Instead, he will sit through hours of testing at his home computer in Milwaukee under a new program that promises to award a bachelor’s degree based on knowledge—not just class time or credits.

“I have all kinds of credits all over God’s green earth, but I’m using this to finish it all off,” said the 41-year-old computer consultant, who has an associate degree in information technology but never finished his bachelor’s in psychology.

Colleges and universities are rushing to offer free online classes known as “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. But so far, no one has figured out a way to stitch these classes together into a bachelor’s degree.

Now, educators in Wisconsin are offering a possible solution by decoupling the learning part of education from student assessment and degree-granting.

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.

No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees. …

It has been cold in the country as evidenced by the chill factor map. If you want to know real cold, Daily Mail, UK has a story about the village of Oymyakon in Yakutsk province in Russia where temperatures in the winter average -50C (122F) Why does anyone live there? Because it is located near warm springs on Stalin’s Road of Bones leading to the Kolyma gold fields in Magadan province. During the 30′s and 40′s half the gold mined in the world came along this road on the way to Western Russia. Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia, writes that it is estimated each ton of gold mined in Kolyma cost between 700 and 1,000 lives, or about one life for every two pounds of gold. Progressive that he was, Stalin must have figured they were lives well spent.  

If you thought it was cold where you are at the moment then a visit to the Russian village of Oymyakon might just change your mind.

With the average temperature for January standing at -50C, it is no wonder the village is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world.

Known as the ‘Pole of Cold’, the coldest ever temperature recorded in Oymyakon was -71.2C (-160F).

Daily problems that come with living in Oymyakon include pen ink freezing, glasses freezing to people’s faces and batteries losing power.

Locals are said to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them.

Another problem caused by the frozen temperatures is burying dead bodies, which can take up to three days. The earth must first have thawed sufficiently in order to dig, so a bonfire is lit for a couple of hours. Hot coals are then pushed to the side and a hole a couple of inches deep is dug. The process is repeated for several days until the hole is deep enough to bury the coffin. …

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Charlie Gasparino lists the ways Jack Lew will be bad for the country. Pickerhead has come to believe the president ought to have the fools he has picked. It will be our Lenin strategy. During 1917 Kerensky’s Provisional government was struggling and Lenin, always one to turn a phrase said, “The worse the better.”

Yes, Jack Lew’s bizarre signature will look pretty awful on our currency, but the real ugly is what he means for our economy.

Lew, President Obama’s choice as the country’s next Treasury chief, will be a carbon copy of his predecessor, Tim Geithner: a drone who’ll mindlessly carry out the president’s short-sighted economic agenda, no matter how silly or disastrous the policy.

When Geithner took over at Treasury in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many on Wall Street expected big things. After all, he had a stellar resume: president of the New York Fed after serving in a top post at the IMF and in the Clinton Treasury Department under Bob Rubin and Larry Summers.

The markets shot up when he was named to the job, as traders applauded the appointment of someone they thought was a key architect of the 2008 banking rescues, which staved off a total collapse of the financial system and a likely depression.

But the markets soon turned south, as Geithner showed his true colors. Truth be told, Geithner had been a side player in the bailouts, which were arranged mainly by Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. But (as people in the markets came to realize) he was a key player in the crisis: As New York Fed president, Geithner was the key guy in charge of making sure the big banks like Citigroup didn’t load up on risky assets — which of course they did, which is why the taxpayer-financed bailout became necessary.

People who know Geithner say he’s weighing a tell-all book on the crisis and recovery. But it will belong on the “fiction” shelves, because nothing the president or his Treasury chief did had much impact. It’s been Bernanke’s unprecedented money-printing and super-low interest rates that keep inflating stock prices while keeping banks’ borrowing costs so low that it’s nearly impossible for them not to make money and repair their balance sheets.

The price of Bernanke’s medicine, of course, is a debased currency, plus a high risk of serious inflation if the economy ever picks up steam. …

Streetwise Professor reacts to the president’s claim only governments can get things done.

… Firms are cooperative enterprises that engage in collective action to produce things that people value.  Markets facilitate cooperation between diverse individuals who may not even know of each others’ existence, and who do not intend to cooperate, but end up doing so while pursuing their own self-interested objectives due to the way that price signals convey information about benefits and costs, and provide powerful incentives to act on that information.  The price system coordinates, and thereby permits multitudes to cooperate.

In other words, the market system is a mixture of cooperation and competition.

In contrast, in Obama’s cramped vision, government and government alone is the sole nexus of cooperation in society.  That it is coercive “cooperation”, rather than voluntary cooperation (a la Burke, de Toqueville, or firms operating in markets) escapes his attention, or at least doesn’t bother him one whit.  To him the alternatives are: cooperation mediated through government and government alone, or atomistic competition, red in tooth and claw.  A regurgitation of the Social Darwinian crap he heaved up a year or two ago.

