Why Did Sarah Quit?

There are been a number of guesses about why Sarah Palin announced that she will resign as governor later this month. Most assume that she plans to run for higher office and wanted to devote all of her time to this. It is true that being Governor of Alaska didn't help her much on the 2008 ticket so it is not likely to help in 2012.

But I don't think that is why she is stepping down. I think that she is doing it because it is the right thing for both the state and her family.

Since her ascension to national prominence, her effectiveness as governor has diminished. Democrats who used to be her allies would no longer be caught dead helping her. Even some of her allies have deserted her. There are constant new ethics allegations, each draining her time. None of this helps Alaska. Without her as a lightening rod, these problems will vanish and the state government can get back to business.

On a personal level, she has a special needs child whose disability will become more obvious as he grows up. Trig will need more and more of someone's care. At the same time, her oldest daughter is now a teen-age, single mother and probably needs help with her own baby.

And those ethics probes are hurting her financially. So far her legal bills have been around a half million dollars.

I think that Sarah is planning on cutting back from politics. She will still make some speaking engagements and a book tour. The money is good and she still has those legal bills. But I don't think that she plans any big campaigns for 2012.

Hating Palin

Why do so many people hate Sarah Palin with such passion? When John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate she was a total unknown to most people. Democratic activists rushed to fill in the blanks with their own narrative. Within 48 hours multiple stories were circulating about her past, none of them true. No accusation, no matter how outlandish, was out of bounds. There was serious speculation that she had faked a pregnancy in order to cover for her daughter.

It didn't help that the McCain campaign tried to reshape her. I saw an interview taped before the campaign and she was direct, smart and articulate (it helped that this was a travel log about the governor's house and office). After a month's coaching she was stumbling and rambling.

You would think that things would have quieted down after the election but they didn't. Near Thanksgiving Palin was talking about the Alaska economy at a turkey farm. By using an unusual angle a cameraman managed to include both Palin and a turkey being processed some ways behind her. This made the national news. The fact that she didn't know what was happening behind her back was given as a sign of her cluelessness.

She continued to be the butt of Letterman jokes, usually involving derogatory sexual terms and sometimes including her children.

Vanity Fair has a hit piece on her in its August, 2009 issue.

There have been fifteen ethics complaints about her. All have been dismissed.

Keep in mind that she was number two on the ticket for an election that was held eight months ago. McCain has long been forgotten but attacks on Palin continue.

We can dismiss Vanity Fair and Letterman as playing to their audience. If Vanity Fair's anti-Palin issue didn't sell then we would never see another hit piece. But it did sell. There is a market for this vitriol. Why?

I can think of a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious is that she continues to be popular with a significant portion of the country. She is (or was before her resignation) a serious candidate for president. This scares the left and they have gone into permanent campaign mode to stop her. This includes constantly belittling her and emphasizing any miss-statements (Huffington thought it important enough to post when she refereed to the Department of Justice and the Department of Law. They would never have revealed it is Obama made a similar mistake.)

That explains some of the attacks but not the intensity. This is personal. A lot of people outright hate her. There are a lot of factors here.

A lot of the anti-Palin hatred isn't against Sarah Palin the person. It is against Sarah Palin the media creation. People believe that she tried to ban books, etc. and hate that person.

There is also the insistence that she is a vindictive half-wit. Vanity Fair said this about her:

Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life's injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

Keep in mind that Obama's qualifications - part of a term in the senate -made Palin look overqualified.

This is part of a continuing depiction. Conservatives are dumb. Liberals are smart. Bush, Gore, and Kerry all graduated from Harvard or Yale. They all had similar grades in college (Cs). According to army aptitude tests they all have very similar IQs but Bush is depicted as dumb while Gore and Kerry are intellectuals. This carries over to almost all Conservatives. A hoax has been circulated several times in the last few years that purports to rank the last 12 presidents by IQ. All of the Democrats come in above all of the Republicans (except Nixon) with Reagan barely above average and both presidents Bush being below average. Depicting Palin as oversexed but dumb is following in this tradition.

There is also a less savory aspect to the Palin-hatred. Obama's election supposedly showed that anyone can grow up to be president. Actually it shows that anyone who managed to get into Yale or Harvard can be president. Obama and Clinton may have started out poor but they managed to get into Ivy League colleges.

In fact, Ronald Reagan was the last president who did not graduate from Harvard or Yale. Clinton and both Bushes went to Yale (W then got an MBA from Harvard). Unsuccessful candidates Kerry, Gore, and Dukakis all went to Harvard. Palin is the odd person out in this company. This shows in some of the comments made about her - the idea that she thought that Africa was a country instead of a continent, the Department of Law comment I already referred to, and the tenor of Letterman's jokes.

America may be ready to accept a black president but we are not ready to accept a blue collar candidate.

In contrast, Palin really is like most of Americans. She bounced around different colleges before getting her degree. She did not

Foreign Affairs Follies

Modern teachers are fond of "conflict resolution" when dealing with problems between students. This holds that one child is never totally at fault. All problems are the result of conflicts between the two students and proper mediation will allow both of them to change their behavior and avoid future conflict. The problem with this theory is that some kids are just mean and act like bullies because they can. Their victims did not do anything to antagonize them except appear to be bullies.

On several occasions, President Obama has made it clear that he views foreign relations as conflict resolution on a global scale. It's not that countries have conflicting ideologies or goals that puts them at odds with the US, it is just that we have insisted on treating them that way. The Obama foreign policy is centered around the idea that we can be friends with everyone. So far that isn't working out very well.

The biggest problem is that some nations have goals that are more important to them than friendship with the US. Iran and North Korea have made it clear that they want to be world powers with missiles and warheads capable of threatening their neighbors and possibly the US. North Korea in particular has been aggressively testing the Obama administration by testing nuclear weapons and firing missiles.

Iran is a particularly difficult case for Obama. During the campaign he promised more than once to have talks with them without preconditions. Once in office, he renewed that offer only to have Iran respond with a list of preconditions that Obama would have to perform before he could meet with them.

Events have a tendency to get in the way of foreign policy. In Iran, the Obama administration wanted friendly negotiations to stop their nuclear program. This was complicated by their sham of an election. This left the US without any attractive options. We can continue to try to deal with the current Iranian leaders, ignoring the election and the way that they suppressed peaceful protests. This approach has already been attacked by conservatives. The alternative is to support the protesters in the hope that they will overthrow the current government and that they will be more open to the United States. Neither of these is likely and any support for the protesters would totally alienate the current government.

Russia is another problem. Putin has made it clear that he misses the days when Russia was the equal of the US and has made several moves to strengthen Russia. While not exactly trying to restart the cold war, he envisions a return to Russian prominence. The Obama administration fails to understand this and sees worsening relations as the result of something that the Bush administration did. They keep talking about "resetting" relations. Hillary already pushed a symbolic RESET button with her Russian counterpart. Now Obama is making a personal visit and promising another reset in relations. While he will have some results in nuclear warhead reduction (already negotiated), he will not make much progress on tougher issues such as missile defense, Iran and Georgia. His goals are in conflict with Russia's. You can't reset from that.

Finally, there is South America and Hugo Chavez. Chavez and Obama met a few months ago and Chavez took that opportunity to embarrass Obama by giving him a copy of Chavez's writings as instruction for how to govern.

Chavez is fundamentally at odds with the US. He sees himself as a revolutionary and the successor to Fidel Castro. He has financed revolutionary movements in other countries and formed an anti-US trading alliance. His view of the world holds that the US and free markets are responsible for all evils. No amount of happy talk can alter that although he and Obama might be personally friendly.

Obama's desire to be liked by South America and Chavez is causing errors in judgment about Honduras. Ousted president Zelaya tried a coup of his own by illegally calling for a constitutional convention that would do away with term limits. He ordered the army to defy their Supreme Court and distribute ballots. Instead the army sent Zelaya packing.

This is a case where both sides were at fault and the resolution should involve a new election. Instead, Obama sided with Zelaya. This is a particularly bad move. Zelaya is an anti-American Chavez ally. He has little support in Honduras and none in its Congress or army. Restoring is unlikely to make him pro-American and supporting him hurts our image in Honduras.

For someone who was supposed to restore world-wide respect for America, Obama is off to a poor start.

Coming Excuses

If things go as planned, the Democrats will pass a cap and trade bill and health care reform. They may even pass a second stimulus. With such a busy first year, what can we expect for the remainder of the Obama administration? A lot of excuses.

The stimulus is not working (it couldn't - very little of the spending takes place this year). Unemployment has already risen to level that Obama promised would not be reached if the stimulus passed. Obama is already giving excuses for why things didn't go as planned.

