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We open with a touching Christmas story shared by Andrew Malcolm in the LA Times. Ronald Reagan is in it.

…One day in the middle of his eight years as governor (1967-75), Reagan received a letter from two sisters — Bertha and Samueline Sisco. According to their story, they had promised their dying mother they would always care for their brother, Buzzy who was, as they phrased it in those days, retarded.

The sisters were seeking guidance to some kind of state help in caring for their 43-year-old sibling and the governor’s office steered them toward it.

But Gov. Reagan heard a about the family’s situation and made some inquiries. He discovered that Buzzy had always wanted a rocking chair to sit in with his teddy bear.

…Shortly before Christmas that year California Highway Patrolman Dale Role delivered a rocking chair to the Sisco home, along with a note explaining that it came from the governor’s personal family furnishings and he wanted Buzzy and his teddy bear to be rocking in time for Christmas. …

In American.com, Arthur Brooks and Peter Wehner discuss how society benefits from capitalism.

…The American founders believed, and capitalism rests on the belief, that people are driven by “self-interest” and the desire to better our condition. Self-interest is not necessarily bad; in fact, Smith believed, and capitalism presupposes, that the general welfare depends on allowing an individual to pursue his self-interest “as long as he does not violate the laws of justice.” When a person acts in his own interest, “he frequently promotes [the interest] of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. ”7

…Smith took for granted that people are driven by self-interest, by the desire to better their condition. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” is how he put it, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”9

…Advocates of free enterprise believe that creativity, enterprise, and ingenuity are essential parts of human nature. Capitalism aims to take advantage of the self-interest of human nature, knowing that the collateral effects will be a more decent and benevolent society. Capitalists believe that liberty is an inherent good and should form the cornerstone not only of our political institutions but our economic ones as well.  …

The Christian Science Monitor editors comment on the individual mandate and the Supreme Court.

…Never before has the federal government tried to punish citizens for not engaging in a private activity. This “individual mandate” is a legal innovation, one now being challenged in several courts. On Monday, US District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled that the mandate “exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution].” Two other federal judges, however, recently ruled in favor of the mandate’s constitutionality.

At least one of these cases will probably reach the Supreme Court by 2012. As in many of its decisions, the high court may be split in a 5-to-4 vote. And Justice Anthony Kennedy, as often happens, could be the swing vote and write the majority opinion.

Here is what he may well say – in a layman’s version of arguments – against the mandate…

Thomas Sowell supplies some gift-giving ideas. We highlight a few:

…Among the books I read this year, the one that made the biggest impact on me was “New Deal or Raw Deal” ($10.20; 32% OFF) by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor at Hillsdale College. It was that rare kind of book, one thoroughly researched by a scholar and yet written in plain language, readily understood by anyone.

So many myths and legends glorifying Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal administration have become part of folklore that a dose of cold facts is very much needed.

…I don’t usually read autobiographical books but two very good ones came out this year. My favorite is titled “Up from the Projects” (34% off) by economist, columnist and personal friend Walter Williams. It is a small book with a big punch. Once you start reading it, it is hard to put down.

“Up from the Projects” is not only a remarkable story of a remarkable man’s life, it is the story of both progress and retrogression in the black community. Everyone wants to take credit for the progress but nobody wants to take the blame for the retrogression.

…My own new books this year are “Intellectuals and Society,” (34% off) an account of another strange and dangerous group of people, and the 4th edition of “Basic Economics,” which is more than twice as large as the first edition. It has been putting on weight over the years, like its author, but the weight is muscle in the case of the book.

“Basic Economics” (38% off) has sold more copies than any other book of mine and has been translated into more foreign languages. Apparently there are a lot of people who want to understand economics without having to wade through graphs and equations.

 David Harsanyi shifts gears and comments on movies versus tv.

…Recently in a Wall Street Journal piece, humorist Joe Queenan made a stinging case that 2010 was the absolute worst year in movies — ever. Queenan contends that Hollywood’s historical mission is to provide “a steady stream of engaging movies to generate a continuous sense of excitement” but also to make us “anticipate” and “talk them up long before their release.” But movies for adults rarely generate any excitement. The medium that produces the most conversation and enthusiasm these days is television.

Take “Mad Men.” The highly rated series set in the 1960s focuses on the escapades of Don Draper, creative director for a fledgling Madison Avenue ad firm. Jon Hamm’s acting is as good anything we’re seeing in movies, and the show is crammed with rich characters and provocative story lines. In the real world, “Mad Men” unleashes a massive post-episode conversation that takes place in thousands of discussion boards, blogs, talk shows, offices and newspapers. What movie can claim anything close to that kind of relevance?

…This kind of care often makes television more akin to reading a novel than watching a movie. It does not shy away from the cerebral. Ask David Simon, the Baltimore Sun crime reporter and co-creator of HBO’s “The Wire,” who explained to Newsweek a few years ago that his standard for Baltimore “was Balzac’s Paris, or Dickens’s London, or Tolstoy’s Moscow.” The realism of that show — which spent each of its five seasons dissecting another area of urban life — had the feel of a documentary.

I remember an FBI agent telling me that “The Wire” was the closest thing to police reality he had ever watched. Certainly, the show’s 21st century newsroom — the focus of the last season — was as authentic as any portrayed in film. …

In the WSJ, Lauren Etter writes about how Chicago is making life difficult for their culinary entrepreneurs who operate food trucks rather than restaurants. 

…Food trucks—essentially restaurants on wheels—have taken off in cities such as Los Angeles and New York, spurred by the weak economy, trendy fare and the proliferation of social media, like Twitter. Food & Wine magazine voted an L.A. food-truck chef one of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 and the Food Network has a show devoted to such vendors. But in Chicago, one of the nation’s most progressive culinary cities, the trucks are held back by restrictive rules and operate in a legal twilight zone.

…Unlike other cities, where chefs are free to actually cook inside their trucks, Chicago chefs can’t unwrap or alter the food in any way once it’s on a truck. And food trucks aren’t allowed to park within 200 feet of a restaurant. Such roadblocks have kept all but a few chefs from taking to the streets—even as the food trucks fight to change the rules.

…A food-truck operation can get off the ground for under $150,000, while many restaurants spend more than $1 million on real estate and equipment to open their doors. .. 

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Richard Epstein explains Virginia’s win against Obamacare.

…The key successful move for Virginia was that it found a way to sidestep the well known 1942 decision of the Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn, which held in effect that the power to regulate commerce among the several states extended to decisions of farmers to feed their own grain to their own cows.  Wickard does not pass the laugh test if the issue is whether it bears any fidelity to the original constitutional design.  It was put into place for the rather ignoble purpose to make sure that the federally sponsored cartel arrangements for agriculture could be properly administered.

At this point, no District Court judge dare turn his back on the ignoble and unprincipled decision in Wickard. But Virginia did not ask for radical therapy.  It rather insisted that “all” Wickard stands for is the proposition that if a farmer decides to grow wheat, he cannot feed it to his own cows if a law of Congress says otherwise.  It does not say that the farmer must grow wheat in order that the federal government will have something to regulate.

It is just that line that controls this case.  The opponents of the individual mandate say that they do not have to purchase insurance against their will.  The federal government may regulate how people participate in the market, but it cannot make them participate in the market.  For if it could be done in this case it could be done in all others. …

The WSJ editors crafted an excellent editorial on individual mandate that is well worth reading.

…Moreover, Judge Hudson says that no court has ever “extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.”

…While Judge Hudson’s ruling is the first to declare part of the law unconstitutional, more than 20 state attorneys general and the National Federation of Independent Business are also suing in Florida. Oral arguments will be heard on Thursday in that case, which we think is the strongest constitutional challenge to the law.

As the Virginia case shows, ObamaCare really does stretch the Commerce Clause to the breaking point. The core issue is whether the federal government can order individuals to do anything the political class decides it wants them to do. The stakes couldn’t be higher for our constitutional order.

David Goldman says get out of municipal bonds and bank equities while you still can.

I’ve been warning for months that a few state and municipal bankruptcies (actually, a few states and a great many city bankruptcies) will be required to slay the beast of government-union pension liabilities. The total size of the muni bond market is about $2.4 trillion. Unfunded pension liabilities (calculated with a realistic discount rate) are almost as high, according to one study. Now comes James Pethokoukis of Reuters to tell us of a “secret GOP plan” to bankrupt local governments and crush the government unions.

…That’s why the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program.  BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31.  And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.”…

I’m not going to trade in Capitol Hill rumors, but whether there is a secret plan or not, the US federal government is in the same position that Germany is with respect to Greece — the creditors (in this case public employee pensions) have to take a massive haircut for the numbers to add up. The delayed effect of the real estate collapse (which is still getting worse) is going to hit local revenues next year due to massive downward adjustment in tax assessments. …

…It’s cities, not states, that live off real estate taxes. Local government was riding the real estate boom along with everyone else but it takes a couple of years for the price collapse to work its way through tax assessments. What’s going to happen is two, three, many Harrisburg bankruptcies. The cities will collapse and the states will push them over the edge (like NY State with NYC in 1974). They’ll make a horrible example of a couple of states — California and Illinois — others will hold the line as the cities go down like ninepins

…There’s a limit to how far they can take this: Banks and insurance companies together have about $700 billion of munis. You can wipe out mom and pop (did so already with the auction securities market) but a 40% haircut would take out about $300 billion of financial institutions’ capital — not pretty.  And that’s not to mention the spillover effect on other markets. That’s yet another reason not to own the banks’ common equity. …

In the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell thinks that the tax deal does not bode well for the US.

…This week’s debate is the latest, and maybe the last, chapter in a woeful deterioration of US budgetary politics. Democrats and Republicans used to understand that tax receipts must equal outlays, and they argued over priorities. For a while after Ronald Reagan, the argument shifted to the size of government, with Republicans arguing for smaller budgets and Democrats for larger ones. But in the decade of George W. Bush, it all changed. Republicans argued for ever-lower taxes, and often had the power to push them through. Both parties agreed on ever-higher spending. This week Mr Obama took a slightly different tack, larding more tax cuts on to the ones he professed to dislike, but the fiscal effect is the same: a social-democratic government on an anarchist budget, with deficits of more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product and a government that pays for 40 per cent of operating expenses by borrowing.

This is evidence of some failure of national character. Perhaps the American moral imagination has been poisoned by those old Hollywood movies about virtuous underdogs, in which the hero’s interests and his principles always point uncomplicatedly in the same direction, and making things easier for oneself is always the right thing to do. Perhaps the failing is an inability to draw boundaries and give straight answers. Everything is provisional in American politics. Republicans, who warned two months ago that “uncertainty” about taxes made it hard for businesses to hire, have happily signed on to a plan that extends that uncertainty for another two years. The two parties have connived to kick every single difficult budget decision down the road. They have collaborated only to give away money. If this were part one of a larger plan to get the country’s fiscal house in order, it might be welcomed. But it is an exercise in wishful thinking. It damps hopes that America can reform before the markets bring it to heel.

