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Sunday evening we will cover the West Point speech in detail. For now though we have Gabor Steingart from Germany’s der Spiegel.

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly. …

Christopher Hitchens thinks that we should be focusing more on strengthening ties with India.

…Monday’s New York Times carried an extensive report, based on deep-background diplomatic sources, of the likely contours of President Barack Obama’s Tuesday night speech at West Point. A salient paragraph read as follows:

“Officials of one allied nation who have been extensively briefed on the president’s plan said that Mr. Obama would describe how the American presence would be ratcheted back after the buildup, while making clear that a significant American presence in Afghanistan would remain for a long while. That is designed in part to signal to Pakistan that the United States will not abandon the region and to allay Pakistani fears that India will fill the vacuum created as America pulls back. [Underline mine.]”

If this interpretation is correct, then it is consistent with the report recently delivered to the president by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in which our senior in-country military official spoke of Indian influence in Afghanistan as a danger to be combated. The visit of Prime Minister Singh should have been the occasion for a vigorous public debate on whether this growing tendency—the Pakistanization of U.S. policy in the region—is the wise or correct one.

India was supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban long before the events of 9/11, and it has been providing a great deal of reconstruction aid since the Taliban were removed. It has excellent sources of intelligence in the region and is itself a frequent target of the very same forces against which we are committed to fight. Its national parliament, the multifariously pluralistic and democratic Lok Sabha, was the target of a massive car bomb attack in the fall of 2001, its large embassy in Kabul has been singled out for special attention from the Taliban/al-Qaida alliance, and of course we must never forget Mumbai. Nor ought we to forget that India’s massive economic and military power on the subcontinent is accompanied by a system of regular elections, a free press, a secular constitution under which almost as many Muslims live as live in Pakistan, and a business class that extends all the way to Silicon Valley and uses the English language.

Of Pakistan, a state that has flirted with the word failure ever since its inception, it is not possible to speak in the same terms. Only with the greatest reluctance does it withdraw its troops from the front with India in Kashmir, the confrontation that is the main obsession of its overmighty and Punjabi-dominated officer corps. This same corps makes no secret of its second obsession, which is the attainment of a pro-Pakistani regime in Kabul. (This objective, too, is determined by the desire to acquire Afghanistan for the purpose of “strategic depth” in the fight with India.) The original Talibanization of Afghanistan was itself an official project of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the CIA has spent the last eight years admitting, or in some cases discovering, what everyone else already knew: that the Taliban still enjoy barely concealed support from the same highly placed Pakistani institutions. …

You might have noticed we don’t let a day pass without something about the emails of the “warm mongers” in ”Climmaquidick.” (Thank you Mark Steyn, for adding to the language’s 600,000 words.) First we’ll hear from David Harsanyi who thinks it is a good idea to be skeptical.

…You may suppose that those with a resilient faith in end-of-days global warming would be more distraught than anyone over these actions. You’d be wrong. In the wake of the scandal, we are told there is nothing to see. The administration, the United Nations, most of the left-wing punditry and political establishment have shrugged it off. What else can they do?

To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean — at least temporarily — ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated “new energy economies,” among many other intrusive policies.

… a conscientious citizen has little choice but to be uneasy when those with financial, ideological and political interest in peddling the most over-the-top ecological doomsday scenarios also become the most zealous evangelizers. …

Next item on climate is from Neal Boortz’ Nealz Nuze.

…OK … so you have all these half-assed third world countries with their dictators of various stripes eyeing the wealth of the developed, industrial nations. They want some of that wealth, though they aren’t willing to earn it. Why would some dictator tolerate a productive economy that might threaten his continued rule? Freedom – the necessary ingredient for a productive economy – has a way of causing domestic intranquility for dictators. So working through free markets isn’t going to cut it. They will simply have to arrange whatever wealth they cannot seize handed to them. The best conduit for this wealth would be the UN.

OK … so you’re going to use the United Nations to transfer wealth from the big, fat wealthy nations to the corruption-plagued third world. But you’re going to need a pretext? Hmmmmm. You need to come up with some way these nations are hurting you; some action these ugly rich nations are taking that is causing you harm. You’re not under military attack. Your property isn’t being conquered and seized … at least not by the U.S. and Western Europe. But there is one thing! Now I don’t have any idea how this idea was brought to fruition … but it’s brilliant! …

…Many of us already knew global warming to be a fraud. When scientists refuse to acknowledge the cyclical nature of solar activity in a discussion on global warming you have to scratch your head in wonder. Plus – when someone tells you that the science “is settled” and that there is “nothing left to debate;” you know that the science is anything but settled and there is plenty to debate. …

…None of this seems to be slowing down The Community Organizer. He’s heading to Copenhagen where the left and those after our wealth are going to try to cobble together a replacement for the hideous Kyoto Treaty. …

In the WSJ, John Cassidy discusses Arthur Cecil Pigou’s economic theories as they attempt to explain last year’s credsis.

…Mr. Pigou drew an important distinction between the private and social value of economic activities, such as the opening of a new railway line. The savings in time and effort that users of the railway enjoy are private benefits, which will be reflected in the prices they are willing to pay for tickets. Similarly, the railroad’s expenditures on tracks, rolling stock, employee wages are private costs, which will help to determine the prices it charges. But the opening of the railway may also create costs for “people not directly concerned, through, say, uncompensated damage done to surrounding woods by sparks from railway engines,” Mr. Pigou pointed out.

Such social costs—modern economists call them “externalities”—don’t enter the calculations of the railroads or its customers, but in tallying up the ultimate worth of any economic activity, “[a]ll such effects must be included,” Mr. Pigou insisted. In focusing exclusively on private costs and private benefits, the traditional defense of the free market misses out on a vital element of reality.

To correct the problems that spillovers created, Mr. Pigou advocated government intervention. Where the social value of an activity was lower than its private value, as in the case of a railroad setting ablaze the surrounding woodland, the authorities should introduce “extraordinary restraints” in the form of user taxes, he said. Conversely, some activities have a social value that exceeds their private value. The providers of recreational parks, street lamps, and other “public goods” have difficulty charging people to use them, which means the free market may fail to ensure their adequate supply. To rectify this shortcoming, Mr. Pigou advocated “extraordinary encouragements” in the form of government subsidies. …

…The mere existence of negative spillovers doesn’t necessarily justify government intervention, Mr. Pigou conceded. In some cases, the parties concerned might be able to come to a voluntary agreement about how to compensate innocent bystanders. A landlord, for instance, may reduce the rents for tenants who have to live over a noisy bar.

With spillovers from the financial industry, however, too many parties are involved for private bargaining to provide a practical solution. During the credit bubble of 2002-2006, the entire housing market turned into a speculative bazaar. Mortgage companies that were supposed to apportion credit on the basis of ability to pay distributed it willy-nilly. And banks and other financial intermediaries, which exist to channel capital to its most productive uses, misallocated resources on a vast scale.

When other industries do a bad job, the fallout is usually limited. If Budweiser and Miller marketed undrinkable beers, it would be bad news for those companies and their customers, but the rest of the economy would be largely unscathed.

In banking, the negative spillover can be catastrophic. Many millions of households and firms rely on credit to finance their expenditures. If this credit is suddenly curtailed, spending can fall precipitously throughout the economy. That is what we witnessed at the end of last year. …

Every so often, Thomas Sowell aggregates the notes to himself that didn’t make full columns. Here’s some more of his random thoughts.

…Since this is an era when many people are concerned about “fairness” and “social justice,” what is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

Many colleges claim that they develop “leaders.” All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else’s freedom. …

…Government pressures on mortgage lenders to accept less than the full amount they are owed may win votes for politicians, since there are far more borrowers than lenders. But how much future lending can be expected when the lenders know that politicians are ready to intervene at any time to prevent them from getting their money back?

Some people think that the Obama administration is going to get rid of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, making him the scapegoat for its economics failures. This would be consistent with the President’s acting as if the people under him are not carrying out his policies. But if they get rid of Geithner too early, that will not help if things still do not get better after he is gone and before the 2010 elections. …

The Economist’s – Democracy In America interviews Radley Balko about problems in the justice system, and about being a libertarian.

DIA: A lot of politicians pay lip service to the principles of smaller government, lower taxes, and more freedom. Yet the result is often the opposite. As a libertarian, do you ever get frustrated with the lack of representation for your views in the halls of government? Is there anything that can be done to improve the standing of libertarians?

Mr Balko: In theory, libertarians share about half of our positions with the right, and about half with the left. Broadly speaking, we’re social liberals and fiscal conservatives. The problem is that once in power, neither side pays much heed to the issues they have in common with libertarians, because that would require them to voluntarily put limits on their own power. And politicians don’t generally seek higher office for the purpose of limiting what they can do when they get there. So the libertarian stuff is where they’re most willing to compromise. And it’s what they’re least willing to spend political capital defending.

So we saw George W. Bush hold the line on social issues, but completely sell out on federal spending, regulation, and general growth of government. We’re seeing the same thing with Barack Obama, only in reverse. I put up a blog post at Reason about this a few months ago. Obama’s holding fast to his campaign promises that expand the size, scope, and power of government. The few promises he made that involve limiting government in some way—generally on social and civil liberties issues—are the promises he’s been less interested in keeping. This isn’t really surprising. But it speaks to the difficulty libertarians have in getting their ideas taken seriously. It’s made worse by the fact that libertarians by definition generally aren’t interested in seeking political power. That leaves public office and the reins of power open to those who crave it.

That said, I think there’s reason for some optimism for libertarians. The generations raised on the internet will be more educated, aware, and informed than any before them, and I think that has instilled in them some naturally libertarian instincts, particularly when it comes to issues like government transparency, accountability, censorship, and police power. Perhaps I’m a bit pollyanna-ish, but it’s at least possible that once the Obama administration proves just as inept, corrupt, and hopeless as the Bush administration, the younger people who flocked to Obama will start to understand that the problem isn’t who’s running government, it’s that government power itself corrupts–and that we’re better off keeping as much of our lives as possible off limits to the whims of politicians instead of this repeating cycle of putting all of our hope into the idea that someday, the right politicians will finally get elected. …

In Slate’s Books, Jon Meacham reviews Paul Johnson’s new biography of Winston Churchill.