The cap and trade legislation will not do much to reduce CO2 emissions, either so Obama will be making excuses for that.

The health care package is still in planning but it is likely to follow the same pattern as privious legislation - a package that is too watered down to accomplish what it is supposed to and full of pork that was inserted at the last minute. Obama will be making excuses for this, too.

Foreign affairs don't look promising, either. Obama came to office promising to improve relations with the rest of the world. So far he has done a poor job of seeing to our traditional allies. He has spent considerable effort courting hostile nations. So far relations with Iran and North Korea have gone downhill. More excused will be coming.

Cap and Trade Follies

When Congress began considering Cap and Trade legislation it had three ambitious goals:

1. Increase the cost of carbon-based fuels enough to reduce CO2 emissions;
2. Decrease the demand for foreign oil;
3. Use the amounts collected to pay for Obama's universal health care and other programs.

Measured by these standards, the bill that passed the House fails all three goals. If passed as originally envisioned, the cap and trade legislation would have been painful. That's the whole idea - make carbon-based fuel too expensive to use. The House chickened out on this. They watered down the cost of the carbon credits and set it to implement slowly to reduce, or at least hide, the pain. As a result, the bill is estimated to cost an average family less than $0.50/day - too low to force behavior changes. It will only bring in a fraction of the revenue that the White House had counted on.

This is the worst kind of legislation. It will not accomplish any of the original goals. Probably the only result will be a drag on the economy over the coming decade.

So why pass it? The Democrats have an image as the only true protectors of the environment. They need to pass something and hope that people mistake movement for progress.

There is a bright side to this. Once this version of cap and trade is passed, the pressure will be off of Congress to do anything about global warming. People will see it as a problem that has been solved. The Democrats will have a vested interest in keeping this illusion. After all, who wants to run on a platform as having passed useless legislation?

Medical Costs

Ever wonder why medical costs keep going up? There are several reasons.

First, there is a lot more medicine available than there used to be. I remember an ad running in the early 1970s where a boy says that he is dying of leukemia and asks people to donate to find a cure so that it will no longer be a death sentence. That day is here. Leukemia now has a high survival rate. While this is great news for people stricken with it, the treatments take 2-3 years depending on gender and age and involve lots of hospital visits. This is true for other cancers, also.

A lot of medicine is like this. Many conditions that used to be untreatable are now easily managed with pills or shots. This has increased our life expectancy by decades but there are costs.

Drug companies are constantly coming up with new drugs. Some are so specialized that they have to invent new problems for the drugs to solve (Restless Leg Syndrome). New drugs are expensive so the drug companies need to convince millions of people to use their products.

Then there is the cost of new equipment and the incentives to use it. A lot of the new equipment costs millions of dollars. Hospitals want to recover that cost by spreading it across as many patients as possible. If enough patients use it then new equipment can go from a cost to a profit center. Accordingly, there is pressure on doctors to have as many patients scanned as possible.

There are other pressures. Malpractice suits often start by looking at all possible tests that could have been performed. A doctor who didn't prescribe a test, no matter how unlikely, looks bad in court. This puts extra pressure on doctors to over-prescribe tests.

Then there is the malpractice insurance. This has been a problem for decades and it is getting worse. Doctors are retiring early because they cannot make a profit because of malpractice insurance and suits.

So far, Obamacare has not addressed these problems. It is focused on getting more people insured. In a speech yesterday, Obama said that malpractice reform is off the table.

Health care cost reform can be tricky. Right now hospitals charge for scanners on a per-use rate. This could be changed but the equipment still costs the same and the costs of purchasing it have to be recovered somehow. Other countries have addressed this by simply spending less money. This creates shortages and waiting lists.

The only real solution to reducing medical costs is to reduce coverage. Americans have come to expect high-quality health care but, between expanding coverage and expanding costs, the future will probably mean reduced care.

The Letterman/Palin flap

A few days ago Sarah Palin and her daughter came to New York City and attended a baseball game. This prompted David Letterman to make the remark

There was one awkward moment during the seventh inning stretch. Her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.

It turns out that Letterman hadn't bothered to find out which daughter was with the Governor. It was her 14 year old daughter who was in New York. The 18 year old daughter and recent mother was back in Alaska. The Palin's, both Sarah and her husband demanded an apology. Letterman sort of responded, admitting that it was a cheap shot, trying to clarify that he didn't mean the daughter who was actually at the game, and taking an additional cheap shot at the Governor's clothing.

Even if we take Letterman at his word that he was too clueless to find out which daughter he was holding up to national ridicule, this is still part of a troubling double standard.

During the Clinton years and again under Obama it is clearly understood that jokes about the presidential daughters are off-limits. Even a year ago it was considered out of bounds to ask a 28-year-old Chelsea Clinton about her father's affair.

In contrast, before they turned 21 the Bush twins were regularly ridiculed (granted they, like most college students, were engaging in under-age drinking). Now Letterman is justifying jokes that imply that an 18 year old girl will have sex with strangers because she became a mother at the age of 17. Letterman would never have made this joke about the daughter of a liberal.

To their credit, the NOW has condemned Letterman, both for his joke about Palin's daughter and for his joke about Sarah's wardrobe.

Right Wing?

Yesterday a white supremacist named James Wenneker von Brunn entered the Holocaust Museum and started shooting. The museum was prepared for such an action and the guards responded quickly although one of them died while stopping von Brunn.

Coming on the heals of the shooting of a doctor who specialized in 3rd trimester abortions, many people are seeing a pattern of violence by right-wing extremists. Some go so far as to blame conservative pundits for these actions. How valid are these complaints?

First, we should recognize that at least four violent actions have happened or nearly happened in the last few weeks. In one of these, a Muslim-convert shot someone at an army recruiting station. In a second near-incident, the FBI arrested a group of Muslims that planned to attack Jews. Clearly, these were not right-wing attacks inspired by conservatives. If anything, they were inspired by people on the left such as Michael Moore who compared the Iraqi insurgents to the American Minutemen.

So that's two our of four eliminated straight off. That's not much of a pattern.

The shooting of the abortion doctor hits closer to home since many conservatives share the killer's belief that abortion is murder. Regardless, the accused killer, Scott Roeder, has a long history of violent anti-abortion activity. It is silly to say that conservatives motivated him since he held his beliefs before they came on the air and has always been considerably more reactionary than any on-air personality.

Then there is von Brunn. He is being labeled as right-wing in major news stories. The Washington Post made a point of identifying a fellow white supremacist who knew von Brunn as a former Reagan official. Then there is the Nazi connection. Von Brunn is on record as saying that we supported the wrong side in WWII. So does that make him a member of the right?

Michael Rowe of the Huffington Post doesn't even have to think about it.

Obama's citizenship was reportedly also something of an obsession for von Brunn, and likely very much on his mind when he walked into the museum and opened fire to make a statement about what "his" America ought to look like. I have no trouble imagining which radio stations he listened to, or which pundits best represented his baseline political ideology. And why.

If Rowe bothered to do any research into von Brunn's beliefs he would be disappointed. Yes, von Brunn worried about Obama's ancestry. He worried about a lot of things. He was so worried about the Federal Reserve system that he tried to kidnap it's head in 1981. He was sure that Christianity and capitalism were both Jewish plots designed to corrupt Aryan values. He was also a socialist and a 9-11 Truther. These are views that are far closer to Rosie O'Donnell than Ann Coulter.

Over the last couple of decades, anti-semitism, especially anti-Zionism, has become a staple of the left, not the right. But it is unfair to attribute any of von Brunn's views to on-air personalities. He was far more extreme than any of them and he has held his views for decades.

For an honest assessment of von Brunn's beliefs, see this article which quotes extensively from von Brunn's own writings. It is clear from this that he stands so far outside the mainstream American views that he is in a class by himself.

Michael Rowe worries that the right no longer has any shame but he shows a disturbing lack of it himself by attacks like this one.

Government Motors

Quick economics quiz, GM made a lot of big SUVs because:

A) They hate the environment
B) They don't know how to make small cars
C) SUVs were easiest to sell
D) SUVs have a higher profit margin
E) Both C and D

The answer is E. GM preferred selling SUVs because those were the only vehicles that GM actually made any money on but they were also a popular choice among car buyers. Even in today's economic downturn, SUVs continue to outsell other segments of the market. The big exception to this was the demand for hybrids last Summer when gas topped $4/gallon. GM's upcoming super-hybrid Volt will not make any money, at best they will break even on it.

