JamesPPinkerton.com

2011-10-09T14:00:00.004-04:00

Serious Medicine Crash--update

According to the Medical Innovation & Competitiveness Coalition, a unit of the National Venture Capital Association, medical investment is dramatically falling off:

The survey found that U.S. venture capital firms have been decreasing their investment in biopharmaceutical and medical device companies over the past three years and expect to further curtail such investment in the future. Overall 39 percent of respondent firms have decreased their investments in life sciences companies over the last three years and the same percentage expect to further decrease these investments over the next three years, some by greater than 30 percent. This is roughly twice the number of firms that have increased and/or expect to increase investment.

While 40 and 42 percent of firms expect to decrease investment in biopharmaceutical and medical device companies respectively, 42 and 54 percent expect to increase their investment in non-FDA regulated healthcare services and healthcare information technology companies respectively.

In another alarming sign, survey respondents expect to see significant investment decreases in companies fighting serious and highly prevalent conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and neurological diseases.

“More than 100 million Americans suffer from diseases for which there are still no cures, or even meaningful therapeutic options. To conquer disease and relieve suffering, we must have a medical innovation pipeline that is as strong and robust as possible,” said Margaret Anderson, executive director, FasterCures. “Bringing critical therapies to market requires venture capital investment to spur a thriving life sciences industry as well as having a regulatory system that’s appropriately resourced and equipped to ensure innovation is translated to better health.”

H/T: Manhattan Institute's Medical Progress Today

2011-03-13T11:05:00.004-04:00

Why the surge of interest in Ronald Reagan?

Now that it's a truth universally acknowledged that RR was a great--even his enemies would cop to "consequential"--president, the MSM culture is finally doing the sort of close journalistic/historical spadework and chronicling of his presidency that they didn't bother with back in the 80s; except, of course, for scandal-mongering.

The title of this new book in question, Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of President Reagan, speaks to the natural drama of historical watershed, while the title of this article is a play on William Manchester's 1967 book, Death of a President, about the Kennedy assassination.

2011-03-02T17:09:00.002-05:00

My Newsday column of October 28, 2003, concerning Donald Rumseld's performance as Secretary of Defense as the Iraq insurgency worsened. In particular, his habit of writing self-exculpatory memos. Before, of course, he turned to writing self-exculpatory books.

^^^

So what’s up with Don Rumsfeld? Was the Secretary of Defense being truthful, or just wacky, when he wrote the now-famous memo of October 16, in which he declared that the war on terror would be “a long, hard slog”? Or was he being cynically shrewd? Was it part of a plan to secure a better place in history for himself than for the war he helped start?

Right now, speculation about Rumsfeld is all over the place. The headline in Newsweek.com lauded him for showing “rare candor.” But Time’s Joe Klein diagnosed him as suffering a “slow motion public nervous breakdown.” For his part, the defense chief said that he was just trying to inject “a new sense or urgency” into America’s war on terror.

Rumsfeld is famous for peppering subordinates with “Rummygrams,” also called “snowflakes,” because they fly so freely around the Pentagon. As a man who knows his way around Washington--he was elected to Congress in 1962--he must have known that his “slog” memo would be leaked. The document was not classified, and he subsequently told reporters that he has no plans to investigate the leaking. Indeed, he joked on October 23, “I re-read the memo in the paper and thought, not bad.”

So when he wrote, “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get?’” he must have known he would be shaking up the happy-talking Pentagon bureaucracy--and also quaking the even happier-talking folks at the White House.

Some of Rumsfeld’s boat-rocking might stem from his experience in the business world; he ran two Fortune 500 companies in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, there’s no more radical, rapidly-mutating environment these days than corporate America; the ex-CEO would have been familiar with the work, for example, of business guru Tom Peters, author of books with such provocative titles as Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution.

But there’s another possible explanation for this most notorious Rummygram: the author is establishing some CYA for himself. CYA? In a family newspaper, let’s say it stands for “Cover Your Anatomy.” At a time when the Bush administration’s spin on Iraq is coming unspun, it can’t hurt for Rumsfeld to have his doubts and reservations loudly on record.

Moreover, the nation’s 21^st secretary of defense might wish to avoid repeating the bitter experience of his Pentagon predecessor, the 8^th secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who oversaw the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1968. In fact, Rumsfeld resembles McNamara--same glasses, same hair, same business-oriented, no-nonsense manner. Yet for his brilliance, McNamara was one of the greatest failures in the history of DOD.

Through his time in office, McNamara was a loyal supporter of the war. And for a quarter-century thereafter, as articles and books and documentaries about Vietnam, most of them critical, cascaded forth, he kept his silence.

Finally, in 1995, after his reputation was mostly mud, McNamara threw some mud of his own--on himself. He published a book entitled In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, in which he wrote of himself and his war-leading colleagues, “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” Part of the problem, he said, was inadequate discussion--“groupthink”--among top officials.

McNamara might have felt better for finally unburdening himself, but the critics were savage in their response. Why, they wanted to know, had he kept quiet for all those years when he was in office and could have made a difference?--and while tens of thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, died?

But now, this Sec Def has solved that problem, at least for himself. If the situation in Iraq gets better, fine; nobody will remember that Rumsfeld wrote a memo in which raised concerns about “mixed results” as of late 2003. Indeed, Rumsfeld might even be able to claim that his “snowflake” helped turn Iraq around.

But if Iraq goes badly, well then, nobody will be able to say that he hadn’t issued a prescient warning. In a few years, everyone involved in the Iraq war will be writing a memoir, seeking to tell his or her side of the story. But now, they’ll all be reacting to Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense who always understood the importance of being on the offense.

2010-11-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

Forty-seven years ago in Dallas...

2010-08-28T13:20:00.001-04:00

Scotland Forever!

2010-06-20T17:39:00.000-04:00

My article in Democracy magazine, reacting to essays by nine progressives, has been published in Democracy's June issue.

2010-06-03T12:47:00.003-04:00

Former President George H.W. Bush, and Mrs. Bush, on Memorial Day, 2010.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. -- Shakespeare's Henry V.

Thanks to Mary Kate Cary and Jean Becker.

2010-05-21T21:13:00.001-04:00

Steve Clemons posted my long article, Gaming Our Way Out of the Crisis, on his blog, TheWashington Note.com.

Perhaps the most interesting, of an interesting set of comments, came from Paul Wilkinson, who observed:

If a fraction of the time and effort spent analyzing baseball statistics for fantasy baseball leagues had been spent analyzing potential mortgage backed securities flows of funds in the late 90s, the bubble wouldn't have grown nearly as big. Alas, baseball statistics were much more easily available than mortgage securities statistics. Like Oakland A's manager Billy Beane, regulation could be much better informed by Bill James than by the pre-Moneyball traditions of the game. When metrics are open and transparent, you have a national pastime like baseball. When they're inaccessible and incomparable, you have an international disaster like the RMBS crisis.

2010-04-15T09:37:00.006-04:00

And you are there, in the 15th century.

I scanned this in from the magazine 3D art & design; the artist is Fernando Russo, and a link is provided to an Italian website, but I couldn't find it. So I scanned it, pg. 15.

The point here is that if a single artist, however talented, can produce a realistic-looking image--using, he says, Cinema 4D software--of what life was like for an artist more than five centuries ago, then just about everything is possible, visually. Something to think about.

2010-04-13T16:37:00.002-04:00

I published this on Foxnews.com on April 7, 2009, and it seems apt once again:

Obama’s Dangerous Disarmament Delusion

President Obama can overspend, overtax, over-regulate, and over-cap-and-trade, and yet America will undoubtedly survive. We might be worse off--probably will be worse off--but our Republic will endure.

But if Obama--or any other president--mishandles national security badly enough, well, that could be the end of our country.

Which brings me to my point: Obama is dangerously dead wrong on the issue of nuclear weapons, specifically, his goal of, “a world without nuclear weapons.” As he said in Prague on Sunday, Obama wants to see the US abolish its nuclear weapons--also known as our nuclear deterrent--while all the other countries do the same. This goal of Obama’s is worse than foolish, it is reckless.

Obama can dream of a world without nuclear weapons, but it is not a good idea in the real world.

In a world without nuclear weapons, how would we defend ourselves against conventional weapons? America needed 16 million men and women in uniform--more than a tenth of the total population--to win World War Two, before we figured out how to end the war with Japan quickly, thanks to the atom bomb. Today, China has 1.3 billion people and a swelling military, and the Obama administration wants to cut our conventional war-fighting capability, by eliminating “costly” weapons systems. Yes, defense is costly--but defeat is more costly. And now he talks about eliminating nuclear weapons. Yet without the best conventional weapons, and without nukes, what would we use to stop a potential Chinese attack? Counter-insurgency tactics? A surge? Please.

More to the point, there is no evidence--none whatsoever--that other countries would abide by such a treaty. To put it bluntly, even if they signed Obama’s no-nukes deal, they would cheat, or else develop some new category of weapon-of-mass-destruction not covered by the treaty. And for good reason: How else could tiny Israel defend itself against Arabs and Iranians over the long run? How else could Pakistan survive against India, with seven times the population? A hundred other countries would find themselves in similarly perilous situations, now and at any time in the future. Who are they going to call for help? President Obama? No, they will call upon themselves, and their own resourcefulness.

That’s cold realism, the hard-earned wisdom of international politics in a dangerous world. But for his part, Obama will have none of that. Speaking in Prague, a city liberated from communism two decades ago, the President said, “We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change.”

So, you see, the people, united, will never be defeated. A relatively decent Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, didn’t have the stomach to massacre the Czechs as they peacefully demanded their freedom, back in 1989--so that’s now the template for the future.

Well, other leaders, still alive today--from Zimbabwe to Syria to China--would not hesitate to machine-gun peaceful protestors, and then machine-gun the protestors’ families, too, just to be on the safe side. And as one robin does not make a spring, one decaying totalitarian regime does not indicate that all totalitarians have given up their desire for control. To such dictators nuclear weapons are simply one more useful tool for control.

But if Obama has his politics wrong, he also has his history wrong. He began his anti-nuclear argument in Prague by asserting, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.” The planted assumption there, of course, is that since the Cold War has gone away, then nuclear weapons, too, can go away. As Obama put it, “Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not.” But of course, the development of nuclear weapons preceded the Cold War. Even before World War Two, Nazi Germany had an active nuclear program, which continued almost to the end of the fighting in 1945. And plenty of countries that played little or no part in the Cold War have sought, and found--or will find--nuclear weapons. Why? Because they have their own conflicts to worry about. And they always will.

Obama attempted to address such criticism:

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

Well, yes, that about sums it up. The use of nuclear weapons, somewhere, is inevitable, because every weapon eventually gets used. Why? Pick your explanation: This is the real world. Man is fallen. Murphy’s Law. You-know-what happens. That’s not fatalism, that’s realism.

The task of the statesman is to look seriously at the real world and figure out what is possible. With his hand on the tiller, the helmsman of a ship of state can dream of a world without storms, or icebergs, or rocky shores, or enemy ships--but he would be foolish to do so. And so he charts a safe course, mindful of all dangers.

And in such a dangerous environment, cheerlines will not suffice. And yet cheerlines are exactly what we got from Obama. Here are more words from the President’s speech, including the White House’s chronicling of the crowd reaction:

Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. (Applause.)

Yes, we must always be for what’s right and good. (Applause.)

But wait, there’s more:

So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.)

And now more:

But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, "Yes, we can." (Applause.)

Got that? Yes, we can. A political slogan, used to win an election in a peaceful, stable democracy is now supposed to become operative policy for a dangerous world that has no desire to disarm.

Obama laid out steps to be taken, starting with the need “to put an end to Cold War thinking.” That was a revealing choice of words, demonstrating that his policy is premised on high-minded sentiments--which he wants to get credit for--as opposed to realistic assessment. Then Obama promised to negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year. Well, excuse me, but is there any evidence that the Russians are interested in helping us in the least little bit? They are helping the Iranians build their nuclear weapons program, and they just joined with the Chinese to block a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the recent North Korean missile launch.

Obama continued, calling for “strengthening” the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. You know about that treaty, which went into effect in 1970, thereby stopping India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel from developing nuclear weapons. Oops. Never mind.

What America needs, of course, is defense against nuclear weapons, in addition to nuclear deterrent. Nuclear weapons are dangerous if they can be delivered to one’s own soil, by missile attack or by terrorist stealth. Such dangers are a great argument for missile defense, and for increased homeland security and counter-terrorism measures.

Unfortunately, those were not the cheerlines heard in Prague. And so America will be put more at risk over the next four years, as President Obama, neglecting realistic defense, pursues a wrong-headed pipedream.

2010-01-16T14:44:00.001-05:00

It's a good thing history never repeats itself:

“Decades of deficit financing had given rise to massive crown indebtedness, which diverted capital from economically productive investment, and generated a whole series of fiscal distortions that were progressively crippling Castile’s capacity for economic revival. In the cities and countryside of Castile, as in the royal administration, an oligarchy of interlocking families had accumulated a power and an influence that were eroding little by little the crown’s authority and limiting its room for maneuver as a potential force for change.” -- p. 677

Elliott, J.H. The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press 1986)

2009-12-31T12:35:00.001-05:00

My answer to Politico's "Arena"--a prediction for 2010:

My not-so-bold prediction for 2010 is that we will recognize the obvious: the late Samuel Huntington was right. This is a clash of civilizations, between the West and Islam. This realization will flummox the politically correct piety of both the right and the left--just in time.

On the right, by the end of 2010, there won't be many who still agree with George W. Bush's 2001 assessment that "Islam is peace.” And so, by the Bushian logic--that the hostility that many Muslims feel toward the US and the West is because their governments aren’t democratic, not because of any innate differences of culture and religion--America’s security policy has been twisted around a p.c. pretzel. For the last eight years, while we’ve been trying to liberate Muslims from their bad governments, we have been misgoverning our own people: screening American-born grandmothers and babies at airports. Because, after all, there's no automatic reason, in this right-wing p.c. worldview--to think of Muslims as more risky.

And on the left, there won't be many remaining who still agree with Barack Obama's assessment that a renewed commitment to diplomacy, speechmaking, bowing, and carbon-reducing--plus, of course, 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, and continuing drone attacks in Pakistan and who knows where else--will warm Muslim hearts. Obama can't be blamed for what's going on in Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and Turkey (on top of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan), but that's Huntington's point: the clash is bigger than any one individual, or any one country.

But in the meantime, the Obamans have inherited, and not thought to change, a homeland security system in which it is forbidden to think that granny and junior, not to mention their lotions and gels, are any more potentially dangerous than a 23-year-old-Nigerian, fresh from "language" school in Yemen, complete with scary stuff in his file--if anyone had bothered to look at his file. As an aside, it is not at all a bold prediction to prophesy that some Beltway heads will soon be rolling in the wake of NWA 253.