In November 1940, on learning of Franklin Roosevelt’s defeat of Wendell Willkie, Winston Churchill composed one of his many flattering and importuning telegrams to the president in Washington. He had, he told FDR, prayed for the president’s re-election. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe,” Churchill wrote, “and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.” It was a brilliant and lovely note—and Roosevelt never replied, an omission that bothered Churchill for years. …

…In this small incident, we glimpse the human Churchill beneath the grandeur of the deity of history he has long since become. The human Churchill is Paul Johnson’s chief concern in his brief new biography, Churchill, but I raise the Case of the Unacknowledged Telegram because it contains one of Churchill’s finest forgotten phrases: “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.” It is an interesting test of the significance of any event, that: Will the problem or crisis of the hour be remembered—cue kettle drums—as long the English language is spoken? Damn little will meet that criterion, but Winston Churchill is among the things that will. …

…In his 166 pages, Johnson gives us what amounts to an elegant survey with a maxim-filled epilogue: in essence, the best possible dinner conversation about Churchill one could ever have with a gifted interlocutor, followed by what PowerPointers might think of as “take-away points.” The book’s most original offering is—in characteristically vivid prose and a consistent intelligence and urbanity—Johnson’s distillation of life lessons from Churchill’s storied career. This is biography as commencement speech—think highbrow how-to. (Examples of didactic wisdom: “always aim high”; “there is no substitute for hard work.”) …

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Peter Wehner posts on the bad reviews that the President’s foreign policy is receiving from abroad. To be sure, there’s no doubt Pickerhead didn’t lose any sleep when W was savaged this way. But, it is amazing to see foreigners grow out of love so quickly with the wonder child.

The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:

Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.

The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Wehner’s post.

Pete, your smart critique raises two key points, which supporters of the president might want to mull over as they consider whether a course correction is in order.

First, the roundup of international public opinion highlights what the Obama team often forgets: the whole world is watching wherever the president goes and whatever venue or crisis is occupying him at that moment. The Russians pay attention when he bows in Japan. The Iranians perk up when he meekly agrees to avoid free encounters with Chinese dissidents. The Syrians watch closely when the Obami try to finesse the reaction to the Goldstone report. And the North Koreans breathe a sigh of relief as they watch the farcical negotiations in Iran unravel. One senses that the Obami don’t quite grasp this, that they believe they are simply catering to this or that despot, trying as best as they can to ingratiate themselves and meet the “concerns” of whichever thugocracy occupies their attention that day. But in fact everyone watches everything, and the portrait of accommodation and concession is taken in by many audiences. That image of irresoluteness becomes fixed in our adversaries’ minds, even when they are not the immediate subject of the president’s focus on that visit or in that particular negotiation. Slowly, our adversaries begin to learn and to test us again and again, motivated by a sense that this president can be pushed and intimidated. The task of keeping foes at bay and allies in line becomes more difficult as a result.

Second, Pete observes: “Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the unique responsibility of the president.” And when national security does rise to the top of the list of voters’ concerns, it is generally because the public is becoming very, very alarmed. …

Jeffrey Goldberg blogs in the Atlantic that the Obama administration got in the way of the Middle East peace process.

This is what the President had to say after the Israeli announcement that 900 apartment units would be built in the South Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo:

“I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security. I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbors. I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous.”

Two issues. The first is that this Administration, unlike previous Administrations, doesn’t seem to understand that all settlements are not created equal. Palestinian negotiators have fairly consistently recognized that Gilo, a Jerusalem suburb built over the 1967 Green Line, but south, not east, of the city, would remain inside Israel in a final-status peace deal, as part of a dunam-for-dunam land-swap with the Palestinian Authority. So it doesn’t matter if Israel adds 900 apartments, or 90 shopping malls, to Gilo. It’s staying inside Israel.

The second issue is the more consequential one: Having made Gilo an issue when it did not previously exist as an issue (as a matter of fact, Gilo, during the second Uprising, stood for Israeli resilience in the face of Palestinian violence) Obama then warned that Gilo is making Palestinians embittered “in a way that could end up being very dangerous.” This is euphemistic, of course, but not too euphemistic, given the history of Palestinian violence. Obama’s statement reads almost as a kind of preemptive rationalization for violent Palestinian protest. It’s never a good idea, of course, for an American president to forecast Palestinian violence, but it’s especially unfortunate now, just when Israel had announced a moratorium on new settlement building. In fact, if the Obama Administration hadn’t made such a hash of the peace process, the Palestinians would now be returning to the negotiating table, acknowledging that the Netanyahu settlement moratorium is, as Hillary Clinton said, unprecedented. But since the moratorium didn’t meet the maximalist conditions set by the Administration, there’s no possible way the Palestinians could have been seen demanding less of the Israelis than Obama did.

In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft has Chris Matthews criticizing Obama’s indecision on Afghanistan.

This was weird.
Chris “Tingles” Matthews says Barack Obama needs to act a little less like Neville Chamberlain and more like Winston Churchill.

Via NewsBusters from this weekend’s “The Chris Matthews Show” …

…DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is, he is going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed and I think this is not…

MATTHEWS: So, too much Chamberlain and not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much, too much college professor.

For the record… It’s been at least 93 days since the Ditherer in Chief was asked by his top general in Afghanistan for reinforcements.

As for the speech, Victor Davis Hanson had some thoughts.

That was such a strange speech. Deploring partisanship while serially trashing Bush at each new talking point. Sending more troops, but talking more about when they will come home rather than what they will do to the enemy. There was nothing much new in the speech, yet apparently it took the president months to decide whether even to give it.

Ostensibly the talk was to be on Afghanistan; instead, the second half mostly consisted of the usual hope-and-change platitudes.

Still, the president, to his credit, is trying to give the best picture of the Afghanistan war. Obama started well in his review of why George Bush removed the Taliban. But that disinterested narrative lasted about two minutes. Then came the typical Obama talking points that characterize his reset-button foreign policy and don’t offer a high degree of confidence that our commander in chief wants to defeat the enemy or believes that he can win the war: …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Obama feels the need to bash Bush.

… It has become a nervous tic with Obama. Something is wrong, people are upset — blame Bush! Obama is going to need to rely on conservative support to prosecute the war since his own crowd certainly won’t be cheerleading for him. So it would have been politically smart and classy to have credited Bush with the surge or with leaving him the assessment for the Afghanistan war, which he relied on in the spring (the one his team previously denied receiving). But that’s not this president’s style. For reasons that aren’t quite clear — either personal peevishness or political expediency — even in a wartime speech in which bipartisanship would have been essential, he felt compelled to get in his digs. If President Obama seems smaller than candidate Obama it’s because he allows pettiness to get the best of him. He should give it up. He’s now president after all.

Clive Crook posts a thoughtful review of Climategate in the Atlantic.

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. …
…One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson’s study raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy. Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre’s campaign to get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work. …

…While I’m listing surprises, let me note how disappointed I was by The Economist’s coverage of all this. “Leaked emails do not show climate scientists at their best,” it observes. No indeed. I should say I worked at the magazine for years, admire it as much as ever, and rely on the science coverage especially. But I was baffled by its reaction to the scandal. “Little wonder that the scientists are looking tribal and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny scraps as proof of a conspiracy,” its report concludes. Tiny scraps?  I detest anti-scientific thinking as much as The Economist does. I admire expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is outrageous. …

…Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods–notably, peer review–that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards–at least whenever “the science” calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.

Roger Simon makes a good point about the IPCC chair’s defense of global warming theory.

Rajendra K. Pachauri – chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – sounded as if he was auditioning for Saturday Night Live when he said Sunday:

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.” …

…Here’s a thought. From now on, when there’s something to research of true scientific importance, let’s keep it as far away from the UN as possible. We might also want to put all findings on the Internet, so the real United Nations of Human Beings can evaluate them. Oh, I forgot. Pachauri tells us their process was “very transparent.” Note the “very” – the true sign of a liar. When something is transparent, it doesn’t need qualification. It is – or it isn’t.

Mark Steyn also posts on the IPCC chair. Apparently Rajendra Pachauri has taken jetsetting to a new level.

In order to save the planet from global roasting, it seems entirely reasonable to ask Mr. and Mrs. Joe Peasant to subordinate their freedom of movement to an annual “carbon allowance” preventing them flying hither and yon and devastating the environment. As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explains:

Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.

Rajendra Pachauri? Hey, if you’re manning the VIP lounge at Heathrow, that name may ring a bell:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

Wow. 443,243 miles. How many flying polar bears does Dr. Pachauri kill in an average quarter? Well, not to worry, he probably offsets his record-breaking ursocide with carbon credits from carbon billionaire Al Gore.

And in any case it’s okay to devastate the planet on IPCC business — plus the occasional cricket match:

So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.

…If you’re waiting for some journalist to ask him about the contradictions between his lifestyle and the one he wants the rest of us to submit to, that sound you hear is cricketers chirping.

In the Boston Globe, Beth Healy looks more closely at the making of Harvard’s financial crisis.

It happened at least once a year, every year. In a roomful of a dozen Harvard University financial officials, Jack Meyer, the hugely successful head of Harvard’s endowment, and Lawrence Summers, then the school’s president, would face off in a heated debate. The topic: cash and how the university was managing – or mismanaging – its basic operating funds.

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members. …

…But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses.

So how did one of the world’s great universities err so badly in something so basic? It is a story with many actors, the story of an institution that grew complacent as its endowment soared ever higher – an institution that, when the crunch hit, was operating on financial auto-pilot, with many key players gone, and those remaining inattentive, in retrospect, to the risks ahead. …

Charles Krauthammer’s take on the party crashers at the White House.

…What you have here is a harmless little con job pulled off by a middling, fairly shady, social-climbing set of publicity hounds, not very different from your average invitee to a White House state dinner. …

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Jennifer Rubin comments on Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s writings about the heartening and historic outcome of this chapter in the democracy of Honduras.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the elections in Honduras:

Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution. Yesterday’s elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle. National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo was the favorite to win in pre-election polls. Yet the name of the victor is almost beside the point. The completion of these elections is a national triumph in itself and a win for all people who yearn for liberty. …

…Almost 400 foreign observers from Japan, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. traveled to Honduras for yesterday’s elections. Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, the German parliament and Japan will also recognize the vote. The outpouring of international support demonstrates that Hondurans were never as alone these past five months as they thought. A good part of the world backs their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.

What is disturbing is that Obama did not count himself among those desiring to back “their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.” It’s hard to fathom what motivates the president and his team, and why they seem so reluctant to oppose our allies’ enemies. Perhaps they have so internalized the criticism leveled by America’s foes that they can no longer discern when the gang in Foggy Bottom is being “played” and what is in our own national interests. We do have them — national interests, that is — and it would be nice if the Obami recognized, articulated, and vigorously defended them, regardless of how loudly Brazil, Venezuela, and much of the rest of the “international community” squawks.

