Hint from Politico: it ain't American cars.
"A survey of West Executive Drive, where White House staffers park, revealed only five American cars out of 23 --a Dodge Grand Caravan, two Ford Escapes, a Jeep Cherokee and a Cadillac.
The lot was sprinkled with BMWs, Mercedes, Hondas, Toyotas, Saabs, Audis, Volkswagens and a Volvo."
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
The Jew-hating cartoonist Pat Oliphant dissected.
Israel Insider examines the Jew-hating cartoon of Pat Oliphant.
Barry Rubin: The loathsome cartoon
Posted by Israel Insider on March 27, 2009 at 1:39am
It is silly to say that the Pat Oliphant Cartoon in the New York Times and many newspapers around the world is antisemitic. But it’s also a bad mistake because the cartoon deserves serious analysis to show just how dangerous and wrong it is, in ways that not only hurt Israel but all Western democracies.
Let’s deconstruct the cartoon to show the basic ideas that underlie it and that make it lie.
1. To begin with, it is not a very good cartoon and bears a striking resemblance to anti-Israel propaganda cartoons in its crudity and one-sidedness. Aesthetic decline has accompanied political crudeness. It doesn’t just say: these people are wrong but these people are 100 percent evil and hateful. The next step is, of course, they deserve to die and their state deserves to be wiped off the map. Is that what Oliphant thinks? Who cares? That’s what he said.
2. On the left is a huge figure. On the right is a small figure. The implication that need not be spoken here is that the big figure—the powerful side—must be wrong. Oliphant like many or most Western intellectuals, academics, and policymakers, still doesn’t understand the concept of asymmetric warfare. In this, a weaker side wages war on a stronger side using techniques it thinks can make it win. What are these techniques? Terrorism, indifference to the sacrifice of its people, indifference to material losses, refusal to compromise, extending the war for ever. This is precisely the technique of Hamas: let’s continue attacking Israel in order to provoke it to hit us, let’s target Israeli civilians, let’s seek a total victory based on genocide, let’s use our own civilians as human shields, and with such methods we will win. One way we will win is to demonize those who defend themselves, to put them in positions where they have a choice between surrender and looking bad. This cartoon is a victory for Hamas. But it is also a victory for all those who would fight the West and other democracies (India, for example) using these methods. Remember September 11?
3. The big figure has no head, and hence is not a human being. Israelis are not human. Moreover the headless figure is irrational. We are to believe that Israel attacked Gaza for no reason. Forget about thousands of rockets, hundreds of mortar shells, and scores of cross-border attacks. The tiny figure on the right is no threat. So there is no reason to attack it. Attacking is immoral and irrational. The same could—and has—been said about al-Qaida, Hizballah, Pakistani terrorists striking at Mumbai, etc.
4. Dehumanization: The figure on the left is a monster, a robot. Monsters and robots deserve no sympathy; they have no right to self-defense. If tomorrow an Israeli child or civilian is killed in a terrorist attack, how can one have sympathy for these people since they are not people?
5. Goosestep: The leg is raised In a Nazi goosestep; the shoe is a jackboot. Thus, Israel is a Nazi power. But why is it a Nazi power? Because it isn’t human and just attacks women and children for no reason at all. And what happens then? Since Israel is said to be Nazi, any sympathy for 2000 years of Jewish suffering—including Arab terrorist attacks—is thus erased. Incidentally, this is all being done when there is still no proof (not even weak proof) for a single Israeli soldier having committed a single atrocity. Where, then, is the rationality here?
6. Sword: Ironically, the sword is the weapon used by Islamists to behead people. Why a sword? Because it is a primitive weapon for a primitive people. The hand which is very hairy—again the ape, dehumanized image—holds the sword at a 45 degree angle reminiscent of a Nazi salute. See point 5 above.
7. The Magen David is Israel’s symbol. Therefore, despite the fact that it is also a general Jewish symbol, it is not antisemitic to use it. Of course, the context matters, too. But that is not what is most important in this cartoon. Still, the author could have labeled the monster “Israel.” Note, however, that “magen” means shield, and the name of Israel’s army is the Israel Defense Forces. In Gaza, they were acting in a defensive manner but that of course escapes much of the media coverage and things said about the war. What strikes me as most bizarre about the usage of this symbol is that it is being wheeled forward, as if Israel seeks to install itself in the Gaza Strip. But Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, openly stating that it wanted peace. The symbolism is to make the action purely offensive, an aggressive war to annex territory, which of course is untrue.
8. The shark is to me the most offensive part of the cartoon because it shows that the cartoonist has lost any sense of his tradition. Aren’t all the other elements enough to show his theme? The “over-kill” puts it into the category of Arab propaganda cartoons. It says: Israel is innately aggressive, that the whole state of Israel is permanently aggressive and exists for no other reason. If the cartoonist had shown Israel doing mean things to helpless Palestinians, the suggestion is that the Gaza War is a terrible thing. The way this cartoon is done it suggests that Israel’s existence is a terrible thing.
9. Palestinians are portrayed as only women and children. There are no fighters. Was there no army in Gaza, no 20,000 Hamas men under arms? Did Israel attack a defenseless area? Again if the cartoonist wanted to portray Israel carelessly attacking into a civilian area, the implication would be that it used excessive force or insufficient care. I would disagree but the extremism of the cartoons suggestion, and its falseness, exceeds the usual bounds of Western rationality.
10. The evil Israel is heading right toward the Palestinians and they are running in fear. Here is an accurate way to describe the war: After Hamas unilaterally announced it was cancelling the ceasefire, it launched even more rockets and mortars at Israel than it did during the “normal” ceasefire. Their range was increasing and the lives of one million Israelis became impossible. Hamas leaders openly bragged that Israel was afraid to fight back and they would keep escalating. Israel then attacked, the Hamas forces retreated into the middle of highly populated civilian areas. After some fighting, where civilians were used by Hamas as human shields, Israel had no intention of going into the most densely populated neighborhoods. It thus ended the war, and withdrew. Hamas then came out of hiding and bragged that it had won a great victory. The fantasy Israel created by Oliphant and others would have continued the war, wiped out Hamas, and retaken the Gaza Strip. In military terms, Israel could have done this with minimal casualties for its own side. Far from proving anti-Israel claims, the history of the Gaza War proved the opposite.
This is, then, a loathsome cartoon. But to dismiss it by the single word “antisemitism” will foreclose thought as to why it is a loathsome cartoon. It will allow its defenders to avoid facing the real problems with this cartoon and the worldview it represents. And worst of all: that argument implies that the only problem was using the ambiguous Mogen David, that it would have been acceptable if he had just written the word “Israel” on the Nazi monster he created to represent the Jewish state.
Finally, this cartoon represents the mentality that will plague every Western and democratic state in the coming years. Imagine the exact same cartoon but with the Magen David replaced by the Stars and Stripes—the evil America attacking the Taliban or al-Qaida, or Iraq, or Muslims in general. Indeed, this is the kind of cartoon which has appeared aimed against America or the West in general. It is part of the merging of much Western fashionable intellectual and cultural thinking with that of extremist Third World, and especially radical Islamist, propaganda.
The cartoonist doesn’t hate Jews; he probably doesn’t even hate Israelis. What is involved here is a lack of understanding so enormous that it will both incite hatred; cause violence and death; and block policies needed to help people—including Palestinians who, are supposedly the object of its sympathy but thus doomed to suffer under a repressive regime with a permanent war policy.
Antisemitism? Ask not for whom the bell tolls because Israel, the canary in the mine—the one who first they came for—can tell you that you are all next.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
Barry Rubin: The loathsome cartoon
Posted by Israel Insider on March 27, 2009 at 1:39am
It is silly to say that the Pat Oliphant Cartoon in the New York Times and many newspapers around the world is antisemitic. But it’s also a bad mistake because the cartoon deserves serious analysis to show just how dangerous and wrong it is, in ways that not only hurt Israel but all Western democracies.
Let’s deconstruct the cartoon to show the basic ideas that underlie it and that make it lie.
1. To begin with, it is not a very good cartoon and bears a striking resemblance to anti-Israel propaganda cartoons in its crudity and one-sidedness. Aesthetic decline has accompanied political crudeness. It doesn’t just say: these people are wrong but these people are 100 percent evil and hateful. The next step is, of course, they deserve to die and their state deserves to be wiped off the map. Is that what Oliphant thinks? Who cares? That’s what he said.
2. On the left is a huge figure. On the right is a small figure. The implication that need not be spoken here is that the big figure—the powerful side—must be wrong. Oliphant like many or most Western intellectuals, academics, and policymakers, still doesn’t understand the concept of asymmetric warfare. In this, a weaker side wages war on a stronger side using techniques it thinks can make it win. What are these techniques? Terrorism, indifference to the sacrifice of its people, indifference to material losses, refusal to compromise, extending the war for ever. This is precisely the technique of Hamas: let’s continue attacking Israel in order to provoke it to hit us, let’s target Israeli civilians, let’s seek a total victory based on genocide, let’s use our own civilians as human shields, and with such methods we will win. One way we will win is to demonize those who defend themselves, to put them in positions where they have a choice between surrender and looking bad. This cartoon is a victory for Hamas. But it is also a victory for all those who would fight the West and other democracies (India, for example) using these methods. Remember September 11?
3. The big figure has no head, and hence is not a human being. Israelis are not human. Moreover the headless figure is irrational. We are to believe that Israel attacked Gaza for no reason. Forget about thousands of rockets, hundreds of mortar shells, and scores of cross-border attacks. The tiny figure on the right is no threat. So there is no reason to attack it. Attacking is immoral and irrational. The same could—and has—been said about al-Qaida, Hizballah, Pakistani terrorists striking at Mumbai, etc.
4. Dehumanization: The figure on the left is a monster, a robot. Monsters and robots deserve no sympathy; they have no right to self-defense. If tomorrow an Israeli child or civilian is killed in a terrorist attack, how can one have sympathy for these people since they are not people?
5. Goosestep: The leg is raised In a Nazi goosestep; the shoe is a jackboot. Thus, Israel is a Nazi power. But why is it a Nazi power? Because it isn’t human and just attacks women and children for no reason at all. And what happens then? Since Israel is said to be Nazi, any sympathy for 2000 years of Jewish suffering—including Arab terrorist attacks—is thus erased. Incidentally, this is all being done when there is still no proof (not even weak proof) for a single Israeli soldier having committed a single atrocity. Where, then, is the rationality here?
6. Sword: Ironically, the sword is the weapon used by Islamists to behead people. Why a sword? Because it is a primitive weapon for a primitive people. The hand which is very hairy—again the ape, dehumanized image—holds the sword at a 45 degree angle reminiscent of a Nazi salute. See point 5 above.
7. The Magen David is Israel’s symbol. Therefore, despite the fact that it is also a general Jewish symbol, it is not antisemitic to use it. Of course, the context matters, too. But that is not what is most important in this cartoon. Still, the author could have labeled the monster “Israel.” Note, however, that “magen” means shield, and the name of Israel’s army is the Israel Defense Forces. In Gaza, they were acting in a defensive manner but that of course escapes much of the media coverage and things said about the war. What strikes me as most bizarre about the usage of this symbol is that it is being wheeled forward, as if Israel seeks to install itself in the Gaza Strip. But Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, openly stating that it wanted peace. The symbolism is to make the action purely offensive, an aggressive war to annex territory, which of course is untrue.
8. The shark is to me the most offensive part of the cartoon because it shows that the cartoonist has lost any sense of his tradition. Aren’t all the other elements enough to show his theme? The “over-kill” puts it into the category of Arab propaganda cartoons. It says: Israel is innately aggressive, that the whole state of Israel is permanently aggressive and exists for no other reason. If the cartoonist had shown Israel doing mean things to helpless Palestinians, the suggestion is that the Gaza War is a terrible thing. The way this cartoon is done it suggests that Israel’s existence is a terrible thing.
9. Palestinians are portrayed as only women and children. There are no fighters. Was there no army in Gaza, no 20,000 Hamas men under arms? Did Israel attack a defenseless area? Again if the cartoonist wanted to portray Israel carelessly attacking into a civilian area, the implication would be that it used excessive force or insufficient care. I would disagree but the extremism of the cartoons suggestion, and its falseness, exceeds the usual bounds of Western rationality.
10. The evil Israel is heading right toward the Palestinians and they are running in fear. Here is an accurate way to describe the war: After Hamas unilaterally announced it was cancelling the ceasefire, it launched even more rockets and mortars at Israel than it did during the “normal” ceasefire. Their range was increasing and the lives of one million Israelis became impossible. Hamas leaders openly bragged that Israel was afraid to fight back and they would keep escalating. Israel then attacked, the Hamas forces retreated into the middle of highly populated civilian areas. After some fighting, where civilians were used by Hamas as human shields, Israel had no intention of going into the most densely populated neighborhoods. It thus ended the war, and withdrew. Hamas then came out of hiding and bragged that it had won a great victory. The fantasy Israel created by Oliphant and others would have continued the war, wiped out Hamas, and retaken the Gaza Strip. In military terms, Israel could have done this with minimal casualties for its own side. Far from proving anti-Israel claims, the history of the Gaza War proved the opposite.
This is, then, a loathsome cartoon. But to dismiss it by the single word “antisemitism” will foreclose thought as to why it is a loathsome cartoon. It will allow its defenders to avoid facing the real problems with this cartoon and the worldview it represents. And worst of all: that argument implies that the only problem was using the ambiguous Mogen David, that it would have been acceptable if he had just written the word “Israel” on the Nazi monster he created to represent the Jewish state.
Finally, this cartoon represents the mentality that will plague every Western and democratic state in the coming years. Imagine the exact same cartoon but with the Magen David replaced by the Stars and Stripes—the evil America attacking the Taliban or al-Qaida, or Iraq, or Muslims in general. Indeed, this is the kind of cartoon which has appeared aimed against America or the West in general. It is part of the merging of much Western fashionable intellectual and cultural thinking with that of extremist Third World, and especially radical Islamist, propaganda.
The cartoonist doesn’t hate Jews; he probably doesn’t even hate Israelis. What is involved here is a lack of understanding so enormous that it will both incite hatred; cause violence and death; and block policies needed to help people—including Palestinians who, are supposedly the object of its sympathy but thus doomed to suffer under a repressive regime with a permanent war policy.
Antisemitism? Ask not for whom the bell tolls because Israel, the canary in the mine—the one who first they came for—can tell you that you are all next.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Sleep well, knowing Obama has a saint by his side
The Chicago Tribune reports on Rahm Emmanuel's sterling past.
www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-rahm-emanuel-profit-26-mar26,0,5682373.story
chicagotribune.com
Rahm Emanuel's profitable stint at mortgage giant
Short Freddie Mac stay made him at least $320,000
By Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac
Tribune reporters
March 26, 2009
Click here to find out more!
Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.
One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago's Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.
As gatekeeper to Obama, Emanuel now plays a critical role in addressing the nation's mortgage woes and fulfilling the administration's pledge to impose responsibility on the financial world.
Emanuel's Freddie Mac involvement has been a prominent point on his political résumé, and his healthy payday from the firm has been no secret either. What is less known, however, is how little he apparently did for his money and how he benefited from the kind of cozy ties between Washington and Wall Street that have fueled the nation's current economic mess.
Though just 49, Emanuel is a veteran Democratic strategist and fundraiser who served three terms in the U.S. House after helping elect Mayor Richard Daley and former President Bill Clinton. The Freddie Mac money was a small piece of the $16 million he made in a three-year interlude as an investment banker a decade ago.
In business as in politics, Emanuel has cultivated an aggressive, take-charge reputation that made him rich and propelled his rise to the front of the national stage. But buried deep in corporate and government documents on the Freddie Mac scandal is a little-known and very different story involving Emanuel.
He was named to the Freddie Mac board in February 2000 by Clinton, whom Emanuel had served as White House political director and vocal defender during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals.
The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board's working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.
On Emanuel's watch, the board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.
The accounting scandal wasn't the only one that brewed during Emanuel's tenure.
During his brief time on the board, the company hatched a plan to enhance its political muscle. That scheme, also reviewed by the board, led to a record $3.8 million fine from the Federal Election Commission for illegally using corporate resources to host fundraisers for politicians. Emanuel was the beneficiary of one of those parties after he left the board and ran in 2002 for a seat in Congress from the North Side of Chicago.