So what happens when you see things in Huntingtonian terms? You conclude that this is going to be a long twilight struggle--if we're lucky. Rollback and regime-change are fun for some to think about, but mostly counter-productive, as well as destructive, in practice. Let’s face it: radical Muslims just aren’t that into us.

But for now, in 2010, the place to start is defense. We should begin, obviously, with much beefed-up homeland security, including El Al-style “terrorist profiling” at airports, but also including whatever high-tech devices we can invent--and we could invent them if we invested 1/100th as much in homeland-security tech as we invest in home-entertainment tech. We also need stronger military defense overall, including missile defense for us and our allies.

In addition, we need a defensive alliance, as we join with countries in Africa and Asia that live on what Huntington called "the bloody borders" of Islam and share our legitimate geopolitical concerns. And finally, we need energy independence; we should be working toward that as part of a long-term plan for defunding jihad. If we are in a clash, we don’t give the people we are clashing with a trillion dollars a year.

Admittedly, that’s a lot to ask for in 2010, but we’ve got some tough decades--or maybe centuries--ahead of us, and so we’d better get to work.

2009-12-29T09:42:00.001-05:00

My answer to Politico Arena's question, "Is the 'Obama way' on terrorism working?"

If the "Obama way" were the "Chicago way"--as defined by Sean Connery in "The Untouchables"--then terrorists, as well as incompetent homeland security officials, would be sleeping with the fishes by now.

Instead, the Obamans want to close Gitmo (send 'em back to Yemen, brilliant!). And of course, the O-people want to try Khaled Sheik Mohammed in New York City (Al Qaeda will be deeply moved by hearing their Miranda rights read to them). So the "Obama way" is really the politically correct way, the ACLU way.

Or maybe, as well, it's the Michael Brown way. We all remember Brownie: the former FEMA chief who oversaw (not) the Katrina relief efforts four years ago. As wits have been saying, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano's comment that "the system worked" will be ranked right up there with "Heckuva job, Brownie."

A year into his presidency, Obama confronts a stark choice, even if his legal advisers, and the Justice Department, are trying to hide it from him. PC never defeated terrorism. Instead, terrorism always defeats PC. And if you lose to the terrorists, you aren't going to win re-election.

2009-12-16T08:18:00.003-05:00

Healthcare regulation vs. going with the flow.

Musing over the obvious similarities between Obamacare in 2009 and Clintoncare in 1993, I was musing further over the fact that Ira Magaziner, the principal architect of the sharing-of-scarcity 1993 plan, then moved over to the Internet, where he did a 180, creating a plan that I described, in a 1998 column, reproduced below, as "utterly libertarian... filled with phrases such as 'no new taxes' and 'industry self-regulation.'" Reflecting back on what I wrote 11 years ago, I might add that such pro-industry libertarianism was built on the foundation of pro-industry government activism. Where, after all, did the Internet come from? It was, of course, a government program. But Magaziner hit on exactly the right Hamiltonian formula: the government starts up something, then turns it over to the private sector.

The Los Angeles Times
July 22, 1998

The Chinese have a saying: If you wait by the bank of the river long enough, the bodies of all your enemies will go floating by. As Ira Magaziner, now in his fifth year in the Clinton White House, gazes out at the Potomac, he has yet to see the bodies of Speaker Newt Gingrich or any of the other House Republican leaders floating by–-but at the rate things are going, he soon will.

In the meantime, Magaziner has put forth an Internet policy paper, “A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,” that is so utterly libertarian–-filled with phrases such as “no new taxes” and “industry self-regulation”--that this document could help the Democrats outbid the GOP for the support of high-tech entrepreneurs, as well as their cachet, and their cash.

Magaziner already holds a special place in the history of the Clinton Administration. He was principally responsible for the “Clintoncare” health plan that triggered the Democrats’ disastrous defeat in 1994, costing them their majorities in both houses of Congress. But President Clinton still kept his job. And with help from Dick Morris and John Huang, he made a roaring comeback two years later. Magaziner maintained a low profile during this period–-he wasn’t even mentioned in Morris’ memoir, Behind the Oval Office–-but beginning in 1996, he booted up his Internet project.

So now comes the Clinton high-tech offensive, seeking to love-bomb cyberpreneurs with laissez-faire. Of course, since Old Guard Democrats no longer have their committee chairmanships on Capitol Hill, Magaziner could write his “Framework” in a way that pleases New Agers, not New Dealers. In an interview, he was asked whether he saw any irony in his role as architect of health care socialization four years ago–-and yet as apostle of Internet liberation today. “I still believe that what we tried to do in health care was the right thing to do,” he said, explaining that “health care and the Internet are completely different.”

Well, maybe. But for generations, the Democrats have been the party pushing for more bureaucrats, not less. A Democratic presidency or two ago, the Johnson Administration filed suit to break up the two leading high-tech firms of that era, IBM and AT&T. Yet one doesn’t hear much talk nowadays about going after the “monopoly power” of Microsoft or Intel.

The Old Media underplayed the Magaziner plan when it was unveiled on July 1; The New York Times didn’t even cover the event. But the New Media was all over it, like a cursor on an icon. On CNET (www.news.com), commentator Tim Clark referred to the plan as “a damn good start.” And one attendee at the White House ceremony, Sky Dayton, the 25-year old chairman of EarthLink, a Pasadena-based Internet service provider, trilled that the proposal was “a mandate for government to keep its hands off the Internet...It was pretty inspiring.”

What’s truly inspiring is the size of the industry that Magaziner & Co. want to seal off from government interference. International Data Corporation projects that “e-commerce” will rise from $2.6 billion last year to $220 billion in 2001. And even then, IDC estimates that fewer than 400 million people around the world will be wired–-just a few bytes out of the planetary apple, with its population of six billion.

Other Democrats, not typically thought of as pro-free enterprise, have jumped on the Magaziner bandwagon. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has proposed the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which would prohibit state and local taxes on the Net. This outrages the US Conference of Mayors, which argues that if e-commerce becomes a tax shelter, sales will be drained away from traditional retailing. Imagine: Democratic politicians favoring corporate moguls over big-city mayors.

Whatever happened to the GOP? Just two years ago, Gingrich gave a nationally televised speech in which he held up a computer chip and said that it represented the future, not only for the Republic, but for the Republicans. But today, with Gingrich watching his back more than the road ahead–-and with the Democratic party downsized to the point where its “paleo-liberal” wing can’t block presidential initiatives and with Vice President Gore, looking to 2000, now the toast of the techies–-Magaziner has a new perspective on the ebb and flow in Washington. “The last thing you want to do is have the government come in and regulate” he says happily, as the Democratic river rises.

2009-12-02T12:31:00.006-05:00

What Clausewitz would say about the Afghanistan war, from Fox Forum at Foxnews.com:

Reading through the depressing news coming out of Afghanistan, and wondering what to think about President Obama’s West Point speech on Tuesday night, I realized that I needed some expert help in making sense of it all. So I pulled out my ouija board and summoned up the ghost of the greatest military analyst and theoretician of all time, Carl Von Clausewitz. The famous Prussian died in 1831, but even today, his book, Vom Kriege (On War), is on the reading list of every military academy in the world. Why? Because the key concepts of strategy are timeless, and nobody put them down on paper better than Clausewitz.

Peering into the misty darkness, I heard a smart click of heels, and then… there he was. What do you say to a famous ghost? I started to tell him how much I enjoyed his book. He bowed politely, but, with typical Teutonic directness, said, “Mein Herr, please get right to the punkt. How may I help you?”

OK, I asked: What do you make of the war in Afghanistan? What do you make of the President?

“I have been following the news with interest,” he told me. “What a Zugwrack, oops, I mean, train wreck! Recent events illustrate some of my concepts, such as ‘friction’ and ‘the fog of war.’” He paused, then delivered his punchline: “And that’s just in your capital of Washington DC!” Who says Germans don’t have a sense of humor?

Continuing, he said, “As your Washington Post reported on Sunday, it has taken 94 days for your president to announce a decision on Afghan war policy; that is, more than three months, from the date of General McChrystal’s report, back on August 30, to the speech Tuesday night. By contrast, it took George W. Bush just 35 days to announce his new plan for a “surge” in Iraq; that is, from the Baker-Hamilton Report, issued on December 6, 2006, to Bush’s ‘New Way Forward’ speech, announcing the surge, which was delivered on January 10, 2007.”

So I guess that makes Bush look good, I ventured.   “It makes Bush look decisive by comparison, that’s for sure. But what really matters,” Clausewitz continued, “is persistent and sustained clarity on the objective of the war. And that’s a matter of politics.”
Politics?

“Ja, Politik. Perhaps my most famous phrase is that ‘War is simply politics by other means.’ By that I meant, all war is a subset of politics. War can never be considered in isolation from its political purpose.”
It does seem strange, I ventured, that Obama is announcing the expansion of a war just days before he travels to Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize.

A trace of a grim smile crossed Clausewitz’s face, “History is a feast of irony. In Valhalla, we have fun watching mortals criss-cross themselves in their own contradictions. In our time on earth, we did it, too, but now we have the perspective of eternity.”
And so I asked him: Back to politics: What do you think is the purpose of the Afghan war?

“The purpose of any war is to change the behavior of the enemy. War is, at bottom, a duel--a test of wills. That is, if you can’t destroy the enemy in toto, to the last man and boy, you have to convince the survivors to not only down their arms, but to think different thoughts about the future. They have to shift their thinking from war to peace. Otherwise, you haven’t achieved your purpose; you haven’t convinced the enemy to stop fighting. You haven’t won.

“In Afghanistan, you started out, eight years ago, to destroy Al Qaeda. You did that within a matter of weeks, back in 2001. But then you Americans developed a different concept, which was to establish a stable government in that country, even as Al Qaeda reconstituted itself in a different country, Pakistan. To use another one of my phrases, ‘the center of gravity’ of the conflict changed, from Afghanistan to Pakistan, even as you remained focused on Afghanistan. For political reasons, you couldn’t seek to eliminate Al Qaeda in Pakistan--a reminder, again, that war exists within the boundaries of politics.”

I could tell that he had thought about this; they must have good access to the news in Val “So you settled for aerial bombardment of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, which has been effective in killing a few leaders--but never the top leaders, such as Osama Bin Laden--and yet has riled up the population in ways that have destabilized both the Pakistan government and also the Afghan government.

“And then, of course, in 2003, you Americans changed the center of gravity of the conflict altogether, from ‘AfPak’ to Iraq. You can’t win anything if you don’t focus on it. So in the last eight years, while your enemy shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan, your attention shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. You had a bad case of ‘fog of war,‘ and consequently a loss of strategic momentum.”

OK, I said, but what do you think is happening now?

“Obama seems to be even more confused than Bush. Obama does not have a political outcome in mind for Afghanistan. The politics he seems to see are back in America--keeping his own left wing happy, while satisfying enough of the middle to win re-election. And that domestic focus jas caused blindness on the battlefront. He fired his first general, David McKiernan, and then he seemed surprised by the advice he got from the new general he himself picked, Stanley McChrystal--that is, to send more troops to Afghanistan. So he spent three months dithering, trying to figure out how to do ‘counter-terrorism,’ but not ‘counter-insurgency.’ Such attempted hairsplitting plays poorly in the international arena.

“Meanwhile, all the signals coming out of the administration seem to be that this surge will precede an eventual withdrawal. For months I’ve been seeing background discussion about “exit strategies” of various kinds. And more recently, such talk has come out into the open. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on November 12, “We have been there for eight years, and we're not going to be there forever.” And then he added, speaking of new American forces, “It’s important to fully examine not just how we're going to get folks in but how we're going to get folks out.”

“And on ‘Meet the Press’ on November 15, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, ‘We’re not interested in staying in Afghanistan. We’re not interested in any long-term presence there.’”

Clausewitz paused for effect, before he started up again. “But the enemy is interested in staying there, there in Afghanistan--that’s where they live! That’s the territory they wish to hold! And so if they stay, still full of fight, and go, they win. Your Senator John McCain ‘nailed it,’ as you say, just a few days later: ‘History shows us that if you set dates for when you're going to leave, the enemy waits until you leave.’”

But, I noted, McCain got clobbered during the 2008 presidential when he said that the U.S. should stay in Iraq for 100 years.

“Ah, yes,” Clausewitz answered, “perhaps the domestic politics of such a statement were negative--there’s much to be said for, uh, circumspection--but McCain got the strategic politics exactly right. You communicate to the enemy that you will stay and fight as long as he will, so that the enemy sees no advantage in waiting you out.

“Instead, what message do you think Obama has sent to the Afghans and Pakistanis? They can see that the President is irresolute. They can see that the United States is not in this war for the long term. Will Americans be fighting in Afghanistan in ten years? Of course not.”

And so that tells the Afghans… what? I was afraid I already knew the answer.

“It tells the Afghans,” Clausewitz answered, “friend and foe, that America has more reach than grasp. It tells them that you are not the ‘strong horse’ in the region, as Bin Laden declared years ago. So the power arrangements that endure in Afghanistan will not be the ones brokered by the Americans, they will be brokered by the Afghans.”

But what if we win the battles over the next year or so, I asked weakly. Won’t that make a difference?

Clausewitz just smiled at me. “Who are you fighting in Afghanistan? Who you are fighting for? You don’t even know any more.”
Clausewitz could see my face fall.

“Look,” he continued, “an American officer, Col. Harry Summers, who had fought in your Vietnam war, had a meeting with a Vietnamese general after the fighting ended, and the North Vietnamese had swallowed up South Vietnam. The American said, ‘You never defeated us on the battlefield.’ To which the Vietnamese general answered, ‘That’s true, but irrelevant. You Americans won your battles and then left the country. We Vietnamese lost our battles, but we stayed in our country.’ The moral of that story is that he who survives and stands his ground--no matter how great the casualties-- is the one who wins in the end.”

So what should we Americans do?

“Well, for one thing, if you’re going to fight these wars, you should fight them to win--not just militarily, but also politically. Indeed, you must realize that the political framework, including international public opinion, is more important than anything else. Otherwise, perhaps you shouldn’t be fighting.”

That seemed like good advice. Anything else?

“My time is running short,” he said. “I have an appointment soon in Tehran, and then an appointment in Moscow, and then one in Beijing. One nice thing about being a ghost, I can go anywhere, and visit anyone. So my last words of advice to you are, ‘Read the book!’ After all, I dealt with these issues almost two centuries ago. And as someone else said, if you don’t learn from mistakes made by others, you will inevitably make them yourself. Now I really must go--Auf Wiedersehen.”

And with that Clausewitz was gone, leaving me alone in the gloom.

