politics
Obama Loses It
Dennis Kneale, CNBC Media & Technology Editor:
In so doing, the President has shed his usual, becalmed visage of judicious intelligence and what-me-worry confidence. In its place is an unpleasant portrait of a sulking, vengeful politician lashing out at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and their brethren on Wall Street--the only target that, his polls say, might resonate with the voters who are forsaking him.
The Obama folks "don’t accept that banks perform a necessary function in the system: to get the economy going again," says one senior executive at a Wall Street giant. "This business has a social benefit, and it’s how we make money. The two are not exclusive."
Yet the White House is deaf to complaints that burdensome new rules would hurt bank profits and hamper the recovery. "When you tell them that reduces our profits, they just don’t care," this exec complains.
That’s the big problem: All of us, especially the Obama Posse, should care a lot about profits at the banks. Healthy banks provide the fuel for a healthy economy. They line up hundreds of billions of dollars a year in syndicated loans for businesses and directly loan out hundreds of billions more.
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Obama’s new proposal to ban banks from trading for their own accounts cracks down on a practice that contributed, in no way whatsoever, to the housing bubble and the tumultuous tumble that followed. A recent Goldman Sachs report shows that, simply put, faulty and loose bank lending practices caused 98 percent of all losses, not the banks’ proprietary trading. Emphasis in bold added by yours truly. This is class warfare on the part of the Obama administration, plain and simple.
Setting brushfires
"It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." --Samuel Adams
Yep, too late.
"[A] rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 1823
Too late?
"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Spencer Roane, 1821
Sinking gradually
"[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, -- who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia." --George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
A dangerous fairy tale
The idea that anti-Americanism exists or increased just because of Bush springs from an immature, self-centered view of the universe and international politics. We saw this in the weeks after 9/11 from the "Why do they hate us" crowd that attempted to blame the victim for the terrorism. It's safer to think that we control everything in the world, and that therefore we have the power to change anything in the world. That's nothing more than a fairy tale, and a dangerous one when taken seriously.
The sheer arrogance
Robert Tracinski, RealClearPolitics:
When you understand what this bill does, you can see why the Democrats would be happy to compromise and drop the public option-for now. This bill so comprehensively wrecks private health insurance that pretty soon a "public option" will seem like the only alternative, and they will already have put into place one of the new taxes needed to pay for it. If the left's goal is to impose socialized medicine in America, this bill does it in the most callous and destructive way possible. It smashes private health care-then leaves us stranded in the rubble, at which point we will be expected to come crawling back to the same people who caused the disaster and ask them to save us.
That is the final and perhaps most compelling reason to kill this bill: the sheer arrogance of the whole enterprise. It is the arrogance of stampeding an unwilling public toward a monstrous 2,000-page piece of legislation while admitting that it still has huge problems, but promising that it will all somehow be fixed later on. It's the arrogance of selling us a bill that expands government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while telling us that it will reduce the deficit. It is the sheer unmitigated gall of appointing a bureaucrat to run a government-controlled insurance market that takes away all of our health choices-and then calling this bureaucrat the Health Choices Commissioner.
That's the kind of government arrogance that has to be smacked down hard, and that alone is reason to demand that your senator reject this vicious bill in its entirety.
A wise and frugal government
"[A] wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." --Thomas Jefferson Oh well...
A Sickening Story
Our armed forces have become exquisitely sensitive--toward Nidal Malik Hasan and Ahmed Hashim Abed, and one wonders who else. Such sensitivity comes at a price, of course. But for now, at least, that price won't be paid by those who set the policy. The SEALs would've been better off if they'd just shot the guy dead.
Justice Denied
Eric Holder's move to try the 9/11 masterminds in Manhattan makes it official: This administration has reverted to pre-9/11 "crime" fighting.
Amid all the talk during the attorney general's surreal press conference of the "crime" committed eight years ago, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon wasn't even mentioned.
Lest anyone forget, the military headquarters of the United States was attacked that day along with the Twin Towers.
An entire wedge of the Ring was gutted when the Saudi hijackers slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into it. Nearly 200 military personnel were killed, along with the passengers and crew of the hijacked jet.
The jet was a weapon used to attack the very center of our military. That was not a "crime," as some say. It was an act of war.
And 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with the four other al-Qaida terrorist co-conspirators Holder wants to try, are no mere criminals. They are enemy combatants -- and should be treated as such.
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Holder clucked that the "trials will be open to the public and the world." And they will turn into circuses, playing right into the hands of the enemy.
