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

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.

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

Just posted it on Fox News' Fox Forum.

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

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.

"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.

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”

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.

###

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.

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

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

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.

My tribute to Paul Weyrich.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.