I do not know whether Obama’s Straw Man is the product of extreme intellectual limitations or extreme intellectual dishonesty.  I’m voting “both” actually.  But regardless, it is embarrassing to witness such a display, and even more embarrassing to see it praised as some great oration.

The real Straw Man here is Obama.  Straw Man as in the Wizard of Oz.  Because he really needs a brain.

American Glob wonders why dems are always comparing the president to GOP guys like Lincoln and Reagan,

He’s Lincoln! He’s Reagan! He’s Lincoln! He’s Reagan! He’s Lincoln! He’s Reagan!

Guess what folks… he’s neither.

Lincoln united a divided country, Obama has done everything in his power to further polarize Americans against each other. Reagan turned around a dismal economy, Obama has made things worse.

Frankly, if liberals are as proud of Obama as they claim to be while wiping the drool from their chins, why do they never compare Obama to Democratic Party presidents? Are Democrats admitting that Republican presidents are more effective and appealing? It sure seems that way.

Here’s Valerie Jarrett, the latest of many to compare Obama to Abraham Lincoln…

Obama’s advisor went on to compare the current president with Abraham Lincoln. “I think you can’t compare the Civil War to what we’re going through,” she said. “But we’ve been through a really tough time in our country. And seeing how Lincoln had to work so hard just to make the progress that he did, how he never gave up, and how resilient he was, and [how] he tried a whole range of different strategies. And I think obviously that resonated with the president. And so it kind of reaffirmed what he already knew, which is you have to be resilient. you have to be determined. And you can’t lose your focus, you can’t get distracted by short-term political interests.

Michael Tomasky swoons at the Daily Beast…

How Obama Can Become Our Era’s Reagan

Barack Obama’s speech was elegantly pugnacious, a fine articulation of civic-republican liberalism and a very clear statement of a political agenda, with its specific mentions of climate change and inequality and other concerns. As others have noted, it was his most openly liberal speech as president, and it tells us what he aiming for in term two. He wants to do for liberalism (without using the word of course; we’re still not at that point yet) what Ronald Reagan did for conservatism.

It’s funny how you never hear Democrats squeal with delight saying, Finally! Our generation’s Jimmy Carter! At Last! A Woodrow Wilson of our very own!

There’s a reason for that.

Dear Democrats,

You own Obama and everything his presidency has wrought. Please stop comparing him to successful Republicans. Your hypocrisy is only slightly more annoying than the credit you give our intelligence.

Signed,

Half of the country

Sen. Barrasso of Wyoming has misgivings with the Hagel pick. We say, let the fool get the other fools he wants. 

I recently returned from meeting in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and in Afghanistan with U.S. generals and troops in the field. The discussions touched on some common themes: supporting Israel, America’s strongest ally in the region, and protecting U.S. interests in the Middle East.

These talks have reinforced my understanding of the tremendous challenges the next secretary of defense will face on a range of national-security issues. Strong leadership and sound judgment will be required day in and day out.

Since Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, was nominated to be the next defense secretary, there is new attention on his many controversial statements. One of them, his remark that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” on Capitol Hill, I found to be particularly offensive and wrong.

As a senator required to provide “advice and consent” on his appointment, I recently asked Mr. Hagel about his comment. He apologized for it and explained that he was only commenting on the strength of the lobby. While I respect his apology, I can’t respect his explanation. My national-security votes are based on America’s national security—not lobbyists’ issues, interests or intimidation.

While Mr. Hagel’s troublesome and insulting words matter, his policy positions matter even more. He has a record of votes and decisions that are far outside the mainstream of foreign policy supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

Mr. Hagel was one of only two U.S. senators to oppose financial sanctions against Iran in 2001. In 2007, he wrote to President George W. Bush urging “direct, unconditional, and comprehensive talks with Iran.” In 2008, he again was one of only two senators to vote against sanctions. That same year, he even implied, in his book “America: Our Next Chapter,” that a nuclear Iran might not be so bad because countries with nuclear weapons “will often respond with some degree of responsible, or at least sane, behavior.” …

Randy Barnett in Volokh Conspiracy posts on a new paper by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.

Glenn Reynolds has a terrific, and very short, paper on SSRN on Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime, which I highly recommend.  (Conor Friedersdorf blogs about it here.)   Here is the key passage that summarizes the problem:

Overcriminalization has thus left us in a peculiar place: Though people suspected of a crime have extensive due process rights in dealing with the police, and people charged with a crime have even more extensive due process rights in court, the actual decision whether or not to charge a person with a crime is almost completely unconstrained. Yet, because of overcharging and plea bargains, that decision is probably the single most important event in the chain of criminal procedure.

He then offers a number of tentative suggestions on how to address this problem, which Friedersdorf summarizes as follows:

Rather than granting prosecutors absolute immunity against lawsuits, shift to a “qualified, good-faith immunity for prosecutors” — in other words, make them personally liable in instance when they aren’t carrying out their duties in good faith.

