The White House threatens Congress with the EPA

Fox news reported today that a top White House official "warned" Congress that, if it doesn't enact legislation to regulate "greenhouse" gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will assume a "command-and-control" role that could (read will) hurt business (i.e. the economy). This is bizarre.

The last I heard, the federal government only had three branches. The EPA clearly is not part of the judicial branch, so it must either be part of the executive branch or legislative branch (many federal agencies are actually arms of Congress). Yet the President's spokesman portrays the EPA as a rogue elephant threatening to trample the economy -- this may be accurate, but how did it come to pass?

The EPA is, in fact, part of the executive branch. Consequently, the President cannot credibly deny responsibility for its actions and their consequences. And he will have a hard time blaming regulations that haven't been enacted yet on his predecessor (although I wouldn't be surprised if he tried).

Ronald Reagan once famously declared that we are people who have a government and not the other way around. I am beginning to have my doubts.

Is Hamid Karzai more corrupt than Rod Blagojevich?

The President's new-found concern with corruption in the Karzai government is passing strange. The President, after all, is the product of Illinois and Cook County political machines, neither of which is celebrated for its moral rectitude. Those political organizations also produced Rod "pay to play" Blagojevich, who would be serving his second term as Illinois Governor, were it not for certain federal wiretaps. Given his own background, methinks the president doth protest too much.

Moreover, Hamid Karzai was the President of Afghanistan back in March 2009, when president Obama formulated his "comprehensive" strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, after extensive consultations with President Karzai's government, among others. Now he decides that the Karzai government may not be worthy of our support? Who did the president think he was partnering with back in March?

The president needs to wake up and smell the poppies.

Nuphedrine

The AGW debate continues

Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, has an excellent article in today's Wall Street Journal in which he discusses the many unresolved issues and paradoxes in the AGW debate.

The science is anything but settled.

Of boycotts and the news

Boycotts only work when everyone (or nearly everyone) complies with them. Once people start cheating, boycotts typically fall apart.

This principle applies to the news business as well. But the legacy media (also referred to as the mainstream media and old media) do not understand this. The major dailies and the networks ignored the Van Jones story for weeks until his midnight resignation forced them to report on it. Van Jones, of course, was forced to resign as the green jobs czar after cable news and talk radio aired some of the inane and occasionally-racist statements he made. The revelation that he was a truther was the final straw. The legacy media, however, was AWOL until the bitter end.

Now the legacy media is studiously ignoring Climategate. As Bret Stephens explains in his Wall Street Journal article:

"Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU."

Climategate is a huge story that is not simply going to fade away, especially with Copenhagen looming on the horizon. Yet the legacy media (with the obvious exception of the Wall Street Journal) has shown scant interest in it. I have not seen a single story about it in our local paper, the Houston Chronicle. That paper, however, does continue to blithely parrot the dire warnings of the very scientists whose objectivity is now being questioned.

When Abe Rosenthal was the editor of the New York Times, he liked to refer to himself as the "gatekeeper." The decision-makers at many of the major dailies and the television networks still seem to regard themselves as filling that role. What they don't realize is that talk radio, cable news, and the Internet have already filled the vacuum that they are trying to maintain.

No wonder the legacy media is withering on the vine.

The facts behind the energy debate

The experts tell us that we are running out of oil and natural gas. But then they've been telling us that at least since 1914, when the Bureau of Mines warned that US oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. This and many other useful facts can be found in George Will's latest Washington Post collumn.

In fact, we are discovering more domestic reserves of oil and natural gas every year.
Billions of barrels of oil have been discovered during the last decade in the Lower Tertiary trend in the Gulf of Mexico and the Bakken Formation (a.k.a. the Williston Basin), which lies beneath North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. The U.S. also has huge reserves of natural gas in various shale rock formations around the country. One formation, the Marcellus Shale in the eastern United States, may contain as much natural gas as the largest conventional field ever discovered. (In addition, the United States also has huge oil shale formations, and Canada, of course, has oil sands thay may contain more oil than Saudi Arabia.) So we are not going to run out of supplies of oil and natural gas any time soon.

Although the left touts solar and wind energy, they comprise only 1/6 of 1% of America's energy consumption. Compare that with coal, which currently provides 54% of our country's electricity (according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is not at all happy about this state of affairs). It is unrealistic to think that wind and solar will supply 20% of this country's energy in the foreseeable future.

The left regards wind and solar technology as new energy sources with vast potential. Unfortunately, that is not true. Wind power has been around for over four centuries (Don Quixote tilted at windmills, remember). The photovoltaic process utilized by solar panels was discovered in the 19th century. Albert Einstein wrote a paper in 1905 describing the nature of light and the photoelectric effect on which solar technology is based -- a paper for which he was later rewarded the Nobel Prize in physics. So neither technology is new, and it would be wildly optimistic to assume that either technology has huge, undiscovered potential.

The only compelling reason to wean ourselves from hydrocarbons and clean coal is the purported threat of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Contrary to the party line, many reputable scientists are skeptical about the fact and/or extent of AGW. And the documents recently obtained from many AGW proponents, including those at the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), strongly suggest that at least some of these proponents may have been cooking, or at least simmering, the scientific books.

Thank heaven the Copenhagen Summit is unlikely to result in anything substantive based on speculative and perhaps even fraudulent science.

Another wind-power demonstration project

The Houston Chronicle reported today that the Energy Department plans to award $200 million in grants for utility-scale energy storage products as part of the stimulus package enacted in February. The inability to efficiently store energy has long been the Achilles heel of the solar and wind power industries. Decades ago, scientists were looking into the possibility of using flywheels to store energy (it didn't pan out). And despite recent breakthroughs in battery design and materials, batteries are not even close to being a cost-effective method of storing energy so that it will be available when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing

One of the applicants is seeking $25 million to build a plant in California that will use compressed air that has been pumped into underground reservoirs to generate electricity when the wind turbines are unable to meet demand. According to the article, when additional energy is needed, "the air is released, heated and used to power turbines."