The board was throttled for its acquiescence to the accounting manipulation in a 2003 report by Armando Falcon Jr., head of a federal oversight agency for Freddie Mac. The scandal forced Freddie Mac to restate $5 billion in earnings and pay $585 million in fines and legal settlements. It also foreshadowed even harder times at the firm.
Many of those same risky investment practices tied to the accounting scandal eventually brought the firm to the brink of insolvency and led to its seizure last year by the Bush administration, which pledged to inject up to $100 billion in new capital to keep the firm afloat. The Obama administration has doubled that commitment.
Freddie Mac reported recently that it lost $50 billion in 2008. It so far has tapped $14 billion of the government's guarantee and said it soon will need an additional $30 billion to keep operating.
Like its larger government-chartered cousin Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac was created by Congress to promote home ownership, though both are private corporations with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The two firms hold stakes in half the nation's residential mortgages.
Because of Freddie Mac's federal charter, the board in Emanuel's day was a hybrid of directors elected by shareholders and those appointed by the president.
In his final year in office, Clinton tapped three close pals: Emanuel, Washington lobbyist and golfing partner James Free, and Harold Ickes, a former White House aide instrumental in securing the election of Hillary Clinton to the U.S. Senate. Free's appointment was good for four months, and Ickes' only three months.
Falcon, director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, found that presidential appointees played no "meaningful role" in overseeing the company and recommended that their positions be eliminated.
John Coffee, a law professor and expert on corporate governance at Columbia University, said the financial crisis at Freddie Mac was years in the making and fueled by chronically weak oversight by the firm's directors. The presence of presidential appointees on the board didn't help, he added.
"You know there was a patronage system and these people were only going to serve a short time," Coffee said. "That's why [they] get the stock upfront."
Financial disclosure statements that are required of U.S. House members show Emanuel made at least $320,000 from his time at Freddie Mac. Two years after leaving the firm, Emanuel reported an additional sale of Freddie Mac stock worth between $100,001 and $250,000. The document did not detail whether he profited from the sale.
Sarah Feinberg, a spokeswoman for Emanuel, said there was no conflict between his stint at Freddie Mac and Obama's vow to restore confidence in financial institutions and the executives who run them. At the same time, Feinberg said Emanuel now agrees that presidential appointees to the Freddie Mac board "are unnecessary and don't have long enough terms to make a difference."
Former President George W. Bush voluntarily stopped making such appointments following Falcon's assessment of their uselessness.
In an interview, Falcon said the Freddie Mac board did most of its work in committees. Yet proxy statements that detailed committee assignments showed none for Emanuel, Free or Ickes during the time they served in 2000 or 2001. Most other directors carried two committee assignments each.
Contrary to the proxy statements, Feinberg said she believed that Emanuel served on board committees that oversaw Freddie Mac's investment strategies and mortgage purchase activities. But Feinberg acknowledged she had no official documents to back up that assertion.
The Obama administration rejected a Tribune request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel's time as a director. The documents, obtained by Falcon for his investigation, were "commercial information" exempt from disclosure, according to a lawyer for the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Emanuel's board term expired in May 2001, and soon after he launched his Democratic congressional bid.
One of Emanuel's fellow directors at Freddie Mac was Neil Hartigan, the former Illinois attorney general. Hartigan said Emanuel's primary contribution was explaining to others on the board how to play the levers of power.
He was respected on the board for his understanding of "the dynamics of the legislative process and the executive branch at senior levels," Hartigan recalled. "I wouldn't say he was outspoken. What he was, was solid."
By the time Emanuel joined Freddie Mac, the company had begun to loosen lending standards and buy riskier sub-prime loans. It was a practice that later blew up and contributed to the current foreclosure crisis.
In his investigation, Falcon concluded that the board of directors on which Emanuel sat was so pliant that Freddie Mac's managers easily were able to massage company ledgers. They manipulated bookkeeping to smooth out volatility, perpetuating Freddie Mac's industry reputation as "Steady Freddie," a reliable producer of earnings growth. Wall Street liked what it saw, Freddie Mac's stock value soared and top executives collected their bonuses.
Another focus of Freddie during Emanuel's day—and one that played to his skill set—was a stepped-up effort to combat congressional demands for more regulation.
During a September 2000 board meeting—midway through Emanuel's 14-month term—Freddie Mac lobbyist R. Mitchell Delk laid out a strategy titled "Political Risk Management" aimed at influencing lawmakers and blunting pressure in Congress for more regulation. Through Delk's initiative, Freddie Mac sponsored more than 80 fundraisers that raised at least $1.7 million for congressional candidates despite a federal law that bans corporations from direct political activity.
Emanuel spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg said Emanuel "can't remember the meeting or topic" but might have been in attendance when Delk outlined his plans. Feinberg downplayed the significance of the fundraiser thrown for Emanuel, which brought in $7,000, stressing that it was but one of many hosted by Delk. The event stood out in at least one respect, however.
The Freddie Mac-linked events were mostly for Republicans, and only a handful benefited Democrats like Emanuel. "Rahm was a good friend of mine. He was on Freddie Mac's board. He was very much supportive of housing," said Delk, who resigned under pressure in 2004.
Then-Freddie Mac CEO Leland Brendsel also hosted a fundraising lunch for Emanuel's 2002 campaign that netted $9,500 from top company executives. Brendsel was later ousted in the accounting scandal.
Federal campaign records show that Emanuel received $25,000 from donors with ties to Freddie Mac in the 2002 campaign cycle, more than twice the amount collected that election by any other candidate for the U.S. House or Senate.
Emanuel joined the House in January 2003 and was named to the Financial Services Committee, where he also sat on the subcommittee that directly oversaw Freddie Mac. A few months later, Freddie Mac Chief Executive Officer Leland Brendsel was forced out, and the committee and subcommittee launched hearings to sort out the mess, spanning more than a year. Emanuel skipped every hearing, congressional records indicate.
Feinberg said Emanuel recused himself "from deliberations related to Freddie Mac to avoid even the appearance of favoritism, impropriety or a conflict of interest."
bsecter@tribune.com
azajac@tribune.com
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-rahm-emanuel-profit-26-mar26,0,5682373.story
chicagotribune.com
Rahm Emanuel's profitable stint at mortgage giant
Short Freddie Mac stay made him at least $320,000
By Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac
Tribune reporters
March 26, 2009
Click here to find out more!
Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.
One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago's Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.
As gatekeeper to Obama, Emanuel now plays a critical role in addressing the nation's mortgage woes and fulfilling the administration's pledge to impose responsibility on the financial world.
Emanuel's Freddie Mac involvement has been a prominent point on his political résumé, and his healthy payday from the firm has been no secret either. What is less known, however, is how little he apparently did for his money and how he benefited from the kind of cozy ties between Washington and Wall Street that have fueled the nation's current economic mess.
Though just 49, Emanuel is a veteran Democratic strategist and fundraiser who served three terms in the U.S. House after helping elect Mayor Richard Daley and former President Bill Clinton. The Freddie Mac money was a small piece of the $16 million he made in a three-year interlude as an investment banker a decade ago.
In business as in politics, Emanuel has cultivated an aggressive, take-charge reputation that made him rich and propelled his rise to the front of the national stage. But buried deep in corporate and government documents on the Freddie Mac scandal is a little-known and very different story involving Emanuel.
He was named to the Freddie Mac board in February 2000 by Clinton, whom Emanuel had served as White House political director and vocal defender during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals.
The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board's working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.
On Emanuel's watch, the board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.
The accounting scandal wasn't the only one that brewed during Emanuel's tenure.
During his brief time on the board, the company hatched a plan to enhance its political muscle. That scheme, also reviewed by the board, led to a record $3.8 million fine from the Federal Election Commission for illegally using corporate resources to host fundraisers for politicians. Emanuel was the beneficiary of one of those parties after he left the board and ran in 2002 for a seat in Congress from the North Side of Chicago.
The board was throttled for its acquiescence to the accounting manipulation in a 2003 report by Armando Falcon Jr., head of a federal oversight agency for Freddie Mac. The scandal forced Freddie Mac to restate $5 billion in earnings and pay $585 million in fines and legal settlements. It also foreshadowed even harder times at the firm.
Many of those same risky investment practices tied to the accounting scandal eventually brought the firm to the brink of insolvency and led to its seizure last year by the Bush administration, which pledged to inject up to $100 billion in new capital to keep the firm afloat. The Obama administration has doubled that commitment.
Freddie Mac reported recently that it lost $50 billion in 2008. It so far has tapped $14 billion of the government's guarantee and said it soon will need an additional $30 billion to keep operating.
Like its larger government-chartered cousin Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac was created by Congress to promote home ownership, though both are private corporations with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The two firms hold stakes in half the nation's residential mortgages.
Because of Freddie Mac's federal charter, the board in Emanuel's day was a hybrid of directors elected by shareholders and those appointed by the president.
In his final year in office, Clinton tapped three close pals: Emanuel, Washington lobbyist and golfing partner James Free, and Harold Ickes, a former White House aide instrumental in securing the election of Hillary Clinton to the U.S. Senate. Free's appointment was good for four months, and Ickes' only three months.
Falcon, director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, found that presidential appointees played no "meaningful role" in overseeing the company and recommended that their positions be eliminated.
John Coffee, a law professor and expert on corporate governance at Columbia University, said the financial crisis at Freddie Mac was years in the making and fueled by chronically weak oversight by the firm's directors. The presence of presidential appointees on the board didn't help, he added.
"You know there was a patronage system and these people were only going to serve a short time," Coffee said. "That's why [they] get the stock upfront."
Financial disclosure statements that are required of U.S. House members show Emanuel made at least $320,000 from his time at Freddie Mac. Two years after leaving the firm, Emanuel reported an additional sale of Freddie Mac stock worth between $100,001 and $250,000. The document did not detail whether he profited from the sale.
Sarah Feinberg, a spokeswoman for Emanuel, said there was no conflict between his stint at Freddie Mac and Obama's vow to restore confidence in financial institutions and the executives who run them. At the same time, Feinberg said Emanuel now agrees that presidential appointees to the Freddie Mac board "are unnecessary and don't have long enough terms to make a difference."
Former President George W. Bush voluntarily stopped making such appointments following Falcon's assessment of their uselessness.
In an interview, Falcon said the Freddie Mac board did most of its work in committees. Yet proxy statements that detailed committee assignments showed none for Emanuel, Free or Ickes during the time they served in 2000 or 2001. Most other directors carried two committee assignments each.
Contrary to the proxy statements, Feinberg said she believed that Emanuel served on board committees that oversaw Freddie Mac's investment strategies and mortgage purchase activities. But Feinberg acknowledged she had no official documents to back up that assertion.
The Obama administration rejected a Tribune request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel's time as a director. The documents, obtained by Falcon for his investigation, were "commercial information" exempt from disclosure, according to a lawyer for the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Emanuel's board term expired in May 2001, and soon after he launched his Democratic congressional bid.
One of Emanuel's fellow directors at Freddie Mac was Neil Hartigan, the former Illinois attorney general. Hartigan said Emanuel's primary contribution was explaining to others on the board how to play the levers of power.
He was respected on the board for his understanding of "the dynamics of the legislative process and the executive branch at senior levels," Hartigan recalled. "I wouldn't say he was outspoken. What he was, was solid."
By the time Emanuel joined Freddie Mac, the company had begun to loosen lending standards and buy riskier sub-prime loans. It was a practice that later blew up and contributed to the current foreclosure crisis.
In his investigation, Falcon concluded that the board of directors on which Emanuel sat was so pliant that Freddie Mac's managers easily were able to massage company ledgers. They manipulated bookkeeping to smooth out volatility, perpetuating Freddie Mac's industry reputation as "Steady Freddie," a reliable producer of earnings growth. Wall Street liked what it saw, Freddie Mac's stock value soared and top executives collected their bonuses.
Another focus of Freddie during Emanuel's day—and one that played to his skill set—was a stepped-up effort to combat congressional demands for more regulation.
During a September 2000 board meeting—midway through Emanuel's 14-month term—Freddie Mac lobbyist R. Mitchell Delk laid out a strategy titled "Political Risk Management" aimed at influencing lawmakers and blunting pressure in Congress for more regulation. Through Delk's initiative, Freddie Mac sponsored more than 80 fundraisers that raised at least $1.7 million for congressional candidates despite a federal law that bans corporations from direct political activity.
Emanuel spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg said Emanuel "can't remember the meeting or topic" but might have been in attendance when Delk outlined his plans. Feinberg downplayed the significance of the fundraiser thrown for Emanuel, which brought in $7,000, stressing that it was but one of many hosted by Delk. The event stood out in at least one respect, however.
The Freddie Mac-linked events were mostly for Republicans, and only a handful benefited Democrats like Emanuel. "Rahm was a good friend of mine. He was on Freddie Mac's board. He was very much supportive of housing," said Delk, who resigned under pressure in 2004.
Then-Freddie Mac CEO Leland Brendsel also hosted a fundraising lunch for Emanuel's 2002 campaign that netted $9,500 from top company executives. Brendsel was later ousted in the accounting scandal.
Federal campaign records show that Emanuel received $25,000 from donors with ties to Freddie Mac in the 2002 campaign cycle, more than twice the amount collected that election by any other candidate for the U.S. House or Senate.
Emanuel joined the House in January 2003 and was named to the Financial Services Committee, where he also sat on the subcommittee that directly oversaw Freddie Mac. A few months later, Freddie Mac Chief Executive Officer Leland Brendsel was forced out, and the committee and subcommittee launched hearings to sort out the mess, spanning more than a year. Emanuel skipped every hearing, congressional records indicate.
Feinberg said Emanuel recused himself "from deliberations related to Freddie Mac to avoid even the appearance of favoritism, impropriety or a conflict of interest."
bsecter@tribune.com
azajac@tribune.com
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
When he's not walking on water, Obama guts the 2nd Amendment
AWR Hawkins on Pajamas Media tells how Obama is trying to gut the 2nd Amendment:
‘Common Sense Gun Laws’: Obama’s Attack on the Second Amendment
Posted By AWR Hawkins On March 24, 2009 @ 12:00 am In Gun Control,
Throughout the 2008 election cycle, Barack Obama espoused support for the Second Amendment. He said he agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision in the [1] Heller case against the D.C. gun ban, professed that “there is an [2] individual right to bear arms,” and appeared in campaign commercials shaking hands with hunters in the field down here in Texas. Yet he simultaneously espoused support for [3] stricter gun control measures, because the truth is that he shares the Brady Center’s conviction that the Second Amendment “is not absolute.” This was evident to anyone who took the time to investigate Obama’s voting record. Even the fruit-loopers on democraticunderground.com worried that Obama’s “[4] anti-gun stand” would undo him.
But Obama won. And now, as president, almost all the emphasis in his rhetoric seems to have shifted from professing individual rights to promoting “[5] common sense gun laws” as the Trojan horse from which he and his minions plan to launch a crippling attack on the Second Amendment. This was evident during his inauguration, when he put the handshakes with hunters in Texas behind him and posted the following “[6] urban policy” on his website:
Obama and Biden … favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.
Throughout the election campaign both the [7] NRA and [8] Gun Owners of America warned that Obama’s pro-gun talk was all a sham, but Obama laughed off their concerns. Then, the moment he was sworn into office he posted an urban policy that proved them right and proved that those of us who love liberty have a fight on our hands. Adding insult to injury, Obama followed this up by appointing Eric Holder and Rahm Emmanuel to his cabinet. Gun Owners of America strongly [9] opposed Holder’s nomination, and [10] Emmanuel shares Obama’s deep dislike of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
How will Obama use the “common sense gun laws” approach to undercut the Second Amendment? If the past is any indication, he will use tragedy to justify further regulation as he did in early 2008 in the wake of the deadly shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University. Just days after those shootings, the president expressed support for California’s “common sense gun law” that requires all semi-automatic handguns to be manufactured with “[11] micro-stamping” capability. This law, which goes into effect in California in 2010, mandates that every semi-automatic sold in the state be equipped with a special firing mechanism that makes a distinctive mark — a “fingerprint” — on every bullet casing fired.
Lest we fall prey to believing this really is “common sense,” consider the following: In order for this to work, every gun will have to be registered; otherwise, when law enforcement officials find “fingerprints” on bullet casings at a crime scene they’ll never know who owned the gun. Moreover, many gun-owning Californians have already assumed that guns made prior to the “micro-stamping” law will be outlawed in the state once the law goes into effect. This seems logical if the goal is to create a gun registry full of traceable “fingerprints” on bullet-casings.
