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American.com thinks the decline of the U. S. is over stated.
… In Europe and Japan, where labor forces are already shrinking, fewer workers will have to pay more taxes to support the growing pensioner population, triggering a vicious economic cycle. Workers will have less money to save. That will mean less investment, which will translate into slower productivity growth and sluggish income progress, making it ever harder for the fewer workers to support the pensions of more seniors.
China will face similar challenges. Thanks to its notorious one-child policy, it has the world’s most rapidly aging population: between 2005 and 2020, the number of Chinese aged 65 and over will grow by 65 percent. China does not offer much government support for its elderly, which may lead to unrest, particularly among seniors living in urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai.
The United States faces a more encouraging demographic future. To be sure, it will need to make adjustments and reform its entitlement programs. But America has maintained higher fertility rates than the countries of Europe and Japan, and its population has been rejuvenated by two generations of high immigration. …
Great Corner post by Andy McCarthy on the fact that now the Dems have to be grown-ups on the war. Gitmo can’t be closed until Congress does some work. Work they refused to do when Bush made the request.
… Naturally, now that it’s Obama rather than Bush doing the asking, there will surely be action — probably even quick action (though, as Obama will remember and come to rue, many in the hard Left from which he comes, don’t mind the prospect of terrorists being freed and would prefer the more detainee-friendly procedures that courts are likely to make up on their own if Congress continues sitting on its hands).
It all underscores a reality that grates even though that we’ve long understood it: Democrats were never going to get serious about the war until they owned it. Be prepared for all sorts of things that were “constitution-shredding” for the last seven years to transform before our very eyes into “smart, effective counterterrorism.”
Along the same lines, The Weekly Standard blog spotted Diane Feinstein doing some back-filling on her military interrogation bill.
Michael Scherer flags this quote from Dianne Feinstein in today’s Times:
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush.
But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.
Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.” …
Eric Posner in Volokh covers another aspect of the debate posting on the chance Bush will issue blanket pardons to ”officials involved in controversial war-on-terror tactics.”
Such a pardon would be a generous Christmas gift to the Obama administration, which appears to want to avoid prosecutions. It would greatly disappoint a lot of Obama supporters, but these people could not blame Obama for pardons issued by Bush. At the same time, Bush would protect loyal administration officials. So a pardon would seem to be win-win, at least for the people who have power—who are about to have power or about to have had it.
Why does the Obama administration (appear to) want to avoid prosecutions? A number of possibilities, none of them very clear: …
Professor Anderson used to wonder if the best way to fill offices would be to put the jobs out for bids. The highest bidder wins. Karl Rove thinks Chicago’s Golden Rule applied this year.
… To diminish criticism, Mr. Obama’s campaign spun the storyline that he was being bankrolled by small donors. Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, calls that a “myth.” CFI found that Mr. Obama raised money the old fashioned way — 74% of his funds came from large donors (those who donated more than $200) and nearly half from people who gave $1,000 or more.
But that’s not the entire story. It’s been reported that the Obama campaign accepted donations from untraceable, pre-paid debit cards used by Daffy Duck, Bart Simpson, Family Guy, King Kong and other questionable characters. If the FEC follows up with a report on this, it should make for interesting reading.
Mr. Obama’s victory marks the death of the campaign finance system. When it was created after Watergate in 1974, the campaign finance system had two goals: reduce the influence of money in politics and level the playing field for candidates.
This year it failed at both. OpenSecrets.org tells us a record $2.4 billion was spent on this presidential election. And with Mr. Obama’s wide financial advantage, it’s clear that money is playing a bigger role than ever and candidates are not competing on equal footing.
Ironically, the victim of this broken system is one of its principal architects — Mr. McCain. He helped craft the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform along with Sen. Russ Feingold in 2002. …
Writing in Human Events, Ann Coulter gets us up to date with political events in Minnesota.
Until now, Minnesota was always famous for its clean elections. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel recently attested to the honesty of Minnesota’s elections, joking: “Believe me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried every way around the system out there, and it doesn’t work.”