If a personal is charged with a crime and acquitted, make the prosecution pay their legal bill. Or if there are multiple crimes being adjudicated, “we might pro-rate things: Charge a defendant with 20 offenses, but convict on only one, and the prosecution must bear 95% of the defendant’s legal fees. This would certainly discourage overcharging.”

 Ban plea bargains all together, so that every criminal charge filed would have to be backed up in open court.

Alternatively, “we might require that the prosecution’s plea offers be presented to a jury or judge before sentencing. Jurors might then wonder why they are being asked to sentence a defendant to 20 years without parole when the prosecution was willing to settle for 5. 15 years in jail seems a rather stiff punishment for making the state undergo the bother of a trial.”

Consider whether regulatory violations should be subject to criminal sanctions at all.

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Leno: Michelle Obama turned 49 the other day. Said she didn’t want an extravagant gift from Barack. Oh, don’t worry. He’s very careful with his own money.

Fallon: Education Secy. Arne Duncan says he’ll stay in the Obama White House. He wants to make the United States No. 1 in education, and he won’t stop until our students are doing gooder.

Conan: On raising the debt limit Obama says the U.S. is no “deadbeat nation.” Then the President added, “By the way — If China calls, I’m not here!”

Conan: Oprah Winfrey said she conducted an “intense” two-and-a-half-hour interview with Lance Armstrong. Oprah said she never would have had the stamina for that if Lance hadn’t given her a little something to keep going. …

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January 15th Pickings had an item about the law school dean paid $867,000 a year. Megan McArdle writes about that and other horror stories from academia. She said that salary reminded her of …

… an earnings call I once listened to with the president of a major casino group (I won’t say which one). It was fascinating listening to all the ways they had to keep “avid gamblers” (read: compulsive gamblers) in the casinos. The analysts asked a bunch of good questions about marketing, investment, and cash flow, but none of them asked the question I really wanted to hear answered, which was “How do you sleep at night?”

No, I don’t think that gambling should be illegal. Yes, I understand that if he didn’t do it, someone else would. Nonetheless, I could not myself spend my days thinking up ways to shake the last dime out of the bleeding pockets of people who were ruining their lives. (As in other “vice” industries like alcohol, a disproportionate share of the revenue comes from the small minority who have a serious problem). 

Similarly, I do not think that should be illegal for Mr. O’Brien to run a law school. But how do you keep enrolling people at such exorbitant tuitions, knowing that the majority of them will not be able to get jobs with their degree? (And a larger majority still will not be able to get jobs which permit them to repay their loans). And pay yourself such a handsome salary to boot?

But let’s not forget that there are lots of people out there exploiting students these days.  A while back, I observed that academics tend to describe the job market as an improbably Dickensian welter of exploitation, a description which matches only one job market: their own.  I asked why such a left wing environment had produced one of the most radically unequal and exploitative job markets in the country, which drew the following story from a reader:

The entry of new job applicants into this labor market has nothing to do with the availability of jobs. University administrators control how many tenure track jobs there are, but the faculty controls how many new graduate students there are. Faculty decisions about how many grad students to admit are usually based not on how many new PhDs they can place in jobs, but how many graduate assistants the faculty feel they need. I went to a fairly prestigious Midwestern university, and I entered the program with a cohort of 14 first-year grad students. In about my second or third year, the Department Chair and Director of Graduate Studies informed us that new cohorts would be smaller, 7-8 students at most, because they could not in good conscience admit students who they knew they couldn’t place. After less than a year, the faculty were furious because there were not enough TAs to do all their grading for them. The next year, the incoming class of grad students went back up to 14.

Presumably, the marginal six or seven candidates were less likely to get a job than the first choices.  The oversupply of graduate students in the humanities is much, much worse than the oversupply of lawyers. The odds of a PhD student from a third tier program getting a tenure track job approaches zero in many fields (and falling every year), yet the schools keep cranking them out. …

 

Roger Simon on Schumer, Hagel and the administration’s “good Jews.”

… Just a few days ago, the New York senator was in the eye of a storm surrounding Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of Defense. After a private interview with the former Nebraska senator (he of the well-documented slurs against gays and Jews contrasting with a more laissez-faire attitude toward Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran), Chuck Schumer — in the role of wise counsel for all Jewish-Americans — announced he was “convinced” Hagel had changed his noxious opinions.

Well, good. But imagine if Hagel had not really changed his opinions (or if he semi-hemi-demi changed them). What would Chuck Schumer, as the president’s inaugural emcee and chief factotum of his second inauguration, have done then? Excoriate Hagel and demand he not be nominated, thus humiliating his mentor?

Not likely. But Schumer would never have had to do that — would never be put in that position — because the game was already rigged. Hagel would say the right things to Schumer who would relay those words to the world, reaping glory less than a week later in the role of president’s “best man” on national and international television.