The trap that Mr Obama’s angry partisans espy is that events will impose some serious gesture of deficit reduction on the new Congress. There are two ways to balance budgets: Democrats would prefer to assess government’s responsibilities, and then raise taxes to fund them. Republicans would rather measure government revenues, and then slash programmes those revenues do not cover. Mr Obama’s short-term deal makes it more likely that the long-term equilibration of income and outgoings will be done on Republican terms. …

Here’s an ugly collusion: big government, big business, and big unions. Gary Jason, in the American Thinker, explains how the taxpayers and GM’s creditors got screwed in the GM deal.

…First is the news that the “new” GM walked away from the crony bankruptcy proceedings with a huge tax break — one worth up to $45 billion.  It was revealed in the paperwork filed for its IPO that the Obama administration gave the new GM a sweetheart deal: it will be allowed to carry forward huge losses incurred by the “old” GM prior to its bankruptcy.  Of course, the IRS doesn’t allow the new companies that emerge from bankruptcy to write off their old losses.  But the feds decided to waive that rule for companies bailed out by TARP.

Thus, the new GM will save about $45.4 billion in taxes on future earnings, which may allow it to escape taxes for the next twenty years. …

…The UAW was given a big chunk of new GM in the crooked bankruptcy settlement.  To be precise, the very monster that drove GM off the cliff — the UAW — received 35% of the stock in the new company.  With the sale of the stock in the new GM, the UAW earned an immediate $3.4 billion in selling about one third of its shares.

…In fact, the Obama administration screwed the taxpayer just as thoroughly as it pampered the UAW.  The taxpayer put $49.5 billion into GM in the bankruptcy, not to mention all the funds shoveled at the company prior to that.  The Treasury recouped only a wretched $13.7 billion in the IPO, mainly because the Obama administration — in yet another unprecedented gift to the union — announced publicly that it would not sell any more stock for the next six months.  This enables the UAW to dump its shares whenever it wants at a much higher price than it could get if the Treasury were also selling.  The taxpayers will almost certainly get a lower payout, and they will never recoup their forced investment in these dinosaurs — all to enable the UAW to walk away made whole.

…The Obama administration car czar, who engineered the crony bankruptcy — the aptly named Steve Rattner — claims that the secured creditors would have received nothing in a standard bankruptcy anyway.  But his claim is ludicrous on its face: in a regular bankruptcy, the union contracts that caused GM’s and Chrysler’s failure would have been nullified, and the substantial assets of the companies (plants, inventory, receivables, land, patents, etc.) would have been worth a substantial amount to other automakers and investment companies.  The proceeds would have gone to satisfy the bondholders at least to a fair degree. …

We have more from the WSJ editors, this time on the ethanol subsidy boondoggle.

…The public choice school of economics describes how the government and special interests collude against the public good, and it’s hard to think of a better model than the ethanol industry. Despite opposition from an emerging left-right anti-boondoggle coalition, the Senate version of the White House-GOP tax deal preserves the corn fuel’s multiple subsidies. …

…Direct subsidies and trade protectionism, plus mandates that force consumers to buy ethanol: This is the trifecta of government support, and all for an industry that is 30 years old and that even Al Gore now admits serves none of its advertised environmental purposes.

The ethanol extension is the bipartisan handiwork of Iowa Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin, who both regularly abandon their professed principles (fiscal conservatism for the Republican and equity for the Democrat) in the service of agribusiness. …

Peter Suderman comments on how the politicians and the people they’ve been paying off are still controlling the ethanol money.

As CEI’s Brian McGraw points out, ethanol subsidies are opposed by just about everyone: researchers, environmental activists, free market wonks, and newspaper editorial writers across the ideological spectrum. Even Al Gore has come out against them.

I say “just about” everyone because of course the ethanol lobby and the farmers it serves still favor keeping the subsidies in place. 

Naturally, the current plan is to extend them for another year. …

In the National Review, Robert Bryce has more on unsustainable fuels. Or fuels that can only be sustained with your tax dollars.

…But the ethanol producers, as usual, can’t get enough of your money, and they are working hard to assure that the fat subsidies (which now total about $7 billion per year) keep flowing. Last month, their main lobby groups — the Renewable Fuels Association, Growth Energy, and the American Coalition for Ethanol — sent a letter to congressional leaders telling them that ethanol has been “uniquely successful in reducing our dependence on foreign, imported oil.” They urged Congress to pass legislation extending the tax credit before the end of the year.

..While oil imports are increasing and the ethanol industry is producing too much ethanol, the wind-energy sector is being garroted by that dastardly opponent of renewable energy:  competitive markets. In late October, the American Wind Energy Association announced that through the first three quarters, just 1,600 megawatts of new wind capacity was installed in the U.S., “down 72 percent versus 2009, and the lowest level since 2006.”

In a press release, the lobby group said the solution for its woes were — wait for it — more subsidies and mandates. The group’s CEO, Denise Bode, said that “the best way to galvanize the industry now will be continued tax credits and a federal benchmark of 15 percent renewables in the national electricity mix by 2020.” Bode continued, saying that those subsidies and a 15 percent renewable mandate “will send a clear signal to investors that the U.S. is open for business.”

…Unable to compete in the free market, the wind industry’s only near-term hope is an ethanol-style mandate. And if given that mandate, perpetual ethanol-style subsidies will surely ensue. Congress, please, just say no.

Jennifer Rubin comments on a Sarah Palin op-ed.

Last week, I criticized Sarah Palin for using Twitter to render an ambiguous, off-the-cuff response to the bipartisan tax agreement. I understand that some of her supporters weren’t too pleased with the suggestion that one of her favorite modes of communication made her seem like a lightweight. But she then followed up in the Wall Street Journal with a robust and detailed endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R.-Wisc.) Roadmap for America’s Future. After detailing her criticisms of the debt commission proposal, she argued:

“…The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission’s proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.

On Social Security, as with Medicare, the Roadmap honors our commitments to those who are already receiving benefits by guaranteeing all existing rights to people over the age of 55. Those below that age are offered a choice: They can remain in the traditional government-run system or direct a portion of their payroll taxes to personal accounts, owned by them, managed by the Social Security Administration and guaranteed by the federal government.”

… she’s made a valuable contribution by highlighting and explaining Ryan’s plan. It is a step in the right direction for someone who in some capacity wants to be a player in the GOP.

The Economist reports on a possible new medical use for an old pain reliever.

FOR thousands of years aspirin has been humanity’s wonder drug. Extracts from the willow tree have been used for pain relief in folk medicine since the time of the ancient Greeks. By 1897 a synthetic derivative (acetyl salicylic acid) of the plant’s active ingredient (salicin) was created. This allowed aspirin to become the most widely used medicine in the world.

In recent years its benefits as a blood-thinning drug have led to it being prescribed in low doses of around 50mg to reduce deaths from stroke and heart attack. There were also hints that aspirin may help prevent some cancers. But these were mostly based on observational studies, which can be misleading. …

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Jonah Goldberg writes that we need to be doing more for the people of North Korea. He has quite an opening: 

If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so? 

In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question: 

“If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire? 

The answers are too obvious, the questions merely rhetorical. And therein lies a very great irony. At long last a genuine spirit of transnational benevolence has arisen, fulfilling the highest hopes of the rare pioneering globalists of the 19th century and before. No longer does this disinterested benevolence abruptly stop at the boundaries of state, nation or culture. Instead it now encompasses all of life both animal and vegetal across the entire globe, with only one exception: Homo sapiens.” 

Luttwak overstated how good animals have it, alas. But his point was well taken. And to America’s credit, it wasn’t long after Luttwak’s essay that the United States and NATO (but not the United Nations) finally did something to curb the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia. 

But that’s probably little solace to the people of North Korea. … 

A National Review post comments on the Virginia Court’s health-care decision. 

In its first serious court test, the most unpopular provision in Obamacare — the individual mandate — has been declared unconstitutional on two crucial grounds. 

First, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce by compelling people “to involuntarily engage in a private commercial transaction.” 

Second, he said the Obama administration can’t argue after the fact that the mandate is a tax and therefore within Congress’s constitutional taxing authority. “The Court is unpersuaded” that the penalty for not purchasing insurance is a “bona fide revenue raising measure enacted under the taxing power of Congress,” he wrote from his bench in the Eastern District of Virginia. 

Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli led the commonwealth’s case against the law. It was a victory for him when Judge Hudson declared that the mandate to purchase health insurance represents an “unchecked expansion of congressional power” that “would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers.” 

Cuccinelli had argued that the Commerce Clause of the constitution does not grant Congress the authority to force people into economic activity. Judge Hudson declared that the mandate is “neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution.” …  

John Podhoretz comments on Clinton taking center stage, and other tax compromise oddities. 

…What was Clinton doing there, exactly? Could it be news to anyone that Clinton would support the deal, especially since it seems to come straight from the his political playbook? Not to mention that, let’s face it, Obama is his wife’s boss. 

The event gobsmacked the political class. On Twitter, ABC News political director Amy E. Walter wrote, “Obama just ceded the podium to Clinton. This. Is. Awesome.” Christina Bellantoni of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call used the same punctuation trope: “This is Un. Real.” 

Washington froze in wonder at this momentary trip into the past. The sheer strangeness of the sight of Clinton alone at that podium crystallized the sense that the American political system (or more specifically, the Democratic party) had spun out of control over the course of the week. 

The week began with the announcement of the grand budget deal on Monday, triggering rage from Obama’s base that he had somehow “caved” to Republicans — conveniently forgetting that the Democratic party in DC had been decimated only a month earlier in the midterm election. … 

George Will reminds us of the issues in Bush v. Gore ten years ago.

…The post-election lunacy could have been substantially mitigated by adhering to a principle of personal responsibility: Voters who cast ballots incompetently are not entitled to have election officials toil to divine these voters’ intentions. Al Gore got certain Democratic-dominated canvassing boards to turn their recounts into unfettered speculations and hunches about the intentions of voters who submitted inscrutable ballots. Before this, Palm Beach County had forbidden counting dimpled chads….But three of the four (of Florida’s 67) counties – each heavily Democratic – where Gore was contesting the count were not finished deciphering voters’ intentions. So Gore’s lawyers persuaded the easily persuadable state Supreme Court – with a majority of Democratic appointees – to rewrite the law. It turned the seven-day period into 19 days.Many liberals underwent instant conversions of convenience: They became champions of states’ rights when the U.S. Supreme Court (seven of nine were Republican appointees) unanimously overturned that extension. But the U.S. high court reminded Florida’s court to respect the real “states’ rights” at issue – the rights of state legislatures: The Constitution gives them plenary power to establish procedures for presidential elections.