Another way Obama can use the “common sense gun laws” approach to cripple the Second Amendment is to allow his understudies, like Holder, Emmanuel, or any other Democrat, to do his dirty work. This way, he can continue to claim support for the Constitution while simultaneously waging war against it via his surrogates. The president is actually using this approach as I type. On January 14, Illinois Congressman [12] Bobby Rush introduced H.R. 45, known as the “Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009.” Should this act pass, it “will make it illegal to possess … any firearm that takes an ammunition clip, without a [federal gun-owner's] license.” According to WorldNetDaily.com’s [13] Drew Zahn, H.R. 45 would also order Attorney General Holder, “to establish a database of every handgun sale, transfer, and owner’s address in America.”
Have you noticed that Obama’s “common sense gun laws” all seem to end in the same way — with the registration of guns and gun owners, as well as an increased number of steps law-abiding citizens must go through to purchase a firearm? It’s just the same old gun-grabbing song and dance, which is why Zahn points out that, “H.R. 45 is a resurfacing of 2007’s H.R. 2666, which contained much of the same language and was co-sponsored by 15 other representatives and Barack Obama’s current chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel.”
As Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general in 1999, Holder described the outlawing of private gun sales as “[14] common sense.” But we recognized the threat, cried foul, and persuaded Congress to ignore Holder’s pleas. Now that Holder, Obama, and Emmanuel are working in unison today, can we do any less?
There is nothing commonsensical about Obama’s “common sense gun laws” approach. At best, it is a smoke and mirrors ploy to make it harder to purchase firearms. At worst, it’s an outright ending of the Second Amendment agenda. We cannot afford to sit idly by to discover which is the case.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/common-sense-gun-laws-obamas-attack-on-the-second-amendment/
URLs in this post:
[1] Heller: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/27/barackobama.usa
[2] individual: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UQTAS80&show_article=1
[3] stricter gun control: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008-presidential-candidates/issues/candidates/barack-obama
[4] anti-gun stand: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3183487
[5] common sense gun laws: http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/barack_obama_comments_on_shoot.html
[6] urban policy: http://change.gov/agenda/urbanpolicy_agenda/
[7] NRA: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29208
[8] Gun Owners of America: http://www.goapvf.org/obama.htm
[9] opposed: http://gunowners.org/a01272009.htm
[10] Emmanuel: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=8317
[11] micro-stamping: http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?id=289
[12] Bobby Rush: http://dprogram.net/2009/01/14/illinois-democrat-introduces-gun-tracking-bill/
[13] Drew Zahn: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=86039
[14] common sense: http://www.justice.gov/archive/dag/speeches/1999/holdergunpressconf.htm
Copyright © 2008 Pajamas Media. All rights reserved.
‘Common Sense Gun Laws’: Obama’s Attack on the Second Amendment
Posted By AWR Hawkins On March 24, 2009 @ 12:00 am In Gun Control,
Throughout the 2008 election cycle, Barack Obama espoused support for the Second Amendment. He said he agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision in the [1] Heller case against the D.C. gun ban, professed that “there is an [2] individual right to bear arms,” and appeared in campaign commercials shaking hands with hunters in the field down here in Texas. Yet he simultaneously espoused support for [3] stricter gun control measures, because the truth is that he shares the Brady Center’s conviction that the Second Amendment “is not absolute.” This was evident to anyone who took the time to investigate Obama’s voting record. Even the fruit-loopers on democraticunderground.com worried that Obama’s “[4] anti-gun stand” would undo him.
But Obama won. And now, as president, almost all the emphasis in his rhetoric seems to have shifted from professing individual rights to promoting “[5] common sense gun laws” as the Trojan horse from which he and his minions plan to launch a crippling attack on the Second Amendment. This was evident during his inauguration, when he put the handshakes with hunters in Texas behind him and posted the following “[6] urban policy” on his website:
Obama and Biden … favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.
Throughout the election campaign both the [7] NRA and [8] Gun Owners of America warned that Obama’s pro-gun talk was all a sham, but Obama laughed off their concerns. Then, the moment he was sworn into office he posted an urban policy that proved them right and proved that those of us who love liberty have a fight on our hands. Adding insult to injury, Obama followed this up by appointing Eric Holder and Rahm Emmanuel to his cabinet. Gun Owners of America strongly [9] opposed Holder’s nomination, and [10] Emmanuel shares Obama’s deep dislike of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
How will Obama use the “common sense gun laws” approach to undercut the Second Amendment? If the past is any indication, he will use tragedy to justify further regulation as he did in early 2008 in the wake of the deadly shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University. Just days after those shootings, the president expressed support for California’s “common sense gun law” that requires all semi-automatic handguns to be manufactured with “[11] micro-stamping” capability. This law, which goes into effect in California in 2010, mandates that every semi-automatic sold in the state be equipped with a special firing mechanism that makes a distinctive mark — a “fingerprint” — on every bullet casing fired.
Lest we fall prey to believing this really is “common sense,” consider the following: In order for this to work, every gun will have to be registered; otherwise, when law enforcement officials find “fingerprints” on bullet casings at a crime scene they’ll never know who owned the gun. Moreover, many gun-owning Californians have already assumed that guns made prior to the “micro-stamping” law will be outlawed in the state once the law goes into effect. This seems logical if the goal is to create a gun registry full of traceable “fingerprints” on bullet-casings.
Another way Obama can use the “common sense gun laws” approach to cripple the Second Amendment is to allow his understudies, like Holder, Emmanuel, or any other Democrat, to do his dirty work. This way, he can continue to claim support for the Constitution while simultaneously waging war against it via his surrogates. The president is actually using this approach as I type. On January 14, Illinois Congressman [12] Bobby Rush introduced H.R. 45, known as the “Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009.” Should this act pass, it “will make it illegal to possess … any firearm that takes an ammunition clip, without a [federal gun-owner's] license.” According to WorldNetDaily.com’s [13] Drew Zahn, H.R. 45 would also order Attorney General Holder, “to establish a database of every handgun sale, transfer, and owner’s address in America.”
Have you noticed that Obama’s “common sense gun laws” all seem to end in the same way — with the registration of guns and gun owners, as well as an increased number of steps law-abiding citizens must go through to purchase a firearm? It’s just the same old gun-grabbing song and dance, which is why Zahn points out that, “H.R. 45 is a resurfacing of 2007’s H.R. 2666, which contained much of the same language and was co-sponsored by 15 other representatives and Barack Obama’s current chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel.”
As Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general in 1999, Holder described the outlawing of private gun sales as “[14] common sense.” But we recognized the threat, cried foul, and persuaded Congress to ignore Holder’s pleas. Now that Holder, Obama, and Emmanuel are working in unison today, can we do any less?
There is nothing commonsensical about Obama’s “common sense gun laws” approach. At best, it is a smoke and mirrors ploy to make it harder to purchase firearms. At worst, it’s an outright ending of the Second Amendment agenda. We cannot afford to sit idly by to discover which is the case.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/common-sense-gun-laws-obamas-attack-on-the-second-amendment/
URLs in this post:
[1] Heller: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/27/barackobama.usa
[2] individual: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UQTAS80&show_article=1
[3] stricter gun control: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008-presidential-candidates/issues/candidates/barack-obama
[4] anti-gun stand: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3183487
[5] common sense gun laws: http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/barack_obama_comments_on_shoot.html
[6] urban policy: http://change.gov/agenda/urbanpolicy_agenda/
[7] NRA: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29208
[8] Gun Owners of America: http://www.goapvf.org/obama.htm
[9] opposed: http://gunowners.org/a01272009.htm
[10] Emmanuel: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=8317
[11] micro-stamping: http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?id=289
[12] Bobby Rush: http://dprogram.net/2009/01/14/illinois-democrat-introduces-gun-tracking-bill/
[13] Drew Zahn: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=86039
[14] common sense: http://www.justice.gov/archive/dag/speeches/1999/holdergunpressconf.htm
Copyright © 2008 Pajamas Media. All rights reserved.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Michael Barone: Republicans Aren't Doing Better--Democrats Are Doing Worse
From U.S. News & Report, Michael Barone opines that:
Republicans Aren't Doing Better--Democrats Are Doing Worse
March 23, 2009 12:45 PM ET | Michael Barone | Print
By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Last Wednesday, I noted that Republicans are now running even or slightly ahead in the generic vote for Congress in two respected national polls. On Friday, Charlie Cook noted the same results. He pointed out that the NPR survey shows Independents favoring Republicans 38-24 percent and that Republican pollster Glen Bolger says this is the first time Independents have favored Republicans since 2004.
What is going on here? One thing we know is that these results represent more of a decline in the Democrats' numbers than an increase in the Republicans'. Some significant bloc of voters, heavily loaded toward independents, seem to have soured on the Democrats since Barack Obama
took office and the 111th Congress went to work. How would this translate into votes in actual elections? Probably in the way we've seen in the special elections that have been held since November: the Senate runoff in Georgia, the two Louisiana House runoffs, three special elections for Virginia House of Delegate seats, the chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, and the election of a new supervisor in Fairfax's Braddock district. These, by the way, can't be dismissed as purely Southern results; one of the House of Delegates seats and the two Fairfax races are in Northern Virginia, which voted heavily for Barack Obama in November 2008.
The common factor in all these races is that, as compared with November 2008, Democratic turnout is way down, much more than Republican turnout. Democrats are less enthusiastic, less motivated than they were last November. Remember that turnout was robust in November 2008. As Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate reported, 63 percent of eligibles turned out to vote, the highest percentage since 1960. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1960 was the year that Americans elected our first Catholic president, and 78 percent of Catholics voted for him; 2008 was the year Americans elected our first black president, and 95 percent of blacks voted for him. Turnout was up 7.3 percent over 2004, although population rose only 3.8 percent in that period. Turnout seems to have increased by greater percentages among blacks and those under 30. According to the exit poll, blacks amounted to 13 percent of the electorate in 2008, compared to 11 percent in 2004 and 13.5 percent of 2007 population; those under 30 amounted to 18 percent of the electorate in 2008, compared to 17 percent in 2004 and 22 percent of 18-and-over population.
The decline in the Democratic percentage in the generic vote and the sharp drop-off in Democratic turnout in special elections suggest that in future contests in 2009 and 2010 Democrats will not be able to count on the robust turnout that contributed to the Obama and Democratic congressional victory margins in 2008. At least if opinion stays where it is right now. I should add, however, that opinion right now is not where it was in November 2008. I think we are in a period of what I call open field politics. Since 2004, starting around the time of Katrina and increased violence in Iraq, the generic vote and party identification have been considerably more unstable and volatile than they were in the years 1995-2005. That instability worked to Democrats' advantage in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Now it seems to be working against them—I was going to write to Republicans' advantage, but I think what we are seeing is more disillusionment toward Democrats than any positive feeling toward Republicans. In the short run, Republicans can benefit from this. In the longer run, they need to offer voters a better vision for the future, or they risk losing once again if there is a revival of enthusiasm among Democrats and warm feeling toward them among independents.
So to my question—Republicans doing better?—the answer is—no, Democrats doing worse.
Republicans Aren't Doing Better--Democrats Are Doing Worse
March 23, 2009 12:45 PM ET | Michael Barone | Print
By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Last Wednesday, I noted that Republicans are now running even or slightly ahead in the generic vote for Congress in two respected national polls. On Friday, Charlie Cook noted the same results. He pointed out that the NPR survey shows Independents favoring Republicans 38-24 percent and that Republican pollster Glen Bolger says this is the first time Independents have favored Republicans since 2004.
What is going on here? One thing we know is that these results represent more of a decline in the Democrats' numbers than an increase in the Republicans'. Some significant bloc of voters, heavily loaded toward independents, seem to have soured on the Democrats since Barack Obama
took office and the 111th Congress went to work. How would this translate into votes in actual elections? Probably in the way we've seen in the special elections that have been held since November: the Senate runoff in Georgia, the two Louisiana House runoffs, three special elections for Virginia House of Delegate seats, the chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, and the election of a new supervisor in Fairfax's Braddock district. These, by the way, can't be dismissed as purely Southern results; one of the House of Delegates seats and the two Fairfax races are in Northern Virginia, which voted heavily for Barack Obama in November 2008.
The common factor in all these races is that, as compared with November 2008, Democratic turnout is way down, much more than Republican turnout. Democrats are less enthusiastic, less motivated than they were last November. Remember that turnout was robust in November 2008. As Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate reported, 63 percent of eligibles turned out to vote, the highest percentage since 1960. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1960 was the year that Americans elected our first Catholic president, and 78 percent of Catholics voted for him; 2008 was the year Americans elected our first black president, and 95 percent of blacks voted for him. Turnout was up 7.3 percent over 2004, although population rose only 3.8 percent in that period. Turnout seems to have increased by greater percentages among blacks and those under 30. According to the exit poll, blacks amounted to 13 percent of the electorate in 2008, compared to 11 percent in 2004 and 13.5 percent of 2007 population; those under 30 amounted to 18 percent of the electorate in 2008, compared to 17 percent in 2004 and 22 percent of 18-and-over population.
The decline in the Democratic percentage in the generic vote and the sharp drop-off in Democratic turnout in special elections suggest that in future contests in 2009 and 2010 Democrats will not be able to count on the robust turnout that contributed to the Obama and Democratic congressional victory margins in 2008. At least if opinion stays where it is right now. I should add, however, that opinion right now is not where it was in November 2008. I think we are in a period of what I call open field politics. Since 2004, starting around the time of Katrina and increased violence in Iraq, the generic vote and party identification have been considerably more unstable and volatile than they were in the years 1995-2005. That instability worked to Democrats' advantage in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Now it seems to be working against them—I was going to write to Republicans' advantage, but I think what we are seeing is more disillusionment toward Democrats than any positive feeling toward Republicans. In the short run, Republicans can benefit from this. In the longer run, they need to offer voters a better vision for the future, or they risk losing once again if there is a revival of enthusiasm among Democrats and warm feeling toward them among independents.
So to my question—Republicans doing better?—the answer is—no, Democrats doing worse.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
For those who claim left-wingers are distinguishable from Nazis
For those who claim left-wingers are distinguishable from Nazis, New York Magazine [!] reports:
Busload of Crazies to Tour Homes of AIG Executives This Weekend
3/20/09 at 12:40 PM
Comment 31Comment 31Comments
Busload of Crazies to Tour Homes of AIG Executives This Weekend
Photo: Working Families Party
Less than a year ago, the most repellent area bus tour we knew of was the one that induced Sex and the City–crazed tourists to put $40 on their Citi cards for a cupcake and a glimpse at Carrie Bradshaw's brownstone. How times have changed! Now, everyone's clamoring aboard the Populist Rage Bus.
The Connecticut Working Families Party this weekend has organized a bus store that will make stops at Wilton, Connecticut, AIG office as well as the security-patrolled homes of AIG execs who are fearing for their lives.
"We're going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do," said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. "I know there's a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what's happened. We're not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy."
Right, they're not fomenting rage, they're just encouraging it. So if you happen to record someone's address so you can return in the dead of night, it's not like Working Families told you to! We know we sound paranoid and we really can't believe we're actually on the same side as Rush, but this is getting way out of hand. Oh, to have fat ladies in high heels clogging up the West Village again.
Busload of Crazies to Tour Homes of AIG Executives This Weekend
3/20/09 at 12:40 PM
Comment 31Comment 31Comments
Busload of Crazies to Tour Homes of AIG Executives This Weekend
Photo: Working Families Party
Less than a year ago, the most repellent area bus tour we knew of was the one that induced Sex and the City–crazed tourists to put $40 on their Citi cards for a cupcake and a glimpse at Carrie Bradshaw's brownstone. How times have changed! Now, everyone's clamoring aboard the Populist Rage Bus.
The Connecticut Working Families Party this weekend has organized a bus store that will make stops at Wilton, Connecticut, AIG office as well as the security-patrolled homes of AIG execs who are fearing for their lives.
"We're going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do," said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. "I know there's a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what's happened. We're not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy."
Right, they're not fomenting rage, they're just encouraging it. So if you happen to record someone's address so you can return in the dead of night, it's not like Working Families told you to! We know we sound paranoid and we really can't believe we're actually on the same side as Rush, but this is getting way out of hand. Oh, to have fat ladies in high heels clogging up the West Village again.
Anti-Semitism picks up steam in American academia
The Weekly standard reports on an increased movement against Israel among American academics. It is, of course, anti-Semitism described, as usual, as anti-Zionism. Jew-hating, no matter what you call it.