Rick Richman also posts on the Honduran resolution and on the State Department finally joining the party.

…On Friday, the State Department finally endorsed the election, describing it in terms that would have made Simon Bolivar blush:

The electoral process — launched well before June 28 and involving legitimate candidates representing parties with longstanding democratic traditions from a broad ideological spectrum — is conducted under the stewardship of the multi-party and autonomous Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which was also selected before the coup. The electoral renewal of presidential, congressional and mayoral mandates, enshrined in the Honduran constitution, is an inalienable expression of the sovereign will of the citizens of Honduras.

Honduras now holds the Guinness record for shortest Latin American “coup” ever. Yesterday, the election officials announced that more than 61.5 percent of registered Hondurans went to the polls, a historic record turnout:

The announcement from the TSE [Tribunal Supremo Electoral] received a standing ovation from the attentive room of official observers and spectators.

The TSE stated they would welcome any international audit of the results.

The Obama administration deserves credit for finally recognizing that its misguided policy had reached a dead end and reversing course before it was too late. It is a lesson the administration could profitably apply in other foreign-policy areas as well.

We have three items anticipating the speech tonight on our new Afghan policy. Jennifer Rubin comments on Obama’s Afghanistan indecision, and what he must do now that he has decided on a strategy.

…Here Obama has made his own job worse. By empowering the likes of Joe Biden and his domestic policy advisers to second-guess the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and to warn openly of the domestic consequences of embracing the only viable plan for victory, the president has signaled that he’s looking over his shoulder. The sole target of his concern has not been the enemy and the horrendous potential consequences of a halfhearted effort. Instead he’s been fixated on his left-wing base. He’s obsessed over an exit strategy, forgetting that his predecessor won a war without one and that George W. Bush’s wartime troubles stemmed not from failing to  promise an end date but from letting a losing strategy persist too long. Obama’s also muddied the waters on the identity of the enemy and whether we can achieve “victory,” a word never uttered but essential to leading a war effort.

Now, as the editors note, “Both Americans and Afghans wonder whether the president believes in the war and has the will to win it.” One way for Obama to demonstrate that he takes being commander in chief seriously would be to dismiss his left-wingers’ “tax the war” gambit, designed to undermine support for the effort we are about to undertake. He should be clear that this is sheer hypocrisy (where’s the stimulus surtax?) and won’t be realistically entertained.

Frankly, it might be a good time for the president to battle his left flank and demonstrate some moxie, if he has it. The world and a vast number of centrists in America, not to mention conservatives, think he’s a wimp. This is his time to prove them wrong.

In the Daily News, Michael Goodwin says we should evaluate three aspects of Obama’s Afghanistan speech.

How does Obama define the goal? He’s not likely to use the “V-word” because victory is verboten in a war on terror that doesn’t exist to this White House. But if Obama doesn’t say success is our goal and be specific about what that means, the commander in chief will be ducking his chief responsibility. …

How does Obama define the enemy? Last March, he announced a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and repeatedly referred to the Taliban as well as al Qaeda. They were inseparable when he said, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

He was right then, but there is considerable doubt he still believes in that linkage. …

…The medieval Sharia government the Taliban wants to impose marches in lockstep with al Qaeda goals. Obama himself cited 9/11 as proof of the connection. Any suggestion now that the Taliban is not part of the problem will reveal he has chosen the path of least political resistance at home.

How much emphasis will Obama put on getting out? Let’s hope press secretary Robert Gibbs’ comment that the president would focus on the exit strategy is only a sop to Democratic liberals opposed to more troops. While some explanation of the endgame is inevitable, a disproportionate emphasis could undercut the new troops before they are deployed. …

Toby Harnden discusses some of the political issues that likely factored into Obama’s indecision.

…He still defines himself principally as the unBush, at every turn reflexively adding the caveat that his predecessor bequeathed him a “mess”. By the time he finally reveals his decision on Afghanistan on Tuesday night, it will be just a day short of three months since General Stanley McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops to stave off American defeat.

This extraordinarily long process has been dubbed “dithering” by his critics, led by former vice-president Dick Cheney, and “deliberative” by his admirers. In fact, it is principally an ostentatious attempt to show that he is not President George W Bush, who once stated that he was “a gut player”.

Alongside that, Obama wants to avoid being President Lyndon Johnson, whose “escalation” (a negative term that is now common currency in news reports) of the Vietnam war condemned him to a one-term presidency despite his Great Society domestic reforms.

…Support for the war in Afghanistan now stands at barely a third of Americans, despite the reality that this was the country from which the 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned – quite a feat for a man who declared it the “good war” in his election campaign. …

…The 90-day “hiatus” – a plainly appropriate word for Bob Ainsworth, the British Defence Secretary to have used last week – in strategic direction from Washington has had a cost in terms of momentum and perception in Afghanistan that will not be easy to overcome.  …

Roger Simon blogs on an amazing development in Switzerland. The tolerant worldly Swiss have decided; no more minarets.

In a supposedly surprising development, the Swiss just voted to ban minarets on mosques in their country:

Over 57% of Swiss voters chose to approve a blanket ban on the construction of Muslim minarets, according to official results posted by Swiss news agency ATS.

Just days before the election only 37% of people polled by state-owned television station DRS said they would support the ban.

Swiss feminists were apparently in the lead in the “Stop the Minarets” campaign. No surprise there really. Salman Rushdie is not the only one to read Islamic texts (and behavior) as an assault on women. Anyone with eyes open, certainly an intelligent female, would. If only our own feminists could get off their reactionary multi-culturalist behinds in this regard. …

…Of course this is called a “right-wing proposal.” That must be news to those feminists. And, of course, there is no mention that throughout much of the Islamic world – forget minarets or spires – churches and synagogues are banned altogether (not to mention apostates have their throats slit).

On a personal note I remember Hans-Rudolf Merz well from my recent trip to Geneva for the Durban II Conference where I watched as the Swiss President welcomed the Holocaust-denying-nuclear-bomb-buliding-mega-misogynistic-homosexual-denying-and-now-demonstrator-murdering-religious-psychopath President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Call it ultra-bourgoies multi-culturalism or simply protecting banking interests, the whole thing was despicable. It’s great to see the Swiss people turn their backs on all that. …

We have Thomas Sowell’s third piece on the housing bubble, and the government’s leading role in it’s creation.

…In short, riskier loans were accepted as good loans by one of the key regulators of the housing markets. Moreover, HUD was not just accepting subprime lending but pushing for more. After HUD became a regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, these government-sponsored enterprises were set numerical goals — quotas — for what share of their lending was to be for “affordable housing” mortgages.

In practice, they were pushed to acquire more subprime mortgages.

This was important not only because of the risk to the assets of these two enterprises themselves but, because they are dominant forces in the housing market and major gigantic financial institutions, there were dangers to the whole financial market if things went wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose securities were widely held by other financial institutions on Wall Street and beyond.

The importance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing markets is demonstrated by the magnitude of their mortgage guarantees, which total more than two trillion dollars. That is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four nations.

Ordinarily, financial markets would become less willing to invest in an enterprise with ever-growing risks. But, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are officially private, profit-making enterprises, their size and the federal government’s involvement in both their creation and their ongoing operations led many investors to assume that the federal government would never allow them to fail. …

…In short, the policies and practices of many institutions, local and national, public and private, set the stage for the housing boom and the housing bust that followed.

Placing the roots of the housing boom and bust in the free market and the solution in government is very convenient for politicians and for those who favor government interventions. But such explanations are inconsistent with facts, however impressive they might be as exercises in rhetoric. …

In Jewish World Review, Michael Barone sums up global warming theory in the wake of Climategate.

…The most charitable plausible explanation I have seen comes from The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle. “The CRU’s main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish.”

Australian geologist Ian Plimer, a global warming skeptic, is more blunt. The e-mails “show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.”

Global warming alarmist George Monbiot of the Guardian concedes that the e-mails “could scarcely be more damaging,” adding, “I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” He has called for the resignation of the CRU director. All of which brings to mind the old computer geek’s phrase: garbage in, garbage out. …

The large number of unemployed teenagers should be one of Obama’s priorities. But instead, he pays obeisance to the left’s worship of minimum wage laws; always coercion over freedom. Steven Horwitz, in the Nightly Business Report, reports on one consensus that didn’t require hiding data or rigging numbers.

During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised that, in contrast to his predecessor, his presidency would be a “science presidency.” In his first year, Obama may well have taken some science more seriously than his predecessor, but one set of settled scientific research he has chosen to ignore has been the economics of the minimum wage. The result has been a nightmare for young workers, especially young workers of color.

Economic theory predicts that raising the minimum wage will cause those employees who are least productive to lose their jobs. If we raise the minimum wage from, say, $6 to $7, it’s the same thing as saying “any worker who cannot produce $7 worth of value each hour is not worth hiring.” Younger workers are, of course, among the least skilled in the economy. In addition, thanks to poor schools and historical discrimination, young workers of color are over-represented in this category. Higher minimum wages should disproportionately affect young workers and especially ones of color.

The empirical evidence to support this theoretical claim is abundant. Hundreds of studies of this relationship have been done by economists and they are nearly unanimous that higher minimum wages are associated with some level of increased unemployment among lower-skilled workers. Whatever consensus there might be among climate scientists about global warming, that among economists about minimum wage laws is at least as great (and, as we discovered recently, we don’t need to rig the computer code to make our models reconstruct pre-historic data to come out the way we want). Despite what the science says, the Obama Administration supported a minimum wage increase last July. …

In WSJ, Arch Puddington reviews David Engerman’s new book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. The people living in the pretend world of the academy, came to view the Soviets in the pretend world of their minds.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is today regarded by most of the world as an unalloyed good: the overdue collapse of a system that was incubated in terror and maintained by a vast police-state apparatus. The Soviet Union deprived ordinary people of their liberties, subjected entire nations to colonial rule, and ruined its own economy and that of its neighbors. Even those who objected to America’s policies during the period of superpower rivalry do not dispute that the Soviet “experiment” proved an abject failure, with terrifying human cost.

But as David C. Engerman reminds us in “Know Your Enemy,” his engrossing history of “the rise and fall of America’s Soviet experts,” the center of the scholarly universe had a more benign appraisal of Soviet reality through much of the Cold War. …

…In the early years, the relationship between the U.S. government and the scholarly community was one of happy co-existence. Government funds allowed scholars to conduct pioneering research, which in turn helped the policy community. University officials “could not imagine government work as presenting any challenge to academic autonomy,” Mr. Engerman notes. By the 1970s, however, the relationship had changed. The radical currents that swept through the universities in the 1960s stirred a hostility to cooperating with officialdom.