…The U.S. Supreme Court was duty-bound not to defer to a state court that was patently misinterpreting – disregarding, actually – state law pertaining to a matter assigned by the U.S. Constitution to state legislatures. … 

 Chris Hitchens reads the riot act to some on the right. Main target – Glenn Beck. Hitch is a little overboard here and overlooks some of the good things Beck has done; like reminding us of Frederick Hayek.

…Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. … …The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.

Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault. …

 In the WaPo, Phillip Howard is back. He has a great idea to have expiration dates on legislation. We might ask lawmakers to try this out on the law they passed to give themselves automatic pay raises every year.

…A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjustment of laws. Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities….the political scuffle over ethanol subsidies – with Republican fiscal hard-liners facing off against Republicans from farm states – shows how sunset laws can reinvigorate democratic debate. Critics have long questioned billions of dollars in subsidies (last year, $7.7 billion) for a product known to have serious environmental drawbacks. The issue has come to a head, however, only because ethanol subsidies, like the Bush tax cuts, are set to automatically expire at the end of this year.  …To an amazing degree, our government’s choices are dictated by political leaders who are long dead. Health-care programs and Social Security – eating up about 70 percent of each year’s federal revenue – don’t even come up for annual authorization and are not limited by a budget. Many programs outlived their usefulness decades ago: New Deal subsidies intended for starving farmers now go mostly to corporate farms ($15 billion annually), and inflated union wages on government contracts (more than $11 billion per year), another relic of the 1930s, have the effect of limiting public works and employment.

…An omnibus sunset law would dislodge the status quo by requiring that every statute expire at some point, unless it is reenacted. Laws with budgetary mandates, such as subsidies, should probably have shorter fuses than broader regulatory laws, such as antitrust statutes. It would be much harder for Congress to overtly support a wasteful subsidy than to passively let it continue. Our democracy would be revitalized if there were an opportunity to debate how laws actually function. However unsatisfactory the current debate over tax cuts, at least there is a debate. … 

Gas prices are rising. The US has an answer that will put people to work and bring gas prices down. Stephen Dinan and Kara Rowland discuss this in the Washington Times. 

Gas prices have risen $1 since just after President Obama took office in January 2009 and are now closing in on the $3 mark, prompting an evaluation of the administration’s energy record and calls for the White House to open more U.S. land for oil exploration….Gas prices have been on a roller-coaster ride over the past decade, dropping to near $1 after President George W. Bush’s first year in office, crossing the $2 mark in 2005 and reaching $4 in June 2008 before Congress and Mr. Bush took action, lifting presidential and congressionally imposed moratoriums on expanding offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.Mr. Bush lifted the presidential moratorium in July that year. The congressional moratorium expired Sept. 30, and prices fell precipitously, dropping more than $1 in October. 

He said the solution is the same for both the short-term and long-term prices: Assure the markets that the U.S. will pursue domestic exploration. ..

“The reason that it dropped is because the U.S. sent a signal to the markets, by dropping the moratoria, that we’re going to drill on our lands. Obviously, we never followed up, and thus you see the crisis gradually rising,” said Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, the ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee.

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David Warren comments on recent events in England.

Prince Charles, and Camilla, were not the only things under attack in England this week, on the streets of London, as the British government took its latest steps to avoid the fate of Ireland and Greece. Not only publicly, but privately, the British are now a people who have borrowed and spent themselves into perdition; and at both the public and the private level, the legacy of consumer gratification is at hand. …

…At the root of criminal behaviour, after we have lopped off all its branches and dug to its source, is indifference to the pain of others, contrasted with wilful indulgence of one’s own pleasures. We think of criminals as brutish and cruel and, fair enough, they are. But only towards those who are in their way. In my experience, they are extremely sensitive about their own rights and perquisites. The person who doubts this should spend more time visiting prisoners in jail.

…Reason comes into this, too. At the root of reason is a certain patience in observing the connections between things. One does not, for instance, take out one’s wrath on Prince Charles because the education secretary in a government he never elected has raised one’s tuition fees. One does not even take it out on the education secretary, who is only doing his job in the face of massive public debt. Instead, one patiently reviews his arguments, to see if they can be confuted. …

David Harsanyi has an interesting take on manufacturing in the US.

…William Strauss at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago recently explained that the same number of Americans are working in the manufacturing sector now — around 14 million — as were in 1950. Yet, there has been a 600 percent increase in output. That’s good news.

It makes no sense for government to prop up non-productive manufacturing jobs any more than it makes economic sense to artificially prop up farmers (oh, I know, we try). We need far fewer people to work those jobs, but it doesn’t mean we don’t make anything. But as Williams succinctly points out, “If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany for the world’s fourth-richest economy in the entire world.”

Eighty percent of Americans told the National Journal that manufacturing was “extremely or very important to U.S. economic growth over the next five to 10 years.” (Manufacturing what?) Sixty-two percent believe it was important for government to help advanced manufacturing industries with “tax incentives and funding.”

How many price-fixing fiascoes does government have to engage in for us to understand that Washington shouldn’t be picking winners in the marketplace? How many wasted dollars will we need to pump into subsidies to understand that the market doesn’t care what we think, that it cares what we buy? …

Last week’s Obama meltdown is the subject of many posts by our favorites who explore presidential leadership past and present. Roger Simon kicks it off.

…We need a leader and don’t have one. This is extremely bad news for our country, especially now.

What is to be done? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t close to simple even with a real leader. Merely cutting taxes — assuming we do that — may not be nearly enough. And pseudo-stimulus spending, such as has been shamefully added on to this “compromise bill,” will most likely make matters worse. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on our economy, our way of life really. Interest to China alone will soon be enough to bankrupt us.

So what indeed is to be done? Paul Ryan has a prescription that’s a starting point, but even his ideas may not reduce spending fast enough. There is little reason to be optimistic, even with the Tea Party victories. I have just returned from New York and found the situation there similar to California, strongly resistant to change. (A good analysis can be found in the WSJ’s interview with Richard Ravitch — “Gotham’s Savior, Beaten By Albany.”) It’s tempting for some on the right to dismiss this as just New York and California, but these are our two most populous states and comprise a huge percentage of the U.S. economy. Things will not be easily improved without them. In fact, they probably can’t be improved without them. And Illinois too seems out of control.

And we have Barack Obama to lead us. Wow. The Republican leadership had better be strong. Their recent “compromise,” as Charles Krauthammer has shown us, was not inspiring. Color me nervous.

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner has depressing poll numbers for the White House. And they are not Obama’s numbers.

You’ve got to hand it to President Bush – his political comeback has been simply stunning. The latest Gallup poll shows him at 47 percent approval, a 13 point increase since he left office, and his highest rating since 2005. He now leads Barack Obama by a percentage point. His book Decision Points is still top of The New York Times bestseller list, and Americans can’t seem to get enough of him at the moment, much to the shock and horror of his increasingly “shellacked” political opponents.

…Bush’s rising popularity is in large part a backlash against Barack Obama’s left-wing and lacklustre leadership of the United States, and the perception that he is weakening America both at home and abroad. As the latest RealClear Politics average of polls shows, almost 60 percent of Americans believe the country is going down the wrong track. The Obama administration’s relentless bashing of the Bush presidency has clearly backfired, and has only served to enhance the former president’s popularity.

In addition, many Americans now look back with nostalgia on a president who had a clear-cut view of the United States as an exceptional nation and a great force for good on the world stage. In contrast to President Obama, there were never any apologies for America’s past from George W. Bush, and the US was feared by its enemies. President Bush liberated 50 million people from tyranny, a staggering achievement. …

John Fund thinks that the president will weather the liberal storm.

…White House officials are playing down the contretemps, emphasizing to reporters that it will use the liberal anger to its political advantage. Distancing Mr. Obama from the left wing of his party will be “a positive byproduct” of the tax extensions for all income groups, a White House aide close to Obama told Politico.com. “Compared to these guys, the president looks mature and pragmatic,” the official said.

But Mr. Obama may have underestimated the potential damage of his about-face on extending the tax cuts. The 2008 campaign featured three Democratic front-runners — Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards — and all solemnly pledged to end the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans. Mr. Obama repeated his pledge after he won the nomination. “We are going to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, those making more than $250,000 a year,” he told an audience in Lake Worth, Fla., just two weeks before the election.

…In the end, of course, liberals will line up to support Mr. Obama against any likely Republican challenger. But the enthusiasm and commitment liberals had in 2008 for Mr. Obama may well be muted. On the margins, that could hurt him as he seeks re-election at a time when many of his core supporters will still be economically stressed.

John Podhoretz comments that Obama’s press conference on the tax cut compromise did not earn him points with either party in Congress.

…Somehow, I don’t think the Democrats disenchanted by his policy choices over the past couple of days are going to be in a coronating mood after Obama furiously upbraided them in ad hominem language of a kind we may never before have heard from a president.

Had he followed their counsel and refused to deal with the GOP, he said, “We [would] be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.”

And the Republicans who just struck a deal with him will surely be less inclined to compromise in future negotiations if they are going to be insulted immediately afterward. …

Peter Wehner adds his thoughts.

President Obama, who during the heat of the 2010 midterm election referred to Republicans as “enemies,” has now decided to refine things a bit. The car-in-the-ditch analogy is out; the-GOP-as-hostage-takers is in.

As John mentioned, in Obama’s press conference earlier today the president, in discussing the tax cut deal he has negotiated with Republicans, said, “It’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed. … In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”

…On some deep level, Obama must understand that, at this moment at least, his presidency is coming apart. It’s not at all clear to me that he’s particularly well equipped to deal with the shifting fortunes, the hardships, and the battering that a president must endure. Difficult circumstances seem to be bringing out his worst qualities rather than his best. And that may be what was on display this afternoon.

Here’s a sentence from the twilight zone: Jennifer Rubin agrees with Maureen Dowd. The president is not looking very presidential.

I agree with Maureen Dowd on virtually nothing. But now and then she meanders close to the mark. Dowd writes of President Obama’s press conference yesterday:

“Obama used to play poker in the Illinois Legislature, but it’s hard to believe. First, he cried uncle to Republicans standing in the corner, holding their breath and turning blue. Then, in his White House press conference, he was defensive, a martyr for the middle class.”

…What is accurate in Dowd’s description, however, is the sense that this whole governing thing — the public salesmanship, the deal making, the explaining — is not Obama’s strong suit. It was disturbing at some level to see him, rendered so hapless, frustrated and angry. So much for the “superior temperament” we kept hearing about during the campaign. As Dowd uncharitably put it, “There’s an argument to be made for what the president did, but he doesn’t look good doing it.” In fact, many conservative pundits, think tankers, staffers and office holders think it’s a bit pricey, but a fine deal. So to put it differently, there is an argument for conservatives to accept the deal, but little reason other than resignation to reality for liberals to do so.

Let’s be honest here: a lot of being president is the aura of authority and the projection of strength and competence. Right now, does anyone on either end of the political spectrum think he’s demonstrating those traits? Well, Dowd and Rubin sure don’t, and that covers a pretty vast swatch of political territory.