Apparently, the wind turbines will be used to generate electricity to sell to customers and to power the pumps that compress the air in the underground caverns. The air is then later released, heated (with what, coal, natural gas, oil?) and used to power turbines to generate additional electricity for sale. Can such a complex system possibly be economical? Color me skeptical.

Somewhere, Rube Goldberg is laughing.

Ludwig von Mises or John Maynard Keynes?

We are experiencing a fundamental debate about the economic policies the federal government should pursue. The title of this post summarizes the essential positions of the two main camps: do we follow the theories of Ludwig von Mises or the theories of John Maynard Keynes. These two theories are poles apart.

Ludwig von Mises wrote his seminal work "Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel" ("The Theory of Money and Credit") in 1912. Unfortunately, it was not published in English until 1934.

Mises theorized that credit markets are essentially self-regulating. Left alone, supply and demand will determine both the amount of credit available and the interest rates charged for it. If, however, the government artificially expands the amount of credit (money) available or artificially lowers interest rates, borrowing increases to imprudent levels, spurring unsound investment. Eventually, the level of unsound spending and investment rises so high it causes the economic system to crash. Mises foresaw the economic collapse that led the Great Depression and took steps to avoid its effects. {See the excellent 'article by Mark Spitznagel at WSJ online).

Unfortunately for our country, our leaders in the 1930s (as well as today) have chosen to follow the teachings of John Maynard Keynes. He published "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in 1936. Keynes essentially argued that the government could and should spend its way out of economic slumps and depressions. His ideas are embodied in current programs such as the stimulus bills, cash for clunkers, and the bailout programs for everyone from financial behemoths to low-income home buyers. Vice president Biden has confidently asserted that the country can spend its way out of insolvency (there is a reason he is commonly called "slow Joe"). Our political leaders are even floating the idea of yet another "stimulus" bill.

A friend once sagely observed that most politicians know as much about economics as a horse knows about algebra. I'm still waiting for our solons to prove him wrong.

Nuphedrine

Victor Davis Hanson on President Obama and the principles of U.S. foreign policy

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian. His October 28 article on the Wall Street Journal's online edition compares the foreign-policy mess that Harry Truman inherited upon unexpectedly being thrust into the presidency with that faced today by President Obama (Truman faced a far worse situation than does Obama). VDH's assessment is that Truman knew less about foreign-policy but learned faster than anyone could have reasonably expected.

The question VDH asks is: "Will an inexperienced Barack Obama, in the fashion of Harry Truman, learn quickly that the world is chaotic and unstable—best dealt with through strength and unabashed confidence in America's historic role galvanizing democratic allies to confront illiberal aggressors?

"Or will a sermonizing Mr. Obama follow the aberrant Democratic path of the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter: finger-wagging at allies, appeasing enemies, publicly faulting his less than perfect predecessors, and hectoring the American people to evolve beyond their supposed prejudices?"

No one knows the answer. But as VDH points out: "America awaits this president's choice. The world safety hinges upon it."

We live in hope.

Is Obama the new Nixon?

In my September 29 post, I discussed a few of the campaign promises that President Obama has already broken, namely promises of transparency in his administration, including his promise to post the log of White House visitors on the Web. As I noted then, President Obama could keep these promises simply with a stroke of a pen (perhaps I should have said with the click of a mouse).

In fact, President Obama is downright Nixonian in his efforts to stonewall both the public and the media--see Quin Hillyer's excellent op-ed on this subject in today's Washington Times:

"The administration repeatedly has stiff-armed Congress, the media, outside organizations and even a prestigious independent government commission. It has raised "none of your business" from an adolescent rejoinder to a public policy - to keep the public in the dark."

Why is President Obama flouting his promises of transparency? Apparently to enable the kind of pay-to-play shenanigans that are an integral part of the "Chicago way." Again, according to the Washington Times:

"During his first nine months in office, President Obama has quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.

"High-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, according to internal Democratic National Committee documents obtained by The Washington Times."

Now I am not shocked, shocked to learn that politicking is going on at the White House. But the level of hypocracy is rather breathtaking.

Recent developments in Obamaland

This week and we have a trifecta: three excellent columns about recent events in the Obama White House. The first is by Mark Steyn. His reference to "Mao Ze Dunn" is priceless.

Next, Charles Krauthammer weighs in with a column on the Fox Wars.

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson has a column about the rapidly-changing perceptions of, and dwindling support for, our new President (here).

One salient thought occurred to me even before reading these articles: President Obama has the will to wage an unrelenting war against Fox News, but not against the Islamic Jihadists in Afghanistan.

What is wrong with this picture?

Of vaccine shortages and government-run health care

If the federal government effectively takes over the United States health care system, how well will it run it? The current shortage of the H1N1 flu vaccine at a critical time may provide a clue. The issue, however, is complicated.

Vaccines are privately manufactured. But government's role as a major buyer of vaccines has increased dramatically, starting with the Vaccines for Children Program (VFC) in 1994. By 2002, VFC purchases alone were 41% of the total vaccine market, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local governments accounting for an additional 16%. (These figures are from an article by the National Center for Policy Analysis.) Members of the Clinton administration boasted at the time that the VFC was a dress rehearsal for Hillarycare. Since the federal government is now the single largest purchaser of vaccines in this country, it effectively controls the market.

