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Roger Simon comments on the Wall Street Journal’s article about Iran’s threats to Israel.
Lost in healthcare, travel, etc., I was a couple of days late reading the WSJ report Iran Lawmakers Close Ranks, Endorse Ahmadinejad Cabinet: Iran’s parliament endorsed most of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet nominees, a political victory for the embattled leader and a signal his fractured conservative base will close ranks to keep the regime afloat.
The legislature approved all but three of his 21 choices, including the controversial appointments of the first female minister in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic and a defense minister wanted by Interpol for a terrorist attack on a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994. Lawmakers broke into cheers of “Death to Israel” and “God is Great” when the approval of the defense minister was announced.
“Death to Israel” right in the parliament itself? Sounds pretty medieval, doesn’t it? Of course, no surprise there. But as per the headline, what would you do if Prime Minister of Israel? When a lot men, including the head of state, say they want to kill, indeed have killed you in this instance, do you take them at their words – or do you just,as some do, dismiss it as an exaggeration, a façon de parler, as they say? Would you act or would you wait until the international community holds some meetings?
Martin Peretz notices some good sense on the Middle East for WaPo editors, and none from the administration.
… Still, the real rogue in this drama is Iran itself and its macabre president, Dr. Ahmadinejad. The government is now making war on its own people. And, soon, perhaps, it may–as Berthold Brecht suggested to his own German Democratic Republic–dissolve its people. But its response to Washington’s nine-month limp diplomacy is just what that diplomacy deserves. In the meantime, we are still talking deadlines while the building of the bombs and the missiles goes on apace.
The Washington Post this morning has dissected the situation. It is nothing less than grim. And the administration looks just plain silly and very very weak.
Charles Krauthammer says that Van Jones had a number of radical views and quotes, but was forced to resign for one reason.
…Why? He’s gone for one reason and one reason only. You can’t sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 — i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil — and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.
Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with “truthers.”
You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice. …
…But on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 — a day when there were no truthers among us, just Americans struck dumb by the savagery of what had been perpetrated on their innocent fellow citizens — a decent respect for the memory of that day requires that truthers, who derangedly desecrate it, be asked politely to leave. By everyone.
The Nose on Your Face has a hilarious motivational poster featuring Van Jones at his new job asking to have the title of Fry Czar.
Obamacare is solely about increasing government power over the lives of US citizens, explains Mark Steyn.
…But, for the sake of argument, let us concede the president’s current number of 30 million uninsured. In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?
Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. OK, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health care portability?
Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.
And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture – one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail, pledging to “deliver” government services more “efficiently.” …
David Harsanyi responds to Obama’s lies with sarcasm.
…The president says that the public option is small potatoes because it would only cover 5 percent of Americans, pay for itself and run like a private not-for-profit. If such an option can change the dynamics of competition in health insurance, why not open a new private not-for-profit organization that pays for itself?
Silly question. As we all know, if any organization has demonstrated an uncanny ability to control costs, drive innovation and foster competition, it’s been government. …
…You may wonder how President Obama can logically sell a public option while at the same time claim that reform will be paid for by waste found in another “public” option. You may also be wondering how mandates, price controls, regulations and added costs will save us any money and preserve level of care. Don’t. Just bask in the radiance of barren rhetoric.
Because when the president tells us that this is “the season for action” and we can no longer waste time debating, he means that legislation won’t be initiated until 2013…
Timothy Garton Ash, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, is left-leaning, but does make a good point. Obama used a special address to Congress merely to advance his political agenda as compared to previous presidents.
…Just 71/2 months into his term, Mr. Obama has reached for the American legislative equivalent of a nuclear weapon. A special address to both houses of Congress – over and above the inaugural and State of the Union addresses – is an exceptional step, last taken by George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. According to veteran political commentator Mark Shields, Lyndon B. Johnson delivered only two such addresses, one after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the other on civil rights. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave only one, to ask Congress to declare war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
And Mr. Obama used it for this …
In the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru dissects more Obamacare lies.
…Obama insists that health-care reform will not result in “government funding of abortions.” Those who claim that it will, he told a group of religious leaders, are ignoring the biblical injunction against “bearing false witness.” (He did not mention them by name, but the country’s Catholic bishops are among those who have borne that witness.) In his radio address he said, “When it comes to the current ban on using tax dollars for abortions, nothing will change under reform.” The current ban applies only to programs, such as Medicaid, that are funded in the annual spending bill for the Health and Human Services Department; the bills before Congress create new, separate funding streams for both the public option and for subsidies to help tens of millions of people buy insurance. Under all of the major bills moving through Congress, taxpayers will subsidize the purchase of insurance policies that cover abortion. The House version of the bill explicitly authorizes the secretary of health and human services to decree that the public option will cover abortion using funds from a Treasury account. The Senate bill has provisions that could easily be read by courts to require that private insurance plans cover abortion, too.
The president’s insistence that his party’s version of health-care reform will not provide coverage to illegal immigrants is, at best, disingenuous. The House health-care bill says that they are ineligible to receive tax credits to buy insurance. But the bills do not require that the legal status of beneficiaries be verified, and in committee deliberations most Democrats have voted against amendments to add that requirement. If the president does not know these facts, surely people around him do. Maybe there is an argument for providing health coverage to illegal immigrants, but the Democrats are not making it openly.
The president is, in fact, a font of misinformation about his administration’s signature initiative. …
…And in some cases, notably those of immigration, abortion, Medicare, and the loss of private coverage, Obama has been misleading in a way that is hard to credit as innocent. On these issues, the liberal accusation that conservatives are lying seems pretty close to a lie itself — perhaps a case of projection.