In Contentions, J.E. Dyer was also surprised by the president’s performance.

…I don’t recall Obama ever coming off in a national forum quite so much like a leftist community organizer. In demonizing his political opponents, lecturing his base, and vowing to fight on in a long struggle, Obama appeared to be channeling his political roots in radical activism. He evoked an activist street fighter on the steps of city hall more than a president of the United States. The president is our head of government but also our head of state: a ceremonial symbol of national unity. One of his chief duties is to be happy about that.

As a partisan performance, Obama’s today didn’t stop with the relatively benign Democrat-versus-Republican divide. It recalled the European political sense in which partisanship is narrowly based on ethnicity or ideology, and opposes the putative complacency of all social compacts and central authorities. I suspect that one of the most difficult things for Obama himself, as well as for the more radical in his political base, is coming to grips with the truth that some homage must still be paid to the traditional compact of the U.S. government with its people. It was not, in fact, politically possible for Obama or the Democrats in Congress to imperil the finances of the middle class with a quixotic standoff over raising tax rates on the wealthy.

The people are, by and large, middle-class householders with no interest in suffering to make ideological points. The source of Obama’s peculiar dissonance in American politics is that he doesn’t feel, in his gut, that that is a good thing.

Ed Morrissey thinks that this is the beginning of the end for Obama’s presidency.

If Barack Obama hoped to launch his triangulation strategy with his tax-cut deal, so far it has failed to impress.  Charles Hurt, a frequent critic of Obama at the New York Post, spends most of today’s column praising Obama for finally cutting the Left loose and working with newly-energized Republicans on tax rates.  At the end, though, Hurt lays out the brutal political math that Obama faces, and declares that Obama has made himself a one-term President with this move…

That may be a little premature, but without doubt Obama is off to a bad start for his apparent triangulation strategy.  When Bill Clinton executed it in 1995-6, he put himself at the lead for what had been Republican agenda items on spending and welfare reform.  Obama didn’t get out in front on tax-rate extensions; instead, he obviously capitulated in return for a lot less than his base is willing to tolerate.

…Update: Greg Sargent reports the results of a Survey USA/WaPo poll among volunteers and contributors to Obama’s presidential campaign that underscores the problem:

The poll shows clearly that these contributors are deeply opposed (74%) to a deal with Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax breaks for those making over $250,000 a year. The depth of opposition to a deal is severe with former Obama contributors saying that they are less likely (57%) to support Democrats who support this deal in 2012. …

Nile Gardiner has more bad news for the Obami, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…The latest Bloomberg National Poll makes especially grim reading for the White House. More than half of all Americans (51 percent) believe they are worse off than they were two years ago when Barack Obama took office, with just 35 percent saying they are better off. A striking 66 percent of voters believe America is on the “wrong track”, with just 27 percent agreeing with the view that the United States is heading in the “right direction”.

Among Democrats, 48 percent think the country is on the wrong track, as opposed to 44 percent who disagree. And even more worryingly for the president, who is now trying harder to appeal to the centre ground, 67 percent of Independents believe Obama’s America is going down the wrong path, with just 24 percent disagreeing.

Fears over the economy are undoubtedly the biggest factor in the lack of confidence Americans have in their president. According to the Bloomberg survey, 50 percent of respondents listed unemployment and jobs as the most important issue facing the country, with 25 percent citing the federal deficit and government spending. Other issues, such as health care and immigration, are ranked as the most important by just 9 percent and 5 percent respectively. And consumer confidence remains stubbornly downbeat. When asked if they plan to spend more this Christmas season compared to 2009, just 12 percent said yes, with 46 percent declaring they plan to spend less. …

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In Forbes, Charles Kadlec comments on the looming debt crisis here and in the EU.

…In the U.S. at least, the looming debt crisis among states and municipalities also reflects a lack of diligence on the part of the citizenry. This can be attributed in part to a naïve assumption by the electorate that those in government, freed from the profit motive, could be trusted to do what was “right” for the community as a whole.

Instead, what we now can see is that elected officials, following a power motive, can be as greedy and irresponsible as anyone in the private sector. In many cases, officials from both parties have been captured by powerful interests, including public sector unions and recipients of transfer payments. As a consequence, they have willfully committed current and future taxpayer money to benefit those with political power at the expense of the community as a whole.

One lesson is that to live in liberty requires an elevated level of diligence, oversight and skepticism of our elected officials. Taxpayers and financial market regulators need to insist on more honest accounting and disclosure of the true costs of the government programs in general, and government employee pensions and benefits in particular.

The sovereign debt crisis now encircling Europe may well prove to be a preview of what lies ahead for the political class in the U.S. Like their European counterparts, they may be participants in an end-game in which capital markets force a reassessment of debt-financed government spending, especially on transfer payments, government pensions and wealth-destroying investments in bridges to nowhere, green energy and other government boondoggles with negative rates of return.

Walter Russell Mead looks over the edge.

The global financial crisis could be heading to a blue state near you: that is the latest grim news from the New York Times:  “Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis.“  Normally a cheerleader for the free spending (in bluespeak, compassionate) policies of the public sector union dominated, high tax, high cost states like California, Illinois and New York, the Times now warns that fiscal ruin could be at hand. 

…The Times story compares blue state debt to the subprime crisis and the Greek meltdown.  A deeply disturbing graph shows a true panic underway as investors pull money out of mutual funds that invest in municipal bonds even faster than at the height of the market collapse in October 2008.  With as much as $4 trillion in off-the-books pension and health care liabilities, the worst hit states may soon be unable to operate without massive federal support.

…Bond investors are much more skittish than stock buyers.  Any risk of default sends them running for the exits.  Without swift federal action, a crisis in the market for some cities and states would inevitably lead to sharp spikes in interest rates for other state and city governments whose positions suddenly looked risky.  Massive layoffs of government employees would be inevitable in a widening range of affected states, throwing the weak recovery off course and quite possibly bringing on the much-feared second dip of the recession. Many banks and other financial institutions like insurance companies hold significant portfolios of state debt; if those bonds tank in value, we could go back to the darkest days of the financial crisis of 2008 as big banks and insurance companies come running to Uncle Sam for more bailouts. …

…Some Democratic voters, heavily dependent on state spending because they are state employees or because they rely on state and local spending for vital services, will want the party to fight for them.  But very few non-affected Americans want to be taxed or for the federal government to take on large amounts of new doubt to bail out the cushy pensions of public employees. Nor will voters in the non-bankrupt states want to bail out the ne’er-do-wells without strict conditions and limits. …

Charles Krauthammer writes that Republicans just agreed to increase government spending to get the Bush tax cuts extended.

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies.

No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president’s deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.

Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way – mostly tax cuts – rather than the Democrats’ spending orgy of Stimulus I. That’s consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget. …

Michael Barone comments on tax cuts and Obama’s surprising admission.

…The strongest part of the press conference came when Obama told liberal Democrats that robust economic growth will make everything easier. That’s true: Robust growth produces a boom in revenues far beyond what government statistical models predict. In 1995 President Clinton refused to even promise to balance the budget, but the tech boom generated enough revenue to do so a few years later.

But that raises the question of why the economy has been growing at such a limp rate two years into the Obama administration. The specter of higher taxes on high earners — delayed now for two years, but still threatened by the president — surely has done something to choke off growth.

So has uncertainty about the extent and cost of the administration’s regulatory policies — which are not limited by the deal on taxes. Extension of unemployment benefits, arguably good policy at a time when jobs are genuinely scarce, tends to perpetuate unemployment as the economy grows, by inducing some workers to hold out for higher-paying jobs.

…But the Democratic base seems more interested in expanding government than in stimulating the economy. They are bellowing with rage not so much at Obama but at the reality that he is grudgingly acknowledging. They had their time and now it’s gone.

Two weeks ago Thomas Sowell explained how historically tax cuts have increased economic growth, and therefore increased government revenues. Surprisingly, Peter Schiff says not always. His complaint is lack of spending restraint.

…While Democrats wanted more government spending,they were unwilling to vote for broad-based middle class tax increases to pay for it.  Instead they want what Democrats have always wanted: higher taxes on the “rich.” Republicans want lower taxes, but as has become typical, they were unwilling to cut government spending to enable it.By running up the deficit both sides get what they want without any political sacrifice.Sure, they break their campaign promise to cut the deficit, but the political fallout that results will be far less costly than voting for the tax hikes or spending cuts.

In truth however, there are no real tax cuts in this proposal. The true burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes but how much it spends. Since this deal ensures that government will be more expensive next year than it was this year, American citizens will have to shoulder the added cost. Just because Congress has decided to deliver the bill with debt rather than current taxes does not mean that the spending will not be paid for. The only thing the plan accomplishes is to alter the means by which government spending is financed. 

…Unfortunately, nothing in the plan addresses the fundamental economic imbalances that underlie our economy and that brought us to the brink of ruin in the first place. What we really need are massive cuts in government spending so we can have true tax relief.  In addition, we need to remove the government-imposed barriers which make our economy uncompetitive, and which are preventing market forces from correcting the imbalances. By expanding government and increasing debt, the plan puts us farther than we have ever been from a real recovery. …

The WaPo editors say enough with the ethanol subsidies.

…In other words, the government pays the industry for the privilege of selling to a captive market, spending $6 billion in 2009 on the tax credits alone. Without the tax credits, the amount of corn ethanol produced would still increase over the next 10 years, the Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri calculates. Yet the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that taxpayers still pay $1.78 to replace a gallon of gasoline with its energy equivalent of corn ethanol. The numbers are far worse when put in terms of greenhouse gases. The CBO reports that it costs a staggering $750 to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions one ton by burning corn ethanol – and the CBO makes some generous assumptions to get even that figure.

Yet because the policy directs cash to farm states that are rich in political influence, lawmakers are rallying to save this payoff from expiration. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who insisted Sunday that President Obama’s fiscal commission didn’t go far enough in its deficit reduction plan, has paired with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to press for renewal of the gratuitous corn ethanol tax credit and the ethanol tariff through 2015. Typically, the farm lobby has won out on such issues. But this year it’s meeting stronger than usual opposition from a bloc of fiscal conservatives and environmentalists, backed by such strange bedfellows as Tea Party organizer FreedomWorks and ultra-liberal pressure group MoveOn.org – even Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Al Gore. …

Proof God has a sense of humor; The Week highlights Cancun’s record low temps during the globalony confab.

The irony: As negotiators from nearly 200 countries met in Cancun to strategize ways to keep the planet from getting hotter, the temperature in the seaside Mexican city plunged to a 100-year record low of 54° F. … 

The reaction: ClimateGate was “bad enough,” says Duncan Davidson in Wall Street Pit, but Cancun’s weather is particularly “inconvenient” for global-warming alarmists. It’s a reminder that global temperatures have “flatlined” despite rising carbon dioxide levels, “which is decidedly chilling against the concept of hampering economic growth to limit Co2 emissions.” …

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An unlikely Pickings today with just two items; from the New Yorker and National Journal of all places. We have not gone over to the dark side. The New Yorker piece is a very fair portrait of John Boehner and others in the GOP leadership. The National Journal article looks at the leadership of both parties. Pickerhead is still trying to understand what has happened at The New Yorker. That magazine has been so reliably obnoxious for years it seems strange to have a political subject treated impartially. You will learn a lot. 