At the same time, a new generation of specialists emerged: They were determined to assess the Soviet experience—present and past—in a more optimistic light. Social scientists churned out study after study seeking to demonstrate that Soviet institutions functioned much like their counterparts in the U.S. and ridiculing the use of the word “totalitarian” to describe the Soviet system. Likewise, revisionist historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote accounts of the Stalin period that dealt primly with the Terror and upbraided traditionalist historians for being, as she put it, “preoccupied with questions of moral judgment.” …

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Christopher Booker, in the Telegraph, UK, elaborates on the scandals of Climategate.

…There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU. …

Ed Morrissey posts on the New York Times editorial board taking Obama to task over his Middle East foreign policy blunders.

It only took them three years to figure it out, of course.  The Gray Lady’s ire focuses on the disaster Obama has made of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which is usually a rolling disaster anyway.  American Presidents haven’t been able to do much to make it better, but as the Times explains, this one’s made it a lot worse than it had to be — mainly because he’s a diplomatic novice with team full of incompetents (via Geoff A) …

…The editors go on to castigate George Mitchell a little more for blowing the effort with the Saudis, who took their signals from Team Obama.  When Obama publicly demanded a halt to all settlements, the Saudis made that their line in the sand.  The Times scolds them for doing so, but the fact is that once the US made that demand, it put all the pressure on Israel and took all the pressure off of the other parties in the talks.

As the editorial says, Obama and Mitchell couldn’t think past their own opening move and game out the possibilities.  Why might that be?  The foreign-policy team that includes Emanuel and Samantha Power (at the National Security Council) has ideological interests in getting Israel to surrender.  Power suggested a few years ago that the Western nations should invade and occupy Israel in order to set the Palestinians free.  With that kind of advice flowing at the White House, this diktat on settlements is hardly surprising, nor is its end result.

When Newsweek and the New York Times tells a Democratic president that he’s screwing up foreign policy, it’s time to clean house and start getting professional help.  Unfortunately, neither of these publications considered the ramifications of endorsing an inexperienced ideologue for the top job when it counted.

And here’s the New York Times editorial.

…Peacemaking takes strategic skill. But we see no sign that President Obama and Mr. Mitchell were thinking more than one move down the board. The president went public with his demand for a full freeze on settlements before securing Israel’s commitment. And he and his aides apparently had no plan for what they would do if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said no.

Most important, they allowed the controversy to obscure the real goal: nudging Israel and the Palestinians into peace talks. (We don’t know exactly what happened but we are told that Mr. Obama relied more on the judgment of his political advisers — specifically his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel — than of his Mideast specialists.) …

…Mr. Netanyahu has since offered a compromise 10-month freeze that exempts Jerusalem, schools and synagogues and permits Israel to complete 3,000 housing units already under construction. The irony is that while this offer goes beyond what past Israeli governments accepted, Mr. Obama had called for more. And the Palestinians promptly rejected the compromise. …

In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson says that the US must get its fiscal house in order if we are to remain a global superpower, and thus to remain safe and keep our high standard of living.

…But if the United States succumbs to a fiscal crisis, as an increasing number of economic experts fear it may, then the entire balance of global economic power could shift. Military experts talk as if the president’s decision about whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan is a make-or-break moment. In reality, his indecision about the deficit could matter much more for the country’s long-term national security. Call the United States what you like—superpower, hegemon, or empire—but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power. …

…As interest payments eat into the budget, something has to give—and that something is nearly always defense expenditure. According to the CBO, a significant decline in the relative share of national security in the federal budget is already baked into the cake. On the Pentagon’s present plan, defense spending is set to fall from above 4 percent now to 3.2 percent of GDP in 2015 and to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2028.

Over the longer run, to my own estimated departure date of 2039, spending on health care rises from 16 percent to 33 percent of GDP (some of the money presumably is going to keep me from expiring even sooner). But spending on everything other than health, Social Security, and interest payments drops from 12 percent to 8.4 percent.

This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America’s debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term should be the administration’s most important task—significantly more than the 24 percent who see health-care reform as the No. 1 priority. But cutting the deficit in half is simply not enough. If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don’t forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

In the WSJ, Fred Barnes reviews the mistakes that have cost the president much of his political capital

…First, Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn’t a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda. …

…Second, Mr. Obama misread his own ability to sway the public. He is a glib, cool, likeable speaker whose sentences have subjects and verbs. During the campaign, he gave dazzling speeches about hope and change that excited voters. …

…But campaign speeches don’t have to be specific, and candidates aren’t accountable. Presidential speeches are different. The object is to persuade voters to back a certain policy, and it turns out Mr. Obama is not good at this. He failed to stop the steady decline in support for any of his policies, most notably health care. …

…Third, Mr. Obama misread Republicans. They felt weak and vulnerable after losing two straight congressional elections and watching John McCain’s presidential bid fall flat. They were afraid to criticize the newly elected president. If he had offered them minimal concessions, many of them would have jumped aboard his policies. If that had happened, the president could have boasted of achieving bipartisan compromise on the stimulus and other policies. He let the chance slip away. …

Thomas Sowell explains that every politician in Washington thinks his job is to take care of himself.

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems— of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind. …

…The current economic downturn that has cost millions of people their jobs began with successive administrations of both parties pushing banks and other lenders to make mortgage loans to people whose incomes, credit history and inability or unwillingness to make a substantial down payment on a house made them bad risks.

Was that stupid? Not at all. The money that was being put at risk was not the politicians’ money, and in most cases was not even the government’s money. Moreover, the jobs that are being lost by the millions are not the politicians’ jobs— and jobs in the government’s bureaucracies are increasing. …

…Very few people are likely to connect the dots back to those members of Congress who voted for bigger mortgage guarantees and bailouts by the FHA. So the Congressmen’s and the bureaucrats’ jobs are safe, even if millions of other people’s jobs are not. …

Investor’s Business Daily has an article from Svetlana Kunin, a Soviet refugee who has understands the evils of socialism.

…When I came to America in 1980 and experienced life in this country, I thought it was fortunate that those living in the USSR did not know how unfortunate they were.

Now in 2009, I realize how unfortunate it is that many Americans do not understand how fortunate they are. They vote to give government more and more power without understanding the consequences

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The climate “warm-mongers” aren’t going to let a little thing like evidence get in the way of their global warming beliefs says Mark Steyn.

My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the “climate change” racket was Stuart Varney’s interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama “St Elsewhere” but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an “activist.” … Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit, in which the world’s leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to “hide the decline” and other interesting matters. …

…”Peer-reviewed studies. Go to Science magazine, folks. Go to Nature,” babbled Ed. “Read peer-reviewed studies. That’s all you need to do. Don’t get it from you or me.”

Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you! …

…Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review”. When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. …

Charles Krauthammer discusses three efficient reforms for health care.

…First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do. …

…Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter. …

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues — the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget. …

Matthew Continetti thinks it is time to try to talk some sense into starry-eyed Dems about the nightmare their health reform will be.

Next time you run into a group of Democrats, offer to splash water on their faces. They’ve spent 2009 in a dream state, and it’s time they wake up. They’re convinced that they can subsidize health insurance for millions of people while also “bending the cost curve” of health care spending. They want to sign us up for the political equivalent of one of those three-step “eat more to lose weight” diets. Step one: Pile on the expenditures, regulations, taxes, and fees. Step two: Close your eyes. Step three: Pray it all works out in the end.

Sorry, it won’t. Entitlements cost money, and they almost invariably cost more than the government’s initial predictions. When you increase demand for a product and the supply remains fixed, the price rises. Thanks to the individual mandate, the Democratic health care bills lasso Americans into a heavily regulated health insurance oligopoly. All these new consumers will wander through the government-run “exchanges,” buying the plans they can afford with taxpayer subsidies. As demand for health care increases, so will the cost.

The idea that expanding coverage will save the country money has always been a fantasy. …

Poll numbers show that Dems can’t have their cake and eat it too, says Karl Rove.

…However, since taking office Mr. Obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion expansion of the child health program known as S-chip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations spending bill, and an $80 billion car company bailout. He also pushed a $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the House and is now urging Congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health-care bill.

An honest appraisal of the nation’s finances would recommend dropping both of these last two priorities. But the administration has long planned to run up the federal credit card. …

…This spending has been matched by a decline in the president’s poll numbers. This week, Gallup found that his job approval rating slipped below 50%. Last March, Americans approved of Mr. Obama’s handling of the deficit by a 52% to 43% margin in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. By October, his standing had flipped in the same poll, with 45% approving and 51% disapproving.

Anger over deficits was picked up in a late October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which asked voters if they’d rather boost “the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits” or keep the “budget deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.” Only 31% chose boosting the economy; 62% wanted to keep the deficit down. …

David Harsanyi writes that at least two Democrat congressmen have not seen the recent polls.

W ith good reason, the prevailing economic concern of most Americans is jobs.

With this in mind, two Democratic congressmen have cooked up a plan to help us out. The strategy entails sucking another $150 billion of capital investment out of the market each year and handing it to an organization that can’t balance a budget, borrows money with abandon, runs massive deficits and excels at creating fairy tale jobs.

Under a bill being drafted by Democratic Reps. Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, every purchase of a financial instrument like stocks, options, derivatives and futures would face an additional .25 percent tax — because capital gains taxes simply haven’t been hampering private investment enough.

… Here’s a restorative idea: Spend less. …

John Tierney makes the case for keeping archaeological treasures widespread. Is a cultural heritage tied solely to a geographic region? And does the government currently in power in that region own the history of that region?

…In some cases, it makes aesthetic or archaeological sense to keep artifacts grouped together where they were found, but it can also be risky to leave everything in one place, particularly if the country is in turmoil or can’t afford to excavate or guard all its treasures. After the Metropolitan Museum was pressured to hand over a collection called the Lydian Hoard, one of the most valuable pieces was stolen several years ago from its new home in Turkey.