2009-11-17T09:43:00.001-05:00

My answer to Politico's "Arena" question, "Has Obama bet his presidency on the NYC terror trial?"

It's not so much that Obama has bet his presidency on the outcome of the KSM terror trial, it's that Obama is betting his presidency on being more politically correct than George W. Bush. And that's risky, as all those p.c. pieties are now crashing down amidst an ongoing clash of civilizations, as shots and bombs go off in Fort Hood and Kabul--and all across the "bloody borders" of Islam, as the late Samuel Huntington described them.

But it was Bush, not Obama, who declared, back in 2001, that "Islam is peace." Such sentiments didn't keep the 43rd president from fighting in Iraq, of course, but as part of his liberation theory, he was required to believe that the only thing standing in between Muslims and loving America was a few bad-apple governments. Once Saddam Hussein et al. were gone, Bush believed, things would be fine; Christians, Muslims, and Jews would all get along, serene and secure in their respective democracies.

Such p.c. not only clouded our understanding of the world, it also seeped back into the home front; that's why all the rest of us had to take our shoes off when we got on airplanes. The obvious tools of good security, such as profiling, were off-limits in the Bush era, at least officially.

Needless to say, others in the Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney, were not on board for such p.c. pieties, but it was under Bush's reign that Admiral Mullen got to be chairman of the JCS under Bush 43, declaring that diversity was a "strategic priority," and Gen. Casey got to lead the Army, saying, in the wake of Fort Hood, that it would be a tragedy if we lost our diversity.

So Obama could have swept into power pushing a new broom, applying a neo-realist vision to the challenges of homeland security, as well as national security. After the Fort Hood shooting, he could have guided investigators to the obvious conclusion: that the policies that made America safe for Nidal Hasan were all implemented in the Bush 43 era or before, and that he, Obama, would make the necessary hardnosed changes to make Americans safer.

But that would have been too easy. Instead, our Nobel laureate president must prove that the cure for the ailments of p.c. is more p.c. Indeed, he is going to double down on Ivy League law-school legalism. And so yes, Obama is betting his presidency on the proposition that what America needs is another Warren Court, bringing the wondrous benefits of Miranda warnings to Al Qaeda and other civilization-clashers.

2009-11-13T10:03:00.001-05:00

From Politico's "Arena" section this morning:

Putting your enemies on trial is what you do after you win your war. Not before. When you are fighting a war, you need to focus on winning, and there's nothing in Sun Tzu or Clausewitz about due process or right to counsel.

You don't put your enemies on trial during the war, when you have secrets that you want to keep. And you don't put your enemies on trial in New York City, the media hub of the planet, where every protest--to say nothing of any terrorist strike--will be amplified into eternity. (Such terrorist strikes might be "incomprehensible" to President Obama, as he said at Fort Hood earlier this week, but to most of us, the meaning of the attacks is plain enough--they don't like us, and they want to kill us.)

Are we now supposed to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and the other defendants are "innocent until proven guilty"? Do we now have to put "alleged" in front of everything? So it's OK to kill them without a trial in Pakistan, through drones, but if they survive, they can come to America and hang with Ron Kuby and the ghost of William Kunstler?

Indeed, you don't put the lawyers of the, uh, defendants in a place where they can go on TV every night to plead their case, to angle for a mistrial, hype book sales, and generally stir the pot, worldwide.

I thought that getting rid of White House lawyer Greg Craig was supposed to put an end to runaway ACLU-ish proceduralism in the Obama administration. But evidently, all the rest of the Obamans come out of the same Ivy League law school pod.

Attorney General Eric Holder seems determined to make Americans reconsider their 2008 electoral judgment on the presence of Republicans in the Justice Department.

2009-11-08T08:59:00.003-05:00

On the origin of conspiracy theories, from Politico's "Arena" section.

This is how populist conspiracy theories arise: The people see something, and call it the result of conspiracy, while the elites see the same thing, and call it something different--something more benign, or at least more random. Something that won’t rile up the folks.

But the masses will get riled up anyway, because they don’t trust their betters. And so out of that credibility gap, between the masses and their masters, conspiracy theories will flourish.

Most of the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting, for example, seems scrupulously undecided between various possible explanations for the killer’s motives. Was he overstressed by his experiences at Walter Reed? Or was he a spontaneous jihadist? We might never know, say the chattering clases.

Well, here’s a bet: The American people will know in their own minds. They will conclude that the alleged shooter, Nidal Hasan, was some sort of sleeper terrorist. On Main Street, folks’ll figure that he was part of a sinister network that reaches back to the Middle East.

By conrast, President Obama and the governing caste will be at pains to discern no larger pattern, to draw no larger conclusion about America and the Islamic world. Out of a desire for order--and perhaps more than a little snobbery--they will be quick to label conspiracy theorists as mere paranoid ranters. And so the establishment will see no need for changes in immigration policy, security procedures, or ethnic profiling.

We have seen this conspiracy dynamic before, in the 40s and 50s, as America struggled to comprehend a vast new enemy. And we are seeing it again now. And oh, by the way, American politics changed substantially during that earlier era.

2009-11-04T10:29:00.001-05:00

Reax on the election, from Politico's "Arena" section this morning:

So now we are seeing the limits of centrifugal politics. It takes Republicans to win big elections that stop Barack Obama in his tracks, not third-partiers.

As I wrote here at “Arena” last week, this year we have been going through a phase of “centrifugal politics”--things flying out from the core, toward the periphery. The core is the two party system, and the establishment in general. The periphery is anti-establishmentarian activists, empowered by the internet and an animating sense of free- radical rambunctiousness. Without a doubt, conservative and libertarian peripherals played a country-saving role this year, stopping Democratic momentum toward more spending, “cap-and-tax” legislation, and Obamacare.

But American politics, at its structural heart, is centripetal-- pulling things back toward the center. And at that center is a two- party system that has dominated American politics since the Civil War. Indeed, human nature is ultimately centripetal; after episodic flirtations with centrifugalism, people return to systems of order and stability.

The elections last night confirm this centripetal trope: The Conservative candidate in New York 23 lost, and the independent gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey fell down into single digits. So much for centrifugalism when and where it counts the most--on Election Day. Meanwhile, the Grand Old Party, centripetal beast that it is, scored huge wins, not only in New Jersey and Virginia, but also in secondary races--in Westchester, NY, for example, a Republican challenger landslided the three-term Democratic county executive out of office.

Obviously, for Republicans, there will inevitably be a night-of-the- long-knives-type score-settling after the NY 23 fiasco, as activists confront establishmentarians with the question, “What were you thinking when you gave a left-wing Republican nearly a million dollars in cash, and millions more in earned media, only to see her turn around and endorse the Democrat?”

But in the end, if conservatives and teapartiers want to win, they will have to restrain their centrifugal impulses and find their place within the stolidly centripetalist Republican Party. Activists can fight within the party, even take the party over, but they need to stay within it. Otherwise, they will win nothing.

2009-10-31T08:07:00.005-04:00

"The End of Liberalism"--a column of mine, published in The Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1993.

The point I made, 16 years ago, echoed the wisdom of the well-known political scientist Thoedore Lowi, who had written a book, The End of Liberalism, back in 1969, arguing that liberalism could not survive the complexity being imposed on it. Here's the text of my column:

The End of Liberalism

In what bids to be the defining event of his presidency, Bill Clinton laid out his "Big Offer" to the American people last night. Presidents who make sweeping change are remembered, for better or worse. Think of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, or Reaganomics.

Clinton's offer sounds good. "Security... Simplicity... Savings..." We'll hear the buzzwords over and over again: "By 1998, everyone is paying less" for health care, Ira Magaziner predicted last week. This week the Clintonians sweetened the pot further, moving the date upon which we all start getting more health care for less money up a year, to 1997.

If Clinton is to be another FDR, this had better work. But the biggest challenge he faces is the deep public skepticism that the government really is here to help us.

Theodore Lowi saw it coming. In 1969, he wrote The End of Liberalism, a far-reaching critique of the post-New Deal welfare state. Lowi, a former president of the American Political Science Association now at Cornell, is no conservative. He would describe himself as committed to real democracy, which he sees as threatened by the delegation of legitimate authority to the Iron Triangle of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and special interests.

As government grows bigger and bigger, Lowi argued, representative government will inevitably give way to the undemocratic rule of insiders. Think about it: how many Members of Congress actually read the 1000-page legislative phone books they vote for? They can barely lift them, let alone comprehend them. So elected officials turn to un-elected officials to explain, interpret, and implement the law with thousands more pages of legalese. It's like the Marx Brothers movie "A Day at the Races": you need a code book to interpret the code book.

Lowi coined the phrase "interest-group liberalism," to describe the bargaining and brokering among the Washington elites that has characterized American politics since the 30s. What we will get, Lowi prophesied, is "a crisis of public authority" leading to the "atrophy of institutions of popular control."

Assuming the Clinton plan passes, consider just some of the thousands of to-be-determined questions that lawyers and logrollers will resolve in the shadowland between K Street and Capitol Hill:

-- The famous One Page Form. If you don't ask questions, how do you keep people from ripping off the system? The Reaganites simplified banking regulation so much that the S&Ls made off with 12 zeroes worth of our money. So, does this mean we will all have a chance to play Charles Keating? Unlikely. The EZ form is the tip of the red tape iceberg. The Administration wants $2 billion to hire additional auditors and overseers to keep track of us.

-- Medical specialties. "Regional review boards" will allocate slots in medical school so that we get the politically correct ratio of general practitioners to specialists. Stay tuned for the story about how Senate Baron Robert Byrd (D-WV) and the multiculturalists have cut the ultimate deal: affirmative action and quotas enabling all West Virginians, from Bluefields to Bleckley, to attend medical school, so long as they promise not be plastic surgeons.

-- The National Health Board. This new regulatory agency, its members appointed by the president, will have responsibility for making the whole trillion-dollar operation work. "NHB" is an acronym to remember, because it will be in charge of everything from baseline budgets for the health alliances (adjusted to reflect regional variations, of course) to providing technical assistance to help dawdling states get up with the new program.

Ira Magaziner is a smart guy: maybe even a genius. But even the most brilliant have their limitations. One is reminded of the scene in the 1981 film "Body Heat," when crook Mickey Rourke discusses murder with crooked lawyer William Hurt. In this business, Rourke advises Hurt, there are 50 ways you can [expletive] up. If you're a genius, you can think of 25. And you, Rourke tells Hurt, ain't no genius. Magaziner is trying hard on our behalf, but it's hard to see how we will bat more than .500. That's a superb batting average in baseball, but not good enough when our lives are at stake.

If popular sovereignty is to mean anything, then sovereign power has to be understandable to the populace. Lowi's book is a restatement of the truism: the devil is in the details. A quarter century ago, he warned us that the details were drowning us. Today, it looks as if democracy is about to take another dunking.

2009-09-22T10:06:00.004-04:00

Lessons in partisanship. According to a new Fox News poll, released today, Democrats approve of the job that Barack Obama is doing in Afghanistan by a 64:20 margin. But they oppose the Afghanistan war--the war in which Obama is the commander-in-chief--by a 62:33 margin. In other words, while only 33 percent support the war, 64 percent support Obama. That's the difference that partisanship makes. Thirty one percent of democrats (64-33) support Obama as he does something, even if they don't support the thing itself.

2009-09-12T22:31:00.000-04:00

2009-08-16T13:37:00.002-04:00

Just posted "The Obama Health Care Order" at Serious Medicine Strategy.

2009-07-15T11:28:00.002-04:00

Just published this piece on Serious Medicine on The Washington Note.

2009-07-10T10:50:00.004-04:00

An interesting post by Andrew Gelman on FiveThirtyEight.com,demonstrating that the GOP is the middle class party.

That insight is full of implications for Republicans--think Silent Majority, and the politics thereof, which led Richard Nixon to two presidential victories--in spite of Nixon being Nixon.

2009-07-07T10:27:00.002-04:00

The Coming Collision

Gallup Says The American People Are Growing More Conservative. The Obama Administration Is Moving To the Left.

Even Democrats are growing more conservative, Gallup sez.

So which is going to give? The people, or their government?

2009-07-07T10:09:00.007-04:00

Is Governor Deval Patrick a leading indicator for President Barack Obama? We shall see. The Boston Herald reports this morning that Tim Cahill, the Treasurer of Massachusetts, has re-registered as an independent, as he prepares to challenge the liberal incumbent governor in 2010.

Shades of 1978, when Ed King knocked off another "gentry Democrat," as Joel Kotkin calls them; that wasMichael Dukakis who lost the '78 Democratic primary to King, only to moderate and come back to win against King four years later.

Nationwide, people with names such as "Tim Cahill" are the swing voters, holding the key to 2012, as well as 2010.

2009-07-01T18:06:00.004-04:00

The Real Meaning of the Ricci Decision: Now the Middle Class Knows Who Its Friends Are

So now the middle-class majority in America knows who its friends are. The names of those friends are Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. And those five, of course, are the majority of the US Supreme Court, who ruled Monday in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano. That courageous quintet upheld the principle of color-blind meritocracy, defeating, at least for now, the much different vision of race-based quotas.

On the other side is the liberal foursome of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, and David Souter. They voted against the interest of white and Hispanic firefighters who did well on a standardized test, an exam would have promoted them to lieutenant or captain within the New Haven, CT Fire Department. To put it another way, that liberal quartet voted for continuation of the sort of race-based policies and racialist politics that have given liberalism a bad name politically. Why? Because for more than 40 years, liberals have been so desperate to achieve their vision of “social justice” that they have sometimes been willing to cheat and lie about it. And even after they are caught by the voters, or the courts, they keep doing it.

That was the gist of Justice Alito’s opinion concurring with the majority, in which he asserted that the City of New Haven had resorted to “sabotage” to get its way in the http://www.newhaven20.com/ New Haven 20 case. That’s a strong word, but it’s the correct word, because the mayor of New Haven, John DeStefano, and his city officials were willing to use legal tricks to sabotage the upward mobility of those 20 white and Hispanic firefighters.

Here’s the way Alito put it in his opinion:

But even the District Court admitted that “a jury could rationally infer that city officials worked behind the scenes to sabotage the promotional examinations because they knew that, were the exams certified, the Mayor would incur the wrath of [Rev. Boise] Kimber and other influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community.

This admission finds ample support in the record. Reverend Boise Kimber . . . is a politically powerful New Haven pastor and a self-professed “kingmaker.” . . . He continues to call whites racist if they question his actions.

Who should rule America? “Activists” or the law? Obviously the Supreme Court was right to reject the sort of rancid politicized policymaking seen in New Haven. But the vote should have been 9:0, not 5:4.

So what does this decision mean for America in 2009?