In the New Yorker, Peter Boyer profiles the new House speaker John Boehner. Boyer also tackles the recent history of House Republicans, and how the reinvigorated conservatives and Tea Party members may effect needed changes.

John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”

The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.

For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”

Back in Washington, Boehner reported what he’d seen to his Republican colleagues. While many Democrats and the mainstream media mocked the Tea Party, Boehner pressed his members to get out in front of the movement or, at least, get out of its way. “I urge you to get in touch with these efforts and connect with them,” he told a closed-door meeting of the Republican Conference. “The people participating in these protests will be the soldiers for our cause a year from now.”

Boehner seemed an unlikely clarion for an anti-establishment revolt. He had been in Congress since 1991, during the Bush-Quayle Administration—long enough to have twice climbed from the back bench to a leadership position. He was a friend of Ted Kennedy’s, and a champion of George W. Bush’s expansive No Child Left Behind legislation. After the economic collapse of 2008, he had reluctantly advocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“a crap sandwich,” he called it), the Tea Partiers’ litmus test of political villainy.

But Boehner was among the first Beltway Republicans to recognize that the rise of the Tea Party represented, for Republicans, a near-miracle of good luck. …

…Boehner is a delegator, but he is given credit by some conservatives for taking on the Republican appropriators in the House last year on the issue of earmarks. He has shunned earmarks for his entire career in Congress, and he insisted upon the gesture of a Republican moratorium on the practice. “He stared the appropriators down, and he won,” Patrick McHenry says. “And I don’t know the last time that appropriators have been beaten.” …

… Boehner forbade a Republican victory party on November 2nd, and has since signaled that he means to play the “adult” card in his dealings with Obama and within his own House conference. It is the strongest play he has. Unlike Gingrich, Boehner is not a visionary; his politics were formed by his revulsion, as a small businessman in Ohio, at the size of his tax bill. Nor is he an extemporaneous rhetorician; in public appearances, he rarely strays from his script. Where Gingrich was at once the Party’s chief political theorist, strategist, and messenger, Boehner is happy to delegate those roles to the young comers around him: Eric Cantor, the next Majority Leader; Kevin McCarthy, who will be the Republican Whip; and Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s designated thinker on the big issues, like entitlement reform. “We have very different personalities and different styles,” Gingrich told me recently. “You have to measure Boehner against other Boehners—you can’t measure him against me. Boehner would tell you up front that he’s not attempting to be the defining figure of this moment. He’s trying to be the organizer of the team that may define the moment. Clinton was able to pivot with me because I was a large enough figure that Clinton could say to the left, ‘You really want Gingrich?’ And they’d go, ‘O.K., even though we’re really mad at you, we’re not that mad at you.’ This may be an argument for the Boehner model.”

Boehner is now the most important Republican in the country, but far from the best known, which carries some advantage. Washington is familiar with him as an amiable, somewhat prosaic conservative with an umbilical connection to business, an old-school pol who loves his golf, his wine, and his cigarettes. His physical aspect—the mahogany skin tone, the smoky baritone, the Ken-doll coif, and the impeccably dapper attire—lends itself to caricature with a throwback theme. (Dean Martin and Don Draper are two press favorites.) Lately, Boehner has taken to reciting his personal biography, perhaps partly to counter the caricature, but also as a device for framing his approach to the job as the uncomplicated application of ordinary American common sense. “Trust me—all the skills I learned growing up are the skills I need to do my job,” he says. …

…The test of Boehner as Speaker will be how the Republican majority decides to interpret that tentative mandate. One reading is that voters were alarmed by a government stuck in overdrive, and elected Republicans in order to slow it down. As a Boehner adviser put it, “The country is saying to all of us, ‘Stop. Just put the gun down and walk away.’ ” Boehner leans toward that interpretation, which dictates a particular approach: an effort to achieve things that might be broadly considered sensible, doable, and practical, like the earmark moratorium. If Boehner gets his way, there would be reforms of the institution itself that, if they worked, might tend toward greater caution on spending. There would be an effort to pass elements of the Pledge to America, such as a rollback of government spending to 2008 levels, and there would be extensive use of the congressional-oversight function.

Kevin McCarthy’s revolutionaries are unlikely to embrace that approach. “They didn’t come to Washington to tinker around the edges,” McHenry, one of the conservatives who have most eagerly welcomed the newcomers, says. “They came to cut the size of government, not to trim its growth.”

The next Congress will also be a test of the Young Guns, two of whom—McCarthy and Cantor—carry rank on Boehner’s leadership team. I asked the third, Paul Ryan, what he thought of the prospect of a go-slow approach. “I could not disagree with it more,” he said. “I am so sick of playing small ball. That’s why I stepped out there with the Roadmap in the first place. The country doesn’t deserve small ball. The country deserves real answers to the enormous problems facing us. And we owe it to our employers, the people who elected us, to give them a choice of two futures. Look, we know where the left wants to go, we know the path that we are on. We owe it to the country to show them an alternative path, based upon our principles. And if, after getting a second chance, we blow that opportunity, then shame on us.”

Ryan noticed that, during the campaign, the complimentary remarks about his reform ideas from President Obama and other Democrats were replaced by criticism of his entitlement plan as a risky scheme. Republicans, too, shied from Ryan’s politically toxic pet subject, even while positioning him to amplify his arguments (he’ll be chairman of the Budget Committee). Ryan believes that the incoming Republican freshmen will ally themselves with him. “We’ve got different people coming to Congress than we have had in the last number of cycles,” he says. “We’re not getting that many career politicians and wannabes. We’re getting a bunch of cause people. And these are cause people who will be fresh out of the experience of being hit by this’’—campaign attacks over proposed entitlement reforms—“and who will have survived those hits.”

Ryan credits Boehner for giving him rein on an issue that many of their colleagues would prefer him to be less insistent about. “He’s never asked me to stop it, he’s never asked me to tone it down,” Ryan says. “He’s never asked me to jettison these things. I think he realizes the kind of class we’ve got coming in, and the kind of times that we are in.” Ryan’s first important task in the 112th Congress will be writing the 2012 budget, which will define the Republican agenda. “I will have to write a budget that can pass,” he says. “I can’t tell you what that is going to look like. I can tell you that it is not going to raise taxes, and it’s going to cut spending. And we are going to have to begin to have this conversation on entitlements.” It is likely that the Rivlin-Ryan plan, rejected by the Obama deficit commission, will find its way into Ryan’s budget next year. …

Charlie Cook writing in National Journal, says the Dems can’t fix a problem they won’t admit to.

…The public certainly hasn’t forgiven Republicans for their mistakes over the last decade.  But the loss of confidence in Democrats has been more immediate and more relevant than Republican miscues when they had both the White House and majorities in Congress.  There were plenty of things that voters held against the GOP, including scandals, the decision to invade Iraq, the case of Terri Schiavo, and the doubling of the national debt.  None of these were forgiven but they were all less relevant.

Americans see Democrats as having failed in their stewardship of the economy. A recession grew worse, unemployment soared, and Democrats seem to have checked the box and moved on to issues nearer and dearer to their hearts.  

For some reason, climate change legislation and health care seemed to be more important than sticking to a focus on the economy through 2009 and into 2010. It might be a while before voters forgive the president and the remaining Democrats in Congress for that.

One of the more interesting things that seems to be happening behind the scenes among Republican leaders in both the House and Senate is their focus on the mistakes made by the Republican majorities after their takeover in 1994.  

The freshmen and some of the younger Republicans certainly have their hubris, but the leaders seem to know that they scored an unearned run in this election and that they have been given an opportunity that they probably didn’t deserve. Nonetheless, they are determined not to blow it.

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Nile Gardiner provides another reason for us to leave the UN.

If further evidence is needed that the United Nations is a complete basket case in the arena of human rights, look no further than the world body’s decision to stay away from this Friday’s Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo. The winner of this year’s peace prize is Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who will not be allowed to travel to Norway by the authorities in Beijing. His family is also barred from traveling. …

Spengler gives reasons why the Tea Party will have longevity.

…The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Government that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.

…Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits. The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.

…This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ”cross of gold” imposed by Eastern creditor interests. …

We’ll wait to Sunday’s post for a complete wrap-up of the tax-cut deal and the petulant president’s presser, but for now Jennifer Rubin gives us a flavor.

… Juan Williams once remarked that Obama wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d want with you in a foxhole. When the crowd is swooning and the votes are going his way, no one can take a victory lap like Obama can. But when crisis hits — for the country or for his and his party’s political fortunes — he too often resorts to grouching and a self-pitying tone. It’s not going to win him new admirers, and it’s quite likely to annoy his already disillusioned liberal base.

Jennifer has some more.

Vice President Biden has been dispatched to calm down the Democratic troops on the Hill. But that’s not likely to alleviate the apparent despair within the liberal base. A tweet from Chris Hayes of the Nation seemed to sum up the sentiment: “Just so we’re clear: Democrats, currently in charge of Cong and WH, are about to ratify single defining domestic policy of W.” …

Rubin again, calling it the worst press conference – ever.

I don’t mean just for Obama. I mean any president. Or head of state. When I wrote this morning that he doesn’t do well in defeat, you didn’t know how right I was, huh? Let’s count the ways.

Calling Republicans “hostage takers.” Not helpful. Saying Republicans opposed middle class tax cuts. Not true — they wanted no tax increases for anyone. Accusing Republicans of holding out tax cuts for the rich as the “Holy grail.” Also wrong. As Republican strategist Mike Goldfarb tweeted, and as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said, beating Obama in 2012 is the Holy Grail. Then Obama started ranting at the media and bashing the left, which, if we are to believe statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, seems poised to abandon him on this. Obama also dragged in the “public option” for no apparent reason other than to remind everyone of the last time he disappointed liberals. Admitting he’s had a whole bunch of lines in the sand. Umm. Thunk.

On Twitter, there is shock and awe among pundits and reporters. Is Obama melting down? Has he lost control of the conversation? Yikes. Whoever let him go out there and do this rant-a-thon should be fired. Oh, was it Obama’s idea? I think his own party is indeed going to go into “riot mode.” A House GOP leadership aide pronounced the performance “angry” and out-of-touch. That’s being generous.

In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino tells us, don’t worry about bankers. The Fed is taking good care of them.

…Obama’s policies, insiders tell me, may be bad for the middle class — but they’ve been pretty good for the banking class.

…they love the fact that the White House has gone out of its way to support (some people think prod) Ben Bernanke’s policies of 1) keeping interest rates at rock-bottom levels and 2) pumping the banking system with $600 billion in cash, known in economic circles as “quantitative easing” and in less formal circles as “printing money.”