The reasons that GM only made money on SUVs are complex involving outmoded plants and high labor costs. It is unclear how many of these factors will be addressed by the bankruptcy. It is unlikely that GMs costs per vehicle will be reduced enough to make smaller cars profitable.

President Obama knows this. He is a smart guy and has smart economists advising him. So why did he announce that GM would be making smaller, more fuel efficient cars in the future? There are a couple of possibilities:

A) He doesn't care if GM fails.
B) He plans on doing something to change demand.

This goes beyond economics and into politics so either is possible. Obama is a believer in global warming as are most of his supporters. Many of them ignore what has been selling and are convinced that small cars will sell. Obama might be placating these people, knowing full well that GM will continue to need government bailouts but not caring.

The other possibility is that the Obama administration is planning a set of policies that will change consumer demand. Last Summer's spike in gas prices caused a temporary demand for hybrids and scooters. In the near future either Congress or the EPA will be taking action to reduce CO2 emissions. This is likely to include some form of gas tax which could make SUVs too expensive to drive. Obama has been open to this. Last Summer he said that the problem with the gas prices was not how high they were, it was that they had risen so fast that people had not had time to adapt (by buying smaller cars?).

Other questions arise. GM and the other two Detroit car makers have already asked for more money to retool to meet new CAFE standards. How much aid will the government continue to give GM and is this fair to other car-makers? Will a government stake in GM mean that they will do whatever they are told or will that give them priority when lobbying?

When the government has an interest in an open market things get messy.

Dinner, a Play, and a side-order of Hypocrisy

Last Saturday the First Couple jetted off to New York for dinner and a play. Normally this would be no big deal. Presidents travel. They are humans and need an occasional break. There is no way for them to do this without costing the taxpayers something. Also, they took a Gulfstream instead of Air Force One which saved the taxpayers some money.

The thing is, this is the same president who scolded a bank that had accepted TARP funds for holding an annual convention in Los Vegas. He implied that in the future, the government would be watching all companies to see if they were spending too much or spending it on something that gave the wrong appearance. By some estimates, this scolding cost the State of Nevada $100 million in convention business. The Governor of Nevada has asked for an apology (is still waiting).

So, by criticizing other people's travel, Obama put himself in a different category. He could just as easily have stayed in DC and taken in a performance at the Kennedy Center. He set the bar himself by saying that banks that received government funds had to avoid even the appearance of wasting taxpayer's money. He didn't follow his own directives.

There is also a matter of timing. 36 hours after his trip GM announced plant closings, something that the Obama administration is part of. The image of the First Couple going on a date night as thousands of workers are waiting to hear if they will keep their jobs is unusually tone-deaf for this administration.

The Future of the Republicans

It is not news that the future direction of the Republican Party is being hotly debated. On one hand we have Republican loyalists such as Vice-President Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. On the other hand are people such as Arlin Specter and Colon Powell who preach moderation.

This could be viewed as the people who got the Republicans into their current mess versus people who already abandoned the party (Specter changed parties and Powell endorsed Obama).

Here is one major view:

In political terms, it's easier to see what a viable Republican Party should ditch than what it should add. It's past time for the GOP to abandon its Gingrich-era, pseudo-libertarian anti-government rhetoric and to accept the broad social consensus behind progressive taxation, retirement security, action to forestall climate change, and a government role in health care. It might want to quit defending torture. It needs to move to a neutral or big-tent approach on major social issues—gay marriage, abortion, and stem cells—the way Democrats have done with gun control and the death penalty. A Sister Souljah moment would help. Some respected party leader needs to give a swift, symbolic kick to a fringe figure who epitomizes the intolerance of the religious right—perhaps Jerry Falwell Jr., whose "Liberty" University recently rusticated its beyond-the-pale campus Democratic Club.

Obama's open-ended expansion of government creates an opportunity for the GOP to propose a leaner, meaner alternative with more space for private enterprise, individual initiative, and dynamic growth. Efficiency-promoting tax reform, of the kind Reagan backed in 1986, would be a big improvement on unfunded tax cuts. After Obama, Republicans need to try for minority votes, both through the kind of immigration reform Bush favored and the kind of empowerment policies associated with the recently deceased Jack Kemp. Their strongest card may be one no Bush ever dared play: education vouchers for the poor. On health care, they might get behind a subsidized, individual-mandate framework as an alternative to Democratic plans that will have a tendency to morph into single-payer over time.

Is this really the only future for the Republicans or is this just wishful thinking by progressives who insist that the last election changed everything? I don't think so for several reasons.

First, a lot of this description would put the Republicans to the left of Bill Clinton (post-1994). There is little evidence that the country has moved to far to the left to quickly. The number of people describing themselves as Republicans has dropped but the number of conservatives has stayed the same.

Obama remains fairly popular but his policies are much less popular. A strong case can be made that the Democrats' rise has more to do with Bush fatigue than anything else. Historically, the party in the White House has big losses in Congress in its 6th year and looses the net presidential election. Even the sainted Reagan lost the Senate in his 6th year. Historic trends show that the Republicans can expect gains in 2010 and 2014. These gains may or may not be enough to retake Congress.

One big problem with the "moderate" approach - the Republicans already tried it. Bush rejected the Libertarian wing of the party. He increased spending on everything, far exceeding inflation but he never got any credit for it.

This is the big problem with trying to be Democrats light. Democrats already own the issue. Whatever the Republicans do, the Democrats will propose more. The Republicans need a different approach.

The platform of fiscal responsibility and honest in government was a Republican staple until reckless spending under Bush and a series of scandals gave the Democrats an opening in 2006. It worked for the Democrats then and in 2008 but they abandoned it before Obama was even inaugurated.

One change that the Republicans should make is their stance on gays in general if not gay marriage. The country accepts gays and is accepting gay marriage. This isn't winning the Republicans any votes and is not compatible with limited government.

Credit Card Reform

Congress quickly passed a credit card reform bill. Good for them. They could have gone a lot further and limited interest rates but they at least did something.

Normally my Libertarian instincts say that the government shouldn't interfere with private business but I make the exception that the government needs to keep business honest. Current practices by the credit card companies are less than honest. They lure people in with promises then change the rules. The idea is that once you are hooked they can gouge you with unexpected fees and penalties.

A major problem in our society is that credit is too easy. Every time I go to Sears Hardware I'm offered a credit card to be issued on the spot. Other stores do the same thing. It's twofold deal for them - they sell you more of their merchandise and they make a killing on the credit cards.

Far too many people find themselves with an unmanageable debt on their credit cards. One way that they have been handling this is to roll it into their mortgage based on inflated housing prices. That's what fed the housing crisis.

Congress should go further. The Republicans passed a terrible bankruptcy reform bill a few years ago. It gave the credit card companies more claim on the assets of bankrupt individuals. The Democrats should repeal it.

A few decades ago the credit card companies didn't give you more credit than you could handle. They didn't want to get stuck. We need to go back to those days. Part of this is increasing the risk to the credit card companies so that they will be more careful with their money. If they are more careful then consumers are less likely to get in trouble.

Truth and the Speaker

A significant portion of the left wants some sort of show trials for the Bush administration. The first step was going to be the establishment of a "Truth Commission" to investigate the use of torture against terrorists. It sounds simple but things get sticky quickly.

If the left was serious about discovering the truth then they would pursue it at all costs. That has not been the case. There was concern from the CIA that current agents would be held accountable for actions that were thought to have been legal when performed even though they are now considered improper. President Obama assured the CIA that they were exempt. Instead the movement talked about going after the lawyers who wrote the legal opinions justifying the interrogation techniques used.

This is the first proof that the whole thing is nothing more than a partisan charade meant to embarrass the Republicans. Much of the argument against waterboarding is that any reasonable person would regard it as torture therefor, the people who actually got their hands dirty should be at least as culpable as a lawyer who wrote an opinion. The problem is that the lawyers are Republicans and the CIA agents are not.

Then the Republicans found out that Nancy Pelosi knew about the waterboarding as early as 2002, 2003 at the latest. They started an uproar. Why limit the inquest to Republicans? Someone who insists that waterboarding is torture knew all about it but was silent on the matter for years. Doesn't that make her an accomplice?

Pelosi gave various answers. She insisted that she was told that waterboarding might be used but not that it had been. By last week she was insisting that the CIA never told her about the waterboarding and that they are lying when they say that they did. She accused them of regularly misleading Congress.

That's a serious charge. The Speaker of the House is saying that the government cannot trust its own intellegence agency, even when headed by a Democrat. The Republicans proposed creating a joint committee to investigate this charge. The Democrats (plus two Republicans) voted it down.