These trials will drag on for years, perhaps even decades, as defense lawyers file endless motions and appeals. Meanwhile, valuable intelligence about interrogation techniques and other methods we've used against al-Qaida will be revealed to the enemy during trial discovery.
This move to a civilian court makes no sense at all, except viewed through a political prism.
The Year of Revolution
November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes in this issue as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s.
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The consensus Year of Revolution for most of our lifetimes has been 1968, with its political assassinations, its Parisian protests, and a youth-culture rebellion that the baby boomers will never tire of telling us about. But as the preeminent modern Central European historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in a 2008 essay, 1989 "ended communism in Europe, the Soviet empire, the division of Germany, and an ideological and geopolitical struggle...that had shaped world politics for half a century. It was, in its geopolitical results, as big as 1945 or 1914. By comparison, '68 was a molehill."
Economic Myths and Irrelevancy
There is no more reliable rule than the 95 percent rule: 95 percent of what you read about economics and finance is either wrong or irrelevant.
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[T]he most repeated statement about the cause of the U.S. Great Depression is that it was caused by the October 1929 stock market crash. How could that be? By April 1930, the stock market had recovered to its pre-crash level. What is not taught in history books is the Great Depression was caused by a massive government failure. The most important part of that failure were the actions by the Federal Reserve Bank that led to the contraction of the money supply by 25 percent. Then, in the name of saving jobs, Congress enacted the Smoot-Hawley Act in June 1930, which increased U.S. tariffs by more than 50 percent. Other nations retaliated and world trade collapsed. U.S. unemployment rose from 8 percent in 1930 to 25 percent in 1933. In 1932, the Herbert Hoover administration and a Democratic Congress imposed the largest tax increase in U.S. history, raising the top tax rate on income from 25 percent to 63 percent. The Roosevelt administration followed these destructive policies with New Deal legislation that massively regulated the economy and extended the Great Depression to after World War II.
Have today's politicians and their economic advisers learned anything from yesteryear's policy that turned what would have been a short, sharp downturn in the economy into a 16-year affair? The answer is very little.
Obama and the Liberal Paradigm
Not only does the liberal paradigm not even come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today, worse, it has largely congealed into a political religion, especially in the nearly 30 years since Ronald Reagan shifted the nation's political center of gravity, just as FDR had done 48 years earlier. Since liberals care about the sheep, all who disagree with liberalism must not, making them morally inferior if not downright immoral. Thus the nastiness in American politics is largely on the left. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, her treatment in the liberal press was ugliness personified.
Too bad we haven't abided by this in decades
"[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes -- rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments." --Alexander Hamilton
Disastrously bad, ridicule-inviting choices
It seems to me that if you’re going to be in the business of making disastrously bad, ridicule-inviting choices, you need to select people with a long track record of feckless, reckless, irrelevant, crowd-pleasing stupidity on an international scale. People like Jimmy Carter, in other words.
Seriously, couldn’t the committee find a murderous thug who, seeing that his bread might be buttered on the side of temporary peace, recently signed some meaningless treaty? And if they wanted an American, couldn’t they find someone with a solid history of lecturing his countrymen about our moral failings?
What’s missing this year, in other words, is outrage. There’s just nothing to be incensed about. Obama certainly shows plenty of promise of becoming Carteresque, what with looming inflation and a seeming inability to make decisions about the military, but he needs time to stumble into that role. Giving him the award now just makes everyone go “Huh?” And I think what the committee is really looking for is “Ack!”
We need a bigger House?
Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online :
Beyond principle, there are practical reasons to expand Congress. For decades, presidential candidates have promised to change the "way Washington works." But once elected, they're soon captured by their own congressional parties, which are in turn beholden to the "old bulls" and constituencies rooted in interests outside their districts.
A Congress of, say, 5,000 citizen-legislators would change that overnight. Would it cost more money? Yes. But today's huge staffs could be cut, and perks and pork might even be curtailed by using the old chewing gum rule: If there's not enough for everyone, nobody can have any.
Term-limit activists have the right idea -- getting new blood in Washington -- but their remedy is anti-democratic. The trick is to swamp Congress with new blood and new ideas. Want more minorities in Congress? Done. Want more libertarians? More socialists? More blue-collar workers? Done, done, done.
In free-speech debates, it's often said that the cure for bad speech is more speech. Well, the cure for a calcified Congress just might be more members; the remedy for an undemocratic system, more democracy. It's certainly interesting to think about. Be sure to read the whole thing. The representation of Montana versus Rhode Island should immediately show you something's wrong.
Appreciating our own
"[W]e ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own." --George Washington, letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, 1795
What we're lacking
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers." --John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
Fundamental
"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience." --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the state of Virginia, 1782