Whether or not caused by government policies, there is a critical shortage of vaccine for the flu caused by the H1N1 virus. A study published on October 15 in Eurosurveillance and reported by the Washington Times predicts that almost two thirds of the population will become infected with the virus (though not necessarily exhibit symptoms) before the vaccine becomes widely available. The study was conducted by professors of Purdue University's statistics and mathematics departments. Canada, which already has the single-payer health system that Obama espouses, is in even more dire straits, because of their government's slowness to approve the vaccine.

Does this mean that the federal government will make a hash of our health care system? No, but it hardly inspires confidence.

The facts about health coverage in America

Senator Moynihan once famously observed that people are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. Given the plethora of numbers being strewn about as to the number of Americans unable to get health coverage, Senator Moynihan must be spinning in his grave.

President Obama, himself, has claimed both that 45 million Americans and 30 million Americans are uninsured. That is quite a spread, especially coming from a single source. A recent article sheds some much-needed light on this issue. Jeffrey H. Anderson, writing in the Washington Post (here), analyzed the Census Bureau's numbers and points out the following: while 46 million people are counted as uninsured, 9 million of those are not U.S. citizens. Moreover, the Census, itself, states that about 9 million people under report their coverage. So, according to Census data, 90% of Americans have health coverage.

Of the 28 million uninsured -- whom President Obama claims "cannot get coverage" -- 18% are between the ages of 18 and 34. For many of these young and healthy individuals, health insurance is a poor bargain that they simply choose to forego. Tellingly, almost half of the uninsured make more than $50,000 a year (more than a quarter make more than $75,000 a year). In short, 95% of Americans either have health coverage or could readily afford to purchase it if they chose to.

So President Obama's plan (he doesn't really have one, but, like him, we'll pretend he does) will cover the remaining 5% of Americans, right? Well, no. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 6% of Americans will remain uninsured even 10 years after the $1 trillion Senate Finance Committee bill is enacted into law (God forbid). So, according to the government's own statistics, Obama's proposed trillion dollar government takeover of our health care system will accomplish precisely nothing.

Let the debate begin.

Race baiting, Rush Limbaugh style.

In my September 25, 2009, post, I asked, rhetorically, if race baiting in this country was dead. The answer, of course, was no. Recent events have now demonstrated that race baiting in this country is not only alive and well, it may be worsening.

This week, it was revealed that Rush Limbaugh was a minority investor in a consortium seeking to buy the St. Louis Rams football team. Upon learning this, the Left reflexively jumped offside. CNN, MSNBC, and other purportedly-reputable media outlets rushed to condemn Limbaugh, falsely reporting that Limbaugh had made statements defending slavery on the merits, and saying that Martin Luther King's murderer deserved a medal. This country's premier race baiters, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, also piled on.


Rush has now been dropped from the Consortium.

Not surprisingly, it turned out these "news" reports were false. For starters, Rush has repeatedly said over the years that he, like Martin Luther King, dreams of a country in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Additionally, it beggars belief that Rush made these statements years ago, and no one noticed, much less expressed outrage, at the time.

The fake quotations apparently trace back to a website, which provided no documentation for the bogus quotes. CNN "explained" that it didn't bother to fact-check its story beyond its secondary, undocumented source.

So the legacy media (formerly known as the mainstream media) has sunk to this: CNN will take the time to fact-check a Saturday Night Live skit about Obama, but it won't take the time to fact-check its own news report.

Does CNN understand that it is becoming the new Comedy Channel?

President Obama 's non-strategy in Afghanistan

President Obama says we need a strategy in Afghanistan. Of course we do. But on March 27, he claimed to have forged a "comprehensive" strategy for Afghanistan after a thorough review that included consultations with the military, the leaders of various countries, and key members of Congress. He even appointed a new general to implement his new strategy. (See Charles Krauthammer's excellent Washington Post Article for more details.)

What changed? Nothing changed in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has not changed fundamentally for centuries. That is regrettable, but it hardly explains the President's decision to scrap a comprehensive strategy that he has only begun to implement.

What has changed is the the political landscape in the United States. Obama wanted the government takeover of health care to be completed before the August recess. That didn't happen, and his various schemes are becoming less popular by the week. And a cap and trade bill was supposed to have been passed before government-run healthcare. That bill is moribund. (And gays still can't serve openly in the military, and Guantánamo Bay is no closer to being closed.) In short, Obama is taking a lot of heat from the left, and committing the resources needed to implement a serious strategy in Afghanistan would only make matters worse.

Something had to give, and national security, to which Obama was never committed to begin with, was the obvious choice.

More regarding the current round of race baiting.

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on the current charges of racism with a column today entitled: The Obsolescence of a Slur. It is well worth reading.

BTW: Attorney General Eric Holder (who cravenly signed off on Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich) infamously called us a nation of cowards because we are allegedly unwilling to discuss racial issues. I wonder if the current discussion is what he had in mind.

Obama 's broken campaign promises

All presidential candidates make campaign promises that they cannot possibly keep once elected, e.g. eliminate waste, slow the growth of federal spending, lower the sea levels, etc. What has struck me about our current president, however, is the number of broken pledges that Obama could easily keep with the stroke of a pen.

Many of them involve transparency and the flow of information. Remember his promise to have the most transparent administration in the history of the country? It hasn't happened. Obama promised to publish the log of visitors to the White House on the White House website, so that people could see who was meeting with him and his key advisers. He hasn't done it. He promised to post the text of bills passed by Congress on the Internet for 72 hours before he signed them. Again, he hasn't done it.

Unfortunately, Congress seems to be taking its cues from the White House.Congressmen and senators are asked to vote on bills they've never had the opportunity to read. Senator Baucus objects to posting the text of his health-care overhaul bill on the Internet, because he claims (implausibly) that it would take two weeks to put it on the website. Even Olympia Snowe wonders why a two week delay is unacceptable given the magnitude of the legislation.