The game has similarly also been rigged against the state of Israel. Schumer, consciously and/or unconsciously, has been one of the riggers, he and a squadron of Obama’s other “good Jews” including David Axelrod, Jack Lew, and Rahm Emanuel.

Meanwhile, the president — actually treating Israel like the fifty-first state she has been accused of being — has reportedly said the Jewish state doesn’t know what’s good for her.

Israel, for her part, is moving to the right. The reason is simple – although contra everything Obama thinks or wishes. The Israeli public is finally facing – years after the Oslo Accords and after unilaterally departing from the Sinai and Gaza only to be the recipient of endless missiles and terror attacks — that the Palestinians, leadership and public, have no real interest in a two–state solution. It is only the Israelis, ironically, that want one. For reasons of tribalism, vengeance, and religious primitivism, the Palestinians seek only a one-state solution. Theirs. If they had wanted a two-state solution, they could have had one of their own decades ago. …

James Delingpole posts on the German move to get their gold home.

Back in the mid-1920s, the head of the German Central Bank, Herr Hjalmar Schacht, went to New York to see Germany’s gold. However the NY Fed officials were unable to find the palette of Germany’s gold bullion. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Strong was mortified, but to put him at ease Herr Schacht turned to him and said ‘Never mind, I believe you when you when you say the gold is there. Even if it weren’t you are good for its replacement.’ (H/T The Real Asset Company)

But that was then and this is now. In the eyes of the Germans – and who can blame them? – America has lost its mojo to such a degree that it can no longer be trusted to honour its debts, even in the unlikely event that it were financially capable of doing so. Which is why, following in the footsteps of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (who may be an idiot but is definitely no fool), Germany is repatriatriating its gold from the US federal reserve. It will now be stored in Frankfurt.

This is an important story. One of the most spectacular con tricks of the last twelve months, pulled off by our political class with the connivance of much of the media, is that we’ve escaped the global economic armageddon which looked till quite recently as if it was going to engulf us. The Euro didn’t collapse; Europe isn’t in flames; QE hasn’t led to Weimar-style hyperinflation; the fiscal cliff has been dodged; Britain hasn’t yet lost its triple A credit rating; the bond markets haven’t gone postal…

Well it may look calm on the surface, but this latest move by the Bundesbank gives us a pretty good indication that beneath the surface that serene-seeming swan is paddling for dear life. …

Peter Schiff posts on the debt ceiling debate.

President Obama said the Republican reluctance to raise the debt limit was the equivalent of a diner who had ordered and enjoyed a meal who then decides to leave the restaurant without paying the bill. The President is actually arguing that if the diner had no cash on hand, it would be much more responsible to simply use a credit card. In taking this moral high ground, the President ignores the fact that the diner (who has indebted himself through habitual restaurant meals) intends to pay his credit card bill with another card, and then repeat the process until he runs out of cards. So in the end, it’s not the restaurateur who gets stiffed, but the issuer of the last card the diner is able to acquire.  As with the platinum coin, this is a distinction without a difference. 

Currently the Federal Government counts more than $16 trillion in funded obligations. Over the next 10 years we are expected to add another $10 trillion or more. At no point in the foreseeable future are we expected to approach balance in our annual budget. All of our future bills are expected to be paid by future borrowing on a massive scale. Anyone with an ounce of integrity would have to plan for the possibility that an ever increasing debt rollover is a limited prospect. Such an understanding will mean that eventually someone will get stuck with the bill. How is this any more responsible than dining and ditching?    

In truth, a failure to raise the debt ceiling is not a commitment to renege on obligations. It is simply a decision to stop borrowing. The government could still meet obligations by cutting spending, raising taxes, or making reforms to entitlements. But it chooses not to take this difficult step. 

More important than that is the message America is sending its creditors. By informing them that the United States will not use its taxing power to repay its debts, but will only rely on its ability to borrow more (ironically from the same creditors), it effectively admits to running the world’s largest Ponzi scheme. It’s a shame that more people can’t seem to grasp these very simple truths.

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Since it is the NY Times, you will be surprised at the criticism.

… Successful modern presidents share an experience that Barack Obama does not have: before becoming president, each played an executive or leadership role that provided insight as to how to run an effective government.

The management troubles that have dogged the Obama administration are not unique to Mr. Obama or his team. One of the biggest problems facing America today is that in Washington, the ability to effectively run complex organizations is among the skill sets that is least valued in our leaders.

Often people with no management experience — academics, writers or politicians who have never run an office with more than a handful of people — are put in charge of giant, complicated government agencies or processes. In part this is because so many people in government mistakenly believe that being able to articulate ideas is the same as being able to put ideas into action.