The legal message is this: Wholly race-conscious remedies are illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. (Yes, of course, the whole point of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was to eliminate race-conscious remedies, but the liberal-left is still trying to use them, as part of its endless quest for “social justice.”)

And as for the political message? The answer is clear: The liberal pro-Obama segment of the legal elite does not mesh with the concerns of ordinary Americans, especially those who lack a college degree.

That is, the vision of America emanating from Ivy League law schools is that the elite should rule in the name of the “poor,” for the benefit of “victims” everywhere. And so while there’s much professed concern for the downtrodden, there is, in fact, much trodding down on ordinary people.

More broadly, Barack Obama’s presidency can be seen as a pincer movement on the middle class--so of course Obama’s lawyers were against the New Haven 20.

From the top, one of these pincers are the limousine liberals, concentrated on the east and west coasts, now hugely reinforced by trillions in bank-bailout money.

And from the bottom, the other pincer is what might be called “The ACORN Vote”--that is, the activist groups, which purport to speak for minorities, all of whom are now well-funded, thanks to the stimulus package. Together, they share a vision of left-liberalism triumphant: an enlarged state using its power to reward friends and cronies, ignoring the well-being of everyone else.

And so, in the middle, getting squeezed, is the middle class. You know, the people of all colors who work hard, pay their taxes, raise their kids, and play by the rules. They fight our wars, march in Fourth of July parades--and have no hope of getting a TARP bailout. All they expect is that others, too, will play fairly.

Those folks in the middle now know that they have five friends on the US Supreme Court--but only five. As for the rest of Washington, well, we will discover soon enough where they all line up. Whose side is Washington officialdom on? The side of merit? Or the side of entitlement? The side of justice? Or the side of injustice?

And yes, these are good questions to ask Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, who, in 2008 voted against the New Haven 20--and against the American Dream.

2009-06-30T08:47:00.003-04:00

I have created a new website, devoted to health care, called Serious Medicine.

2009-06-28T13:09:00.001-04:00

2009-06-22T16:32:00.011-04:00

Is "Obamboozled" a word? You know, a fusion of "Obama" and "bamboozled"?

You've been "bamboozled." That's the famous quote from Malcolm X, addressing fellow blacks in Harlem back in the 60s. The full quote, at least as it was recorded in Spike Lee's film "X," is:

"Every time you break the seal on that liquor bottle, that's a Government seal you're breaking! Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!"

Again, the key thing to remember is that this was Malcolm addressing his fellow blacks. Wake up, people! Quit with the drugs and alcohol.

And so I couldn't help but think of that quote when I saw this headline on the front page of The Washington Post this morning: "Recovery's Missing Ingredient: New Jobs/Experts Warn of A Long Dry Spell." Barack Obama has been bamboozled--bamboozled by an economic policy aimed at Wall Street, not Main Street--and certainly not Division Street.

Here's some of what the WaPo's Michael Fletcher had to say:

With many forecasters projecting unemployment to remain above 10 percent next year and not return to pre-recession levels of roughly 5 percent for years after that, Obama is likely to be confronted with defending the effectiveness of his economic policies as the nation endures its worst employment situation in a generation.

Analysts say the high levels of joblessness would be accompanied by increases in child poverty, strained government budgets, and black and Latino unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.

"I find it unfathomable that people are not horrified about what is going to happen," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. "I regard all this talk about how the recession is maybe going to end, all the talk about deficits and inflation, to be the equivalent of telling Americans, 'You are just going to have to tough it out.' But we're looking at persistent unemployment that is going to be extraordinarily damaging to many communities. There is a ton of pain in the pipeline."

As an aside, one can ask: What would the WP be saying if it were a Republican President in the White House?

In any case, as I wrote last week for USNews, Obama's solicitude for Wall Street has probably cost Obama his chance to enact a health care plan.

(The picture, btw, comes from a somewhat obscure Spike Lee movie from 2000.)

UPDATE: A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows increasing pessimismabout the economy.

2009-04-23T22:55:00.000-04:00

2009-03-07T16:17:00.001-05:00

"Don't be Fooled--Obama Wants to Raise Everyone's Taxes."

Just posted it on Fox News' Fox Forum.

2009-02-08T22:32:00.003-05:00

Here's my review of The Once and Future Reagan, a new documentary about the Gipper, presented by Newt and Callista Gingrich.

2009-01-25T19:17:00.001-05:00

I have just unveiled the Business As Usual Index,my attempt to track the genuine change of the Obama era, in the realm of fiscal and governmental policy.

2009-01-21T15:27:00.002-05:00

"CDC Warns of Program Cuts"--that's the headline in Global Security Newswire this morning.

Does it get any clearer than that?

According to GSN, the Centers for Disease Control warns the rest of the federal government--and all of us--that progress has been made, but warns:

This progress, however, is threatened by prospects of reduced funding, the report says.

The federal public health agency might "have to make difficult decisions about what the highest priority activities are and what must be postponed," the report says. "Public health departments at state and local levels may have to make similar choices"

And this ominous graf below, which highlights the danger of a "dirty bomb," is taken directly from the CDC website:

The report, Public Health Preparedness: Strengthening CDC's Emergency Response, outlines CDC′s future preparedness priorities, including enhancing biosurveillance systems to support rapid detection of and response to emerging public health threats, increasing nationwide laboratory capacity to respond effectively after a radiological incident (such as a dirty bomb), and helping state and local health departments strengthen their emergency response capabilities.

Everybody knows that this is going to be a time of tough choices, and foregone priorities. But it's hard for me to believe that anyone in Washington--either in the Executive or Legislative branch--could read this CDC report and then seek out risky budget cuts.

2009-01-20T08:40:00.002-05:00

Two new posts: Better Late Than Never: Bush Frees Compean and Ramos.

And Inside the Beltway, Outside of History — In the Bubble of Obama’s “Moment”

2009-01-13T15:40:00.006-05:00

Just posted, "Beam Us Up, Barack!" on the Fox News Fox Forum.

A humorous headline, but a serious topic:

The projected size of Barack Obama’s “stimulus package” is heading north, from hundreds of billions of dollars into the trillions. And the Obama program comes, of course, on top of the various Bush administration bailouts and commitments, estimated to run as high as $8.5 trillion.

Will this money be put to good use? That’s an important question for the new President, and an even more important question for America. The metric for all government spending ultimately comes down to a single query: What did you get for it?

If such spending was worth it, that’s great. If the country gets victory in war, or victory over economic catastrophe, well, obviously, it was worthwhile. The national interest should never be sacrificed on the altar of a balanced budget.

So let’s hope we get the most value possible for all that money--and all that red ink. Let’s hope we get a more prosperous nation and a cleaner earth. Let’s also hope we get a more secure population and a clear, strategic margin of safety for the United States. Yet how do we do all that?

There’s only one best way: Put space exploration at the center of the new stimulus package. That is, make space the spearhead rationale for the myriad technologies that will provide us with jobs, wealth, and vital knowhow in the future. By boldly going where no (hu)man has gone before, we will change life here on earth for the better.

To put it mildly, space was not high on the national agenda during 2008. But space and rocketry, broadly defined, are as important as ever. As Cold War arms-control theology fades, the practical value of missile defense--against superpowers, also against rogue states, such as Iran, and high-tech terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas--becomes increasingly obvious. Clearly Obama agrees; it’s the new President, after all, who will be keeping pro-missile defense Robert Gates on the job at the Pentagon.

The bipartisan reality is that if missile offense is on the rise, then missile defense is surely a good idea. That’s why increasing funding for missile defense engages the attention of leading military powers around the world. And more signs appear, too, that the new administration is in that same strategic defense groove. A January 2 story from Bloomberg News, headlined “Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link,” points the way. As reported by Demian McLean, the incoming Obama administration is looking to better coordinate DOD and NASA; that only makes sense: After all, the Pentagon’s space expenditures, $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, are almost a third more than NASA’s. So it’s logical, as well as economical, to streamline the national space effort.

That’s good news, but Obama has the opportunity to do more. Much more.

Throughout history, exploration has been a powerful strategic tool. Both Spain and Portugal turned themselves into superpowers in the 15th and 16th century through overseas expansion. By contrast, China, which at the time had a technological edge over the Iberian states, chose not to explore and was put on the defensive. Ultimately, as we all know, China’s retrograde policies pushed the Middle Kingdom into a half-millennium-long tailspin.

Further, we might consider the enormous advantages that England reaped by colonizing a large portion of the world. Not only did Britain’s empire generate wealth for the homeland, albeit often cruelly, but it also inspired technological development at home. And in the world wars of the 20th century, Britain’s colonies, past and present, gave the mother country the “strategic depth” it needed for victory.

For their part, the Chinese seem to have absorbed these geostrategic lessons. They are determined now to be big players in space, as a matter of national grand strategy, independent of economic cycles. In 2003, the People’s Republic of China powered its first man into space, becoming only the third country to do so. And then, more ominously, in 2007, China shot down one of their own weather satellites, just to prove that they had robust satellite-killing capacity.

Thus the US and all the other space powers are on notice: In any possible war, the Chinese have the capacity to “blind” our satellites. And now they plan to put a man on the moon in the next decade. “The moon landing is an extremely challenging and sophisticated task,” declared Wang Zhaoyao, a spokesman for China’s space program, in September, “and it is also a strategically important technological field.”

India, the other emerging Asian superpower, is paying close attention to its rival across the Himalayas. Back in June, The Washington Times ran this thought-provoking headline: “China, India hasten arms race in space/U.S. dominance challenged.” According to the Times report, India, possessor of an extensive civilian satellite program, means to keep up with emerging space threats from China, by any means necessary. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Deepak Kapoor said that his country must “optimize space applications for military purposes,” adding, “the Chinese space program is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content.” In other words, India, like every other country, must compete--because the dangerous competition is there, like it or not.

India and China have fought wars in the past; they obviously see “milspace” as another potential theater of operations. And of course, Japan, Russia, Brazil, and the European Union all have their own space programs.

Space exploration, despite all the bonhomie about scientific and economic benefit for the common good, has always been driven by strategic competition. Beyond mere macho “bragging rights” about being first, countries have understood that controlling the high ground, or the high frontier, is a vital military imperative. So we, as a nation, might further consider the value of space surveillance and missile defense. It’s hard to imagine any permanent peace deal in the Middle East, for example, that does not include, as an additional safeguard, a significant commitment to missile and rocket defense, overseen by impervious space satellites. So if the U.S. and Israel, for example, aren’t there yet, well, they need to get there.

Americans, who have often hoped that space would be a demilitarized preserve for peaceful cooperation, need to understand that space, populated by humans and their machines, will be no different from earth, populated by humans and their machines. That is, every virtue, and every evil, that is evident down here will also be evident up there. If there have been, and will continue to be, arms races on earth, then there will be arms races in space. As we have seen, other countries are moving into space in a big way--and they will continue to do so, whether or not the U.S. participates.

Meanwhile, in the nearer term, if the Bush administration’s “forward strategy of freedom”--the neoconservative idea that we would make America safe by transforming the rest of the world--is no longer an operative policy, then we will, inevitably, fall back on “defense” as the key idea for making America safe.

But in the short run, of course, the dominant issue is the economy. Aside from the sometimes inconvenient reality that national defense must always come first, the historical record shows that high-tech space work is good for the economy; the list of spinoffs from NASA, spanning the last half-century, is long and lucrative.

Moreover, a great way to guarantee that the bailout/stimulus money is well spent is to link it to a specific goal--a goal which will in turn impose discipline on the spenders. During the New Deal, for example, there were many accusations of malfeasance against FDR’s “alphabet soup” of agencies, and yet the tangible reality, in the 30s, was that things were actually getting done. Jobs were created, and, just as more important, enduring projects were being built; from post offices to Hoover Dam to the Tennessee Valley Authority, America was transformed.

Even into the 50s and 60s, the federal government was spending money on ambitious and successful projects. The space program was one, but so was the interstate highway program, as well as that new government startup, ARPANET.

Indeed, it could be argued that one reason the federal government has grown less competent and more flabby over the last 30 years is the relative lack of “hard” Hamiltonian programs--that is, nuts and bolts, cement and circuitry--to provide a sense of bottom-line rigor to the spending process.

And so, for example, if America were to succeed in building a space elevator --in its essence a 22,000-mile cable, operating like a pulley, dangling down from a stationary satellite, a concept first put forth in the late 19th century--that would be a major driver for economic growth. Japan has plans for just such a space elevator; aren’t we getting a little tired of losing high-tech economic competitions to the Japanese?
So a robust space program would not only help protect America; it would also strengthen our technological economy.

But there’s more. In the long run, space spending would be good for the environment. Here’s why:

History, as well as common sense, tells us that the overall environmental footprint of the human race rises alongside wealth. That’s why, for example, the average American produces five times as much carbon dioxide per year as the average person dwelling anywhere else on earth. Even homeless Americans, according to an MIT study--and even the most scrupulously green Americans--produce twice as much CO2, per person, as the rest of the world. Around the planet, per capita carbon dioxide emissions closely track per capita income.

A holistic understanding of homo sapiens in his environment will acknowledge the stubbornly acquisitive and accretive reality of human nature. And so a truly enlightened environmental policy will acknowledge another blunt reality: that if the carrying capacity of the earth is finite, then it makes sense, ultimately, to move some of the population of the earth elsewhere--into the infinity of space.

The ZPG and NPG advocates have their own ideas, of course, but they don’t seem to be popular in America, let alone the world. But in the no-limits infinity of space, there is plenty of room for diversity and political experimentation in the final frontier, just as there were multiple opportunities in centuries past in the New World. The main variable is developing space-traveling capacity to get up there--to the moon, Mars, and beyond--to see what’s possible.

Instead, the ultimately workable environmental plan--the ultimate vision for preserving the flora, the fauna, and the ice caps--is to move people, and their pollution, off this earth.

Indeed, space travel is surely the ultimate plan for the survival of our species, too. Eventually, through runaway WMD, or runaway pollution, or a stray asteroid, or some Murphy-esque piece of bad luck, we will learn that our dominion over this planet is fleeting. That’s when we will discover the grim true meaning of Fermi’s Paradox.

In various ways, humankind has always anticipated apocalypse. And so from Noah’s Ark to “Silent Running” to “Wall*E,” we have envisioned ways for us and all other creatures, great and small, to survive. The space program, stutteringly nascent as it might be, can be seen as a slow-groping understanding that lifeboat-style compartmentalization, on earth and in the heavens, is the key to species survival. It’s a Darwinian fitness test that we ought not to flunk.

Barack Obama, who has blazed so many trails in his life, can blaze still more, including a track to space, over the far horizon of the future. In so doing, he would be keeping faith with a figure that he in many ways resembles, John F. Kennedy. It was the 35th President who declared that not only would America go to the moon, but that we would lead the world into space.