And then there is the matter of ethics: Obama promised that his administration would not hire lobbyists. But the one executive office in the Obama administration that is fully staffed is that which grants ethical waivers to the host of lobbyists who have joined the current administration. Such waivers are now routinely and expeditiously granted.

President Obama doesn't need new legislation or federal regulations to keep these promises. Did he ever intend to keep them?

Racist slurs from the left.

Further to my "End of Race Baiting" post, as Mark Steyn points out, racial slurs actually are tolerated by the left, as long as they are aimed at conservatives.

Mark Steyn on Obama and the U.N.

I wish I could write as well as Mark Steyn, but, since I can't, herewith his latest column regarding this week's events at the U.N.

Nuphedrine

The end of race baiting?

When people on the left want to curtail debate, they frequently hurl one of two epithets: fascist or racist. This is designed to silence people with whom they disagree, rather than engage them on the merits of whatever topic is under discussion. This tactic has been much in evidence of late.

"Fascist" isn't working terribly well these days, however, in no small measure because Jonah Goldberg, in his book, Liberal Fascism, has convincingly demonstrated that fascism is a doctrine of the left. "Nazi," after all, is shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers Party. Benito Mussolini was named after a prominent Socialist leader. This fact does not make modern-day lefties fascists of course, but it severely undercuts their reflexive claim that modern-day conservatives are.

This week, the left has been trotting out the "racist" canard. If you oppose a government takeover of the government healthcare system or Charlie Rangel defrauding the American taxpayers or Acorn using taxpayer money to aid and abet child prostitution rings, you're a racist. The aforementioned Jonah Goldberg also has a recent article on this tactic, entitled a Tackle Box Full of Race Bait.

Frankly, I am glad that the left has resorted to this sordid tactic so early in the debate, precisely because the charge is so ridiculous and unsupported that it too is losing its power to intimidate. Yes, President Obama is black, but, as he himself recently noted, he was black before he was elected President. And the country rejected government-run healthcare when the Clintons proposed it, even though the Clintons are white folks. In short, conservatives know that the charges of racism are malarkey, and they are saying so.

Now I am not so naïve as to believe that race baiting will end any time soon. It is a cheap and convenient tactic, and people with nothing constructive to say will continue to resort to it. But I am hopeful that race baiting's capacity to intimidate conservative voices will continue to decline. Then we can get back to debating the merits of the important issues that confront us.

Obama at the United Nations

Peter Wehner has an excellent critique of President Obama's speech to the U.N.

Charles Krauthammer on Maureen Dowd

Charles Krauthammer's take on Maureen Dowd"s latest collumn, priceless:


"As for Maureen Dowd, imagining a word [“boy”] that wasn't said: Well, in my previous profession, I saw a lot of people who heard words that weren't said. They were called patients. Many of them were actually helped with medication."

Venezuala's declining oil production

We know that Mexico's oil production is declining with no prospect of new supplies coming on-line in the foreseeable future. Now we have word that production in Venezuela is also declining. Bloomberg.com reports:

"What the media rarely report is that the existing plant in Venezuela is continuing to produce less and less oil every year--at this point roughly half of what it would normally be capable of extracting--because of bad management, the departure of qualified engineers, and plain old corruption, not to mention the squandering of petrodollars to buy political influence in Latin America and elsewhere (including Joe Kennedy's Massachusetts) instead of investing in maintenance, spare parts, and acquisition of new technology."

This merely confirms what many of us suspected, but it reinforces the need for the U.S. to aggressively develop its own natural resources. Mexico and Venezuela are two of our largest suppliers, and both are declining. Is anyone in Washington paying attention?

The Omnipresent Leader

I don't know if the furor over President Obama's address to the school children in overdone. But I, like many, find the accompanying materials originally drafted by "his" Department of Education "creepy." Mark Steyn, as usual, has an excellent take on the subject.

The war in Afghanistan

A lively debate over the war in Afghanistan has broken out, sparked by George Will's most recent column,Time to Get Out of Afghanistan. His column has already drawn responses from Frederick W. Kagan, Mark R. Levin, Rich Lowry, Mark Steyn, and others.
No doubt,many more will follow.

Each of these authors makes valid points. Afghanistan is a mess, both geographically and politically. I don't know what "victory" there would consist of. What are our near-term and long-term goals, and what price -- especially in blood -- are we willing to pay to achieve them? Maybe this debate will help to clarify these issues

Wars are inherently difficult and bloody undertakings with uncertain outcomes. I certainly don't claim to have any answers. I can only hope that our leaders are giving these issues as much thought as the columnists and bloggers are.

The best of Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter in 2008.

Here for your enjoyment and edification are John Hawkins's picks from Mark Steyn's 2008 columns. And here are his picks from Ann Coulter's 2008 columns. Enjoy!

Nuphedrine

Why is Obamacare such a mess?

Victor Davis Hanson explains why Obamacare is going over like a lead balloon.

Key grafs:

Liberal columnists decrying the Obama administration’s supposed lack of partisan fortitude and eagerness for a nasty fight for health care seem oddly detached from reality. The opposition to Obamacare would have gone nowhere had the president offered a concise plan, had his team kept repeating four or five logical and easily understandable talking points, and had he prepared a few pat answers to the more controversial elements of the plan, from the public option to so-called “end of life” panels to treatment of illegal aliens and the real cost.

Instead, Obama and his advisers, in lazy fashion, outsourced the plan to the partisan left-wingers of the Democratic party who are key House chairs. They in turn offered up a 1,000-page legalese mess, which the administration’s key players never read, and which Obama arrogantly thought he could wing through in a few weeks with his “hope and change” / “trust me” cadences.