This administration provides an object lesson in how, when too many staffers have excessive influence, political calculations often trump good policy choices. When an inner circle maintains too tight a stranglehold over the president’s time and attention, too few views come into play. If isolated by an inner circle, the president will have a harder time fostering cooperation in his administration. During his first term, Mr. Obama’s inner circle included Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Pete Rouse. Even top administration officials believe these gatekeepers held power too closely. Staff casualties resulted.

When Obama campaign insiders on the National Security Council staff were thought to have more access to the president than their boss, Gen. James L. Jones, the general reportedly felt undermined and left the administration. Ms. Jarrett is said to be seen as so powerful that hardly anyone dares to cross her.

Despite constant behind-the-scenes grumbling from top officials, few appear to have successfully challenged her. Acknowledging how much the president values her opinion, staffers complain about her involvement in matters outside her competence. Battles with Ms. Jarrett reportedly played a role in at least one top official’s decision to leave the administration.

Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they often feel alienated from the president. There is a sense in the White House that “Barack Obama’s theory of government is he is the government.”

Mr. Obama’s perceived aloofness didn’t help his relations with Congress. Many Hill Democrats resent the fact that the president essentially did not consult with them during the last campaign, regularly keeping them away from him during his campaign appearances.

CHIEF executives who have visited the White House for much publicized consultations with the president and senior staff report that Mr. Obama appears to be more interested in delivering his message than in listening to others. This, too, speaks to Mr. Obama’s management weakness. Selecting a diverse team, creating a system in which ideas surface, listening to those ideas and then empowering others to put them into action are the cornerstones of good management — and of effective leadership. …

Joel Kotkin revisits his look at the “clerisy.”

… The clerisy shares a kind of mission which Bell described as the rational “ordering of mass society.” Like the bishops and parish priests of the feudal past, or the public intellectuals, university dons and Anglican worthies of early 19th century Britain, today’s clerisy attempts to impart on the masses today’s distinctly secular “truths,” on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment. Academics, for example, increasingly regulate speech along politically correct lines, and indoctrinate the young while the media shape their perceptions of reality.

Most distinctive about the clerisy is their unanimity of views. On campus today, there is broad agreement on a host of issues from gay marriage, affirmative action and what are perceived as “women’s” issues to an almost religious environmentalism that is contemptuous toward traditional industry and anything that smacks of traditional middle class suburban values. These views have shaped many of the perceptions of the current millennial generation, whose conversion to the clerical orthodoxy has caught most traditional conservatives utterly flat-footed.

As befits a technological age, the new clerisy also enjoys the sanction of what Bell defined as the “creative elite of scientists.” Prominent examples include the Secretary of Energy, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Chu; science advisor John Holdren; NASA’s James Hansen; and the board of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the words of New York Times hyper-partisan Charles Blow, Republicans have devolved into the “creationist party.” In contrast Obama reigns gloriously hailed as “the sun king” of official science.

Let’s be clear — this new ascendant class is no threat to either the “one percent,”  or even the much smaller decimal groups. Historically, the already rich and large economic interests often profit in a hyper-regulated state; the clerisy’s actions can often stifle competition by increasing the cost of entry for unwelcome new players. Like Cardinal Richelieu or Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, our modern-day dirigistes favor state-directed capital that has benefited, among others, “green” capitalists, Wall Street “too big to fail” firms and, of course, General Motors.

More disturbing still may be the clerisy’s regal disregard for democratic give and take. Both traditional hierarchies, or new ones like the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, disdain popular will as intrinsically lacking in scientific judgment and societal wisdom. Some leading figures in the clerisy, such as former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag, openly argue for shifting power from naturally contentious elected bodies to credentialed “experts” operating in places Washington, Brussels or the United Nations.

Such experts, of course, see little need for give and take with their intellectual inferiors, in Congress or elsewhere. This attitude is expressed in the administration’s increasing use of executive orders to promote policy goals such as better gun control, reduced greenhouse emissions or reform of immigration. Whatever one’s views on these issues, that they are increasingly settled outside Congress represents a troublesome notion.

Like empowered bureaucrats everywhere, the clerisy also sometimes reserves a nice “taste” for themselves, much as the old bishops and upper clergy indulged in luxury and even prohibited pleasures of the flesh. Just look at the lavish payouts accorded to Orszag and Treasury Secretary-designate Jacob Lew, who, after serving in the bureaucracy, make millions off the same Wall Street firms that have so benefited from administration policies.

So who loses in the new order? Certainly unfashionable companies  – oil firms, agribusiness concerns, suburban homebuilders — face tougher times from regulators and the mainstream media . But the biggest losers likely will be the small business-oriented middle class. Not surprisingly Main Street, far more than Wall Street, harbors the gravest pessimism about the president’s second term.

The small business owner, the suburban homeowner, the family farmer or skilled construction tradesperson are intrinsically ill-suited to playing the the insiders’ game in Washington. Played up to at election time, they find their concerns promptly abandoned thereafter, outliers more than ever in a refashioned political order.