As JFK put it so ringingly back in 1962:

The vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

Today the 44th President must spend a lot of money to restore our prosperity, but he must spend it wisely. He must also keep America secure against encroaching threats, even as he must improve the environment in the face of a burgeoning global economy.

Accomplishing all these tasks is possible, but not easy. Yes, of course he will need new ideas, but he will also need familiar and proven ideas. One of the best is fostering and deploying profound new technology in pursuit of expansion and exploration.

The stars, one might hope, are aligning for just such a rendezvous with destiny.

###

2009-01-06T20:12:00.002-05:00

My answer to My answer to Politico's "Arena" section question this morning: what's the best & worst of the Bush presidency?

The best that I can say about George W. Bush's foreign policy is that he begs comparison to British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who masterminded a Middle East foreign policy fiasco in 1956 that spelled the ruin of his government and the further decline of his country's power.

The worst that can be said about Bush's foreign policy is that he will be remembered alongside Kaiser Wilhelm II; as an impetuous young man--in Bush's case, though, not so young--who threw away a favorable system of alliances in pursuit of a failed military unilateralism.

As for economic policy, he seems to be sort of a cross between Ulysses Grant and Herbert Hoover, although he does get credit for stalling Kyoto-type rules, long enough, perhaps, for a critical mass of people to see the Canute-like foolishness of the whole effort.

But on the distinct and enduring upside, he appointed sound judges and he is personally a nice enough guy, and a good family man.

2009-01-03T19:17:00.002-05:00

Das Bailout: My Conversation with Karl Marx, in The Huffington Post.

2008-12-31T21:10:00.002-05:00

The Republican Comeback, Part 3, from the Fox Forum at Foxnews.com.

2008-12-23T15:35:00.003-05:00

Yes We Can Reward Failure!

Should one of the geniuses who helped run Citigroup off a cliff now move over to a top job at the State Department? Should there be any penalty for failure--or should failures get promoted, if they know the right people?

As so often happens, The New York Times got the scoop on a hot story this morning: The headline reads, “Clinton Moves to Widen Role of State Dept.” The story concerns the efforts by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the incoming Secretary of State, to enlarge the “turf” of her new department.

And as so often also happens, the Times missed the hottest part of its own story: the upward mobility of yet another Wall Street bailout recipient. This is from the second graf of the Times story:

Mrs. Clinton is recruiting Jacob J. Lew, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, as one of two deputies, according to people close to the Obama transition team. Mr. Lew’s focus, they said, will be on increasing the share of financing that goes to the diplomatic corps.

OK, fine. But is there anything else we should know about Lew? Deep in the story, the Times adds this bit of biography: “A well-connected figure who was once an aide to Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, Mr. Lew now works for Citigroup in a unit that oversees hedge funds.” [emphasis added]

Now let’s see here. Citigroup, Citigroup. Would that be the same Citigroup that employs Bob Rubin as chairman of its executive committee? The same Bob Rubin who was Lew’s Clinton Administration colleague when Rubin ran Treasury and Lew ran the Office of Management and Budget? And more recently, the two of them have been colleagues at Citigroup? And now Rubin is a top adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, and Lew might be joining the State Department in a top slot? And hedge funds--aren’t those the squirrelly investments that nobody really understands--not even Wall Street’s “masters of the universe”?

Do I have all that right?

And would that be the same Citigroup that last month received a direct cash injection of $45 billion and a loan guarantee of another $306 billion? Why, yes, it would be the one and the same Citigroup, a bailout recipient whose dollar totals put Detroit’s Big Three to shame. As Reuters points out, the mismanagement of Citigroup means that “the government has pledged about $1,000 per American to guarantee the bank's assets.”

So let’s see: Rubin and Lew were both high-ups at Citigroup, as Citi stock fell by 95 percent in the last year; without its bailout, the company probably would have gone bankrupt.

And now, what’s the reward for such failure? Rubin has a place of honor at Obama’s table, and Lew is slated for a big job at the State Department.

This doesn’t look to me like change we can believe in. But surely it’s a career bailout that Lew can believe in.

2008-12-20T12:07:00.001-05:00

My tribute to Paul Weyrich.

2008-12-09T15:12:00.002-05:00

More posts on FoxForum: I see the beginnings of a Republican comeback, starting with the Louisiana and Georgia elections, and now the arrest of Governor Blagojevich (D-Ill.) on corruption charges.

2008-12-03T23:41:00.001-05:00

"Throw a TARP on Hank Paulson — The Treasury Secretary Should Go, Now"

That's the headline for my piece calling for Paulson's resignation.

2008-12-01T23:21:00.003-05:00

CHRIS WALLACE IN THE LIBERAL LION'S DEN!

Tonight's D.C. showing of “Frost/Nixon” was an early holiday gift to Beltway liberals, delivering glad tidings of anti-Nixonian feelgood to the permanent Washington establishment, which has felt shut out of power for so long, during the dark night of Gingrich-DeLay-Bush these past 15 years, before the Obama dawn. But even during this happy masque of lefty triumphalism, Fox News’ Chris Wallace threw a fair-and-balanced apple of discord into the middle of the festivities. Wallace had the nerve to defend George W. Bush from the ongoing liberal effort to Nixonize the 43rd President.

After the screening of the film, at the National Geographic Society headquarters in downtown D.C., director Ron Howard, playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan, and Nixon-hater James Reston Jr. (son of the legendary New York Times columnist) appeared onstage for a question-and-answer session with the audience, moderated by Robert Dallek, the retired Boston University professor and well-known historian. Howard was, well, Hollywood-ish, talking about the making of the film and the screen-testing of various alternate endings. And Morgan was arty and somewhat abstract, seemingly more hostile to Frost—who conducted the 1977 “checkbook journalism” interviews with the disgraced 37th President that are the heart of the film—than to Richard Nixon. But Reston, portrayed in the film as a young Nixon-hating researcher for Frost, was relentlessly vehement, using every occasion he could to steer the discussion back to Nixon’s “criminality” and the need to confront it. Again. And again. And again.

Then Reston went further, declaring that the film was “a metaphor for George W. Bush,” a theme that Howard and Dallek, at least, seemed comfortable with. That was fine for the liberal multitudes in the audience, including former CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, now up in his 90s, who proudly recollected for the audience that he was “Number fourteen on Nixon’s enemies list,” and former Watergate Committee counsel Richard Ben-Veniste, who resurfaced in 2004 as one of the 9-11 Commissioners.

But then “Fox News Sunday” anchorman Chris Wallace, braving the liberal wind, asked a question, which was actually more of an accusation. “To compare George W. Bush to Richard Nixon is to trivialize Nixon’s crimes and is a disservice to Bush,” Wallace said. Recalling that 3000 people were killed on 9-11, and noting that there hadn’t been any attacks on U.S. soil since, Wallace suggested that something had been done right. That’s why, he said, “we are all sitting here tonight so comfortably”—and not afraid of another terrorist attack. Moreover, Wallace said, “Richard Nixon’s crimes were committed solely for his own political gain, whereas George W. Bush was trying to protect the American people.” To suggest otherwise, Wallace insisted, “was a grave misrepresentation of history, then and now.” And, amazingly, Wallace received a smattering of applause.

Seemingly not wanting to get into a fight with the TV man, Dallek answered that we knew full well of Nixon’s criminality because of the Watergate tapes, but that no similar documentary record existed yet for Bush. Only when such information comes out, Dallek suggested, would the full horror of Bush’s presidency become visible. Which, of course, proved Wallace’s point: It was not fair to equate proven facts about Nixon with mere allegations about Bush.

“You make suppositions on no facts whatsoever,” Wallace concluded.

“Do you read The New York Times?” Dallek countered. That might not have been the strongest comeback ever, but it worked just fine with this audience. And with that, the Q & A session resumed its liberal course for the rest of the evening.

2008-11-26T15:16:00.003-05:00

I have been writing a lot, lately, on the disastrous bailout, for FoxNews.com's "Fox Forum," and for The Politico's "Arena" section.

2008-11-13T08:12:00.002-05:00

I just posted this on The Politico's Arena website. The question was, "does anyone get what's happening with our $700 billion?" And my answer:

No one knows what’s happening on the bailout—and that’s the point. Power never wants accountability, and money never wants transparency.

It’s hard to blame the revolving-door Wall Streeters, the ones running the program, for operating this way. It’s the only way they know. Sharks can’t help themselves.

But it is easy, and necessary, to blame those who claim to represent Main Street for voting for it—they should have known better.

2008-11-12T11:07:00.001-05:00

Will a Governor Be the GOP’s Next Star?

I just posted this at FoxNews' "FoxForum" site:

Miami – Here at the Republican Governors Association annual meeting, there is no great sense of defeat, but rather a sense of positive anticipation—and for good reason.

Despite the general GOP wipeout of 2008, no incumbent Republican governor was defeated for re-election this year; in fact, two Republican incumbents, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Jim Douglas of Vermont, hung on, even as their states went for Obama. Indeed, the case of Vermont’s Douglas is particularly striking: he won a fourth term with nearly 55 percent of the vote, while Obama was winning the Green Mountain State by more than 2:1.

So while the Party’s presidential candidate, and its Congressional wing, were both soundly repudiated at the polls earlier this month, Republican governors did well. Republicans still have 21 governors—including a certifiably hot political property for the future, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who speaks here this afternoon.
And staffers at the Republican Governors Association (RGA) look forward to 36 governorships are up for grabs in 2010. With George W. Bush and his deep unpopularity gone from the White House, and Barack Obama the incumbent, the “off year” election of ‘10 is likely to go quite well for the Republicans. The RGA could well find itself back in the majority come 2011.

And in the shorter term, the RGA has gotten some big breaks: In a grotesque sign of arrogant hubris, Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has announced that he wants to run for governor of Virginia in the “off off year” of 2009. McAuliffe’s ambition is a huge gift to Republicans: Take a Democratic wheeler-dealer, born in upstate New York, then transplant him to the Beltway, where he made millions as a K Street operative—and then turn him loose on the Old Dominion. Yes, Virginia is changing (Obama carried it) but it hasn’t changed so much that lobbyists can buy the Richmond state house. McAuliffe is exactly the sort of over-reach that Democrats don’t need. But it’s what they’ve got, as Democrats over-interpret the 2008 election.

And returning to the longer term, the defeat of Sen. John McCain only underscores the reality that statehouses are the best springboards to the presidency; the last time that a Republican Senator or Congressman went directly to the White House was 1920.

Ed Tobin, a former executive director of the RGA, now a lawyer in Boston, offers an explanation for gubernatorial effectiveness, “Governors are leaders—they have to be. Governors have to produce. They have to make decisions every day, on how balance budgets and manage programs—and be held accountable for what they do. By comparison, the Senate is a debating society, and the House is too often captured by pork barrelers and earmarkers.”

But there’s is a paradox here. Compared to the outgoing Republican in the White House, and the surviving group of Republicans on Congress, governors might be the most effective, but they get the least attention. Out in the states, from Alaska to Florida, governors do their thing—and receive little attention for what they do, beyond their own state.

Indeed, the political and policy discussion in Washington and New York is dominated by policy wonks and freelance ideologues, plus whatever Member of Congress has the time to speak at a think-tank seminar—or go on cable TV. That is, the “national” debate eclipses the state-by-state actions of governors, in both parties.

For their part, governors just plug along in their states, confident that their own constituents will be able to judge their performance.

But of course, whenever a party gets tired of losing nationwide, it is well advised to look out to the states, and the statehouses, for new talent.

As Tobin, the former RGA staffer, puts it, “Governors are closer to the people. They have their principles, but they are also pragmatic.”

That sounds pretty good right about now.

2008-11-06T13:54:00.002-05:00

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama, and the Permanent Campaign.

Published today in Fox Forum:

So President-elect Obama has asked Cong. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) to be his White House chief of staff. I am a little surprised that Emanuel would consider taking the job; he is giving up, at age 49, a promising long career in the House of Representatives—to become an aide to someone else. Yes, he will be part of history in the 44th President’s White House, but he would have been part of history in the 111th Congress, and thereafter.

But I am not surprised that Obama offered him the job. Obama, the man with the awkward middle name, could use some reinforcement among Jews, Christian Zionists, and other friends of Israel. At the tail end of the campaign, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was caught on camera telling a synagogue in Florida that Obama “didn’t have the political courage” to walk out of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Afrocentric church. Indeed, the close scrutiny of Obama’s life and times—including the tantalizing details about life with a Kenyan Muslim father and an Indonesian Muslim step-father—has only just begun. Muckrakers and biographers and kiss-and-tellers (some peddling truth and perhaps more peddling falsehood) will come from all corners of the earth. The White House rapid-responders will have to be ready.

And then, of course, Obama plans some profound shifts in American policy toward the Mideast and the Muslim world. The 44th President will need all the Jewish help he can get.

Yet there will be some pushback on the Emanuel choice from Obama’s own base—because Emanuel is not a “movement” leftist. Indeed, Steve Clemons, the well-known DC blogger, headlined his posting “Movement Left has Stroke: Rahm Emanuel Accepts Obama's Chief of Staff Offer.” Clemons, who seemed to know sooner than the rest of us that Emanuel had, in fact, taken the job, observed, “Many in the movement left are having a heart attack that the first major move of President-elect Barack Obama is the appointment of Congressman Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff.” Emanuel is a liberal, but he is not a Moveon/Acorn-type leftist. And that will go down hard with Moveon-ers and Acorn-ers.

So what would Emanuel be like in the White House? This inheritor of Chicago political tradition? On Thursday, The Politico referred to Emanuel’s “take-no-prisoners style.” Indeed, one thinks back to the 1987 film “The Untouchables,” in which would-be gang-buster Eliot Ness (played by Kevin Costner) is told by an Irish cop (played by Sean Connery), “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!” Obviously Emanuel in the White House wouldn’t rub anyone out, but it’s a safe bet that Emanuel would play the hardest of hardball.

Meanwhile—and this is all part of the plan—President Obama can sail above it all, speaking in lofty tones to the adoring multitudes, preserving his own image from the chips and cracks that come from down-‘n’-dirty politicking. That is, Obama can take the high road, and Emanuel can take, well, the not-so-high road.

But this much is for sure. Obama has big plans for his presidency. The veteran street organizer knows tough tactics, even if he himself no longer wishes to engage in them. That’s for others now.

A veteran Democrat told me on Wednesday that the Obama campaign has $160 million—that's right, $160 million—left over from his campaign. After the campaign pays off its outstanding debts, covers legal and accounting fees, etc., it will still easily have $100 million left. To do what with? Well, one can assume that Obama means it when he says, as he has said several times, that he will look for ways to keep his political organization going, even after the election, presumably to advance his legislative agenda—and, presumably also, to get going on his 2012 re-election campaign.