War of Silence
The intellectual boycott of Israel hits the United States.
by Erin Sheley
03/20/2009 12:00:00 AM
In late January, a group of American university professors launched the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the first American effort of its kind. Part of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel, the boycott calls for its adherents to, among other things, "refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions," to "advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels," and to "promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by academic institutions and place pressure on [their] own institution[s] to suspend all ties with Israeli universities."
The boycott, spearheaded in part by University of Southern California Professor of English David Lloyd, follows on the heels of several similar attempts made by British professors since 2002; the latest, proposed by the British University and College Union lecturers' conference, disappeared after the threat of litigation under Britain's discrimination laws. Though the U.S. effort is far narrower in scope (the statement has only 250 individual American signatories thus far) it is significant as the first organized effort of this kind in the U.S., where unfettered academic debate has traditionally been fostered by a much more robust constitutional right to free speech than Great Britain's. (Indeed, when Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg drafted a petition responding to the proposed UCU boycott, calling for professors to decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics were excluded, it garnered thousands of endorsers, including Columbia President Lee Bollinger, UC Berkeley President Robert Birgeneau, and New York University President John Sexton.)
Despite the comparatively low number of signatories, the USACBI puts an official face on what many students already experience as a monolithic anti-Israel narrative supported by professors across American campuses: a narrative that, most perniciously, obscures the harm inflicted upon the Palestinians by their own leaders, as well as gross human-rights violations by the leaders of the rest of the Arab world. As Ruth Wisse, Professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, says, "being against the Jewish nation was a great feature of leftism since Karl Marx" and this impulse to "be against something," coupled with the natural instinct of activist students to seek a single scapegoat for the plight of an undeniably oppressed people, results in a dramatically simplified story, in which Israelis become the "only group that you can safely aggress against with no price to be paid." All this despite the role of Arab nations themselves in keeping Palestinians victimized.
Endorsers of the USACBI (speaking in their individual capacities in commenting for this article) frequently invoke the distinction between Israel as an occupier and Palestine as an occupied territory, and the obvious military disparity between the two, to justify the apparent bigotry in targeting Israeli scholars for retribution. On the subject of Palestinian violence against Israel, James Fetzer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, argues that "the comparison is not meaningful. We have fighter jets and heavy tanks, artillery and bombs versus rocks and an occasional rocket, which may have symbolic significance but seldom inflicts any real damage." Even setting aside the points-of-view of the victims of "symbolic" rockets and, even more dramatically, ignoring the roles of Hamas and the rest of the Arab nations in perpetuating the Palestinians' plight, the idea of silencing all intellectual discourse with an entire nation is troubling for two obvious reasons. First, it assumes that no value exists in scholarly exchange so long as all parties cannot agree with the political principles of a particular side (which is to say that no legitimate scholarly exchange should ever occur at all). Second, it ascribes a particularized, presumptively malicious viewpoint to an entire nationality. As Professor Dershowitz notes, "many of the people who want boycotts claim that Israel is inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinians but a boycott is essentially punishing every Israeli academic without regard to what their views may be." The notion of a boycott in this context is uniquely disturbing to the extent it can be construed to apply solely to Israeli Jews and, thus, is religion-based. (The proposed British boycott would have exempted "Israeli academics and intellectuals who oppose the colonial and racist policy of their state," which could be taken to mean only those who did not believe in Israel's right to exist at all.)
USACBI endorsers appear to vary widely on the dangers of closing off debate with their Israeli colleagues. Eleanor Doumato, a Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute, describes this as "a huge concern," though one partially justified by the alienation of Israeli peace groups within their own country. Another signatory said this was the first question she asked before endorsing the boycott, but was assured by those in leadership roles that "the boycott targets Israeli institutions as opposed to Israeli individuals." Other signatories say up front that they don't care how the boycott affects individual Israeli scholars: Gray Brechin, a geologist at UC Berkeley, states he has "no problems with that," as "[t]he Israeli academics who support their government's policies and incremental annexation of the occupied territories far outweigh those who do not." Cal State Fullerton Professor of Accounting Paul Foote simply says "Israeli thinkers who agree with my positions on the issues are not in the majority in Israel."
University of Washington Professor Raya Fidel believes that "most Israeli thinkers who agree with my position support the boycott," and that "if they are not worried of being isolated, there is no reason for me to be concerned." Somewhat more precisely, James Holstun, Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, explains that "we have weighed the possible inconvenience to anti-Occupation Israeli academics against the probable good in the struggle to end the murderous Israeli Occupation non-violently [and] have found the probable good outweighs the possible inconvenience."
As widely diverging as these views are in terms of acknowledging harm to "innocent" individuals (and as consistently as they all ignore the pervasive harm-not only in Israel but in American classrooms-of the perceived religious discrimination inherent in the boycott) they all share one disturbing commonality: the idea that disagreement is a valid justification for shutting off academic discourse in its entirety. The comments suggest that the greatest fear, if any, is the inadvertent shunning of like-minded thinkers, not the broader harm of silencing scholarly discussion as a general end. The extreme form of this attitude was typified by the least thoughtful response I received from one of the signatories: a professor, outraged at my "arrogant effrontery" in asking the questions at all, asked, seemingly seriously, "why would I wish to communicate with you on this or any other matter?"
Critics of the USACBI point out, of course, the absence of similar boycotts of other nations-notably China-guilty of widespread human-rights abuses, including those directed at non-violent religious minorities. Of the twelve signatories who responded to my question on this issue, only two indicated that they would support a similar academic boycott of China. Professor Holstun noted that, "in the case of China, given political disempowerment of most Chinese, including most academics, an academic boycott would be unlikely to exercise much pressure on behalf of religious and civil rights." But of course many of the well-funded China research centers in the U.S. work directly with the Chinese government, such as the China Law Center at Yale Law School which works with government entities as well as Chinese academic groups to try to support China's legal reform process through a range of collaborative projects. Whatever one believes about China's treatment of the Tibetans-and of its own dissenting citizens-such institutions draw interest and funding precisely because of the perceived collateral utility of working towards the development of the rule of law in a dictatorship interested primarily in enhancing its economic well-being, which necessarily involves the coming together of thinkers who disagree strongly on deeply important issues.
One cannot escape the fact that academic boycotts of Israel seek to marginalize a narrow community of scholars based on nationality and religion, while scholars of other countries with far worse records on human rights remain exempt. This is of course partially because there would be no academy at all were all scholars to boycott all countries whose governments they criticized. Professor Fidel argued in response to the China case, for example, "I do not support violations of human rights in any country, but the U.S. has its own violations, that are not much worse than those in China." While some American academics doubtless would support a boycott of our own universities for just that reason, most would not likely voluntarily cut themselves off from scholarly exchange with each other and with the rest of the world. As Professor Wisse notes, "America is large and can absorb ideological hits; for Jews these have very immediate, harsh and threatening consequences."
But the fundamental problem with an academic boycott transcends even these important concerns over racial and religious discrimination. The fact is that any attempt to close scholarly debate to any subset of institutions will necessarily prevent the individual minds in those institutions from contributing to solutions to international problems, and most especially with respect to those problems that form the basis for the boycott in the first place. Professor Fetzer, who signed the USACBI and supports a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, states he believes-and hopes-that one day "Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Israelis can live together in peace and harmony, which appears to be the only moral and just solution." It is difficult to imagine that harmony can be derived from an official ban on "cultural cooperation [or] collaboration" with all but those who subscribe to a single narrative of an infinitely complicated geopolitical situation.
Erin Sheley is a writer and attorney in Washington, DC
War of Silence
The intellectual boycott of Israel hits the United States.
by Erin Sheley
03/20/2009 12:00:00 AM
In late January, a group of American university professors launched the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the first American effort of its kind. Part of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel, the boycott calls for its adherents to, among other things, "refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions," to "advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels," and to "promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by academic institutions and place pressure on [their] own institution[s] to suspend all ties with Israeli universities."
The boycott, spearheaded in part by University of Southern California Professor of English David Lloyd, follows on the heels of several similar attempts made by British professors since 2002; the latest, proposed by the British University and College Union lecturers' conference, disappeared after the threat of litigation under Britain's discrimination laws. Though the U.S. effort is far narrower in scope (the statement has only 250 individual American signatories thus far) it is significant as the first organized effort of this kind in the U.S., where unfettered academic debate has traditionally been fostered by a much more robust constitutional right to free speech than Great Britain's. (Indeed, when Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg drafted a petition responding to the proposed UCU boycott, calling for professors to decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics were excluded, it garnered thousands of endorsers, including Columbia President Lee Bollinger, UC Berkeley President Robert Birgeneau, and New York University President John Sexton.)
Despite the comparatively low number of signatories, the USACBI puts an official face on what many students already experience as a monolithic anti-Israel narrative supported by professors across American campuses: a narrative that, most perniciously, obscures the harm inflicted upon the Palestinians by their own leaders, as well as gross human-rights violations by the leaders of the rest of the Arab world. As Ruth Wisse, Professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, says, "being against the Jewish nation was a great feature of leftism since Karl Marx" and this impulse to "be against something," coupled with the natural instinct of activist students to seek a single scapegoat for the plight of an undeniably oppressed people, results in a dramatically simplified story, in which Israelis become the "only group that you can safely aggress against with no price to be paid." All this despite the role of Arab nations themselves in keeping Palestinians victimized.
Endorsers of the USACBI (speaking in their individual capacities in commenting for this article) frequently invoke the distinction between Israel as an occupier and Palestine as an occupied territory, and the obvious military disparity between the two, to justify the apparent bigotry in targeting Israeli scholars for retribution. On the subject of Palestinian violence against Israel, James Fetzer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, argues that "the comparison is not meaningful. We have fighter jets and heavy tanks, artillery and bombs versus rocks and an occasional rocket, which may have symbolic significance but seldom inflicts any real damage." Even setting aside the points-of-view of the victims of "symbolic" rockets and, even more dramatically, ignoring the roles of Hamas and the rest of the Arab nations in perpetuating the Palestinians' plight, the idea of silencing all intellectual discourse with an entire nation is troubling for two obvious reasons. First, it assumes that no value exists in scholarly exchange so long as all parties cannot agree with the political principles of a particular side (which is to say that no legitimate scholarly exchange should ever occur at all). Second, it ascribes a particularized, presumptively malicious viewpoint to an entire nationality. As Professor Dershowitz notes, "many of the people who want boycotts claim that Israel is inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinians but a boycott is essentially punishing every Israeli academic without regard to what their views may be." The notion of a boycott in this context is uniquely disturbing to the extent it can be construed to apply solely to Israeli Jews and, thus, is religion-based. (The proposed British boycott would have exempted "Israeli academics and intellectuals who oppose the colonial and racist policy of their state," which could be taken to mean only those who did not believe in Israel's right to exist at all.)
USACBI endorsers appear to vary widely on the dangers of closing off debate with their Israeli colleagues. Eleanor Doumato, a Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute, describes this as "a huge concern," though one partially justified by the alienation of Israeli peace groups within their own country. Another signatory said this was the first question she asked before endorsing the boycott, but was assured by those in leadership roles that "the boycott targets Israeli institutions as opposed to Israeli individuals." Other signatories say up front that they don't care how the boycott affects individual Israeli scholars: Gray Brechin, a geologist at UC Berkeley, states he has "no problems with that," as "[t]he Israeli academics who support their government's policies and incremental annexation of the occupied territories far outweigh those who do not." Cal State Fullerton Professor of Accounting Paul Foote simply says "Israeli thinkers who agree with my positions on the issues are not in the majority in Israel."
University of Washington Professor Raya Fidel believes that "most Israeli thinkers who agree with my position support the boycott," and that "if they are not worried of being isolated, there is no reason for me to be concerned." Somewhat more precisely, James Holstun, Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, explains that "we have weighed the possible inconvenience to anti-Occupation Israeli academics against the probable good in the struggle to end the murderous Israeli Occupation non-violently [and] have found the probable good outweighs the possible inconvenience."
As widely diverging as these views are in terms of acknowledging harm to "innocent" individuals (and as consistently as they all ignore the pervasive harm-not only in Israel but in American classrooms-of the perceived religious discrimination inherent in the boycott) they all share one disturbing commonality: the idea that disagreement is a valid justification for shutting off academic discourse in its entirety. The comments suggest that the greatest fear, if any, is the inadvertent shunning of like-minded thinkers, not the broader harm of silencing scholarly discussion as a general end. The extreme form of this attitude was typified by the least thoughtful response I received from one of the signatories: a professor, outraged at my "arrogant effrontery" in asking the questions at all, asked, seemingly seriously, "why would I wish to communicate with you on this or any other matter?"
Critics of the USACBI point out, of course, the absence of similar boycotts of other nations-notably China-guilty of widespread human-rights abuses, including those directed at non-violent religious minorities. Of the twelve signatories who responded to my question on this issue, only two indicated that they would support a similar academic boycott of China. Professor Holstun noted that, "in the case of China, given political disempowerment of most Chinese, including most academics, an academic boycott would be unlikely to exercise much pressure on behalf of religious and civil rights." But of course many of the well-funded China research centers in the U.S. work directly with the Chinese government, such as the China Law Center at Yale Law School which works with government entities as well as Chinese academic groups to try to support China's legal reform process through a range of collaborative projects. Whatever one believes about China's treatment of the Tibetans-and of its own dissenting citizens-such institutions draw interest and funding precisely because of the perceived collateral utility of working towards the development of the rule of law in a dictatorship interested primarily in enhancing its economic well-being, which necessarily involves the coming together of thinkers who disagree strongly on deeply important issues.
One cannot escape the fact that academic boycotts of Israel seek to marginalize a narrow community of scholars based on nationality and religion, while scholars of other countries with far worse records on human rights remain exempt. This is of course partially because there would be no academy at all were all scholars to boycott all countries whose governments they criticized. Professor Fidel argued in response to the China case, for example, "I do not support violations of human rights in any country, but the U.S. has its own violations, that are not much worse than those in China." While some American academics doubtless would support a boycott of our own universities for just that reason, most would not likely voluntarily cut themselves off from scholarly exchange with each other and with the rest of the world. As Professor Wisse notes, "America is large and can absorb ideological hits; for Jews these have very immediate, harsh and threatening consequences."
But the fundamental problem with an academic boycott transcends even these important concerns over racial and religious discrimination. The fact is that any attempt to close scholarly debate to any subset of institutions will necessarily prevent the individual minds in those institutions from contributing to solutions to international problems, and most especially with respect to those problems that form the basis for the boycott in the first place. Professor Fetzer, who signed the USACBI and supports a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, states he believes-and hopes-that one day "Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Israelis can live together in peace and harmony, which appears to be the only moral and just solution." It is difficult to imagine that harmony can be derived from an official ban on "cultural cooperation [or] collaboration" with all but those who subscribe to a single narrative of an infinitely complicated geopolitical situation.
Erin Sheley is a writer and attorney in Washington, DC
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Three years later, the lie about Iraqi civilian deaths is unraveled
Investor's Business Daily uncovers the truth about the lie that the US caused 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.
Dead Wrong Data
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, February 06, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Iraq: A shocking number from a study about the extent of civilian deaths during the war got a lot of attention. Too bad that further evidence indicating the figure is wildly inaccurate will go largely unnoticed.
Read More: Iraq
The "findings" of Dr. Gilbert Burnham were widely covered in 2006 because, as the National Journal noted at the time, they "fit an emerging narrative: Iraq was a horrific mess."
Writing in the respected British medical journal Lancet, Burnham accused the U.S. of inflicting 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq. The media received the numbers uncritically, but skepticism rose outside the press.
Anthony Cordesman of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies believed the figures were "almost certainly" too high. "This is not analysis," he said. "This is politics."
Iraq Body Count, which believes "war is an abomination" and that "information empowers people to act" (presumably against the war), noted that the 654,965 figure "would imply that officials in Iraq have issued approximately 550,000 death certificates for violent deaths (92% of 601,000)."
Yet in June 2006, the total figure of postwar violent deaths known to the Iraqi Ministry of Health and the Baghdad morgue was roughly 50,000.
Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of a Brussels disaster epidemiology research center, told Canada's Nature News that the numbers were inflated and felt it was "because of the (2006 midterm) elections," a reasonable assumption as study co-author Les Roberts admitted he insisted on an October 2006 release for political reasons.
Burnham's latest trouble comes from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. After an eight-month investigation, it found that Burnham "violated the Association's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices."