Americans have increasing doubts about President Obama’s agenda but generally like him as a person. They consider him honest and trustworthy, and give him the benefit of the doubt. As the health-care debate continues, it becomes less and less clear that Obama deserves that trust.
WSJ Editors inform us on the political play in Massachusetts, and sets up a good punchline as well.
John Kerry, the former junior Senator from Massachusetts, was back in Boston Wednesday, urging the state legislature to change the law governing U.S. Senate vacancies. The seat held by Edward Kennedy from 1962 until his death last month is to be filled in a January special election. Mr. Kerry, echoing a letter Kennedy wrote not long before he died, asked lawmakers to enact legislation allowing Governor Deval Patrick to appoint a Senator to serve in the interim.
“What Ted proposed is a plan that is hardly radical,” Mr. Kerry declared in his prepared testimony. “It’s hardly even unprecedented, even in Massachusetts.” That’s for sure. The law in the Bay State provided for interim appointment by the Governor as recently as 2004. That, of course, was the year that Mr. Kerry won the Democratic nomination for President. Just in case he won, the state legislature changed the law to strip the Governor of this power. That change also came at Senator Kennedy’s urging.
What changed in the ensuing five years? In 2004, the Governor, Mitt Romney, was a Republican. Mr. Patrick is a Democrat. So are the overwhelming number of state lawmakers, who overrode Mr. Romney’s veto. Raw partisan advantage explains why Mr. Kerry, like his departed colleague, was for the 2004 change before he was against it.
The Economist reviews two new books on the Credsis, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, by Lawrence G. McDonald and Patrick Robinson, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
…Many blame the sycophantic “court of King Richard” for Lehman’s undoing. To feed his desire for ever bigger bonuses, Mr Fuld encouraged the use of borrowed money to take big bets on rising property prices. He did not help matters by riling Hank Paulson, the former boss of Goldman Sachs turned treasury secretary, at a private dinner in early 2008. Though Mr Paulson encouraged Lehman’s boss to sell the firm, Mr Fuld came away with a different message. “[W]e have huge brand with [T]reasury,” he swiftly wrote in a now famous memo. This smug disregard of what was more an order than advice perhaps strengthened Mr Paulson’s resolve to let Lehman go bust—a decision that was to prove catastrophic within days as the entire financial system panicked.
That, at least, is how Lawrence McDonald tells it. The former Lehman trader’s inside account of the investment bank’s collapse, published earlier this summer (and newly in paperback in Britain), has been branded by Mr Fuld as “absolutely slanderous”, not least for its description of him bunkered in his huge office on the 31st floor of Lehman’s headquarters (“Well, I left my office, I left my office plenty,” he has countered). It would come as no surprise to learn that Mr McDonald (who wrote his account with Patrick Robinson) has taken some liberties in his highly readable yarn, which hits its stride a few chapters in. He provides no sources for scenes that take place after he was fired in early 2008, many of which show Mr Fuld in a particularly bad light. Yet “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” largely rings true. It expresses the anger that many former Lehman employees still feel toward Mr Fuld. And it convincingly characterises the investment bank as a house divided against itself, between the bears who had foreseen bubbles and the bulls who wrongly believed that this time would be different.
The silly notion that history and precedent have no bearing on contemporary finance is at the root of what Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff call “eight centuries of financial folly”. The two economists’ book is no page-turner (though it is much more readable than the academic research it draws from). But it is essential reading nonetheless, and is certain to have a longer shelf-life than the Lehman book, both for its originality and for the sobering patterns of financial behaviour it reveals.
The authors identify several red flags that indicate a looming financial crisis (such as house prices rising in tandem with increased debt-to-income ratios), many of which were visible in the run up to Lehman’s demise and the panic that followed. Even more worrying is their evidence of just how damaging banking crises tend to be, and how long it takes to recover from them. In the aftermath of the average crisis, asset prices fall sharply. Real housing prices fall on average by 36% over six years, equity prices by 56% over three-and-a-half years. Unemployment tends to rise by seven percentage points during the down phase of the cycle, which on average lasts four years. Government debt increases by 86%; GDP falls by over 9% on average, and typically takes ten years to return to what it was before the crisis. (When only post-war crises are considered, this changes to just over four years, though the current crisis is worse than any of them.) …
And The Economist also reviews In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, by David Wessel.
Central bankers are not typically associated with high drama. But a year ago America’s top economic policymakers faced a momentous decision: whether or not to let Lehman Brothers fail (see article).
Ever since, debate has raged about the effect of these decisions. Could Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Hank Paulson, then treasury secretary, have saved Lehman? Was their failure to do so a colossal mistake, or would the financial crisis have deteriorated anyway? Analysts will debate these questions for years. As they do, this book should be at their side. David Wessel has written a gripping blow-by-blow account of how the top brass at the Federal Reserve and Treasury flailed against financial collapse. …
…This book is not a comprehensive account of the crisis: that would have required more time, more research and the inclusion of people other than the officials involved. Nor is it wholly impartial. Mr Wessel’s assessment of Mr Geithner is a bit rose-tinted, while he overdoes the criticism of Mr Paulson as bungling and erratic. Nor does the book stand out analytically. Mr Wessel is broadly sympathetic to the officials’ response. When he faults them for being slow to realise the gravity of the crisis, or for failing to prepare for the collapse of another big financial institution after the Bear Stearns bail-out, his criticisms are conventional and underdeveloped.
Mr Wessel spends little time teasing out lessons for crisis-management or for the future of central banking. But he has written a cracking story, the best chronicle so far of what officials were doing in the great financial bust of 2007-08.