In addition, Obama has 3.6 million donors on file, as well as 40 million people who are considered Obama volunteers. Obama can get things done with those sorts of numbers and quantities. And Emanuel will be at his right hand.

2008-11-06T11:04:00.004-05:00

Who does this picture, above, remind you of?

Is this a time to nail Obama for visual plagiarism? Or to say a prayer?

2008-11-05T08:05:00.002-05:00

Why McCain Lost

Published in Fox News' FoxForum:

John McCain could never decide if he wanted to be a winner—or a martyr. He took arbitrary stands (he would prefer, of course, the adjective "principled") on issues that cut against the grain of his party, as well as undercut his potential victory coalition, which always had to include populist Reagan/Hillary Democrats. He opposed drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and denounced those who mentioned Reverend Wright or Barack Obama's middle name. And he supported "comprehensive immigration reform" and "cap and trade" on global warming—liberal positions which were anathema to the GOP faithful, as well as turnoffs to moderate-conservative Democrats. All of these "high-minded" stances garnered McCain favor from newspaper editorial boards and self-declared establishment thought-leaders, but all taken as insults to the Republican base.

And yet when it came time for the general election, environmentalists, the mainstream media, and Hispanics all went solidly for Obama, joined by a sufficient number of swing Democrats, who saw no compelling reason to cross the aisle and vote Republican. In particular, McCain got no "credit," if that's the right word, from good-government types for not bringing up Obama's support for drivers' licenses for illegal aliens--probably the single best populist arrow the Republicans had in their quiver, and yet an arrow that McCain never fired.

To top it all off, McCain voted for the Wall Street bailout last month--once again putting the establishment ahead of the Republican base, putting pundits’ praise ahead of populist swing voters. And so, by the end of the campaign, plenty of activist Republicans had figured out what McCain really thought of them, and acted accordingly.

With apologies to Frank Sinatra, McCain ran the campaign "his way"--and just like the narrator in that famous song, he paid a steep price. Maybe that's what McCain wanted all along. It sure seems like it.

2008-10-23T14:36:00.003-04:00

Just published this at FoxForum on the Fox News website:

The Devil Is In the Details: Another Obama Connection You Ought to Know About

Could Lucifer play a role in this presidential election? It may sound crazy, but one of the candidates in this race has publicly praised, even emulated, a writer-activist who himself paid tribute to Lucifer. That’s right, Lucifer, also known as the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub—you get the idea.

Do you think that admiring a Lucifer-admirer would make a difference to some voters?

If you’ve never heard of this true fact—and most Americans obviously haven’t—well, that might help to explain why John McCain is behind in the polls.

OK, you might be asking, where is this Lucifer stuff coming from? It comes from a man named Saul Alinsky, who devoted his life to left-wing agitation in Chicago. He also wrote two seminal books, “Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules for Radicals,” still regarded as key how-to manuals for left-wing activists.

But Alinsky was more than just a leftist; he was a genuine out-there crazy, someone who loved to shock and stun, just for the helluvit. And so in the first edition of “Rules for Radicals,” published in 1971, he offered this astounding dedication: “Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement of the very first radical, from all our legends, mythology, and history … the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”

This dedication is no secret. David Freddoso wrote about it in his book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate; and the inimitable Ann Coulter noted it, too, just last month.

And the connection between Alinsky and Barack Obama—and Alinsky and the left in general—is real enough. As John Fund, author of a newly revised book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, observes, Alinsky, who died in 1972, was a sort of godfather to all the activist groups that emerged in the 60s and 70s, the most famous (or, if you prefer, notorious) of which today is ACORN.

Fund notes that young Hillary Rodham was such a fan of Alinsky that she traveled to Chicago, four times, to interview him for an adulatory school thesis she was writing. And Obama is an on-the-record fan too: Fund quotes The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin, writing in 2007, “Obama embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life.” Slevin further noted that Obama’s and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “common connection to Alinsky is one of the striking aspects of their biographies.”

OK, so the Alinsky-Obama connection is real. But the full truth about Alinsky, and whom he admired, is so wacky, or so horrible, that even the media have been reluctant to get into the story. And so it has received relatively little play. Oh sure, if John McCain had expressed admiration for a Lucifer admirer, that would have been news, but as we all know, there’s a media double standard on such things. That media bias is lamentable, of course, but for a Republican, it’s part of the strategic landscape—one more roadblock to factor into any GOP victory strategy.

Speaking of McCain, he would seem to have the greatest interest in taking Obama down a peg—or, according to the latest calculation from RealClearPolitics, about seven points in the polls. So why hasn’t he highlighted the Alinsky-Lucifer connection? Why hasn’t the McCain-Palin ticket raised this issue, knowing full well that if the candidates say it, reporters have to cover it? Good questions. Did I mention that the Republican nominee is down seven points?

In debate and argumentation, there’s a concept called the “rule of three”—that is, if you can come up with three examples to support your argument, you’ve got a pretty good argument. And so, for example, if one were to make the argument that Obama has strange radical associations, one could bring up Bill Ayers. And check, the McCain campaign has done that. And of course, there’s Reverend Wright, who McCain has stayed away from. So no check there. And no check, of course, for Alinsky-Lucifer. So McCain is left with the “rule of one,” which isn’t much of a rule. If McCain won’t bring up Wright, I guess it’s no surprise that he’s not bringing up Alinsky-Lucifer, assuming his campaign even knows about it.

The point of the “rule of three” is to make a sustained argument, to paint a comprehensive picture, to build an overall narrative—so that nobody can say that any one “hit” is just a cheap shot. That’s what happened to McCain with Ayers; the Obamans, and their allies in the media, said that it was just a “one off,” the sort of incidental association that happens in the course of a public career. And McCain had no good comeback, no additional opposition-research arrows to pull from his quiver.

So the Obama-Alinsky-Lucifer connection is left to float around in the vast soup of the Internet—plenty of mentions, here and there, but no real impact.

But had McCain really gone after Ayers AND Wright AND Alinsky-Lucifer, all at once, he would have had a strong argument that Obama was, and is, well out of the mainstream. And then all the information about Tony Rezko, Emil Jones, and the scandal-ridden Daley machine, would be all the more compelling to reporters and voters, because, as they would have to admit, a “pattern has emerged.”

And, for that matter, let’s talk about the great state of Illinois, where three governors in the last 40 years—Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, and George Ryan—ended up not only convicted, but imprisoned. And a fourth, incumbent Rod Blagojevich, may also end up in the clink. That’s quite a streak of corruption. And what does Obama have to say about any of that? And what did he know, and when did he know it?

If the McCain campaign had been on its game, its opposition researchers would have gone through every single day of Obama’s life since he first set foot in Chicago in 1987. Everyone he met, everything he did. And then, having amassed all that information, the McCainiacs would have made the rest of us know about it—in a sustained, organized, and unrelenting volley.

That’s how you win a presidential campaign, even amidst hard times for your party.

2008-10-07T19:31:00.002-04:00

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL CONFIRMS: YES, IT IS A WALL STREET BAILOUT

Yes, it is a Wall Street bailout—a bailout for Wall Street, first and foremost. But don’t take my word for it. Trust the hometown newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, to provide the scoop. According to one informed estimate, the same Wall Streeters who got us into this mess could make another $100 billion for their help in “cleaning it up.”

The role of lobbyists, descending on the $700 billion—oops, make that $850 billion, including additional earmarks—bailout bonanza has been much reported on. Sample headline in The Hill newspaper: “With bailout passed, lobbyists look to get in the game.” The paper quotes Rich Gold, head of Holland and Knight’s government relations and regulatory practice, declaring, “This is going to be a big trend, in all honesty, for the next three to five years.” And outside-the-beltway birds of prey, too, are circling overhead, including Rudy Giuliani. The likes of Gold and Giuliani might look forward to making millions. But the real money, denominated in billions, is to be found back on Wall Street.

Let’s get right to the Journal: an article by Deborah Solomon and Aaron Luccheti in Tuesday’s edition. Here’s the lede: “The Treasury Department, seeking to jump-start its $700 billion rescue, is giving financial institutions two days to submit proposals to work as asset managers for the program. Treasury's request for proposals makes clear that it wants large, established firms with significant assets to work for the government's program to buy mortgage-backed securities and other distressed assets.” [emphasis added, all bolds to follow are mine]

In other words, the big get bigger. The Journal continues: “To qualify, institutions must already manage at least $100 billion. Firms that want to manage whole loans, such as residential and commercial mortgages, must already oversee at least $25 billion in such loans or prove that they have capacity to handle that much…. Market observers say there are just a handful of firms that could handle such a large portfolio of assets.”

So this is not for the little guy. And the big guys will apply. The Journal explains: “Since plans for the bailout plan were announced, a range of firms—from large investment banks to boutique real-estate companies—have been angling to grab some of the advisory business. Many are hungry for this work because their sales, financing and other traditional forms of real-estate business have dried up with the credit crisis.” Translated, this means that Wall Street firms, having destroyed their own nest, are now looking to Uncle Sam to re-feather it for them.

Some of the big companies mentioned by the Journal include Pimco, Blackrock, Legg Mason, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. “There are so many people who need something to do,” says John Douglas, former general counsel of the Resolution Trust Corporation (an earlier government bailout outfit, which disposed of $394 billion from 1989 to 1995), who is now a partner at the law firm of Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker.

The Journal provides a look ahead into the new enterprise, now being sketched out behind closed doors in Washington and New York: “The asset managers will have significant power… the institutions are expected to assist Treasury in determining which assets to buy, when to buy them and whether to sell or hold them.”

Mallory Factor, a businessman in Charleston, S.C. with a background in New York finance, estimates that costs, fees, and expenses—to myriad advisers, lawyers, consultants, rating agencies, as well as money managers—associated with the bailout could total as much as one percent a year. One percent of $700 billion is $7 billion; if we multiply that over five years, that’s $35 billion. “But I think this will go higher than $700 billion, to easily more than a trillion,” Factor told me. “And the cleanup process could last a decade.” If so, then fees for Wall Streeters could easily hit $100 billion.

But that’s not all. As the Journal further explains, “One of Treasury's biggest hurdles will be handling conflicts of interest that are likely to arise. Companies that qualify for Treasury's program are likely to have a financial stake in the very assets they will be charged with buying and selling.”

That’s known as a conflict of interest, and oftentimes, folks who violate their fiduciary responsibility end up paying a fine, or even going to jail. But not anymore. In this Paulson-ized new world, it is understood that conflicts of interest come with the territory. As the Journal puts it, “Treasury doesn't expect to eliminate all conflicts of interest, but is hoping to minimize them, according to a person familiar with the matter.” Got that? The Department of Treasury will do everything it can to “minimize” conflicts of interest.

So now we know. Lobbyists and fixers will make millions, and Wall Streeters, even those with unclean hands, will make billions. We are looking at a bull market in morally hazardous profiteering. It’ll be a great time to be a muckraker, too—but the Wall Streeters, having written the rules that require them only to “minimize” their conflicts of interest, will just shrug off the criticism.

Once again, they will go laughing all the way to the bank. But of course, they’ve been there before.

2008-09-30T17:41:00.001-04:00

How To Make the Bailout Bill (More) Acceptable.

Is the Axis of Arrogance—the bipartisan bunch supporting the bailout bill—plotting to get rich(er) off your $700 billion? Of course they are! That’s why they are so desperate to get the bill enacted, so desperate that they are practicing economic terrorism on nervous Americans, threatening to crash the economy, just to get their way.

For this Axis of Arrogance, some things are worth fighting for. Such as $700 billion, with the promise of plenty more where that came from—that’s worth fighting for. But here’s a way to take away most of their fun: Put into the bailout bill a stipulation that all governmental transactions have to be online, in real time, so that everyone can see what everyone else is doing.

One of the many reasons to oppose the bailout bill is the looming prospect that lobbyists will circle that $700 billion like “birds of prey,” as John McCain so memorably observed. Back rooms in Washington DC aren’t smoke-filled anymore, but the rooms where lobbyists meet are well in the back, out of sight. And you can be sure that every lobbyist in town is waiting to open up a new “practice,” which will consist mostly of figuring out how to help banks sell distressed financial instruments to the government at a higher price than they would otherwise get. (One suggested name for the new entity, by the way, is the Securitized Housing Insurance Trust.)

And of course, Members of Congress, and activist groups such as ACORN, will seek to oversee the process of doling out that $700 billion. That’s right, the same people who brought you Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—and before that, the Savings & Loan bailout—are looking forward to “serving” the public once again. They just don’t want you to know about it—and they certainly don’t want you to see it.

But there is a solution: full disclosure. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis observed nearly a century ago, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” And that has always been true. In the 90s, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich put actual drafts of legislation online, through the Thomas system. More recently, Sen. Barack Obama has teamed up with conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to begin making federal spending more transparent. And conservative activist Grover Norquist has teamed up with Ralph Nader to make state government spending fully transparent; already, in nine states, you can go online and see how they are spending your money.

So now, before anybody even thinks about enacting a bailout bill, let’s make it totally transparent. As in totally transparent. That is, put all the distressed financial instruments on the Internet, via eBay—or better yet, some totally open-access system—so that everyone can analyze the documents and make a bid for them. That would set a fair-market price for each of these pieces of paper.

Now Secretary Paulson, of course, has said he wants to pay more than fair-market price for these securities, as a way of paying off his friends. Oops, I meant to say, “injecting liquidity into the system”! Forgive me.

But if the Securitized Housing Insurance Trust, or whatever it’s called, chooses to overpay for an instrument, well, that will all be online, fully visible to one and all. And Presidents and the rest of the political class will be held visibly accountable.

Now let’s add a provision mandating that all lobbying and “consulting” fees be fully disclosed. We might still get a legislative turkey, but at least we’ll know how badly we’re being ripped off. Down to the penny.

Posted on FoxForum this afternoon.

2008-09-29T17:40:00.003-04:00

Two more takes on the financial crisis. First, I invoke Andrew Jackson.

And then, Howard Beale.

2008-09-26T10:26:00.003-04:00

The Bailout: Why Are President Bush and the Democrats Working Against Congressional Republicans?

Another post this morning:

In Washington, it’s a showdown between the representatives of Wall Street and the representatives of Main Street. But have you noticed that the old partisan alliances are reversed? It’s the Democrats who are now the Wall Street Party. And Republicans—with the conspicuous exception of President Bush—are now the Main Street Party.

Consider: President Bush proposed the $700 billion plan; after days of hiding behind the Secretary of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, Bush finally emerged from the sidelines Wednesday night to tout the plan in prime time. Just this morning, he spoke again in favor of his plan, while again taking no questions from pesky reporters.