Keith Hennessey's analysis of the uninsured

Keith Hennessey has an informative analysis of the true number of legal residents who are unable to obtain health insurance and are not eligible for existing government programs. It turns out the number is closer to 15 million than 50 million. It will surely help if we at least get the facts right.

Mexico's oil production continues to decline.

Mexico's energy minister announced yesterday that Mexico may pump as few as 2.6 million barrels of oil a day this year, down from about 2.8 million barrels per day last year. Production at Mexico's largest producing field, Cantarell, continues to decline. Mexico's state oil company, Pemex, has not even begun to develop the oil field located in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico that it is counting on to replace production from Cantarell.

If the current administration is doing anything to encourage production of our domestic oil and gas reserves, it has escaped my notice.

A simple plan.

I cribbed the title of this post from Jonah Goldberg, although it dates back at least to Jonathan Swift.

The Democrats are playing a semantic shell game with healthcare "reform." Various Democrat administrators and legislators , including President Obama, keep assuring us that their proposed legislation will do this and won't do that. Meanwhile, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sibelius has the ultimate copout, insisting that "the bill" hasn't even been written yet.

What should we do? That's where the simple plan comes in. We won't know what's in the final legislation, if any, eventually passed by Congress. Of course, neither will most of the Senators or Congressman who vote on it. All we can do is absolutely insist that, whatever bill they pass, will apply equally to all federal employees, including the President and the rest of the executive branch and Senators and Congressmen and their staff.

Oklahoma Senator Coburn's Amendment #226 would require all members of Congress and their staff to enroll in the newly-required public health insurance plan. We should insist that any bill that is passed include this provision. For me, this is a deal breaker.

Obama 's drop a dime Hotline

And you thought the Patriot Act was an infringement of civil liberties. Now the Obama White House wants us to report "fishy" statements on the Internet regarding Obamacare. The snitch e-mail address is flag@Whitehouse.gov. This is literally Orwellian. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says that the White House is not keeping a record of the people snitched on, but how would he know?

In fact, according to this Fox News article, the White House may be required to keep a record of such communications. Under a different federal statute, it may be illegal to keep such records. Go figure.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius assures(?) us weekly if not daily that the health-care bill is a work in progress. This week she chided people for criticizing Senator Arlen Specter for not having read the Senate version of the bill. Her "defense" of Specter was that the bill hasn't been written yet.

I have a question: if the legislation hasn't been written yet, and the drafts that do exist are continually being revised, what qualifies as a "fishy" statement about this shape-shifting chimera? And how can the President credibly give us "guarantees" as to what the eventual bill will or will not do?

Is this the new era of politics the President promised?

"He can run but he can't hide."

Joe Louis uttered the words in the title about Billy Conn before their fight, but they apply equally to President Obama, especially where health insurance "reform" is concerned. Very recently, a video recording of statements he made in 2003 has surfaced at Breitbart.tv. In the video, Obama states:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

White House flack, Linda Douglass, claims in a new video that these remarks were taken out of context. This is the favorite cop out of people who have been caught telling inconvenient truths.

If the White House is seriously claiming that President Obama would not like to see a single-payer health-care program with "everybody in, nobody out," it should provide the allegedly-missing context that will illuminate the true meaning of his statement.

Judge Sotomayor

Jim Geraghty posted an article today on Judge Sotomayor' s Credibility Gap. I can't help but think of that often-quoted line from Alice in Wonderland, when the Queens says that, when she uses words, they mean whatever she wants them to mean.

Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed to the Supreme Court, but this was hardly her finest hour.

Nuphedrine

Republicans need to grow a spine.

The latest kerfuffle regarding the CIA and congressional notification appears to be the mother of all fluff. According to press reports, the CIA allegedly failed to notify Congress of a program to kill Al Qaeda leaders that it thought about but never tried to implement. Big whoop.

Andrew McCarthy and Jonah Goldberg have already posted excellent articles about this: see respectively Another Phony Scandal and The Mother of All Nothingburgers.

Dick Cheney doesn't need anyone to come to his defense (certainly not me). And if he did, his daughter, Liz, seems more than equal to the task. But it would be nice if the Republicans responded to this cynical political ploy by calling it what it is: an attempt to provide political cover for Nancy Pelosi, who has accused the CIA of lying to her ("they do it all the time") with no supporting evidence.

T. Boone Pickens update

Mr. Pickens said yesterday that he is delaying, not canceling, his $10 billion wind energy project, called the Pampa project. The project purportedly will be postponed until 2013, when Texas is "expected" to complete a $4.9 billion transmission line. Yet on Tuesday, Mr. Pickens said that he was looking for a home for the 687 giant wind turbines that Mesa Petroleum ordered from General Electric Co. a little more than a year ago for a reported $2 billion. One report said that Mr. Pickens joked that he didn't have room for the turbines in his garage.

I sincerely hope that the Pampa project comes to fruition at some future date. But if Mr. Pickens resells those wind turbines to third parties, they won't be available for the project four years hence (although I suppose he could order replacements sometime in the future). And it's hard to believe that Mr. Pickens will keep the leases Mesa Petroleum currently has on 200,000 acres in Texas for four years in the hopes that the project will eventually go forward.

As much as I want the Pampa project to succeed, I certainly wouldn't invest my money in it.

How's that wind power working out for you?

I can't think of a more ardent supporter of wind power than T. Boone Pickens. He has championed the construction of the world's largest wind farm, to be located in the Texas Panhandle. As part of this project, he contracted to purchase 678 giant wind turbines -- which can stand taller than most 30 story buildings -- and he leased about 200,000 acres in Texas for his proposed site. He even paid for television commercials touting his project. Yesterday, he announced he is abandoning the project, at least in its current form.