So how does the clerisy treat today’s slaves – adjunct professors? Walter Russell Mead knows.

When the Affordable Care Act passed in early 2010, many in academia—faculty and students alike—cheered on. But now that its provisions are going into effect, some of these same people are learning firsthand that Obamacare has some nasty side effects.

A new piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are cutting back on the number of hours worked by adjunct professors, in order to avoid new requirements that they provide healthcare to anyone working over 30 hours per week. This is terrible news for a lot of people; 70 percent of professors work as adjuncts and many will now have to cope with a major pay cut just as requirements that they buy their own health insurance go into effect:

In Ohio, instructor Robert Balla faces a new cap on the number of hours he can teach at Stark State College. In a Dec. 6 letter, the North Canton school told him that “in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act… employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week.”

Mr. Balla, a 41-year-old father of two, had taught seven English composition classes last semester, split between StarkState and two other area schools. This semester, his course load at StarkState is down to one instead of two as a result of the school’s new limit on hours, cutting his salary by about a total of $2,000.

StarkState’s move came as a blow to Mr. Balla, who said he earns about $40,000 a year and cannot afford health insurance.

“I think it goes against the spirit of the [health-care] law,” Mr. Balla said. “In education, we’re working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen serious unintended consequences from Obamacare, and it’s unlikely to be the last. It’s already become painfully obvious that the law’s creators failed to think through its full implications.

But beyond alerting us to one of the many problems that implementing Obamacare will cause, this news provides a depressing look at the underbelly of the academy. Universities are citadels of blue model thinking and most faculty members are relentlessly liberal in their politics. But the reality is that these same universities are some of the nastiest and most exploitative employers in America. The exploitation of adjuncts is an ugly feature of contemporary American academic life, and the smug complacency about it among many beneficiaries of the two tier system should remind us all that moral hypocrisy can co-exist with impressive degrees.

Partisans of the blue social model like to think of it as a utopian commonwealth; academic adjuncts know the truth, and the revolting treatment of adjuncts by colleges understandably anxious to avoid the high costs of Obamacare should remind us all that the blue social model, especially in decline, is not as benign as its supporters and beneficiaries believe.

Reason with yet another government nightmare of unintended consequences. 

Jerrie Brathwaite was not in her car when Washington, D.C. police seized it in January 2012. She had lent her 2000 Nissan Maxima to a friend, and that friend was pulled over, searched, and found to be in possession of drugs. A year later, Braithwaite—who has never been charged with a crime—still doesn’t have her car back, and no one from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) will return her calls.

Brathwaite, 33, is knee-deep in the murky world of civil asset forfeiture, where confiscated cars, cash, and other property disappear into police coffers, and where legal recourse for owners is confusing, slow, and expensive. Under civil forfeiture, police can seize property from people who are never convicted—much less charged with—a crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, where the government must prove property was used in the commission of crime, civil forfeiture law presumes an owner’s guilt.

According to Brathwaite, a single mother of three living in Southeast Washington, D.C., a police investigator told her in June that the car was no longer needed as evidence in the case against her friend, and would be released. “He told me…to make sure I faxed him all the necessary paperwork…. I faxed everything and I just haven’t heard anything,” she says. “I’ve been calling. I called in the past three months I know at least 10 times and left voicemails and no one has called me back.”

Brathwaite’s situation—and the MPD’s behavior—are not uncommon. Civil forfeiture is a national problem. Law enforcement agencies seize millions of dollars worth of property each year with little or no due process for owners. In all but six states property owners are considered guilty until proven innocent. State law typically allows law enforcement to keep most or all of the proceeds from forfeiture—an enormous incentive to police for profit. 

In court filings, MPD claims to have sold over 200 forfeited vehicles at auction in the last three years—and to have returned 16 to 20 vehicles a week to property owners during that time. MPD says it collected $358,000 from civil forfeiture in fiscal year 2011, according to court documents. Over the same period the department received $529,000 from federal equitable sharing, a program in which local law enforcement turns cases over to federal prosecutors. The feds process the forfeiture and then return 80 percent of the proceeds to the seizing agency. It’s a finder’s fee of sorts for local cops.

In theory, the government uses asset forfeiture to strip criminal enterprises of resources and “toys”—the cars, planes, boats, and homes that make the illicit life look glamorous. But a glance at the legal notices the department publishes periodically in The Washington Times reveals the city is hardly targeting kingpins. A notice from last September lists these cars: a 1985 Chevrolet, a 1994 BMW, a 1999 Lincoln, a 1994 Lexus, a 1991 Honda, and a 2001 Chevrolet. Most seizures are of cash—generally less than $100 and as little as $7—taken from thousands of people each year. …

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Mark Steyn was traveling and got a different view of the country.

