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John Fund thinks Chambliss has a good chance tomorrow in Georgia.
Ann Coulter on the foolishness of Obama’s Gitmo promises.
I thought the rest of the world was going to love us if we elected B. Hussein Obama! Somebody better tell the Indian Muslims. As everyone but President-elect B. Hussein Obama’s base knows, many of the Guantanamo detainees cannot be sent to their home countries, cannot be released and cannot be tried. They need to be held in some form of extra-legal limbo the rest of their lives, sort of like Phil Spector.
And now they’re Obama’s problem.
If Obama wants his detention of Islamic terrorists to be dramatically different from Bush’s Guantanamo, my suggestion is that he cut off — so to speak — the expensive prosthetic limb procedures now being granted the detained terrorists.
Far from being sodomized and tortured by U.S. forces — as Obama’s base has wailed for the past seven years — the innocent scholars and philanthropists being held at Guantanamo have been given expensive, high-tech medical procedures at taxpayer expense. If we’re not careful, multitudes of Muslims will be going to fight Americans in Afghanistan just so they can go to Guantanamo and get proper treatment for attention deficit disorder and erectile dysfunction. …
Amity Shlaes says Krugman’s ideas will only make things worse.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book “The Return of Depression Economics,” emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn’t spend enough.
He’s also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR’s overall policy look worse than it was. I’m interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one “whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right.”
Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn’t. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else’s mind as well. In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, “keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%.”
The New Deal is Mr. Obama’s context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before. …
And Reason Magazine tells what big spending states can learn from Texas and Florida.
… Policymakers also seem to be increasingly recognizing that privatization and competitive service delivery are proven tools for doing more with less. Competitive sourcing allows the private sector to compete for jobs and contracts that are currently performed by the government. Federal employees actually won 83 percent of the job competitions from fiscal year 2003 through fiscal year 2007. But the competition still helps save a lot of money. Taxpayers saved $25,000 for every job that was put up for competition because even when the government kept the job it significantly improved efficiency and reduced costs.
Privatization is also coming back into vogue these days, partially buoyed by the successful track record of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The state engaged in over 138 privatization initiatives saving taxpayers over $550 million in aggregate during Bush’s term (1999-2007). When many other states were raising taxes, Bush’s privatization initiatives helped Florida to shed almost $20 billion in taxes and over 3,700 positions in the state workforce.
And at the urban level, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, has been on a privatization tear in recent years. Under his watch he’s privatized over 40 services and activities, saving taxpayers millions. Since 2005, Daley has initiated long-term lease agreements with the private sector for the Chicago Skyway toll road, Midway Airport, four major downtown parking garages, and the city’s parking meter system downtown. Chicago netted over $5 billion in the process to pay down city debt, establish a $500 million rainy day fund, and shore up public pensions. …
Ruben Navarette says Richardson was dissed.
… It’s humiliating to be second choice for secretary of state. But it is even more humiliating to be second choice for secretary of commerce.
This isn’t about Richardson, who might be very happy heading for ribbon cuttings in Toledo while Clinton heads for blue-ribbon summits in Tel Aviv. This is about something larger. Richardson is the nation’s only Hispanic governor and the most prominent Hispanic elected official in the country. And the way he was treated doesn’t say much about Obama’s respect for the Hispanic community. Nor does the fact that Obama seems to have filled his top four Cabinet posts — justice, treasury, defense, and state — and couldn’t find a single Hispanic to put in any of them.
America’s largest minority took a chance on Obama despite the fact that the president-elect had no track record in reaching out to them and didn’t break a sweat trying to win their votes. They deserve better.
Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had nice things to say about W. Of course, she slapped him around first.
… The president-elect’s popularity stands in stark contrast to that of the man he is replacing. President Bush’s approval rating is stalled in the low 20s — and deservedly so. But Bush did at least one thing right in an eight-year tenure characterized by incompetence and hyper-partisanship: He appointed black Americans to the post of secretary of state, the highest position of authority blacks had held before Obama’s election.
Many pundits have already noted that Bush’s failures helped to create a climate in which Obama could win. So did Bush’s singular achievement — the elevation of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. It ought to be noted that it was a Republican, not a Democrat, who broke the barrier that had limited black appointees to the usual Cabinet positions dealing with housing and health.
Whatever their political failures, Powell and Rice are both bright, hardworking and honorable individuals. Their presence on the national stage, in positions that had nothing to do with affirmative action or “urban affairs,” helped white Americans get used to seeing black Americans in positions of great prestige. …
WSJ reports on W’s pardon proclivities.
A decade ago, Leslie Collier, a 50-year-old corn and soybean farmer in Charleston, Mo., pleaded guilty to poisoning bald eagles. He says the worst thing about his criminal record was that it meant he was barred by law from owning a gun.
So, after George W. Bush, a strong defender of the Second Amendment, took office, Mr. Collier wrote to the president seeking a pardon, saying he wanted to go hunting with his kids. He explained that he accidentally killed the eagles while trying to poison coyotes that were attacking wild turkeys and deer on property he farms.
On the surface, the list of the 14 people pardoned by the president this week shows few common denominators in terms of time served, geographic location or even type of crime, except that the felonies were non-violent. But a closer look at some of the newly pardoned shows many of them are church-going, blue-collar workers from rural areas (and ardent Bush supporters) who had little trouble finding jobs after their convictions. There is another common thread: the important role firearms once played in their lives.
President Bush has pardoned fewer people — 171 — than any president since World War II, with the exception of his father, who pardoned 74. …