Think about this. If Pelosi is correct then our government is in serious trouble. How much of our foriegn policy is based on misinformation? You would think that this would be a high priority for Congress. Since the Democrats rejected the investigation the only conclusion is that they already know what they would find - the CIA told the truth and Pelosi lied.

So much for the truth. Pelosi dug herself into a hole. The Democrats tried to dig her out but she is in too deep.

This is the final proof that the whole waterboarding investigation is partisan. If the Democrats were interested in the truth then they would not hesitate to implicate any CIA agents and Democrats involved. By trying to limit their investigation to Republicans, the Democrats are making themselves look bad. This may end Pelosi's term as speaker.

She could have shot down the whole truth squad movement when it started. She knew that her own hands were dirty, that she had given her implied concent when informed of the procedures years ago.

The Government Option

It's hard to believe but we came very close to universal health care around 20 years ago during the administration of George H. W. Bush. The program proposed was called "Pay or Play". An employer "played" by providing insurance. Those who did not play would pay - they would be charged a fee which would go to a government-run health program. This would not provide coverage but it would mean that everyone who had a job had insurance coverage. The plan had wide support in Congress and the backing of the White House. It was supposed to be the best of both worlds. It would preserve private health care and insurance and it would eliminate the competitive advantage of not covering health care.

Then it fell apart. The reason why is instructive today.

At some point during the negotiation between Congress and the White House, someone pointed out to President Bush that it would be easier for companies to "pay" than for them to "play". As time passed, most employers would switch coverage to the government run plan and eventually the would be the norm. That was more than Bush had bargained for. He had no intention of dismantling the insurance industry and nationalizing health care but that was the inevitable result of Pay or Play. The White House backed away from the proposal. Members of Congress who always favored Canada's single-payer plan disowned Pay or Play and the endeavor collapsed.

I'm mentioning this because one of the big issues in the new health care debate is the existence of a government-run alternative. Some on the Left such as Paul Krugman, insist that no plan should be passed that does not include a government-run portion.

In all likelihood, any insurance plan offered by the government would have some sort of subsidies in it that would make it more attractive than the for-profit alternatives. That puts us right back to the government slowly nationalizing health care.

There some very solid reasons why you don't want the government in charge of your health. The biggest one is that insurance companies don't have the authority the the government has. Right now the government has no financial stake in your health and it is still intrusive. Once your health care depends on the public coffers then the government has the right to micro-manage your life.

This is happening in England and Scotland where councilors are knocking at doors to give obesity advice.

Part of being free is being able to choose your lifestyle. If you want to be a couch potato you can be. Put the government in charge of your health and we will see mandatory daily calisthenics like in 1984 or Communist China.

Olbermann Over the Top

Keith Olbermann recently premiered a new segment entitled "WTF". The fact that these initials, when spelled out, would earn a movie an R rating shows how much class this new segment has. For his opener, Olbermann focused on Miss California, Carrie Prejean. He showed some clips and pictures of her, some in tasteful topless poses. Then he mocked her. He mocked her beliefs. He mocked her religion. He mocked her freedom of speech.

Your grandfather did not fight to protect your right to answer a question during a network television soft-porn special without consequence or fallout.

There are several disturbing things about Olbermann's rant. The first is that Prejean should never have been asked that question. It is unfair to ask politically charged questions in a beauty contest. It came up because the organizers invited a celebrity judge with an agenda - "Perez Hilton". Since gay marriage ballot initiatives have been consistently voted down, the odds were in his favor that any contestant he asked about gay marriage would say that she was against it giving him an oppertunity to spout off after the contest.

The next thing is that Prejean's answer is almost identical to what Barack Obama said at least three times on the campaign trail. That includes the reference to god. A beauty contestent is not in a position to change the law. The President is. He also had plenty of time to consider his answer while Prejean was caught unprepared. Why unload on Prejean and not on Obama?

But none of this is as troubling as the way that Olbermann unloads on Prejean. He absolutely hates her and goes to lengths to belittle her. Why? She is not an important figure. She is a beauty contest contestant and model whose shares beliefs with a president that Olbermann supports. She is even open to civil partnerships. There just isn't anything there to inspire such invective. WTF?

BTW, for the record - my daughter is in a civil partnership and I support her. I'm defending Prejean because Olbermann's attack was unjustified, not because I agree with her.

Bankrupt Obama

The nation's financial future looks bleak. The Obama budget included huge deficits but even those were based on some unlikely projections. The first one is that the economy would turn around during the Summer and take off by Fall. That has not started yet, no matter how many "green sprouts" are visible. Instead, the government ran a deficit in April for the first time in 26 years. At best, we will see a recovery late in the year or early next year.

There are several factors slowing the recovery. We may not have bottomed out yet. After months of news stories about the return of the Great Depression, it is unlikely that people will rush out to borrow and spend like they had been. In fact, Obama has said that we should not return to those ways (except in the short run when the economy needs it). All of this adds up to a recovery that is more likely to be a swoosh than a "V".

Obama is likely to have trouble with his new taxes, also. The biggest one, the carbon trading scheme known as Cap and Trade is is serious trouble and is unlikely to pass as Obama desired. Cap and Trade served a double purpose. It is supposed to reduce CO2 emissions and to raise revenue.

The big budget-breaker is going to be Obama's universal health care. The President met with health care leaders yesterday and announced that they would control costs. This has been met with universal skepticism. Event the New York Times thinks that results are unlikely.

If history is a guide, their commitments may not produce the promised savings. Their proposals are vague — promising, for example, to reduce both "overuse and underuse of health care." None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. Without such a guarantee, budget rules would normally prevent Congress from using the savings to pay for new initiatives to cover the uninsured. At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.

The Senate is considering new tax hikes to pay for health care. This will probably slow economic growth even more.

Currently the deficit is unsustainable. For every $1.00 spent in 2009, the government will borrow $0.45. A big chunk of this is stimulus spending which is supposedly a one-time deal. Even so, a budgetary time bomb is about to go off in the form of Social Security and Medicare.

Since its founding, Social Security has run a surplus. In theory, this surplus has been invested. The reality is that the investment was in government bonds. This was a means of laundering the money. The government would write itself an IOU then spend the surplus. By using a "unified budget," this disguised how large the deficit really is. Every administration has done this going back generations.

This worked as long as the pool of workers was greater than the pool of retired. That time is nearing its end. Within seven years the Social Security administration is going to start cashing in those bonds it holds. This means that general fund money will be diverted to redeeming the bonds which means higher deficits. Medicare is in worse shape. It will start needing money this year and will be insolvent in 2017.

People, mainly Republicans, have warned for years that this day was coming but politicians were reluctant to do anything. The day of reckoning is nearly here and the Obama administration's response is to create a new entitlement on top of the ones we cannot afford (following the Bush administration which added an expensive Medicare drug benefit).

At this rate, the country will be bankrupt before the end of Obama's first term.

Prosperity and the President

What is it about 3rd world nations that keeps them so poor? What is it about the wealthier countries that makes them wealth? Groups like the CATO institute have bee studying this question and found that prosperous countries have two attributes: rule of law and strong property rights. It turns out that people are only willing to invest their life's savings if they know that the results will not be seized arbitrarily or by corrupt officials.

This is important to the current economy. President Obama and the democratic Congress are a weak defenders of these two principles. Obama has talked about taxing the richest 5% of the population. Congress came close so seizing bonus money after it had been paid. With Chrysler, Obama dictated terms. The hedge funds, which by law could demand that 100% of their investment be paid back before the union pension funds got anything, agreed to lose 40% of their investment but balked at losing 60% when the pension funds got a better rate. For this, Obama denounced them as speculators who were only interested in profit. Banks that have accepted TARP funds have found themselves saddled with ever-changing restrictions on bonuses, salary, and even where they can hold conventions. Obama plans to have the government take over all student programs, pushing out the private institutions that currently provide half the loans.

All of this is having an effect. According to Forbes, investors are not investing.

Investors, other than the banks who desperately needed TARP funds for survival, are leery of any program that uses them. Anyone who took TARP funds has been subject to government interference in managerial decisions. The restrictions on bonuses and executive pay have been widely discussed in the media. Less well known are restrictions on the banks' ability to hire foreigners, and the constant harassment by Congress over internal management decisions on everything from the use of private aircraft to the locations of conferences. Some of these concerns are well justified, of course, but it wasn't clear ex-ante what all of the rules were and it isn't clear ex-post either.

[...]

Why would private capital get involved when the rules of the game are so capricious? No one would take that gamble when it is clear that, in dealing with the government, private capital will always take a back seat to politically powerful entities.