I was out of the country for a few days, and news from this great republic reached me only fitfully. I have learned to be wary of foreign reporting of U.S. events, since America can come off sounding faintly deranged. Much of what reached me didn’t sound entirely plausible: Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player? Did the president of the United States really announce 23 executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully prescreened grade-schoolers (“I want everybody to be happy and safe”)? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous.

And, indeed, upon my return, it seemed to be business as usual. ABC News revealed that, in 2007, President Bush’s Secretary of the Interior – oh, come on, it’s on the citizenship test: “Name a Secretary of the Interior. Any Secretary of the Interior.” Anyway, ABC revealed that Bush’s Secretary of the Interior spent 220,000 taxpayer dollars remodeling his (or her, as the case may be) office bathroom. Who knew the gig was really Secretary of the Interior Design? I’ll bet the guy who made Saddam’s solid-gold toilets was delighted to get a new customer. But what can be done? If we changed the name to Secretary of the Exterior, he’d have blown a quarter-million on a new outhouse.

Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman and various other American eminencies apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider called the trillion-dollar coin “the most important fiscal policy debate you’ll ever see in your life,” most Democratic pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit reduction plans, all the Treasury Secretary has to do is pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change. …

… Do you ever get the feeling America’s choo-choo has jumped the tracks? Joe Weisenthal says that the trillion-dollar coin is the most serious adult proposal put forward in our lifetime, “because it gets right to the nature of what is money.” As Weisenthal argues, “We’re still shackled with a gold-standard mentality where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully.” Ha! Every time it rains it rains trillion-dollar pennies from heaven. I believe Robert Mugabe made a similar observation on Jan. 16, 2009, when he introduced Zimbabwe’s first one hundred-trillion-dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that’s what’s so great about being American. Because, when you’re American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: everybody knows that. …

Conrad Black does a number on Oliver Stone’s latest, a film on Henry Wallace.

… Oliver Stone is a notorious myth-maker, and is responsible for the films on John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon that claim, inter alia, that Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy led by Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a group of Texas oil centi-millionaires that spread to approximately 2,000 people in the FBI, CIA, and right through the Dallas police force, without any of the legion of conspirators’ hinting at any of this these nearly 50 years; and that Nixon resigned as president to cover up an even larger conspiracy involving a similar cast of immense size and treachery rooted in the inevitable and proverbial military-industrial complex.

Stone and Kuznick, in as preposterous an act of historical myth-making as Stone’s scurrilous fabrications about Kennedy and Nixon, claim that if Wallace had been renominated for vice president and had succeeded to the presidency on the death of Roosevelt in April 1945, Stalin would not have been provoked into the Cold War, and the wartime good relations between Moscow and Washington would have continued. (The relations were so excellent that, as Roosevelt assumed was happening, Stalin bugged the rooms of the American delegation to the Tehran and Yalta conferences. Stalin told Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas after the initial Big Three meeting at Tehran — which ended with the communiqué saying that the leaders parted “as friends in fact, in spirit, and in purpose” — that “Churchill would pick my pocket for a kopek but Roosevelt would only dip in his hand for larger coins.”)

In fact, as commentator Ron Radosh has remarked:

Wallace would have created an American foreign policy run by Soviet agents he had installed in the White House, including Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, his former assistant at Commerce, and the secret Communist and Soviet agent Harry Magdof, who wrote Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech in 1946 . . . all of whom would have given Joseph Stalin precisely what he sought: control of Eastern Europe and inroads into subversion of France, Italy, and Great Britain as well. The result would have been a deepening of Stalinist control of Europe, and a tough road that might well have made it impossible for the West actually to have won the Cold War and to have defeated Soviet expansionism. Moreover, as Gaddis suggests, new evidence has emerged that points to just how much Wallace was under the control of the Soviets, and how they were counting on him as the man in the United States best suited to serve their ends.

No one could expect anything more rigorous or responsible from a compulsively mendacious fiction-producer like Stone, but it is distressing to see the New York Times and The New York Review of Books, suckers for or even aggressive propagators of self-flagellating American leftist revisionism though they often are, taking up the cudgels to respectabilize such lies. We seem to come closer every year to the triumph of Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous and familiar “great liberal death wish.”

John Tierney finally got around to his New Year’s column.

For the past 5 years, or maybe it’s more like 10, I’ve been meaning to publish a New Year’s Day column offering a bold resolution for the coming year: “The Power of Positive Procrastination.”

Well, Jan. 15 is close enough, especially if you still haven’t gotten around to dealing with this year’s resolutions. And you can stop feeling guilty for procrastinating. Science has come up with a defense of your condition.

Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it last year. Admittedly, it’s not a long book (92 quite small pages), but give him credit: He got it done, and only 17 years after he identified the concept.

Dr. Perry was a typical self-hating procrastinator until it occurred to him in 1995 that he wasn’t entirely lazy. When he put off grading papers, he didn’t just sit around idly; he would sharpen pencils or work in the garden or play Ping-Pong with students. “Procrastinators,” he realized, “seldom do absolutely nothing.”