Restricting the export of artifacts hasn’t ended their theft and looting any more than the war on drugs has ended narcotics smuggling. Instead, the restrictions promote the black market and discourage the kind of open research that would benefit everyone except criminals. …

…Some of the most culturally protectionist nations today, like Egypt, Italy and Turkey, are trying to hoard treasures that couldn’t have been created without the inspiration provided by imported works of art. (Imagine the Renaissance without the influence of “looted” Greek antiquities.) And the current political rulers of those countries often have little in common culturally with the creators of the artifacts they claim to own. …

Dr. Hawass may consider the Rosetta Stone to be the property of his government agency, but the modern state of Egypt didn’t even exist when it was discovered in 1799 (much less when it was inscribed in 196 B.C., during the Hellenistic era). The land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the local historians were most interested in studying their Islamic heritage.

The inscribed stone fragment, which had been used as construction material at a fort, didn’t acquire any significance until it was noticed by Napoleon’s soldiers and examined by the scholars on the expedition. …

Nick Schulz, in the Enterprise Blog, has a fascinating chart that helps explain some of the poor choices coming from the Obama administration.

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

In Bloomberg News, Caroline Baum takes the Obama administration to task for the bogus job numbers.

At first it was just an unverifiable assertion. Now it turns out to have been a case of bureaucratic ineptitude and possible fraud. Transparency and accountability aren’t working out the way President Barack Obama had hoped.

The administration was already skating on thin ice when it announced on Oct. 30, with great fanfare, that 640,329 jobs had been created or saved as a result of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. …

…Watchdog.org, a collection of independent journalists covering state and local government, has put together a “Guide to the Stimulus, District by (Phantom) District.” Overall the group found that 440 phantom districts in 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories received $6.4 billion and created or saved — let’s consolidate to “craved” — 30,000 jobs. That works out to $213,333 per job. Think how much easier, not to mention transparent, it would have been to hand out that kind of real money to real people who will spend it! …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reminds us that we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the failure of collectivism in the US.

Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving. And there is no better time to remember an underappreciated lesson of the original Thanksgiving: that the Pilgrims nearly starved to death because of collectivism and eventually saved themselves by adopting a system of private property. Economist Benjamin Powell tells the story here:

Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did. …

…Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. While not a complete private property system, the move away from communal ownership had dramatic results.

…Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years. It was only after allowing greater property rights that they could feast without worrying that famine was just around the corner. …

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National Review OnLine with a symposium on things for which we might want to give thanks.

David Warren is the first of our favorites to column on the hacked emails of the globalony specialists in England; what Mark Steyn has called Warmergate.

A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which “human-induced global warming” claims have been advanced over the years.

By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia — in some respects the international clearing house for climate change “science” — he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.

More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various “progressive” causes require a particular scientific result.

There is little doubt that the e-mails were real. Even so warmist a true-believer as George Monbiot led his column in the Guardian yesterday with: “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The e-mails extracted … could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” …

Debra Saunders writes on the misuse of pardon power.

On Wednesday, President Obama will issue the White House’s standard hokey pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey. It goes with the job.

That’s good news for the lucky turkey, but not much help for the many nonviolent first offenders languishing in federal prisons because, nine months into office, Obama has yet to exercise his presidential pardon power. …

… the new president doesn’t seem eager to use his unfettered pardon power to correct sentencing injustices for the politically unconnected.

Look at Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder. When Holder worked for the Clinton administration, Ruckman noted, “he wouldn’t take the time, energy or effort to make it a regular feature of government.”

“But he would, if you will, make an effort in wildly controversial situations.” Such as Holder’s “neutral leaning positive” recommendation for the pardon sought by fugitive gazillionaire Marc Rich and his role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists.

When you think about it, the pardon petition is the rare Washington exercise that encourages politically unconnected people to petition their president for relief. But like Bush and Clinton before him, Obama seems to be hoarding this power. It’s as if Team Obama sees justice as perk, not an equal right.

David Harsanyi on Washington “courage.”

… These days, the idea of courage — especially in Washington — flows freely.

Recently, Newt Gingrich called Obama “a liberal Democratic president who has the courage to take on the establishment on education,” as if the tepid education reforms of the administration were akin to a power move against the Gambino crime syndicate (though, admittedly, the National Education Association comes close).

Actress Angie Harmon this week declared Sarah Palin was a “woman who has her own set of values and morals and ethics and has the courage to live her life accordingly.” How many of you have the steely courage to sell 700,000 books in a week? …

John Stossel says we pay politicians to lie to us.

When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician.

President Obama insists that health care “reform” not “add a dime” to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow “$900 billion over 10 years” has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit.

It’s amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion.

How do they do that? …

Jennifer Rubin has a couple of posts on the KSM New York trial. First on how the prez might get out of this. She also posts on KSM’s lawyer who has made frivolous pleadings in the past. And has been admonished by the court and ordered to pay the costs his opponents incurred defending against his bogus motions.

… The president can blame Greg Graig or Holder, if he must. Obama reversed course on the detainee photos after advice from Justice, so he’s not unaccustomed to the process. Embarrassing? Sure. But if he thinks about what years and years of a show trial will mean, and the impact it will have on his image as commander in chief as the public realizes that this could easily have been avoided, Obama may come to see that a quick dose of embarrassment now is preferable to years of humiliation down the road.

Someone’s polls are crashing and J. Rubin posts on that also.

… You might have to strain to get the point, but the Times is explaining that the health-care debate is making things worse because it’s proving conservatives’ point about Obama’s statist tendencies. It’s also significant that Obama did not get a bump, in fact got a slide, out of his overseas trip, which reminded Americans of their president’s cringey incompetence. (The Times, again, spins this: “The media coverage of Mr. Obama’s visit to China was critical of the way he dealt with Chinese leaders.”)

Well, rational people would look at this and reassess, see what has gone wrong, fire those whose judgment was flawed, and try to get the presidency back on track. This crowd? A combination of true believers and purveyors of “damn the consequences for the moderates,” I suspect, will prevent much if any alteration in the course of this administration. Only elections, I suspect, will have much impact.

Ryan Streeter at American.com says Texas v. California might be a metaphor for the divisions in our country.

New Geography, the online magazine created by Joel Kotkin and others with a special focus on demographics and trends, has been tracking the implosion of California in an interesting way: by comparing it to Texas.

Texas and California are America’s two most populous states, together numbering approximately 55 million people, which is only about 6 million less than the United Kingdom, where I live. California, as everyone knows, has a coolness factor that Texas cannot match. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and wine. Say no more. But, unless one has been living in a cave, everyone knows that the cool state is also the broke state. If Hollywood turned California’s budget and fiscal position into a movie, it would be a blockbuster horror film indeed.

Texas, on the other hand, is growing, creating wealth, and attracting the entrepreneurial and creative classes that too many people think only go to places like New York and California. This interesting post by Tory Gattis at New Geography explains why. He shares a four-point analysis from Trends magazine: …

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For a long time it looked like the new administration would be Welcome Back Carter time. Read this from Spengler and see if you don’t agree with Pickerhead we are instead seeing Carter Lite. Amazing, the luck of Jimmy Carter; somebody worse than him. Think that’s unfair? Read next about Obama’s policy towards India. W’s policy there was a major American success. So, the petulant president ignores the country.

… Obama’s fecklessness has allowed the unimaginable to occur: Russia’s influence in the Middle East rivals that of the United States.

David Samuels wrote on November 13 in Slate magazine about “the elegant and brutal way that the Russians have leveraged their position as the arms supplier of last resort to Iran and Syria”. Russia feints towards Iran by offering to sell Tehran a top-of-the-line air-defense system, the S-300. It then extorts concessions from the West (or Israel) in return for delaying shipment of the system. One result of Russia’s rocket diplomacy, Samuels observes, is a three-way alliance between Russia, India and Israel to develop high-tech weapons, including a so-called fifth-generation fighter that may be able to challenge America’s F-35.

If Israel does attempt an air strike against Iran’s nuclear program, it will do so in response to the visible failure of American diplomacy, and with the tacit permission of Russia – which has the capacity to veto such a strike by giving Iran anti-aircraft missiles of sufficient capability (or by not giving Israel the key to the counter-measures, for Russia never sells a weapons system to another country that it cannot neutralize).

Obama’s foreign policy in every manifestation – Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia – has come to grief, and the White House so far has shown no reaction except lockjaw. The great decisions of the world are being taken outside Washington. Too many things have gone wrong to secure the outcome. The game now is in the hands of the spoilers, the players who draw strength from chaos, and first among them is Russia. That creates positive feedback, for the powers who thrive on uncertainty will do their best to generate more

With India’s prime minister currently visiting the US, Tunku Varadarajan takes the opportunity to discuss the importance of India in US foreign relations.

…It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the political, strategic, and moral worth to America, the world’s most powerful democracy, of a strong alliance with India, the world’s largest. Mr. Obama, by no stretch a man of tepid intelligence, has calibrated things artfully: Not only is Mr. Singh the first state visitor to Washington since the president took office in January, his trip is the first time that India has headed an American president’s list for a state visit—ever. (Richard Nixon must be turning in his grave.) …

…Given all this swirl, Mr. Obama has had scant inclination to pay much attention to, let alone court, Delhi. This has not gone down well in India, a country surrounded by a wall of thin skin. India had grown used, under Mr. Obama’s predecessor, to alpha-dog treatment. George W. Bush was the best American president India ever had, and Mr. Obama’s ability to take India for granted is, in some measure, a tribute to the extent to which Mr. Bush locked the two countries into a presumptively inseparable alliance. But for all his emphasis on diplomacy in dealing with hostile states, like Iran, or inveterate competitor-states, like China, Mr. Obama has failed to grasp the diplomatic importance of tending to alliances, whether they be old and true ones, such as the one with Israel, or young and sensitive ones, such as the one with India. …

…Finally, a broader word about India and its relationship with America: Unlike China, which is inherently competitive for global leadership—and which will never accept American leadership or direction—India is a country that would, like Britain or Japan or Germany, settle for a partnership with the United States that guaranteed mutual benefit and respect. India’s natural state, if nations can be said to have such a thing, is neither triumphalist nor antagonist; it is cooperative and redemptive, much as America’s tends to be. One trusts that Mr. Obama will come to see these qualities as clearly as his predecessor did. If not, this could be one area in which history will judge Mr. Obama to have been “dumb,” and Mr. Bush to have been the “smart” one.

Pickerhead thinks that Beltway bias shows when discussing Palin’s supposed lack of qualifications to be president, considering the empty suit who currently occupies the position. Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts his thoughts.