And that is the larger worry that current policy has neglected. Firms and markets can function quite well within a framework of rules. Indeed, rules are good for the orderly conduct of business. But when rules get imposed or dispensed with willy-nilly in the interests of politics, it is very dangerous. We have should have learned this lesson long ago.

The Obama administration's record on the rule of law isn't that good either. A law professor appointed to the top legal spot in the State Department thinks that international law (i.e. European law) takes precedence over the Constitution. The Supreme Court has used foreign precedent in determining domestic cases.

Obama has indicated that he wants his nominee for the Supreme Court to have "empathy". His qualifications are:

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges

BTW, the nominee also has to be a woman.

The implication here is that Obama wants a justice who values bending the law to help specific groups of people over being fair and impartial. A strange requirement from a former constitutional law teacher but he has said the same thing more than once.

While none of this is going to turn us into a 3rd world country, it is going to slow investment and that is going to hurt everyone. The quickest way out of the recession is to expand the economy. That is why both the Obama and Bush administrations have gone to lengths to free up credit. But this will not accomplish anything if people are afraid to invest.

Ironically, the economic crisis went a long way to assuring Obama's election but his anti-business attitude makes him a poor person to be in the White House during an economic downturn. His administration gives constant mixed messages and his base in the Net-Roots accuses him of having sold out to Wall Street.

Until Obama realizes that he has to help investors instead of punishing them we will have a slow recovery. Since his promise to halve the deficit is based on a strong recovery, this will eventually come back to hurt him in several ways.

Obama and the Capitalists

It is becoming increasingly evident that the president doesn't like capitalists. Specifically, he doesn't like people who make investments and expect a profit, or at least a chance to minimize their losses.

The Chrysler bail-out made the news a few times over this. Last week it was announced that Chrysler would have to declare bankruptcy because an agreement could not be reached with some hedge funds. This earned them a public rebuke from Obama. More recently, these hedge fund managers have started speaking out about the way they were treated. Their complaint is that the government wanted to do to them what it did to the large banks holding Chrysler debt - dictate terms outside of normal bankruptcy protections. In both cases, they were told that the losses on their secured debt would be higher than on unsecured debt. They were also told that there would be no discussion about this. The head of a hedge fund had this to say:

Let's be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. If they give away their clients' money to share the 'sacrifice,' they are stealing.

Newsweek thinks that this is an isolated case and no cause for further alarm.

In ordinary times and circumstances, there's no justification for the government to intervene in a way that privileges unsecured lenders over secured lenders. But the times and circumstances surrounding Chrysler aren't ordinary.

While the circumstances may not be normal, the president is disturbing and part of a general pattern of anti-business behavior by the Obama administration.

In March the large banks that had accepted TARP funds were surprised to find out that the Obama administration felt that this gave the government control over these banks. Several have expressed a desire to return the funds. Currently the government will not allow this. Several possible restrictions on returning the TARP funds have been advanced but restrictions continue to change. Just this week the government suggested that banks that return TARP funds will also need to quit the FDIC. In the meantime, the government controls salaries and bonuses on Wall Street banks.

Obama recently announced that the government was going to take over student loans. Currently the student loan market is split between the government and private lenders. The reason for the government takeover seems to be to remove profit from the loans.

Obama proposed new tax laws on companies operating overseas. Currently, money earned overseas is only taxes at the local rate until it is brought to the US. If a company builds a call center in Ireland and re-invests its profits in expanding the call center then it would only pay Ireland's modest 15% corporate tax. Obama would tax all corporate profits at US rates. That would more than double the taxes in the Irish example. To Obama, this is nothing more than a tax break for moving American jobs overseas.

Obama also proposed requiring financial companies world-wide to provide detailed records to the US. Anyone in the US who placed money in an institution that did not comply would be assumed to be guilty of tax evasion by the IRS and have to prove their innocence.

The Obama administration has expressed a strong desire (negotiated down from a requirement) that any universal health care proposal include a government-run alternative to private insurance. Senator Byrd denounced the for-profit motive of insurance companies. Conservatives fear that the government program would be subsidized and slowly drive the private insurers out of the market ending up with a Canadian-style single-pay system.

All of these cases show that the Obama administration is not comfortable seeing people profit from investing. They want to see corporations putting other priorities ahead of making money. This sort of mushy Marxism sounds nice but capitalism requires that companies succeed or fail on their own. Companies that put other priorities ahead of success (profit) will eventually either fail or require further government bailouts.

President "I Didn't Do It"

Ronald Reagan was known as the Teflon President. Scandals didn't stick to him. Bill Clinton was known as Slick Willie for the same reason.

Obama has a different approach. He insists that he didn't do it, that it has nothing to do with him. There is a running gag on The Simpsons where Bart Simpson says "I didn't do it," even when he is caught red-handed. Obama is becoming the "I didn't do it" president.

Last year, during the campaign, Barack Obama deflected accusations that he had a close relationship with people who had committed terrorist actions in the 1960s by pointing out how young he was at the time. How could we hold him responsible for something that one of his neighbors did while he was a child? He also insisted that the Reverend Wright had never given an incendiary sermon while Obama was at church.

He repeated that line recently at the Summit of the Americas. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega listed a set of grievances against the US including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Obama replied by saying that Ortega couldn't be holding him responsible for something that happened when he was 3 months old.

During a speech last night, he insisted that he was not responsible for the deficit. "It was like that when I got here."

In speeches given in Europe and to Arab audiences, Obama has apologized, on behalf of his country, for everything that his predecessor, making it clear that these were Bush's policies, not Obama's.

All of this is disingenuous. He certainly knew about the domestic terrorists' backgrounds and Wright's sermons but he associated with them anyway.

He is President of the United States. That makes him responsible for everything that his government has ever done, regardless of who was in control at the time. Trying to separate himself from his office and his predecessors is a poor strategy. Most of the world has a long memory and holds grudges against countries or peoples, not against office-holders.

His disavowal of the deficit was almost immediately rebutted by an AP fact checking column. This pointed out that:

1. As a Senator and a member of the majority party, he shares responsibility for the budget, especially the big-ticket parts that he voted for.
2. His first actions were to increase spending. His budget shows a temporary dip in spending (to twice the highest Bush deficit then climbs rapidly).

Yes, he did take responsibility when one of his nominees was eliminated but that is a long way from taking responsibility for his presidency or his country. It may be funny for a 10-year-old cartoon character to avoid responsibility but presidents are held to a higher standard.

Is Colbert Funny?

Some people at Ohio State University actually spent time and effort doing a study on people's perceptions of the Colbert Report. I hope that no grants were involved.

You have to have an paid account to see the actual paper so all I have to go on is a report in Huffington.

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

Notice that the study didn't say where Colbert is on the political spectrum, but Jason Linkins who wrote the post knows that Colbert is a liberal and that conservatives are outright stupid to believe otherwise. That actually matches up with the OSU study - liberal think that Colbert is liberal. One of my conservative co-workers is convinced that Colbert is a secret conservative so that matches up, also.

So what is he? Short answer - he is a political comedian playing a role. Most of his lines are written with the help of a staff of writers and the writers are to the left of the real Colbert. Colbert follows the old rule, don't cut funny, so left-leaning jokes stay in if they are funny.

How do I know that he is not as liberal as his writers? Because I watch the show. More important, I watched it before, during, and after the writers strike. Unless Colbert had a staff of right-wing ghost-writers working for him during the strike, those episodes were examples of his real views and they were considerably more moderate than his show with writers.

Then there is his religion. On the show he is an over-the-top Roman Catholic. If you assume that he is the opposite of his character then you have trouble reconciling the fact that he is a practicing Catholic who attends mass regularly.

The real proof is in the interviews. Colbert has the reputation as one of the toughest interviewers on tv. He actually does three different types of interviews. When he is interviewing scientists or musicians then he is a pretty easy interview. When his guest is a conservative then he makes them work. He really turns mean when he interviews liberals. He doesn't let them get their message out. He interupts them with questions like, "George Bush, great president or greatest president?" His "Better know a district" series of interviews always makes the recipient look foolish but more often than not, he is interviewing Democrats. Would a true-believer liberal go out of his way to make Democrats look bad?

During the 2008 campaign, the two candidates who got the friendliest treatment from Colbert were Dennis Kucinich and Mike Huckabee. Satire or not, I just can't imagine Jon Stewart playing foosball with Huckabee for the primary.

Like his religion, Colbert's real feelings are probably far more moderate than his fans on the left would believe. The secret of his success is that his show is not based on his beliefs. That frees him to make fun of both sides.