But the Congressional Democrats, who mostly despise Bush, are also mostly for the Bush plan. Sure, they made some cosmetic changes in the bailout proposal, but they have never wavered in their basic endorsement.

So who’s against the plan? It’s Congressional Republicans who are getting in the way. They are the heroes of the hour. Although outnumbered, these brave Capitol Hill GOPers have stopped official Washington in its tracks. Why? Because the Democratic majority, supporting the bailout, doesn’t actually dare to vote for it unless they know that most Republicans will vote for it, too. And that’s because the Democrats fear that this bailout legislation is deeply unpopular with the country. So the only way that Democrats can vote for the bill and be safe this November is if Republicans also put their names on the legislative dotted line. Not a profile in courage for Democrats, of course, but it’s smart practical politics for them to demand some “cover.”

But let’s step back a minute. How did it come to pass that President Bush is siding with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? What thought process led the Administration to support a big-government bill that the Republican grassroots all despise? Bush, of course, never met a Cheney-esque secret plan that he didn’t like. And it would also seem that seven-and-three-quarters years in office have totally disconnected him from rank-and-file Republicans. Remember his support for the ill-fated immigration “amnesty” bill back in 2004? And after that misguided legislation was beaten back, he proposed it again in 2007. What was he thinking?

For their part, the Democrats are emerging as the new party of the rich, the party of Wall Street, the party that champions financiers at the expense of producers. For years now, the most affluent precincts in the country—mostly on the two coasts—have been solidly Democratic. And in 2008, the polls show that upper-income voters mostly support Barack Obama. And Obama, of course, guided by the likes of Robert Rubin, has been quietly supportive of the deal. Indeed, Obama personally epitomizes the Democrats’ new political arrangement: He was raised mostly poor, then worked mostly with the poor, but now he is rich and works mostly with the rich—his campaign is a well-financed corporation. Yet he has maintained his popularity with the poor. For their part, the Republicans now represent the majority of middle-income voters—Main Street. But the Democrats, with their political pincer movement, from the rich above and the poor below, have the clear electoral advantage in 2008.

So it’s understandable that the Democrats would want to take care of “their” people at the top. That’s the revised Democratic model: The same old socialism for the poor, of course, in the form of the bureaucratic welfare state, and a new kind of socialism for the rich, in the form of this bailout.

In addition, the Democrats have some sordid secrets to protect—and Paulson & Co. are helping them keep hidden. Much of the overall financial crisis can be traced back to bad mortgages made to unqualified buyers at the behest of Democratic poverty advocates; it was a neat arrangement, poor Democrats got houses, as rich Democrats got richer by manipulating the financial paper. But the Bush administration, eager for a deal with the Democrats, has made it clear that it won’t point fingers. For their part, Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) are returning the favor by pushing the bill forward.

So only Congressional Republicans—the single most implacable figure being Sen. Richard Shelby, the Rock of Alabama—are taking a firm stance against this monstrosity. They even seem to have brought along John McCain, who has taken various positions on the bailout over the last few weeks. But bravo for the Congressional Republicans. After years of embarrassments and scandals, the Capitol Hill GOP has rediscovered principle and honor. And so rediscovered the glory of genuinely representing the people, against the powerful.

I am reminded of Aragorn’s Battle Speech at the Black Gate in the third of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The King tells his outnumbered troops:

I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.

An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day!

This day we fight!!

By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!!!

And so, in the Tolkien story, the Men of the West are triumphant. But today, in the real world, could the Republican Men and Women of Capitol Hill yet prevail? The Washington DC conventional wisdom, as of Friday, is that the Bush Administration/Democratic/Wall Street juggernaut will eventually bring the Congressional GOP to heel. If so, that would be the final victory of Wall Street over Main Street.

But maybe not. Maybe ordinary people will win this epic struggle.

2008-09-25T16:16:00.004-04:00

Let’s Bail Out Main Street NOT Wall Street

I just posted this on the FoxForum at Foxnews.com

Who should we bail out: Wall Street? Or Main Street? According to today’s reports, Washington has made its choice clear—Wall Street will get the bailout. The White House and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, seem to agree: Help Goldman Sachs, not Joe Sixpack. But there are alternatives, if the people will order their “leaders” to pay attention to them, instead of the lobbyists and bankers who are currently calling the shots.

The emerging bipartisan consensus—the original bailout, plus a few new provisions concerning oversight—is the epitome of “trickle down.” Wall Street made bad decisions, but Wall Street is too big to fail, so we must give them $700 billion, so that the rest of us can avoid a recession. Got that? The Wall Street message is, “We screwed up, so give us money, otherwise, you’ll be sorry.”

Amazingly, that argument—top-down piracy at its most naked—is carrying the day in Washington. If one ever needed proof that the government is the tool of the ruling class, this is Exhibit A.

So what’s the alternative? Mallory Factor, a South Carolina businessman, has a better idea: “Bail out homeowners, not lenders,” he says. “Any qualified buyer who wants to buy a house,” he says, “could buy one at a guaranteed low interest rate, of, say, 3.5 percent. And any qualified homeowner who wants to refinance could get the same rate.” If that happens, Factor predicts, “There would be a flood of liquidity into the system, as people bought houses again, which would also help reduce the housing-stock overhang. In addition, as people refinanced, all these instruments, such as collateralized mortgage obligations, which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have choked on, would once again start performing. And that would save the banks and many investors, by saving homeowners and homeownership.” In other words, trickle up, not trickle down.

The current interest rate for a standard 30-year mortgage is around 6 percent. At that rate, the payments on a $300,000 mortgage work out to $1,799.65 a month. By contrast, at Factor’s proposed rate 3.5 percent, the payment would be just $1,347.13 a month. That’s a whopping difference, especially for homeowners who might have paid more for a house than it is currently worth. And at 8 percent, which many adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) have shot up to, the monthly bill is a prohibitive 2,201.29 a month.

This interest-rate buy-down is the elegant heart of Factor’s plan. And who would do the buying down? “The federal government,” Factor answers bluntly. “This is a government buy-down of interest rates, but it would benefit homeowners first, and only then, second, the banks.” But, he notes, the buy-down is only for qualified borrowers. So the banks would still lose a lot of money. Which is good, since they need to be reminded not to make this mistake again. And since there’s no Fannie or Freddie any more to buy these dubious loans in the future, the banks will have to be careful, once again, about who is a qualified borrower, and who is not. The government, Factor reminds, would only be on the hook for the costs above 3.5 percent—the banks would be responsible for the first 3.5 percent, and for the principal.

That’s bad news for bankers, Factor adds, but good news for taxpayers: He estimates that his interest-rate buy-down plan would cost Uncle Sam perhaps $200 billion (more if interest rates rose, less if interest rates fell). But it would surely be cheaper, he suggests, than the trillion or more that the Washington plan seems destined to cost. And once again, Factor’s plan would focus on Main Street, not Wall Street—surely a substantial virtue in and of itself.

“The Washington plan,” Factor observes, “is like the government going to a bunch of car dealers, and saying, ‘You’ve got a bunch of cars in your warehouse that nobody wants to buy, because most of them are lemons. How did this happen? Because you didn’t bother to kick the tires or otherwise examine them before you ought them from the factory. But because we’re the government, Uncle Sugar, we will buy them off you, deliberately overpaying, big, so that you can take our cash and get back in the car-retail business.’”

And yet there’s an obvious “moral hazard” in that arrangement: How do we know that these myopic car dealers will do a better job tire-kicking the next time?

Washington’s answer is “more regulation,” but that regulation generally just creates another layer of bureaucracy, as opposed to genuine protection. Factor’s approach is much simpler: Under his plan, banks will get a bunch of new mortgage applicants all seeking the government-subsidized rate of 3.5 percent; then the banks, for their own protection, will have to figure out who will be able to pay back their loans.
Of course, if the rate were a guaranteed 3.5 percent, plenty of homeowners would rush to refinance their existing higher-rate mortgages. That’s fine with Factor: “That would create the liquidity that banks need.”

Factor freely concedes that his solution is not perfect: “There are no really good answers to this disaster,” he allows. “There are just less-bad answers, that minimize the cost to the taxpayers, and that teach the banks and Wall Street a harsh but useful lesson in market economics.”

And of course, to the rest of us, weary of being ripped off by Wall Street shysters who are using Washington to rip us off a second time, the Factor Plan sounds like a pretty good deal.

2008-09-24T11:02:00.011-04:00

Jim Pinkerton's takes on the financial crisis, published in Politico.com's "Arena" section. I published this last Sunday:

The biggest flaw in the Administration bailout package: It could all happen again. The system doesn’t need just fixing, it needs decentralizing. Financial institutions should be big enough to fail—and never any bigger. We need compartmentalization, also known as federalism.

The current crisis was caused by mega-financial institutions that could gamble their money—and lose it. And they did. But first, they grew to the point where they couldn’t be allowed to fail. That’s why even a staunch free-marketeer such as Larry Kudlow supported the AIG bailout. “A collapse of AIG would have been unfathomable,” he wrote on Saturday. “It is simply too interconnected globally.”

Well OK, then, AIG was too big. When even free-marketeers want the government to step in, that’s proof that size matters. In a bad way. But the American people cannot let themselves be hostage to the financial megalomania of casino-capitalist empire builders.

It might, indeed, be the responsible thing to vote for a bailout, but it is irresponsible to allow such a meltdown to happen again. And it will happen again if banks, investment houses, and insurance companies are allowed to grow this big once again. Adding another layer of regulations and record-keeping will make work for more lawyers and more accountants, but if the basic business model survives—gambling with other people’s money, and lots of it—then we will right back into deep doodoo soon enough, except that the dollar totals will have a few more zeroes. Remember Sarbanes-Oxley? What good did that do?

As my colleagues at the New America Foundation, Sherle Schwenninger and Michael Lind, have argued for years, we need different kinds of banks to do different things. So the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act—which solved this problem once before—should be restored, so that the bank down the street once again is limited to only accepting deposits from its neighborhood and only making loans to locals. That’s a boring low-margin business, to be sure, but it’s mostly a safe business. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, investment bankers and speculators would be free to speculate, but they wouldn’t be free to speculate with the capital base of Main Street.

In addition, the states should reclaim their role as laboratories of democracy—and laboratories of the economy. Leaders of each state should figure out how much money they are losing in this deal—that is, how much of that projected $1 trillion they are “contributing.” Or, to put it another way, how much of an income transfer is the state of New York reaping? How much is Manhattan gaining at the expense of all the rest of us?

Politicians across the 50 states might be tempted to demagogue these wealth-transfer data, but there is the not-so-little concern of avoiding a depression.

Instead, politicians should say, “I will vote for this bailout, AND I will also insist that we compartmentalize, or federalize, the solution. How? We should establish a state bank, or a regional bank, to keep capital right here in (fill-in-the-blank) state or region.” If South Carolina and North Dakota keep more of their money in the first place, to be invested in local projects, that will be good news for South Carolinians and North Dakotans. And it will be bad news for money-hungry Manhattanites, plotting their next incomprehensible derivate swap; they will be free to gamble their money, and nobody else’s.

And that would be good news for the rest of us.

And this today, Wednesday:

If the Bush administration really believed that the Paulson proposal was absolutely vital, it would be accompanied by a) the President's prime time speech to the nation; b) the resignations of top administration officials who have been overseeing the situation heretofore; or c) a tax increase, specifically, a "Tobin Tax" on speculation, perhaps balanced with a reduction in the tax rate on long-term capital gains. But if the administration can't rouse itself to even do a), then it's obviously not that serious a situation.

The situation of Paulson himself is particularly egregious. Having been in charge at Treasury for more than two years and issued innumerable "sunny skies" forecasts, he now wants a $700 billion blank check to oversee the bailout of his once and future colleagues.

His swift exit from the scene ought to be a rock-bottom minimum requirement.

2008-09-11T22:39:00.002-04:00

Al-Qaida hikes 'dirty bomb' efforts/ British intelligence issues global-wide warning

That's the headline today atop an important article in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Here's the most important material:

LONDON -- Britain's MI6 intelligence service has issued a global-wide priority warning to all security services that Islamic terrorists now are closer to obtaining material to create a "dirty bomb" to launch against Western targets, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Osama bin Laden long has made this a priority and reinforced it with regular messages from his mountain redoubt in the northwest province of Pakistan. He repeatedly has said every "true Muslim must make it his duty to assist in all ways possible to find the next powerful weapon to destroy our enemies."

Last weekend, Pakistan elected a new president, the controversial Asif Ali Zardari. He had served a nine-year jail term on corruption charges he has strongly denied. But MI6 agents fear he has little ability to provide strong leadership against the new wave of Islamic extremism al-Qaida has launched across the country.

Groups such as the newly formed Pakistan Taliban have proclaimed they are focusing on creating a "dirty bomb."

MI6 agents based in Islamabad fear the mounting instability in Pakistan will make it easier for them to do so.

While Pakistan is the only Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal, it has in the past provided its expertise to Iran.

Pakistan's Islam bomb was developed in the 1990s by the rogue scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. He sold the results to pariah states like North Korea and Libya. He was placed under house arrest by Pervez Musharraf.

2008-09-11T22:33:00.000-04:00

SEVEN YEARS AFTER 9-11: THE PYRAMID OF PREPAREDNESS

Seven years ago today, America was attacked.

So now, seven years later, what to do Americans think about the prospects for another attack? And the aftermath? A new nationwide poll provides some answers.

According to the Washington DC-based Benenson Strategy Group, nearly two-thirds of Americans say that they are aware of the danger of a “dirty bomb” (that is, a radiological dispersion device). But less than half, 47 percent, say that they are confident that the government is prepared. And only 42 percent say that they themselves would know what to do in the wake of a dirty-bomb attack. Just 34 percent say that the government has done a good job of informing people about what to do.

A dirty bomb is especially insidious because components for such a weapon are spread so widely across the United States. Deadly “dual use” materials are found in medical offices, industrial sites, and, in minute quantities, even in household devices, such as smoke detectors. And yet radiation is radiation: If enough radioactive material is gathered together, and then dispersed in a malevolent manner, thousands of Americans, even millions, could be at risk. That’s a problem.

The Radiological Threat Awareness Coalition (R-TAC), which commissioned this opinion survey, believes that the government has indeed done much to prepare for a dirty bomb—but it needs to do more. R-TAC believes that the government has been less effective at communicating information about what to do in the wake of a dirty-bomb attack. And yet public awareness isn’t just a job for the government, it’s a job for all of us.

Interestingly, just 27 percent of Americans know that a medical antidote to radiation poisoning exists. Broadening awareness of post-attack medical solutions might not be everyone’s duty, but if—some say when—such an attack comes, everyone will surely want to receive treatment. So now is the time to look ahead, and think ahead.