A modest insight, perhaps, but it eased his conscience and disabused him of the old idea that procrastinators should limit commitments. The key to productivity, he argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it.

At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.

“Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”

Dr. Perry generously acknowledges that he has stood on the shoulders of giants, in particular Robert Benchley, the Algonquin Round Table member. In 1930, Benchley revealed how he mustered the willpower to pore through scientific magazines and build a bookshelf when an article was due.

“The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” he wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”  ….

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The Atlantic published an interesting revisionist look at the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reason Magazine introduces the subject.

Benjamin Schwarz has written a long and interesting article for The Atlantic that draws on recent scholarship (and not-so-recent scholarship) to debunk the conventional wisdom about the Cuban missile crisis, arguing that the Kennedy administration “risked nuclear war over a negligible threat to national security.” The whole thing is worth a read, but this anecdote should be especially enjoyable for anyone who suspects that JFK was a playboy doofus in over his head:

On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security policy: “Why does he put these in there, though?…It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well we did it, Mr. President.”

If you prefer stories that make Bobby Kennedy look bad, you’ll enjoy the part where the president’s brother tries to conceal a document that “could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.”

But Schwarz has a deeper point to make than The Kennedys were kind of awful. The myths of the Cuban missile crisis, he writes, have encouraged a lot of dangerous and inaccurate ideas about foreign policy: …

Here’s the article from The Atlantic.

“On october 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.”

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.

Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.

In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. …

… The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days. In fact, he was among the most consistently and recklessly hawkish of the president’s advisers, pushing not for a blockade or even air strikes against Cuba but for a full-scale invasion as “the last chance we will have to destroy Castro.” Stern authoritatively concludes that “if RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.” He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts—“profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive”—were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys. …

After seeing how the media swallowed the Kennedy line, you can understand how obamalove exists. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the chattering classes to understand what a disaster this president is becoming. Michael Barone writes on the problem. 

To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.

His point-blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad.

But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government’s debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over the last 20 years have been part of broader measures.

Working out what will be in those measures is a matter for negotiation between the legislative and executive branches. That’s because the Constitution gives Congress the power to incur debt and the president the power to veto.

Obama supporters like to portray Republican attempts to negotiate as hostage-taking or extortion. But those are violent crimes. Negotiations — discussions attempting to reach agreement among those who differ — are peaceful acts.

What we do know, from Bob Woodward’s “The Price of Politics,” is that Obama is not very good at negotiating. He apparently can’t stomach listening to views he does not share.

Perhaps that is to be expected of one who has chosen all his adult life to live in university communities and who made his way upward in the one-party politics of Chicago. Thus on the “fiscal cliff” he left the unpleasant business of listening to others’ views and reaching agreement to Joe Biden.

Obama has laid down another marker in his puzzling nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense.

As the Washington Post editorial writers pointed out, Hagel, though a nominal Republican, has stood way to the left of Obama on whether a military option to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program is feasible. …

Jennifer Rubin has more on the man/child president.

President Obama has always been prickly when it comes to receiving criticism and averse to glad-handing or even dealing with Congress, both Democrats and Republicans. LBJ he is not. However, his recent performances go beyond arrogance. And this time it is not only conservative critics who have noticed the obnoxious indifference to others’ views and role in the legislative process.

I don’t often agree with Maureen Dowd, but she pegs Obama’s last news conference as aptly as anyone on the right:

 [T]he president always seems to be dancing alone. And that was the vibe of his swan-song press conference for Act One of his presidency.

His words were laced with an edge — churlish, chiding and self-pitying. He sardonically presented himself as Lonely Guy, shafted by the opposition, kicking around the White House on his own. Days before his second inauguration, he seemed to be intimating that the job he had fought so hard for and won against all odds was a bit of a chore, if not a bore.

Even mild-mannered lawmakers voice despair. In an interview Tuesday, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) was both astounded and utterly frustrated with the president’s refusal to engage.   “Did you see him?!” he asked rhetorically more than once in reference to the news conference. He worries that no deal will get done on anything.

The Post editorial board put it this way:

Can, or will, Mr. Obama do anything to help the cooler heads within the Republican Party prevail? Or does he regard the debt-ceiling threat as a no-lose proposition for him and his party: either a GOP bluff or a promise to commit political suicide? Certainly Mr. Obama’s refusal to negotiate — coupled with his appropriate refusal to raise the debt ceiling through executive action — suggests that he’s willing to ride with the GOP right up to the brink.

In fact, Republican leaders are conferring on how to delink the debt ceiling and their spending demands. It is President Obama who is spoiling for a fight for reasons that are not altogether clear. He won the election. What is the point?

Obama’s peevish approach to governance is evident even in his approach to gun violence, which reeks of manipulation and defiance.