I suspect that each side sees something that they find funny and convinces themselves that Colbert represents their own views. The left, since they consider themselves smarter than everyone else, then laughs at the right for being fooled by Colbert. The joke is probably as much on them as on the right but they are too busy looking down their nose to see what it under it.

Barack Obama vs Jack Bauer

There are two debates on the use of harsh interrogation techniques. For the past several days the debate has been about what is so harsh that it crosses into torture. This is a tricky enough subject. By opening it, President Obama is appeasing his anti-Bush base who want to see show trials and conviction. At the same time, Obama has to convince the CIA that they are not going to be held accountable for actions that they performed. This resulted in a strange situation where it is apparently fine to torture people but a lawyer can be charged for giving a legal opinion. This lets the Democrats pursue their agenda against the Bush administration without antagonizing the CIA.

Recently former vice-president Cheney changed the argument. He asserted that these techniques stopped a terrorist attack and called on Obama to declassify documents which would prove it.

This takes the argument into different grounds. Legal niceties aside, people have been wondering aloud for years, what would you do if you needed information from someone to stop an act of terrorism. The argument here gets tricky.

In popular culture this is never an issue. Agent Jack Bauer on 24 regularly goes far beyond waterboarding or sleep deprivation to stop impending doom. The show's audience has no problem with this. After all, they know that the threat is both real and urgent.

There is the heart of the real life argument. Opponents of harsh interrogation insist that this situation never actually comes up and that it never produces reliable information, anyway.

Now Cheney is saying that it was urgent, it did produce good intelligence, and lives were saved.

For years the anti-Bush crowd insisted that he didn't keep us safe. They insisted that there was never any threat. 9/11 was a one-time event. No other terrorists have targeted the US. The few who have been arrested were never any threat, their plots would never have come to anything. The incidents that have happened in other countries will never happen here because we have integrated our Muslim population better that Europe.

But what if all of those assumptions are wrong? What if there were plots to kill Americans that could only be discovered through waterboarding or other harsh treatment? There is a reason that the last five directors of the CIA wanted Obama to keep the various torture memos classified and avoid the debate.

In the near future Obama is going to have to give a position on this. Would he sacrifice American lives to keep his hands clean? Further, if there is an attack, Republicans will spend years insisting that he could have stopped it if he had been less squeamish.

A frequent complaint about Bush was that he didn't listen to the experts (in this case, his generals). Now Obama has ignored five different CIA directors. He is counting on the country never encountering a situation again where someone has vital information. This is a huge gamble.

"isms"

What are we to make of President Obama? Is he a socialist? No. He is a believer is private ownership. Even when presented with the perfect excuse to nationalize the largest banks, he declined.

So Obama doesn't practice socialism. But he is not a follower of capitalism either. He has made that very clear. He plans to do away with the boom and bust cycles of open markets. His government has assumed control of banks, insurance companies and car makers. He has talked about putting limits on salaries and mandating benefits. He plans on taking over the energy, medical insurance and health care portions of the economy.

By the end of his first 100 days, Obama has appointed 20+ "czars" with wide but poorly-defined authority. That's a new czar every four or five days.

With much fanfare he signed a bill for increasing national service and encouraged all teenagers and seniors to participate.

In the meantime, in the name of safety, Congress outlawed all small-scale manufacturing of toys, children's clothing, and books (they all have to be tested for lead). They are now considering legislation that would outlaw small-scale food production including farmer's markets. Obama's EPA declared CO2 a pollutant which will give it jurisdiction over manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. The reach of government was already expanding during the Bush government and, along with spending, this trend has increased exponentially under Obama.

So what does all of this add up to? Something called Corporatism.

This grew out of the early 20th century progressive movement. The idea was that society would be divided into different interest groups or bodies (the Latin word for body, "corpus", is where Corporatism gets its name).

While obscure, Corporatism has influenced the left for a century or more.

One early and important theorist of corporatism was Adam Müller, an advisor to Prince Metternich in what is now eastern Germany and Austria. Müller propounded his views as an antidote to the twin dangers of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith. In Germany and elsewhere there was a distinct aversion among rulers to allow markets to function without direction or control by the state. The general culture heritage of Europe from the medieval era was opposed to individual self-interest and the free operation of markets. Markets and private property were acceptable only as long as social regulation took precedence over such sinfull motivations as greed.

Coupled with the anti-market sentiments of the medieval culture there was the notion that the rulers of the state had a vital role in promoting social justice. Thus corporatism was formulated as a system that emphasized the postive role of the state in guaranteeing social justice and suppressing the moral and social chaos of the population pursuing their own individual self-interests. And above all else, as a political economic philosophy corporatism was flexible. It could tolerate private enterprise within limits and justify major projects of the state. Corporatism has sometimes been labeled as a Third Way or a mixed economy, a synthesis of capitalism and socialism, but it is in fact a separate, distinctive political economic system.

Does this sound familiar? Think of the demand that car companies start producing smaller, earth-friendly cars. Or the massive stimulus bill. Or Obama's desire to replace air travel with high-speed trains. Just yesterday Senator Kennedy worried that companies with a profit motive might be allowed to participate in universal health care.

Corporatism is collectivist; it is a different version of collectivism than socialism but it is definitely collectivist. It places some importance on the fact that private property is not nationalized, but the control through regulation is just as real. It is de facto nationalization without being de jure nationalization.

Isn't this was was done with the banks? Obama did not nationalize them but he controls them down to executive salary.

New York Times Columnist David Brooks characterized Obama's long-term plans this way:

His view was clear. The market is dynamic and important, but it makes people reckless, parochial and dangerously shortsighted. The market needs adult supervision — a leadership class made up of people who appreciate the market but who also have committed themselves to public service, and who therefore take the long view and are more conscious of the public good.

None of this is new. FDR was a Corporatist although some of his programs were ruled unconstitutional and have been forgotten (look up his battles with the Supreme Court sometime). What is scary is who influenced FDR. During the 1920s and 1930s, several countries tried Corporatism under different names. The worrying part is that once this level of control is given over to the government, how easily it is abused.

The names of Corporatists includes:

Franklin Roosevelt
Miguel Primo de Rivera
Antonio Salazar
Getulio Vargas
Ioannis Metaxas
Francisco Franco
Juan Peron
Benito Mussolini
Adolph Hitler

So what does this add up to? A government with ever-expanding powers and control. One that is not responsive to the desires of the people (after all, they buy SUVs and set their thermostats to 72 degrees), but to the vision of the president and his appointees. This has never worked in the past but one recurring aspect of progressives is that they are sure that they are smarter than anyone else who ever lived and that this time they will succeed.


Note - Mussolini chose the Fasces as the symbol of his party. This is an axe with a handle made up of thin rods and symbolizes strength in unity. The United States has used this symbol to represent the states forming the nation. Mussolini used it to symbolize a collectivist movement and named his party fascists after it. His government was greatly admired by progressives including many in the Roosevelt administration. Fascism didn't get a bad name until after Hitler came to power.

Bush/Obama

What if George W. Bush and Barack Obama made the same decision independently? Would they be judged the same or would Bush be reviled and Obama praised?

In 2001, the Bush administration announced that it would boycott a UN conference on racism. The reason given was that the conference was nothing but a thinly-disguised attack on Israel. The left was up in arms. A month later, after 9/11, some on the left insisted that this boycott had inspired that act of terror.

Last week the Obama administration announced that it would boycott the 2009 UN conference on racism. They gave exactly the same reason. So, where is the outrage?

You don't see any here. This is part of a general cognitive disconnect on the left. They see everything that Bush did as wrong and evil while everything that Obama does is good and proper - even when they do the same things for the same reasons.

BTW, both presidents were correct in avoiding the conference. The conferences are part of a world-wide creeping antisemitism.

How Soon They Forget

The Huffington Post is in full attack mode over the Tea Party protests. Lincoln Mitchell is upset because the governor of Texas joked about seceding from the Union. One of the comment is unintentionally funny.

What kind of Americans openly states that they want to secede from the United States? These cowards are no more then traitors to the United States. I didn't serve in the military and shed blood for these dogs who say they represent America and want to secede because now their political party is no longer in control in Washington. Real Americans don't secede from your country. You stay by your country until you die. You instead work to build this country better. The military code of justice has the right remedy for treason. Those that want to secede are traitors and the lowest circle in Hell is reserved for traitors. This crap goes way beyond free speech. They want to secede, let them. Then have the Commander In Chief call up the US Army. We beat them once, we can surely beat them again. I'll be more then happy to shed some blood again to cut down the weeds in Texas.