Why? It turns out it is uneconomical to transmit power from the proposed site to a distribution system. Mr. Pickens referred to "technical" problems, but transmission systems are almost as old as electrical power itself. It is far more likely that the ambitious project turned out to be uneconomical. Apparently, Mr. Pickens's faith in new sources of alternative energy blinded him to the economic realities.

But then, there is nothing new about wind power. Don Quixote tilted at windmills in a book that was first published in 1604. Wind power is older than commercial electricity itself. To be sure, modern wind turbines bear scant resemblance to those 16th-century windmills. But that is because the technology has been continuously improved over the intervening centuries. One has to wonder how much additional efficiency can be wrung out of this centuries-old power source.

The ineluctable facts are that the winds do not blow 24/7, and they often blow most strongly in remote places like the Texas Panhandle, far from potential consumers. Apparently, even Mr. Pickens's formidable resources could not overcome those facts

The global warming debate

Yes, there is a global warming debate, despite what Al Gore claims. Jack Kelley has an informative article on post-gazette.com. Key grafs:

"To combat a problem that probably doesn't exist, the House narrowly passed a bill to restrict emissions of carbon dioxide (to 83 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and to 17 percent by 2050). If the Waxman-Markey bill, named after its Democratic sponsors, Rep. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, were to work exactly as its sponsors claim (and what bill ever has?), global temperatures 100 years from now are projected to be one-tenth of a degree Celsius cooler than they otherwise would have been.

We'd pay a lot for that tenth of a degree, though how much is hotly in dispute. Cost estimates range from about $100 per family when the bill would go into effect in 2012 to $3,900 per family."

"We rely on fossil fuels for 85 percent of the energy we use to run our automobiles; to heat, light and cool our homes and offices; and to power our factories. The problem with wind and solar is not just that they are much more expensive than coal, oil or natural gas, but that they can't begin to replace the amount of energy we get from fossil fuels."

Obama and the 'Noble Lie'

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article on today's National Review Online regarding Obama and the 'Noble Lie.' He really nails the President's
"style" of governing.

The government health care "option."

A reporter suggested to President Obama last week that the government healthcare "option" would crowd private health insurers out of the market, creating a single-payer (i.e. government only)system. The President emphatically denied this, calling this conclusion "illogical," and further stating that he did not understand why anyone would expect such a result. There are two compelling answers to the President's denial, one of which has been fairly widely reported, while the other has been largely ignored.

The reported answer, which makes a lot of sense, is that private employers, seeking to remain competitive, will simply stop providing health coverage to their employees, "dumping" them onto the government in order to cut costs. I do not doubt that many employers will do just that. Even if an employer does not want to take that step, General Motors and Chrysler have demonstrated that a company cannot concede significant cost advantages to its competitors and hope to survive (absent a government bailout of course).

But there is a second, equally compelling, reason, which I have not seen discussed, why the government "option" will probably become the only game in town when you seek to obtain health insurance: the government doesn't have to operate at a profit. In fact, it almost never does. That's why the federal government can keep Amtrak operating ad infinitum. The government didn't have to drive the private railroads out of that market; it was (and is) unprofitable, so the railroads were happy to let the government have it.

But the government can drive private companies out of any market, including the insurance market, precisely because the government doesn't play by the same rules. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority drove a number of electrical utility companies (including Wendell Wilkie's company) out of business in a significant portion of the Southeast United States. Amity Shlaes recounts this history in The Forgotten Man. Even if you think this was a good result, it demonstrates the government's power to take over any market it chooses, because private companies have to operate at a profit, and the government does not.

Moreover, the government can dictate to doctors and other health care providers what it will pay for medical services to a degree that private health insurers cannot. The government already does this with Medicare, and healthcare providers can either accept below-market reimbursement or forego Medicare patients altogether. The government will have significantly more leverage if it radically expands government-provided healthcare via the proposed new program.

If you can't fight city hall, you definitely cannot fight the federal government. I fear a single-payer system would be inevitable.

Obama's "empathy" standard for Supreme Court Justices

President Obama has stated that he will select judges, including Supreme Court Justices, who have what he considers the proper "empathy." In one statement, he said:

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

But is empathy a proper, or even useful, quality in a Supreme Court Justice? My answer is no. There are numerous problems with this "standard." First, with whom should the Justice empathize? Stuart Taylor Jr. notes in his excellent article in the National Journal that Obama's comments "stress special empathy for 'the powerless,' for single mothers, for employees as against employers, for criminal defendants, and the like. How does that square with the oath to do equal justice to the poor and to the rich?"

Obviously, Obama's desire that Justices demonstrate empathy for specific groups does not square with the oath to do equal justice to all without regard to their wealth or status.

Moreover, as Taylor notes: "In addition, law-making is supposed to be mainly a democratic exercise driven by voters, not a judicial exercise driven by empathy for selected groups. Indeed, our laws as written already reflect the balance of interests -- of empathy, if you will -- that the democratic process has struck between the powerless, the powerful and other groups."

Second, Supreme Court cases frequently do not lend themselves to Obama's pat dichotomy between different groups, e.g. the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless.

Consider, for example, the DC gun control case decided last term, Heller v. District of Columbia. This case, decided by a 5-4 vote, was arguably the most contentious case of the term. Justice Breyer stated during oral argument that 80 briefs had been filed in the case. In other words, this was precisely the type of case where Obama claims that empathy is key.

But with whom should his hypothetical justice have empathized? Mr. Heller, a law-abiding citizen, who wanted to keep a handgun in his home in the crime-ridden District of Columbia? The District of Columbia, which possesses far more resources and power than Mr. Heller ("you can't fight city hall")? The burglar who might get shot if he breaks into the home of a gun owner? In this and many close cases decided by the Supreme Court, Obama's empathy criterion is simply irrelevant.