Longtime readers may recall that I was initially positive about Sarah Palin because her record was much more libertarian than that of most other major national politicians. Later, I had to reassess my view of Palin, as her ignorance of many important policy issues became apparent. But I also emphasized that ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity, and that in my view Palin suffers from the former, not the latter — a conclusion also reached by liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. I do a lot of research on political ignorance, and the distinction between ignorance and stupidity is one that I have often urged people to keep in mind. For reasons that I discuss here and here, even professional politicians often find it rational to devote their time to activities other than learning about major national issues.

Still, an ignorant but intelligent person is capable of remedying her ignorance to a greater extent than one who is both ignorant and stupid. In reading Palin’s recent memoir, Going Rogue, I wanted to see if there was any evidence that she has taken steps to address what many people see as her biggest weakness — myself included. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say either way. As a sympathetic WSJ reviewer points out, the book devotes little attention to national policy issues. Palin does come across as knowledgeable about Alaska state issues, but her facility in that area was never seriously in question.

The book argues at length that the various gaffes that revealed Palin’s ignorance during the 2008 campaign were mostly the fault of McCain’s consultants and a biased media. I remain unpersuaded. Yes, many people in the media were biased against Palin, and perhaps the consultants made mistakes (it’s hard for me to assess that claim without knowing more about the consultants’ side of the story). Even so, there is no excuse for Palin’s inability to give competent answers to relatively simple questions about such things as which newspapers and magazines she read, which Supreme Court decisions she disagrees with, or describing the basics of her position on US policy towards Russia. If Katie Couric really was out to get Palin, as the book suggests, she could surely have asked tougher questions than these. In any event, a candidate facing a biased media should be all the more careful to avoid obvious mistakes. …

Ilya Somin also has optimistic comments about right-wing populism, despite his somewhat exaggerated concerns about the irrational fringe elements and their sway.

I am no fan of populism of either the left or right-wing variety. In my view, most populist movements exploit voter ignorance and irrationality to promote policies that tend to do far more harm than good. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the right-wing populist reaction to the economic crisis and Obama’s policies. With rare exceptions, right-wing populists such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the Tea Party protesters, have advocated free market approaches to dealing with the crisis, and have attacked Obama and the Democratic Congress for seeking massive increases in government spending and regulation. They have not responded in any of several much worse ways that seemed like plausible alternatives a year ago, and may still be today.

True, much of their rhetoric is oversimplified, doesn’t take account of counterarguments, and is unfair to opponents. But the same can be said for nearly all political rhetoric directed at a popular audience made up of rationally ignorant voters who pay only very limited attention to politics and don’t understand the details of policy debates. On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars. There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories. Indeed, efforts to paint the Tea Partiers and others as merely closet racists usually have to rely on unsupported claims about “unspoken” assumptions and subtexts. Most, if not all, of the right-wing populists would have reacted in much the same way if the policies advocated by Obama had instead been put forward by a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton or President John Edwards.

Things could have been a lot worse. For example, the right-wing populists could have reacted to Obama and the financial crisis by embracing the kind of big government social conservatism advocated by Mike Huckabee during the presidential campaign. Still worse, they could have flocked to the protectionism and nativism advocated by people like Pat Buchanan. This latter possibility would have been in line with the anti-illegal immigration hysteria that swept the populist right just two years ago. …

Thomas Sowell’s series on the housing bubble continues. Sowell explains how the government forced banks to meet racial quotas, rather than assessing loans on creditworthiness.

…Although the Community Reinvestment Act had no major immediate impact, over the years its underlying assumptions and provisions provided the basis for ever more insistent pressure on lenders from a variety of government officials and agencies to lend to those whom politicians and bureaucrats wanted them to lend to, rather than to those whom lenders would have chosen to lend to on the basis of the lenders’ own experience and expertise.

These pressures began to build in the 1990s and increased exponentially thereafter. Studies in the early 1990s, showing different mortgage-loan approval rates for blacks and whites, set off media sensations and denunciations, leading to both congressional and White House pressures on agencies regulating banks to impose new lending rules, and to monitor statistics on the loan approval rates by race, by community and by income, with penalties on banks and other lenders for failing to meet politically-imposed norms or quotas.

These stepped-up pressures began during the George H.W. Bush administration and escalated during the Clinton administration, when Attorney General Janet Reno threatened legal action against lenders whose racial statistics raised her suspicions.

It would be too much of a detour at this point to go into the details of these claims of racial discrimination by mortgage lenders. However, even at this point, the idea that lenders would be offended by receiving monthly mortgage payment checks in the mail from blacks should at least give us pause to assess whether or not it seems plausible — especially since a substantial majority of both blacks and whites had their mortgage-loan applications approved.

The issue has been about the statistical difference between these approval rates, not any claim that most blacks could not get mortgage loans. …

…For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn’t enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of “innovative or flexible” lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods.

In plain English, the regulators imposed quotas — and, if lenders had to resort to “innovative or flexible” standards and methods to meet those quotas, so be it. …

…These were not the only government pressures on banks to fulfill lending quotas. In 1993, the Department of Housing and Urban Development “began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers that declined a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants.” Lenders then began lowering their down payment and income requirements. …

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In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff builds an explanation of the Chinese pegging the yuan to the US dollar, and what will happen when the Chinese stop this practice.

During President Obama’s high profile visit to China this week, the most frequently discussed, yet least understood, topic was how currency valuations are affecting the economic relationship between the United States and China. The focal problem is the Chinese government’s policy of fixing the value of the renminbi against the U.S. dollar. While many correctly perceive that this ‘peg’ has contributed greatly to the current global imbalances, few fully comprehend the ramifications should that peg be discarded.

The common understanding is both incomplete and naive. Most analysts simply see the peg as China’s principal weapon in an economic struggle for global ascendancy. The peg, they argue, offers China a competitive advantage by making its products cheaper in U.S. markets, thus allowing Chinese firms to gobble up market share and steal jobs from U.S. manufacturers. The thought is that were China to allow its currency to rise, American manufactures would regain their lost edge, and both manufacturing firms and the jobs formerly associated with them would return. In this narrative, the struggle centers on the United States’ diminishing leverage in persuading the Chinese to lay down their unfair weaponry. It’s a sympathetic picture, but it tells the wrong story.

While the peg certainly is responsible for much of the world’s problems, its abandonment would cause severe hardship in the United States. In fact, for the U.S., de-pegging would cause the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. Our economy is currently on life support provided by an endless flow of debt financing from China. These purchases are the means by which China maintains the relative value of its currency against the dollar. As the dollar comes under even more downward pressure, China’s purchases must increase to keep the renminbi from rising. By maintaining the peg, China enables our politicians and citizens to continue spending more than they have and avoiding the hard choices necessary to restore our long-term economic health. …

In WaPo, Robert Samuelson comments on Obamacare’s transfer of wealth from the young to the old.

One of our long-running political stories is the economic assault on the young by the old. We have become a society that invests in its past and disfavors the future. This makes no sense for the nation, but as politics it makes complete sense. The elderly and near elderly are better organized, focus obsessively on their government benefits and seem deserving. Grandmas and Grandpas command sympathy.

Everyone knows that the resulting “entitlements” dominate government spending and squeeze education, research, defense and almost everything else. In fiscal 2008 — the last “normal” year before the economic crisis — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43 percent of federal spending and more than twice military spending. Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old.

Now comes the House-passed health-care “reform” bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of that for younger Americans. That’s much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those age 60 to 64 is four to five times greater than those 18 to 24. So, the young would overpay for insurance that — under the House bill — people must buy: Twenty- and thirtysomethings would subsidize premiums for fifty-and sixtysomethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.) …

In Der Spiegel, Gabor Steingart assesses Obama’s Asian trip, and reviews Obama’s foreign policy paradigm.

…The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences. …

We hear from another disillusioned liberal. In Politico, Elizabeth Drew discusses Greg Craig’s departure.

…While he (Obama) was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason – not the first or only reason – to conclude that he wasn’t the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign. …

In the Daily Beast, Lee Siegel looks at Obama’s governing style in light of the KSM decision.

…This illusion of national participation in his decision-making process, with the promise of a happy ending that excludes no one, has been Obama’s method almost from Day One. Call it the American Idol style of governing—except that no possibility ever gets voted out of the competition. …

…On health care, once again, Obama proclaimed his desire for an ideal solution, held himself aloof from the fray, and let the public, the media, and the politicians turn it into a World Wrestling match that made almost any sort of compromise a victory. On Afghanistan, the same process: The president might deplore the leaks that came from inside and outside his administration, but they dripped slowly, and from widely scattered places, just like the slowly dripping, all-inclusive way he appears to think.

Obama seems not so much to govern as to preside. And yet for all the prudent pragmatism of his style, he doesn’t seem merely to want to please everyone. He seems determined not to be held responsible for the displeasure he causes. In the end, Obama won’t be blamed for what will likely be the health-care bill’s substantial flaws. Instead, the transparency of the process leading up to the bill ensures that at every point where the bill seems to fail one constituency or another, a particular person or people will be blamed for thwarting Obama. …

In News Busters, Noel Sheppard has a surprising post on Chris Matthews’ opinion of Obama.

Chris Matthews appears to have lost that loving feeling for Barack Obama.

On “The Chris Matthews Show” Sunday, the once smitten MSNBCer called some of Obama’s recent mistakes “Carteresque” …

…Potentially as surprising as Matthews bringing these issues up was the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut and David Ignatius agreeing with him

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Welcome back. The word these days is optics, visuals, signals. In the Carter presidency, the optics were not exactly robust, and Ronald Reagan rode that to a big victory in 1980. Is the Obama White House sending some Carteresque signals these days? Some see that in the deep bow to the Emperor of Japan, an unforced error say critics. Then there was, there was what happened in China: Obama got nothing in the way of concessions over there in spite of playing the polite visitor. And his effort to speak directly to the Chinese was jammed by the government. Third, that decision to try the terrorists up in that federal court in New York City. Again, nothing that had to be done, and critics say it shows that Obama, his team doesn’t understand this is a war we’re in. David, that’s the question. These optics are everything in a president. Carter used to carry that garment bag over his shoulder. This president is he making mistakes like in China like in Japan?

DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST : I think he is coming across as stiff. He is talking too much sometimes and communicating too little. So the opposite of what we saw during the campaign. Although the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York apparently was Eric Holder’s, it strikes me that it really is a mistake. I mean, there are too many bad things that could happen. There is no reason to have to have done this. …

Sometimes you have to laugh at the ludicrous liberal politicians. Jonah Goldberg has an article in National Review that helps us do that.