But that was before Minnesota encountered the pushiest, most aggressive, most unscrupulous person who has ever sought public office, Al Franken.
On Election Day, Franken lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota to the Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman by 725 votes. But over the next week, Democratic counties keep discovering new votes for Franken and subtracting votes from Coleman, claiming to be correcting “typos.”
In all, Franken picked up 459 votes and Coleman lost 60 votes from these alleged “corrections.”
As the inestimable economist John Lott pointed out, the “corrections” in the Senate race generated more new votes for Franken than all the votes added by corrections in every race in the entire state — presidential, congressional, state house, sanitation commissioner and dogcatcher — combined.
And yet the left-wing, George Soros-backed Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, stoutly defended the statistically impossible “corrected” votes. There’s something fishy going on in Minnesota besides the annual bigmouth bass tournament. …
IBD editors will not let the Dems and their media lie about the sub-prime crisis.
… Here at IBD, we’ve done more than a dozen pieces — most recently, in yesterday’s paper — detailing how rewrites of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 under President Clinton, along with major regulatory changes pushed by the White House in the late 1990s, created the boom in subprime lending, the surge in exotic and highly risky mortgage-backed securities, and the housing boom whose government-fed excesses led to inevitable collapse.
Despite this clear record, we’re now besieged by enterprising journalists blaming Republican “deregulation” or the president’s failure to recognize the seriousness of the problem or act. But these claims fall apart, as a partial history of the last decade shows.
Bush’s first budget, written in 2001 — seven years ago — called runaway subprime lending by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “a potential problem” and warned of “strong repercussions in financial markets.”
In 2003, Bush’s Treasury secretary, John Snow, proposed what the New York Times called “the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.” Did Democrats in Congress welcome it? Hardly.
“I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis,” declared Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in a response typical of those who viewed Fannie and Freddie as a party patronage machine that the GOP was trying to dismantle. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” added Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.
Unfortunately, it was broke. …
Writing in National Review, John Miller gives us a tour of the capitol visitor’s center.
Carpenters follow a simple rule: Measure twice, cut once. The builders of the brand-new Capitol Visitor Center (CVC) might have benefited from a similar adage about checking facts before etching them into stone. Just a few weeks before the opening of their $621 million underground complex on December 2, they were trying to correct a dumb mistake. A major display misidentified the nation’s motto as “E pluribus unum.” In reality, the national motto is “In God We Trust,” as Congress established by law in 1956. Anyone who looks closely at the panel in the front of the exhibition hall will see the temporary plaster fix-up job.
Confusion about the motto is the type of innocent blunder a person might make while playing a casual game of Trivial Pursuit, but not the kind of error you’d expect to see chiseled into the hallowed halls of the Capitol. And some conservatives worry that this is more than a routine case of federal incompetence. “There’s a terrible movement to rewrite our history and obscure our faith,” says J. Randy Forbes, a Republican congressman from Virginia who chairs the Congressional Prayer Caucus, about the CVC.
In September, Forbes and more than a hundred members of the House, from both parties, released a letter to Stephen T. Ayers, the acting Architect of the Capitol: “We have been troubled to learn in recent weeks that some aspects of the new CVC . . . [may] reflect an apathetic disposition toward our nation’s religious history.” Their efforts have led to improvements, but it’s a fight that shouldn’t have needed waging in the first place — and even in its aftermath, plenty of problems remain unaddressed. …
Al Gore must be in England lecturing on globaloney. London Times says a blizzard is about to hit the UK.
Blizzards and snowdrifts threaten to disrupt rail services and motorways today as heavy snow and high winds make milder winters seem a distant memory.
From Scotland to the Midlands, snowfalls of up to 20 centimetres are expected to play havoc with travel arrangements, and even London can expect traces of snow among the rain.
Trains equipped with snowploughs have been placed on standby by rail operators to clear routes crossing the Pennines, where the heaviest conditions are expected. During the night, Network Rail was using special trains to spray warm deicer on mainline stretches of track on lines in the North West and North East. …
News Biscuit found an honest Christmas letter.