The organization says the Johns Hopkins public health faculty member "repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on civilian deaths in Iraq.. . . When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused."
Johns Hopkins is also trying "to determine if any violation of the school's rules or guidelines for the conduct of research occurred."
So how many civilians did lose their lives to the allied effort to topple Saddam Hussein? Iraq Body Count estimates nearly 100,000. Even that is appallingly high, but it must be understood in context:
If the bloody Saddam had stayed in power, it's conceivable that many, many more would have died since the invasion — with still no end to the horror in sight.
Dead Wrong Data
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, February 06, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Iraq: A shocking number from a study about the extent of civilian deaths during the war got a lot of attention. Too bad that further evidence indicating the figure is wildly inaccurate will go largely unnoticed.
Read More: Iraq
The "findings" of Dr. Gilbert Burnham were widely covered in 2006 because, as the National Journal noted at the time, they "fit an emerging narrative: Iraq was a horrific mess."
Writing in the respected British medical journal Lancet, Burnham accused the U.S. of inflicting 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq. The media received the numbers uncritically, but skepticism rose outside the press.
Anthony Cordesman of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies believed the figures were "almost certainly" too high. "This is not analysis," he said. "This is politics."
Iraq Body Count, which believes "war is an abomination" and that "information empowers people to act" (presumably against the war), noted that the 654,965 figure "would imply that officials in Iraq have issued approximately 550,000 death certificates for violent deaths (92% of 601,000)."
Yet in June 2006, the total figure of postwar violent deaths known to the Iraqi Ministry of Health and the Baghdad morgue was roughly 50,000.
Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of a Brussels disaster epidemiology research center, told Canada's Nature News that the numbers were inflated and felt it was "because of the (2006 midterm) elections," a reasonable assumption as study co-author Les Roberts admitted he insisted on an October 2006 release for political reasons.
Burnham's latest trouble comes from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. After an eight-month investigation, it found that Burnham "violated the Association's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices."
The organization says the Johns Hopkins public health faculty member "repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on civilian deaths in Iraq.. . . When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused."
Johns Hopkins is also trying "to determine if any violation of the school's rules or guidelines for the conduct of research occurred."
So how many civilians did lose their lives to the allied effort to topple Saddam Hussein? Iraq Body Count estimates nearly 100,000. Even that is appallingly high, but it must be understood in context:
If the bloody Saddam had stayed in power, it's conceivable that many, many more would have died since the invasion — with still no end to the horror in sight.
Good explanation of how the AIG bonus scandal is a coverup for the real scandals
Powerlineblog.com has a good explanation on why the AIG bonus outrage is nothing more than a coverup of far more serious Democrat scandals.
Minority View
March 19, 2009 Posted by John at 10:19 AM
As I explained on Bill Bennett's radio show this morning, I don't think there is anything wrong with the AIG bonuses, and the people who got them should keep them. This is based on the testimony of Edward Liddy, who said yesterday:
* All of these payments, as to AIG's troubled financial products division, are retention bonuses, not performance bonuses.
* The money is not going to anyone responsible for the implosion of AIG--those people, who were in the credit default swap area, are gone.
* These retention bonuses were promised to AIG employees who are responsible for winding down the company's financial products division. At the beginning, this division had a potential exposure of $2.7 trillion. Winding down AIG's book of business in this area was a dead-end job, and there was a great likelihood that the people responsible for the work, who knew the most about the products involved, would take jobs elsewhere.
* In late 2007 or early 2008, AIG made a deal with these employees: if they would stay at AIG until specified conditions were met, i.e., either certain business was wound down or a given period of time had elapsed, they would receive a specified retention bonus.
* As to all of the employees involved, they satisfied the terms of the bonus by wrapping up a portfolio for which they were responsible and/or staying on the job until now. As a result of the efforts of this group, AIG's financial products exposure is down from $2.7 trillion to $1.6 trillion.
There is no legal principle that would justify not paying these bonuses. If you make an offer to someone along the lines of, if you do X I will pay you Y dollars, and he does X, it's too late to change your mind. You're on the hook for Y dollars, and you should be.
The legislation introduced by the Democrats today to tax these bonuses (and possibly a few others, although it isn't clear that any others have been or will be paid that are covered by the statute) at a 90 percent rate is an outrage. It is, in my legal opinion, obviously unconstitutional. It is evidently intended to calm the current political firestorm and not to achieve any real objective.
The Republicans' alternative, which basically just demands that AIG give the money back, somehow, is better but still silly. No doubt one could deduct $165 million from past and future bailout payments to AIG and thereby make the taxpayers "whole." But that just illustrates the foolishness of concentrating on these bonuses rather than the larger picture.
The Obama administration has done a great many things about which taxpayers should be livid--one bailout after another, mammoth tax increases, the bogus "stimulus" bill, the $410 billion leftover appropriations bill, the multi-trillion dollar budget with a $1.7 trillion deficit. Paying employees of AIG money which they have earned and are owed is at the very bottom of the list of actions for which we should be enraged at the Obama administration.
The other lesson of this story is the futility of having the federal government running the world's largest insurance company. When the salaries earned by derivative traders at an insurance company can become a major political issue, you know the government has gotten way too deeply involved in the private sector.
AIG, like GM, should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it could have wound down its financial products division just as it is doing now. Bankruptcy would not have affected the company's international insurance businesses, distinct corporate entities which are both solvent and profitable. Those businesses could have been sold, which is what AIG now plans to do.
Why did the federal government prefer to bail AIG out rather than let the bankruptcy court unwind its business? Because of "systemic" risk; that is, the feds wanted AIG in business and funded with $80 billion in taxpayer money so that it could make good on its commitments to third parties, especially third parties to whom it had guaranteed the value of residential mortgage-backed securities. But if AIG had gone into bankruptcy, and there were third parties in danger of failing because AIG couldn't pay what it owed, and it really was in the taxpayers' interest to save those third parties, then the government could have paid the bailout money not to AIG, but selectively to the third parties it deemed important to the economy.
Why wasn't that approach followed? Because of politics. Much of the money that AIG owed was due to European banks. For the American government to bail out European banks would have been a tough sell, to put it mildly. Other third parties were entities like Goldman Sachs, which said it didn't need to be bailed out but received, I believe, $13 billion in taxpayer dollars that was funneled through AIG.
What is happening in Washington is a scandal and an outrage. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi should not be allowed to divert attention from the disastrous policies they are pursuing by focusing on the sideshow of AIG bonuses.
Minority View
March 19, 2009 Posted by John at 10:19 AM
As I explained on Bill Bennett's radio show this morning, I don't think there is anything wrong with the AIG bonuses, and the people who got them should keep them. This is based on the testimony of Edward Liddy, who said yesterday:
* All of these payments, as to AIG's troubled financial products division, are retention bonuses, not performance bonuses.
* The money is not going to anyone responsible for the implosion of AIG--those people, who were in the credit default swap area, are gone.
* These retention bonuses were promised to AIG employees who are responsible for winding down the company's financial products division. At the beginning, this division had a potential exposure of $2.7 trillion. Winding down AIG's book of business in this area was a dead-end job, and there was a great likelihood that the people responsible for the work, who knew the most about the products involved, would take jobs elsewhere.
* In late 2007 or early 2008, AIG made a deal with these employees: if they would stay at AIG until specified conditions were met, i.e., either certain business was wound down or a given period of time had elapsed, they would receive a specified retention bonus.
* As to all of the employees involved, they satisfied the terms of the bonus by wrapping up a portfolio for which they were responsible and/or staying on the job until now. As a result of the efforts of this group, AIG's financial products exposure is down from $2.7 trillion to $1.6 trillion.
There is no legal principle that would justify not paying these bonuses. If you make an offer to someone along the lines of, if you do X I will pay you Y dollars, and he does X, it's too late to change your mind. You're on the hook for Y dollars, and you should be.
The legislation introduced by the Democrats today to tax these bonuses (and possibly a few others, although it isn't clear that any others have been or will be paid that are covered by the statute) at a 90 percent rate is an outrage. It is, in my legal opinion, obviously unconstitutional. It is evidently intended to calm the current political firestorm and not to achieve any real objective.
The Republicans' alternative, which basically just demands that AIG give the money back, somehow, is better but still silly. No doubt one could deduct $165 million from past and future bailout payments to AIG and thereby make the taxpayers "whole." But that just illustrates the foolishness of concentrating on these bonuses rather than the larger picture.
The Obama administration has done a great many things about which taxpayers should be livid--one bailout after another, mammoth tax increases, the bogus "stimulus" bill, the $410 billion leftover appropriations bill, the multi-trillion dollar budget with a $1.7 trillion deficit. Paying employees of AIG money which they have earned and are owed is at the very bottom of the list of actions for which we should be enraged at the Obama administration.
The other lesson of this story is the futility of having the federal government running the world's largest insurance company. When the salaries earned by derivative traders at an insurance company can become a major political issue, you know the government has gotten way too deeply involved in the private sector.
AIG, like GM, should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it could have wound down its financial products division just as it is doing now. Bankruptcy would not have affected the company's international insurance businesses, distinct corporate entities which are both solvent and profitable. Those businesses could have been sold, which is what AIG now plans to do.
Why did the federal government prefer to bail AIG out rather than let the bankruptcy court unwind its business? Because of "systemic" risk; that is, the feds wanted AIG in business and funded with $80 billion in taxpayer money so that it could make good on its commitments to third parties, especially third parties to whom it had guaranteed the value of residential mortgage-backed securities. But if AIG had gone into bankruptcy, and there were third parties in danger of failing because AIG couldn't pay what it owed, and it really was in the taxpayers' interest to save those third parties, then the government could have paid the bailout money not to AIG, but selectively to the third parties it deemed important to the economy.
Why wasn't that approach followed? Because of politics. Much of the money that AIG owed was due to European banks. For the American government to bail out European banks would have been a tough sell, to put it mildly. Other third parties were entities like Goldman Sachs, which said it didn't need to be bailed out but received, I believe, $13 billion in taxpayer dollars that was funneled through AIG.
What is happening in Washington is a scandal and an outrage. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi should not be allowed to divert attention from the disastrous policies they are pursuing by focusing on the sideshow of AIG bonuses.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Obama begins packingthe court with left-winger
Obama is doing the expected and beginning the tilt of federal courts toward the radical left. His nominee, David Hamilton, to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is clearly a left-winger.
Most people, unfortunately, don't realize the impact that unelected federal judges can have on their day-to-day life, liberty and pocketbooks. Someone like David Hamilton, allegedly a one-time fundraiser for ACORN, doesn't believe ordinary people are capable of controlling their own lives.
Futile as it may be, write your Senator opposing this choice, contact all the Republican Senators urging them to show courage and challenge this nominee, write your editors and talk to your neighbors. Borrow a leaf from the Democrats and "bork" David Hamilton.
Here are two blog entries on this left-winger who should not be allowed to sit on a federal appellate court.
From Powerline:
From National Review Bench Memoes:
Most people, unfortunately, don't realize the impact that unelected federal judges can have on their day-to-day life, liberty and pocketbooks. Someone like David Hamilton, allegedly a one-time fundraiser for ACORN, doesn't believe ordinary people are capable of controlling their own lives.
Futile as it may be, write your Senator opposing this choice, contact all the Republican Senators urging them to show courage and challenge this nominee, write your editors and talk to your neighbors. Borrow a leaf from the Democrats and "bork" David Hamilton.
Here are two blog entries on this left-winger who should not be allowed to sit on a federal appellate court.
From Powerline:
And so it begins
March 17, 2009 Posted by Paul at 11:25 AM
Barack Obama has selected a leftist, David Hamilton, to be his first nominee for the federal bench. Hamilton is Obama's nominee for a spot on the Seventh CIrcuit Court of Appeals. Appropriately enough, Hamilton reportedly was once a former fund-raiser for the radical activist outfit ACORN, a key Obama ally. He is also a former leader of the Indiana chapter of the ACLU.
Hamilton's record as a federal district judge confirms his ultra-liberalism. Recently, he invalidated a law requiring the registration of sex offenders. He also prevented enforcement of an Indiana law that required information and a waiting period before an abortion. The Seventh Circuit (the court to which Hamilton now has been nominated) found that the law in question was materially identical to a law upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Casey decision. It noted that no judge in the land, other than Hamilton, has found such a law invalid since Casey was decided. Apparently, Hamilton did not consider himself bound by decisions of the Supreme Court with which he strongly disagreed.
In addition, Ed Whelan points out that Hamilton somehow managed to invoke the doctrine of substantive due process to suppress evidence of a criminal defendant's possession of cocaine. The Seventh Circuit unanimously reversed that ruling.
Not to worry, though, the New York Times calls Hamilton a "moderate."
From National Review Bench Memoes:
Seventh Circuit Candidate David Hamilton—An ACLU “Moderate”! [Ed Whelan]
In an article headlined “Moderate Is Said to Be Pick for Court,” the New York Times reports that President Obama’s first nominee to a federal appellate court seat is expected to be David F. Hamilton. Hamilton, appointed by President Clinton to a district judgeship in Indiana in 1994 (despite the ABA’s “not qualified” rating), is expected to be named to the Seventh Circuit.
It’s far from clear what justifies the article’s characterization of Hamilton as a “moderate” (or, as the article oddly puts it, as “represent[ing] some of his state’s traditionally moderate strain”—how does one represent some of a strain?). Was it perhaps Hamilton’s service as vice president for litigation, and as a board member, of the Indiana branch of the ACLU? Or maybe Hamilton’s extraordinary seven-year-long series of rulings obstructing Indiana’s implementation of its law providing for informed consent on abortion? That obstruction elicited this strong statement (emphasis added) from the Seventh Circuit panel majority that overturned Hamilton:
For seven years Indiana has been prevented from enforcing a statute materially identical to a law held valid by the Supreme Court in Casey, by this court in Karlin, and by the fifth circuit in Barnes. No court anywhere in the country (other than one district judge in Indiana [i.e., Hamilton]) has held any similar law invalid in the years since Casey. Although Salerno does not foreclose all pre-enforcement challenges to abortion laws, it is an abuse of discretion for a district judge to issue a pre-enforcement injunction while the effects of the law (and reasons for those effects) are open to debate.
Or perhaps Hamilton’s inventive invocation of substantive due process to suppress evidence of a criminal defendant’s possession of cocaine, a ruling that, alas, was unanimously reversed by the Seventh Circuit?
With “moderates” like Hamilton, imagine what Obama’s “liberal” nominees will look like.
03/17 11:03 AM
Monday, March 16, 2009
Foremerly useful idiots comment on Obama
From American Thinker:
March 16, 2009
Formerly Useful Idiots
By Cliff Thier
Lenin famously said of liberals in the West that they were "useful idiots."
A number of really smart (go ahead, ask them) people endorsed Obama only to find out that they were hoodwinked. He's not the guy they fell in love with. It's the morning after, and they've been forced to confront the fact that he's a fraud. A forgery.
In John LeCarre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" master spy George Smiley points out that "the more one has paid for a forgery, the more one defends it in the face of all the evidence to the contrary." And, these people have paid plenty for their forgery.
They fell in love with the idea of Obama and that blinded them to the reality of the man Obama. The hard leftist. The man with no management skills. The man with no knowledge of history. The man who insults our allies. Now, as the reality of what they have done is hitting them in the face, they are painfully coming to grips with their colossal gullibility.
What have I done
Alec Guinness brilliantly portrayed the moment of clarity when he contemplated the bridge he had built for the Japanese over the River Kwai and said, "What have I done?"
This occasional column will be a hall of fame for easy marks. If you have evidence of other really smart people waking up and exclaiming "What have I done?" please send it to cliffordthier@mac.com The list will be growing.
Christopher Buckley -- Commentator and Offspring
HALLELUJAH
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament, "pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he's a Harvard man, though that's sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I'm libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him-I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric-the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
-- October 10, 2008
OOPS
Hold on-there's a typo in that paragraph. "$3.6 trillion budget" can't be right. The entire national debt is-what-about $11 trillion? He can't actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, "Well."...
If this is what the American people want, so be it, but they ought to have no illusions about the perils of this approach. Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetical bureaucratic jargon, "sunset." He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely was whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one-half the total accumulated national debt in all US history. All in one fell swoop.
-- March 1, 2009
David Brooks: NT Times' Pet Conservative
HALLELUJAH
And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather - already has gathered - some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.
-- October 16, 2008
OOPS
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates - moderate-conservative, in my case - are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice.