The Supreme Court decides many more difficult cases in Obama seems to realize. And in a great many of them, empathy is irrelevant, unless Obama simply wants Justices who will place their thumbs on one side of the scales of justice.

I'll take an impartial, conscientious Justice any day.

President Obama and the Supreme Court

President Obama has consistently made two assertions about the nature of cases decided by the United States Supreme Court. The first is that, in 95% of the cases that come before the Court, the correct result is clear-cut, "slam dunks." The second is that, in the other 5% of the cases, those that involve difficult issues, the most important quality for a Justice is "empathy." The first assertion is grossly inaccurate. The second is incomprehensible. This post discusses the first assertion. A subsequent post will discuss the second.

The Supreme Court deals with cases involving an incredible range of federal issues: tax, patent, environmental, securities law, antitrust, etc. In addition, of course, the Court deals with Constitutional issues. If President Obama were correct that 95% of these cases are slam dunks, you would expect that 95% of its decisions would be unanimous or near-unanimous (8-1).


Even a casual observer of the Supreme Court,however, knows that unanimous opinions from the Court are almost as rare as hen's teeth. Alhough I have not crunched the numbers, nowhere near 95% of the Supreme Court's decisions are unanimous or near-unanimous. In fact I would wager that the percentage of unanimous or near-unanimous opinions handed down by the Court is much closer to 5% than 95%.

The Court's docket consists of review of decisions by Federal Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Court rulings that involve federal constitutional issues. Often, the Court takes a case to resolve a conflict among the Courts of Appeals. If these cases were slam dunks, the Courts of Appeals would not have disagreed as to the correct result in the first place.

Cases raising constitutional issues necessarily involve the construction of general provisions,e.g. "unreasonable," "cruel and unusual," etc. Understandably, the Justices frequently disagree as to the correct interpretation of these general terms. On top of that, the Justices who espouse the doctrine of the "living Constitution" assert that modern societal values, both here and abroad, may properly be taken into account in construing be Constitution. Since the Justices do not even agree on the proper rule of construction, disagreements (in the form of both concurrences and dissents) are frequent.

In short, President Obama appears to have a blinkered view of the work done by the Supreme Court. Since he will shortly be nominating a new Justice to the Court, this lack of basic understanding is worrisome.

New economic and tax myths

So much economic nonsense has been generated by the new administration that it was hard to know where to start discussing it. As usual, Robert J. Samuelson provides an excellent starting point. His current article in the Washington Post deals with the taxes that American corporations pay on overseas operations. The truth is that American corporations are taxed more heavily on their foreign operations than almost all of their foreign competitors. Most countries do not tax the profits of their corporations' foreign operations beyond the taxes levied by the host countries. The United States does, though it does provide a credit for the foreign taxes paid. Moreover, there is no empirical vidence that US corporations' foreign operations "export" American jobs overseas. In fact, they are more likely to create additional support jobs here.

As usual, yesterday's tax incentive is today's "loophole."

Nuphedrine

Obama's oratory

"Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter."

Michael Wolff, of Vanity Fair, doesn't even care for President Obama's speeches.

The Unbearable Lightness of Obama

OK. He can deliver a great speech, at least when the teleprompter is on. He looks good--plug in Joe Biden's remarks from the Democrat primary. But can he govern? Does he even want to govern, as opposed to just being President, which is undeniably a cool gig? I would say the jury is still out, or would be, if he had gotten around to picking one.

Very soon, people are going to start taking him at his word when he says: "blame me."

Where is our country headed?

There has been a slew of articles recently about the direction our country is taking. Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker asks Are We a Banana Republic?. Powerline also has a cartoon that captures the current tone of Washington (scroll down about 3/4ths of the way).

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn writes about The Outrage Kabuki now taking place in Washington.

Finally, Peter Robinson has some disquieting perspective from two people who have first-hand knowledge about banana republics.

Do I share their concerns? Absolutely! The claim that we are a nation of laws, not men may quickly be turning into the tag line of a bad joke. There are two related phenomena here: the refusal of our elected representatives to take responsibility for their own frantically-enacted laws (see my earlier post on this), and their efforts to scapegoat private citizens and enact punitive laws against them. Neither bodes well for the country.

This certainly isn't the change I was hoping for.

Who is in charge of our government?

Apparently the British aren't the only ones unable to get the Treasury Department to answer their telephones. Representative Paul Kanjorski (D.), Chairman of the House Capital Markets Subcommittee, says that he knew about the AIG bonuses more than a month before they were issued. He further stated that, if Secretary Geithner claims that he only found out about the bonuses after they were issued, he should check with his telephone and mail departments. He repeatedly contacted Treasury about this issue for more than a month before the bonuses were awarded. The video is here.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn wonders whether the teleprompter is running things at the White House, and, if so, why it isn't doing a better job.

Obama's priorities

Although President Obama has warned us repeatedly that the country is facing an economic "crisis" that could turn into a "catastrophe," numerous commentators have noted that his stated priorities do not address, much less solve, the underlying causes of the economic downturn. In his State of the The Union address, the President stressed that we need cap and trade for carbon emissions, universal healthcare, and education reform . Each of these policy initiatives can be debated on their merits, but none of them address our core economic problems. So, is the Administration tackling our economic problems?

The British are beginning to wonder (HT: Jonah Goldberg). The head of the British civil service, Sir Gus O'Donnell, made a rare complaint about the new Administration. Sir Gus and his minions have been trying to consult with the US Treasury regarding the upcoming G20 world economic summit. But he can't get anyone to answer the phone. "There is nobody there," he said. "You cannot believe how difficult it is."