Both measures are supposed to spur lending to small business as banks, flush with cash, start to lend again and businesses can expand. But the direct beneficiaries of the “easy money” are the banks — which continue to hoard the cash, and (according to Leopard) are ready to rake in billions of dollars in fees as that backlog of deals starts to emerge next year.

Big bankers also don’t mind the inflation that Bernanke’s policies risk: Inflation usually pushes (nominal) stock prices up — and when the stock market rises, financiers and traders make a killing, even if the rest of us need a wheelbarrow filled with cash to buy a loaf of bread. …

Robert Samuelson criticizes the Deficit Commission’s lack of guiding principles that led to some arbitrary plans.

…One task of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson – was to discredit this self-serving morality. Otherwise, changing the budget will be hard, maybe impossible. If everyone feels morally entitled to existing benefits and tax breaks, public opinion will remain hopelessly muddled: desirous in the abstract of curbing budget deficits but adamant about keeping all of Social Security, Medicare and everything else. Politicians will be scared to make tough decisions for fear of voter reprisals.

…Answers exist. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize farmers, because food would be produced at low cost without subsidies. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize Americans, through Social Security and Medicare, for the last 20 or 25 years of their lives because healthier people live longer and the huge costs make the budget unmanageable. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally: If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it.

…The biggest blunder of their approach involved huge proposed cuts in defense, about a fifth of federal spending. National security is government’s first job. Bowles and Simpson reduced it proportionately with all other discretionary spending as if there’s no difference between a dollar for defense and a dollar for art subsidies. Nor was there much effort to identify programs that should be eliminated because they fail the national need test. Good programs would have been cut along with the bad. Finally, spending on the elderly, now about two-fifths of the budget, was treated too gently. Social Security’s full eligibility age would have increased slowly to 69 years around 2075. These programs are essential, but eligibility ages should be raised faster and, for wealthier recipients, benefits cut more. …

In the NYTimes, Ross Douthat takes a more optimistic view of the Deficit Commission results.

…Most importantly, we have at least a rough sense of how and where a compromise might ultimately be negotiated. As Barro wrote last week:

Conservatives’ reactions to the Bowles-Simpson Chairmen’s Mark … have been heartening: while some hardcore anti-tax groups (such as Americans for Tax Reform) have attacked the plan for raising taxes, the bulk of conservative commentators and politicians have sounded cautiously optimistic notes about the plan ….  [Meanwhile], a lot of liberal analysts and think tankers have drawn distinctions between Bowles-Simpson, which they don’t like, and Rivlin-Domenici, another bipartisan plan which they like a lot better. There are good reasons for the Left to feel better about the Rivlin-Domenici plan: its tax components are more progressive, and raise more revenue overall; it doesn’t raise the eligibility age for Social Security. But the two plans are fundamentally similar in a lot of ways, so if conservative policy elites like Bowles-Simpson and liberal policy elites can live with Rivlin-Domenici, that bodes well for coming up with a compromise plan that works for both sides.

None of this makes a compromise inevitable, or even necessarily likely. (The fact that Paul Ryan didn’t join the “yes” votes represents a missed opportunity, I think, for the reasons that Allahpundit sketches here.) But if America does manage to pull back from the fiscal precipice, there’s a good chance that we’ll remember the Simpson-Bowles proposals as a significant and clarifying step toward figuring how to make that pullback work.

As pointed out by several commentators featured in Pickings, the nation would be better off if the government did less: less taxing, less regulating, less meddling. John Steele Gordon has the latest example. 

The American Congress — not itself unknown for doing nothing in particular on occasion — has an opportunity in the next couple of weeks to do nothing at all and render the country a considerable service thereby.

What it needs to do nothing about is ethanol, one of the truly epic boondoggles in American history. As the ball falls in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, both the 45-cent-a-gallon tax credit on ethanol (which goes to companies that blend ethanol and gasoline, i.e., Shell, Exxon, et al.) and the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on foreign ethanol will expire, unless Congress acts.

The 45-cent tax credit costs the government $5-6 billion a year and is opposed by such strange bedfellows as the Sierra Club and the National Taxpayers Union. Those in favor are, no surprise, ethanol producers and the farmers who grow the corn it is made from. The 54-cent tariff, which, of course, is paid by American consumers, keeps cheaper foreign (mostly Brazilian) ethanol out of the American market.

…Since federal law now mandates that motor fuel contain 10 percent ethanol, both the tax credit and the tariff favor only the few (corn farmers and ethanol producers) at the expense of the many (taxpayers and drivers). …

In the Denver Post, Vincent Carroll comments on the cowardly Colorado Senators’ opinions on ethanol subsidies. Carroll reminds us what Al Gore says, now that he is out from under the lobbyists’ thumbs.

…Gore may have broken a tie vote in the Senate over ethanol tax credits when he was vice president, but last month in Greece he admitted that “first-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake.”

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies,” he added, noting the diversion of 40 percent of our corn crop into ethanol also “has an impact on food prices.”

To be sure, Gore continues to have a soft spot for the even more outlandish subsidies for biofuels produced from grasses and other non-edible organic material — although there still isn’t a single large-scale commercial producer of such fuels. Fifteen years from now, if Gore sticks with his schedule for confronting inconvenient truths, he may well be admitting that cellulosic ethanol subsidies were a boondoggle, too.

Make no mistake: Ending corn ethanol subsidies could hike fuel prices, especially if the tariff survived, because the federal renewable fuels standard requires oil companies to blend an escalating amount of ethanol into gasoline. If senators were truly focused on consumers, they’d call for an end to the fuels standard, too.  …

And we have a cartoon that’s not to be missed.

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Toby Harnden tells us what Colin Powell is up to these days, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK. This post does a number on the president and Powell

Sitting in the Oval Office beside the first black President of the United States on Wednesday was the man who, 15 years ago, many thought would achieve that distinction.

“He is not only a great statesman, and a great public servant, but also very funny and a great counsellor,” said President Barack Obama, speaking with a warmth he normally reserves for descriptions of his own qualities.

…Powell was in the Oval Office to urge Republicans to ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which Obama is seeking to push through the Senate before Christmas.

The capacity of Powell to persuade Republicans has been severely limited since he endorsed Obama for president in 2008 even though John McCain, the Republican nominee, was a long-time friend. …

Also in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the embattled Secretary of State.

Could Hillary Clinton become the highest profile casualty of the Wikileaks scandal? In Bahrain last Friday, a tired looking Secretary of State declared she would definitely not be running for president in 2012 (no real surprise there), but far more significantly stated that her current role would be “my last public position”. She signaled that she would “probably go back to advocacy work, particularly on women and children and probably around the world.” This was a big step back for a hugely ambitious politician with potentially another two decades of public life ahead.

The timing of her statement was highly significant, coming just days after Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of confidential State Department cables with the aid of several newspapers across the world, including The New York Times. Mrs. Clinton has been given the unenviable task of trying to repair the huge damage which the leaks have inflicted upon the trust America’s allies traditionally place in Washington. She has already been directly in touch with dozens of world leaders in an effort to soften the blow to America’s standing.

Whereas a British foreign secretary in similar circumstances would probably be forced to resign over such a large diplomatic debacle, it is unlikely that Clinton will stand down over the issue. After all, the initial leak occurred at the Pentagon, not the State Department, and was the result of an extraordinary security breach. Although there have been some calls for Clinton’s resignation from critics on the Left, (who are unhappy at claims that she ordered US diplomats to spy on the United Nations), she has at the same time received backing from unexpected quarters on the Right. …

Nile Gardiner is on a roll. He packed a lot into this next WikiLeaks post.

The White House strategy so far has been to largely ignore WikiLeaks, and let Hillary Clinton and the State Department handle the fall-out from the debacle. The president hasn’t even commented publicly on the release of over a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables, despite the immense damage the leak is doing to American diplomacy and US strategic interests on the world stage. He is giving all the appearance of a commander-in-chief who is not in control, with an inept administration that seems to blunder from one crisis to another, at times with no-one at the helm.

That’s surely going to have to change, with WikiLeaks now dramatically upping the stakes with the release of some extremely sensitive documents which will be exploited by terrorist groups across the world, including al-Qaeda. As The Times has just reported:

WikiLeaks raised the stakes tonight in its battle with the United States with the release of a secret list of vaccine suppliers, mineral sources and pieces of infrastructure that Washington believes would harm US security if attacked.

Experts said the cable, published by the whistle-blower website as part of an unauthorised trove of diplomatic correspondence, was a gift for terrorist organisations wanting to harm the United States as it spelt out the pipelines, undersea cables and factories across the world — including a number in Britain — that would cause most damage to US interests if destroyed.

The WikiLeaks disclosures are not only embarrassing for Washington on the world stage – they also pose a fundamental threat to the security of the United States and key allies including Great Britain. And it’s the third time this year that the nefarious organisation has dumped vast numbers of confidential US documents on the Internet with complete impunity, aided and abetted by The New York Times and several international newspapers. …

President Obama has made a practice of apologizing for everything that the president hasn’t liked about the US. Now that he’s gotten the hang of it, the president can apologize for WikiLeaks, as it happened on Obama’s watch. Nile Gardiner blogs in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…In the case of Britain, whose partnership with the United States is vital to the defence of the free world, the WikiLeaks disclosures are particularly sensitive. …

…Subjects discussed included British policy on Iran and Afghanistan, the US-UK Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, British defence procurement, and the future of the Anglo-American alliance. These extremely frank, high level discussions between future British government ministers and the new US administration were private affairs never intended for public consumption, and their unveiling to the world’s media will have a chilling effect on future talks like these.

These documents have been released together with more recent sneering assessments from a senior US diplomat of Britain’s deep interest in the Special Relationship, amid concerns in the UK that the Obama administration would downgrade the alliance with London, fears which are described as “paranoid”. British fears about Washington’s distinctly cooler approach towards the UK have of course been subsequently realised with the White House’s assault on BP, and Hillary Clinton’s stab in the back over the Falklands, both of which have gone down badly across the Atlantic. And the official view of the Obama administration was summed up by a senior State Department official in March last year who told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

The Secretary of State will need to work hard to repair the damage caused by the release of sensitive diplomatic cables which were supposed to be kept secret. An apology from the Obama presidency to America’s most important friend on the world stage would be a good start. And please, Mrs. Clinton, let’s have less of the mocking, highly offensive rhetoric from State Department employees about Britain and the Special Relationship, especially at a time when 10,000 British troops are laying their lives on the line alongside their US allies on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

One more from Nile Gardiner on how appeasement is working for the Obama administration. Perhaps more apologies are needed.