-- March 2, 2009
Martin Peretz: Publisher of The New Republic
HALLELUJAH
Obama's points, which he has made many times, should reassure anyone who is concerned about what his presidency would mean for the security of Israel. And yet many are not reassured. They are alarmed by e-mails, saying that Obama's middle name is Hussein (true, and so what?), that he is a Muslim and not a Christian (untrue, and so what if it was?), that he took the oath of office as a Senator on the Koran rather than the Bible (utterly untrue and, once again, so what?). All these charges have been aired and negated often enough that anyone interested in hearing the truth about them has heard it. But another charge, circulating on the Internet, has not yet been sufficiently refuted. This is that he has advisers on the Middle East who despise Israel.
Let's take one example. There are all kinds of spooky rumors that a man named Robert Malley is one of Obama's advisers, specifically his Middle East adviser. His name comes up mysteriously and intrusively on the web, like the ads for Viagra. Malley, who has written several deceitful articles in The New York Review of Books, is a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it. But Malley is not and has never been a Middle East adviser to Barack Obama. Obama's Middle East adviser is Dan Shapiro. Malley did, though, work for Bill Clinton. He was deeply involved in the disastrous diplomacy of 2000. Obama at the time was in the Illinois State Senate. So, yes, this is a piece of experience that Obama lacks.
-- January 31, 2008
OOPS
Here is the most stunning prospective appointment of the Obama administration as yet. Not stunning as in "spectacular" or "distinguished" but stunning as in bigoted and completely out of synch with the deepest convictions of the American people. What's more, Charles "Chas" Freeman is a bought man, having been ambassador to Saudi Arabia and then having supped at its tables for almost two decades, supped quite literally, and supped also at home, courtesy of Prince Bandar, confidante of the Bushes who as everybody knows became extremely wealthy through the intimacy with the royal house, a story that has not been done adequately ever. [snip]
Chas Freeman is actually a new psychological type for a Democratic administration. He has never displayed a liberal instinct and wants the United States to kow-tow to authoritarians and tyrants, in some measure just because they may seem able to keep the streets quiet. And frankly, Chas brings a bitter rancor to how he looks at Israel. No Arab country and no Arab movement--basically including Hezbollah and Hamas--poses a challenge to the kind of world order we Americans want to see. He is now very big on Hamas as the key to bringing peace to Gaza, when in fact it is the key to uproar and bloodletting, not just against Israel but against the Palestinian Authority that is the only group of Palestinians that has even given lip-service (and, to be fair, a bit more) to a settlement with Israel.
That Freeman would be chosen as the president's gatekeeper to national intelligence is an absurdity. It would be as if I were appointed the gatekeeper to that intelligence.
But Freeman's real offense (and the president's if he were to appoint him) is that he has questioned the loyalty and patriotism of not only Zionists and other friends of Israel, the great swath of American Jews and their Christian countrymen, who believed that the protection of Zion is at the core of our religious and secular history, from the Pilgrim fathers through Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. And how has he offended this tradition? By publishing and peddling the unabridged John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, with panegyric and hysteria. If Freeman believes that this book is the truth he can't be trusted by anyone, least of all Barack Obama. I can't believe that Obama wants to appoint someone who is quintessentially an insult to the patriotism of some many of his supporters, me included.
-- February 25, 2009
Coming: Smart People: Chris Matthews, Warren Buffet, Stuart Taylor, Paul Volcker, David Gergen
March 16, 2009
Formerly Useful Idiots
By Cliff Thier
Lenin famously said of liberals in the West that they were "useful idiots."
A number of really smart (go ahead, ask them) people endorsed Obama only to find out that they were hoodwinked. He's not the guy they fell in love with. It's the morning after, and they've been forced to confront the fact that he's a fraud. A forgery.
In John LeCarre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" master spy George Smiley points out that "the more one has paid for a forgery, the more one defends it in the face of all the evidence to the contrary." And, these people have paid plenty for their forgery.
They fell in love with the idea of Obama and that blinded them to the reality of the man Obama. The hard leftist. The man with no management skills. The man with no knowledge of history. The man who insults our allies. Now, as the reality of what they have done is hitting them in the face, they are painfully coming to grips with their colossal gullibility.
What have I done
Alec Guinness brilliantly portrayed the moment of clarity when he contemplated the bridge he had built for the Japanese over the River Kwai and said, "What have I done?"
This occasional column will be a hall of fame for easy marks. If you have evidence of other really smart people waking up and exclaiming "What have I done?" please send it to cliffordthier@mac.com The list will be growing.
Christopher Buckley -- Commentator and Offspring
HALLELUJAH
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament, "pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he's a Harvard man, though that's sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I'm libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him-I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric-the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
-- October 10, 2008
OOPS
Hold on-there's a typo in that paragraph. "$3.6 trillion budget" can't be right. The entire national debt is-what-about $11 trillion? He can't actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, "Well."...
If this is what the American people want, so be it, but they ought to have no illusions about the perils of this approach. Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetical bureaucratic jargon, "sunset." He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely was whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one-half the total accumulated national debt in all US history. All in one fell swoop.
-- March 1, 2009
David Brooks: NT Times' Pet Conservative
HALLELUJAH
And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather - already has gathered - some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.
-- October 16, 2008
OOPS
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates - moderate-conservative, in my case - are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice.
-- March 2, 2009
Martin Peretz: Publisher of The New Republic
HALLELUJAH
Obama's points, which he has made many times, should reassure anyone who is concerned about what his presidency would mean for the security of Israel. And yet many are not reassured. They are alarmed by e-mails, saying that Obama's middle name is Hussein (true, and so what?), that he is a Muslim and not a Christian (untrue, and so what if it was?), that he took the oath of office as a Senator on the Koran rather than the Bible (utterly untrue and, once again, so what?). All these charges have been aired and negated often enough that anyone interested in hearing the truth about them has heard it. But another charge, circulating on the Internet, has not yet been sufficiently refuted. This is that he has advisers on the Middle East who despise Israel.
Let's take one example. There are all kinds of spooky rumors that a man named Robert Malley is one of Obama's advisers, specifically his Middle East adviser. His name comes up mysteriously and intrusively on the web, like the ads for Viagra. Malley, who has written several deceitful articles in The New York Review of Books, is a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it. But Malley is not and has never been a Middle East adviser to Barack Obama. Obama's Middle East adviser is Dan Shapiro. Malley did, though, work for Bill Clinton. He was deeply involved in the disastrous diplomacy of 2000. Obama at the time was in the Illinois State Senate. So, yes, this is a piece of experience that Obama lacks.
-- January 31, 2008
OOPS
Here is the most stunning prospective appointment of the Obama administration as yet. Not stunning as in "spectacular" or "distinguished" but stunning as in bigoted and completely out of synch with the deepest convictions of the American people. What's more, Charles "Chas" Freeman is a bought man, having been ambassador to Saudi Arabia and then having supped at its tables for almost two decades, supped quite literally, and supped also at home, courtesy of Prince Bandar, confidante of the Bushes who as everybody knows became extremely wealthy through the intimacy with the royal house, a story that has not been done adequately ever. [snip]
Chas Freeman is actually a new psychological type for a Democratic administration. He has never displayed a liberal instinct and wants the United States to kow-tow to authoritarians and tyrants, in some measure just because they may seem able to keep the streets quiet. And frankly, Chas brings a bitter rancor to how he looks at Israel. No Arab country and no Arab movement--basically including Hezbollah and Hamas--poses a challenge to the kind of world order we Americans want to see. He is now very big on Hamas as the key to bringing peace to Gaza, when in fact it is the key to uproar and bloodletting, not just against Israel but against the Palestinian Authority that is the only group of Palestinians that has even given lip-service (and, to be fair, a bit more) to a settlement with Israel.
That Freeman would be chosen as the president's gatekeeper to national intelligence is an absurdity. It would be as if I were appointed the gatekeeper to that intelligence.
But Freeman's real offense (and the president's if he were to appoint him) is that he has questioned the loyalty and patriotism of not only Zionists and other friends of Israel, the great swath of American Jews and their Christian countrymen, who believed that the protection of Zion is at the core of our religious and secular history, from the Pilgrim fathers through Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. And how has he offended this tradition? By publishing and peddling the unabridged John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, with panegyric and hysteria. If Freeman believes that this book is the truth he can't be trusted by anyone, least of all Barack Obama. I can't believe that Obama wants to appoint someone who is quintessentially an insult to the patriotism of some many of his supporters, me included.
-- February 25, 2009
Coming: Smart People: Chris Matthews, Warren Buffet, Stuart Taylor, Paul Volcker, David Gergen
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Dick Cheney speaks out
PowerLine Blog has an interesting excerpt or two from the CNN interview with Dick Cheney. You can see a re-broadcast of the whole thing on Sunday, 8PM ET on CNN.
Cheney Unbound
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March 15, 2009 Posted by John at 12:04 PM
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by John King on CNN this morning. He had some interesting and candid observations on a number of topics. On Iran's nuclear program:
KING: When he was here, Admiral Mullen also said he agreed with the IAEA report that says Iran now has enough nuclear material, enough fissile material to produce a bomb. He says he agrees with that. What should President Obama do if that's the case?
CHENEY: Well, you've got to find ways, I think, to avoid having Iran develop an inventory of nuclear weapons. We've talked about this for years. We worked it aggressively through the international community and with a lot of our friends in Europe...
KING: You were not always happy with that, especially at the end of the administration.
CHENEY: I was not always happy with that.
KING: You think your president invested too much in the European diplomacy?
CHENEY: Well, I can't say that. It was a choice he made. And...
KING: But it was not your choice? It would not have been your choice?
CHENEY: I supported what he did. I supported his policies. And I got to argue my case with him. The circumstances now, though, are that we still have an Iran that I believe is pursuing nuclear weapons. What they've done, I think, as best I can tell -- I'm not reading the intelligence reports anymore like I did before January -- is they produced a fair amount of low enriched uranium, the kind that you would use for a power plant. That's the hardest step to get to. Once you have got low enriched uranium, it's relatively simple to change it to highly enriched uranium, and that's the last step that's needed before you have got fissile material for a weapon. So I'm not sure exactly where they are at this point, but I am confident of what their objective is, and I don't think that's changed.
On North Korea and Ambassador Chris Hill:
KING: Before we get to another break, let me follow up on that point. You disagree with the overreliance, I think is a good term, a fair term, tell me if I'm wrong, on the diplomacy with the Europeans when it came to Iran. You also disagreed with the approach in the end to North Korea and taking them off the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for, I believe your view is, for nothing, or for just false promises.
The man who led that effort, Chris Hill, the diplomat in charge then is now President Obama's choice to be the ambassador in Iraq. That's a tough job. Do you think Chris Hill is up to that job based on what he did in North Korea?
CHENEY: He's not the man I would have picked for that post. He doesn't have any experience in the region. He's never served in that part of the world before. He doesn't speak the language. He's got none of the skills and talents that Ryan Crocker had, who was our last ambassador, who did a superb job, deserves as much credit as Dave Petraeus in terms of how that process worked during the surge that led to the success we've seen now in Iraq.
So I think it's a choice that -- a choice I wouldn't have made. I did not support the work that Chris Hill did with respect to North Korea.
KING: Why didn't the president listen to you?
CHENEY: Well, he gets to listen to whoever he wants to listen to, and I had my say. I got my chance to voice my views and my objections. I didn't [think] the North Koreans were going to keep their end of the bargain in terms of what they agreed to, and they didn't.
On Osama bin Laden:
KING: What's the closest you ever got?
CHENEY: Well, of course, we don't know for certain. We were fairly confident where he was located. We also believed, though, that he is buried so deep that it's very rare that he is able to communicate with his associates. We also had a very great effect upon the number three in Al Qaida. That was the most dangerous job in the world for a long time was to become the number three, because that was the one that sort of interacted between bin Laden and Zawahiri and the rest of the organization, and we were often able to capture or kill him.
On the Obama administration's retreat from some of the Bush administration's security policies:
KING: I'd like to just simply ask you, yes or no, by taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?
CHENEY: I do. I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11. I think that's a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.
President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.
KING: That's a pretty serious thing to say about the president of the United States...
CHENEY: Well...
KING: ... and commander in chief of the military. So I want to give you a chance, because many people will say, Vice President Cheney just said Barack Obama, President Obama is making us less safe, more at risk, which you just said. I want to give you a chance -- and take as much time as you want -- to prove it. Because you put that list up there, and I know you say there have been three cases, I believe, of waterboarding in the past, and you say that specific things have been prevented. I know some of this is classified intelligence, but now that you're out of government, to the degree that you can, tell the American people, because of those tactics, because of those, yes, sometimes extreme tactics, we stopped this.
CHENEY: Well, I would say that the key to what we did was to collect intelligence against the enemy. That's what the terrorist surveillance program was all about, that's what the enhanced interrogation program was all about.
KING: But another 9/11, because of a tactic like waterboarding or a black site, can you say with certainty you stopped another attempt to do something on that level?
CHENEY: John, I've seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It's still classified. I can't give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them. The one that has been public was the potential attack coming out of Heathrow, when they were going to have several American planes with terrorists on board, with liquid explosives, and they were going to blow those planes up over the United States.
Now, that was intercepted and stopped, partly because of those programs that we put in place.
Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It's not a law enforcement problem. Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.
Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they've got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.
When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.
On Scooter Libby:
KING: I am told by people close to you and close to the former president that the most tense moment came late, when you wanted the president to pardon your friend and your former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the president said no. How tense did that get?
CHENEY: Well, it was -- it was one of the moments that occurred in the administration where we had fundamental difference of opinion. I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the president disagreed with that.
KING: Angry? Tense? Shouting?
CHENEY: Those kinds of details, I think, are best left to history. Maybe I'll write about it in my book. ...
I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind, which I didn't think was appropriate. I think he's an innocent man who deserves a pardon.
On Rush Limbaugh:
KING: What next for your party? There has been a big dust-up in recent days, in parts stoked by the White House, about Rush Limbaugh making some comments. David Frum, a conservative who worked in your administration, says that Rush Limbaugh is kryptonite, because he drives away the voters the Republicans need to build the road to discovery. Is Rush Limbaugh kryptonite?
CHENEY: No, Rush is a good friend. I love him. I think he does great work and has for years. He's now offered to debate President Obama on his radio show. Hell, I'd pay to see that! It would be interesting to have developed.
I think Rush is a good man and serves a very important purpose.
The contrast between Cheney's lucidity and the babbling brook who now serves as Vice President is painf
Cheney Unbound
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March 15, 2009 Posted by John at 12:04 PM
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by John King on CNN this morning. He had some interesting and candid observations on a number of topics. On Iran's nuclear program:
KING: When he was here, Admiral Mullen also said he agreed with the IAEA report that says Iran now has enough nuclear material, enough fissile material to produce a bomb. He says he agrees with that. What should President Obama do if that's the case?
CHENEY: Well, you've got to find ways, I think, to avoid having Iran develop an inventory of nuclear weapons. We've talked about this for years. We worked it aggressively through the international community and with a lot of our friends in Europe...
KING: You were not always happy with that, especially at the end of the administration.
CHENEY: I was not always happy with that.
KING: You think your president invested too much in the European diplomacy?
CHENEY: Well, I can't say that. It was a choice he made. And...
KING: But it was not your choice? It would not have been your choice?
CHENEY: I supported what he did. I supported his policies. And I got to argue my case with him. The circumstances now, though, are that we still have an Iran that I believe is pursuing nuclear weapons. What they've done, I think, as best I can tell -- I'm not reading the intelligence reports anymore like I did before January -- is they produced a fair amount of low enriched uranium, the kind that you would use for a power plant. That's the hardest step to get to. Once you have got low enriched uranium, it's relatively simple to change it to highly enriched uranium, and that's the last step that's needed before you have got fissile material for a weapon. So I'm not sure exactly where they are at this point, but I am confident of what their objective is, and I don't think that's changed.
On North Korea and Ambassador Chris Hill:
KING: Before we get to another break, let me follow up on that point. You disagree with the overreliance, I think is a good term, a fair term, tell me if I'm wrong, on the diplomacy with the Europeans when it came to Iran. You also disagreed with the approach in the end to North Korea and taking them off the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for, I believe your view is, for nothing, or for just false promises.
The man who led that effort, Chris Hill, the diplomat in charge then is now President Obama's choice to be the ambassador in Iraq. That's a tough job. Do you think Chris Hill is up to that job based on what he did in North Korea?