…The point of that emasculating exercise was ostensibly to tell the world that Joe Biden was going to be riding herd over how the stimulus money was spent. It’s worth revisiting exactly what he said:

“That is why I have asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort — because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my Cabinet, as well as mayors and governors across the country, that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend. I have appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general to ferret out any and all cases of waste and fraud. And we have created a new website called Recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.”

In the cold, bracing light of today’s facts, this is just plain bladder-draining hilarious. We’ve all heard the stories of vast sums of money funding a tiny number of jobs, and tiny amounts of money paying for vast numbers of jobs. Even better, the stories have for the most part been broken by such non-right-wing-decoder-ring-wearers as the AP and the Boston Globe. A story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that after spending $608.9 million, the White House got 1,458 jobs. That’s nearly half a million dollars per job. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Talladega County alone claimed that it stretched $42,000 into 5,000 jobs “saved or created.”

“Saved or created” is itself the greatest weaselly locution yet coined in the 21st century. Just for the record, I save or create 500 push-ups every morning. …

Another great T-Shirt. This from Boing Boing.net.

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In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne makes a bleak evaluation of our economic situation. Here’s the opening, and a realistic assessment of how Obama got votes.

The U.S. economy is in uncertain times. Analysts are split between those seeing recovery and those fearing a second downturn. This confusion is being echoed in the highest levels of government as President Obama simultaneously speaks about the need for more federal spending and warns of the dangers of increased debt. As the volatile markets indicate, investors are not only confused – they are seriously concerned.

The country appears to be going through a period of buyer’s remorse over the election of Barack Obama. The majority cobbled together by the President one year ago included the Democratic base, independents hoping for “change,” and many disaffected Republicans betrayed by the Bush Administration’s big-government neoconservatism. It is unlikely that most of these voters favored an overt push toward socialism; however, this is what they have received. As the ‘tea parties’ illustrate, voters are not only confused – they are seriously concerned.

These concerns are justified. The Administration’s hard-left turn was evident from the outset. Ignoring expert advice to spend on job-creating infrastructure, Obama spent wildly on entitlements. Now, with rising grassroots discontent, a falling currency, and threats to America’s AAA credit rating, there is some evidence that the Administration is trying to hedge its bets through tough talk. Yet, they still have not taken any tough action. As their gold stockpiling highlights, foreign governments are not only confused – they are seriously concerned. …

14 percent of mortgages are in trouble. One out of seven. In WaPo, Renae Merle reports that foreclosures are increasing due to unemployment.

More than 14 percent of borrowers were in trouble on their mortgage during the third quarter, a new record, according to an industry survey released Thursday, which also suggests that the foreclosure rate is likely not to peak until next year as unemployment rates continue to rise.

Unemployment remains a big driver of the problem, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, which conducts the survey. Those with delinquent loans now include a growing portion of people traditionally considered creditworthy and people whose mortgages are insured by the Federal Housing Administration. …

…About 9.6 percent of borrowers were delinquent on their mortgage during the third quarter, according to the survey, and another 4.5 percent more were somewhere in the foreclosure process. Overall, about 14 percent of mortgage loans or 7.4 million households were delinquent or in the foreclosure process during the quarter, according to the group.

That is the highest level recorded by the survey, which has been conducted since 1972, and is up from about 10 percent of borrowers who were in trouble during the same period last year.

If unemployment rates peak by the middle of next year, foreclosures could reach their highest levels by the end of the year, Brinkmann said. But even after peaking, foreclosure rates are likely to remain elevated as borrowers in regions that have had steep price declines and now owe more than their home is worth continue to struggle, he said. …

In Contentions, John Steele Gordon has commentary on the national debt.

…The national debt was for most of American history, as Hamilton said it would be, a “national blessing.” It allowed us to fight and win our wars and to relieve suffering in an economic depression far worse than what the country is experiencing now. But in the last thirty years — the most prosperous and relatively peaceful thirty-year period in American history — liberals and “conservatives,” Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington have allowed the debt to explode for their short-term political benefit while they hid the truth with phony accounting.

How bad was it? Consider this: In 1980, the debt was 33.3 percent of the country’s GDP. By 1990 the GDP had increased by 37.6 percent in real terms. But the debt had grown much faster. It was 55.9 percent of the much larger GDP. In the 1990’s GDP increased by 39.7 percent, and the debt more than kept pace. It was 58 percent of GDP in 2000. At the end of 2008, GDP had grown 18.5 percent over 2000, and the debt was fast approaching 80 percent of GDP.  And the debt, being denominated in dollars, is made smaller by inflation while GDP is enlarged.

No one believes that the debt can be kept under 100 percent of GDP in the near future. And if Obamacare gets passed in anything like its present form, it will only makes matters far worse. As Mr. Holtz-Eakin explains, President Obama’s promise not to sign a bill that adds to the deficit is false:

. . . the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.

If you’re disturbed by the long-term outlook for the country’s fiscal health, you shouldn’t be. You should be terrified.

Vermont and Europe may have more in common than Vermont might like, says Mark Steyn.

… In fact, Vermont school enrollments have declined 13 years in a row. Since 1996, they’ve fallen by 13 percent, slumping below 100,000 in 2004 and projected to fall below 90,000 in 2014. The part of the state that my corner of New Hampshire borders is admittedly rural, and it’s not an unusual phenomenon for small towns to drain population to the big cities. But a couple of days later I was in the capital, Montpelier, and its school board is in merger talks with the neighboring towns of Berlin and Calais.

If schoolkids are thin on the ground, the state’s total population has held steady — 604,000 in 1999, 621,000 today. So Vermont is getting proportionately more childless. Which is to say that Vermont, literally, has no future. …

…Graying ponytailed hippies and chichi gay couples aren’t enough of a population base to run a functioning jurisdiction. To modify Howard Dean, Vermont is the way liberals think America ought to be, and you can’t make a living in it. So if you’re a cash-poor but land-rich native Vermonter taxed and regulated and hedged in on every front, you face a choice: In the new North Country folk wisdom, they won’t let you fish, so you might as well cut bait. Your outhouse is in breach of zoning regulations, so you might as well get off the pot. Etc. When he ran for president, Howard Dean was said to have inspired America’s youth. In Vermont, he mainly inspired them to move somewhere else. The number of young adults fell by 20 percent during the Dean years. And what’s left is a demographic disaster: The state’s women have the second lowest birthrate in the nation, and the state’s workforce is already America’s oldest. Last year, Chris Lafakis of Moody’s predicted Vermont would have “a really stagnant economy” not this year or this half-decade but for the next 30 years. …

…Nowhere in the news reports of school-merger talks does anyone suggest trying to reverse the policies that drive out young families and make Vermont — what’s the word the eco-types dig? — “unsustainable.” …

In the Enterprise blog, Charles Murray has a thoughtful post on Glenn Beck.

…Beck was, as usual, standing in front of his blackboard. Chalked on it was:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson

It is a sentiment with which I completely agree. I’ve written whole books with that sentiment as the subtext. The problem: The quote is a fake. Thomas Jefferson never said it. Jefferson would have been sympathetic to the idea, as other writings clearly imply. But he didn’t actually say it. In front of a national television audience, Glenn Beck put up a quote that his researchers would have discovered is a fake if they had done the slightest bit of Googling.

…So here’s the unbearable paradox. Beck really has had important effects on the way the Obama administration and its legislation is perceived. It is conceivable that if healthcare goes down to a razor-thin defeat, Beck will have made the difference. If that turns out to be the case, he will have made a far greater contribution to the survival of the American project than ink-stained wretches like me can dream of having. And I want to shut him up?

I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework. ..

David Harsanyi’s article merits a pithy introduction, but I can’t find the words. Speaking of words, will Facebook be responsible for, “Don’t unfriend me, Bro!”

One needn’t be William Safire, though, to be unsettled that the word “philanderer” is a major mystery to so many people. According to a new list by Merriam-Webster, “philanderer” (a national pastime, meaning to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife) was one of the most searched words of the past year because of the crush of politicians and celebrities busy hiking the Appalachian Trail.

The word receiving the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time was “admonish” (to express warning or disapproval). It was triggered by a crude outburst of a South Carolina congressman and the subsequent moralistic “admonishment” of him by Congress. …

…The 2009 Word of the Year, announced this week, is “unfriend.” Unfriend is a verb, meaning the removal of a virtual acquaintance from your social networking’s pretend “friends” list. It would appear in sentence as so: “Oh, yeah, now I remember why I didn’t keep in touch with those bozos from high school. I’m not sure how they found me, but I must remember to unfriend them.”…

Late last week, a group of Russians hacked into computers at a university in England. Specifically, it was the U of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in Hadley (Hadley CRU). The hackers posted 3,000 documents (mostly emails) on the web. They have proven to be an embarrassment to people who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW); the belief that humans have been the cause of the past increase in earth’s temperatures. The news has been breathlessly reported by a number of bloggers. The best we’ve seen so far has been James Delingpole in the Telegraph, UK.

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

…But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. …

Richard Brookhiser weaves an interesting discourse on apples.

…Left to themselves, apples mutate uncontrollably, so growers employ grafts to make sure they get what they want. Agricultural-research stations produce new varieties by careful cross-fertilization. But once in a while, some new seedling pops up that everyone decides he likes; such varieties often retain the word “pippin” (Middle English for seed) in their names.

Some varieties do go back only a few centuries shy of Chaucer. …but in the last half century they fell by the wayside, largely thanks to their looks. Calville Blanc d’Hiver is yellow-green and bulbous, Esopus Spitzenberg is yellow and red, Newtown Pippin is often russeted, or marked by rough brown streaks. In the mass market they were supplanted by apples like Macintosh and Red Delicious, red and sturdy enough to survive shipping: fine fruits in themselves, but a bit drained of zest by overproduction. …

…But most of the time the apple tree is a sturdy and amenable creature. After its apples and leaves fall, it stands naked all winter. Ice can maim it, but it does not bother about snow. In the spring it wraps itself in a turban of blossoms. When it becomes old and unfruitful, morel mushrooms grow at its feet. A thrifty grower will not let that happen; he culls his old trees (the wood is excellent for smoking), and plants young ones. They look fragile as a kindergartner’s stick drawing, but they get right to work, putting out blossoms, and soon enough fruits. …

Pickerhead has been shopping. The Nose on Your Face has a clever t-shirt.

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Mark Steyn writes about how lost our president is.