Obviously, this does not bode well for the country or even for the world economic order. Moreover, it reinforces the impression that this Administration is not ready for prime time. Saturday Night Live may wish to take notice.

The cost of Obama's proposed mortgage bailout plan

A New York Times article reports today that the administration's mortgage bailout plan is estimated to cost about $75 billion to "help as many as 4 million people avoid foreclosure . . .." I did the math: it works out to $18,750 per homeowner. While I don't have any benchmark, we should be able to accomplish this for a lot less .

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Obama's first month in office

Does anyone really know what the blizzard of plans that Obama has put forward in his first month in office really entail, other than a massive increase in the size of government and government spending? I doubt it. Certainly not the legislators who have voted and will be voting on these various plans. I don't believe a single one of them read the full spending bill that just passed before voting on it.

This rush (panic really) to legislate is tragic, perhaps catastrophic. Nancy Pelosi's ludicrous claim that every month that passed without the passage of the spending bill would cause the loss of 500 million American jobs is emblematic of the lack of serious consideration these proposals have received.

The military says that speed kills. In the legislative arena, speed leads to the frantic passage of bills written by nameless staffers and passed by elected officials who don't even know what is in them. What we do know is that all of this, if passed, will cost a staggering amount. And President Obama's proposals to pay for all or even most of this new spending are voodoo economics on stilts. And it will be with this for a very long time, even if it turns out we don't like it.

Mark Steyn sums this up better than I can. He certainly does it more wittily.

Phill Gramm on the economic debacle

Senator Gramm is a former Professor of economics. Here is his article published in today's Wall Street Journal. I have to agree with him that the current mess cannot be blamed on deregulation, as opposed to lax and misguided regulation. As he points out, government regulators actually encouraged lenders to make bad loans.

More of this kind of "regulation" is not the solution.

The economics of stimulus.

Dick Armey isn't telegenic, but he is a former economics professor (and House Majority Leader). He has an excellent article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal analyzing the economics under girding the various proposed "stimulus" proposals. It boils down to Keynes versus Hayek. I think Hayek's criticisms are valid and largely unrebutted.

Obama's first two weeks

Victor Davis Hanson has a pithy post summing up the first two weeks of the Obama administration. It's been a weird procession of self-promoters, tax cheats, and lobbyists. And, as VDH notes: "its only been two weeks." Even the adoring MSM will have to admit (at least privately) that it has not been an auspicious beginning.

Why a new New Deal is a really bad idea.

There is an excellent article in today's Wall Street Journal explaining how the New Deal actually prolonged and worsened the great depression. If only our political leaders would read and learn from this kind of research.

Bruce Bartlett on the economy

Bruce Bartlett Has an excellent article about the various schools of economic thought regarding stimulating the economy. From what I know of the House Bill. it would satisfy none of them.

More on the financial crisis

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker,has written a long but informative and entertaining article about the subprime mortgage debacle.

Change we can believe in?

The Daily Show.

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The financial crisis: a perfect financial storm?

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of words have been written about the current financial crisis and the accompanying recession. Much of this analysis has been first rate, but this article will provide an overview of how we came to this pass.

As many before me have said there is plenty of blame to go around.
The current mess was brought about by a combination of government and private sector mistakes. The federal government significantly contributed to this mess in three ways: the Community Reinvestment Act, lax oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a loose monetary policy.

The CRA was passed during the Carter administration. Its goal was to make affordable housing available to low income borrowers. Unfortunately, the phrase "affordable housing" is a pernicious misnomer. In reality, people were often encouraged to purchase houses that they could not afford, leading to defaults and foreclosures.

Mortgage lenders frequently went along with this scheme, some more eagerly than others, because they could lay off many of these risky loans on somebody else. That is where Fannie and Freddie come in. These government-sponsored enterprises do not originate mortgages. Rather, they purchase mortgages in the aftermarket. Fannie and Freddie hold approximately half of all of the mortgages outstanding in this country. I haven't seen a breakdown, but I would bet that a disproportionate number of mortgages held by Fannie and Freddie are dogs. When the auditors sounded the alarm about what was happening at Fannie and Freddie in 2004, they were savaged by Democrats in Congress, including Maxine Waters and Barney Frank. Real estate prices were still rising, and no one wanted to face the truth.

One reason real estate prices kept rising was that the Federal Reserve pursued a very loose monetary policy, driving short-term interest rates down to historic lows. But eventually the housing boom ended (booms always do), and the house of cards came crashing down.

Interestingly, the mortgage lenders were not those hardest hit. In addition to laying off mortgages on Fannie and Freddie, lenders had also packaged them into derivative securities called Collateralized Debt Obligations. These were snapped up by investment houses that frequently used leverage (borrowed money) to purchase them. When the investments finally had to be marked down, these companies did not have the requisite financial reserves to avoid defaulting on the loans.

The first major company to go was Bear Stearns, followed by Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. American International Group, a huge international insurance company, also found itself in trouble, because it had sold contracts guaranteeing the repayment of the CDOs (called credit default swaps). None of these companies was in the business of making mortgage loans. Their spectacular miscalculations are incomprehensible Three large retail lenders, Countrywide, IndiMac Bank, and Washington Mutual also became insolvent, along with a number of smaller lenders.

We have all learned the hard way that laying off risky loans to other companies doesn't protect you if the entire financial system becomes overburdened and crashes. Our elected officials -- Democrat and Republican alike -- still do not want to face the music. Their frantic efforts to prop up bad loans and insolvent companies may well prolong the problem by preventing the unwinding that has to occur. This same thing happened in Japan during the 1990s, and Japan has still not fully recovered.

The market will eventually self correct, if it is allowed to do so. The process will be painful, but it is necessary to get valuations back to rational levels.