CHENEY: He's not the man I would have picked for that post. He doesn't have any experience in the region. He's never served in that part of the world before. He doesn't speak the language. He's got none of the skills and talents that Ryan Crocker had, who was our last ambassador, who did a superb job, deserves as much credit as Dave Petraeus in terms of how that process worked during the surge that led to the success we've seen now in Iraq.
So I think it's a choice that -- a choice I wouldn't have made. I did not support the work that Chris Hill did with respect to North Korea.
KING: Why didn't the president listen to you?
CHENEY: Well, he gets to listen to whoever he wants to listen to, and I had my say. I got my chance to voice my views and my objections. I didn't [think] the North Koreans were going to keep their end of the bargain in terms of what they agreed to, and they didn't.
On Osama bin Laden:
KING: What's the closest you ever got?
CHENEY: Well, of course, we don't know for certain. We were fairly confident where he was located. We also believed, though, that he is buried so deep that it's very rare that he is able to communicate with his associates. We also had a very great effect upon the number three in Al Qaida. That was the most dangerous job in the world for a long time was to become the number three, because that was the one that sort of interacted between bin Laden and Zawahiri and the rest of the organization, and we were often able to capture or kill him.
On the Obama administration's retreat from some of the Bush administration's security policies:
KING: I'd like to just simply ask you, yes or no, by taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?
CHENEY: I do. I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11. I think that's a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.
President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.
KING: That's a pretty serious thing to say about the president of the United States...
CHENEY: Well...
KING: ... and commander in chief of the military. So I want to give you a chance, because many people will say, Vice President Cheney just said Barack Obama, President Obama is making us less safe, more at risk, which you just said. I want to give you a chance -- and take as much time as you want -- to prove it. Because you put that list up there, and I know you say there have been three cases, I believe, of waterboarding in the past, and you say that specific things have been prevented. I know some of this is classified intelligence, but now that you're out of government, to the degree that you can, tell the American people, because of those tactics, because of those, yes, sometimes extreme tactics, we stopped this.
CHENEY: Well, I would say that the key to what we did was to collect intelligence against the enemy. That's what the terrorist surveillance program was all about, that's what the enhanced interrogation program was all about.
KING: But another 9/11, because of a tactic like waterboarding or a black site, can you say with certainty you stopped another attempt to do something on that level?
CHENEY: John, I've seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It's still classified. I can't give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them. The one that has been public was the potential attack coming out of Heathrow, when they were going to have several American planes with terrorists on board, with liquid explosives, and they were going to blow those planes up over the United States.
Now, that was intercepted and stopped, partly because of those programs that we put in place.
Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It's not a law enforcement problem. Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.
Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they've got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.
When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.
On Scooter Libby:
KING: I am told by people close to you and close to the former president that the most tense moment came late, when you wanted the president to pardon your friend and your former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the president said no. How tense did that get?
CHENEY: Well, it was -- it was one of the moments that occurred in the administration where we had fundamental difference of opinion. I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the president disagreed with that.
KING: Angry? Tense? Shouting?
CHENEY: Those kinds of details, I think, are best left to history. Maybe I'll write about it in my book. ...
I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind, which I didn't think was appropriate. I think he's an innocent man who deserves a pardon.
On Rush Limbaugh:
KING: What next for your party? There has been a big dust-up in recent days, in parts stoked by the White House, about Rush Limbaugh making some comments. David Frum, a conservative who worked in your administration, says that Rush Limbaugh is kryptonite, because he drives away the voters the Republicans need to build the road to discovery. Is Rush Limbaugh kryptonite?
CHENEY: No, Rush is a good friend. I love him. I think he does great work and has for years. He's now offered to debate President Obama on his radio show. Hell, I'd pay to see that! It would be interesting to have developed.
I think Rush is a good man and serves a very important purpose.
The contrast between Cheney's lucidity and the babbling brook who now serves as Vice President is painf
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Msrk Steyn hits hard at theft from our children and grandchildren
From the National Review, Mark Steyn hits hard at generational theft:
March 14, 2009, 7:00 a.m.
The Brokest Generation
Our kids are the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all pre-approved!
By Mark Steyn
Just between you, me, and the old, the late middle-aged, and the early middle-aged: Isn’t it terrific to be able to stick it to the young? I mean, imagine how bad all this economic-type stuff would be if our kids and grandkids hadn’t offered to pick up the tab.
Well, okay, they didn’t exactly “offer” but they did stand around behind Barack Obama at all those campaign rallies helping him look dynamic and telegenic and earnestly chanting hopey-hopey-changey-changey. And “Yes, we can!”
Which is a pretty open-ended commitment.
Are you sure you young folks will be able to pay off this massive Mount Spendmore of multi-trillion-dollar debts we’ve piled up on you?
“Yes, we can!”
We thought you’d say that! God bless the youth of America! We of the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X salute you, the plucky members of the Brokest Generation, the Gloomers, and Generation Y, as in “Why the hell did you old coots do this to us?”
Because, as politicians like to say, it’s about “the future of all our children.” And the future of all our children is that they’ll be paying off the past of all their grandparents. At 12 percent of GDP, this year’s deficit is the highest since the Second World War, and prioritizes not economic vitality but massive expansion of government. But hey, it’s not our problem. As Lord Keynes observed, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Well, most of us will be. But not you youngsters, not for a while. So we’ve figured it out: You’re the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all pre-approved!
The Bailout and the TARP and the Stimulus and the Multi-Trillion Budget and TARP 2 and Stimulus 2 and TARP And Stimulus Meet Frankenstein and the Wolf Man are like the old Saturday-morning cliffhanger serials your grandpa used to enjoy. But now he doesn’t have to grab his walker and totter down to the Rialto, because he can just switch on the news and every week there’s his plucky little hero Big Government facing the same old crisis: Why, there’s yet another exciting spending bill with twelve zeroes on the end, but unfortunately there seems to be some question about whether they have the votes to pass it. Oh, no! And then, just as the fate of another gazillion dollars of pork and waste hangs in the balance, Arlen Specter or one of those lady-senators from Maine dashes to the cliff edge and gives a helping hand, and phew, this week’s spendapalooza sails through. But don’t worry, there’ll be another exciting episode of Trillion-Buck Rogers of the 21st Century next week!
This is the biggest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. If you’re an 18-year old middle-class hopeychanger, look at the way your parents and grandparents live: It’s not going to be like that for you. You’re going to have a smaller house, and a smaller car — if not a basement flat and a bus ticket. You didn’t get us into this catastrophe. But you’re going to be stuck with the tab, just like the Germans got stuck with paying reparations for the catastrophe of the First World War. True, the Germans were actually in the war, whereas in the current crisis you guys were just goofing around at school, dozing through Diversity Studies and hoping to ace Anger Management class. But tough. That’s the way it goes.
I had the pleasure of talking to the students of Hillsdale College last week, and endeavored to explain what it is they’re being lined up for in a 21st-century America of more government, more regulation, less opportunity, and less prosperity: When you come to take your seat at the American table (to use another phrase politicians are fond of), you’ll find the geezers, boomers, and X-ers have all gone to the men’s room, and you’re the only one sitting there when the waiter presents the check. That’s you: Generation Checks.
The Teleprompter Kid says not to worry: His budget numbers are based on projections that the economy will decline 1.2 percent this year and then grow 4 percent every year thereafter. Do you believe that? In fact, does he believe that? This is the guy who keeps telling us this is the worst economic crisis in 70 years, and it turns out it’s just a 1 percent decline for a couple more months and then party-time resumes? And, come to that, wasn’t there a (notably unprojected) 6.2 percent drop in GDP just in the last quarter of 2008?
Whatever. Growth may be lower than projected, but who’s to say all those new programs, agencies, entitlements, and other boondoggles won’t also turn out to cost less than anticipated? Might as well be optimistic, right?
Youth is wasted on the young, said Bernard Shaw. So the geezers appropriated it. We love the youthful sense of living in the moment, without a care, without the burdens of responsibility — free to go wild and crazy and splash out for Tony Danza in dinner theater in Florida where we bought the condo we couldn’t afford. But we also love the idealism of youth: We want to help the sick and heal the planet by voting for massive unsustainable government programs. Like the young, we’re still finding ourselves, but when we find ourselves stuck with a medical bill or a foreclosure notice it’s great to be able to call home and say, “Whoops, I got into a bit of a hole this month. Do you think you could advance me a couple of trillion just to tide me over?” And if there’s no one at home but a couple of second-graders, who cares? In supporting the political class in its present behavior, America has gone to the bank and given its kids a massive breach-of-trust fund.
I mentioned a few weeks ago the calamitous reality of the U.S. auto industry. General Motors has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to over a million people. They can never sell enough cars to make that math add up. In fact, selling cars doesn’t help, as they lose money on each model. GM is a welfare project masquerading as economic activity. And, after the Obama transformation, America will be, too. The young need to recognize that this is their fight. They need to stop chanting along with the hopeychangey dirges and do something more effective, like form the anti-AARP: the association of Americans who’ll never be able to retire.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn
March 14, 2009, 7:00 a.m.
The Brokest Generation
Our kids are the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all pre-approved!
By Mark Steyn
Just between you, me, and the old, the late middle-aged, and the early middle-aged: Isn’t it terrific to be able to stick it to the young? I mean, imagine how bad all this economic-type stuff would be if our kids and grandkids hadn’t offered to pick up the tab.
Well, okay, they didn’t exactly “offer” but they did stand around behind Barack Obama at all those campaign rallies helping him look dynamic and telegenic and earnestly chanting hopey-hopey-changey-changey. And “Yes, we can!”
Which is a pretty open-ended commitment.
Are you sure you young folks will be able to pay off this massive Mount Spendmore of multi-trillion-dollar debts we’ve piled up on you?
“Yes, we can!”
We thought you’d say that! God bless the youth of America! We of the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X salute you, the plucky members of the Brokest Generation, the Gloomers, and Generation Y, as in “Why the hell did you old coots do this to us?”
Because, as politicians like to say, it’s about “the future of all our children.” And the future of all our children is that they’ll be paying off the past of all their grandparents. At 12 percent of GDP, this year’s deficit is the highest since the Second World War, and prioritizes not economic vitality but massive expansion of government. But hey, it’s not our problem. As Lord Keynes observed, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Well, most of us will be. But not you youngsters, not for a while. So we’ve figured it out: You’re the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all pre-approved!
The Bailout and the TARP and the Stimulus and the Multi-Trillion Budget and TARP 2 and Stimulus 2 and TARP And Stimulus Meet Frankenstein and the Wolf Man are like the old Saturday-morning cliffhanger serials your grandpa used to enjoy. But now he doesn’t have to grab his walker and totter down to the Rialto, because he can just switch on the news and every week there’s his plucky little hero Big Government facing the same old crisis: Why, there’s yet another exciting spending bill with twelve zeroes on the end, but unfortunately there seems to be some question about whether they have the votes to pass it. Oh, no! And then, just as the fate of another gazillion dollars of pork and waste hangs in the balance, Arlen Specter or one of those lady-senators from Maine dashes to the cliff edge and gives a helping hand, and phew, this week’s spendapalooza sails through. But don’t worry, there’ll be another exciting episode of Trillion-Buck Rogers of the 21st Century next week!
This is the biggest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. If you’re an 18-year old middle-class hopeychanger, look at the way your parents and grandparents live: It’s not going to be like that for you. You’re going to have a smaller house, and a smaller car — if not a basement flat and a bus ticket. You didn’t get us into this catastrophe. But you’re going to be stuck with the tab, just like the Germans got stuck with paying reparations for the catastrophe of the First World War. True, the Germans were actually in the war, whereas in the current crisis you guys were just goofing around at school, dozing through Diversity Studies and hoping to ace Anger Management class. But tough. That’s the way it goes.
I had the pleasure of talking to the students of Hillsdale College last week, and endeavored to explain what it is they’re being lined up for in a 21st-century America of more government, more regulation, less opportunity, and less prosperity: When you come to take your seat at the American table (to use another phrase politicians are fond of), you’ll find the geezers, boomers, and X-ers have all gone to the men’s room, and you’re the only one sitting there when the waiter presents the check. That’s you: Generation Checks.
The Teleprompter Kid says not to worry: His budget numbers are based on projections that the economy will decline 1.2 percent this year and then grow 4 percent every year thereafter. Do you believe that? In fact, does he believe that? This is the guy who keeps telling us this is the worst economic crisis in 70 years, and it turns out it’s just a 1 percent decline for a couple more months and then party-time resumes? And, come to that, wasn’t there a (notably unprojected) 6.2 percent drop in GDP just in the last quarter of 2008?
Whatever. Growth may be lower than projected, but who’s to say all those new programs, agencies, entitlements, and other boondoggles won’t also turn out to cost less than anticipated? Might as well be optimistic, right?
Youth is wasted on the young, said Bernard Shaw. So the geezers appropriated it. We love the youthful sense of living in the moment, without a care, without the burdens of responsibility — free to go wild and crazy and splash out for Tony Danza in dinner theater in Florida where we bought the condo we couldn’t afford. But we also love the idealism of youth: We want to help the sick and heal the planet by voting for massive unsustainable government programs. Like the young, we’re still finding ourselves, but when we find ourselves stuck with a medical bill or a foreclosure notice it’s great to be able to call home and say, “Whoops, I got into a bit of a hole this month. Do you think you could advance me a couple of trillion just to tide me over?” And if there’s no one at home but a couple of second-graders, who cares? In supporting the political class in its present behavior, America has gone to the bank and given its kids a massive breach-of-trust fund.
I mentioned a few weeks ago the calamitous reality of the U.S. auto industry. General Motors has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to over a million people. They can never sell enough cars to make that math add up. In fact, selling cars doesn’t help, as they lose money on each model. GM is a welfare project masquerading as economic activity. And, after the Obama transformation, America will be, too. The young need to recognize that this is their fight. They need to stop chanting along with the hopeychangey dirges and do something more effective, like form the anti-AARP: the association of Americans who’ll never be able to retire.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn
Friday, March 13, 2009
Should you care about what happens in Canada? Yes.
Mark Steyn in Macleans:
Macleans.ca
Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine.
‘Facts.’ Such a quaint notion now.
Mar 12, 2009 by macleans.ca
‘Facts.’ Such a quaint notion now.When the metaphorical dust has settled on the Plains of Abraham—metaphorical dust being the only kind you’re allowed to kick up on the sacred sod a quarter-millennium on—the larger question remains:
What’s the future of the past?
That’s to say, the lesson of the last few weeks is that the latter depends on the former. In 1759, General Wolfe won a decisive victory that led to the end of French rule on this continent: that is what we used quaintly to call a “fact.” To take another unfashionable word, the “reality” of North American life today derives explicitly from that fact.
Once upon a time they used to teach Wolfe in schools. I don’t suppose, between diversity studies, anger management classes and Ritalin shots, he gets much of a look-in these days. Yet it is still startling to discover that to observe 2½ centuries of this transformative event would be a ghastly social faux pas (pardon my French) in the province (pardon my English) of Quebec. When I first heard that the long-scheduled re-enactment of the battle had been cancelled on “public safety” grounds, I roared my head off: the notion of a warrior nation now too fainthearted even to stage re-enactments seemed too obvious a parody of Canadian squishiness. But it turned out to be true. The British won the battle but the French won the re-enactment—which may yet be what counts. As the separatist bruiser Patrick Bourgeois couldn’t resist crowing, it was a glorious victory over the old enemy.
I say “separatist bruiser” but, of course, the pseudo-separatists never do separate and M Bourgeois will end his days a subject of the same Crown that has already inflicted 250 years of humiliation on him. “Je me souviens,” as the licence plates say, although given Quebec’s advanced state of societal dementia maybe they could switch quotations to: “a British subject I was born and a British subject I will die.”
In other countries, they épater les bourgeois. But in Canada les bourgeois épater everybody else. I warmed up to Quebec’s newest hero after listening to everybody else’s response to him. The British victor’s successor as gauleiter of Quebec, the federal government, turned out to be a Wolfe in sheep’s clothing, and abandoned the National Battlefield Commission to its fate. The commission chair, André Juneau, conceded that it is “an ex-tremely painful page in our history,” apparently mostly for the winning side, but he said a commemorative book would still be issued, and—who knows?—it may even be legal to distribute it in Quebec. A spokesman for the organizing group, the Quebec Historical Corps, said they might go ahead and hold the re-enactment in Ontario, which would be as funny as it gets, short of moving the venue to the garden of Buckingham Palace, where presumably it would fall foul of European Union “xenophobia” laws.