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama “doesn’t know how to be president.” It was a low but effective crack, and I didn’t pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the past week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don’t just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan – though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower’s previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi king, one assumed there’d be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don’t bow to foreign monarchs. Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic – or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

Tear down that wall …so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who, at a critical moment in history, decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal, they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours. It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it. …

…Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: “OK, we know you’re gay. Now try being funny.” I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: OK, we know you’re black. Now try being president. But a few days later, Obama dropped in on U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea for the latest episode of The Barack Obama Show (With Full Supporting Chorus). “You guys make a pretty good photo op,” he told them. …

…The above are mostly offenses against good taste, but they are, cumulatively, revealing. And they help explain why, whenever the president’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin agrees with David Gergen’s assessment of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.

…The media did not miss the way the Chinese leadership handled Obama. Even such a purveyor of the conventional wisdom as David Gergen wrote on CNN.com to compare Obama’s poor performance with that of another young and inexperienced president, John F. Kennedy, whose disastrous 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Russians the impression that the Americans didn’t know what they were doing and that they could be pushed around. That led to the nearly catastrophic showdown over missiles in Cuba a year later. …

…Gergen is right. Though the most embarrassing moment of the trip was Obama’s obsequious deep bow to the Japanese emperor — which was duly noted by American bloggers and dismissed by the liberal punditry as well as by the White House — the real damage done to the national interest by Obama’s travels is the way he has come across to America’s rivals and foes, not to our allies. The Chinese, like the Iranians and the Russians, all think they have the measure of Barack Obama. He strikes them as a weak man more interested in trying to please and to evoke applause than in standing up for principles such as human rights or even the danger of nuclear proliferation. The occasional tough talk that has come from Obama has been undermined by his relentless devotion to engagement, which has convinced these countries that he is a leader to be trifled with. That is the only explanation for the disrespect that the Iranians have shown to his diplomatic outreach as well as for the harsh way in which the Chinese demonstrated their disdain for the president.

Gergen believes that Obama must treat this as a moment for a “wake up call” to revive his foreign policy. “For the President, the challenge is whether he will start approaching international affairs with a greater measure of toughness, standing up more firmly and assertively for American interests.”

We will soon see whether Obama is capable of doing that or whether his blind faith in engagement as well as his unbounded desire for adulation will lead to similar or worse fiascoes in the future. The problem, as the Kennedy example highlights, is that the country’s margin for error on dangerous foreign-policy issues is limited. Obama’s ongoing failure to act to halt Iran’s nuclear program is evidence of the price the country is paying for the president’s on-the-job education. … But Obama’s weakness, a fault rooted deeply in his inexperience in foreign affairs as well as in his overweening vanity, has become a major liability for the United States, the price of which has yet to be fully assessed.

America in the World shows the November 21st 2009 cover of the Spectator, UK showing the empty suit in the oval office, with the title “The Worst Kind of Ally” and posted this quote from Con Coughlin’s article:

“The astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain has been made clear by his deliberations over the Afghan issue. As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan — a decision which will fundamentally affect the scope of the mission — Britain is reduced to guesswork. The White House does not even pretend to portray this as a joint decision. It is a diplomatic cold-shouldering that stands in contrast not just to the Blair–Bush era, but to the togetherness of the soldiers on the ground… There will, though, inevitably come a time when Obama discovers who America’s true friends really are. Sooner or later he will have to deal with the considerably more taxing issues of Islamist militancy, rogue nuclear states and other tangible threats to the West’s security. At that point, Obama will discover a simple but essential truth. The world divides between those who support American values of freedom and democracy, and those who seek to destroy them. Few nations have been more committed to supporting those values with both blood and treasure than Britain. This country, and especially those British troops fighting alongside their American counterparts, deserve far better than this president’s disregard.”

President Obama did not want KSM tried by military tribunal. For that reason alone, we now have an upcoming trial that is illogical in many respects, writes Charles Krauthammer.

…What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning. …

…What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times? …

…Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadist is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform — everything but your own blog.

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Barack Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice. …

On his blog, Roger Simon posts a criticism of Obamacare from the Dean of Harvard Medical School.

Jeffrey S. Flier – the dean of Harvard Med – has thrown a haymaker at Obamacare in today’s WSJ – Health ‘Debate’ Deserves a Failing Grade:

“In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.”

Game, set, match, tournament. But, hey, it’s only the Dean of Harvard Med. What would he know compared to such great clinicians as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? This would be magnificent black comedy were it not our lives and – more importantly – those of our children that were hanging in the balance. The rush to enact this self-serving legislation is pretty much the most disgraceful US governmental act of my lifetime …

In the WSJ, we have Dean Flier’s full article.

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade. …

…Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform. …

…So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

John Stossel points out that some states have created their fiscal troubles by increased spending. He then discusses the hidden taxes that will be assessed by some states to make up for their lack of fiscal responsibility.

…Last week on “The O’Reilly Factor” , we talked about California’s and New York’s enormous budget deficits and planned tax increases. Those states would have big surpluses had they just grown their governments in pace with inflation. But of course they didn’t. Now the politicians act like their current deficits are something imposed on them by the recession.

But that’s nonsense. They created the problem with their reckless spending.

Let’s look at the particulars. Had the government of New York state grown at the rate of population and inflation over the past 10 years, it would have a $14 billion surplus today. Instead, spending grew at twice the rate of inflation. So New York has a $3 billion deficit. …

…Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government. We blame merchants, not our legislators, for the high price of gasoline, liquor, cigarettes and phone calls, but the money goes to the political thieves. …

… It reminds me of Walter Williams’ riff: “Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don’t expect you to thank them for it.”

Taxes, even counting hidden taxes, are not the real measure of what the thieves take. The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is the spending level. …

David Harsanyi comments on the MSM attack coverage of Sarah Palin.

…There’s nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin’s book, “Going Rogue” (HarperCollins, November 2009) for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking was applied to President Barack Obama’s two self-aggrandizing tomes — or even the health care or cap and trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to non-existent congressional districts — which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one’s nose demands a constant struggle, I guess. …

…Newsweek must have a point. Palin is a populist dead end. “Just over half of Americans,” a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, “have an unfavorable opinion” of Palin overall, “as many say they wouldn’t consider supporting her for president and more — six in 10 — see her as unqualified for the job.”

Similarly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation recently found that 48 percent disapprove of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a woman busy writing policy that affects all of us. …

Now it’s time for some entertainment. In a post on The Corner, John Miller tells us about the little ferry that could. Less than 20 miles from the DC beltway there is a small privately owned ferry service with one craft named the Gen. Jubal A. Early. Early attacked Washington in July 1864, and Lincoln observed the fighting from Fort Stevens which is located just south of the site of Walter Reed Medical Center. Imagine if Early had succeeded; New Yorkers might need visas to enter Virginia. We need Gen. Early to come out of internment.

It has been a goal of mine for some years to cross the Potomac River at White’s Ferry — the river’s last remaining ferry crossing. I finally had a chance yesterday, when my daughter had a soccer game in Maryland. The ferry wasn’t a novelty; it was actually the quickest and most convenient way to travel between Virginia and Maryland, given where we had to go.

And it felt good to support this family-owned throwback enterprise, which has gotten into scraps with federal government. Three years ago, the Coast Guard tried to shut down White’s Ferry for having an unlicensed operater on the ferry. You know, because the Coast Guard doesn’t have more pressing things to do. The ferry’s 86-year-old owner, Edwin Brown, was plucky and defiant:

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before they collect any money from me,” Brown, 86, said yesterday, adding that he had made his fortune defending property owners in eminent-domain disputes with the authorities. “I have never had any fear of the government.”

Brown also was shocked that Coast Guard investigators in Baltimore were considering hefty penalties, saying he thought he had worked out a settlement with officers who had visited the ferry’s offices in Dickerson.

“You can’t trust the government,” he said.

To give you a little more background on the ferry, here’s an article from 2006 that Fredrick Kunkle wrote for the Post.

True to its Confederate namesake, the Gen. Jubal A. Early ferryboat yesterday defied orders by the federal government to halt operations because of a licensing dispute and instead kept chugging back and forth across the Potomac River carrying hundreds of commuters.

The penalties risked by the 70-year-old family-run service, known as White’s Ferry, were not trifling, either. U.S. Coast Guard officials said yesterday that investigators were considering seeking criminal charges and fines that could run into the thousands of dollars per trip for allowing an unlicensed mariner to operate the ferry and disobeying an order to terminate a voyage.

But that did not seem to rattle the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, who bought the ferry in 1946 and christened its first wooden barge in honor of the flamboyant cavalry officer whose great-niece was a regular passenger. …

…The controversy could not have alighted on a more peaceful stretch of the Potomac. The river is wide and shallow there — no more than four feet deep on the Maryland side, maybe twice that on the Virginia shore. …

The 87-foot vessel has a ship’s bell, a pilot house, a fire ax, a lifeboat and a grand old silver anchor, but it looks more like a hunk of driveway that has broken loose and floated downstream with a bunch of cars. Each trip takes about 15 minutes, and the round-trip fare is $6. …

What happened to the little ferry that could, you ask? Shannon Sollinger has the denouement in a 2006 Loudoun Times article.

…Capt. Brian Kelley, Coast Guard commander of the Port of Baltimore, met Tuesday morning with the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, at the ramp down to the Potomac just west of Poolesville, Md.

“He found everything to be very pleasing and very satisfactory,” Brown said. “He’s happy the ferry is operating and everything is fine.”

The key word in his fracas with the authorities, Brown said, is “substantial. We were in substantial compliance, and there was never a safety risk of any kind.”

Commander Brian Penoyer said the ferry now is “street legal and safe” and will continue operating. Although the Coast Guard has a history of issues with Brown, Penoyer said, his office has opted to assess fines for a first-time offense. Brown can pay a fine of about $8,000, or appeal the tickets to a Coast Guard hearing officer.

White’s Ferry made the news again in 2008 for a less rebellious reason. Debbi Wilgoren reported the excitement in WaPo.

…The vehicle ferry that crosses the Potomac River between Poolesville and Leesburg became mired in a floating debris field yesterday morning, forcing about two dozen passengers to be removed by smaller boats.

The ferry became stuck in the unusually large amounts of debris flushed into the river by the heavy rain of recent days, according to ferry operators. …

…”The river hadn’t been up like this for months, and there was a lot of stuff piled up along the banks,” said Malcolm Brown, whose family owns and operates the White’s Ferry barge. “Debris is a constant problem on any river, but we had a big mass of trees coming down.”

Montgomery County fire and rescue workers took passengers to shore, leaving about 20 cars aboard as ferry operators cleared branches and logs from the cable that guides the barge across the river. There were no injuries, and drivers got their cars about an hour later. …