The challenge for all those involved in homeland security, in both the public and the private sector, is to strike the right note. We must not be naïve about the risks, but we must also not give in to either panic or fatalism. With the right mix of duty and diligence, we can protect our country while at the same time protecting our civil liberties.

To keep us safe, R-TAC envisions a Pyramid of Preparedness. Here’s the architecture: At one of the four corners of the base, there’s the government—federal, state, and local. These are the people and agencies tasked with overseeing and coordinating the effort at detection, and, if that fails, response and recovery. At another corner of the pyramid are the men and women of science—those who can build the sensors, those who can invent the cures. At another corner is the business community—those who can mass-produce, at the lowest possible cost, the tools for protection and remediation. And at the fourth corner is the citizenry. As individuals and as groups (including R-TAC), we all have an obligation. In a time of possible emergency, we are all our brother’s, and sister’s, keeper.

Together, R-TAC hopes, the four corners at the base of this Pyramid will converge into an Apex of Awareness—alert to threats, quick to respond. We have seen the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill, the one with the eye in it. That image is a reminder: If we are looking out together, we are more likely to be safe.

The results of the R-TAC public opinion survey tell us that the America people are aware of the dirty-bomb danger, but they need to know more. They need to see more—and that’s where the Pyramid of Preparedness comes in. It might seem visionary, but we have all seen what happens when there is no vision.

2008-08-27T17:34:00.003-04:00

I am have been writing a lot of late, here, there, and everywhere.

2008-08-16T15:43:00.005-04:00

I have a new piece up at The Huffington Post, explaining how the 44th President of the United States, and the 38th Governor of California, teamed up to solve the energy and environmental crises.

And you can also watch me on "Fox News Watch," at 6:30 pm ET on Saturdays.

2008-08-02T17:23:00.002-04:00

I am now blogging regularly for the "FoxForum" at Foxnews.com.

2008-01-27T08:15:00.001-05:00

Voting With My Feet--Why I Quit Everything to Go Volunteer for Mike Huckabee.

(From the January 28 issue of The American Conservative .)

Warren, Michigan -- I love Ed Rollins like a brother, but it’s Mike Huckabee who inspired me to return to politics—for such a time as this.

Rollins was my boss at the Reagan White House in the early 80s, and then I followed him to the Reagan-Bush ’84 re-election campaign—and thus into morning-in-America glory. We have kept up ever since. And over the last few years, we have both returned to the church; he’s Catholic, I’m Protestant. And we both, from our different perspectives, became fans of Governor Huckabee. Ed and I both agreed that Governor Huckabee combined solid conservatism, a gentle manner, and a willingness to try new things that reminded us of, yes, Ronald Reagan.

So when the call came, I was ready to hear it. I resigned from Fox News and from Newsday, and signed on as a Senior Adviser, traveling around with the campaign. (I don’t know what my status with TAC is; if this piece runs, I’ll know I’m still a contributing editor.) But don’t let my fancy new title fool you: Among my greatest accomplishments has been figuring out how to print a document from my laptop at Kinkos. And yes, I’m re-experiencing campaign life: such as not being able to tell whether your heart is beating faster because you hear something inspiring, or because you think you might have made an error in a policy paper, or because you have drunk too much coffee and eaten too many donuts.

Actually, not donuts, because the Huckabee campaign is lean, if not mean. Without anywhere near the sorts of resources commanded by some other candidates, we bump along without the perks that many campaigns enjoy. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not The Grapes of Wrath for us out here, but it’s not the J.W. Marriott, either.

As for Governor Huckabee, he is a low-cal man. Many people know about his epic diet—the loss of more than 100 pounds—but what sets Governor Huckabee apart from most weight-losers is that he was governor of Arkansas at the time, and so he had the opportunity to convert his own experience into a teachable moment for the citizens of his state. Some will call it sappy, others will call it “Love Thy Neighbor.” Now he is a believer in prevention, including both better diet and more exercise; as he says on the stump, “We don’t have health care, we have sick care.” That is, people stop taking care of themselves, they get sick prematurely, and somebody pays the tab. There’s not enough money for that kind of health care.

But the governor is not judgmental; he knows he came from the sort of family where eating too much wasn’t such a bad idea—because you could never be too sure about that next meal. As he reminds audiences, “I know the stone from which I was hewn, I know the rock from which I was quarried.”

Like the minister he once was, he pauses to offer a word of encouragement—to an old lady in a walker, to an unemployed husband and father, or to a gymnasium full of Christian homeschoolers in St. John, Michigan; he first apologized for interrupting their basketball game. Then he said to them, “You will face giant challenges in your life, but you are never taller and stronger than when you are on your knees praying to God.” Then he wrapped up, told them to have a good game—and “remember to show sportsmanlike conduct.”

But for adults, Governor Huckabee has a more serious message. Here’s the headline of The Detroit Free Press on Tuesday, January 15: “Huckabee appeals to working class/On factory tour, he cites tax plan, family-friendly efforts.” The Governor is for free trade, but he is also for fair trade. If the Chinese are “cheating” by putting lead paint on toys and poison in dog food, well, that’s not fair. If American workers have to meet stringent labor and environmental standards, then they shouldn’t be left unprotected to compete against workers who don’t get the benefit of those social-contract basics. Makes sense to me. Is it really a good idea to export our factories overseas, so that the American middle class is hollowed out? So that others can generate CO2 without regard to emissions controls? So that China, say, can develop its arsenal of non-democracy? I don’t think so.

Mike Huckabee, mindful of the Truman precedent, wants a new Fair Deal for Americans. He cares about their jobs, but he also cares about traditional family values, including the rights of the unborn. Plus, he was a great governor, he is a great speaker, and he is a very nice guy.

So that’s why I’m here.

2007-12-08T17:20:00.000-05:00

Ends Against the Middle

Are the Democrats really the party of the rich? Well, they certainly are the party of the plutocratic chatterers, from Robert Rubin to George Soros on the east coast, to David Geffen and the Googlers on the west coast. Meanwhile, in the heartland, Warren Buffett holds lonely liberal court.

And they all, of course, read The New York Times, still a rich man’s publication, even if the Sulzbergers themselves are fading fast. Yes, plenty of rich Republicans remain, but even among their ranks, many of the old GOP dynasties—Rockefeller, Heinz, Harriman—are now notably Democratic.

The phenomenon of limousine liberals has been around since the 60s—ever since the Ford Foundation started funding radical multiculturalists, ever since Leonard Bernstein hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panthers, ever since rich liberals such as Teddy Kennedy embraced forced busing while sending their own kids to private schools. In 2005 Michael Barone took note of “the trustfunder left”; the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, voted 70 percent for John Kerry, while on the other coast, Kerry picked up 73 percent of the Martha’s Vineyard vote. In addition, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee won such rich-nomad spots as Aspen, Sun Valley, and Boulder.

On November 5 of this year, The Heritage Foundation’s Michael Franc, op-ed-ing in The Financial Times, calculated that Democrats now represent the majority of the nation’s wealthiest Congressional districts. “More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats,” Franc observed—which would include, of course, such obviously affluent states as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Washington.

Franc’s findings provoked a furious reaction. “Silly New Wingnut Meme: Democrats Are The ‘Party Of The Rich’” headlined TalkingPointsMemo.com; DailyKos.com was similarly nasty. Those two liberal websites, of course, are more notable for their Democratic partisanship than for any consistently lefty ideology. And so naturally, those two sites sought to inoculate the Democrats from the charge that they are now belong to bloggers and billionaires—that being precisely the thesis of Matt Bai’s recent book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.

Bai is a reporter for The New York Times, and that’s probably the only reason he got close enough to his subjects to hear them refer to evangelical Christians as “lizardheads” who live in “Dumbf__istan.” To be sure, Democrats have no monopoly on arrogance or asperity, but it is a Democratic Congress, now, that is showing no interest in closing the obvious capital-gains loophole that benefits hedge funders, of the type that hired John Edwards.

Meanwhile, journalists have made the same point as Franc: This is The Wall Street Journal, from November 16: “Affluent Voters Switch Brands/Stands on 'So-Called Moral Issues' Prove Costly for Republicans.” And here’s a headline from The Huffington Post—speaking of rich-Republicans-turned-rich-Democrats—from November 25: “Fortune 500 CEOs Favor Dems: Gobs Of Green Go To Blue Candidates.” Indeed, in their unguarded moments, even partisan Democrats seem giddy with their gilt; I found this August 21 headline, “Democrats Outraise Republicans 2-to-1,” on the website of the Democratic National Committee.

Of course, it can’t really be said that the Democrats are the party of the richest of the rich—because they have the poorest of the poor, too. From East LA to the Rio Grande Valley to the Deep South, donkeys rule.

So that’s the dual reality: The Democrats are safe in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, but they also rule among the poor. Look at Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—they themselves are poor, right?

So what, pray tell, do Barbra Streisand and Charlie Rangel actually agree on? Probably only this: The Americans in between them, the Middle Americans, are the common enemy. In* this reckoning, small towns and suburbia are subtly racist—except when they are overtly racist—toward people of color. And everybody on the port side of politics knows that “family values” is thinly disguised code for sexual repression and homophobia.

In fact, the normal, historic pattern of small “d” democratic politics is for the very rich and the very poor to ally themselves against the bourgeoisie. The poor look up at the working stiff of a foreman and see the hated Simon Legree. The rich look down the social ladder and see nothing but Babbitts and other small-minded reactionaries, who might well be pro-life.

For their part, the Republicans might as well get used to their new status as the middle class party. Being the party of the rich is good for fundraising, being the party of the poor is good for invoking moral authority—plus provoking the occasional riot—but being the party of the Silent Majority is the best for winning elections.

Published in the 12/17/07 issue of The American Conservative.

2007-11-28T13:11:00.000-05:00

THE SCHWARZENEGGER DOCTRINE

News item, October 27, 2007:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today spoke of the arsonists who set killer brushfire blazes in California: “We will hunt down the people that are responsible for that.” In addition, Schwarzenegger expressed special thanks to President George W. Bush for “being such a tremendous partner.”

Future news item, c. 2008:

In a major policy shift, Gov. Schwarzenegger today announced that he was no longer actively pursuing the arsonists, believed hiding in Nevada, who had devastated California last year and caused billions of dollars in property damage. “I know I pledged to ‘terminate’ those arsonists, but now we have new priorities. History summons us in a different direction. Our intelligence experts have identified even greater arson threats to California, as well as to our friends and neighbors. So now we must act immediately against grave and gathering threats, which could be launched at any time by remorseless pyromaniacs who hate us for no reason.”

Schwarzenegger, who early in his gubernatorial career seemed uncomfortable with soaring rhetoric, is now confidently using lofty language to describe the enemies of the Golden State. In particular, he has identified three states—Kansas, Nebraska, and Vermont—which form, he says, the “axis of ignition,” guilty of “state-sponsored pyromania.” Now, he continues, this axis poses an even greater danger than last year’s arsonists. And the danger could grow worse: “If these state-sponsors could gain access to WMC (‘weapons of mass conflagration,’) the fires of October 2007 would look, by comparison, like backyard barbeques.”

In the past, Schwarzenegger had warned, “Those who could become arsonists in the future are as bad as those who committed arson in the past.” More recently, the governor’s Sacramento-based “brain trust” enunciated a new policy agenda, which some dub “The Schwarzenegger Doctrine,” calling for “pre-emption” of fire-starting state governments across the US.

But Schwarzenegger insists that low-level enforcement efforts will continue in Nevada, where Golden State police agents are working with local authorities to apprehend suspected arsonist cells within in the Silver State. However, most analysts believe that the leading arsonists have fled even further, into the badlands of Utah. But Schwarzenegger dismisses any continuing danger from the 2007 arsonists, wherever they might be: “We have those arsonists on the run; they are ineffective, hiding in canyons. The real danger, now, comes from the ‘axis of ignition.’”

In particular, Schwarzenegger has singled out Kansas, led by Democratic governor Kathleen Sebelius. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, told reporters, “The weapons of mass conflagration that we know she is hiding could cause enormous damage in California.” Reminded that Sebelius says she does not possess such weapons, Schwarzenegger shot back: “OK, let her prove that she is not hiding WMC in Kansas.”

Schwarzenegger refuses to negotiate directly with Sebelius, but he has been persuaded to work with the National Governors Association (NGA), issuing demands to the Sunflower State—demands that neutral analysts equate to full surrender. And yet as those NGA negotiations drag on, Schwarzenegger says, “Time is running out.”

The California governor is believed to be preparing a pre-emptive strike against WMC sites in Kansas, with or without the NGA. Schwarzenegger is developing a “coalition of the willing”—including Indiana, Rhode Island, and Delaware—as allies in possible joint action against Kansas.

However, Schwarzenegger denies that any action is imminent. “Violence is our last resort.” But, he adds, “While I have no war plans on my desk, nothing is off the table.” He continues, “Kansans have just as much right to live their lives free from fire as Californians.”

Some have expressed concern about Schwarzenegger’s policy, fearing possible chaos in the Sunflower State. But Schwarzenegger dismisses those worries—“We are planning carefully for every possibility”—reminding Californians of the stakes as he sees them: “If you saw what I saw, the fires burning, from Malibu to San Diego, you would understand the need to take this fight to the enemy. We will make Kansas the central front in our war against fire—not that I have made any final decision about Operation Kansas Freedom.”

In fact, some Schwarzenegger advisers speak grandly of a “Greater Midwest Initiative,” to transform fire-usage across Middle America.

In other late-breaking developments, Schwarzenegger denied reports that he was building a secret prison site for suspected arsonists in Humboldt County. “That’s nonsense. We have all the prison space we need, now that we have re-opened Alcatraz and can give arson suspects the punishment—I mean, fair trials—that they deserve.”

Meanwhile, the Schwarzenegger administration brushes off reports of infiltration, into California, from Mexico. “There’s no danger to the south,” said a spokesman, “only folks coming across the border who need our help. Compassion does not stop at the Salton Sea.” The adviser added, “The Governor is looking east, laser-like, to the real threat—Kansas.”

Reprinted from the 11/19/07 issue of The American Conservative.

2007-11-19T16:28:00.000-05:00

I have created the Sovereignty Caucus and the American Sovereignty Caucus, as both blogs here on blogspot and as groups on Facebook. Everyone who shares my enthusiasm for protecting American Sovereignty--and by extension, the sovereignty of all law-abiding nations--is welcome to join one or both of these groups.

2007-10-22T11:06:00.000-04:00

This is the cover art for my piece, "The Once and Future Christendom," which appeared in the September 10, 2007 issue of The American Conservative.

Those interested in the geopolitical prescription herein might wish to join me at "The Council of the West" group on Facebook.com

2005-11-21T19:37:00.000-05:00

Read Jim's cover story on China in the November 7, 2005 issue of the American Conservative magazine.