The funny part is who was talking about secession just four years ago. That was when George W. Bush won reelection and the liberals wanted to join Canada. See Jesusland.

These are the same people who are calling conservatives traitors.

Who Controls the Tea Parties?

Hale "Bonddad" Stewart posting on Huffington thinks that he has found a gotcha in the Tea Parties.

My only question is this: where were these people 8 years ago? More importantly, where were these people 30 years ago?

{...}

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, it's obvious what's going on. Republican/conservative rank and file are protesting because they are out of power and their leadership is terrible. But they aren't protesting spending; they are protesting the Democratic Party's governance. And that is fine. But please, don't tell me it's about spending or debt. If that were the case, you guys should have taken to the streets years ago.

Does he have a point? No. As I posted yesterday, this is the left trying to convince itself that they don't have to worry about the Tea Party movement. There are several problems with his assertion.

Republicans leaders were not leading the Tea Parties. They had to request to be speakers. In some cases they were turned down. The big party in DC pushed the GOP Chair to a less prominent role than he requested. Many protesters make it clear that they are upset with both parties.

This has been building for some time. The Democrats stoked the movement in 2004, 2006, and 2008, running ads about the crushing debt that Bush was leaving the next generation. In the 2006 and 2008 elections, voters expressed their anger at out-of-control spending by electing Democrats.

Bonddad quotes a 2005 CATO Institute piece about Bush's spending. He conveniently ignores more recent CATO papers that include Obama's projected budget. CATO makes it clear that Obama is outspending Bush.

Bush favored large spending increases, even in years with big deficits. Obama titled his budget A New Era of Responsibility but his huge deficit spending will push up public debt as a share of GDP to levels not seen since the 1940s.

There are some other factors that Bonddad overlooks (or ignores). Bush spent a lot but managed to keep his increases quiet. Most complaints about Bush spending were tied in with the anti-war movement. As far as I can tell, no one has done a survey of Tea Party protesters to see if any were anti-war protesters. The wars totally overshadowed Bush's domestic spending.

Bush may have spent outrageous amounts but it didn't buy him popularity. His approval rating was one of the lowest on record.

The biggest spending jolts in the Bush administration came at the very end. Between September and  January, the Bush administration announced bail-out after bail-out. By the time the Big Three car makers came asking for a relatively small bailout, the public was sick of it. A new bail-out was politically unacceptable by then and Bush used TARP funds instead.

That is what led up to the current protests. Three things actually set it off:

• Passing a huge stimulus that spent the majority of its funds after the economy is expected to recover.
• A mortgage bail-out that seemed to reward people who had behaved irresponsibly at the expense of people who never missed a house payment.
• Obama's budget outline which the CBO estimates will push the national debt to unsustainable levels within a decade.

Bush doubled the national debt in eight years. Obama will double it again in six years and that is without counting the full cost of his health care plan. That is a geometric increase in spending. That is why people who sat home and grumbled during the last 30 years are now taking to the streets.

Trying to Tarnish the Tea Party

The Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party movement is staging hundreds of protests today, April 15, across the nation. While the Tea Party protesters have a number of complaints, many of them ill-defined, they center around the growing deficit and national debt.

The Left is making a concerted effort to minimize this movement. The most common complaint is that it is "astroturfed". This refers to a centrally manufactured protest designed to look like a grassroots movement. ACORN specializes in these. The widely covered tour of AIG executive homes was organized and paid for by an ACORN-affiliated group. Only a small group was actually involved in the protest but they got disproportionate press coverage. Many stories noted that the press outnumbered the protesters. Congress is holding hearings that allege that ACORN pays people to show up for protests on demand.

The people who claim that the Tea parties are astroturfed point out that one of the main organizing web sites is paid for by someone who normally works for conservatives and that Fox News is promoting the events. Some talk show hosts and Republicans are making speeches at Tea Party events.

Strangely, these same critics never questioned the legitimacy of events sponsored by George Soros. Neither did they worry about celebrities or Democrats becoming involved in anti-Bush activities. Cindy Sheehan had a lot of organising behind her protests. No one questioned her legitimacy. Similarly, no one suggested that anti-war rallies were really anti-Bush rallies.

When the press does report on the Tea Parties, the main thread is that people are involved in a protest for the first time in their lives. This is as far as you can get from paid activists.

Possibly the silliest example of trying to tar the movement came from Arthur Delaney on the Huffington Post. He saw a clip of a protester complaining about communists college professors and a woman off-camera who called for burning books. As far as Delaney is concerned, that wraps up the Tea Party movement. To him it is all about anti-intellectualism and burning books. Delaney also conflate a Tea Party with Glen Beck's 9-12 Project. The two are separate and have nothing to do with each other. Neither are they responsible for everything that anyone says at a rally. I have seen Free Mumia signs an numerous left-wing rallies but that does not mean that the event was about freeing a cop-killer.

Of course, the real reason that the Left is trying so hard to denigrate the Tea Party movement is that, for decades, steer protests have been the property of the Left. Conservatives just didn't do things like that. That threatens their whole world-view. For years they have insisted that protests represent the voice of the people and must be listened to.

In order to reconcile the protests with their world-view they insist that the protests aren't real, that they are somehow staged. They are part of the Republican Party (or Fox News which they are convinced is the same thing) so they can be ignored.

The fact is that the Tea Parties are separate from the Republicans. They would be just as outraged if the Republicans were in charge. In fact, this sentiment comes from a pool of frustration that the Democrats tapped in 2006 and 2008. In both elections the Democrats ran as the party of fiscal responsibility. Just yesterday in an economic speech, Barack Obama said that we can no longer borrow and spend. These people agree with him and want a budget that reflects this sentiment.

Obama often defends his spending by pointing out that George W. Bush started it. This is true but it does not mean anything to the Tea Party protesters. They want the government to cut spending, not increase it until interest on the national debt equals the total of all discretionary spending. The Republicans are talking fiscal responsibility right now but they doubled the national debt under Bush. The Democrats promised to bring back the balanced budgets of the Clinton administration them passed a budget outline that will double the debt again in six years (and that's after raising taxes and making unlikely assumptions about the economy).

The truth is that Democrats have never been fiscal conservatives. Now that the Progressives have taken over they don't even pretend to care about the deficit. Congressional Republicans had a good record under Clinton but they threw it away under Bush. Bush and Karl Rove decided that limited government does not bring in enough votes so they abandoned this group. The Democrats courted them in 2006 and 2008 but quickly proved to be worse than Bush.

At its core, the Tea Party movement represents the forgotten libertarians, the people who think that government is already too big and don't want to see it growing bigger and more powerful. Their hero is Ronald Reagan. This is the counter to the Obama-progressives currently running the country. This represents a big swing vote from a segment that has been ignored for years.

Rather than leading this movement, the Republicans are in a position to benefit from it. This will mean turning away from the easy compassionate conservatism of both presidents Bush and returning to the party of Reagan. If they fail to follow through then this group will probably stay home at the next election.

Obama and the Pirates

After several days in which Somali pirates held an American cargo ship captain, the Navy rescued him. They talked the pirates into attaching a tow rope so that the lifeboat they occupied could be towed to calmer waters. The toe rope was shortened until the boat was only around 100 feet from the snipers. Three pirates were killed.

President Obama gets credit for authorizing this action and the use of lethal force. This may help his credibility among our enemies. He has proved that he will order the death of foreign nationals in order to save an American.

That resolved the short-term crisis but not the long-term problem of piracy. There are several possible results:

• Somalis may think twice about pirating in the future. This is very unlikely. There is too much money to be made by piracy. In fact, four ships have been hijacked since the rescue.
• Somalis may leave American-flagged ships alone but continue raiding other ships. This is probably the best that we can hope for but it is still unlikely. Again, there is too much money involved.
• Somalis may escalate attacks against US-flagged ships. Some pirates promised this when they heard of the dead pirates. I am skeptical. Right now crews are willing to surrender to the pirates because they can count on good treatment. If the pirates start beating or killing captives then ships will be more likely to fight back.
• Nothing will change. This is most likely given the events of the last couple of days.
  

So where does that leave us? Pretty much back where we started. Probably the only way of stopping the pirates is to start attacking their bases. Announce that any port that shelters a ship taken by pirates will be shelled. At the same time warships need to patrol the Somali coast to keep foreign ships away. The whole mess started because foreigners started dumping toxic waste in Somali waters and poaching on their fishing (hopefully in different areas). The pirates may not like returning to fishing but it could be made an attractive option.

I expect President Obama to take the opposite approach - try to stop the pirates through increased patrols. Historically this has never worked. The surest way to eliminate pirates is to deny them safe harbor.