Meanwhile, Michael Ignatieff displayed the characteristically bold leadership we’ve come to associate with him since he momentarily wandered off the Liberal reservation and accidentally supported the Iraq war. The leader of the Opposition declared that he wasn’t saying he was for or against the re-enactment per se but that any commemoration of this “defeat and tragedy” ought to be respectful. You remember Lord Nelson at Trafalgar? He put the telescope over his eye patch and said “I see no ships.” That’s Iggy. He put a patch over both eyes, swivelled in all directions, and declared, “I see no re-enactment, but if it’s out there I hope it’s sober and dignified.”
Speaking of Trafalgar, couldn’t we have opted for the solution adopted by the British on the bicentennial in 2005? Worried that the French and Spanish dignitaries would be embarrassed at seeing their side routed, they decided to stage the re-enactment not as a battle between Britain and the French and Spanish navies, or even between “the good guys” and “unspecified shifty foreigners,” but instead between “the Red Team” and “the Blue Team.” And just to be on the safe side the commemorative booklet referred not to “the Battle of Trafalgar” but only to “an early 19th-century sea battle.” It doesn’t exactly fire the blood—“the Red Team expects every man to do his duty”—and I’m not sure whether the dying Nelson turned to Hardy and said, “Kiss me, fellow Red Team member.” But surely the same dodge might have worked in Quebec? The Red Team battling the Blue Team, with perhaps an Orange Team led by Jack Layton coming in at the last minute to do all the commemorative TV interviews about how this battle establishes the Orange Team as the real choice of working families.
But no. Instead, General Wolfe’s historic victory is history in the robust sense of that useful Americanism: aw, he’s history—as in fuhgeddabouttim; he’s gone, he’s over, put a fork in him—he’s done. John Robson wrote a splendid column arguing that not even Quebecers should be dumb enough to want to exchange 250 years under the British Crown for 250 years under absolute monarchy, the Revolution, the Terror, Napoleon, the Second Empire, the Fourth Republic, etc, etc. As for France, she was happy to trade “quelques arpents de neige” (a few acres of snow) for the security of her Caribbean colonies. How’d that work out? See the riots in Guadeloupe the other week? I mean, real riots, not just a staged re-enactment of riots from hundreds of years ago.
Not so long ago, there were millions of people in every corner of the world who attended schools that taught them that the Britannic inheritance was on balance a good thing as opposed to the root cause of all the world’s woes. Good for individual liberty, standard of living, constitutional democracy: see, e.g., Canada, America, the Bahamas, India, Australia, and even a few francophone redoubts such as Mauritius. But then the alumni of Canada’s residential schools sued for “cultural genocide” (a novel concept), and on the whole you’re safer to steer clear of the whole business. The past didn’t change: it is what it is. But the present changed, and the future will be beyond recognition. A couple of years ago, the Mail On Sunday in London reported as follows:
“Schools are dropping controversial subjects from history lessons—such as the Holocaust and the Crusades—because teachers do not want to cause offence, government research has found . . . Some teachers have even dropped the Holocaust completely from lessons over fears that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions in class.”
This was from a study for the Department of Education, which noted that “teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned. Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
Cross the Channel to the Netherlands: different country, same discreet closing of the door on awkward corners of the past. Dutch teachers are wary of mentioning the Second World War because “in particular settings” most pupils don’t believe the Holocaust happened. If there happens to be a Jewish child in the class, it could be a little distressing. But fortunately Europeans won’t have to worry about Jews in the school system much longer. A few weeks ago, during the Israeli incursion into Gaza, Olav Nielsen, headmaster of Humlehave School in Odense, Denmark, announced that he would no longer accept Jewish children. The Copenhagen Post reported that several other principals had also decided that they would no longer let Jews enrol at their schools. Once that system’s up and running, they’ll be able to teach the Second World War without any complicating factors. Likewise, those soi-disant “Church of England” schools in Yorkshire where every student is Muslim will soon be able to resume teaching the Crusades, albeit from a fresh perspective.
In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” On the Plains of Abraham this last month, Canada lost control of its own past. That’s less bloody than old-fashioned battles with cannon and musket, but sometimes it’s just as significant. Meanwhile, in Britain, public commemorations of St George’s Day, England’s national holiday, have been cancelled on grounds of potential “racism.” On the other hand, Anjem Choudhary, whose last rally featured cries of “Bomb the U.K.!,” was permitted to go ahead with a march calling for the introduction of sharia. Perhaps, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity the British should participate in every re-enactment, but this time round make sure they lose.
Tags: contraversial history, plains of abraham, separatists
Posted in Mark Steyn, Opinion, Top01 |
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http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/03/12/%e2%80%98facts%e2%80%99-such-a-quaint-notion-now/ printed on Mar 13, 2009
Macleans.ca
Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine.
‘Facts.’ Such a quaint notion now.
Mar 12, 2009 by macleans.ca
‘Facts.’ Such a quaint notion now.When the metaphorical dust has settled on the Plains of Abraham—metaphorical dust being the only kind you’re allowed to kick up on the sacred sod a quarter-millennium on—the larger question remains:
What’s the future of the past?
That’s to say, the lesson of the last few weeks is that the latter depends on the former. In 1759, General Wolfe won a decisive victory that led to the end of French rule on this continent: that is what we used quaintly to call a “fact.” To take another unfashionable word, the “reality” of North American life today derives explicitly from that fact.
Once upon a time they used to teach Wolfe in schools. I don’t suppose, between diversity studies, anger management classes and Ritalin shots, he gets much of a look-in these days. Yet it is still startling to discover that to observe 2½ centuries of this transformative event would be a ghastly social faux pas (pardon my French) in the province (pardon my English) of Quebec. When I first heard that the long-scheduled re-enactment of the battle had been cancelled on “public safety” grounds, I roared my head off: the notion of a warrior nation now too fainthearted even to stage re-enactments seemed too obvious a parody of Canadian squishiness. But it turned out to be true. The British won the battle but the French won the re-enactment—which may yet be what counts. As the separatist bruiser Patrick Bourgeois couldn’t resist crowing, it was a glorious victory over the old enemy.
I say “separatist bruiser” but, of course, the pseudo-separatists never do separate and M Bourgeois will end his days a subject of the same Crown that has already inflicted 250 years of humiliation on him. “Je me souviens,” as the licence plates say, although given Quebec’s advanced state of societal dementia maybe they could switch quotations to: “a British subject I was born and a British subject I will die.”
In other countries, they épater les bourgeois. But in Canada les bourgeois épater everybody else. I warmed up to Quebec’s newest hero after listening to everybody else’s response to him. The British victor’s successor as gauleiter of Quebec, the federal government, turned out to be a Wolfe in sheep’s clothing, and abandoned the National Battlefield Commission to its fate. The commission chair, André Juneau, conceded that it is “an ex-tremely painful page in our history,” apparently mostly for the winning side, but he said a commemorative book would still be issued, and—who knows?—it may even be legal to distribute it in Quebec. A spokesman for the organizing group, the Quebec Historical Corps, said they might go ahead and hold the re-enactment in Ontario, which would be as funny as it gets, short of moving the venue to the garden of Buckingham Palace, where presumably it would fall foul of European Union “xenophobia” laws.
Meanwhile, Michael Ignatieff displayed the characteristically bold leadership we’ve come to associate with him since he momentarily wandered off the Liberal reservation and accidentally supported the Iraq war. The leader of the Opposition declared that he wasn’t saying he was for or against the re-enactment per se but that any commemoration of this “defeat and tragedy” ought to be respectful. You remember Lord Nelson at Trafalgar? He put the telescope over his eye patch and said “I see no ships.” That’s Iggy. He put a patch over both eyes, swivelled in all directions, and declared, “I see no re-enactment, but if it’s out there I hope it’s sober and dignified.”
Speaking of Trafalgar, couldn’t we have opted for the solution adopted by the British on the bicentennial in 2005? Worried that the French and Spanish dignitaries would be embarrassed at seeing their side routed, they decided to stage the re-enactment not as a battle between Britain and the French and Spanish navies, or even between “the good guys” and “unspecified shifty foreigners,” but instead between “the Red Team” and “the Blue Team.” And just to be on the safe side the commemorative booklet referred not to “the Battle of Trafalgar” but only to “an early 19th-century sea battle.” It doesn’t exactly fire the blood—“the Red Team expects every man to do his duty”—and I’m not sure whether the dying Nelson turned to Hardy and said, “Kiss me, fellow Red Team member.” But surely the same dodge might have worked in Quebec? The Red Team battling the Blue Team, with perhaps an Orange Team led by Jack Layton coming in at the last minute to do all the commemorative TV interviews about how this battle establishes the Orange Team as the real choice of working families.
But no. Instead, General Wolfe’s historic victory is history in the robust sense of that useful Americanism: aw, he’s history—as in fuhgeddabouttim; he’s gone, he’s over, put a fork in him—he’s done. John Robson wrote a splendid column arguing that not even Quebecers should be dumb enough to want to exchange 250 years under the British Crown for 250 years under absolute monarchy, the Revolution, the Terror, Napoleon, the Second Empire, the Fourth Republic, etc, etc. As for France, she was happy to trade “quelques arpents de neige” (a few acres of snow) for the security of her Caribbean colonies. How’d that work out? See the riots in Guadeloupe the other week? I mean, real riots, not just a staged re-enactment of riots from hundreds of years ago.
Not so long ago, there were millions of people in every corner of the world who attended schools that taught them that the Britannic inheritance was on balance a good thing as opposed to the root cause of all the world’s woes. Good for individual liberty, standard of living, constitutional democracy: see, e.g., Canada, America, the Bahamas, India, Australia, and even a few francophone redoubts such as Mauritius. But then the alumni of Canada’s residential schools sued for “cultural genocide” (a novel concept), and on the whole you’re safer to steer clear of the whole business. The past didn’t change: it is what it is. But the present changed, and the future will be beyond recognition. A couple of years ago, the Mail On Sunday in London reported as follows:
“Schools are dropping controversial subjects from history lessons—such as the Holocaust and the Crusades—because teachers do not want to cause offence, government research has found . . . Some teachers have even dropped the Holocaust completely from lessons over fears that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions in class.”
This was from a study for the Department of Education, which noted that “teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned. Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
Cross the Channel to the Netherlands: different country, same discreet closing of the door on awkward corners of the past. Dutch teachers are wary of mentioning the Second World War because “in particular settings” most pupils don’t believe the Holocaust happened. If there happens to be a Jewish child in the class, it could be a little distressing. But fortunately Europeans won’t have to worry about Jews in the school system much longer. A few weeks ago, during the Israeli incursion into Gaza, Olav Nielsen, headmaster of Humlehave School in Odense, Denmark, announced that he would no longer accept Jewish children. The Copenhagen Post reported that several other principals had also decided that they would no longer let Jews enrol at their schools. Once that system’s up and running, they’ll be able to teach the Second World War without any complicating factors. Likewise, those soi-disant “Church of England” schools in Yorkshire where every student is Muslim will soon be able to resume teaching the Crusades, albeit from a fresh perspective.
In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” On the Plains of Abraham this last month, Canada lost control of its own past. That’s less bloody than old-fashioned battles with cannon and musket, but sometimes it’s just as significant. Meanwhile, in Britain, public commemorations of St George’s Day, England’s national holiday, have been cancelled on grounds of potential “racism.” On the other hand, Anjem Choudhary, whose last rally featured cries of “Bomb the U.K.!,” was permitted to go ahead with a march calling for the introduction of sharia. Perhaps, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity the British should participate in every re-enactment, but this time round make sure they lose.
Tags: contraversial history, plains of abraham, separatists
Posted in Mark Steyn, Opinion, Top01 |
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http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/03/12/%e2%80%98facts%e2%80%99-such-a-quaint-notion-now/ printed on Mar 13, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Animal farts and belches to be taxed in Europe
From the London Times: animal flatulence to be taxed.
From The Times
March 10, 2009
What do cars and cows have in common? No, not horns
Carl Mortished, World Business Editor
Proposals to tax the flatulence of cows and other livestock have been denounced by farming groups in the Irish Republic and Denmark.
A cow tax of €13 per animal has been mooted in Ireland, while Denmark is discussing a levy as high as €80 per cow to offset the potential penalties each country faces from European Union legislation aimed at combating global warming.
The proposed levies are opposed vigorously by farming groups. The Irish Farmers' Association said that the cattle industry would move to South America to avoid EU taxes.
Livestock contribute 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The Danish Tax Commission estimates that a cow will emit four tonnes of methane a year in burps and flatulence, compared with 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide for an average car.
Agriculture, transport and housing are not included in the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which enables industrial companies to buy and sell permits to emit carbon dioxide. Instead, EU member states are obliged to cut the emissions from non-ETS sectors by 10 per cent overall by 2020.
While Romania and Bulgaria will be allowed to increase emissions, Ireland and Denmark are each faced with cuts of 20 per cent in farming sector emissions.
The cow tax proposals would raise funds to buy allowances from other member states or to invest in technology that might reduce emissions. Denmark is believed to be further advanced with housing for pigs that captures and stores methane emitted from the animals. The gas can be used as a fuel for power generation.
A spokesman for the European Commission said that a cow tax was not its preferred option. “We would rather have solutions that reduce emissions by capturing methane from manure and new animal feeds that reduce methane.”
From The Times
March 10, 2009
What do cars and cows have in common? No, not horns
Carl Mortished, World Business Editor
Proposals to tax the flatulence of cows and other livestock have been denounced by farming groups in the Irish Republic and Denmark.
A cow tax of €13 per animal has been mooted in Ireland, while Denmark is discussing a levy as high as €80 per cow to offset the potential penalties each country faces from European Union legislation aimed at combating global warming.
The proposed levies are opposed vigorously by farming groups. The Irish Farmers' Association said that the cattle industry would move to South America to avoid EU taxes.
Livestock contribute 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The Danish Tax Commission estimates that a cow will emit four tonnes of methane a year in burps and flatulence, compared with 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide for an average car.
Agriculture, transport and housing are not included in the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which enables industrial companies to buy and sell permits to emit carbon dioxide. Instead, EU member states are obliged to cut the emissions from non-ETS sectors by 10 per cent overall by 2020.
While Romania and Bulgaria will be allowed to increase emissions, Ireland and Denmark are each faced with cuts of 20 per cent in farming sector emissions.
The cow tax proposals would raise funds to buy allowances from other member states or to invest in technology that might reduce emissions. Denmark is believed to be further advanced with housing for pigs that captures and stores methane emitted from the animals. The gas can be used as a fuel for power generation.
A spokesman for the European Commission said that a cow tax was not its preferred option. “We would rather have solutions that reduce emissions by capturing methane from manure and new animal feeds that reduce methane.”
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Dems want President to fail? That was yesterday.
From Deceiver.com:
James Carville Wants the President to Succeed (Sometimes)
By Simon Scowl
Categories: Crazy People and U.S. Left-wing Politicos
james_carville_1Here’s Carville on CNN’s The Situation Room, 2/25/2009:
BLITZER: We should know, James, sooner rather than later, if all this money being spent will work or not work, because the folks’ bottom lines, their pocketbooks, will be directly affected.
CARVILLE: Well, I don’t know about soon. It will take a while for it to work. As I point out, the most influential Republican in the United States today, Mr. Rush Limbaugh, said he did not want President Obama to succeed. So at the very top of the Republican Party, he’s not being wished well here.
Here’s Carville on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001:
Just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”
Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.
“We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I’m wanting them to turn against him,” Greenberg admitted.
The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: “They don’t want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails.”
James Carville Wants the President to Succeed (Sometimes)
By Simon Scowl
Categories: Crazy People and U.S. Left-wing Politicos
james_carville_1Here’s Carville on CNN’s The Situation Room, 2/25/2009:
BLITZER: We should know, James, sooner rather than later, if all this money being spent will work or not work, because the folks’ bottom lines, their pocketbooks, will be directly affected.
CARVILLE: Well, I don’t know about soon. It will take a while for it to work. As I point out, the most influential Republican in the United States today, Mr. Rush Limbaugh, said he did not want President Obama to succeed. So at the very top of the Republican Party, he’s not being wished well here.
Here’s Carville on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001:
Just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”
Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.
“We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I’m wanting them to turn against him,” Greenberg admitted.
The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: “They don’t want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails.”
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