Policies of “engagement” with hostile powers are always risky, and frequently lead to embarrassment, as Hillary Clinton discovered last weekend in Bahrain. Foreign Policy.com has a revealing article today detailing the Secretary of State’s futile attempts to greet Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki at the 2010 IISS Manama Security Dialogue, where she was the featured speaker. According to Foreign Policy’s report:

…Everybody at the opening dinner for the 2010 IISS Manama Security Dialogue, where Clinton gave the speech, was watching to see if she and Mottaki would trade words. After all, they were seated only five seats apart. Clinton went out on a limb twice to try to make it happen, but the end result was only an unintelligible mutter from the Iranian leader in the general direction of the secretary. …

The incident was clearly humiliating for the Secretary of State, and strikingly illustrates the futility of the Obama Administration’s failed policy of “constructive engagement” with Iran, which the European Union has been trying for a decade without success. Tehran’s nuclear programme continues to march forward in the face of Washington’s weak-kneed approach, and we are now perilously close to having a nuclear-armed rogue state. …

More security troubles. In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm reports on the MSM screw-up. Seem all the networks broadcast news of the president’s Afghan trip before he was safely on the ground. All except for FOX.

A growing flap — and concerns — over President Obama’s personal safety and security in the Afghan war zone tonight, given that some American news outlets reported he was there nearly a half-hour before Air Force One actually landed. …

According to news pool reports from Air Force One, already White House officials are investigating how the news embargo was dangerously broken first by ABC News and then CNN and MSNBC.

…In fact, according to TVNewser, Fox News Channel was the only major news outlet to strictly honor the Obama security embargo, waiting and reporting the president’s arrival in Afghanistan two minutes after White House press aides gave the official OK. …

Christopher Booker comments on the latest global warming “convention” in Cancun, in the Telegraph, UK.

If, last week, frozen behind a snowdrift, you heard a faint hysterical squeaking, it might well have been the sound of those 20,000 delegates holed up behind a wall of armed security guards in the sun-drenched Mexican holiday resort of Cancun, telling each other that the world is more threatened by runaway global warming than ever. Between their tequilas and lavish meals paid for by the world’s taxpayers, they heard how, by 2060, global temperatures will have risen by 4 degrees Celsius; how the Maldives and Tuvalu are sinking below the waves faster than ever; how the survival of salmon is threatened by CO2-induced acidification of the oceans; how the UN must ban incandescent light bulbs throughout the world.

…The prediction that global temperatures will rise by four degrees in 50 years comes from that same UK Met Office computer which five weeks ago was telling us we were about to enjoy a “milder than average” winter, after three years when it has consistently got every one of its winter and summer forecasts hopelessly wrong. (And the reason why our local authorities are already fast running out of salt is that they were silly enough to believe them.)

When Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s Head of Climate Change Advice, wanted to fly out from Gatwick to Cancun to tell them that 2010 is the hottest year on record, she was trapped by inches of the same global warming that her £33 million computer had failed to predict. …

It’s sometimes hard to find humor in the tremendous waste and fraud that is global warming, but James Delingpole helps out, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…Signs That Show Man Made Global Warming Is Definitely Still Happening And That Cancun Won’t Be An Almighty Flop.

1. Warm weather

2. Cold weather

3. In-between weather.

4. Dark skies at night

5. Light skies in the morning

6. An unpleasant moist/damp/wet sensation when it rains

7. Ice appearing when the temperature drops below zero …

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Writing in the WSJ, Simon Hier and Abraham Cooper discuss irrational political stances made by the World Council of Churches, and most specifically, the Presbyterian Church  

…In 2009, on the first day of Chanukah (which Jews again celebrate this week), a group of Christian Palestinians issued the Kairos Palestine Document, which was immediately published on the World Council of Churches website. The document calls for a general boycott of Israel and argues that Christians’ faith requires them to side with the “oppressed,” meaning the Palestinians. It speaks of the evils of the Israeli “occupation,” yet is silent on any evils committed by Palestinians, including the Hamas terrorists who now govern the Gaza Strip.

The Kairos document also describes the Jewish connection to Israel only in terms of the Holocaust, denying 3,000 years of Jewish domicile. “Our presence in this land, as Christian and Muslim Palestinians, is not accidental but rather deeply rooted in the history and geography of this land,” it states. “The West sought to make amends for what Jews had endured in the countries of Europe, but it made amends on our account and in our land.”

…The Kairos document quickly won accolades from religious groups including from the Presbyterian Church (USA), which has 2.3 million American members and in 2004 was the first mainline American Protestant group to call for divestment from Israel. 

…The Simon Wiesenthal Center will soon meet with the president of the World Council of Churches to urge an end to its campaign against Israel and the Jewish people. Like anti-Israel diplomatic and academic campaigns, such religious calls and writings won’t improve the life of a single Palestinian. But they will certainly embolden terrorists and anti-Semites, and cast carefully nurtured interfaith relations into darkness and disarray.

In the Washington Examiner, Diana Furchtgott-Roth reports that there is noise being made by Tea Partiers to keep Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich) from being appointed chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

…More than 30,600 people have signed an online petition against Upton organized by FreedomWorks, chaired by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

…One reason that Upton received so few votes is his voting record. It’s hard to make the case that he can be a strong chairman when his votes clearly label him as against smaller government and in favor of more regulation. He has consistently voted against tax cuts and in favor of more government spending and regulation.

Consider that in 2004, he was one of 11 Republicans who voted with Democrats to make tax cuts subject to a 60-vote standard in the Senate, so it’s harder to cut taxes. And in 2005, he voted against extending the Bush tax cuts on capital gains and dividends.

…In 2009, Upton voted to block millions of acres from new oil and gas leasing, logging, and mining, eliminating 1.2 million acres from leasing and exploration in Wyoming, and designating 2 million more acres as wilderness.

Later that year, Upton voted against cutting fiscal 2010 funding for the Environmental Protection Agency to 2008 levels. If he wanted to expand the scope of the EPA just last year, how can he be serious about reining the EPA in as chairman? …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, posts on the infighting among Liberals.

While US conservatives are focusing on cutting the budget deficit, creating jobs, winning the War on Terror, and protecting the United States from dangerous treaties such as New START, America’s liberal elites are investing a great deal of energy fighting each other, and blaming the White House for, incredibly, not being Left-wing enough. In the wake of their crushing defeat in midterm elections, some on the Left have upped the stakes in the increasingly brutal liberal civil war, with open talk in some quarters of a challenge to Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012.

There have been some scathing attacks on the president from high-profile traditional supporters. Recently New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of “a spineless spiral” in reference to the Obama White House, while over at The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson spoke of an “uninspired and uninspiring president”. But it is today’s piece in The New York Times by Paul Krugman which is by far the most damning.

…Paul Krugman has set his sights on the White House, sharply condemning Barack Obama’s decision this week to freeze federal pay for two million government employees over two years, which will save taxpayers $5 billion, or “chump change” as Krugman puts it. The Princeton and LSE professor also accused Obama today of “gestures of appeasement to the GOP”. …

In Pajamas Media, Marlo Lewis tells us about the possible end of the ethanol racket.

The lame-duck Congress has a rare opportunity to avoid $25-30 billion in new deficit spending over the next five years, ease consumers’ pain at the pump, and scale back political manipulation of energy markets by literally doing nothing.

At the stroke of midnight on December 31 of this year, the 45¢ per gallon Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), commonly known as the blender’s credit, and the 54¢ per gallon tariff on imported ethanol, will expire.

A bipartisan group of 17 senators, led by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), say it’s time for these special-interest giveaways to go gently into the night. A broad coalition of environmental, taxpayer, hunger, free market, and food industry organizations are urging House and Senate leaders to let the VEETC meet its statutorily appointed fate.

An exciting prospect — for the first time ever, Congress may decide to put the general welfare of consumers and taxpayers ahead of the corporate welfare of the ethanol lobby. …

John Steele Gordon blogs about the unemployment numbers.

The recession officially ended 17 months ago. But the economy added only a net of 39,000 jobs last month, when 100,000 jobs a month is needed just to keep pace with population growth.

Indeed, the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.8 percent from 9.6 percent in October. That, counterintuitively, is probably a good sign, the result of more people, encouraged by their prospects, now actively looking for work. The number of people who are unemployed, have settled for a part-time job, or are discouraged and not currently looking for a job remained unchanged (at a dismal 17 million).

A particularly nasty surprise was the loss of 28,000 retail jobs, which most economists, responding to fairly good news about holiday sales, etc., expected to increase. But more and more of those sales are happening online, which is a much less labor-intensive means of selling goods. Online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving were up a whopping 20 percent from last year.

This, of course, is just more evidence that the on-rolling digital revolution is causing unemployment to recover from recession much more slowly than the economy as a whole. After each of the four recessions since 1980, the number of months needed to bring unemployment back down to normal levels has been longer. …

Linda Chavez comments on extending unemployment benefits.

…It’s hard not to sound like Scrooge to suggest that extending benefits is a bad idea — but it is. Most economists agree that extending benefits can actually increase the time workers remain unemployed, which is reason enough to resist the pleas for yet another extension. Extending benefits also means higher UI taxes for employers. There have been steep increases in UI taxes over the past couple of years in many states, as state trust funds for benefits have been depleted. Employers who might want to hire new employees end up instead paying more for workers who’ve been let go. Once again, the Democrats demonstrate that they don’t have a clue about how to create jobs. But the politics of this one are probably too difficult for Republicans to resist.

Jennifer Rubin highlights some Republican responses to the November unemployment report.

…As you might imagine, congressional Republicans are not missing the chance to highlight the Democrats’ failure to hold down unemployment. Rep. Tom Price (Ga.) sends out a release:

“Nationwide, the unemployment rate has stayed at 9.4 percent or higher for 19 straight months,” said Chairman Price. “Yet instead of sensible policies to encourage private sector job creation, Democrats have pushed one job-killing idea after another. Just yesterday, Speaker Pelosi’s lame duck majority voted for higher taxes on small businesses all across the country. Well, higher taxes don’t hire Americans. Small businesses do.

“Washington has built up some daunting barriers to job creation in recent years. Breaking down those barriers will be Republicans’ number one goal next year.” …

Since the 1960′s, Republicans and Democrats have both been increasing government spending, notes David Boaz, in Reason.

…But it’s hard to find the differences on this chart of the upward march of government spending, handily provided by the Heritage Foundation…

To the naked eye, it looks like a pretty steady climb through the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, with a bit of acceleration under Bush II and then a sharp jump in 2008 and 2009. Heritage’s color-coding refers to Congress only, so you can’t see that the slight slowdown in the Clinton years occurred under divided government. And of course the TARP and other 2008 spending was proposed and forced through by the Republican White House, even though Congress was indeed Democratic at the time.

But the bottom line is: If we have two parties for a reason, because they believe in different things, why don’t we some real differences in the growth of federal spending?

Abe Greenwald is invoking the wrath of the gods of climatology.

..the talks began as follows:

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

She called for “a balanced outcome” which would marry financial and emissions commitments from industrialized countries aimed at combating climate change with “the understanding of fairness that will guide long-term mitigation efforts.”

“Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful interlacing of many threads,” said Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica and started her greetings in Spanish before switching to English. “I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel.”

And to think some people doubt global warming.

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Pickerhead needed a Mark Steyn fix. Here’s one from 2004.

…In Mission Impossible, to get hold of top-secret classified information Tom Cruise has to break into CIA headquarters, crawl through the ventilation shaft, suspend himself from the ceiling, and hack into the computer. The whole room is hermetically sealed and ultra-motion-sensitive and ultra-heat-sensitive. So if Tom’s dainty little foot brushes the floor or he starts to perspire heavily, the alarms will go off and all hell will break loose.

IN REALITY, as we now know, the most sensitive, most classified documents in America’s National Archives are not kept in a sealed room that’s ultra-motion-sensitive. They’ve only just introduced a security camera, and they only did that because of a pattern of national security breaches by the, er, national security adviser. Or, to be more precise, the former national security adviser for Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger.

Last fall, while preparing to testify to the 9/11 Commission, Sandy Berger went to the National Archives and “inadvertently” removed dozens of pages of the most classified documents by “inadvertently” stuffing them in his pants and “inadvertently” secreting them in his socks and “inadvertently” taking them home, where he “inadvertently” lost some of them, and then he “inadvertently” returned to the Archives and “inadvertently” removed other drafts of the same document. Lather, rinse and repeat, inadvertently. He “inadvertently” made improper cell phone calls from within the secure room and he “inadvertently” made a suspicious number of trips to the men’s room for who knows what “inadvertent” purpose. …

Charles Krauthammer is appalled by the government’s lack of response to the WikiLeaks.

…At a Monday news conference, Attorney General Eric Holder assured the nation that his people are diligently looking into possible legal action against WikiLeaks. Where has Holder been? The WikiLeaks exposure of Afghan war documents occurred five months ago. Holder is looking now at possible indictments? This is a country where a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Months after the first leak, Justice’s thousands of lawyers have yet to prepare charges against Julian Assange and his confederates?

Throw the Espionage Act of 1917 at them. And if that is not adequate, if that law has been too constrained and watered down by subsequent Supreme Court rulings, then why hasn’t the administration prepared new legislation adapted to these kinds of Internet-age violations of U.S. security? It’s not as if we didn’t know more leaks were coming. And that more leaks are coming still.

Think creatively. The WikiLeaks document dump is sabotage, however quaint that term may seem. We are at war – a hot war in Afghanistan where six Americans were killed just this past Monday, and a shadowy world war where enemies from Yemen to Portland, Ore., are planning holy terror. Franklin Roosevelt had German saboteurs tried by military tribunal and shot. Assange has done more damage to the United States than all six of those Germans combined. Putting U.S. secrets on the Internet, a medium of universal dissemination new in human history, requires a reconceptualization of sabotage and espionage – and the laws to punish and prevent them. Where is the Justice Department?

And where are the intelligence agencies on which we lavish $80 billion a year? Assange has gone missing. Well, he’s no cave-dwelling jihadi ascetic. Find him. Start with every five-star hotel in England and work your way down. …

David Warren notes the irony that the NYTimes’ unethical and biased actions have exposed its incompetence in reporting the news as well.

…”It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires; it must abandon itself to its master passion.” Thus spoke Rebecca West, perhaps the greatest of the leftists and feminists of the last century, who did honestly wrestle with questions of treachery and betrayal. See her book, The Meaning of Treason.

What, I’ve been wondering, would Dame Rebecca have said, about the casual treachery of The New York Times, and other media who have cooperated with Wikileaks in return for advance access to their stolen documents — as if this were a straightforward business arrangement?

The total hypocrisy of the Times has been exposed by several of my right-wing colleagues, who have juxtaposed the paper’s various self-justifications. The Times smugly refused, for instance, to print or link any “Climategate” revelations of a global warming scam, because “the documents appear to have been acquired illegally,” and “were never intended for the public eye.” But when an opportunity arises to publish potentially devastating state secrets, they do so without hesitation “in the public interest.” And the smugness is the same.

Paradoxically, these documents confirm everything the Times and like-minded media have not been reporting for the last few years. …

Caroline Glick covers a lot of important ground in discussing WikiLeaks.

…The leaked documents themselves expose a profound irony. To wit: The US is unwilling to lift a finger to defend itself against an act of information warfare which exposed to the world that the US is unwilling to lift a finger to protect itself and its allies from the most profound military threats endangering international security today.

…THE MOST important question that arises from the entire WikiLeaks disaster is why the US refuses to defend itself and its interests. What is wrong with Washington? Why is it allowing WikiLeaks to destroy its international reputation, credibility and ability to conduct international relations and military operations? And why has it refused to contend with the dangers it faces from the likes of Iran and North Korea, Turkey, Venezuela and the rest of the members of the axis of evil that even State Department officers recognize are colluding to undermine and destroy US superpower status?

…THE FINAL irony of the WikiLeaks scandal is the cowardice of WikiLeaks that stands at the foundation of the story. Founded in 2006, Wikileaks was supposed to serve the cause of freedom. It claimed that it would defend dissidents in China, the former Soviet Union and other places where human rights remains an empty term. But then China made life difficult for WikiLeaks and so four years later, Assange and his colleagues declared war on the US, rightly assuming that unlike China, the US would take their attacks lying down. Why take risks to defend dissidents in a police state when it’s so much easier and so much more rewarding to attempt to destroy free societies?

…And that brings us to the real question raised by the WikiLeaks assault on America. Can democracies today protect themselves? In the era of leftist political correctness with its founding principle that Western power is evil and that the freedom to harm democracies is inviolate, can democracies defend their security and national interests?

John Fund points out where the Obami will continue to attack American businesses.

…On Sept. 22, Labor’s Office of the Solicitor—which employs 400 attorneys to enforce the nation’s labor laws—issued a draft “operating plan” to dramatically increase pressure on employers. …

…But while the Department of Labor prepares for a hyper-aggressive enforcement strategy against business, it has rolled back Bush-era reforms mandating greater union transparency. Just this week the department rescinded its Form T-1, which required unions to report on strike funds and other accounts under union control.

The Labor Department is also planning to transfer responsibility for whistleblower investigations from OSHA (which currently has 80 investigators on this beat) to the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS), which oversees union financial integrity. But the Obama administration has severely cut funding and staff for OLMS. There are 187 OLMS investigators, down from 223 last year. With additional responsibilities, the office’s ability to investigate embezzlements and union corruption will be further hindered. …

…Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government, a government watchdog group that monitors union issues, says Labor’s new approach should trigger oversight hearings by the new GOP House. “But that won’t be enough,” he predicts. “The solicitor’s budget at Labor will have to be kept in check.”

David Harsanyi has another classic, this time on taxes.

Few displays of phony generosity and bogus earnestness are more irritating than watching a stinking rich tycoon advocating that others shell out more in taxes.

“People at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it,” explained Warren Buffett, who must be aware that “people like him” number somewhere in the low single digits.

But, please, go for it, Mojambo. Hand it over if you’re feeling compelled. And if your “please-tax-me- more” companion Bill Gates feels equally bonded to the virtues of federal revenue streams, he can always divert some of that foundation funding from the private sector to the IRS — where the magic really happens.

“Rich” families with two student loans, mortgages, outrageous property taxes and young children they can’t send to the awful local public schools are, undoubtedly, indebted to you guys for finally speaking up. …

…Anyway, if tax cuts do not generate economic activity, as most liberals contend, why limit tax hikes to the rich?…Surely some in the middle class can afford to pay more. …

Peter Schiff indicts the myriad government interventions that circumvent market corrections and prevent economic recovery.

Today’s payroll report severely disappointed on the downside and left economists scratching their heads to explain the weakness. The explanation, however, is plain as day. As I have been saying for years, the US economy will not create jobs as long as the Fed keeps interest rates artificially low, and Congress keeps stimulating spending and consumer debt, punishing employers with mandates, regulations, and taxes, crowding out private investment with massive government borrowing, and preventing market forces from restructuring our out-of-balance economy.

…No doubt the 9.8% unemployment rate (17% when counting the under-employed or discouraged workers) will spark another extension of unemployment benefits, which will provide yet additional incentives for the unemployed not to work. In addition, we will likely get another round of stimulus – paid for with higher budget deficits – that will further hinder the capital investment and business formation necessary to produce sustainable jobs. Then, the inflation created by the Fed to finance those deficits will send consumer prices higher, making life that much harder for all Americans, regardless of their employment status.

…If printing money and dolling it out to the unemployed could create growth and jobs, why hasn’t it already worked? After all, we have already extended benefits to 99 weeks. Where are all the jobs? Also, if every dollar of unemployment benefits generates two dollars of growth, as our legislators claim, why not double or triple the benefits? In fact, why limit them to the unemployed? Just give the benefits to everyone – then we will really get this economy going.

Politicians cannot create economic growth at will simply by doling out money. If it could, the Soviets would have won the Cold War. …

Jennifer Rubin anticipates an interesting 2011 Senate session.

…The numbers that matter are 23 (Democrats plus independents up for re-election in 2012), 47 (total Senate Republicans) and 60 (the cloture minimum). The name of the game for those 23 will be to balance partisan loyalty against electoral self-interest. From a self-interest standpoint, many of them will feel extreme pressure to join with the 47 Republicans on everything from taxes to health care to regulation.

…it’s “the most serious class” he’s seen entering the Senate since he arrived on the Hill 14 years ago. Since voters last month rejected a number of Tea Party-backed Republican candidates — Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell — most of the incoming Republicans are rather mainstream and experienced. They include two former congressmen (Pat Toomey and Mark Kirk), a state house speaker (Marco Rubio), a Bush administration veteran (Rob Portman), a popular governor (John Hoeven), a state attorney general (Kelly Ayotte), a veteran senator and former ambassador to Germany (Dan Coats) and a small businessman who, as one advisor put it, “got pissed off” at what was happening to the country (Ron Johnson). Yes, there is Rand Paul, but he’s sounding more like a mainstream Republican than a wide-eyed radical these days. And a number of Capitol Hill Republican can’t hide their delight that quirky figures such as Arlen Specter and George Voinovich are being replaced by more serious, reliable conservatives.

Moreover, adversity has bred unity on the Republican side. Each Republican, including the Maine senators, knows what it feels like to have debate cut off by Democrats and to be left with nothing for their constituents. Sen. Susan Collins was left out in the cold on small business issues. Sen. Olympia Snowe was infuriated at one point over what she deemed abuse of Senate rules by the majority. That has fostered a certain solidarity, as evidenced by this week’s letter in which all 42 Republicans vowed to filibuster bills before tax and government financing measure are completed.

…The Senate will be the most unpredictable, and, therefore, the most interesting player on the political scene come January. Will the hapless Reid control the body, or will a fluid coalition of red state Democrats and Republicans led by McConnell run the show? Stay tuned.