Chaos and Order

A common idea in science fiction and fantasy is that the world is divided between chaos and order. Usually, but not always, the hero is a champion of order.

Over the last few years politics have reordered themselves into a similar grouping. The leaders of the Democratic Party including the President and the Secretary of State insist that they are progressives instead of liberals. As they have pushed their agenda, the Republicans opposing them have coalesced around small government/open market principles. These correspond roughly to order anf chaos.

The chaos in question is the free market. Progressives look at aspects of free markets such as pay inequality and boom/bust cycles with horror. Their impulse is to bring order to this untidiness though increased regulations. The current batch of progressives draw from a long history. This is at least the third time in the last century that they have pointed to an economic bust and insisted that capitalism is dead, that it doesn't work. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama insisted that each economic problem could be solved through more regulation. Now that he is president, the list of industries that he plans to regulate is constantly growing.

This dates back to the first half of the 20th century and the first Progressive era. American progressives were fascinated with the changes going on in Europe. A number of them, particularly the editorial staff of The New Republic, made pilgrimages to the USSR to see progress of the Five Year Plans and other reforms. The less-radical wanted to follow the example of Italy and Germany where the government kept private ownership but established strong economic controls.

On the other hand we have the libertarians. They celebrate free, open markets. They insist that markets may not be pretty but they are the most efficient way of producing and distributing goods. What looks like chaos to the outsider is an orderly, self-correcting system. It is not random but it has too many inputs to control and any attempts at taming the chaos will bring unforeseen and undesirable consequences elsewhere. This view has parallels in chaos theory which holds that small changes in initial conditions can lead to large changes in behavior. This is often called the Butterfly Effect.

You can see this breakdown on most of the major objectives of the Obama administration. They want to control banks, large financial institutions including insurance companies and automotive manufacturers. Later this year they will propose some form of universal health coverage. They plan to reshape the power grid. They are appalled by income equality and are changing this through caps on earnings and through additional taxes on the upper end.

Their insistence that everything is knowable and therefor controllable convinces them that global warming models are correct and that urgent action is needed.

The libertarians have a completely different take on all of these issues. Yes, pay inequities exist but wealth has its own multiplier effect. Eliminating wealth hurts other portions of the economy. A one-size-fits-all approach does not fit all. Some people, especially those in their 20s, prefer to spend their money on food and shelter rather than insurance. Not everyone wants or needs the tiny, unsafe econoboxes that the progressives want produced. Climate is too complex for models to predict with enough accuracy to bet our economy on.

There attitudes are not the exact opposites of each other which means that each side sometimes finds itself talking past the other. In a recent meeting between the president and the heads of several banks, the bankers tried to explain that cutting executive pay would just rob their firms of talent. Obama didn't want to hear this and cut them off. From his point of view, no one should be paid millions of dollars, ever.

Personally, I side with those who think that open markets are preferable to regulated ones. Too often well-meaning attempts end up making things worse in the long-run. Here are a couple of examples:

Around 1990, President George G. W. Bush and a Democrat-led Congress decided to reduce the deficit by raising taxes. One new tax that was tailored to only hurt the rich was a new sales tax on yachts. It turned out that most boats covered by the new tax were purchased by upper-middle class boating enthusiasts. The new tax made new boats too expensive for these people to afford. As a result, the boat-building business had major layoffs. Between lost income tax and unemployment benefits, the tax cost the government much more than it brought in.

Another example from the Bush (41) administration - acid rain became a major issue. Congress rushed to pass legislation that required low-sulfur emissions. This hit the coal mining industry in the east hard to the benefit of the western states. More recently, a study just put out by NASA indicates that this legislation is the main cause for Arctic temperature rises. The study indicated that the best way to cool the Arctic would be to resume burning high-sulfur coal. Ironically, this came from someone who works for James Hansen. Hansen has called for outlawing all coal-fired generators. Acting on Hansen's recommendations may actually make things worse instead of better.

Global warming is an example of the two sides talking past each other. The progressives want to take action right now and can't understand why anyone would wait. The libertarians are not convinced that there is a problem and see the cure as being worse than the problem. They want solid assurances that there is a problem.

This is the state of the American political debate right now.

An Obstinate President

In January, President Obama met with House Republicans, asking for their support for his stimulus bill. They tried to explain to him that it was a bad bill that they could not support. His response - "I won the election."

Many fiscal conservatives felt that the failing economy would have the silver lining of making Obama slow his plans for transforming America. This was quickly proven wrong when Obama unveiled his budget which included plans for several expensive changes to government.

The Congressional Budget Office announced that Obama's budget was optimistic. They projected deficits so large that even Obama's budget director admitted that they would be unsustainable. When asked how this would affect his plans, Obama brushed off the question as nothing but projections based on different sets of numbers. He went on to say that he was not going to pass problems onto our children (just a huge debt).

Many European countries are further in debt than is healthy. European economists say that Obama's stimulus is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Regardless, Obama told the G20 that they needed their own global stimulus.

During the campaign Obama was roundly criticized for suggesting that he would meet with hostile foreign governments without precondition. He sent an appeal to Iran, anyway. Their response was a set of preconditions that they had before they would meet with the US. Obama made a second appeal through YouTube. Iran responded with the same set of preconditions.

In a late-March meeting, officials from the country's largest banks tried to explain why bank executives were paid so much. Obama cut them off, saying that "I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks." Not mentioned was that he had been shaking a figurative pitchfork a few days prior.

In case after case, the President makes up his mind regardless of facts or practicality. If someone questions him he silences them with a curt remark.

I have suggested before that Progressives think that they are the smartest people who ever lived. How else can I explain Obama's insistence in having things his way no matter who disagrees?

President Bush was often criticized for refusing to second-guess himself but he often backed down from proposals. Obama appears to be even less introspective than Bush. He decided what course he is going to take and does not recognize obstacles. How many of Bush's critics are willing to make the same complaint about Obama?

Government Control

(and why it's a bad thing)

The US government is taking over General Motors. The President already fired the head of GM and the government will have a say in the make-up of the new board of directors and in future operations.

Another key stakeholder in the company, of course, would be the government, which has lent the company money but does not own any shares. And many analysts believe that whoever the shareholders may be, the government's interest will matter most.

"Obviously, the government has a voice as an investor," said Charles Elson, head of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "But it's not like the government speaks as one voice among many. It becomes the overwhelming voice."

First, this was probably inevitable given GM's requests for bail-out money. The out-going Bush administration was willing to hand over large sums with few strings but the incoming Obama administration is still hungry to put its stamp on everything it can.

A little background - Detroit in general and GM in particular have been trying to restructure themselves back into the forefront of auto manufacturing for decades. Twenty years ago, Michael Moore made his name with Roger and Me, his attempt to confront Roger Smith, the head of GM, over layoffs. Moore wanted Smith to bring prosperity back to Flint Michigan. In retrospect, Smith didn't do anywhere near enough restructuring and Flint was never going to be the paradise that Moore painted it. Had GM rehired all of the unemployed in Flint, then the request for a bailout would have come years earlier.

This is where outside influence in large corporations becomes a problem. The current leadership may not be able to save their company but they are at least focused on that task. Once government gets involved then other factors are introduced.

During the early days of the Iraq war, many liberal hawks said that it was important that Saddam be overthrown but not by this (Bush) administration. Of course, that was the administration that we had and waiting another 2-6 years for a new administration wasn't going to stop Saddam's atrocities.

We are in the same position with GM. It needed to be saved but not by this administration. Obama and the Congressional Democrats have several things on their plate. They recently increased the CAFE millage requirements. They are hostile to executive pay. Members of Congress have talked about requiring GM to produce smaller, more efficient cars. Detroit is a basket case because their costs are so high that they can only make money selling low-millage SUVs but the market for that dried up.

Granted, Obama has ordered GM to get concessions from the unions to reduce manufacturing costs. That should help but the government can't resist using its influence for social good. Assuming that GM survives and continues under government control then we will see ever increasing restrictions on how they do business. This is inevitable. It is how government works.

Look at the last budget and the number of earmarks. Control of GM represents another opportunity for earmarks. This might take the form of pushing the Volt electric car or targeting plants according to an influential congressman's constituency. It doesn't matter. What matters is that these decisions will be made for political reasons, not business ones.

Beyond that, what is there to suggest that the President and Congress are competent to run a large business? They can't balance a budget and most of them (starting with the President) have never run a large company. Many of them are motivated by ideology and a number of the most ideological are in top positions.

This has been tried before. Lots of times in lots of countries. Government control of business just doesn't work.